How Long Bay?

Just back at the hostel in Hanoi after a fab 3 day tour in Halong Bay & Catba Island, Vietnam.

It was Indiana Jones style jam packed with activities including kayaking, boating, jumping of the roof of aforementioned boat into the water at night*, trekking up a moutain, running from coca-cola swizzling, oreo-munching, banana-stealing monkeys on Monkey Island, laughing along with our funny guides (called B4 and Lucky**), chatting with more fellow friendly travellers than we've met for the rest of the 2.5 months combined, eating our weight in squid and rice and playing drinking games on board the boat at night with other English and Irish packpackers.

I am proud to say my Fuzzy Duck skills are still finely tuned from Uni & The Heard drinking sessions. And I have discovered a dormant talent for a delightful game called 'Penny up the Bum'. I won the final and am now the International champion of this game. (All part of the lesser known Asian Games 2009, held here in Vietnam). Best described or even better still demonstrated in person, I just couldn't do it justice on this blog...

My legs are like jelly today though- we call this 'new born foal' syndrome when your legs don't behave themselves and threaten to collapse beneath you in an ungraceful manner. I'll quickly add that this was from all the trekking and scrambling down mountains and nothing to do with the 'Penny up the Bum' game.

Still, ace trip all round

* Kieran did this, not me before you all fall off your chairs with shock
** I suspect these are not their real Vietnamese names

flurry of activity

my goodness, K has been busy with all his blogging, so i thought I'd get a quick word in edgeways...

We had some really lovely final departing memories of china:

1. Caught a bus to Nanning from Yanshuo without difficulty (and the toilets were pretty good at the stop, with Great Wall of china tiles and incense and running water!!)

2. Got a lady taxi driver to Nanning train station from the bus station and she was an ace sensible safety first driver and never used her car horn once!! (unheard of in china)

3. managed to find the correct ticket booth for international departures (thank you 3 years of Japanese tuition) FIRST time round

4. The ticket seller was REALLY friendly and helpful and sold us lovely soft sleeper tickets for a very good price. (Best price for you!) Transactions were conducted in fluent Chinglesh

5. Put our luggae in left luggage at train station and had a great laugh with the 2 little old ladies there who marvelled at Kieran's display of strength and power and my obvious 'fluency' with the Chinese language. (Mingtian...piao...3 ge..etc)

6. Had a luxurious train berth TO OURSELVES...well the train was pretty much empty.

7. Most of the train staff spoke to us (nicely) in English!

8. Had no trouble exiting the China or entering Vietnam at the border (albeit in the middle of the night.) One of the customs police actually had a bit of a laugh with a couple of Chinese tourists helping them to pronounce all important Vietnamese words like 'thank you'. Which also gave us a laugh and created a nice relaxing atmosphere while waiting for our passports- not all that common an experience at passport control in the middle of the night.

It was all so easy and fun and everyone was so friendly and helpful it made us sad to leave China... But we are ready to walk the streets of Hanoi now...

China part 3: Xi'an and Chengdu

Xi'an is a big, bustling provincial capital on the site of the former
capital of China, Chang'an. It was the capital on and off over a
period of over 1,000 years, and marks the Eastern end of the fabled
Silk Road. This importance has left it with some interesting legacies
for the tourist:

1. The first emperor of China had a huge mausoleum built to store all
the things he'd need in the afterlife. It covered 45 square km, but
was ransacked during the civil war shortly after his death and for
many years the only legacy was a small artificial hill over the site.
35 years ago, a farmer was digging a well when he found some pieces of
carved stone. When archaeologists explored they found the remains of
over two thousand life-size clay figures of warriors and horses,
including charioteers, archers, and infantrymen. No two soldiers were
alike. Unfortunately, the statues had largely been smashed up in the
civil war, with only a single archer being complete, but they have
been painstakingly putting them back together again. The site is
pretty spectacular, especially the largest pit with row upon row of
figures in a genuine battle formation. Other riches have been found
there too, including a bronze half-size model of chariot and horses -
the chariot designed as a working model with moving parts. see here

for a sample picture, since we haven't been able to get our photos
onto the internet.

2. The city walls, which stretch for 14km around, and have been
restored so that you can walk or cycle (as we did) around the lot.
they're a lot bigger than those at Pingyao, at least 20m high and
similar width. see here

3. a large Muslim population, who are the main traders in a street
market near the city's belltower. You can buy plenty of souvenirs
here, but we focussed on the street snacks, and lunched on tea
-flavoured eggs, breads, pastries and pancakes filled with minced
meat or vegetables, persimmon cakes with date filling, rice cakes with
bean paste filling, sugarcane juice, wontons, fried quails eggs on a
stick, little kebabs rolled in spices. We also bought snacks for
later, including dried fruit - not just the usual, but also kiwi,
pineapple and goji berries; candied ginger and our favourite, peanuts
fried with sichuan pepper and dried chillies - the perfect beer snack!
see here

Xi'an is not all about the past though. One evening we took a bus
South of the city walls and walked through a bright shining new
development of shopping malls, restaurants and a square with fountains
where a nightly show is set to Chinese and western classical music.

