After a twelve hour flight to Munich, a connection from Munich to Heathrow, and a callous hurtle into an eight-hour-behind time zone, I am now fully back in England - to stay (probably. For a few months. Or until a good deal comes along.) So now I'm all Englished up with my bad weather and my cup of milky tea, I'll recount the last few days of the whole Trans-Siberian adventure, China-style, for any of you who have retained interest and/or attention for lack of excitement/alternative nearby reading material.
On my fourth day in Beijing, I changed from the fairly upmarket Jade Hostel (well, it had a God of Wealth in a nook by reception) to the 365 Inn in the more down-at-heel but definitely trendier Xuan Wu district (the Chinese Euston versus the Chinese Hackney, or something like that.) Xuan Wu is a brilliantly labyrinthine place full of fake watch sellers and non-tourist restaurants where a bowl of noodles as high as your head costs less than 10 yuan (a pound); where you can get lost among the schoolchildren playing in alleyways next to conspicuous bunches of gamblers next to impromptu food markets and just-as-impromptu hairdressers. Ten-minute-long businesses crop up everywhere: the old man with a spare chair starts cutting kids' hair, another one offers to sell you a dog he found and put in a humorous position on a statue, another one has an 'English menu' that offers you 'green snow' for a dollar, and 'green snow' turns out to be imported Sprite. I spent two days just soaking in the atmosphere of the district, and two nights braving the notorious 'bar streets' with a varied bunch of people who had been on the TS Express from Mongolia (more on THOSE nights later...maybe.)
The best thing, however, about being in the Jade Hostel the few days before had been the night markets. Quiet streets at night transform completely at nightfall into huge food stalls of everything you can imagine (starfish, seahorses, and cockroaches on sticks a specialty.) The noise is incredible, the market sellers in their regulation communist-red hats and aprons leaning over and bartering with locals and tourists simulatenously, switching expertly from Mandarin to English and back again, trying to convince the westerners of the quality and superior taste of snake meat, handing the less curious locals sodas full of billowing dry ice that make children squeal.
I went back to the night market twice, less inclined to try snake meat than a guy in my group of Trans-Siberianers, happier to stick to fruit kebabs encased in caramel (which gave me enough mysterious stomach cramps. Lucky I didn't go for the snake.)
It took me six days, however, to gather the courage to actually use the Beijing subway alone.
'It's easy!' said the Chinese people at reception in the 365 Inn, shoving a photocopied metro map at me. 'Get on line 1 at Chian'men, change to line 2, get off six stops down the line and you'll be at the old silk market. Which westerners LOVE.'
Travelling somewhere that 'westerners love' sounds like something that would usually make a backpacker self-righteously vomit, but what the hell, I was battered by three weeks of unfamiliarity followed by a week of mock celebrity in the eyes of the Beijing residents, and off I went.
Luckily, the Beijing metro is actually really easy, since they had to clear up their Chinglish act Olympics-wise. No longer is their gastro-unit proclaimed as the 'THE CHINESE ANAL HOSPITAL' on the skyline, although the sign in the bathroom at the Jade Hostel still retained its 'Beware of Landslide' sign (after feeling extremely uneasy, I worked out this meant 'beware of slipping.') The metro is slick and announces every stop in Mandarin and English. Like Singapore, oppression makes the underground shine; and like all terrible governments, we can justify China by saying the trains run at maximum efficiency every time.
I got spat out somewhere near the other side of Beijing at the Silk Market: a load of market stalls in a building six storeys high. Electronics jostle against jewellery and Dior jackets and iPhones that 'fell off the truck' at the same place where a couple of zeroes fell off the price. Bartering is compulsory, and eventually fun; after you have your first reasonably priced item, you work off that in order to barter for other things. I bartered for a so-called Dolce and Gabbana trenchcoat using an iPod speaker I'd just bought as a prop.
When I returned to the hostel, I had to dump an unfortunate pair of shoes and a towel in order to carry my (ill-gotten?) gains back. Otherwise my spine may well have folded somewhere between leaving the hostel and hailing an airport cab.
The end of this day was my last night in Beijing, offset lovingly by the Trans-Siberian people who hadn't already left China hopping in a taxi with me and finding the 'party district.' The night went by in a blur of vodka-Redbull-mad-German-tourists-and-Lady-Gaga-sang-on-request-by-Chinese-people-who-can't-speak-English haziness. At one point I may have said 'I love you guys.'
8am, my iPod faithfully woke me, I slung my backpack on and let a Chinese girl from the hostel hail me a taxi. An hour later, I woke up to the driver chucking me out and telling me we were at Terminal 3; Starbucks greeted me like a horribly familiar mirage in a shiny metallic sea of moneyed travellers. Post-security, Beijing Airport has 'oases of peace' every few steps that include waterfalls and meditation areas for the hungover flier.
Next thing I was in Munich.
Now I'm back home.
Blog abandoned until the next travelling experience, which hopefully will never be too far around the corner.
Sunday, 15 August 2010
Saturday, 7 August 2010
Beijing, day 4
It's me, reporting to you finally from inside the Great Firewall of China!
Just kidding. I'm outside of China now...nobody breaks the wall.
This is going to be a quick one because I'm once again zipping off somewhere else again but I have to tell you that bar all the, er, obvious oppression, I absolutely fell in love with Beijing. It's what all the travellers I met coming the other way on the Trans-Siberian called 'a city of contradictions' (in a very guidebook-written-by-Louis-Theroux kind of way) and you can see why: Starbucks coffee stores are crammed inside traditional Chinese buildings with elevated lanterns outside; there are 52 McDonalds in central Beijing alone and the mascot is an anime character rather than Ronald the clown.
Arriving in China from Mongolia was an interesting experience. First of all, the Mongolian border town is a sad place, unusual for the Mongolian countryside in that it has brick housing rather than the normal ger tents. The reason for this? It used to be a massive Soviet base, and at the collapse of Soviet control over Mongolia, it was left at the edge of the Gobi Desert with a bunch of abandoned residents. When you get poked off the train during border control by the provodnitsyas, little kids try to sell you common desert stones out of biscuit tins by the sides of the rails. The crumbling brick houses around them are an obvious sign of the slow trickle of depopulation occurrent daily there; the lack of local animals suggest that these residents still rely on extremely infrequent deliveries from Ulaanbaatar. Nobody wants to buy a pebble for a dollar.
