All Aboard The Jazz Train Express (North) to Selenge Province
Whilst mum was on holiday with us in Mongolia we took another trip aboard the ‘Jazz Train Express’ from the capital Ulaanbaatar (UB), north to Selenge province on the Russian border and back again. The main purposes of the trip were: to raise money for the National Cancer Council of Mongolia; to see a bit of the country; to listen to some fantastic jazz music; to have a great time. We achieved them all.
UB train station is quite an amazing building. There is lots of marble and ornate architecture, it’s almost majestic. There are a number of original paintings hanging inside.
The weekend had been a promise of authentic culture, five-star cuisine, geographic riches and trips to and views over uninterrupted mountainous, down to the wide sweeping plains of the Mongolian steppe [the countryside, the outback] and weaving rivers cutting the landscapes. When I was promised this, I already knew most of it to be true and allowed myself a slight margin of interpretation with the cuisine. It’s a train – what do you expect!
The Trans-Siberian express runs from Beijing to Moscow and cuts through Ulaanbaatar. The trains are the old ones you see on the movies where you climb up the steps to board, not ones that are level with the platform and they look old too – both inside and out.
There is a boiler in the corner where you get on and underneath is a pile of wood. A wood fired burner still on a train.
On aircraft you now have Flight Attendants so on the train, the staff must have been Train Attendants. All were female and all wore uniforms that looked like 1960’s Aeroflot issue and all wore expressions that looked like they were Soviet issue from Soviet era. We had a number of carriages allocated including 2 berth, 4 berth, a couple of dining cars with bars and (believe it or not) one that had been cleared except for a stage to make it a nightclub.
Friday evening as the sun set, we boarded with all our goods and chattels such as cooler boxes full of booze, snacks and a toothbrush – it’s a fairly basic sort of a weekend and headed off north towards the Russian border. Being the spring the sun didn’t start to set until after 8:30pm so it gave us great views of the rolling Mongolian hills outside UB. In the distance you could see the traditional white canvas gers dotted around the hillsides like little patches of mushrooms.
As the bar wasn’t going to be open for an hour we all did the hospitable thing and crammed as many as possible into each compartment and cracked the beer and wine and wound up the music and it wasn’t long before the rocking and rolling commenced which was nothing to do with the train tracks.
Once the Dining cars opened, we all adjourned and very ornate these cars are too. Clearly a lot of workmanship has gone into these and it’s easy to see why the ‘Orient Express’ has such a reputation.
The itinerary said we were going to be served snacks and that’s exactly what we got. I’m not quibbling over it because the whole weekend was so cheap but if you ever do this, either eat before you go or take stuff with you (we’d done the latter). After that came the main entertainment around the title of the weekend ‘Jazz Train’ and it was the 2 musicians, Alexander on guitar and Yuri on saxophone. I’m told that Alex has played with symphony orchestras around the world – I’m not surprised, that man can make a guitar do anything! Yuri teaches music at UB conservatorium – I’m equally not surprised.
Then it was all on, music, singing, dancing – I honestly never thought it was possible to have such a good time on a train. Although the bar was supposed to shut around midnight it didn’t. And the train rattled it’s way northbound as the passengers bumped and swayed around which I’m sure was only to do with the train tracks and speed of the locomotive……
At some point we adjourned to our respective sleeping compartments and the train rolled on ever northwards. In the early hours of the morning we arrived at the station in Selenge, although we didn’t know anything about it at the time. The train had uncoupled our carriages, shunted us over into a siding and carried on its way along the Beijing-Moscow route.
When we awoke and the sun was not yet over the horizon but the first rays of light were appearing over the nearby hills and rooftops. Disembarking the train, Selenge station looked deserted. It was. There were a few old railway wagons and engines dispersed around but no signs of life at all.
This was no real surprise because Mongolia is huge with a tiny population which is very sparsely distributed so feelings of isolation are nothing new here at all. One thing we had learned from years of traveling, especially in remote places – always take your own toilet paper and hand cleaner. That came in very handy because all the time the train is at a station the toilets are supposed to be locked and you use the ones on the platform. Let’s just say the ones on the platform had seen better days and we’ll leave it at that.
At 7:30am breakfast was served back in the ornate dining cars which had been the scene of the previous evenings frenetic drinking. I’d taken my own tea bags and a flask of boiling water which was still sealed and still hot. It’s the little things that make or break a trip. I was fairly sure the breakfast wouldn’t sustain me until we got back about 1:30pm so I supplemented with my own rations – which turned out to be a wise move.
