What follows is just the text of various rambling email I sent during my 2001-2 trip, complete with typos and unfunny jokes. I'll probably get around to writing something a little more coherent, and including some photos, Real Soon Now. In the meantime, enjoy...
Well hello from Fremantle everyone. It's a cold and windy day here and I accidentally locked myself out of the place I'm staying in (oops), so I hope you're warmer wherever you are...
Anyway maybe some of you would like to hear about my adventures, such as they are. (If not, you can delete this now -- isn't email wonderful? You'd have to at least pretend to be interested if I was telling you this in person.) So here goes:
Just for a change I caught the bus to Sydney and spent the day trying to find a coffee for less than $3. I failed, and I was reminded why I don't care for Sydney all that much, but never mind. After some adventures on the Airport bus (which didn't stop when it should have and left me on the wrong side of the wrong terminal! -- but the information people at the international terminal are wonderful beyond description) I leaped on my plane for Perth, where I joined my family (including a somewhat shocked mother, who didn't know we'd been planning this as a birthday surprise). In Perth we rented a nice shiny 4WD (it didn't stay shiny for long!) and headed off on the Great WA Road Trip.
First stop on our trip north was a place called New Norcia, which is entirely composed of a Benedictine monastery and associated tourist traps. It had a lovely museum and art gallery attached, as well as a wee shop where we bought the local bread and olive oil -- yummo! For reasons that elude me, the monks churn out enormous quantities of both and sell them to locals and tourists alike -- the whole enterprise has got so big that they've opened a second bakery in suburban Perth, and a week or two later we saw the bread for sale in a town on the South Coast a full day's drive from Perth and two day's drive from New Norcia itself. But it's good bread so why ever not? Then on up north through the towns of Mt Magnet (mining town in the middle of nowhere), and Newman (mining town in the middle of nowhere) before heading west again to the town of Tom Price (mining town in the middle of nowhere). Apart from the roadhouses every 300km or so, and the mining towns a day apart, there's a lot of big red nothing out there: really spectacular stuff. Alas, we had no Midnight Oil CDs to play...
After Tom Price it was full speed across the Pilbara, which if anything proved to be ever more spectacularly arid and inhospitable than the more inland areas we'd already been through. The Pilbara is punctuated by massive gorges as well as a few low rolling hills (which true to form the locals called "mountains"; there were a few "mountains" marked on roadsigns which we couldn't see from the car at all), so it's not monotonous, but it is spectacularly empty. We had the whole world to ourselves, or at least it seemed that way, although the various mean- -looking raptors we passed may have begged to differ.
Then down the coast -- water again, hooray! -- and a most welcome couple of days in the resort town of Coral Bay. Coral Bay's really only a couple of campgrounds and motels with the ocean (and lovely reef) on one side and about forty dive shops on the other. I spent a happy day snorkeling just off the beach, and taking a nosy at some western species I hadn't seen before as well as some old favourites. (For those who know and care: there were heaps of moon wrasse, possibly my all-time favourite fish. I'd never seen so many in one place. Hooray!) We also took side trips to see more wildflowers -- even more beautiful than any we'd seen so far, and definitely more numerous nearer the coast -- and to pay our respects to one of the world's four known sets of stromatolites, composed largely of the same sort of cyanobacteria which spent an industrious two billion years producing oxygen only to be largely out-competed by newer forms of life such as plants and animals. Fair boggles the mind.
But alas it was soon time to repack the car and do yet more driving: now we were headed to the south-west corner of WA (and indeed of Australia). Margaret River was a lot of fun -- I saw my first snake (excellent!) and tried my first Western Australia pinot noir (also excellent) and utterly blew my budget on frivolities like canoe hire. From there to the utterly gorgeous karri, marri, jarrah, and tingle forests of the South Coast -- there's a tree called a tingle! Oh I do like that name, it sounds like a Lynley Dodd creation -- which I loved of course, then back to Perth. All in all a *lot* of driving around in such a short time. But WA is huge and time was limited, at least for the others who didn't have the luxury of several months' free time on their hands, and really anything less than six months wouldn't even begin to do WA justice.
And now having farted around in Perth for a couple of days I'm about to start my six-week stint with the Australian Trust for Conservation Volunteers. I checked in with them yesterday and they all seem like good people, although an alarming number of them said "welcome to th madhouse" when I first turned up. Tomorrow I'm off planting trees somewhere near here, and then on Monday we're off down south to spend a week helping to fix up some wetlands that were damaged by mining. Should be a lot of fun.
Hello everybody!
Well it's now about three months since I left Canberra and I'm still in WA, so at this rate I should have made it to the UK just in time to start drawing a pension. Having signed up originally for six weeks with the conservation volunteers mob, I've now been here nine weeks but! today is my last day and then, finally, I'm off.
