Hanno's blog

After crossing Yunnan province, I finally left China to go further south into Laos. I travelled by bus from Jinghong to Medan and from there to Mohan, which is the chinese border town. From there, I just walked across the border. In Laos, EU-citizens can get a visa-on-arrival, which was easy. I just had to fill in a form and got my visa about 10 minutes later.

Right behind the border in Laos is the small town Boten. There's a quite interesting story behind this place. A couple of years ago, this was a place of casinos for chinese gamblers. In China itself casinos are forbidden, so this gained quite some popularity. A couple of luxury Hotels and other facilities for the chinese gamblers emerged. However, some conflicts were arising. The casinos sometimes held chinese gamblers unable to pay their gambling debt as hostages. Chinese authorities were unhappy with this and pressured the laotian authorities to shut the place down, which finally happened in 2011.

So today Boten is mostly a ghost town of abandoned hotels and casinos. The town is split. On one side of the street is what probably was Boten before the casino boom and were most of today's inhabitants live. Some simple houses, some shops and also a small and simple hotel where I stayed for one night. Although this is in Laos, everything is still very chinese. Everyone pays and sells in chinese Yuan, which came quite handy for me, as I didn't have any laotian Kip at that time.

On the other side of the street is the ghost town. It's not completely empty. One large hotel is still welcoming customers, some shops are still operating and also a couple of people live there. But there are a number of former luxury buildings in different states of decay. Probably the most weird thing was a former luxury hotel that's now used as a cowshed.

It was definitely one of the more interesting places on my trip.

Pictures from Boten

When travelling from Kazakhstan to China overland, the common way is taking the train directly from either Astana or Almaty to Urumqi in northwestern China. The train takes about 30 hours and a significant part of that time is spend on the border, because the trains need to change their wheels for the different train track size.

I read at some places about a different possibility: A bus service from Almaty to Yining (伊宁 which, to make things complicated, has also a kazakh/uighur name - Kulja / Құлжа / قۇلجا - which, to make things even more complicated, can be written in many different ways using latin characters, cyrillic characters or arabic characters). The information was quite scarce. I basically only had a few forum entries mentioning it, so all the information I had seemed quite unreliable. And even the guy from the hostel where I stayed didn't know more.

I could find out that there's an international bus station in Almaty called Sayran (сайран). It is located somewhat outside the city and can be reached with bus number 100 from the Almaty 2 train station. I went there on Thursday and - although without language communication possible - could tell them what I wanted. They wrote me down a date and time for the next bus: Saturday at seven in the morning. Sadly, I didn't find out how often this bus goes. Saturday was fine for me so I bought my ticket for the bus.

Two days later I got up at 5 in the morning and took a taxi to the Sayran bus station. Although no overnight trip, the bus was a sleeper bus with beds. However, the bed I got was so small there was just no way I'd fit in there laying down. I spent, like most others, most of the time sitting on the floor which was covered with matresses. As expected, I was the only western traveller on the bus. Everyone got a plastic bag at the entrance for the shoes. The bus ride was quite okay, although really bumpy. The bus wasn't that full and there were larger, unused beds in the back, so I also layed down for some time. However, sleeping was impossible, it was just too bumpy.

We spend about an hour at a restaurant in the middle of the desert and also some time at the border. I was a bit worried about the border crossing, because recently there have been some conflicts in the Xinjiang province, which is the chinese province you enter when coming from Kazakhstan. But at the border everything was fine, except that my border crossing took a bit longer than the others.

Right behind the border a lot of people were trying to offer money exchange. I didn't do that, because at such points you usually don't get the best exchange rates, which later turned out to be a mistake. It seems not exactly easy to change Tenge into Renminbi in Yining and as I'm writing this, I still have some Kazakh money with me after having tried to exchange it in three different banks in Yining.

I first feared that I had lost my bus after the border crossing, because I didn't see it anywhere, nor did I see people I remembered from the bus. I wasn't too worried, because the border town Khorgas itself seemed large enough to provide a place to sleep and further travelling options, but after a while, I saw some people I remembered from the bus and finally, it came back and picked us all up. We arrived in Yining at around 9 in the evening, so the bus trip took about 12 hours. That was longer than I expected, as I read 7 or 10 hours at other online sources. If you wonder why it's 12 hours from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., you have to consider the timezone change (but timezones deserve another blog entry anyway).

Hopefully this information will provide other travellers some help when they try to take this bus. To recap the important information:

• Bus from Almaty to Yining starts at Sayran bus station (reachable via local bus 100 from Almaty 2 train station).
• Runs at 07:00 a.m. on unknown weekdays, but due to my experiences probably on fridays and not on thursdays (If you have any info on that, e. g. a link to the bus company, please add it in the comments).
• Costs 4600 Tenge (thats about 21 € or 30 US$).
• Takes about 12 hours.
• Crosses border to China at Khorgas (霍尔果斯 in mandarin chinese, قورعاس in uighur, Хоргос in russian and Қорғас in kazakh language).

