Day 15- Sardines

This day was spent on the train, heading from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing. It included the unusual experience of being winched into the air so that the wheels of the carriage could be changed to fit Chinese rails. I'm sure there is a good reason for doing this (it took four hours) instead of just changing trains.

Three was one other image I'll never forget. Picture a thousand miles of flat, empty land, with barely a living creature in sight, never mind buildings, rivers or roads. You could draw a map of this area, and it would simply be a sheet of white paper, with one black line through the middle marking the railway. You could imagine setting out to walk across it, and days would pass by without a single shape disrupting the flatness of a horizon, as if you were sailing across a calm ocean. Now add to the picture a dark grey sky and lashing rain. The dry soil laps up the water, leaving none in any cool stream for a person to drink. If anything, this place now looks even less hospitable, as you are reminded that the cold of winter is even harsher than the heat of summer. Just as there is no shade when the sun shines, there is no shelter now from the wind or rain. 

Yet what is that, at the corner of the window? Two shapes come into view. They are a man and a boy on horseback, galloping so fast that they are only gradually overtaken by the train! And of course, there is a speck now on the horizon that must be their ger- they are racing home to escape the weather. What a place to live.

You could guess from that description that people in rural in Mongolia are pretty widely spread out. In fact the figure for the whole country is just 1.7 people per square kilometre. I'm writing this now in Beijing, where the central districts have a population density of around 20,000 per square kilometre. But don't take my word for it- here are some time lapse videos to back up the claim.