We arrived in Hohhot just before 7am (although we were awake at 5am after Liv panicked that we were arriving and woke a less-than-happy Adam up), and soon found a decent-ish, cheap-ish hotel. Almost immediately we went to the Mongolian Consulate to apply for our visas, where we had a rather odd experience. First of all, we kind of had to barge our way into the consulate, as the guard didn't really want to let us in. The second came when we were applying for the visas. We applied for a 30 day visa, but when we were asked if we had friends in Mongolia (um, no) the lady told us we could only get a 14 day visa! After standing around for 20 minutes or so saying how 14 days couldn't possibly be enough time to see the country, she finally relented and said "ok 21 days". Weird - never thought we'd have to bargain for our visas!!
Our next stop was the train station to buy train tickets from Hohhot to Ulan Baator - not knowing much about this (well, nothing at all) we were happily surprised when we found a short line for the international bookings, that there was a train leaving on Friday, and that there were tickets available! We were glad we had photocopies of our passports with us, as ours were at the Consulate but we needed them to book tickets! A catch-22: don't want to buy tickets without visa, don't want to wait until after getting visa to book tickets!
The only exploring we did today in Hohhot was walking down a side street to find food. After eating we had a snooze at our hotel, before doing a lot of internet research about Mongolia - we don't have a guide book so we want to be at least a little prepared before we just turn up in an entirely new country by ourselves!
While at the internet bar we met a couple of French travellers, who we spent a couple of hours with eating snacks on the side of the road and sharing travelling stories. It was great to have some company and turn the normal daily eating activity into something more social.
Adlibing it one step closer to Mongolia
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
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