Hanno's blog

The well-known way of getting from Europe to China overland is the transsiberian railway. However, I noted that the route through Kazakhstan I took is the quickest way to get to China by train and bus. I thought I'd write that up:

• Take train EC 43 from Berlin Hauptbahnhof (09:37 on Monday, Berlin time) to Warsaw Wschodnia, change to train D 10SZ (15:28). If you - like me - feel that the time to switch trains is a bit risky in case of delaqys, you can take the earlier Beriln-Warsaw-train EC 41 (06:37 until 12:08). There's also a direct Berlin-Moscow-train D 50472 (Berlin 04:28, Moskwa Belorusskaja 10:33), but it's often sold out early.
• Spend some time in Moscow and then take the Metro Line 5 (Circular Line) to Komsol'skaya (Metro of Kazasky railway station)
• Take train 090У from Moscow Kazansky (18:48 on Tuesday, Moscow time) to Petropavl/Petropavlovsk in Kazakhstan (09:46 on Thursday, Astana/Almaty time). Note that this only works every second Tuesday - you may choose other days where this train goes, but then other options may not work.
• Take train 152T from Petropavl (13:48 on Thursday, Astana/Almaty time) to Almaty (22:28 on Friday, Astana/Almaty time).
• Take bus number 100 to Sayran bus station and hope that they'll sell you a ticket late in the evening for the bus next morning. Find a place to sleep (but not very long).
• Take bus from Astana Sayran bus station (07:00 on Friday, Astana/Almaty time) to Yining (approx. 21:00 on Friday, Beijing time). You're in China.

With the transsiberian, you can leave Berlin on Monday (same options as above until Moscow) and take the D4ZJ direct train from Moscow to Beijing. You will enter China in Erlian on the next Monday at 00:47. So this makes almost 7 days vs. about 4 and a half days.

I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that. Better spend some time on the way and see some places in Russia or Kazakhstan. Also it should be noted that one obvious reason for being faster is that you'll enter China at a place much further in the west. And getting to the main part of china (the western part is much less inhabited than the eastern part and all big cities are in the east) can be somewhat troublesome. Still, I thought it might be of interest to document the fastest overland way from Europe to China.

I always assumed the starting point Berlin, obviously because I live there, adapting that to other starting places should be trivial. For example you can usually easily (and for a comparatively cheap price) reach Berlin by Eurolines bus in a day from other major european cities like Paris or London.

I'm lagging a bit behind with blogging, so I'm trying to quickly recap the recent days of my journey in China. I already mentioned that I arrived in Yining, which is a town near the border to Kazakhstan. I was a bit surprised, because I more or less expected a small town, but I found out that Yining isn't that small. It has 430.000 inhabitants (at least Wikipedia says so, maybe it's outdated) and the distances sometimes were quite huge and I did a lot of walking there. The train station was a bit outside and walking there I passed a number of construction sites for new residential area. I first thought I found one of the "ghost towns" many western media lately reported about, a clean and new looking residential area. But a closer look revealed that it was probably just not finished - inside the buildings construction work was still going.

I took the train from Yining to Urumqi. My original plan was to move along quite fast and directly take the next train to Xi'an. But that didn't really work. I had to find out that all train tickets for the upcoming days to every location east of Urumqi were sold out. This was kind of a déjà vu. Last time I was in China I had the plan to travel this way in the other direction - and no tickets were available. Reading local news, this situation might improve 2014, when a new highspeed train line opens between Urumqi and Lanzhou. I didn't want to wait that long though.

However, this time I knew that there are alternatives - by taking the bus. I took a bus to the town Dunhuang, which is about 1,000 kilometers east of Urumqi.

Finding out the bus times in Urumqi was a bit tricky. At the bus station, there was a screen with scrolling departure times - but only in Chinese. While I am in theory able to recognize Chinese characters, this was much too fast for me (and there were a lot of buses). No paper or otherwise static timetable was available. My solution was to do many photographs of the timetable. That worked and afterwards I bought the ticket. I usually do this by writing down the time, date, the start and destination - usually that works quite well when language communication is limited due to language barriers. I took a bus the next day starting at 4 p. m., which arrived in Dunhuang at around 8 a. m., so it took roughly 16 hours.

