The intrepid Shines ride the trans-Siberian

Kitty takes the long walk back from old redcoat’s Soviet café up front to civilisation in Carriage 10…

Day 18 – Mongolia and the Russian border incident…

“Here is your name; and here is our law you have broken”

“YESSSSSS. We did it!” – Jasper punched the air and jumped down from his bunk, his big sleepy yellow hair standing on end and an enormous smile on his face.

“Tell me what happened, mummy.”

Our joy was irrepressible as we talked him through the events of the night before at the Mongolian border and he smiled and high-fived us at every twist.

July 18 started well. It started as a day of endless skies, grassy plains, yurts, cowboys and the freshest air imaginable pouring into our window, as we traversed the Gobi and the Mongolian Steppe.

We celebrated solving our Mongolian visa crisis with a hearty breakfast of eggs in the ornately carved Mongolian dining carriage. Eggs, tea, toast as we rocked through the Steppe.

 

 
Mongolian joy!

We sucked in the fresh air, and Jasper and I both mused how we could live in a place like this. Mrs S was less convinced a diet of “yak fat and dried horse meat” was her thing. But all in we were euphoric.

Prematurely so, it soon transpired.

I had been flicking through our passports with a smile on my face to admire the shiny new Mongolian visas, and I glanced at the adjacent Russian one in Kitty’s passport.

I quickly rifled through the others to ensure they said the same thing.

“What time do we get to the border?” I asked Mrs S.

“We get to Naushki at around 11pm,” she said. “But we lose four hours so it is only about seven.”

“Right,” I replied. “But it is still the 18^th? Or at best on Mongolian time, the 19^th. It’s not the 20^th is it?” 

And with those few words, that familiar feeling settled in my gut as it dawned on us that just 24 hours after arriving on the Mongolian border with no visa at all, we would shortly be landing at the Russian border with a visa which was not yet valid.

Hurtling towards another border challenge

Of course I know we should have double-checked all these things ourselves, but we had made the mistake of thinking that by outsourcing the visa issues to a professional travel visa company, we would be able to focus on other more pressing tasks.

We had been rather taken up with the mammoth task of organising our withdrawal from Singapore and the simultaneous renovation of our new house in England to pay as much attention as we clearly should have done.

And so now we were facing a re-run of the Mongolian border incident, this time on Russian soil. 

I tried to nap but couldn’t, tried to eat but could only pick at food, and I thought once again of being stranded at a desolate border town.

Outside, meanwhile, unfurled a tapestry of galloping horses, cows, camels and yurts. 

As we approached small villages, we passed permanent houses with brightly coloured roofs and yurts in the gardens. It looked as though the circus had come to town. Locals with wide, sunburnt faces watched the train go past and waved from their homes.

 There were windmills on the plains, their enormous arms turning gently in the breeze and from time to time a small cluster of industry would appear like a tumour of funnels on the landscape.  Old Soviet trucks rumbled along deserted roads.

Cowboys herded cattle – some on horseback and others riding scrambling motorcycles up the bumpy terrain.

The landscape took on an alpine feel as we headed west, with flowers and trees and rabbits inhabiting the railway sidings.

As we neared Ulaan Baator the clusters of brightly coloured houses thickened, and we passed homes made out of converted buses, railway carriages and metal containers. A fun-fair had been set up near the central station along with modern-looking hypermarkets and an office block.

 

 

More petrol stations spring up, in patches of two and three as we near the Russian border, and locals at the railway stations seem more affluent, and carry smart phones. The guard at Darhan wore leggings, high boots a puffer jacket and heavy make-up. She held an iPhone in one hand and her flag in the other.

We reached the Mongolian border at Suhe-Bator as the shadows were cast long, and soon after having our papers collected a large immigration officer in a bright white suite came to tell us we would likely face problems at the Russian border.

“They might say go back,” he smiled. “Your visa is not good yet. You would stay the night in Naushki. Then get the train back to Mongolia.

“Your Mongolian visa is good,” he grinned. “No problem, you would be welcome.

“Then perhaps you go to Russia the next day when your visa is good.

“I work tomorrow – maybe see you,” he added cheerily.

Of course this would throw out all our plans and would mean a total reworking of our route plus a flight on a Topolov or something equally scary to get to Moscow in time to pick up our train to St Petersburg.

We would have to risk the wrath of border patrol once again.

As we crawled out of Mongolia, a policeman, a female soldier and three passport officials stopped their joking around to stand to attention and salute the train pulling off, breaking off from their solemn task to give Mrs S a quick wave.

We rolled past barbed wire fences and heavily foliaged no-mans-land, and it dawned on me that the Russian border guards might be a very different proposition to the Mongolians.