All quite Las Vegas, I know, but fun to watch. Also a reminder of just
how "communist" china is these days!

We shared a soft sleeper carriage with Angela and Nicolla for the
overnight trip to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. This journey
really marked the transition between Northern China - dry, dusty with
wheat or corn fields; and southern china - lusher, greener, with rice
fields (stepped up the sides of hills when not on the flat) and
sometimes water buffaloes pulling the ploughs.

Population-wise and area-wise, most Chinese provinces are are as big
or bigger than a large European countries, so their administrative
centres are like national capitals. Chengdu is no exception, with 11
million people living here. We found a fairly relaxed corner of it to
stay in, in the Tibetan quarter where every other shop sells prayer
wheels and flags, and there is a large park nearby with a temple in
the middle and a tourist-oriented snack street - a tidier, dearer
version of Xi'an's Muslim quarter - but the food was just as good. It
was a blast from the past for me, as I stayed at the same hostel 7
years ago on my previous visit to China... So I let the others go off
to see the pandas at 7 am and had a lie-in instead! While there we
learned how to play Mah Jong and how to cook some popular Sichuan
dishes - visitors to chez K&A in the future can expect gong bao
chicken and fish-fragrant aubergines for dinner. WE were also on the
receiving end of some traditional massage techniques: scraping, where
a flat stone is dragged down your back using the thin edge "to get rid
of toxins" apparently, and cupping, where little jars are placed on
the back and then the air extracted pulling the flesh up inside. Our
backs have just about recovered...

We had a day trip out to Qingcheng Shan - a Taoist holy mountain a
couple of hours out of Chengdu. The mist didn't lift all day, which
meant that we didn't get great views across the mountains, but it did
add a sense of atmosphere to the place. We took the easy way up, a
short ferry trip across a lake and then a chairlift up most of the
way. It was odd to look down from the chairlift and instead of seeing
snow and skiers, to instead see gingko biloba trees, monkeys, and
Buddhas painted on the cliff-faces. We wondered around up and down
steps, in and out of temples for few hours, and even though we were
mostly going down, our legs were like jelly towards the end, so we
stopped and had tea overlooking a view of the mountains and trees that
the Chinese call "natural painting" because of its beauty. The return
journey was typically Chinese, being dumped on the outskirts of
Chengdu - fortunately a bus came by that took us almost to our hostel,
so it wasn't a problem. Hard to find an image that conveys the
atmosphere at Qingcheng Shan, but here's one to be going on with.

China part 2: Shanxi province

Shanxi is a Northern province of China where we spent a week between
Beijing and Xi'an. It's quite mountainous, bur the flatter bits are
heavily farmed. We saw mountains of corn cobs around the place, for
example, as they've just been harvested. Unfortunately, it doesn't
seem to get much rain (we have benefited from blue skies much of the
time) and many of the river beds are dusty and dry, although this may
be partly due to overuse. It also provides 1/3 of China's coal, and
our first destination, Datong, smelt so much of it that it took
Adrienne back to her childhood when she lived in a house heated by a
coal fire.

We didn't visit Datong for the city itself, although it has some
interesting remnants of its past as a capital city, but to visit two
sights nearby. The first is the hanging monastery, which clings
precariously to an overhanging cliff face, with the ground 50m below
(it used to be 100m, but silt deposits from the river below has raised
the ground level over the years). It was built after a great flood in
order that people could pray for better fortune in the future, hence
the reason it was built so far off the ground - just in case the
floods did come back. It was constructed by workers lowering
themselves down on ropes from the top of the cliff. The overhang and
its north-facing position has protected it from the sun and the rain
for hundreds of years,. It seems to be more a tourist attraction than
a working monastery these days- the monks having "left" during the
cultural revolution.

The other site was the Cloud Ridge caves. Here in the 5th century, an
emperor who had conducted a bloody purge of Buddhists repented and
ordered a large Buddhist statue to be built. First a cave was dug out
and then the carving done in the cave, to protect the statue form the
elements. His descendants added more, until there were more than 20
caves, moistly with large seated Buddhas (the largest nearly 20m tall)
and other carvings and paintings around the walls and ceiling of each
cave. The caves and carvings were dug from the top down so that the
sculptors could see what they were doing - in one cave they made
Buddha's torso too long, and had to dig down a couple of metres below
ground level to fit his legs in!

We moved on to Wutai Shan, one of China's many holy mountain areas,
with about 20 Buddhist temples dotted around the valley -and some up
the mountains. We were taken aback by the weather - it snowed as we
arrived! We had to lean our packs against the door o our room to block
the draught at night. We enjoyed more the temples with fewer other
tourists as they were more atmospheric - it wasn't that hard to dodge
the Chinese tour groups, to be honest. However, by the end we were a
little bit templed out, even though each one had its own style.