After three hours' border control on the Mongolian side, you get shunted off to China and undergo six hours of wheel changing: substantially less painful than on the Russian side because Chinese trains have AC and padded beds.
Pulling into China, I actually derived genuine joy from the presence of fluorescent lights, because I knew they meant that the toilets here would no longer be holes in the ground. Sorry, I am an uncultured swine.
Beijing is a place where Mao's Mausoleum stands overlooking Tiananmen Square, where Facebook and Blogspot are banned, where I came at the brunt end of all the bad points of celebrity. Warned by the guidebook that if you are 'blonde, blue-eyed, or fair skinned' (check, check, check) Chinese people may request photographs with you, I wasn't surprised when the first teenage girl approached and asked in broken English if she could be photographed alongside me. I was more surprised when, at the Forbidden City, hundreds of people converged upon me requesting my face for their mantelpiece. I was even more surprised by the ones making the requests, who were almost invariably families and often fathers wanting each one of their daughters in separate pictures. Interesting.
It had to be stopped when I was approached while I was eating breakfast - in a backpacker's hostel that a family actually entered when seeing me from a distance. That didn't stop school groups openly pointing at me when I took my later walks around the central city...luckily it's usually good-natured, if racially insensitive (you know how often Aryans like me have to deal with racial insensitivity.)
On my third day in Beijing, I signed up to a tour to the Great Wall along with six other confused westerners. As we gathered round a table with the Chinese guide to discuss which part we should visit, we were given a number of options that included:
1. The touristy one
2. The fake one
3. The really real one
4. The one with the slide
No contest. I took a toboggan slide down the Great Wall of China.
[[[There will be more on China soon but I'm incommunicado for another week]]
Just kidding. I'm outside of China now...nobody breaks the wall.
This is going to be a quick one because I'm once again zipping off somewhere else again but I have to tell you that bar all the, er, obvious oppression, I absolutely fell in love with Beijing. It's what all the travellers I met coming the other way on the Trans-Siberian called 'a city of contradictions' (in a very guidebook-written-by-Louis-Theroux kind of way) and you can see why: Starbucks coffee stores are crammed inside traditional Chinese buildings with elevated lanterns outside; there are 52 McDonalds in central Beijing alone and the mascot is an anime character rather than Ronald the clown.
Arriving in China from Mongolia was an interesting experience. First of all, the Mongolian border town is a sad place, unusual for the Mongolian countryside in that it has brick housing rather than the normal ger tents. The reason for this? It used to be a massive Soviet base, and at the collapse of Soviet control over Mongolia, it was left at the edge of the Gobi Desert with a bunch of abandoned residents. When you get poked off the train during border control by the provodnitsyas, little kids try to sell you common desert stones out of biscuit tins by the sides of the rails. The crumbling brick houses around them are an obvious sign of the slow trickle of depopulation occurrent daily there; the lack of local animals suggest that these residents still rely on extremely infrequent deliveries from Ulaanbaatar. Nobody wants to buy a pebble for a dollar.
After three hours' border control on the Mongolian side, you get shunted off to China and undergo six hours of wheel changing: substantially less painful than on the Russian side because Chinese trains have AC and padded beds.
Pulling into China, I actually derived genuine joy from the presence of fluorescent lights, because I knew they meant that the toilets here would no longer be holes in the ground. Sorry, I am an uncultured swine.
Beijing is a place where Mao's Mausoleum stands overlooking Tiananmen Square, where Facebook and Blogspot are banned, where I came at the brunt end of all the bad points of celebrity. Warned by the guidebook that if you are 'blonde, blue-eyed, or fair skinned' (check, check, check) Chinese people may request photographs with you, I wasn't surprised when the first teenage girl approached and asked in broken English if she could be photographed alongside me. I was more surprised when, at the Forbidden City, hundreds of people converged upon me requesting my face for their mantelpiece. I was even more surprised by the ones making the requests, who were almost invariably families and often fathers wanting each one of their daughters in separate pictures. Interesting.
It had to be stopped when I was approached while I was eating breakfast - in a backpacker's hostel that a family actually entered when seeing me from a distance. That didn't stop school groups openly pointing at me when I took my later walks around the central city...luckily it's usually good-natured, if racially insensitive (you know how often Aryans like me have to deal with racial insensitivity.)
On my third day in Beijing, I signed up to a tour to the Great Wall along with six other confused westerners. As we gathered round a table with the Chinese guide to discuss which part we should visit, we were given a number of options that included:
1. The touristy one
2. The fake one
3. The really real one
4. The one with the slide
No contest. I took a toboggan slide down the Great Wall of China.
[[[There will be more on China soon but I'm incommunicado for another week]]
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
Mongolia, day 4
This is going to be an EXTREMELY quick and badly-written post because the Mongolian man is shouting at me that he wants to close in 15 minutes and flickering the lights at the ashen-faced Counterstrike/World of Warcraft players.
I'm leaving Mongolia tomorrow for Beijing bright and early at 6am - some impressions that I can't write up properly:
1. A way people actually make money on the street in Ulaanbaatar - they sit next to some scales (the kind you get in the bathroom) and charge you to weigh yourself. Apparently it's even a lucrative business...and it's tailored toward tourists
2. I went to the Ulaanbaatar Black Market today - makes you appreciate the small things in life, since I joined a ten-strong group of westerners with some locals in order to find it, accessed it through a documentary-style shanty town, and left after seeing a man lying on the floor with his eyeball hanging out. One of the most amazing, chaotic places I've ever seen in my life, that stretches out for miles and begins with 'anomalous' stalls which may as well be called 'I stole these from the tourists' stalls: one of them is just a collection of miscellaneous British and European plugged devices (phone chargers, iPod connectors, etc) alongside clearly used, dusty old shoes from Topshop Oxford Circus and H&M
3. MONGOLIAN THROAT SINGING. YouTube it - you might not regret it
4. I spent three days in the countryside staying in a Mongolian ger - I went rock-climbing, I rode a horse through the Mongolian mountains in slip-on trainers, jeans, and a T-shirt (in other words, mostly clad in anxiety.) Although not keen for a repeat performance with the horses, the Mongolian countryside is Lord of the Ringsy AWESOME. The only not awesome part is hanging out with a big group of mad tourists whose improvised cocktails mostly involved pickled kiwi - yes, pickled kiwi - and 'Genghis Khan' vodka, getting drunk, and then realising the nearest toilet is a half hour walk away. Over a hill. And a ditch. And some rocks.
