Too Many Times To Count

By chance we ended up in the luxury sleeper car on the train from Zamyn-Uud to Ulaanbaatar (UB). We ordinarily would never pay the 54,600 togrog (US$40 for both of us) it costs to be here instead of the more reasonable 33,600 togrog, but we were forced, by luck, to buy the luxury ticket. And is it luxurious. There are four of us in a compartment that has a sliding door, which means each party of two can comfortably sit on the bottom bunk and there’s plenty of space for storing our big bags as well as little hooks and shelves to store our smaller items. The car is clean; the women in charge are constantly cleaning the floors. And the bathroom is a dream, if one can say that about a train toilet. In this car, the two bathrooms are divided between gender. So far on this journey, the female toilet has remained immaculate. It doesn’t even smell bad, which, for anyone who’s been on a foreign sleeper train, should say a lot.


Scott sitting in our luxury compartment, looking out the window. Notice the sliding door behind him.

Scott and I are sharing the 4-bed compartment with a mother-daughter duo who are kind and funny. The daughter speaks very good English (self-taught) and, with her mother’s insight, has been giving us advice about where to go in UB and what to eat. They even spotted a large group of wild camels hanging out in the Gobi and made sure we saw them as well. The two of them have also been helping us with pronunciation – bar-yar-la-a (thank you) and san-ban-uu (hello). Since I can’t even get these two words down perfectly, I haven’t even approached asking them how to say longer phrases.

How we got into this luxury train car is a result of a prolonged frustrating episode of trying to buy train tickets to Ulaanbaater at the Zamyn-Uud ticketing office. As soon as we reached Zamyn-Uud, we quickly exchanged money and ran to the ticketing office, but it was of no importance when we arrived at the office and started waiting because, here, lines do not exist. Instead, those around us also trying to buy tickets employed the huddling method – groups of two would huddle around the window booth and not leave until they got their tickets. Others huddled around the original huddle and so on. The most opportune position was within the first huddle ring blocking those behind you from getting in.

After having spent the last hour and a half in a crush of people going through China immigration and then through Mongolian immigration, I was in no mood to push or be pushed. We tried a few times to buy tickets to Ulaanbaatar but all we got, to our utter frustration and madness, was a shaking head. Times were thrown out at us – 5:30 pm, 7:00 am – but we didn’t know exactly what they meant. We got that we couldn’t buy tickets for the current day’s train, so we tried to buy tickets for tomorrow’s – margaash in Mongolian. Still a shaking head. We were at a loss. I can’t say I didn’t contemplate using tears to help the situation. Then, out of nowhere, came English words, “You want to go on tomorrow’s train?” They came from a man who was standing in the second huddle ring. “Yes,” we eagerly replied. He translated our request to the female ticket agent. She replied. He translated, “You can’t buy the tickets now. You have to come back tomorrow morning at 7 to buy tickets for the 17:30 train.” Okay. We didn’t know why we couldn’t, at the moment, buy tickets for tomorrow’s train, but we accepted the directions and were resigning ourselves to staying the night and most of the next day in the small dusty town of Zamyn-Uud.

As Scott and I were walking out of the office, we saw the man who had helped us again and thanked him. His English was the best that we’d heard so far and I thought it might be a good idea to have him write down some words in Mongolian so we could have an easier time the next morning communicating what tickets we wanted to buy. After we thanked him, I said, “Tomorrow, we’d like to buy tickets for the sleeper car.” I put my two hands in prayer, leaned my head to the side, and mimed the motion for sleeping. Before I could ask him to write down the Mongolian translation for ‘hard sleeper,’ he said a jumble of English words about sleeping. His English wasn’t as good as I had originally thought – we didn’t  understand what he was trying to say – but before we knew what was going on, he was leading us out of the office and towards another building.

We guessed that maybe this man thought we were asking about a hotel and was going to lead us to one. Although that wasn’t our intention, it was still very kind of him to want to help us, so we followed. Next thing we knew, we were in another office building, not a hotel, and, in Mongolian, he was talking to various people. Scott and I had no idea what was happening – did this man think this office building had a place for us to spend the night? After a few minutes, he turned to us and said, “You wait. The train director will be here in ten minutes.” In a stutter of surprised words, we asked whether we were waiting to talk to the director about a place to spend the night or about train tickets. The man quickly clarified the situation – he wanted the director to issue us tickets for tomorrow’s train immediately so we wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of waiting at 7 am the next morning. He seemed to think, for whatever reasons, that it would be impossible for us to get tickets to UB the following morning.

The man, kindly and patiently, waited with us for the train director. We talked about his son going to Tennessee for high school. We asked him about the important Mongolian celebration of Nadaam. We asked him about UB, where he lived, what we should do there. We asked him anything we could think to ask to make the waiting time not as awkward. Finally, about 15 minutes later, we heard footsteps approaching and a man came down the hallway. It was, finally, the train director. The man instantly started talking to him. Scott and I stood up but kept our distance so as not to cross whatever social boundaries may exist. Soon, the man and the train director disappeared into his office. Scott and I just waited. Within a minute or two, the man popped his head out of the office and said, “Leave tonight okay?” “Yeah!” we replied. We had thought that the night train was sold out – that’s how we interpreted the shaking heads at the ticket office. Scott and I were relieved to think we didn’t have to waste time or money spending a night in Zamyn-Uud, even if it meant spending the 15 hours in a seat and not a sleeper, as we thought seats might be all that was left. Another minute later, the man emerged from the office with a piece of paper with the director’s handwriting. Apparently, this piece of paper would ensure us tickets on the 17:35 train. We were elated. After showing us this paper, the man said, “He is ready to see you now.” Scott and I went into the office and awkwardly expressed our thanks to the train director who sat emotionless behind his desk. He accepted our thank yous and shook our hands when we put them out. The formality and process of the situation instantly reminded me of Bhutan.

Scott and I, along with our new friend with the piece of paper, rushed back to the ticket office. It was on this rushed walk that we realized the tickets that the director has given us permission to buy were in the luxury class. After this man had gone out of his way to help us, there was no way we were going to show any emotion other than complete and utter gratitude. In our minds we were calculating what this would amount to, but when we got to the ticket window and presented the handwritten director’s note to the woman who had earlier shaken her head at us, we easily gave up the money, accepted our luxury class tickets and proceeded to look for our train car, car #16.

Scott and Pewjee.

The man’s name is Pewjee. While traveling, there are so many times when the kindness of total strangers is all there is, when you just have to let go of control and leave your fate up to someone else, someone you don’t know. It’s amazing really how strangers change a situation from bad to good, from impossible to possible. And that’s happened too many times to count.