First day of Trans-Mongolian Railway

Boarding our train.

A reservoir for making power. We saw several of these heading out of Beijing then coal fired power plants and a few wind farms later on.

In our first class compartment. It had this chair, table, big window, two bunks, shower and sink shared with the next door compartment, a closet with padded hangers, luggage storage area, a fan, several lights and an electrical outlet.

A new city being built.

A part of the Great Wall we passed on our first day. The wall is in several sections, this is not one of the sections they let people walk on.

June 8, 2011
Yesterday we picked up our tickets for our departure out of Asia. If you hear about the booming economy in China, apparently much of that money ends up in Beijing. On our 45 minute walk to get our tickets, we passed the Lamborghini, Mercedes, Bugatti, Aston Martin, Ferrari, Maserati, and Porsche dealerships. All this on our way to the Forbidden City. I guess extravagant spending and conspicuous consumption is not forbidden.
We boarded our train easily at 7:15am in Beijing. We are in the middle of car #9 in compartment IV, berths 7 and 8.It was surprisingly organized and calm finding out way to the waiting room in this huge train station. We thought it would be crowded and bustling with people but it wasn’t. There were people of course, backpacks, rice sacks full of things, people sitting, standing, milling about; waiting for the beginning of their journey. A skinny, long haired Chinese man forced us out of our seats when he lit his cigarette. Although we are used to the smell of second hand smoke now after 10 months in Vietnam, we still don’t like it. We boarded our train with other travelers many of whom seemed to be together on a tour group.
Over the last several months we had changed our minds about which route to take to Moscow. At one point it looked like we were going to take a ferry from Japan to Vladivostok, Russia, but a 9.0 earthquake changed that plan. We were going to be in a 4 person sleeping berth and travel the entire length of the Trans-Siberian Railway, Vladivostok on the Pacific coast to Moscow. Due to extreme difficulty in getting visas for Russia while in Vietnam (7 trips to the Russian Embassy) we settled on the original plan. Take the Trans-Mongolian Railway northwest out of Beijing, cross the Gobi Desert and Mongolia itself into Russia where we connect with the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow. A 5 ½ day train trip-in a two berth first class sleeping cabin. This is a trip I have wanted to do since reading The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux. I am writing this while sitting in a chair at our table next to the window of our cabin. The window in the hallway across our open door is open. The temperature is perfect and our orange diesel engine is pulling us along at about 35-45 mph.
We have passed beautiful jagged mountains only a few hours outside Beijing, houses made of brick and mud with tile roofs, dams, lakes, trains full of coal, coal burning power plants, new cities being built, several tunnels, small villages, sheep herders, sheep, reforestation projects, eroded gullies, dump trucks moving fill, several wind farms and now at 5:50 pm vast open expanses of grazing land that looks a bit like eastern Wyoming. The schedule for the entire trip is posted just outside our door in the hallway so we know when and where we stop and for how long. We have a 3 hour stop at the Mongolian border to go through immigration and when the train gets its bogies (wheels) changed to fit the different gauge track. I’ll have to write about this process after I see it happen.