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A TripAdvisor™ TripWow slideshow of a travel blog to Ulan Bator, Mongolia by TravelPod blogger Bastin79 titled “A Kingdom Full Of Horses” Bastin79′s travel blog entry: “A calm early morning Beijing aids my walk to the subway station and line 2 carries me to Beijing’s main station, the departure point of the train to Mongolia. After clearing the tight security, I meet my contact with the tickets and a good luck. With luggage stowed, I meet my cabin mates, a German couple called Raphael and Ann-Marie. The long train pulls slowly out into the hazy Beijing suburbs. We are soon out into the countryside around Beijing, getting steadily drier as we move north. The train crosses the Great Wall at Zhangjiakou on the edge of Inner Mongolia. At this point the wall is less well repaired, sometimes disappearing entirely when it reaches the valley floors. Hundreds of tiny villages slip by, each one less developed than the last. The day flashes by with the scenery, chatting away with my cabin mates. After dinner in the functional Chinese dining car, we pull into the border point between China and Mongolia. In the gloom, a stream of Chinese border guards start the laborious task of checking papers and baggage. Satisfied, they allow us off the train to relax while bogeys are changed. The railway lines are different gauges in China and Mongolia, so the train disappears off to get some new undercarriage. A couple of hours later we are set to move over the border and repeat the paperwork …