Finally, we visited the walled town of Pingyao. A bit like Suzdal in
Russia, it was an important city for many years and then became a bit
of a backwater which spared it a lot of modern deb\velpomnet and makes
it a pleasant place to visit. It's admittedly very touristy, with the
main streets entirely composed of guesthouses, restaurants, massage
parlours (real ones!), museums and shops selling handicrafts, local
food specialities, such as corned beef and big jars of vinegar, and
general touristy tat. However, it's easy to get off the beaten track
and walk down local side streets, often largely car-free for a bit of
peace. Or walk the walls as we did and get a bird's eye view of the
old town. The many museums are all based around a traditional
courtyard style layout, each specialising in a different topic, from
furniture to newspapers, to banking (the first modern Chinese bank was
started here), armed escorts (to move the bankers' money around, I
assume...) and even a museum of Chambers of commerce - surprisingly
more interesting than it sounds! Based around a single house with
maybe two or three courtyards, they were all bite-sized, so not too
heavy going to visit a few in a day. Anyway, a nice place to while
away a few days. It was here that we first met up with an ex-Ofgem
colleague, Angela and her friend Nicola, who finally caught us up
after leaving London 2 weeks after us.

From Pingyao, it was another sleeper train to Xi'an in the completely
different province of Shaanxi and home to the terracotta warriors.

Beijing

This was our first stop in China, and it was a great introduction to
the country. We had a great hostel that we stayed in, there's plenty
of public transport, lots to see and do, fantastic food for very
little money, and the weather was pretty good. It was very easy to get
on with things - we found local people very helpful -for example if
we were near a tourist attraction, but couldn't quite see which way to
go, people would invariably point us in the right direction. the
Olympics last year has probably ensured that the whole city is used to
foreign tourists and giving them a helping hand, and contributed to
the number of signs in English - on the metro and inside the buses for
example, showing the route.

It's good that things are set up well, because sightseeing in Beijing
can still be quite tiring - just due to the sheer scale of the city
and its major sights. On our first day, we tried to get to Tiananmen
square. We got a bus to a spot very close by, but there were so many
people around, the police had cordoned off certain routes to manage
the stream of people and carry out security checks. So it took us
about half an hour just to get into the square. Even then, with
thousands of people, plus floats and giant screens showing a kind of
Chinese travelogue. We had caught the tail end of the celebrations of
60 years of communist china, and lots of Chinese were still on holiday
(lucky we weren't around on October the 1st when foreign tourists were
banned from leaving their hotels). We pushed on into the Forbidden
city, and spent a few hours exploring this labyrinthine palace, which
covers a whole city "block" - making it about a km square, and the
various exhibitions within. It was teeming with tourists, both Chinese
and foreigners, which is a far cry from a century or so ago, when we
would all have been put to death for setting foot inside it! There was
the odd exception to this rule, for example when an Anglo-French army
sacked Beijing in the 1860s and trashed the place - the signs around
the palace point out the damage frequently. Actually, we aren't the
only ones to blame - most major old Chinese monuments seem to have
burned down frequently. This explains the large metal vats outside the
major buildings, which were permanently kept full of water in case of
fire - in winter they were covered with quilts an fires were lit
underneath to make sure it didn't freeze over. As we'd not thought to
bring any lunch, we survived on ice cream from the few vendors around
the place -until we left, when we tucked into a couple of tasty
minced beef pastries from a street stall.

Next day was another marathon session at the summer palace - a long
bus ride out of the centre, which gave us a chance to see the new
China springing up - big ultra-modern blocks of offices, shops and
apartments. The place has an artificial hill at the North end, which
was again like a 3-dimensional maze to explore - although the style
was somewhat different and the scale larger, it reminded me somehow of
Park Guell in Barcelona, if you've ever been there. Once we got
through that section, there was a quiet spot by the lake where we
could escape the crowds for a while and have some lunch (remembered to
bring some food this time) before walking along a 700m corridor
decorated with over 10,000 paintings. The sheer scale of the
craftsmanship required to create not only these palaces, but also most
of the Buddhist temples we visited is astonishing, there are carved
roof tiles, marble staircases and balustrades, statues galore, metal
incense burners or water holders, frescoes, decorated flagstones,
stone bridges screens, furniture, formal gardens here and there.
Practically everything is decorated, and the motifs chosen all have
symbolic religious or superstitious significance. Many of the wooden
buildings are held together without nails, so require excellent design
and carpentry. It's clear that many of them have been restored
recently and/or are undergoing further restoration (this especially
applies to the temples, which were neglected and sometimes destroyed
or damaged in the earlier years of the Communist era. So now is a
great time to be a skilled craftsman in China!

Of course, we had to visit the Great Wall - there are several places
near Beijing to do so , depending on what sort of experience you want.
We went for the middle road- a nicely photogenic restored section, but
one that if you get there earlyish is not too crowded with other
tourists and hawkers. Plus we got to toboggan down a mile long slide
to get back to the car park! 3 things to know about the Great Wall:
1. It's not a single wall, but a number of different walls built at
different times to different specifications
2. It was never really designed to keep the marauding hordes out -
just as well, be cause it didn''t - three of China's imperial
dynasties were founded by invaders from the North
3. You can't see it from space
Nevertheless, it's still an impressive feat of construction, snaking
its way over high mountains for several thousand miles.