There's a hole in the ground, of course, but it's pitch black and falling in the hole is a serious potential problem.
5. The view of Ulaanbaatar shows a massive city considering the population is 1 million, and the entire population of Mongolia sputters on at only 3 million. Wanted to take a picture while I stood on the top next to the HUGE communist monument they have there that has the local heroes (Genghis Khan, Sukhbataar) placed next to Lenin and a huge mosaic of 'the communist dream' still standing prominently over the country's capital - but I wasn't allowed to take my camera within any distance of the black market, as (sternly) advised by the nervous local who only agreed to take our naive little eager group of whiteys (OK, we weren't all white, but we should have been) into the jaws of the beast after a lot of badgering and enthusiasm. Even when inside, he insisted, we all stayed together in a semicircle and it was clear that no non-locals had entered the grounds for a very long time
I wish I could describe Mongolia with the kind of writing it deserves, but this is being prevented now by one of its own citizens (ironically?) I probably won't be able to write from Beijing but will try faithfully and LOTS, I promise. In between enjoying meals that don't only comprise curdled milk in various forms.
I'm leaving Mongolia tomorrow for Beijing bright and early at 6am - some impressions that I can't write up properly:
1. A way people actually make money on the street in Ulaanbaatar - they sit next to some scales (the kind you get in the bathroom) and charge you to weigh yourself. Apparently it's even a lucrative business...and it's tailored toward tourists
2. I went to the Ulaanbaatar Black Market today - makes you appreciate the small things in life, since I joined a ten-strong group of westerners with some locals in order to find it, accessed it through a documentary-style shanty town, and left after seeing a man lying on the floor with his eyeball hanging out. One of the most amazing, chaotic places I've ever seen in my life, that stretches out for miles and begins with 'anomalous' stalls which may as well be called 'I stole these from the tourists' stalls: one of them is just a collection of miscellaneous British and European plugged devices (phone chargers, iPod connectors, etc) alongside clearly used, dusty old shoes from Topshop Oxford Circus and H&M
3. MONGOLIAN THROAT SINGING. YouTube it - you might not regret it
4. I spent three days in the countryside staying in a Mongolian ger - I went rock-climbing, I rode a horse through the Mongolian mountains in slip-on trainers, jeans, and a T-shirt (in other words, mostly clad in anxiety.) Although not keen for a repeat performance with the horses, the Mongolian countryside is Lord of the Ringsy AWESOME. The only not awesome part is hanging out with a big group of mad tourists whose improvised cocktails mostly involved pickled kiwi - yes, pickled kiwi - and 'Genghis Khan' vodka, getting drunk, and then realising the nearest toilet is a half hour walk away. Over a hill. And a ditch. And some rocks.
There's a hole in the ground, of course, but it's pitch black and falling in the hole is a serious potential problem.
5. The view of Ulaanbaatar shows a massive city considering the population is 1 million, and the entire population of Mongolia sputters on at only 3 million. Wanted to take a picture while I stood on the top next to the HUGE communist monument they have there that has the local heroes (Genghis Khan, Sukhbataar) placed next to Lenin and a huge mosaic of 'the communist dream' still standing prominently over the country's capital - but I wasn't allowed to take my camera within any distance of the black market, as (sternly) advised by the nervous local who only agreed to take our naive little eager group of whiteys (OK, we weren't all white, but we should have been) into the jaws of the beast after a lot of badgering and enthusiasm. Even when inside, he insisted, we all stayed together in a semicircle and it was clear that no non-locals had entered the grounds for a very long time
I wish I could describe Mongolia with the kind of writing it deserves, but this is being prevented now by one of its own citizens (ironically?) I probably won't be able to write from Beijing but will try faithfully and LOTS, I promise. In between enjoying meals that don't only comprise curdled milk in various forms.
Sunday, 25 July 2010
Mongolia, day 1
I'm now speaking to you from the extremely humid streets of Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia. This probably won't be the most coherent post because I'm going slightly insane from lack of sleep, after spending the last couple of days back on the Trans-Siberian Express and bumping into a few people I'd met briefly before on platforms during the four day transfer across Siberia. They reappeared on the steaming platform at the Russian border town, and we lamented the old Russian bureaucracy (six hours' wait on the Russian side to cross, and then four on the Mongolian side broken up by one slow hour across no-man's-land.) Promising - somewhat meaninglessly, I thought - to find each other on the 24 carriage train, we disappeared back inside after having our bags torn apart and our passports scrutinised by mean-faced Russian officials with guns.
Come midnight, when the border crossings were finally, finally done with, I was surprised to find one of the guys from the platform at the entrance to my compartment.
'We have decided,' he said gravely, 'to start drinking.'
When I arrived in the carriage and compartment of the person who had initially suggested it, with no vodka to my name, I was amazed to watch the tiny four-bed cabin transformed into a twelve-person game of 'celebrity heads.' Russian vodka versus Polish vodka versus Chinese 'we don't know what it is but it's 40% and it tastes disgusting' was sampled and 'judged.' A couple of Polish newlyweds came to join the party, and then an elderly couple from Mexico. A tour guide from Australia and two Belgian girls from opposite sides of the political spectrum (one Flemish, one French), a sixth former from the South of England, and at least five committed travellers made their way inside over the course of the night; the age range was a solid forty years, from 18 to 58. The party was broken up and then reformed a number of times, as the angry provodnitsyas (glad it wasn't my carriage) banged on the walls, yelled at us in Russian, and then eventually cut the carriage's electricity in a bid to get us to dissipate back to our beds. There was a toast for everything, and no one was allowed to pass.
I stumbled back to my compartment in the early hours of the morning and was shaken awake at 5am Mongolian time, 4am Siberian time, by my own provodnitsya. As I opened my eyes, she hissed something urgently in Russian in my face, and then turned around and began to shake the girl above me. I took this to be the wake-up call for our 6am arrival into Ulaanbaatar, and dragged my protesting limbs off the board I'd been sleeping on and into the familiar Trans-Siberian bathrooms for a quick toothbrush that might disguise this was the morning after the night before.
