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Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Wheels on the Train...get switched around

The rest of our Trans-Mongolian experience was largely uneventful until our next border crossing. Russia and Mongolia (as a result of their liberation by Russia) are on a different rail gauge than the rest of the known universe - this necessitates their hoisting the train on pnuematic?/hydraulic? lifts, mechanics scurrying under the carriages to detach the one set of wheels, then sliding the next under and securing them and finally lowering the whole mess back onto the rails to resume the journey. You couldn't feel the lifting, but the process of positioning the train in the hangar, detatching all the carrs and then rehooking them was fantastically jarring.
Border formalities took the usual eon - very oddly the Chinese border station has no ATM or facilities of any kind for acquiring money. the most podunk Russian and Mongolian hamlets ALL had their ATMs front and center. How can you be coaxed into impulse snack buying if you have no immediate access to cash? There was also no ATM in the train station in Beijing. This was starting to seriously weird us out - we know the Chinese are brilliant moneymakers and everything is wretchedly still cah based. It was all very reminiscent of Kimberly's first trip to Beijing with her dear friend Rebecca. They had gobs of Korean won which they discovered after the fact could not be traded in the PRC, the ATM had not yet made an appearance behind the bamboo curtain and the banks were on holiday.
See video of the wheel change on our youtube channel!
http://www.youtube.com/user/beartubalooza

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