So what have I been up to for nine weeks? I've mulched half of WA, pulled out several tonnes of weed, pushed wheelbarrows from here to Albany, and been chased around by both of the two local species of deadly snakes. The volunteer organisation maintain a house in Fremantle, where I've been staying about half the time I've been here; it's conveniently half an hour from town (I say convenient because the one hour round trip is just enough to discourage too many trips to Fremantle's excellent cafes and pubs, but not too far to stagger home when I do get tempted), has fruit trees in the back garden, and oodles of hot water to revive sore muscles after a day of snake-dodging. It's generally been full of 18-year-old English things on their gap year, which has made me feel terribly grown-up and more of a local than I really am, although it's also reminded me that I don't like my food boiled. From there we're driven off to do a day's snake-dodging, which is of course the point of the exercise, and a great deal of fun: in the time I've been here we've been as far afield as Capel and Yallingup (I just missed trips to Exmouth, Kalgoorlie, and Esperance, natch), working in nurseries, wetlands real and man-made, inner-city parks and forgotten mine sites; I've chased and caught black swans, handled pythons, planted my own body weight in trees and sedges, eaten cheesecake, played hacky sack 'till my feet fell off, had mud fights, and slept in the sun. That said, nine weeks was rather a long time and I'm glad to be moving on...
On Saturday morning (tomorrow already, yikes!) four of us from the volunteer program are squeezing into what surely must be the world's smallest hire car and exploring the south-west corner of WA for a while. First stop, of course, is Margaret River for some nice walks and some excellent pinot noir, then we'll travel around the coast past Albany and Esperance before turning north for Kalgoorlie, where I'll leave the car, massage some life back into my limbs, and jump on a train bound for Adelaide. After that is anyone's guess (any suggestions?) although I'll probably head on to Melbourne and then back to Canberra for a wee rest.
And now, without further ado, the top ten things I've learned working with the Australian Trust for Conservation Volunteers:
Hasn't it been an educational trip, boys and girls?
Hi all,
Well another leg of Paul's winding trip around the world has come to an end (that was quick!) -- I've just spent a couple more weeks exploring the southern wee bit of WA with fellow weeding-and-mulching survivors Katherine, Heidi, and Helene, and with a little blue rented Hyundai with no insurance on dirt roads. Hoorah!
We piled our stuff into the back (and middle and front) of the rental a fine Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago and headed off for Dunsborough, which is a little south of Fremantle and has the distinction of being almost the only place I could book accommodation (but more of that later). We detoured via Bunbury, WA's second-biggest town -- they call it a city -- which is famous for the dolphins which come in to shore to pay the locals a visit most days. Needless to say they didn't come to see us; Heidi had been in Bunbury a week and hadn't seen them. Bunbury also has an astonishing number of hairdressers, at least with respect to its size -- it may very well be the hairdressing capital of the world. (Oddly, its inhabitants didn't seem especially well-groomed.) Then on to Bussleton, to see the longest wooden jetty in WA or Australia or something. It's *1km* long, because the water's so shallow and doesn't get deep until you're that far out. It's an impressive piece of construction, beyond a doubt, but I'm still not entirely clear why the powers that were didn't just build a shorter jetty 10km south, where there's plenty of deep water, and have done. Ah well.
Dunsborough was full of schoolkids. Turns out we'd inadvertently decided to travel during "schoolies' week", when lots of 17- and 18-year olds celebrate the end of the school year by looking at my itinerary and booking out every hostel en route. Fortunately we were able to find beds at the YHA, but we were happy to get out of town the next morning and head off to Margaret River. Of course we couldn't do that without stopping off at every tourist trap on the way, and in this case "tourist trap" means food and/or booze. We picked an erratic course connecting Simmo's icecream shop (yum) to Wild Ales brewery (chocolate beer is bad, chili beer isn't much better) to the Margaret River cheese company (excellent baked ricotta) to the Candy Cow fudge factory (ok but pricey) to the Margaret River chocolate company (ho-hum). We also took a look at a national park and a cave, and had an exciting encounter with what was probably a venomous snake at a beach, but who cares?
Margaret River was full of schoolkids. In our search for accommodation, we were eventually driven all the way south to Augusta, right on the south coast, where we stayed for cheap at the YHA voted #1 in Australia for two years running. And it was almost empty. Who'd've guessed?
Augusta was not full of schoolkids, but nor was it full of anything else. They town's only real attraction is the lighthouse 8km south of town, from which you can see the point (ok, line) where the southern and Indian oceans meet. The lighthouse and grounds were closed. Off to Pemberton! We climbed a very tall tree (the Diamond Tree, for those in the know), stopped at a winery and made them stay open as we sat in the sun and thought about buying a bottle, and bumbled our way in to Pemberton. There are some lovely walks (and more tall trees to climb) around Pemberton; there are also a *lot* of snakes, and the next day while walking about and not climbing trees I saw no less than four. Two, I am certain, were tiger snakes, which needless to say are deadly venomous. Hoo boy. But I also saw a family of red-winged fairy wrens, which restored my faith in nature and had me grinning like an idiot for hours.
Just north of Walpole, 15 minutes or so away on dirt roads, is a place called Dingo Flat where there are no dingoes but where there is a backpackers'. Go There.