Pulling into Ulaanbaatar was pretty grim. Its heat is oppressive and grey, its buildings a couple of glass structures fighting for professionalism amoung a load of crumbling Soviet blocks. Jumping off the train at 6am, I was confronted with a singular hammer-and-sickle monument which still stands in the main part of the city station.
My hotel (an actual hotel! It's basic but it's real) is on Peace Avenue, which does NOT live up to its name. All of this came as a bit of a disappointment before I wandered up to the resident Buddhist temple - accessible via a shanty town where the local Mongolian guy warned me to
'stay very, very far from the dogs' - and was greeted by an incredible, hidden haven of Buddhism starkly contrasting to the grimy poverty of the rest of Ulaanbaatar. The temples were definitely worthy of any other South East Asian country I've been to, and the service that I managed to miraculously arrive bang on time for was incredible.
A Mongolian guide directed me towards the school that young children attend before becoming fully fledged Buddhist monks, and their service was if anything more impressive. The identically shaven kids all chanting separate rhythms that come together every few minutes over many hours a day is really something to see. As a few other groups of tourists and me walked around the school during the chanting and inspected the Buddhist artifacts, a Nokia mobile phone tune rang out suddenly. Tourists and locals looked around and at their own bags sheepishly, and then angrily.
'Wouldn't it be funny--' started a guy beside me, before his humorous moment was granted. One of the teenage monks picked up the phone and started to have a leisurely chat on it while his mates carried on chanting. Good to know absolutely everywhere has joined the 21st century.
Hidden in one of the temples was also the biggest Buddha in the world: 26m high. That's a fucking tall Buddha.
'We had to build this one again from scratch in the 90s,' said the Mongolian guide, 'because when Russia turned our country communist, they took the old 26m Buddha and melted it down to make bullets.'
Good old Russians. Why did I leave again?
Tomorrow: off to the countryside to stay in a 'traditional Mongolian ger.' I'm warned this will include horse-riding, fermented mare's milk, and the possibility of no running water. Luckily it's only for two days before coming back to UB, as the in-the-know locals (such as myself) call it.
I hope it's raining in England, kids. Actually, I wouldn't mind a bit of rain right now!
Come midnight, when the border crossings were finally, finally done with, I was surprised to find one of the guys from the platform at the entrance to my compartment.
'We have decided,' he said gravely, 'to start drinking.'
When I arrived in the carriage and compartment of the person who had initially suggested it, with no vodka to my name, I was amazed to watch the tiny four-bed cabin transformed into a twelve-person game of 'celebrity heads.' Russian vodka versus Polish vodka versus Chinese 'we don't know what it is but it's 40% and it tastes disgusting' was sampled and 'judged.' A couple of Polish newlyweds came to join the party, and then an elderly couple from Mexico. A tour guide from Australia and two Belgian girls from opposite sides of the political spectrum (one Flemish, one French), a sixth former from the South of England, and at least five committed travellers made their way inside over the course of the night; the age range was a solid forty years, from 18 to 58. The party was broken up and then reformed a number of times, as the angry provodnitsyas (glad it wasn't my carriage) banged on the walls, yelled at us in Russian, and then eventually cut the carriage's electricity in a bid to get us to dissipate back to our beds. There was a toast for everything, and no one was allowed to pass.
I stumbled back to my compartment in the early hours of the morning and was shaken awake at 5am Mongolian time, 4am Siberian time, by my own provodnitsya. As I opened my eyes, she hissed something urgently in Russian in my face, and then turned around and began to shake the girl above me. I took this to be the wake-up call for our 6am arrival into Ulaanbaatar, and dragged my protesting limbs off the board I'd been sleeping on and into the familiar Trans-Siberian bathrooms for a quick toothbrush that might disguise this was the morning after the night before.
Pulling into Ulaanbaatar was pretty grim. Its heat is oppressive and grey, its buildings a couple of glass structures fighting for professionalism amoung a load of crumbling Soviet blocks. Jumping off the train at 6am, I was confronted with a singular hammer-and-sickle monument which still stands in the main part of the city station.
My hotel (an actual hotel! It's basic but it's real) is on Peace Avenue, which does NOT live up to its name. All of this came as a bit of a disappointment before I wandered up to the resident Buddhist temple - accessible via a shanty town where the local Mongolian guy warned me to
'stay very, very far from the dogs' - and was greeted by an incredible, hidden haven of Buddhism starkly contrasting to the grimy poverty of the rest of Ulaanbaatar. The temples were definitely worthy of any other South East Asian country I've been to, and the service that I managed to miraculously arrive bang on time for was incredible.
A Mongolian guide directed me towards the school that young children attend before becoming fully fledged Buddhist monks, and their service was if anything more impressive. The identically shaven kids all chanting separate rhythms that come together every few minutes over many hours a day is really something to see. As a few other groups of tourists and me walked around the school during the chanting and inspected the Buddhist artifacts, a Nokia mobile phone tune rang out suddenly. Tourists and locals looked around and at their own bags sheepishly, and then angrily.
'Wouldn't it be funny--' started a guy beside me, before his humorous moment was granted. One of the teenage monks picked up the phone and started to have a leisurely chat on it while his mates carried on chanting. Good to know absolutely everywhere has joined the 21st century.
Hidden in one of the temples was also the biggest Buddha in the world: 26m high. That's a fucking tall Buddha.
'We had to build this one again from scratch in the 90s,' said the Mongolian guide, 'because when Russia turned our country communist, they took the old 26m Buddha and melted it down to make bullets.'
Good old Russians. Why did I leave again?
Tomorrow: off to the countryside to stay in a 'traditional Mongolian ger.' I'm warned this will include horse-riding, fermented mare's milk, and the possibility of no running water. Luckily it's only for two days before coming back to UB, as the in-the-know locals (such as myself) call it.
I hope it's raining in England, kids. Actually, I wouldn't mind a bit of rain right now!
Friday, 23 July 2010
Siberian countryside/Irkutsk, day 3/4
Great set-up here in Irkutsk, 'administrative capital of Eastern Siberia', which I've been in today after a frankly terrifying two hour taxi transfer from the countryside. I'm sitting in a corrugated iron hut with twenty computers and one fan. Temperature has once again hit the 30s, and I'm about to get on a train to Mongolia!