The rest of the time we mixed the old with the new - visiting the main
lama temple (funnily enough no mention of the Dalai Lama...) and the
temple of heaven with its echo wall, where you can whisper to another
person 50 m away and the sound travels round the wall to meet them -
but also going to see the new shopping and entertainment districts (at
one expat hangout we paid twice as much for dessert and a drink as we
had done for any of our slap up meals in local restaurants) and the
Olympic site. We visited the latter after dark, which was good idea
as the area is dazzlingly lit up, showing off the bird's nest and the
water cube to great effect. These buildings are destined to become as
much a symbol of Beijing as the Wall and Tiananmen square. We also
explored what's left of the hutongs - Beijing's traditional web of
alleys and courtyards where all aspects of daily life have taken place
fro hundreds of years. Some have already been cleared to build big
blocks, others have been cleaned up and prettified into tourist
hangouts - with shops, bars, restaurants, guesthouses and so on, which
may undermine their "authenticity", but gives them a better chance of
survival, and others have been given designated heritage buildings,
which again gives them a chance of survival.

All in all, it was with a little reluctance that we booked our tickets
to our next destination and checked out of the Red Lantern to resume
our travels.

The Trans-mongolian part 2: the stopovers (K)

Since we didn't really want to spend 6 days non-stop on a train, we
broke the journey up at a few places:

1. Suzdal - this is a little town not far outside Moscow, so our 2
hour train there didn't really feel like part of the epic
trans-Mongolian trip. It was an important town in medieval times,
being the seat of one of the principalities that were the cradle of
Russia as it later became. Like the other principalities, it
eventually got eclipsed by Moscow, and as it was not on a major trade
route (even now it's actually 20 miles away from the railway), it
became a sleepy backwater, and various invasions, plagues and fires
reduced it still further. At one point, it had a church for every 12
inhabitants. This misfortune is now a positive point in its revival as
a tourist town - as it's small, the sights are all clustered together,
and there are no tower blocks to spoil the rustic charm. Much of the
town has had a facelift in the last couple of decades, and it's now a
charming place to stroll around for a couple of days, investigating
churches and monasteries. The cathedral especially is a popular spot
for wedding photos, and we saw plenty of brides and grooms around the
place. A real antidote to the cities we'd stayed in in Russia until
now.

2. Yekaterinburg - in the Urals, this is the closest city to the
Europe-Asia dividing line and has a rather cheesy monument just
outside the city that we went to in order to have one foot in each
continent. Perhaps more importantly, it is the city in which the last
Tsar and his family were held when they were shot and buried. The site
of their burial a forest outside the city is now being developed into
a religious centre, with seven wooden churches being built - one for
each member of the family. The choice of wood, and of old-style
iconography inside suggests that the Orthodox church is intent on
rolling back the years to before the revolution. For example, women
visiting the site must wear skirts (they have some wrap-around ones
there that you can put over trousers). Similarly, in the city centre,
over the site where they were held before being shot, a new cathedral
has been built - even though there's a perfectly good one a few
hundred meters away, that just needed a bit of renovation. Inside the
Romanovs are painted in a traditional style with haloes- for all seven
of them have been canonized. I found it all a bit odd - whilst they
were a very symbolic family, they were unfortunately seven amongst
millions who were killed for being too rich, too intellectual or too
aristocratic, or because they were accused of made-up crimes, or even
just who were caught up in the civil war or the famines of the early
soviet period. A memorial to all the victims of Communism might be
more appropriate. However, the tsars were heads of the orthodox
church, and were accorded semi-divine status in past centuries, so
perhaps it's the logical thing within the beliefs of the Orthodox
church.

3. Lake Baikal - we didn't do a lot here, just pottered along admiring
the lake, and the snow-capped mountains on the far shore. Again it was
another good place to just relax for a day or two. We made sure we
tried the local fish (Omul, and also Sig) as they are unique to the
lake, so you won't see them on restaurant menus anywhere else. They
are just two of over a thousand species unique to the lake, which as
well as being the world's largest by volume (20% of the world's
unfrozen fresh water) is also the oldest, having been formed 70
million years ago. Anyway, they were delicious.

4. Mongolia - as we only had 3 days here, we'd arranged a tour. so we
were whisked straight out of Ulan Batur and spent 2 nights in a ger
(traditional nomads' tent) in a very pretty national park. It was
pretty soft ger living - we had proper beds, a TV and toilets and hot
showers were a short walk away. But it still got pretty cold at night
when our fire died down - our neighbours had a little thermometer with
them and recorded a low of 4 degrees inside their ger! we explored the
area and tried our hand at the traditional Mongolian activities of
horse-riding, archery and er, table tennis. Our final day was spent on
a whistle stop tour of ulan batur, which is developing pretty fast by
the looks of all the construction and the gleaming new tower blocks.
Unfortunately, one of the developments is apparently taking place on
the site of what was the last public kid's playground in the city. We
finished with a variety performance of traditional Mongolian arts-
dancing, music , singing and acrobatics. The throat singing, has to be
heard to be believed. It starts out like a didgeridoo and then the
singer manages to make both a whistling sound and sing some words at
the same time. The two young contortionists were pretty amazing, too,
balancing on each others' elbows or hips and then doing handstands.and
bringing their feet round to their ears.