The Valley of the Giants, our next stop after a most excellent but somewhat bizarre night at Dingo(less) Flat, is a big tourist attraction and no fewer than three towns we passed through claimed to be "the gateway to the Valley of the Giants". What it is (have I mentioned this from my last visit?) is a metal walkway amongst a stand of tingle forest, but -- and this is the neat bit -- the whole thing is suspended 40m above the ground, so you can see the trees and the community of plants and animals around them from a completely different angle. This was my second time on the walk, and I enjoyed every minute again -- there was even a ring-necked parrot nesting in a tree hollow about 35m off the ground, which normally I'd never have seen at all and which I got almost nose-to-nose with. Hooray!
From Walpole (gateway to the Valley number two) we drove on to Albany, which has the world's most unfortunate lookout (over a rubbish tip!). It also used to have a museum with -- ready for it? -- a display on dialtones through the ages, but it had closed. Oh yes, also a rock that looks like the head of a dog. Poor Albany. At least it had a backpackers' where we got free chocolate cake.
Then The Rain Came. We got rained on walking in the Porongorup Range National Park, which was a shame since it looked (from the little I saw) exceptionally beautiful. We got rained on driving through the Stirling Range National Park, where I had really wanted to do some walking. We got rained on having hot chocolate at a replica Dutch windmill in the middle of nowhere, where I insisted we stop as it was such a stupid place for a Dutch windmill. We got rained on in Esperanace, famous (according to the guidebook) for its white sand beaches and its reliably excellent weather. We got rained on in Norseman. We got rained on in Kalgoorlie. We got rained on all the way across the Nullabor -- which given the size of the Nullabor is very impressive. And I've been in Adelaide for a couple of days now, and it's still drizzling on and off.
Adelaide is a nice town, except for the weather. It's got loads of good cafes, one restaurant for every thirty people(!), lots of bookshops and a superb museum. It reminds me a lot of Melbourne, except it's a more manageable size and noone I know lives here. Also it's of course at the heart of some mighty fine wine country -- I spent this morning wandering happily (and increasingly unsteadily) through the brand new National Wine Center, and tomorrow I'm off to McLaren Vale to cruise the wineries and generally do nothing much for a day or two. Mmm, red wine...
Hey there!
Well finally I managed to drag myself away from Australia's shores and here I am in Singapore, land of shopping malls. Actually it's been a lot more fun than I expected, hooray!, and it's a bit of a shame that I'm booked to leave tomorrow morning, but there you are.
I'm staying in Chinatown, which is a lot of fun especially since the build-up to Chinese New Year is well under way and the streets are festooned with lights, bangers, and lights-and-bangers shops for several blocks. Only the little Buddhist-sculpture shop and the wizened old barber (for wizened old hair) seem immune to the festive spirit -- even the Hindu temple is buzzing. There's a lot of the original Chinatown hanging on in the back streets away from the tourist buses, so the place has rewarded exploration; if you ever need to know where to buy live frogs, live turtles, or pork floss (what *is* "pork floss"?) for that special dinner, I can help. Little India has been fun, too, and equally full of inexplicable Asian oddities; obviously it won't last, mind you, as it's messy, chaotic, and run-down, all of which I'm sure are illegal.
(An aside: did you know that chewing gum attracts a fine twenty times higher than urinating in public -- S$10,000 vs a mere S$500? Personally I have a lot more time for gum-chewers than people who piss in stairwells, but then what would I know? People who live here tell me that the introduction of the no-urinating rule was met with a protest which was surely unheard of in recent Singaporean history, as hundreds of people fouled lifts, stairwells, and back alleys across the island.)
So I've done Chinatown and Little India, I've eaten superb food for next to nothing, I've ridden the MRT and been to Jurong bird park, I've got lost in the 'burbs and haggled for camera parts, and tonight I'm going for a Singapore sling at Raffles hotel, which means tomorrow it's time to move on. Next stop somewhere in Malaysia!
Hello again,
Well here I am in Bangkok and wondering why (which must be the usual reaction, alas, to a city of 10 million people all of whom seem to be on the make). I've had a wee explore and discovered that everything I wanted to see here is being renovated, I've wandered around about a million wat and admired some extremely beautiful Big Buddhas and little flakes of ceramic, and I've eaten rather more Korean fod than I expected, so it's time I think to head somewhere a little quieter.
Since I last wrote I've come up overland from Singapore; unfortunately I only spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia but I loved (almost) every minute. KL is that rarest of things, a big city which is still fun to be in and nice to look at, and I spent a very happy few days wandering the back streets looking at buildings with tiles, buildings with minarets, buildings with spires and arches, and the odd colonial confection with all of the above in one. The owner of the guesthouse where I was staying was, unaccountably, a big fan of New Zealand soccer, which is an odd colonial confection in itself I thought.
I was just out of KL and at the Batu Caves in time for Thaipusam, a Hindu festival which the Hindu poluation celebrate in a big way and which the rest of the town (muslim, taoist, buddhist, christian, and all) mark as well, in that wonderfully multicultural way that Malays do so well. Thaipusam sees worshippers giving thanks for prayers answered by going into a trance and covering themselves with skewers through lips and face, hooks through the back and chest (with weights from leaves to limes or even, in several cases, strong friends or small trolleys hanging off ropes), and entire elaborate shrines sitting atop their shoulders. Then it's off on a full day's walk from the outskirts of KL to the shrines at the caves, with music and chanting and some very concerned-looking first aiders all the way. All a bit more full-on than the average Australasian christmas parade really, and not something I'm likely to forget in a hurry.