To finish off after the birch stick charade, I stumbled out of the banya into the Russian farmhouse connected, where the Russian woman running the place cooked me dinner over the blaring of a TV in the corner.
'Massive storm in Moscow,' she informed me over rice, and gestured towards the news report. The tropical weather had caught up with the city I was in a few days before, and battered everything in sight.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before the same storm made its happy way down to the little Siberian village of Listvyanka. Grabbing a beer from the nearby convenience store (licencing hours don't exist in Russia) around midnight, I sat with a couple of people from the hostel on a bench overlooking Lake Baikal. It was about half an hour into my 'Ruski No.7' beer that I noticed jagged flashes miles across the water. The rain started, almost imperceptibly, as a group of drunken Chinese tourists struck up a spontaneous conversation with us.
At the first faint sound of thunder, we legged it back up to our middle-of-nowhere farmhouse and managed to duck inside as the rain began properly with a vengeance. By the time we'd entered one room, we were trapped inside by the force of the gale.
I made the mistake of saying, 'This is really like a horror movie' as the thunder began to shake our corrugated iron roof and rain began to seep through the poorly enforced windows. Predictably, my announcement came immediately before a power cut.
The awesome darkness of that Siberian valley was the kind of darkness you NEVER get in England, as every single house was plunged into pitch black. The people who had managed to throw themselves into the room I was in gathered at the window and enjoyed an amazing view of an extremely rare thing: a monsoon storm in Russia. Lightning periodically transformed the farmhouses and the mountain goats into figures blazingly illuminated, far brighter than daylight, before the impenetrable darkness again.
The geek of the group produced a reading light you can attach to your head as a torch. We all judged her.
The next day in Listvyanka was spent being bullied up a mountain, round a cliff, and into the Siberian forest by the same sadistic Russian man who beat me with birch sticks. I don't want to talk about it, except to say I have injuries. Most are, admittedly, emotional, but were slightly tempered by the existence of a private beach (you only have to be mad enough to rock climb through the Siberian mountains in heat lovingly accompanied by blinding fog to get there, too!)
Now I'm sitting in Irkutsk, waiting to catch the train to Mongolia, catching y'all up. Irkutsk, for what it's worth, is a funny mixture of new-builds and the land that time forgot - like Listvyanka, there are rusty hammer-and-sickles and communist stars that remain stubbornly attached to every other lamppost, and a massive statue of Lenin chokes on the fumes of hundreds of passing Toyotas and Landrovers, wrapped around with telephone wires. His outstretched stone hand among the dodgy sellers advertising very sad camel rides and even sadder 'dancing bear experiences' is a bit poignant, a bit vulgar, a bit something else. Just to push the effect even further, I ate pizza at a fast food place directly opposite this very same statue only an hour ago. Sorry, Lenin. It feels a bit like I'm mocking the corpse I paid 300R to see back in Moscow not so long ago - but damn, pizza is good.
Mongolia here I come. I'm not exactly relishing the two days I'm about to spend back on the Trans-Siberian Express, especially since the temperature is faithfully climbing once again (it knows instinctively when I'm about to take public transport.) I'm also somewhat apprehensive about the 'approximately eight-hour - sometimes four, sometimes fourteen' border crossing from Russia, which involves changing the wheels of the train and a shitload of classic Russian bureaucracy. Expect to be woken rudely at 3 in the morning by a provodnitsya shaking a baton and demanding your passport. They'll probably also want to see the endless, endless streams of paper you have to gather from each hostel in Russia along the way - all costing between 100 and 500R each, which is a price hike of 2GBP to 14GBP in pure administration.
Never mind, though! Adventure, adventure, adventure! Ulaanbaatar, the capital I know absolutely nothing about! Mongolian ger camps! Fermented mare's milk! (I'm serious.) Bring it on... back to the Trans-Siberian Express I go.
See you all - metaphorically of course - in two days.
To finish off after the birch stick charade, I stumbled out of the banya into the Russian farmhouse connected, where the Russian woman running the place cooked me dinner over the blaring of a TV in the corner.
'Massive storm in Moscow,' she informed me over rice, and gestured towards the news report. The tropical weather had caught up with the city I was in a few days before, and battered everything in sight.
Needless to say, it wasn't long before the same storm made its happy way down to the little Siberian village of Listvyanka. Grabbing a beer from the nearby convenience store (licencing hours don't exist in Russia) around midnight, I sat with a couple of people from the hostel on a bench overlooking Lake Baikal. It was about half an hour into my 'Ruski No.7' beer that I noticed jagged flashes miles across the water. The rain started, almost imperceptibly, as a group of drunken Chinese tourists struck up a spontaneous conversation with us.
At the first faint sound of thunder, we legged it back up to our middle-of-nowhere farmhouse and managed to duck inside as the rain began properly with a vengeance. By the time we'd entered one room, we were trapped inside by the force of the gale.
I made the mistake of saying, 'This is really like a horror movie' as the thunder began to shake our corrugated iron roof and rain began to seep through the poorly enforced windows. Predictably, my announcement came immediately before a power cut.
The awesome darkness of that Siberian valley was the kind of darkness you NEVER get in England, as every single house was plunged into pitch black. The people who had managed to throw themselves into the room I was in gathered at the window and enjoyed an amazing view of an extremely rare thing: a monsoon storm in Russia. Lightning periodically transformed the farmhouses and the mountain goats into figures blazingly illuminated, far brighter than daylight, before the impenetrable darkness again.
The geek of the group produced a reading light you can attach to your head as a torch. We all judged her.
The next day in Listvyanka was spent being bullied up a mountain, round a cliff, and into the Siberian forest by the same sadistic Russian man who beat me with birch sticks. I don't want to talk about it, except to say I have injuries. Most are, admittedly, emotional, but were slightly tempered by the existence of a private beach (you only have to be mad enough to rock climb through the Siberian mountains in heat lovingly accompanied by blinding fog to get there, too!)
