A Brush with the Law

Sunday 27 June 1999 – Saturday 3 July 1999

Our last few days in Ulaan Baatar were spent sightseeing and buying souvenirs to take home.  We were invited round to Damdensuuren’s for dinner and spent a wonderful evening with him and his family, finding out more about how the Mongolians live and toasting one another for our remarkable personal qualities and exploits.  This included the consumption of an alarming quantity of Genghis Khan vodka, which our host made clear was not an option.  We also visited Miga’s monastery, and were all the more sorry to have to leave this amazing country where we had so much fun and so many memories.

The last leg of our journey was to be a two-day train ride on the Trans-Mongolian to Beijing where we were meeting up with Pippa’s mum.  We had bought our tickets and were ready to go.  The train left Ulaan Baatar on a Thursday afternoon and as we climbed on board, we felt like old hands at rail travel, unpacking within minutes and settling down to wait for the attendant to come by with a thermos of hot water.  We would be in Beijing late the following day, so pulled out our guidebooks to start planning what we would do with the three weeks we had in China.

By evening, we had reached the Mongolian border and, as ever, there were hours of waiting for passport and customs officials to turn up and do their thing.  It was only then that we realized our visas into China had expired two days previously.  As the Mongolian officials kindly pointed this out to us, we knew it would be a problem but decided to travel on to the Chinese border nonetheless and hoped we would be able to acquire a temporary entry permit in exchange for some kind of fine.  No such luck.

We were immediately hauled off the train and our passports confiscated.  The next two days were spent under house arrest, trying to get tickets back to Mongolia where we would have to reapply for visas at the Chinese Embassy.  The whole episode was immensely frustrating, not least because Pippa’s mum had already arrived in Beijing, but also because we were helpless to do anything without the approval of the Chinese authorities.  They combined absolute authority, spontaneous rule-making, and (owing to the embassy bombing in Belgrade) a serious disliking of Americans.  It was not pleasant.

We spent much of our time secretly plotting to evade the police and reach Beijing by employing various subterfuges and forms of public transportation, and were just about desperate enough to try it!  Fortunately for everyone, we finally got a ticket to UB; it was a genuine relief to be back in Mongolia, and within 24 hours we had our visas and reservations on the next flight out to Beijing.  Sadly, we had to abandon our goal of crossing the whole of Eurasia overland, and given our somewhat unfavourable first-impressions of China were not terribly excited about the prospect ahead.