From KL I took off to Kampung Kuala Tahan, a village on the outskirts of Malaysia's biggest and oldest national park, to spend a week or so walking up and down hills in an effort to see tapir, leopards, and elephants in the wild. In the end I saw none of the above; but I did see a lifetime's worth of monkeys, a few wild pigs, cave-dwelling bat-eating snakes, all manner of birds (hornbills! I saw hornbills!), and a few elephant turds, so I did very well on the wildlife stakes anyway. Plus I got violently ill six (hard) hours' tramp into the jungle, which surely counts as an authentic tropical jungle experience. Anyway from there it was a boat, van, beautful train ride, taxi, walk, even more beautiful train ride, puzzled map-reading stop, and annoying petrol-less taxi into Bangkok, which is where I came in and where I want to get out.
Happy (lunar) new year to you all wherever you are. Toodles!
It seems to be Oscar awards time of year (how do I know? A long story involving the UN Transitional Authority in Cambodia, touts who speak kiwi slang in a kiwi accent, and the waiting room at the SOS medical clinic in Phnom Pehn). Based on the past six or seven months' wasting time across Australia and Asia, and in the spirit of the Oscars, I'd like to propose my own awards. I'll call them the Wheelers, in honour of the couple who have done more than anyone else to fill South-East Asia with 18-year-old Aussies looking for cheap ganja.
So, the Wheeler awards for March 2002:
Hi there,
(Getting sick of these yet? Better things to do? Don't know who I am in the first place? Let me know...)
Well, it's been a while since I last wrote and I've covered so much ground and seen and done so many neato things I hardkly know where to begin. I finally made it out of Bangkok, and got three hours north (to a town called Ayutthaya, where I looked at crumbling old ruined temples and played takraw with security gaurds) before going back again; but on the second attempt I made it all the way to Chiang Mai. I'd originally planned to do a loop around some of the small towns to the west and north-west of Chiang Mai (Pai, Mae Hong Son, and others en route), but the number of flyers advertising tours that way put me off and to spite the tour operators I went east instead, to a town called Nan. Nan is seven hours from Chiang Mai by slow public bus, and this is most of its charm; the landscape is beautiful, the people are friendly, there are almost no tourists (incredible for Thailand) and not a single pizza shop or Bob Marley tape. I spent a very happy few days hanging out in Nan, trying to learn more Thai and riding around the edges of the national park, before returning to Chiang Mai, where I hung out with the locals at an old folks' home, forgot all the Thai I'd learned, checked out the local hospital, and jumped on a bus bound for Chiang Khai and the Lao border.
Lao really defies desctription, at least by me; you'l have to wait until some super-literate travel writer like Paul Theroux or Eric Newby or Norman Lewis visits -- assuming they're not all dead already -- to get a real idea of the place. I rummaged around in small towns and bounced over the countryside in the back of utes; I gorged myself on superb cooking and superb views; I gatecrashed a village party and accidentally tried to cross the Chinese border; and I revelled in being the only tourist for miles around. The northern part of the People's Democratic Republic, where I was, is largely mountainous and hard to get around, and presumably for this reason it's been spared (so far) the worst of the homogenisation of southern Laos and the countries surrounding. It's probably the only place left in the world where the local hill tribes (Hmong and Thai Dam mostly, in case you care about such things), who elsewhere are paraded around as if they were zoo animals or sideshow freaks, come and stare at the tourists instead of the other way around. I was stared at, poked and prodded, didn't recognise half of the food in the markets, and couldn't read the language to save myself. Needless to say I had a fantastic time and it's one place I'm already thinking of revisiting.
I popped out of Laos from Vientiane back into Thailand ad caught a train back to Bangkok - which I still don't like! -- where I got a visa and a bus ticket and turned around as fast as I could and headed for Cambodia and the cliched splendors of Angkor. Turns out the temples there are as good as everyone says -- actually even better. Who'd have expected it? Certainly not me, but I spent a very happy few days clambering amongst the ruins before jumping on a boat and heading across the Tonle Sap lake to Battambang. Battambang is, well, pleasant. Then to Phnom Pehn via a remarkable ute trip (I didn't know you could fit 20 people in the tray of a Toyota), where I hung out with friends from Australia and generally lived the ex-pat lifestyle for a while, sitting in cafes all day and drinking red wine most evenings. Mmm.
All that luxury was starting to wear a hole in my wallet pretty speedily, and besides I hadn't seen a tree for weeks, so I decided one day to head to Kampot, in southern Cambodia, to explore the nearby national park. Turns out Kampot has a nice market, a hospital with no medical staff, no English-speaking medics at all, one phone that works for toll calls 20% of the time, and a possibly rabid dog that doesan't like kiwis much, so after half a day there I was back to Phnom Pehn for medical treatment. Obviously a sign, although of what I'm not entirely sure.
