Yet another early start for our 06:40 train from Ulan-Ude to our next stop – Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia! For the first time luck went our way and we managed to get first class (or a 4 berth for just the 2 of us, as the train didn’t have a 1st class carriage). Anyway it was nice.
The journey was the longest ever as it involved crossing the border from Russia to Mongolia. We sat and waited for 7 hours on the Russian side (without access to a toilet!) and 2 hours on the Mongolian side (again without access to the toilet) – night mare! We managed to pass the time reading, playing cards and playing my new favourite game – chess! (Great purchase from the Irkutsk market for two squids).
Arrived into Ulaanbaatar at 06:00am, where our guide met us and proceeded to show us around some of the sights in the city. We probably weren’t the most interested as not only was it stupidly early, it was freezing and quite frankly all I wanted was to be back in bed. As part of the city tour we were also down to see the local Buddhist temple, which didn’t open until 9.30am – we had 3 hours to kill in the freezing cold in a city which was closed as it was so early!
Straight from the station we were taken to a lookout over the city where we got to see the sun rise, then to the main square and the government build of UB – this building was an interesting mix of old style architecture and modern glass/brushed metal which was very charming. If only the Scots had seen this before they built Holyrooyd – they would have had a better building and saved a future probably!
After a coffee, little walk and nap in the car, we got to see the temple, Mongolia’s biggest Buddha and a service taking place which involved a lot of chanting, throwing of rice (how bizarre!) and regular people off the street fighting to get their hands on some pieces of cloth that the Lama’s were holding. All very interesting.
Eventually time had come to drive out to the ger camp – this was the real deal of the stopover in Ulaanbaatar and we were both keen to get there to check out our ger (Mongolians version of a wigwam!). On the drive out to the camp we passed lots of gers dotted around the city – quite crazy for the capital city!