The trans-mongolian part 1: the trains (K)

Russian trains are a great way of getting around, especially when you
have vast distances to cover. They vary in style and quality, but are
the same basic layout: 4 beds to each cabin (in second or kupe class)
in 2 bunks. During the day, you can sit on the bottom bunks and put
the top ones up to make more head-room. There's luggage bins under the
bottom bunks and over the corridor, so plenty of storage space, and a
small table in the middle. you are provided with a pillow, bedding and
a small towel. In the nicer ones, the table had a tablecloth and there
was a carpet on the floor. sometimes the top bunk has a kind of
harness so you don't fall out in the middle of the night. Inside the
temperature can vary wildly depending on whether the windows can be
opened and whether the heater's on, as well as whether the sun's
shining. The Russian ones were mostly too hot, while the last one,
into China, they didn't use the heaters at all, and we were freezing
during the night. There's a toilet either end of the carriage, which
is locked before and after each major station, since the contents are
deposited straight onto the track, and at international border
crossings, which can take several hours. the unpleasantness of the
toilets depends on how diligently they are cleaned. This is one of the
jobs of the provodnitsas, who also give out and take in bedding, check
your ticket as you get on the train (a helpful way of ensuring you
don't get on the wrong train) and provide hot drinks etc. for a small
charge.

The other key facility in the carriage is a hot water dispenser. This
means that if you have you've planned ahead as we had and brought
provisions and receptacles, you can get tea/coffee whenever you like,
and make up cupasoups, instant noodles, porridge oats, etc. So it's
actually very easy to feed yourself on board. This is helpful, as the
restaurant cars are typically expensive serve pretty mediocre food,
and usually only about 3 of the 80 menu options are available. On the
plus side our Mongolian one was beautifully decorated with carved wood
panelling. the other source of food is at the longer station stops (up
to half an hour), locals often turn up selling snacks, drinks, and
even freshly cooked food, like pastries, chicken pieces, hard-boiled
eggs and boiled potatoes. so we ate reasonably well, which given that
several journeys were 24 hours or more, and one was 52 hours, was
pretty important. A couple of times we got food provided, but it was
always a surprise, and we weren't sure if we were going to be
presented with a big bill at the end.

The scenery in Russia was a little on the monotonous side, to be
honest - trees, trees and more trees. Russia is a land of vast
forests, and they were the dominant sight, punctuated by occasional
villages of wooden houses, the odd big city and sometimes a river or a
lake. But if you're going to be looking at trees all day, the best
time to do it is in September, when the silver birches turn gold and
red to contrast with the evergreen firs. Mongolia was largely desert
or plains, sometimes with mountains and the odd camel or herd of
sheep. Only in China was there much to look at, including few
glimpses of the Great wall. so we passed the time with reading, games,
writing journals and chatting. On our first couple of trains we
shared with Scott and Gill, so that was good fun. On the later Russian
trains, we had a succession of Russian cohabitants; no-one was ever
going as far as us. They were all decent people, but once they
realised we didn't speak Russian, there wasn't a lot of conversation.
This often meant they decided to sleep and usually snore. A couple of
times we ended up with the cabin to ourselves, and could spread out.On
the train to Mongolia, the rest of the carriage were Mongolia traders.
This was the liveliest train. At the stations, the normal pattern was
reversed and they got out to sell to the locals - mostly clothes -
some even had mannequins with them, but we saw a lot of boxes of other
stuff. In between, the spent the whole time going up and down the
corridors moving stuff around -not sure why, perhaps they were trading
amongst themselves. They were a bit more friendly -several of them
peered in to our compartment to say hello. At the Russian border
several of them did a runner before the immigration officials got on
board.

The border crossings were pretty lengthy - there was always two sets
of immigration, customs and health officials to deal with. When
entering china, we also had to wait while the bogies (i.e. wheels)
were changed, because the Chinese tracks are a different gauge from
the Russian and Mongolian ones. On the plus side, we could stay on the
train while all this was happening and they came to us. At the Russian
border we were able to get off and stretch our legs. After a while
with nothing much happening, I went down the road with a fellow
passenger to spend our last few roubles. Unfortunately we picked the
time when the officials came back on to do the immigration check, and
so they'd locked all the carriages. We got shouted at a bit, but
someone opened up and let us back in. At the Mongolia/China border, we
couldn't get off, so by the time all the formalities were compete and
we could, we were happy to see the restrooms. The Chinese like to
welcome visitors, and as we got off, the station PA system was playing
"The green green grass of home". The whole process was around 6-7
hours each time.

Next instalment, I'll tell you about the places we stopped at on the way.

The March on Moscow part 2 (K)

Another overnight train brought us into St Petersburg, a city laid out
by Peter the Great in European style (some of the key architects
employed were Italian). It's probably long been the most attractive
big city in Russia, and the new money has helped do it up nicely. The
jewel in its crown is the Hermitage, one of the worst-named buildings
in the world. No self-respecting hermit would have put up with the
sheer luxury and opulence of this huge building and its decor. the 300
or so rooms are now filled with art treasures from all over the world.
We had a mere 4 hours (after queueing) to try and take it all in. For
those of you who've been to Paris, imagine the Louvre, the Musee
d'Orsay and the palace of Versailles all rolled into one and you won't
be far off. In a country that excels in taking large amounts of money
off foreign tourists, it's a steal at 7 quid to get in (and
incidentally has the cheapest internet in the city). We spent much of
the rest of the time wondering around the streets and canals admiring
the other fabulous palaces and cathedrals.