...and here I am in Vietnam: land of socialist realist statuary, propaganda billboards, and rampant capitalism. Also of excellent food and silly currency, so I'm having a grand time laying on a supply of fat for the upcoming Mongolian epic while sniggering at the banknotes. What with racing off to a clinic for rabies jabs every few days I haven't been able to see much of the country, really, but I can at least report that the buses are comfortable -- ish -- and the bits in between major cities look nice out a window. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks I'll be able to explore more.
Rightio, there's a bakery right outside this internet place and the smell is driving me crazy, so I'll wind up here. It's all a bit once-over-lightly through four countries I'm afraid, so if you want to know more about motorbikes in Saigon's rush hour or Vietnamese cowboys or inedible Lao berries or metamorphosing Buddhas you'll just have to ask.
PS: Did you know that 2,000,000 people in Vietnam -- plus a smattering in Cambodia and France -- worship the spirit of Vioctor Hugo? Now that's a funky religion.
Hello all,
Okay, I may have been a bit slack emailing recently, but I've spent a quarter of my time in China in trains -- China is BLOODY BIG -- and used all my spare time for sleeping.
I have to confess to arriving in China with a little trepidation; everything I'd heard from tourists passing the other way suggested it was a big country full of scam artists and touts, the border gaurds hummed and hahed a long time about letting us out of Vietnam and again about letting us in to China,the first person we met over the border was an annoying would-be scammer who latched on to us and wouldn't let go, and on the train from the border to Kunming I was ill. Happy to say, though, that China's a bonza place and I had a great time.
We -- "we" is me and Sonia, a friend from Canberra who I lured across China and Mongolia with the promise of throat-singing and pointy boots -- arrived from Hanoi to the border town of Hekou, where we spent a few hours waiting for a train and trying to dislodge a little shit who decided we hadn't been scammed enough recently, then jumped on a train headed to Kunming. In Kunming we learned many Important Facts About China for the first time:
In Kunming we had a merry time riding bikes, eating, and getting lost before leaping on a sleeper bus and heading for the town of Lijiang, halfway up a mountain and surrounded by Kodak shops. Sleeper buses seem to be a peculiarly Chinese invention (probably no other race can be packed so tightly) but they're brilliant: little beds three across and two high fill a large bus, so punters can sleep in relative comfort while the crazy driver overtakes on blind corners at night. Lijiang is a pretty wee town, except maybe for the Kodak shops, and we had a very pleasant few days exploring ruined monasteries on the tops of hills, listening to ancient Taoist temple music in new concert halls, and stuffing ourselves silly on goat's cheese, flat bread, and lychee wine. Mmm.
From Lijiang we took a bus (apparently -- I was perfecting my sleeping-on-buses technique and don't remember the trip at all) over the border into Sichuan province, joined a monster queue at the train station, and discovered the only option for getting to Chengdu, 16 hours away by train, was the dreaded Chinese "hard seat" class. Actually it wasn't too bad in the end, since we got a couple of hours' sleep perched on the little wooden benches and there was only one fight in our carriage in the whole time we were there. Chengdu struck me at frist as a pretty uninspiring sort of place; big, grey, smoggy, and full of featureless modern buildings. Soon enough though we discovered its charms, principal among which are teahouses. What a brilliant innovation these are, and three jeers to the Gang of Four (Five? Surely not) for shutting them all down during the Cultural Revolution. Here's how it works: you find a comfy bamboo seat at a handy table, and pay some pittance for a bowl of tea with infinite refills; then you sit all day eating sunflower seeds, watching the ear-cleaners doing thier thing, and fermenting counter-Revolutionary ideas for the overthrow of the state. Eventually all the tea takes its toll, so you go to pee -- this is the oddest bit of the exercise, since the locals feel compelled to come and watch -- and start all over again. Hurrah! What a civilised way to spend a day.
Chengdu also has pandas (cute), baby pandas (cuter), a park in the middle of town (fun) with a subway ride that looks like a kid's science project (bizarre), opera with fire-breathing and acrobatics (neato), and a roller rink (huh?).
From Chengdu to Songpan, where we had booked a two-day horse trek over the hills and far away. Songpan is halfway up a mountain -- so beautiful scenery all around, although climbing a flight of strairs even left us short of breath -- and full of ethnic Tibetans, so we got to sample a whole new culture (and food!) in one easy step. The horse trek itself was fantastic, with magic scenery and campfires and suchlike, although for some reason I didn't get to ride a horse. I was given a donkey, and I only fell off once.
From Songpan back to Chengdu, and then for a change it was another overnight train ride to Xi'an, home of the famed terracotta warriors and of a whole lot of prostitues. Really. They all had little "hairdressing" booths set up along the road, and would offer their services to any likely-looking lad. There were so many it was hard to believe they could make any money, so as an experiment Sonia and I ate our dinner one night opposite a few of these ladies. After only ten minutes they had a customer, but what did they do? Wash his hair! After half an hour they hadn't gone back into the curtained enclave next to the sink, so we left dissapointed. Maybe the punter did too.
Oh, yeah, and the warriors were pretty neat.
