On Monday, one day prior to the train departure, we dropped off our bikes at the Beijing railway station. The process involved an interesting mix of developing world mayhem and bureaucratic formalities. All in all everyone was quite helpful and accommodating. The customs agent we dealt with was particularly kind and even offered Krystil his own chair while we waited for some paper work to be finished. When we left, our bikes were still sitting on a dolly in front of the train station with a sea of thousands of people streaming through. However, we were pretty sure they'd make it to Mongolia without a problem.
We got up early the next morning to catch the train. We were lucky to have managed to book the deluxe sleeper class (especially since this is the week of
Nadaam), so we got a cushy ride. We had our own 2 person sleeper compartment which shared a shower/sink with the adjacent compartment. We spent most of our time lazying around, eating in the dining car, and making friends on the train.
The border was a 5 hour affair starting with visits from Chinese health (another temperature reading!), customs and immigration officials. Next, the
bogies needed to be changed since the tracks in Mongolia use the Russian
gauge. Finally, after pushing on to the Mongolian side of the border we dealt with Mongolian health (no temperature check, just a form), immigration, and customs authorities. We were finally free to sleep without interruptions around 1 am.
We woke up the next morning to a view of the Gobi. It looked pretty bleak and we were both glad it wasn't part of our cycle plans. Eventually, as we approached Ulaanbaatar, the scenery became greener.
About 34 hours after leaving Beijing, we arrived in Ulaanbaatar. Staff from our guesthouse met us at the train station. After waiting for a few minutes, our bicycles appeared at the luggage claim. However, it turned out that the crux of getting our bikes was going to be clearing them through customs. Luckily, our guesthouse employees transformed into bureaucracy navigation superheroes and for the next couple hours ran around trying to get approval to bring them in without paying duty. Although we declared the value of the bikes as being about 1/3 of their true value, this amount was still astoundingly high for the Mongolian authorities. They simply couldn't just take our word that we would take them with us when we left (and would therefore not be subject to import duty). After our helpers went to talk to what seemed to be the head honcho of Mongolian customs (he had the big corner office on the top floor), we were told we'd have to pay the duty as a deposit and get it back when we leave. At this point it was past office hours so we would return the next day to finish the job. We returned alone the next day and seemed to get an empathetic customs agent who eventually decided we would not need to pay the deposit and summoned our customs broker (whose service we had unknowingly retained the previous day) to navigated us up and down the stairs of the building for another hour or so getting the rest of the paper work done. At each step of the process some insignificant sum of money was paid ($0.10-$2.00) and it all appeared legitimate. Somehow, about $5.00 and 10-20 people hours of wasted time later we had our bikes!
All in all we actually kind of got a kick out of the whole process. Therefore, we decided to have a bit more fun and spent part of the afternoon extending our visas. Though after the customs experience this was downright easy.