This was confirmed within seconds of the spiky-haired dyed-blonde officer climbing aboard. “Look at me, look my eyes,” she barked as I slowly got to my feet. She compared my weary face with the more youthful one peering out of my passport.

I handed her Ben’s passport as he was sleeping above.

“Look at me. He look at me,” she insisted, so I lifted his head up and pointed him towards her as his eyes swam in his head.

She then moved next door, softening only when she saw Kitty and when she questioned Jasper’s woolly-haired appearance compared to the neat haircut in his passport pic.

 She began to march off, and I stopped her. “We have a problem,” I began.

She turned on her heels and looked at me sharply. “A problem?”

“Yes,” I explained, and went through the whole story about how the visas did not match our travel itinerary.

She instantly raised this with a young blond superior wearing a broad green Russian peaked hat.

He rolled his eyes, clearly relishing this pantomime as much as we were.

“Your visa, your woman visa – no good,” the man said to me.

I told him that all five were the same.

A dark-haired woman was giving the Chinese man in the cabin next to us a hard time. “How long have you lived in Germany,” she was saying – almost shouting. “Twenty-two years? Show me Germany stamp in your passport. No, that is China – show me Germany.”

The young blond man called out to her, and she left our poor neighbour to turn her attention on me.

“Why did you come to Russia early?” she asked, fixing me with her blue eyes.

I told her how our train ticket – how our entire itinerary – did not match up with the visas a company had obtained for us, and that we were all very, very sorry and needed her help to resolve this.

I explained how we would never have got on the train had we realised, not with three small children, but that with so much traveling we were only looking a day ahead or so and that by the time we realised our error we were well and truly on our way.

I explained how we were booked into a Moscow hotel on the 21^st (and we would be required to register there on that date as part of our visa requirements) and how we were booked onto a Moscow-St Petersburg train in 22^nd.  All the while I held our travel itinerary open and pointed out the relevant sections while she looked down at it and listened.

Each explanation she duly recounted to her colleague – her boss, it turned out – in Russian, clarifying at one point that the visa error had not been ours, but a combination of the Russian Embassy in Singapore and the visa company we had used.

I could feel momentum shifting. I was winning her over.

Meanwhile customs officers rummaged through the carriage. A tall skin-headed man in a military boiler-suit flashed a torch into every crevice of my cabin.

We went next door and as I motioned to lift Kitty out of her bed so he could search under it as he had done mine, he stopped me, and held up his finger and thumb signalling just a little bit.

His friendly face smiled – he didn’t want me to wake her. I lifted the bed a chink and he flashed his torch briefly into the tiny gap. The war with customs had clearly been won.

The immigration officials left our carriage and we waited. It was silent apart from the occasional uniformed official marching purposefully past our door.

Eventually the dark-haired woman who spoke good English returned. “You and your wife must come with me. You must sign some protocol because you have broken the law,” she told me.

“The children can stay here, but you two come.”

Mrs S said: “My daughter is unwell, she keeps waking and will be upset if she wakes and I am not here.”

“She is unwell?” the woman said, and at that moment Kitty played her role to perfection, delivering a juicy cough and a small complaint.

“Okay. First you, and then you,” she said, pointing first at me and then Mrs S.

I followed her off the train into the border offices, a cold building with the Russian Federation flag flying outside. “First you wait, sit there,” she said with a smile, motioning to a bench occupied by five soldiers in black uniforms.

 

One with an Asian face – the only non-Caucasian of the five – shifted across to let me sit down.

 

After a minute or two, our woman emerged from a wooden door and beckoned me over.

 

I followed her into a long thin room. Just inside the doorway was a large scanner connected to a computer and camera, and at the far end was a PC and printer.

 

She motioned for me to sit with her at the far end. She called up a template on the computer and we went through a series of questions. Most of the information she had already inputted, gleaned from my passport, but the rest she asked. Where did I live, what was my job, and so on.

 

I told her I was a sports writer, avoiding the journalism word which tends to put government officials on edge, and said that I would be visiting Russia regularly for the next few years for the Winter Olympics and the World Cup. This seemed to amuse her and she shared it with her male colleague in the room.

 

He called me over and stood me in front of the scanner where he took prints of both my hands – my palms, thumbs and all my fingers. He also took photographs of my face from three angles. He had started to warm up too, and we joked a little as we did the scans.

 

Then I returned to the woman. She had printed out some papers and was holding a pen.

 

“This is your name. This is name of woman who check your passport. This is name of man who check your cabin,” she explained, translating the Cyrillic text.