I had a brisk walk around the town to check out the local surroundings prior to the days excursions commencing. There are some interesting buildings and the old soviet architecture is conspicuous.
Just a word of warning though, beware of the stray dogs. They are scavengers and hungry so don’t go too far, it’s probably best not to be on your own. As the old adage goes ‘walk softly but carry a big stick.’
After breakfast the buses arrived to take us on the days sightseeing excursions, Selenge province is the birthplace of Queen Hulan, wife of the great Chinggis Khan. In addition to arranging ourselves a Jazz Train we had also acquired [possibly unknowingly / inadvertently] a Jazz Bus complete with blinged-up steering wheel and bejewelled gearstick. Possibly designed by Elton John.
The buses departed to visit the 1921 Revolution museum in the nearby soum of Altanbulag.
A soum is like a council / local govt area, an Aimag is like a state / county. This is a really interesting place and tells the story and depicts the history of the revolution of 1921 when the Mongolians ended the Chinese governments occupation of Mongolia with assistance from the Russian Red Army. There are many depictions of some of Mongolia’s revolutionary heroes. Like many countries we all live in today – if you look back into the history – some people gave their lives for that country. Pay them due reverence.
There are excellent displays of original artifacts, clothing, weapons and equipment like horse saddles all of which have been well preserved. The place gives you a real authentic taste of the Mongolian struggle of 100 years ago.
Bizarrely enough, outside on the fenceline are a set of rugby goalposts. There was no evidence that anyone here had ever played, watched or even heard of rugby, but here they were.
You can see the Mongolia-Russia border from the museum. There are some really high watch towers and wire fences, but then – it just stops. So if you’re 1 mile up the fence you could just walk 1 mile and walk round it.
However, it probably wouldn’t be that simple because our entire congregation queued up to have their photo taken right on the spot where Mongolia finishes and Russia starts. Russian guards were there, stood with their toes right up to the line and no one and I mean no one – was getting a toe over the line into the Russian Federation. They had these German Shepherd guard dogs with them which were snarling and barking and were obviously trained for a certain purpose. None of us had the desire or need to take on 40kg of K9 teeth and muscle so we stayed a toe’s length back from the imaginary line.
The three of us on the imaginary border
On completion of the border and museum tour we all piled back aboard the buses for our next excursion 10 km north of the centre of Selenge. We headed up to Saikhnii Hutul which translates as Beautiful Gorge and the reasons why are obvious. The whole region is an area of outstanding natural beauty and the two main rivers Orkhon (that’s a great name) and Selenge merge here and drain into Lake Baikal. The lake has in excess of 300 rivers and streams draining into it and once upon a time it was known as the Pearl of Siberia. It is almost 1 mile deep in places and when all the snow and ice has melted it is said to hold roughly 20% of all freshwater on earth. It’s a big lake.
Dramatic is the operative word for the views over Saikhnii Hutul. Over millions of years the wind, the ice, the rain and the temperature (- 40 to + 40) has hewn fascinating rock formations leaving massive rocks jutting up from the ground like the fins of a buried monolithic stegosaurus.
Paradoxically, next to rock formations millions of years old are modern statues of eagles, deer, tigers only recently installed. The old alongside the new.
When we first arrived the sky was cloudy and overcast. But the wind picked up for a while, the clouds disappeared leaving us an overhead canopy of skies of azure blue
Then before you as far as the eye can see are valleys and hills and forests, much of it will untrodden by human foot. The rivers snake away into the wilderness and before you all you know is that ‘somewhere’ out there in front of you, is the border between two vast countries. The wild horses, deer and bears take no notice and enjoy the warm weather whilst they can.
I stood in silent awe for a while and one of my Mongolian colleagues came up beside me and asked “what are you looking at?”
“Beauty” I replied.
“Where?” she asked.
“Everywhere.”
She had grown up in northern Mongolia and had seen this scenery every hour of the day for most of her life and had just got used to it.
If there truly is beauty at the end of a rainbow somewhere on earth, then this was the place. Surrounded by infinite landscapes of nature at its finest. I’ve seen it on every continent [except Antarctica] and too many countries to mention – but this – was Mongolia’s. This was nature untouched and untrodden. And it was beautiful and peaceful and serene. That is why we should maintain it for the generations to come.
