Crossing from Zamiin Uud (Mongolia) to Erlianhot (China) is a trust exercise. We walked out of our hotel in Zamiin Uud and we’re pegged for crossers immediately. An old man pulled us aside to his jeep, climbed atop it, and hefted our bikes on haphazardly. After perilously lashing them down with a single strap, my bike dangling from the back, we were off. We needed to go through two check points and a no-mans-land that could not be traversed without a car. The first checkpoint was Mongolian customs. We had to leave our things in the man’s car while we entered this building and stood in line, hoping our guy didn’t drive off with everything we owned. Our trust payed off when we got through, he was standing there waiting for us, and he drove us to the Chinese checkpoint. Here he completely abandoned us, bikes and all, to navigate security. We had to explain ourselves to Chinese authorities about five times. There was an elevator next to the customs line, and each time an officer stepped out of it he saw us looking like a pair of heathens standing in line with our bikes, and of course immediately thought “Well that’s odd. Passports please.” Fair enough, we looked like morons unloading all of our bags and dirty clothes onto the security conveyor and then loading them all back onto the bikes. The whole crossing took like three hours.

One last piece of bureaucratic bullshit would impede us however. Outside Chinese border control was a gate to a bridge which crossed into Erlianhot. We approached it on our bikes and we’re stopped by rhetoric guards. We couldn’t cross this threshold without a car. We assumed they meant the whole bridge. They stopped two Mongolian jeeps as they were passing through, and ordered them (not a request) to open their trunks. The Mongolians quietly acquiesced, but wore bitter expressions. The security officer threw our bikes in one, which Sebrand stayed with, and threw me in the other. We drove ten feet ahead, through the gate, stopped, unloaded, and got back on our bikes. Turns out we just weren’t allowed to cross that one gate on foot. One gate. We waved to the guards, and they smiled and watched us bike off. That was that. We were in China. Yay bureaucracy!