Our last 48-hours in UB were quite hectic and after visting the cultural highlights of the city, a day rock-climbing in the Terelji Natural Park (only a few kilometers away from UB) and a lot of time trying to sort out the shipping of the bikes we finally left beautifull Mongolia.
The shipping of the bikes proved so far to be far more complicated than expected and despite spending a lot of time running around UB and opting for the safe (and more expensive) option with DHL, we have still a lot of doubts that the bike will ever make it back home. We spent most of day last Wednesday at a timber factory dismounting the bikes in the smallest possible space and watching the crates litterally being custom-bulit around the bikes. Quite impressive indeed even if the bill turned out to be much more than expected...
We left UB onboard the Transiberian on Thursday morning for a 30-day journey to Beijing. This is exactely what one would expect from such a trip; nice landscapes and most of the time is spent reading and sleeping in a 4-people cabin. The border crossing process was fairly simple but we were quite impressed by the change of wheels on the train wagons to accomodate for the different systems between Mongolia and China. They separate the entire train, elevate each cars 2meters above the ground and change all the wheel-base.
1 comment:
Changing all the wheel-base is also done on freight carriages at the French/Spanish border in Port Bou.
Ciao
Onkel Giuseppe
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