I had been in China less than three months when the travel bug flared up and I became eager to get out of Beijing. Not permanently – I’m finally getting into a groove here and loving my life in China’s capital city. But I am always game to see something new, so when Anderson told me he needed to make a visa run (there are different rules for different visas, some of which require you to leave and reenter the country after a certain amount of days) and was thinking of going to Mongolia, I decided to go along.
The trip was partly pleasure – I’m not one to turn down an opportunity to go adventuring somewhere I’ve never been – and partly professional. I’m hoping to get some travel pieces published from it (and will post them here if that happens). But there is a lot from the trip that probably won’t make it into those articles so I decided this blog is the perfect venue for those tales.
To be honest, I had no idea what to expect from Mongolia. I did some research on the cheapest ways to cross the border, got a few recommendations for places to stay and things to do from a friend who had already been and then began making travel plans.
The first step was getting across the border.
Plane from Beijing to Erlian
Since moving overseas, I’ve found myself developing empathy for immigrants and refugees, particularly when they first arrive somewhere, broke and not knowing the language.
Growing up in the States, I will admit that I was of the opinion that people who moved there should “learn the language and learn to fit in.” Having now lived in two cities where I don’t speak or understand the language, I can appreciate how challenging and overwhelming that can be when you first arrive in a new and unfamiliar place.
After this trip to Mongolia, I also have a new appreciation for how stressful and grueling it is to cross a border, and I did it the legal way. I can only imagine the anxiety and frustration of those desperately trying to cross without visas and all of the other paperwork that goes with it.
Our journey started around 5 a.m. on a Tuesday, as Anderson and I set out from an uncharacteristically quiet Beijing hutong for the airport. We boarded a plane bound for Erlian, China, a Chinese-Mongolian border city, on a flight scheduled only once a day.
The flight was quick, less than an hour and a half. There was a shuttle van waiting outside Erlunda Airport, a ten-minute ride away from Erlian, waiting to take passengers into the city. A Chinese man we could barely understand ushered us onto the bus and somehow conveyed that we didn’t have to pay for the ride, which was pretty sweet since we were definitely on a backpacking budget.
Apparently Erlian’s claim to fame is dinosaurs, the fossils of which have been found in the surrounding area. The town announces this distinction with several enormous dinosaur statues set up along the road that leads from the airport to the town.
The other bizarre thing I noticed on the ride were the number of elegant apartment complexes being built in otherwise empty fields. We didn’t see any grocery stores, banks or other establishments that would suggest this would be a convenient place to live.
Anderson speculated that the government orders the complexes to be built, which are then purchased by rich Chinese and rented to poor or low-income workers as the area builds up and attracts more people.
Dinosaur statues on the way to Erlian
Erlian itself was more developed than I had anticipated. It was small, but fairly busy, with plenty of shops and restaurants open and people milling around. On the most organized street we passed, the signs on the buildings were written in Chinese characters on one side of the street and Mongolian Cyrillic on the other. The further we got from there, however, the more desolate Erlian became, with many of the buildings appearing run-down and abandoned.
After the Chinese passengers had disembarked, the shuttle driver took Anderson and me to the border, a colorless place, save the enormous rainbow that announces the Chinese-Mongolian divide.
The thing is, you can’t cross the border on foot. Why, I’m not sure, but those are the rules and when you’re two Americans being stared at by Chinese soldiers in a town you know nothing about where you don’t speak the language, you just kind of go with it. We knew from reading blog posts by other expats who had made the visa run that we would have to hire a driver to take us across, and had prepared for this, even down to how much money we should pay for it.
As with most things, things didn’t go exactly as planned. The first driver who stopped for us tried to charge us 80 rmb a person, which was way more than we had expected to pay. We turned him down and waited by the side of the road, alongside small clusters of Mongolian and Chinese women sitting with large packages of fruit, clothes and other goods.
Chinese-Mongolian border
After a few minutes of snapping photos and unsuccessfully attempting to flag drivers down, a Chinese soldier who had been watching us approached and asked to see our passports. This made me nervous, even though we weren’t doing anything wrong and I knew that people crossed all the time. The soldier’s English was actually pretty good and when we told him we had been unable to get a jeep, he walked us to a taxi and told the driver to take us to a place where we would be able to find a driver.
Should have been simple from there, right? Not exactly. The taxi driver, a nice guy who asked if we were Russian and guessed we were going to Mongolia, dropped us off in what appeared to be a heavily Mongolian area of town, where there were plenty of rickety jeeps and shrewd drivers to be hired.
We approached a group of Mongolians who knew immediately what we wanted (I doubt many foreigners visit Erlian for anything other than a visa run) and Anderson began negotiating a price. We didn’t learn until later that Mongolians aren’t keen to haggle, unlike their Chinese neighbors.
“Wu shi kuai,” (which means 50 kuai, or rmb) Anderson told them and the Mongolians started chuckling. That’s what we had expected to pay total for the ride, but the Mongolians had other ideas.
“Wu shi kuai!,” one exclaimed as he pointed to the back of a rickety flat bed, meaning that’s what we would cross the border on for that price. The others laughed and so did we. The Mongolians named a price and Anderson managed to negotiate them down from 100 per person to 50 per person, which was more than we wanted to pay but better than the alternative.
I examined what was to be our ride with a feeling of slight disbelief. The jeep appeared to be a few hunks of metal slapped together, with wooden boards serving as the backseat. The Mongolians seemed to think nothing of it and encouraged us to get inside. Anderson took the back next to two enormous Mongolian men while the driver gave me the front passenger seat. It didn’t take long to realize that if I leaned too far to one side, the rickety seat would tip over, or that there were holes in the floor of the jeep through which I could watch the pavement below fly by.
I took a deep breath and a death grip on the door handle, taking it all in as part of the adventure. After what already seemed like a long morning, we were finally ready to cross the border.
