Sleeper bus hell
The overground trip from Mongolia to China, once you have flogged your car in Ulaanbaatar, is best achieved by train. A leg of the Trans-Siberian railway runs through the Gobi desert down into Beijing. Unfortunately for us this needed to be booked months in advance. We had three days to get a visa and get out of the country.

And so we found ourselves on a local sleeper train that would take us to the Mongolian/Chinese border at Erlian. There we would pick up the sleeper bus (Individual beds! Air con! Flush toilet! Other completely made-up bullshit!) and travel on to Beijing.

The overnighter on the train was lovely, if slightly warm, and we all fell asleep on our bunks to the swaying of the carriages as they rattled through the empty landscape. We awoke in the border town. All border towns have that transitional grimness: heat, dust, queues of stationary vehicles and buildings bleached with sunlight. We saw the coaches and waved our tickets and were ushered on board.

A veal calf would have pitied our conditions. The beds were about a foot wide and five feet long, two high, three rows running the length of the coach. They were metal, with a thin foam mattress and grimy sheet over each one, and a pillow that could cause a pandemic balanced at one end. I fought to secure a bottom bunk and tried hunching myself into the tiny space. It was impossible to sit fully upright on either the top of bottom bunk.

By means of sign languages and the odd familiar word we were told that the toilet was out of order. As was the air conditioning. It was easily nearing 40 degree heat outside in the midday sun and we had a day and a half on this motoring hell.

The first bus broke down half an hour outside the town. Our bus, of course, had to stop too. We took the opportunity to piss by the side of the road. I got back on the bus, unearthed my sleeping tablets and half bottle of top quality Mongolian vodka and decided to cope with the journey in my time honoured tradition of forcibly blocking it from my memory.

For me, the journey was a nightmarish, sweating, semi-awake, half-paralysed trip to the darker pits of transport hell. I remember flashes, like scenes from a movie: loud voices and lights at a truck stop and the smell of frying meat; the pitch of the engine and the broken spring on the bunk above me; my mate's face, blurred and pale, in the bunk opposite. For my unfortunate friends, it was ten times worse - two of them had food poisoning. On arriving to Beijing we were unceremoniously dumped in the outskirts of the city while taxi drivers vied to take us to one of their specially recommended hostels. We slunk into a McDonalds and praised globalisation and Western capitalism.

I love travelling. I do a lot of it, for work and for pleasure. But ever since that journey I have refused point blank to get on a coach. Don't try convincing me that National Express so much better - that's merely trading discomfort for a different class of psychopaths.
( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 25 Jun 2009, 13:50, 2 replies)

Click!
Did the same, with food poisoning, constantly falling off a top bunk 'coz of my fat arse, and with the inside of the bus filled with smoke from the dodgy, typical Chinese-duct-tape-fixit-job exhaust pipe. Never again!
(Celerydemon, Fri 26 Jun 2009, 6:43, closed)

A fine write up
*click*
( chart cat has an itch, Sat 27 Jun 2009, 8:04, closed)