Pictures from bus trip

When you go to Russia, you'll always have to fill this little form. The so-called migration card. It's just a tiny piece of paper, not really a "card".

The migration card is a double-form where you have to fill in some of your basic data. It's then stamped by the border guards and split in half. They keep one half, you get the other and keep it until you leave the country again. From what I've heard, one of the more troublesome things you can encounter is losing your migration card while in Russia.

There are some tricky things to know about the migration card. First: If you enter Russia through Belarus, you'll get only one migration card for both countries. That bothered me a lot on my last trip, because I only entered the data for Belarus, that means a stay of one day. Turned out this wasn't a big issue. When leaving Russia the border guards had a more closer look on the documents and obviously noticed the misinformation, but they didn't seem to care that much.

There seem to be similar issues with other countries. I even once got a migration card at the Ukrainian border, where I didn't want to enter Russia at all. It just happened that I was sitting in a train that was going to Russia after crossing the Ukraine. So if you ever happen to enter Russia through another country, although you don't necessarily get the migration card at the Russian border, you should enter the data for your stay in Russia.

Another thing I learned this time: There is a field for the Visa number. Now I obviously had two Visa - one for Belarus and one for Russia. I filed the number of the Russian one, because after all, I wanted to go to Russia and only cross Belarus on a train. Turned out I was wrong and the Belarus border guards complained. Admittedly, it can be a bit frightening if a border guard tells you something is wrong, especially if you don't understand their language. But after all, he just filled in the correct Visa number himself and everything was okay.

Kazakhstan also has a migration card, but it is not split in half and no similar pitfalls seem to occur there.

I promised before that I'll present a cheaper way than the international train to get from Ulaanbaatar on to China. But after doing it and all its obstacles, I'm not sure if I'd suggest it any more.

Taking the normal train route on the transmongolian train, the way from Ulaanbaatar to any place in China is quite expensive. Our hostel offered us a train ticket to Jining (濟寧市) or Datong (大同市) for about 140 $. It would've probably been a bit cheaper at the train station, but still it's quite expensive.

Some people in the Hostel told us about a cheap alternative: Taking a local train to the border town Zamyn-Üüd (Замын-Үүд), then going with a Jeep through the border and then using a bus from Erenhot (二连浩特, also called Erlian) to Hohhot (呼和浩特, ᠬᠥᠬᠡᠬᠣᠲᠠ). However, it turned out that it wasn't that simple.

The ticket for the local train to the border costed 10.000 ₮ (about 7 €) for a hardsleeper. But it came with an unplesant surprise: They sell more "hardsleeper" tickets than there are hardsleepers in the train. So having a hardsleeper ticket with a reservation number does not mean that you have your sleeper for sure. For every two sleepers, three tickets are sold. We ended up having the lower beds and we could use them, but regularly people were sitting at the foot end of our sleepers.

We wanted to go on from Zamyn-Üüd to Erenhot and were confronted with the next unplesant surprise: It was the first of June - international childrens day - and that's a national holiday in Mongolia and the border check is closed. So we were stuck in Zamyn-Üüd for a day longer.

In the evening, we saw the local way of "waste treatment": They just burned it openly. Mongolia is a country which has a lot of problems with air pollution (this is especially a problem of the capital city Ulaanbaatar, but I doubt it's much different there) - it would probably be easy to do this at least a bit better.

The next day, we went on with a jeep to the chinese border town Erenhot. In the end, we payed 10.000 ₮ (about 7 €) per Person plus a small fee at the chinese border I payed with a dollar due to the lack of any chinese or mongolian money.

There's not so much to say about Erenhot - the city is very fond of Dinosaurs (because some were found nearby in the Gobi desert) and has a couple of Dinosaur monuments.

Now with that mysterious bus - I read on several places in the Internet that there exists a bus line between Erenhot and Hohhot, however none of them had anything to say where this bus departs, where you can buy a ticket or where you can find any information at all. It also turned out that communication here was a much bigger problem than thought - I think we didn't meet a single english-speaking person at all. So we ended up using a train to Hohhot, which was also quite cheap and comfortable.

We went to Hohhot not because of anything interesting there, it was just a stop to go on, as there aren't many options for further travelling from Erenhot. It turned out the People's Park there was quite nice and it was our first experience with a bigger chinese city. Afterwards, we went on to the south of China.

Pictures from Zamyn-Üüd
Pictures from Erenhot
Pictures from Hohhot