Now I'm sitting in Irkutsk, waiting to catch the train to Mongolia, catching y'all up. Irkutsk, for what it's worth, is a funny mixture of new-builds and the land that time forgot - like Listvyanka, there are rusty hammer-and-sickles and communist stars that remain stubbornly attached to every other lamppost, and a massive statue of Lenin chokes on the fumes of hundreds of passing Toyotas and Landrovers, wrapped around with telephone wires. His outstretched stone hand among the dodgy sellers advertising very sad camel rides and even sadder 'dancing bear experiences' is a bit poignant, a bit vulgar, a bit something else. Just to push the effect even further, I ate pizza at a fast food place directly opposite this very same statue only an hour ago. Sorry, Lenin. It feels a bit like I'm mocking the corpse I paid 300R to see back in Moscow not so long ago - but damn, pizza is good.
Mongolia here I come. I'm not exactly relishing the two days I'm about to spend back on the Trans-Siberian Express, especially since the temperature is faithfully climbing once again (it knows instinctively when I'm about to take public transport.) I'm also somewhat apprehensive about the 'approximately eight-hour - sometimes four, sometimes fourteen' border crossing from Russia, which involves changing the wheels of the train and a shitload of classic Russian bureaucracy. Expect to be woken rudely at 3 in the morning by a provodnitsya shaking a baton and demanding your passport. They'll probably also want to see the endless, endless streams of paper you have to gather from each hostel in Russia along the way - all costing between 100 and 500R each, which is a price hike of 2GBP to 14GBP in pure administration.
Never mind, though! Adventure, adventure, adventure! Ulaanbaatar, the capital I know absolutely nothing about! Mongolian ger camps! Fermented mare's milk! (I'm serious.) Bring it on... back to the Trans-Siberian Express I go.
See you all - metaphorically of course - in two days.
Thursday, 22 July 2010
Siberia, day 2
SO. I stumbled bleary-eyed off the train in central Siberia at 9.45am local time, having moved over a three day/four night period through time zones GMT+2 to GMT+8. So it was something like 4.45am in my poor, battered circadian rhythm, concealed in my poor, overstimulated brain.
There was a taxi waiting to transfer me to the hostel by Lake Baikal (vital statistics: biggest freshwater lake in the world, 20% of the world's freshwater, thousands of endemic animals, frozen over by ice 3m thick from December to March when you can drive/sled over it - but not build traintracks and transport coal over it, as they found out one winter recently.) Taxi driver was a cheerful Russian (somewhat of a rarity) with a penchant for racecar-style driving. When we reached 100mph in a 40 zone, we were met the unfamiliar sound of a Russian police siren. The taxi pulled over, documents were produced, an agreement was made, money changed hands, and we were off again.
Lonely Planet's fairly sparse section on the lakeside village of Listvyanka included a complaint that the traditional houses would soon be hit by 'ugly gentrification' - we passed a gaudy, plasticky hotel and a lot of mock-original architecture, but then made a sharp turn into a very 'real' street. My room is at the top of a farmhouse structure, and I know it's 'original' - if not by all other signs - by the outhouse. The outhouse that you access by a ladder. It makes nocturnal peeing much more of an adventure.
So Lonely Planet also told me that 'you haven't genuinely been to Russia if you haven't experienced a Russian banya', and my 'budget accommodation' includes an innocent-looking little corrugated iron hut that turns out to be just that. Tempted inside by promises from a resident Siberian and the presence of willing and similarly aged peers, I ended up in an oven. That's all I could possibly describe it as: an oven.
Gasping and coughing and sat in a pool of my own sweat, I provided ample entertainment for the Siberian who knew that 'stupid English tourists' have only ever experienced British saunas that he eats for breakfast.
'And now,' he announced brightly, 'we hit you with sticks.'
Sticks. Seriously. He had a bucket of birch sticks. And he was going to hit us with them.
'IT'S CLEANSING!' he shouted as the birch connected with my bikini-clad body in hideously boiling repetition. 'You OK?' every now and then.
Unable to lose face, I replied: 'Carry on! More birch!'
I've never been more glad to feel cold water in my life than when that Siberian man pushed me out the Russian banya, post-birches, and pointed me towards a bucket of freezing cold water. So screw you, Lonely Planet. I've 'genuinely' been to Russia.
There was a taxi waiting to transfer me to the hostel by Lake Baikal (vital statistics: biggest freshwater lake in the world, 20% of the world's freshwater, thousands of endemic animals, frozen over by ice 3m thick from December to March when you can drive/sled over it - but not build traintracks and transport coal over it, as they found out one winter recently.) Taxi driver was a cheerful Russian (somewhat of a rarity) with a penchant for racecar-style driving. When we reached 100mph in a 40 zone, we were met the unfamiliar sound of a Russian police siren. The taxi pulled over, documents were produced, an agreement was made, money changed hands, and we were off again.
Lonely Planet's fairly sparse section on the lakeside village of Listvyanka included a complaint that the traditional houses would soon be hit by 'ugly gentrification' - we passed a gaudy, plasticky hotel and a lot of mock-original architecture, but then made a sharp turn into a very 'real' street. My room is at the top of a farmhouse structure, and I know it's 'original' - if not by all other signs - by the outhouse. The outhouse that you access by a ladder. It makes nocturnal peeing much more of an adventure.
So Lonely Planet also told me that 'you haven't genuinely been to Russia if you haven't experienced a Russian banya', and my 'budget accommodation' includes an innocent-looking little corrugated iron hut that turns out to be just that. Tempted inside by promises from a resident Siberian and the presence of willing and similarly aged peers, I ended up in an oven. That's all I could possibly describe it as: an oven.
Gasping and coughing and sat in a pool of my own sweat, I provided ample entertainment for the Siberian who knew that 'stupid English tourists' have only ever experienced British saunas that he eats for breakfast.
'And now,' he announced brightly, 'we hit you with sticks.'
Sticks. Seriously. He had a bucket of birch sticks. And he was going to hit us with them.
'IT'S CLEANSING!' he shouted as the birch connected with my bikini-clad body in hideously boiling repetition. 'You OK?' every now and then.
Unable to lose face, I replied: 'Carry on! More birch!'
I've never been more glad to feel cold water in my life than when that Siberian man pushed me out the Russian banya, post-birches, and pointed me towards a bucket of freezing cold water. So screw you, Lonely Planet. I've 'genuinely' been to Russia.
The Trans-Siberian Express - a 4 day stint
I've arrived in one piece in the small Siberian town of Listvyanka, via the 'capital of Siberia' Irkutsk (small-ish city, it turns out.) This after four nonstop days living on the Trans-Siberian Express, which is certainly an experience I won't forget soon...