From Xi'an we went and had adventures in the north, and saw another stuffed Communist in Beijing, but you'll have to wait 'till next time since this email is a bit massive already.
Hello again,
In our last exciting installment, our heroes were racing across China and had got to the scenic town of Xi'an, home of hairdressers that aren't and of terracotta warriors that resemble nothing so much as extras from Gilbert & Sullivan.
A friend of a friend was, for some reason, living in the town of Yangling, an hour or so out of Xi'an, so figuring that any friend of Steve's is good for a beer we jumped on a bus to go see him. Yangling was another of those uniquely Chinese towns: it was a little tricky finding a bus that went there, the hotel staff didn't appear to know that the town existed, and it didn't even appear on any of our maps -- and it was huge. This seemed to be a recurring phenomenon in China, with every little weeny hamlet-sized dot on the map actually coresponding to a city of half a million people, and we never learned. ("Wow, this town is bigger than I thought.") Still I suppose you have to put 1,300,000,000 people somewhere.
Anyway, Yangling is scary. It's some sort of free-trade town for biotech firms, out in the Chinese countryside where noone has to see what's going on. I half expected to see two-headed cows and man-eating wheat, but instead we saw the world's second-largest rainfall simulator, lots of wooden drum manufacture, and the only outsized mutants in sight were in Yangling's restaurants where you could buy "station water noodles", which for some reason are about a metre long. Five noodles fed three people. How wonderfully impractical.
To do our bit for the Chinese pot noodle and dried fruit industries, we decided on another overnight train, this time to Yinchuan, the little wee capital of Ningxia, a little wee Muslim province in north-central China. It barely registered on our maps. My journal for the day says "Yinchuan itself is much bigger than I'd expected". The scenery around Ningxia, though, was beautiful, with low rolling hills, sandy plains, and no sign of life as far as the eye could see save a few very tired-looking shrubs scattered about; or, closer to the towns, lush green irrigated fields with people out planting rice. These, I realised, were the first people we'd seen out working in the fields in all of China, which was odd; they were also tending the first sheep we'd seen in China, which was especially odd given how much mutton Sonia had eaten. Hmm.
I decided I liked Yinchuan. There was the best regional museum possibly in all of Asia, lots of cheap and scrummy restaurants, a post office where it only took four forms to send a fax, the odd mosque, and a cake shop where for about US$1 we could eat bad sponge cake, drink bad instant coffee, and listen to cheesy Casiotone arrangements of Beethoven and Mozart. The buses ran on time, too, and the local oldies did square dancing in the park every evening under the watchful eye of an enormous Mao portrait. And -- you may not believe this but I swear it's true -- I saw a queue. Twice.
Likable or not, unfortunately it didn't take long to see all Yinchuan had to see and there's only so long you can sit in a hotel room watching badly-dubbed Molly Ringwald movies before it's time to move on, so it was on to the hustle and bustle of Beijing -- via a train which seemed to go backwards an awful lot but which did take us through Wuhai, possibly the most polluted place on earth and certainly the most depressing place I've even seen. The smokestacks in Wuhai, I can report, belch orange smoke when they're not belching purple. What the hell burns orange?
Beijing, it turns out, was a fun mix of new and old -- down our street people wandered about in pajamas in the early evening and played chess on the spittle-covered footpath, but just a block away the subway staff spoke English and you couldn't have fitted anyother glass-walled skyscraper in if you'd tried. We were staying about 20 minutes' walk from Tiananmen Square, which sounds nice but isn't -- to my disappointment, the famous Square turns out to be a big block of bare concrete in the middle of Beijing. Easier to drive your tanks around, I guess. Tiananmen is, however, home to Mao's mortal remains, so we dutifully joined the shuffling queue to sneak a peek at Stuffed Commie #2. They have the same orange light illuminating Mao as Ho -- it must make the wax harder to spot -- but apparently the Chinese budget is a little larger since Mao appears to actually have legs, or at least leg-like lumps in the right place, and you can hardly tell his ear was recently re-attached.
And now, since bullet lists are easier to write than real sentences:
Tune in next time for our continuing adventures in Mongolia -- same bat-time, same bat-channel.
Hello again,
Well I'm more than a little behind with this email malarky, but a month or so ago Sonia and I were in Mongolia and we had a bonza time -- definitely one of our favourite places so far. Lots of wide open spaces, the occasional nomads' ger (felt tent), groovy traditional clothes with silly hats, and super friendly people.
Almost as soon as we arrived in Ulaan Baatar from Beijing we turned around and headed back south for ten days in the Gobi desert. Needless to say it was amazing. A group of six of us travelled around in a big blue Russian van driven by a local guy who kept trying to partner off various members of the tour group (it didn't work). Even though the Gobi is a desert it was absolutely crawling with life -- furry rodenty things running around; marmots (supposedly very tasty but also carry the plague!); gazelles, although only ever saw their bums because they were always running away; huge eagles and vultures and whatnot; two threatened species -- wild ass and wild sheep; and the odd ibex, with the most enormous curved horns. (Sonia did manage to souvenir herself a set of ibex horns when she was wandering around one afternoon, but a nomad's kid ran off with them and it didn't seem too polite to snatch them back considering the family served us lunch in their ger and didn't mind a bunch of us falling asleep on their floor for an afternoon nap! Never mind, customs would have gone crazy anyway, and ibex parts are a bit heavy to carry around the world.)
