Fun at the Chinese border

The Chinese border itself was not too much trouble (although the usual sitting around for a few hours in a stationary train doesn't get more interesting with practice). However, the fun started when we got out of the station and tried to get to Beijing.

After our 4 hours on the train that morning waiting to pass the border from Mongolia, we finally emerged from the train around noon. We were assured that there would be plenty of busses to meet the train and sure enough there was a huge mob of hawkers there trying to sell us a bus ticket (in fact, all busses were the same - these were just different salesmen). One poor unfortunate soul had the misfortune of asking us if we wanted a bus to Beijing. I say unfortunate because little did he realise that he was gonna be stuck with us for the next 6 hours.

Since we had come from Mongolia, we had no Chinese money on us just yet so told our friend that we'd take his bus but that we had to go to the bank first.

"Bank? OK!" he said, and so our tour of Erlian began. The first bank he took us to was some regional bank - one which hadn't yet heard of ATMs, and so we moved on to bank No. 2. Thankfully this bank knew what an ATM machine was (I know the M stands for Machine, but I'm writing this so you can like it or lump it) but didn't know what a Visa card was :-(

When we arrived at Bank No. 3, we were greeted to a beautiful Visa sticker inside the bank :-) Saved! (or so we thought). The ATM accepted our card, but worked really slowly and after about 3 minutes, spat our card out with a "timed out" error. We went into the bank and tried to explain this to the staff. They just looked at our Visa card and shook their heads. I felt like taking their Visa logo and stuffing it in the bin! by now our taxi driver was getting a little impatient and said several things to us in Chinese (he knew we didn't understand). His English ammounted to: 'No maney, no Beijing' - we got the message, but since he had driven us around for the past hour, he wanted us to get our money too (so that he could get paid).

He seemed to be under the impression that the Visa ATM would work after 4pm (not much good to us though since the bus left at 3pm). We tried to go to some of the larger hotels hoping that they could charge our card and give us the cash, but they too thought it was hillarious that we wanted to uses such an obscure card in their town.

After our taxi-man brought us to some blackmarket moneylenders (he seemed to think because we had no money, we could invent some to change), we eventually returned to the bank at 4pm. Sure enough, there was no difference. In fact, a member of staff of the bank tried to "help" by turning off the ATM while I was using it! This only helped the machine to swallow my card...

So here we were - 400km from the nearest town, no money, we had missed the bus to Beijing, no hotels took Visa and now the bank machine had swallowed my card (Kate still had hers). Our plans at this point revolved around waiting 3 days for the next train from UB so that we could ask some western tourists if they could lend us some money.

Thankfully this was the lowest point of the day. We managed to come across a Western Union branch in nowheresville (aka Erlian), and after phoning Conor (our taxi-man paid for the calls!), we were soon the recipients of US $350 :-) I even got my Visa card back!

Our transport out of Erlian - 11 hours after arriving!

Because we missed our bus, our taxi-man arranged for a friend of his to drive us 4 hours through the Gobi desert to the next town so that we could catch an overnight train to Beijing. We finally left Erlian at 7pm (11 hours after we arrived) and spent the journey teaching our driver some English :-) He was very nice, and even went into the station with us to buy our train tickets and made sure we got all we needed. Before he left, he gave us his phone number in case we had any more problems, and then a hug goodbye :-)