[[HERE I just remembered that I wanted to add in something I did, so forgive my shameless editing. The night before I left Moscow, I sat in front of St Basil's Cathedral in the middle of Red Square, admiring the view in shorts and flip flops. How many people can say they enjoyed a 35C Red Square in flip flops at 4am? Am definitely coming back to mark the same spot in snow-boots come December.]]
Since my train was scheduled to leave Moscow at 1pm, I braved the heat (which soldiered on at 40C) to see Lenin's dead body holed up in the Red Square's mausoleum, something any faithful communist would do.
No, I'm not really a communist, dickhead.
Because it only opens at 10am, I made a run for the Metro with two fine like-minded individuals (Belgian Ruth the dancer and Essex Martin the builder) and we ended up paying a guy outside the mausoleum 300R to let us skip the (astronomical) queue. This was all to be quickly shepherded past poor old Len's waxy formaldehyde-ridden body (left fist clenched because he had a stroke which affected one side of his body) by armed Russian guards, and spat out by the heavily air-conditioned mausoleum out into a graveyard where Stalin lay at rest a stone's throw away from the big guy. Underneath a giant marble Stalin bust. No kidding.
'Is it controversial that Stalin is buried here alongside other, less genocidally inclined politicians?' I asked the Russian guy we paid to get us in, once outside the graveyard and in not so many words.
The guy shrugged. 'Yea. I guess.'
Without the time to be affected by this characteristically Russian display of callous nonchalance, I had to scarper back to the hostel in order to catch the train to Siberia. Goodbye Lenin.
Hello, Trans-Siberian Express.
'Fresh' from the Moscow Metro, I was directed toward a blisteringly hot carriage in the train all those days ago. It would be fair to call the train 'basic' - the toilet gives you a good view of the tracks, the train inexplicably whistles and makes chugging noises which were supposed to have died in the steam era, and the nearest you get to luxury in a sweltering, AC-free carriage is a boiler at the end which spits out hot water for your awaiting tea and noodles. Ah, noodles. I may never eat them again after those four long days where they fulfilled breakfast, lunch, and dinner faithfully, but they served me well.
The train ride started out with the conspicuous presence of children: ten Russian toddlers set free in the carriage by their parents, dressed in nothing more than underpants and sometimes less than that. Throughout the train ride, these toddlers would worm their way into your cabin, chew your books, break their toy cars, and climb up into your laps with outstretched arms and plaintive Russian babytalk.
I took the bottom bunk in my cabin of four, having experienced the nonexistent highs and the very real lows of sleeping in an Eastern European train's top bunk when Interrailing the previous year. The first person to take the bed beside me was a middle-aged Russian man with entirely metal teeth called Serozha (he wrote it down on the back of a CD case for me in Cyrillic.) Like his bunk successor - a nameless young Russian girl who travelled for two days with me to Irkutsk - he spent a lot of time holding the regulation pillow and staring out the window as European Russia, then the Europe-Asia border, then full-on Siberian countryside rolled past the window. Occasionally, they would both leave the compartment out of courtesy and smoke endless cigarettes out the carriage windows; a courtesy which didn't make a whole lot of difference.
As we made our way through Russia, the 38C inside temperature of the train dropped suddenly to 10C and then climbed back up to 20C. At the 10C point, the children all appeared out of their cabins in the morning, transformed from hyperactive underwear-clad kiddies into... similarly hyperactive kiddies, stuffed into snowflake-decorated jumpers and (for the boys - yes, the boys) tights. A good number of the little boys had mullets, which is a style prevalent in Russia, I have come to learn. It was a bitter lesson to come to terms with but the mullet is alive and well from Moscow to Yekaterinburg (where the Romanovs were shot) to Omsk (where everyone was always exiled to) to Lake Baikal. Believe me - I saw them with my own eyes, almost exclusively on the very young (that includes teenagers, however) in each one of those places.
Scenery from the grubby windows of the Trans-Siberian Express is slow to evolve and cheesily breathtaking. The regularity of Soviet-era factories, completely abandoned along with the settlements which were created for the communist dream of factions of self-sustainability, was pretty shocking. Massive structures of production stand, half-destroyed by nature, revealing their insides, becoming dangerous playgrounds or oddly, oxymoronically beautiful eyesores. The settlements that HAVE survived are tiny - ten houses at best, it looks like - and nothing like how they must have once been. They're the landscape scars of Russian history... enough to get anyone a bit pretentiously carried away.
Health and safety is yet to hit the Trans-Siberian, so a trip to the 'dining car' (which really doesn't have the credentials to deserve that name) includes leaping over open spaces of tracks while you manoevre your careful way across carriages. It isn't worth the journey, which is why you hop off at every other stop and buy food from the babushkas.
Babushkas are basically women selling food who congregate on the platforms of the more out-of-the-way mid-Siberian stations, where the train stops to refuel/re-wheel/inspect the buffalo damage from the previous night. These stops usually last about 20 minutes, where you can leap off the train and be confronted with thousands of little moving stalls setting themselves out: pastry, meat-and-potato meals squashed into polystyrene boxes, pots of berries, etc., that have been cooked and/or picked in the houses and gardens of the nearest settlement. These Russians are very different to the slick, slightly-trashy Muscovites in their nine inch heels beside their smug little 5'2" men or the in-the-know St Petersburg University students. Their life remains one making use of the most basic of tools and often the most basic of standards: their houses are, without exception, constructed entirely from wood and corrugated iron.
When you see them concealed in the countryside from the train, you don't quite know whether to call them villas or shanty towns.
Obviously stuck in a country often openly hostile to the idea of vegetarianism, I took advantage of the babushkas' fresh fruit and sometimes their pasties, which were always a guessing game. If they had no change, you got little plastic sachets of coffee for every 5R they couldn't make. 'Potato pasties' proved pretty delicious (Russian peasants don't count their carbs.)
I don't think I'll ever forget watching the kids career up and down the carriages, the visibility of communism and its subsequent decline, the 'white nights' on the train where Siberia shot by in semi-darkness, the babushkas with their ridiculously cheap offerings. For some reason, Belle & Sebastian's 'Sleep the Clock Around' was the one-song soundtrack for my four-day Trans-Siberian journey. Very unlike me, but true. The Express can do stuff like that to you.