Sadly it was in St Petersburg that we said goodbye to Scott and Gill,
who'd accompanied us through Norway and Russia to this point, but had
little things like jobs and a house to attend to. We consoled
ourselves with some excellent sushi, (St Petersburg's favourite food,
it seems) and caught the fanciest train of the trip to Moscow. It was
a night train, midnight to 8 am and so we didn't spend much time awake
to enjoy it, but at least we slept well.

Moscow has also had some new money put into it, and so the centre is
looking pretty smart. Red square in particular is stunning - possibly
the best-looking square in the world with on the East side, the
Kremlin wall and Lenin's mausoleum in front of it; the magnificent
national museum in red brick to the south; GUM, which I imagined from
hearing tales about the lack of anything to sell in soviet times would
be a drab concrete block is actually an upmarket department store that
would give Harrods a run for its money, especially at night when all
lit up; and finally St Basil's a swirl of onion domes in primary
colours that is almost disney-style in its colourfulness. Inside it's
a little less impressive because it's broken up into a number of small
chapels, so you don't get quite the sense of grandeur inside that you
do in the other big cathedrals of Europe. But like almost all other
Orthodox churches it's a riot of colour - painted walls and gilt all
over the iconostasis. A male choir sang. a hymn inside the tallest
chapel (good acoustics) - very atmospheric - turned out to be a
marketing ploy for selling their CDs, but none the worse for that.

Other highlights of Moscow included celebrity grave-spotting in
Novodevichy cemetery) and visiting Peter the Great's log cabin in the
lovely Kolomenskoye Park by the river. The park is surrounded by apple
orchards and we were tempted to join the locals busily scrumping. We
also visited Adrienne's favourite Russian chain restaurant -
Yalki-Palki (which translates as "bleedin' 'ell!). It's easy to eat
well in Russia, but you often pay a lot for the privilege, so this
cheap and cheerful place was a good find.

the magnificent 7

And we also have a scoring system for the public toilets which we have nick named the magnificent 7:

the holy grail of toilets (scoring the magnicent 7);

1. has a door (preferably that you can close and even lock)
2. is clean
3. flushes
4. has toilet paper
5. has running water to wash your hands
6. has soap (real luxury)
7. is western style

the joys of Asian travel!

5 mins, prepare

when you're travelling for a while you start to pick up and use some common phrases. here is a compilation of some of ours:

"5 mins- prepare"
Origin: came from one of our Chinese tour guides who used to shout this urgently as us to get us ready to hop off the tour bus in time. (did give us the slightly startled impression that the tour bus wasn't even going to stop and we'd have to jump off instead)
Uses: now used whenever we feel we are getting to the end of our bus/train journey and need to collect all our things together for a hasty jump off

"Best not to look"
Origin: not sure when we started to use this, probably comes from the idea of what you don't know (or see) can't hurt you.
Uses: Many, many uses in China including; when the bus you're in decides to overtake the vehicle in front on a steep incline around a bend (often with another vehicle heading for you). Or when you pass the kitchen where they are preparing your just eaten meal. Or when you need to use a public toilet (more about this later)!! Or when a parent is holding their toddler in their poopie pants (pants engineered with a big gap at the back for easy dispensing, very popular all over China, rarely worn with a nappy) over a drain in the street to do their 'business'

"How's the serenity?"
Origin: a classic Castle quote
Uses: Again, many in China. The continuous honking of car horns- used more than brakes I would say. Music (Chinese pop or Chinese opera) being piped into trains, planes and scenic spots. Tour guides in serene temples with megaphones. Drilling and building works

"if you're going to have someone in the photo, it might as well be someone you know"
Origin: The summer Palace in Beijing the weekend after the National public holiday i.e. with thousands of people swarming around
Uses: Any time you take a photo of nice scenery. It's very hard to get a photo opportunity without someone in it in this country of 1.3 billion people!

"!!Relax!!"
Origin: first shouted at us by the lady selling us jade bracelets at the terracotta warriors as she squeezed potentially too small bracelets over our ("so soft") hands
Uses: now used to shout at each other in situations where relaxing is not really an option

Ah, such fun!!

China, 3 weeks in.....