About 45% of Mongolians still live as nomads(!) and they are really the most incredibly hospitable people. We would drive around all day, then simply walk into one of their gers and ask if we could stay the night. The answer was always yes. They usually stuffed us full of mutton, dairy products (yak yoghurt is okay but goat yoghurt is disgusting), and salty, milky tea (sometimes with camel milk -- how exotic!). We had a great time playing with the kids and traipsing around after the women of the family as they milked the herds of camels, sheep, goats and yaks. We were even lucky enough to see a couple of baby yaks being born!
One of the more unusual sights in the desert was a gorge full of ice; how it all stays frozen in the middle of a hot, intensely sunny desert is beyond me. Just down the road (by Mongolian standards -- a day's drive over featureless, roadless, plains) we had a great time rolling down 200 metre high sand dunes, giggled ourselves silly and suffered some sickening dizzy spells. Two morals though: climbing up that much sand dune is absolute agony, and belly buttons collect a lot of sand. The dunes even sing! -- a deep ringing noise emanated as we tumbled down the hill. Weird.
And how did I break my arse? Well, first I rode a camel to a bunch of big red cliffs. I discovered camels only have two gears -- slow and slower -- and they ignored every badly pronounced Mongolian command I gave them to try to speed them up. If I whacked it with a stick it 'obeyed' by taking one quick step then immediately slowing down again, so I just rested my head on its rather droopy hump and let it wander home of its own accord, developing a ghastly saddle sore on my bum as we meandered along. It didn't spit on me at least, although Sonia's did use her leg to wipe its nose.
Then came the horse riding adventure, on a short side trip to see Mongolia's only(!) waterfall. (How can a country the size of western Europe only have one waterfall? I don't know either.) Mongolians have obviously decided that comfort is not an important quality in a saddle, because they make them of WOOD and put decorative metal studs in the most inconvenient places. The locals have even developed a couple of weird horse riding postures to avoid the discomfort of sitting on a converted log, because clearly it makes more sense to design a hideous saddle and then not bother sitting in it rather than to pad it out with wool and leather from their herds of sheep and yaks. Oww ow ow oww.
And to round things off we punished our aching behinds with a short ride on a rather surprised yak. Actually yaks turn out to be pretty comfortable, and there's not very far to fall should anything go wrong, but apparently they're ridden without even the benefit of a chunk of wood between the rider and the beast's backbone.
After the brilliant Gobi trip it was back to the bleak Soviet-style capital city to organise visas and tickets for the next leg of the journey. We got stranded here for quite a few days while I fought with the Russian embassy about my visa -- it appears noone has told these Ruskies that the cold war is over. They could make the word 'sir' sound like an insult, and although they only actually laughed at me once it was without a doubt the most horrible bureaucratic experience of the trip -- except for the wee matter of buying train tickets in Moscow. Ahh, those crazy Russians. Eventually I gave up for a couple of days and we took a break in the countryside and had some great walks among the spring wildflowers, finding fossils and avoiding being eaten by bears or wolves; then, because there would otherwise have been a chance of my being able to walk again one day, we went for a day-long horse ride to a ruined monastery with some rather lovely rock paintings. Oww. Even dinosaurs had brains in their behinds; why didn't I learn?
In the next exciting episode: Paul jumps on the trans-Siberian and spends 7000km eating pot noodle. 'till next time!
Hi again,
You know you're in western Europe when it's raining all summer, the pubs are older than the country they're in, and the locals are wearing socks with sandals. How'd I get here? Here's a quick summary of the last 8000 or 9000km...
A mere week or so chasing bits of paper around Ulaan Baatar finally netted me a Russian transit visa, a ticket across Siberia as far as Moscow, and a reservation on a train from Moscow to Helsinki. A few days later I was standing on the platform of Ulaan Baatar's train station with a backpack full of personal effects and two or three bags of pot noodles, dried fruit, and tea, wondering what I'd let myself in for and what I could do if I was stuck in a small box with a drunk Russian -- or, worse, a completely clueless backpacker -- for the better part of a week.
As it turned out both Russians and tourists were conspicuously absent. There was one other backpacker on the train, somewhere five or six carriages away, but after some chit-chat before boarding I never saw him again, and surprisingly there were almost no Russians. Instead I shared a four-bed berth with a lovely Mongolian babushka who spoke not a word of English or Russian (and who almost never spoke Russian, for that matter), and for two days with a pair of Mongolian truckies who were heading to Ekaterinberg to pick up a truck. In true Mongolian fashion, all three took it to be their solemn duty to look after me and feed me; as the truckies were living on dubious mutton sausage and the babushka on what appeared to be dried chunks of mutton fat I had to learn to play not-hungry pretty fast. Otherwise the cast of wagon seven included a flunky in the Russian mission in Mongolia and his wife, heading home to Moscow (with a BIG Mongolian mutt in tow) to stock up on frowns and red tape; a Mongolian French teacher, meeting her school-aged kids who were in Moscow for reasons entirely obscure; a young mother, with two boys who divided their time amongst tearing around the platforms buying sugary food and tearing in and out of my compartment to borrow my pocket-knife; an enormous, drunk, vodka-sculling oaf who terrorised me for a day and then vanished, presumably having drunk himself into a coma; and a motley collection of small traders, making a living selling cheap Chinese goods to the locals at every station en route.