[[HERE I just remembered that I wanted to add in something I did, so forgive my shameless editing. The night before I left Moscow, I sat in front of St Basil's Cathedral in the middle of Red Square, admiring the view in shorts and flip flops. How many people can say they enjoyed a 35C Red Square in flip flops at 4am? Am definitely coming back to mark the same spot in snow-boots come December.]]
Since my train was scheduled to leave Moscow at 1pm, I braved the heat (which soldiered on at 40C) to see Lenin's dead body holed up in the Red Square's mausoleum, something any faithful communist would do.
No, I'm not really a communist, dickhead.
Because it only opens at 10am, I made a run for the Metro with two fine like-minded individuals (Belgian Ruth the dancer and Essex Martin the builder) and we ended up paying a guy outside the mausoleum 300R to let us skip the (astronomical) queue. This was all to be quickly shepherded past poor old Len's waxy formaldehyde-ridden body (left fist clenched because he had a stroke which affected one side of his body) by armed Russian guards, and spat out by the heavily air-conditioned mausoleum out into a graveyard where Stalin lay at rest a stone's throw away from the big guy. Underneath a giant marble Stalin bust. No kidding.
'Is it controversial that Stalin is buried here alongside other, less genocidally inclined politicians?' I asked the Russian guy we paid to get us in, once outside the graveyard and in not so many words.
The guy shrugged. 'Yea. I guess.'
Without the time to be affected by this characteristically Russian display of callous nonchalance, I had to scarper back to the hostel in order to catch the train to Siberia. Goodbye Lenin.
Hello, Trans-Siberian Express.
'Fresh' from the Moscow Metro, I was directed toward a blisteringly hot carriage in the train all those days ago. It would be fair to call the train 'basic' - the toilet gives you a good view of the tracks, the train inexplicably whistles and makes chugging noises which were supposed to have died in the steam era, and the nearest you get to luxury in a sweltering, AC-free carriage is a boiler at the end which spits out hot water for your awaiting tea and noodles. Ah, noodles. I may never eat them again after those four long days where they fulfilled breakfast, lunch, and dinner faithfully, but they served me well.
The train ride started out with the conspicuous presence of children: ten Russian toddlers set free in the carriage by their parents, dressed in nothing more than underpants and sometimes less than that. Throughout the train ride, these toddlers would worm their way into your cabin, chew your books, break their toy cars, and climb up into your laps with outstretched arms and plaintive Russian babytalk.
I took the bottom bunk in my cabin of four, having experienced the nonexistent highs and the very real lows of sleeping in an Eastern European train's top bunk when Interrailing the previous year. The first person to take the bed beside me was a middle-aged Russian man with entirely metal teeth called Serozha (he wrote it down on the back of a CD case for me in Cyrillic.) Like his bunk successor - a nameless young Russian girl who travelled for two days with me to Irkutsk - he spent a lot of time holding the regulation pillow and staring out the window as European Russia, then the Europe-Asia border, then full-on Siberian countryside rolled past the window. Occasionally, they would both leave the compartment out of courtesy and smoke endless cigarettes out the carriage windows; a courtesy which didn't make a whole lot of difference.
As we made our way through Russia, the 38C inside temperature of the train dropped suddenly to 10C and then climbed back up to 20C. At the 10C point, the children all appeared out of their cabins in the morning, transformed from hyperactive underwear-clad kiddies into... similarly hyperactive kiddies, stuffed into snowflake-decorated jumpers and (for the boys - yes, the boys) tights. A good number of the little boys had mullets, which is a style prevalent in Russia, I have come to learn. It was a bitter lesson to come to terms with but the mullet is alive and well from Moscow to Yekaterinburg (where the Romanovs were shot) to Omsk (where everyone was always exiled to) to Lake Baikal. Believe me - I saw them with my own eyes, almost exclusively on the very young (that includes teenagers, however) in each one of those places.
Scenery from the grubby windows of the Trans-Siberian Express is slow to evolve and cheesily breathtaking. The regularity of Soviet-era factories, completely abandoned along with the settlements which were created for the communist dream of factions of self-sustainability, was pretty shocking. Massive structures of production stand, half-destroyed by nature, revealing their insides, becoming dangerous playgrounds or oddly, oxymoronically beautiful eyesores. The settlements that HAVE survived are tiny - ten houses at best, it looks like - and nothing like how they must have once been. They're the landscape scars of Russian history... enough to get anyone a bit pretentiously carried away.
Health and safety is yet to hit the Trans-Siberian, so a trip to the 'dining car' (which really doesn't have the credentials to deserve that name) includes leaping over open spaces of tracks while you manoevre your careful way across carriages. It isn't worth the journey, which is why you hop off at every other stop and buy food from the babushkas.
Babushkas are basically women selling food who congregate on the platforms of the more out-of-the-way mid-Siberian stations, where the train stops to refuel/re-wheel/inspect the buffalo damage from the previous night. These stops usually last about 20 minutes, where you can leap off the train and be confronted with thousands of little moving stalls setting themselves out: pastry, meat-and-potato meals squashed into polystyrene boxes, pots of berries, etc., that have been cooked and/or picked in the houses and gardens of the nearest settlement. These Russians are very different to the slick, slightly-trashy Muscovites in their nine inch heels beside their smug little 5'2" men or the in-the-know St Petersburg University students. Their life remains one making use of the most basic of tools and often the most basic of standards: their houses are, without exception, constructed entirely from wood and corrugated iron.
When you see them concealed in the countryside from the train, you don't quite know whether to call them villas or shanty towns.
Obviously stuck in a country often openly hostile to the idea of vegetarianism, I took advantage of the babushkas' fresh fruit and sometimes their pasties, which were always a guessing game. If they had no change, you got little plastic sachets of coffee for every 5R they couldn't make. 'Potato pasties' proved pretty delicious (Russian peasants don't count their carbs.)
I don't think I'll ever forget watching the kids career up and down the carriages, the visibility of communism and its subsequent decline, the 'white nights' on the train where Siberia shot by in semi-darkness, the babushkas with their ridiculously cheap offerings. For some reason, Belle & Sebastian's 'Sleep the Clock Around' was the one-song soundtrack for my four-day Trans-Siberian journey. Very unlike me, but true. The Express can do stuff like that to you.
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