And so we've been in China now for 3 weeks. Highlights include:
climbing the great wall of china early in the morning before the tourists arrived and the heat began
visiting the holy mountain of Wu Tai Shan and getting there as soft snow flakes began to fall... (it was so cold there we had to put our packs up against the door to keep the draft out and even still you could see the curtains gently swaying in the chilling breeze!!) thank goodness for thermals
seeing the terracotta warriors in situ with Gerry our tour guide leading the way and getting us in ahead of the larger groups. A lot of people complain that they are a bit of an anti-climax because they're located in this big hangar but i thought it was all quite spectacular!! Out of 7000 (all unique) warriors & horses only 1 was found intact. Such dedication putting that jigsaw puzzle back together!
seeing the pandas in Chengdu at feeding time (and watching the pups wrestling)
food food glorious food - especially sugared ginger pieces, mantou (soft bread like buns), gongbao chicken, 4 seasons green beans, spicy sechuan peppers in a chilli peanut mix, actually sechuan peppers in everything. The spicier the better, won't even look at a dish that hasn't got a Sechuan pepper or two in it. I'm contemplating carrying our chilli & Sechuan pepper mix around in my handbag to add to potentially bland food, AKA Renu's grandmother style. One of the best dishes we've had was a tofu dish with Sechuan pepper, garlic, ginger, dried chilli, fresh chilli, fermented black bean, edamame beans and tofu- man that dish was TASTY.
drinking Wulang tea on the river with the locals and trying to 'avoid' the 'temptation' of getting an ear clean from wandering ear cleaning man and his frightening array of tools...
meeting up with one of Kieran's colleagues from Ofgem & her budding to do a bit of sightseeing (and drinking) in Xi'an and Chengdu. When it comes to Chinese food it really is the more the merrier
playing Mahjong with the locals (thank goodness we weren't betting or it would have been a problem and we wouldn have ended up a few Yuan short) That game is complicated but really good, i can see us getting addicted to it and it replacing nuts and rummikub, although you need 3 or 4 people- any takers??
Climbing up a holy mountain that looked like one of those scroll paintings- all clouded in mist. I admit we did cheat a bit and got the chairlift part of the way (we were pressed for time, I swear!) but nobody told my legs that we took the 'easy' way - they are still sore today from the numerous steps
getting a Chinese massage complete with scraping and cupping. Ouch. Good ouch...
being proud of ourselves whenever we manage to buy train tickets from the station with our 'limited' Chinese language skills (computer screens and occasional friendly staff sure do help this process)

Saturday Night at the Wangba

So we arrived in Beijing and fell in love with the city, the area we were staying (Xicheng), the local restaurants, and the hostel (Red Lantern). So much so that we booked an extra 2 nights. Probably the longest we'll stay anywhere (voluntarily) until we get to Australia...

There is so much to see and do in Beijing but everything seems to take slightly longer than you think. Blocks are enormous, so you look at your tourist map and think- 'sure it's only a couple of blocks' and then 40 mins later you're still walking. The bus system (if you can read your location and destination) was dirt cheap (10p a trip) and the tube (20p) was even better with announcements in English & TV screens and all kinds of flashing lights. Clearly we were reaping the benefits of the Beijing Olympic Renovations from last year!

The first morning (the Saturday of the weekend of the national holiday & the PRC celebrations) we foolishly attempted Tiananmen Sq. Well, it took 30 mins just to figure out how to cross the road- even the Chinese didn't know (and we followed them). It was wonderful Chinese style chaos. We couldn't really get a sense of the grandeur of the square with so many people (plus the celebratory floats everywhere) so later in the week we passed it on the bus (it was closed to visitors) and appreciated it. The Forbidden City was very impressive too- the sheer size of everything is staggering. We also spent time in the Summer Palace, the Lama temple, the temple of Heaven and took a day trip to the great wall at Mutianyu.

All were amazing but my favourite was the great wall. Great in name and experience. Not sure if it was the time of day (early morning) or whether it's off peak or all the national tourists have gone back home after their week of heavy 60 year celebrations but I was pleasantly surprised to have the wall almost to ourselves for a couple of hours. We hiked up and then cheated and took the tobaggan down- hiliarious. I thought it would be a bit scary and that I'd be breaking all the time but it turned out to be the opposite and the guides stationed at dangerous bends to make sure you didn't go to fast where shouting at me to go faster!

the food has been amazing too- we have been 'lucky' enough to find restaurants where they have picture menus for the tourists (with tourist prices- good lordy wordy, a pound for a dish), so we just point and say Wo yao dge ge (I want this one) and Liang ge pijo (2 beers), bindao (cold). Peking Duck was a highlight as is this great dish of green beans with chillies that we keep finding on menus (not sure how to say it in Chinese but the Japanese characters say 4 season beans)!

So now we are in Datong doing what the local 13-18 year old boys do on a Saturday night- hanging out at the Wangba (internet cafe), smoking, (passive in our case), playing games and getting a surpise every now and then to look up and see a couple of foreigners in their space! We spent the day at the eerie hanging monastery Xuankong si and the closer Cloud Ridge Caves where each emperor created caves and carved enormous buddhas into the rocks. Amazing.

6,30 bus tomorrow to Wutai Shan for a look at some holy mountains or something. We've been warned the temperature is going to drop even further to about 2 degrees tonight. Kieran is glad he didn't ditch his warm coat and I'm glad I didn't post my thermals home with the parcel from Beijing.

Well, that's about all i have time for- my lungs and eyes are crying for me to get out of this smoky place!

Zaitian

Welcome to Mongolia- Home of Chinngis Kahn!!