The traders ruled the train, really. We hadn't even left the platform in Ulaan Baatar before the first few came along, distributing their goods (cheap clothes, cheaper shoes, and for some reason tacky acrylic blankets) from compartment to compartment to avoid paying duty. (Umm, yes officer, those *are* my three blankets and seven pairs of women's shoes. And those are her three blankets and seven pairs of shoes. For sale? No, of course not.) And as soon as we crossed the border into Russia it was all on; the train wouldn't even stop before the Mongolians would leap out, clutching bundles of tops or armfuls of shoes, and hawk them to the Russians who would already be waiting. It was obviously something of an event for the Russian towns we passed through; the Mongolians would shout, the Russians would haggle ruthlessly, and the local militia would wander about threatening Mongolians (never Russians) with their batons for various real or imagined offences. After a while the train would silently start up again -- over 100 years operating on this line and still noone's thought to buy a few whistles! -- and the Mongolians, their goods, and the occasional dim-witted kiwi tourist would pound down the platform and somehow land inside the train. Despite nasty militia, the odd thief, and the fierce haggling, people on both sides seemed to love it -- "Russian supermarket!" bellowed one old bloke at me, as he grinningly worked his way through a pile of jeans -- which is just as well really since it went on for five long days.
Long days but very comfortable ones, actually. I had old science fiction paperbacks; endless cups of hot tea thanks to the samovar in the carriage; entertaining conversations with the others in an odd mix of Russian, French, English, Mongolian, sign language, and cartoons; and of course the faithful pot noodles to keep me nourished and warm. The railway provided ample pillows, linen, and the other creature comforts, and fortunately the blankets only smelled very slightly of mutton.
And so after five days of sitting in a rocking box, watching Siberia roll past and menace Mongolians, I came to my senses to find the train arriving in Moscow only five minutes late.
Moscow was, well, Russian. It took me several hours to find a place to stay amongst the dreary Stalinist high-rises (on a dreary wet day), and the next day it took me five hours queueing to learn that the railway staff had lost my reservation to Helsinki and that I'd have to find a way out of Russia before my visa ran out without recourse to the one I'd actually paid for. But on the other hand, the buildings that weren't big concrete blocks were wonderful whirly spiky confections, and while I didn't get to see stuffed commie #3 in Red Square I did get to see the marvel of St Basil's cathedral right next door. I wonder what Lenin would make of being interred alongside a cathedral and a department store? Oh, how he'd laugh. And the metro! Crikey! It was the brainchild of a certain Josef Stalin (Hitler built the autobahns, too, so beware leaders with big transport plans) and built by a budding politician by the name of Kruschev, and if they'd only managed to run the USSR the way they run the metro we'd all be speaking Russian right now. I doubt there are many metro systems in the world where idiot backpackers spend an hour or so riding around just to take photos of the stations: lovely marble and brass concoctions, a whole branch line of art deco marvels, and more mosaics than you could shake a capitalist oppressor of the workers at. Huzzah!
From Moscow it was a mad dash against the clock to get to St Petersburg (nice railway station) and on a bus to Helsinki before my visa expired. Good thing I made it in time, too, since the lads from the army jumped on our bus to check passports (for what?) no less than three times and I doubt they'd have missed anything as potentially revenue-earning as a Westerner with an expired visa. On the other hand, on the Finnish side of the border the immigration people barely looked at my passport, the only soldier in sight was half-asleep and woke up only to direct traffic, and a sign in the toilet referred to me as "dear guest".
That pretty much sums Finland up, actually, at least as far as I could tell from a very short visit. I saw a cigarette butt once (someone was picking it up). Pedestrians queued on the footpath when the lights changed -- I did jaywalk once, but if looks could kill I'd be in a spotlessly clean, well-run Finnish morgue right now. Helsinki has trams, and trees, and old churches, and cobblestones, and everyone is friendly and speaks fourteen languages. Hooray!, I thought, I'm in Europe!
Then I caught a ferry to Rostock, on Germany's north coast, where the weather was foul but the train connections exemplary, and from there made my way to the wee Bavarian village of Eitlbrunn, outside Regensburg, where the weather was pretty lousy but the locals didn't mind; they were too busy wearing lederhosen and drinking beer from 1L steins in the middle of beer gardens in old monasteries while listening to oompa-pa music. Hooray!, I thought, I'm in Europe!
From Eitlbrunn to Stuttgart, where I did almost nothing of consequence except my laundry, then via Duesseldorf to Brussels, where I am now. In Brussels there are about a million museums, as many outdoor cafes selling as many types of beer, the "new" churches are older than the country itself, there are even more cobblestones than in Bavaria and more croissanteries. Hooray! I'm in Europe!