The bus trip through the Xinjiang desert passed a lot of wind turbines. While China is often portrayed as the environmental bad guy, one shouldn't fail to recognize that it's also the world leader in building renewable energies. However, the many Xinjiang wind turbine fields also told the other not so green side of the Chinese renewable boom: Many of the turbines were just standing still. The most likely reason: China is building up wind power faster than it's caring for grid integration. I'm used to that look in Germany - wind power there is also often downregulated, because grid integration is not keeping up with the installation of new wind energy. But it was quite obvious that this problem is far bigger here in China's desert.

In Dunhuang I spend three nights. Dunhuang is not on the Urumqi-Lanzhou train line, so the scarce ticket situation there doesn't affect me here. But still, I didn't get a ticket for the train I wanted and had to stay one day longer. After having traveled through several huge cities, staying here for some time was okay and I did things a bit slower. Dunhuang is famous for the Mogao caves, which are a famous tourist attraction with buddhist statues and wall paintings. I'm usually not the person who has to see every tourist attraction on the way, but as I had more time than expected, I went there.

Tomorrow I'll take the train to Lanzhou.

Pictures from Yining
Pictures from Dunhuang
Pictures from wind power turbines in the Xinjiang province
Pictures from Lanzhou

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

All russian cities we visited had a very well working public transport system. It consists of metros, trams, busses, trolleybusses and minibusses.

On the metro, you pay for a coin (Yekaterinburg) or ticket (Moscow) before entering the area.

On Trams, you usually just get on the tram and there's a person where you can buy a ticket in the tram. It has a fixed price, which is usually between 10 and 20 rubels (about 0.25 to 0.50 €), if you need to switch the tram, you pay again. On busses, it's sometimes the same, if there's no person collecting ticket fees, you pay to the driver when leaving the bus. Same with trolleybusses and minibusses.
As long as you know which line to take, this is quite convenient. Usually, all lines come quite frequently, you only wait some minutes if you miss one. There was only one occasion where we had to take a taxi in Russia (to get the ferry to Port Baikal in time - the ferry itself worked like the trams, you pay on the ferry).

In Ulaanbaator, we found it a bit harder, mainly because we never really found out which bus to take (no tram or metro here). The ticket system is the same (you pay to a ticket seller on the bus). The busses here are often very overcrowded. Taxis here are really cheap, so that's what many people use.

Ulan-Ude (Улан-Удэ) was our last stop in Russia, afterwards we took the bus to Ulaanbaatar (Улаанбаатар), the capital of Mongolia.

I don't know why, but the mongolian part of the transsiberian railway is significantly more expensive than the russian part. The bus is a cheap alternative for the first part and it's also twice as fast (12 hours compared to 24 hours with the train). It costs 1000 rubels (about 25 €). We got the ticket through our hostel, so I can't tell where you can regularly buy it. (For the Mongolia-China part, there's also a cheap alternative, I'll write about that later.)

We started at 7 in the morning in Ulan-Ude. I'm usually a bit uncomfortable with long bus trips, especially if they go on curvy roads. Mongolia has nothing like motorways, so the whole ride goes on bumpy roads through the step.

Arriving at the russian-mongolian border, we had a bad feeling, because our migration card for russia was wrong. We got it at the border to Belarus and we didn't know that it's the migration card for both Belarus and Russia - so we only entered the dates and visa number for Belarus and realized that this was wrong when we entered Russia without a second border check. But it turned out our fear was unneccessary - the staff at the border called a colleague to look at the issue, but shortly afterwards we could go on without any more hassle.

Right at the border, we already noticed that in Mongolia, english was much more common than in Russia. Unlike on the russian side, some of the mongolian border officers were able to speak english. After the border, we stopped at a restaurant for a while.

Driving through the mongolian steppe, I felt that the main part of our journey really begins here: The landscape looked very different from everything I am used to and I found it quite exciting. Several times, the bus had to stop or horn for cows crossing the street.

In the evening, we arrived in Ulaanbaatar.

Pictures from Bus trip