Well. We spent about 6 hours on the border of Russia heading into Mongolia. We were fully expecting to be heavily fined for not having any stamps in our passports to prove the hotels had been registering us in Russia but thankfully no problem there. Clearly the invite/registering system has slackened a little since the last time I visited Russia!!

The Irkutsk (Russia) to Ulaan Bataar (Mongolia) train had quite a few tourists on it, but none on our wagon. Consequently we created quite a stir of interest from our fellow Mongolian passengers (traders from the looks of it); every one of them poked their heads in as they passed our berth to check us out and a few asked us where we were from.

We couldn't figure out, at first, what everybody was doing on our train- as soon as the doors would close the relentless moving would start, people would start carrying boxes, packages, stuff on trolleys etc. from one end of the carriage to another. And it seemed one woman's job was to masking tape everything in sight- and i tell you, there was a whole lot of masking going on.

When we got to the first big Russian station we realised what was happening- Usually at the Russian stations people get off the train and buy food from vendors on the platform- in this case, our trader friends were getting off the train and selling goods to the local Russians on the platform- mostly cheap clothes & toiletries. They even had manequins to advertise their wares. Hilarious. After the Russian trains the Mongolian traders sure seemed like a jolly lot and we had good fun with them.

It didn't happen to us but apparently at the border when the officious Russian border control officers got off and the Mongolian officers got on, they slid open the carriage door dramatically bellowing; "Welcome to my country. Home of Chinggis Kan. Where are you from?" and shook all their hands. Classic. This was pretty much the sentiment in Mongolia. People were great fun.

We tried some horse-riding, mostly because there is no getting out of horse riding in Mongolia- it's like a national hobby or something. Nearly died at first when the guide tried to make my horse go faster. Naturally my horse had a mind of its own and kept heading off towards cliffs and steep drops (or so I felt). The Mongolian guide kept indicating to me with wild gesturing and Mongolian grunts that I should stick with the group and I kept shouting at him- tell the horse not me!! Anyway, we lived to tell the tale and quite enjoyed it at the end- even Kieran who had a slight phobia of horses (some story from his childhood about a horse and a paddock and his kite but I'll let him tell that one!)

Mongolian Archery was another highlight (Kieran got 3 Bulleyes), as was sleeping in a Ger hut for 2 nights (freezing in the morning when the fire went out), visiting a nomadic family (and drinking watery tea and curd biscuit things), singing national anthems and Beatles songs with our tour guide Ocean, climbing the 108 steps to have a buddhist temple all to ourselves for meditating, and eating our weight in excellent Mongolian meat!! Thank god I'm not a veggie any more, otherwise it would have been eggs all day, every day for me.

On the train from Monogolia into China we were, for certain, on the tourist train. Almost everyone was from Europe or Australia. We shared our wagon with our first tourists (an English lad and a German woman) since Scott and Gill left us at Moscow. The rest of the time we were with sleepy (& snoring) Russians. The border crossing took just as long as the Russia- Mongolia one but that was because they had to change the bogies under the train. We got the giggles when the Norwegians in the next carriage started singing 'Yes sir, I can boogie". I think they thought bogie and boogie was the same word.

So now we're in Beijing and loving it so far. I'm amazed at how much Chinese I think i can read (a little knowledge could be a bad thing) but of course can barely speak a word but we're trying. It was great today to have a shower and unpack and just wander the local streets (we seem to be in a shopping district- hurrah!) I'm also looking forward to sleeping in a non-moving bed for 5 nights. We're thinking of visiting the Summer Palace tomorrow, or Tiannemen Sq and leaving the trip to the Great wall for later in the week.

Zaitian!

(C/0 dee)

The March on Moscow - part 1 (Kieran)

WE were folowing where others had failed before us; Napoleon, Hitler. Perhaps the reason we succeeded where they failed is that a) we didn't go in winter and b) we didn't bring an invasion force, just turned up as a couple of tourists. Going on Autumn has been a good move - the weather has generally been very pleasant for getting out and about - not too cold - and the trees (there are lots of trees here, I mean lots) have beautiful golden, orange and red leaves, making it picturesque. What was not so picturesque was Murmansk our first Russian city. It's a pretty grim industrial port in the arctic circle, but it was our way in from Norway. We only had one day, and ssaw the main sight, a massive statue of a Russian infantryman standing as a monument to the dead of world war 2. This guy is big - gives the Angel of the North or the Christ of Corcovado a run for their money.

Our first overnight train went smoothly - we had our friends Scott and Gill with us, so the 4 of us shared a compartment. More about the trains in a future blog. Our next stop was Petrozvodsk - a pleasant city on the shores of Europe's second largest lake, Onega, which we could see from our hotel room. Out in the middle of the lake is the island of Kizhi, which we reached by Thunderbirds style lime green hydrofoil. On Kizhi is a collection of wooden architecutre, some transported from elsewhere in russia, but some built there, inlcuding 2 churches and a belltower collectively with 33 onion-shaped domes of aspen wood. These shimmer golden in the sunlight when first made, then fade to silver and finally grey-brown. One of teh churches was made without a single nail, and all the decorative features are designed to keep water form collecting and rotting the wood.

Next stop st petersburg - I'll save that for another blog, as this internet is very expensive!