Around the national park are multiple monuments and plaques. Get a local guide to translate them for you.
Believe it or not, even in remote northern Mongolia there is the ubiquitous Irish pub!
As the sunset over Sukhbataar aimag, the Jazz Train Express coupled-up to the southbound train and started the overnight haul back to Ulaanbaatar with all the passengers far richer in new friends, knowledge, culture and experience [certainly the foreign ones anyway]. Sunsets over the Mongolian steppe can be spectacular and this particular one left us with memories of skies of gold and fields of fire.
On the way back, the unthinkable happened and the bar ran out of beer and all passengers had exhausted all their own supplies. We still had another couple of hours of music and dancing to go so this called for some serious action. By an unparalleled stroke of good fortune, we had a scheduled stop in the city of Darkhan but for an unspecified period which translated as “a few minutes” but none of the train staff could clearly define “few” and it seemed as if it would be when the train driver felt we had been there long enough to do whatever the train was stopped for but we knew it was longer than embarking and disembarking passengers.
We had first hand information that there was a beer shop / off licence / bottle shop just a couple of minutes outside the station but nothing exact. We also knew that these trains wait for no one and nothing so this was quite a serious risk. So Shane and I designated ourselves as the beer re-supply champions and asked for a couple of volunteers who fancied a drunken sprint with no certainty of making it back but everlasting drunken adulation if we did – it seemed worth it. In the event we didn’t make it back, we would be stranded in a city we knew nothing about, at nearly midnight, in the middle of Mongolia, with no transport to get back to Ulaanbaatar, no accommodation and just a shedload of alcohol so everyone had to know the risks. As the Jazz Train Express pulled into this small remote city we were out the doors, empty bags over shoulders and galloping across the station like a herd of young gazelles. Sure enough a few hundred yards away there was a beer shop and it had plenty of beer but not much in fridges. We threw as much as we could into the bags we had, chucked down far more Tugriks (Mongolian currency) than it was worth and then started back the few hundred yards towards the station but not quite at the same gallop we had started out at. Running with 2 bags weighed down with dozens of cans of beer is quite difficult. Sure enough before we reached the train the whistles sounded indicating the train was about to leave. Everyone was hanging out the doors and we were throwing in bags laden with beer and hands reached out and grabbed Shane plus the two volunteers and they were onboard. I was last in the conga line and somehow manage to hurl the first bag aboard. The train has now increased speed from beyond a crawl to a jogging pace which is OK but I’m jogging with 20kg of beer! It’s starting to outpace me. I manage to swing the bag from my left shoulder across my body towards the door and it’s caught and I’m free of all the excess weight. Which is good because the train is now at running pace. I can still put on a reasonable running pace for an old bloke but I’ve been running for a few minutes already, weighed down with 40kg’s and I’ve already had a skinful. I have this instant vision of everyone aboard enjoying all the beers of my hard labour, me missing out on it and being alone in a strange town and having to make my own way back to UB and explain that away. It gives me a final burst of energy and we are now at a sprint and I’ve got about 5 – 10 seconds of sprint in me. I hit the gas and I’m alongside the door with two of the train trippers hanging out, holding on with one hand each and reaching for me with the other. It’s like a scene from Von Ryan’s Express, only with less machine guns involved. And unlike the movie they grab me and haul me aboard the train.
A couple more hours of entertainment from the great jazz musicians and as much dancing as you can fit in a railway carriage and we had to call it a night ready for a 5am arrival into UB. The fierce stewardesses / attendants are banging on your compartment door as the train starts to clunk and clank it’s way across the tracks to line up with the platform. As soon as you’re at a stop, there is a mad scramble to get all your gear down the stairs onto the platform, before the Trans-Siberia Express starts it’s long haul to the next remote station on the multi-thousand mile journey.
For this entire enriching experience I would like to thank the two organisers, my friends Tseggy and Gombosed. Without them, I would never have heard of, never mind experienced this truly unique and fascinating part of their culture and history. I still feel very privileged that our Mongolian hosts and friends chose to share such a special part of their country with us.
The whole weekend consisting of:
- 2 nights accommodation;
- Meals;
- Entertainment;
- Transport;
- All entry fees;
and an excursion along a part of the Trans-Siberian Express to a remote and fascinating part of the world, had cost AU$165 per person. I doubt I could buy a round of drinks for that in most cities.