“This is the law you have broken. This is where you say it is fault of Russian Embassy in Singapore. And this is your fine of 2,000 roubles. You sign here please.”

 

I felt a little uneasy signing these papers I could not read, but did so at her urging.

 

The blond boss called over to me. “Your woman, where she, she, where she born?” he asked. “London” I told him, and he tapped into a keyboard.

 

“OK, you go. Go to train,” he told me. “Your wife come.”

 

I left the building and strode back to the train (I was becoming fairly adroit at midnight train manoeuvres) and sent Zoe to the HQ. “It is our UK address, remember?” I called after her.

 

<Russian border pix>

 

She went through the same procedure and returned. A short while later the blond officer returned with our passports.

 

Spasiba I told him, and he muttered that it had been nothing under his breath, almost managing a smile.

 

We flicked through the passports to find them all correctly stamped and were soon on our way.

 

Siberia lay ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

Day 17 – The trip dangles by a thread

WHEN it finally came – finally – it was the most beautiful sound in the world. 

In a dimly lit ante-room in the desolate Mongolian border town of Dzamynude the midnight thud of stamp on newly minted visa brought a close to the most anxious and stressful 12 hours of our trip so far.

And so thank you, you beautiful, wonderful, compassionate, pragmatic Mongolian government officials.

Women A and B finally put us out of our misery…

This had been a 12-hour period during which the travelling Shines had become convinced the Trans-Siberian leg of our Long Trip Home was to be derailed on day one.

Horror scenarios had plagued our thoughts throughout the day as we hurtled towards our fate and the train ploughed through China. 

And to think, we had been so euphoric after we’d battled the early morning crowds to get into Beijing’s old railway station.

We’d lugged three children and nine bags through the streets having been dropped off round the corner, we’d navigated the unfamiliar signs, we’d found the train — our magical K3 — and we had set up home in our adjoining two-berth cabins.

We’d breakfasted on croissants and pastries and drank coffees and hot chocolate as we’d pulled out of Beijing on the famous old workhorse headed for Moscow.

We had been simply joyous. But that joy was squashed like a lemon under a mallet just a few hours into our journey with the awful realization we had no Mongolia visas and, contrary to the advice repeatedly given to us by our Singaporean visa services company, we most certainly needed one.

Without one we would be kicked off the train before Mongolia.

It was Mrs S who first raised the alarm tentatively while reading a guide.

“No”, said I, “We’re not getting off, that can’t be right, and anyway they told us we only needed visas for Vietnam, China and Russia and we have those. I’m sure we’ll be okay.”

But as she climbed up top for a post-lunch nap, the doubt started eating at me. I googled as best I could with imperfect search phrases and patchy telecoms. Everything I could find suggested we would all need visas, even just to transit, and everything indicated we would not be able to get one on the train or at the border.

By the time Mrs S woke up, I had played out every scenario from us being stranded at a Chinese border outpost, stranded in Mongolia or stuck in no-mans-land with three small children. None of the scenarios was pleasant.

I put another call in to Melissa back in Singapore who had arranged a lot of our trip, but not the visas, and once again she was amazing, calling embassies and consulates from Britain, Mongolia and China. Nobody, though, knew what would happen, although in all likelihood we would not be allowed out of China, I was told. 

And still we hurtled  towards our fate as the train ploughed relentlessly through China, past beautiful wooded hills which flattened out into grasslands and then grew into mountains again.

We informed the train conductor of our plight and he was less-than-pleased. An official interpreter said he would try to help us and advised we tried to get visas at Erlian, the Chinese border town where we  stopped and the trains’s bogies  or wheelbase was changed to fit the Mongolian gauge. 

He did his best, I guess, but returned to cheerily inform that no, Erlian could not issue a visa, but we could always try at Dzamynude.

This would be a point-of-no-return for us – where we to leave Erlian we would not be able to get back into China with our single entry Chinese visas. This would scotch our best Plan B which was to stay in Erlian for the night – we had a room protectively booked at the grandly titled Erlian Pacific International in Xinhua Street – and then fly back to Beijing and on to Moscow two days later (once our Russian visas kicked in on the 20^th) to pick up the train again.

We had only enjoyed a brief evening in Beijing, but in that time managed to cram in an amazing evening driving through Tiananmen Square, passing the Forbidden City at sunset, checking into an über-cool boutique hotel in Sanlitun and educating the boys on the art of eating Peking Duck at the fun Da Dong.

No, the thought of returning to Beijing left us all with a sinking feeling.

