The train from Ulan-Bator to Beijing was the worst I have experienced during this trans-siberian journey. Train was dirty, little comfort & the staff was smoking openly in the carriage (cigarettes are dirt cheap here, about 1£ for a pack and government does not care ).
Border crossing was quite an experience. Train stopped at some small border town. Loudspeakers were playing some sort of Chinese patriotic music and we saw about 50 border guards literally running out of the train station and line up perfectly in front of each door of every compartment to make sure nobody could run away.
Passport control was rough, no English at all and they started to panic and scream when the headcount was not matching the number of customs duty forms they had. After this disagreement, the train moved on revealing Chinese soldiers posted every 50m apart on each side of the rail, by night and without moving a finger.
This was quite a good first glimpse of China: China is a really secure country. To get into the country, you need as part of the Visa application to detail your full itinerary trip day by day, including where you will sleep, what you will see & do + the train/planes details for internal travels. You can’t check in anywhere without your passport (which they will scan thoroughly), you can’t buy a train ticket without your passport (which will be scanned again, only locals can use the ticket machines where they need to scan their electronic id-card ..)+ in any subway station throughout the countries; there is airport type security where they are scanning your bags and you must in front of the security guards open all of your bottles and drink some of the contents to prove you won’t harm anyone with it.
Anyway, after moving, the train ended up in some kind of hangar where they literally lift up the whole train to change the boogies as the rail track width is different between China & Mongolia. Amazing experience.
In the morning, as I got closer to Beijing; we were passing through mountains, rivers to finally arrive in the capital. As soon as I step out of the train, I was surrounded by thousand of Chinese heading towards the same direction. I knew China had a large population but I would never have imagined there would be so many Chinese in China ! The air outside was heavy and warm , probably because of the pollution. Drinking water like crazy.
Tried to buy a subway ticket station, 45 min queue. I have never seen such a big queue. On my way to the hostel, I can already feel the pressure and stress of a city hosting more than 20 million inhabitants. Chinese everywhere, people & traffic jam, noise, pollution. no understanding at all of the writing & language, suffocating temperature & humidity but I arrived in a good mood at the hostel. In my dorm, young Chinese graduate from the countryside coming to Beijing to land their first job. They are quite enthusiastic to see a Westerner (“French ? Awww, Romantic !!”)) and I ended up going through many photo sessions with them.
Next day, went to hike on the great wall. Impressive, at the time when in Middle ages; we were just in Europe building Cathedrals and a few Castles; Chinese civilization was able to build 20000km of massive wall over mountains. Climbing it in Summer was really physical and tiring, with many locals selling over-priced water at every fort to prevent the looming dehydration.
Spent about 1 week in Beijing, visiting the different sights. 1 thing I will always remember is that during that week, I haven’t seen the sky a single time and as a matter of fact anything further than 300m around me. Behind the forbidden city, I climbed onto a hill where you could basically not even see the large forbidden city & Tien Anmen square due to the air pollution. It seems the locals accept it as they are used to not see the sky and they only see Chinese movies on TV, but I really wonder how much health issues can arise from this pollution.
Communicating is extremely though as no one speaks English. Furthermore, customer service is really poor. The Chinese market is so large (over a billion) than unless you are really rich, they don’t care much about you as a customer in most of the restaurants & Taxi experiences I had. Beijing is a crowded city and going from one place to another can takes literally 2 hours due to congestion. Not having an overly good impression of the city, luckily I met Bonny; a Chinese English teacher who helped me during that week and made my experience of Beijing more enjoyable (by being able to communicate with English speaking people). She works for a company preparing Chinese students to TOEFL tests so as to be able to be accepted in US universities. Thanks to the one child policy, Chinese parents are doing everything they can for the kid to have the best education, including paying 200$/hour for English classes!
After 1 week, had enough and boarded a fast Chinese train to Shanghai (over 1000 km in 5 hours, including stops)