Instead, if we got through Erlian, we would be throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Mongolians, entering their country without visas and facing possible deportation – if there was any way to deport from Dzamynude. (the Lonely Planet lists precisely nothing to do in Dzamynude. Nothing. I could find nothing online and there is certainly no airport.)

We were trying to figure out what the appropriate penalty fee we should have to offer to resolve the problem when green-suited Chinese border officials swept onto the train at Erlian. Our passports, along with everyone else’s, were taken away while we waited for the wheels to be changed.

Not until four hours later did the official return having stamped exit on our Chinese visas and waved us on to Mongolia and our fate at the border. At least we would have a fighting chance of bribing a Mongolian official, we reasoned, since we were being given the opportunity of meeting them face to face.

The children slept fitfully in their bunks and I waited in the darkness. My stomach was in knots as the immigration team boarded the train. A burly female passport official stood in the doorway blocking out all the weak yellow light from the hallway.

“Passport” she said, holding out an upturned hand.

I handed over all five, making it clear I had three sleeping children next door 

Our train conducter mumbled something. She glanced at him, and again at me, before flicking through my passport’s pages with the dexterity of a money counter.

“Ah… slight problem there,” I began to stammer, before she spoke over me. “Mongolian visa?”

I shook my head and tried to begin my rehearsed spiel about how it was all a terrible mistake, how we hadn’t deliberately boarded the train like stowaways knowing we were breaking Mongolian law, and that I had US dollars and obviously knew there would have to be a “penalty fee” if she could only help me out of this whole mess.

But before I could even get into my stride she had walked away and turned to Mrs S next door with the same questions: “Passport? Mongolian visa?”

All the while she shook her head gravely, flicking through the passports again and again as if a Mongolian visa might suddenly appear. 

“You come with me,” she said finally, pointing at my chest.

We climbed down the steep iron ladder of the train onto the tracks and towards an austere block as Mrs S peered out the window after me.

I was led through a reception room, down a corridor lit by flickering fluorescent tubes, and into a small room inhabited by two women. They seemed less intimidating than their muscular colleague, were dressed in blue rather than white, and lacked the military-style decorations on their uniforms.

These women too shook their heads gravely, however, and their English was as bad as my Mongolian and so we were left with shrugs and smiles and pleading looks.

On the table, though, was a calculator and a pen and some papers – this looked promising I thought, as I reached into my pocket to separate the US dollars from one fold into two bundles.

Woman ‘A’ gave me a level look through her oval glasses but didn’t appear without sympathy as she looked through the passports. Among her Mongolian I could here ‘Katt-er–eeyn’. She was telling her colleague about Kitty.

The clock ticked and we had less than half an hour before the train was due to head into the Gobi.

“So, please, if there is anything you can do to help me, I would really appreciate it,” I told them both. “Anything. I have U.S. dollars, and know this will be more expensive than usual because it is an emergency.”

Woman ‘B’ sighed and picked up the calculator.

“You will need 10 day transit,” she said, before tapping into the keyboard.

She handed the calculator to me. $280. It was much less than I had been prepared for and barely more than the price of five visas obtained the more conventional way.

“Okay, of course,” I nodded after a brief pause, and she nodded back, handed me five forms and a pen. It was one of those pens with four coloured inks in it and she spent 10 seconds clicking them round before smiling at me and handing it to me.

We were almost there.

I filled in the forms while Woman ‘A’ tapped away on her computer and printed out visas. Woman ‘B’ smiled again when I handed her $300, and showed me the $280 on her screen.

I smiled back. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, waving away the money. I didn’t expect $20 change – or 30,000 Tugriks. The tip was the least I could do for them.

Woman ‘B’ seemed happy and spoke to Woman ‘A’ before collecting up our passports. We walked back through the corridors to another room where a row of white-uniformed officers were stamping passports.

Ours were handed to the stern black-haired woman who had marched me off the train. She looked up at me, back down at my passport, and then brought her stamp down on the visa with a loud thud.

“Go back to train,” Woman ‘B’ told me, and led me out to the front of the building.

I crossed the platform walking on air.

The doors to the train were locked and I banged on the side of the carriage. This brought me to the attention of a combat-uniformed soldier who walked towards me, but the train conductor opened up the door and I clambered in.

I smiled at Mrs S as I walked towards her along the thin corridor, not wanting to celebrate until the passports were in our hands and we were off. Minutes later our stern border patrol officer handed back our passports and the train began to edge off into Mongolia.

I flicked through the passport and all our visas categorised us as Irish in our British passports, but we were by now rattling through the Gobi desert, illuminated only by the stars and my mac screen.

For the last few days, Jasper has been saying that as a team we are invincible. I had my doubts today at times, but you know what? I think he might be right.