Tomsk, by Platskart

Platskart is the third class of Russian trans, a significant difference in cost from second. It's a great chance to meet Russian people, and get utterly rat-arsed with them. On the left hand side of the train are booths made up of four bunk beds, whilst the right holds tiers of two which can be converted into tables. There is no shower, two toilets per carriage and little chance to change ones clothes. To cap it all off, Russia is a massive country...

...after two days on platskart, we arrived in Tomsk with Leah & Kara, two Americans we met in Irkutsk. even though our preliminary investigations into finding a bed were met with naught but failure, we figured that in a city, we might be able to find somewhere to sleep and that nectar of the long distance platskart traveler, a hot shower...alas, it was not to be. Seemingly every hotel within our budget was completely booked up. We learned later that Mariah Carey was to be performing in Tomsk, consequently filling up the beds with flouncy appreciators of insipid soul, and giving me an actual concrete reason to dislike her.

In despair, exhaustion and clouds of B.O, we decided the only course of action was to go to the pub. Luckily for us, this establishment closed at 3am, so we could drink our woes away, stay up all night and get a train to somewhere else first thing in the morning...beer of course changes everything...adrift and sleepy, after three hours of expensive procrastinating, the idea struck that maybe we should try to find a bed in whatever mystery city we ended up in, so off we went to an internet cafe.

Laden with rucksacks, clearly exhausted, sweaty and consulting our guide book, we hardly looked inconspicuous. It was then that we encountered a group of students who spoke really good English, offering to help us...it seems that ordinary Russians rent out apartments to people at roughly the same cost as our budget, and our mysterious benefactors were ringing round the city, each with an identical I-phone...finally, one of them named Artor found one, and escorted us to his car...what I know about cars could be measured in millilitres, but it was clear even to me that his vehicle didn't come cheap.

Off we cruised in this financial impossibility for any other twenty year old student I've ever met, round the streets of Tomsk to the sounds of Russian hip-hop. Finally, we arrived in a residential area that at first glance looked a bit ropey.
"Stay in the car!" commanded Artor to the girls. "Don't open the door! Come with me." he said to me, so we stood outside, waiting for the man we'd be renting from.

At this point, the street gradually went on to display a variety of souls, possessed, if one were to make assumptions, of dubious character...it also occurred to me that what we were doing was actually pretty dangerous - here we were, getting into the car of a stranger, in a strange country, exhausted, vulnerable...where exactly does he get his money from? Who is waiting for us in this apartment? How can we trust anyone? Images of Lilya 4 ever flashed through my mind, and nor was I alone in my paranoia. The girls, securely in the car were having similar suspicions...sharing them with each other didn't lighten our mood.

"No good," said Artor, "let's go."
"Where are we going?"
He chuckled "To my grandmothers'."
I doubt any of us believed him. Yeah, your "grandmothers."
"Is it safe?"
He chuckled again "Yes, it's very safe."

Ten minutes later, scared out of our wits by our own imaginations, we met his grandmother, who provided us with tea, biscuits, that all-important shower and bade us goodnight. We sat round the table, nursing our cuppas, scarcely believing what had just happened. Indeed, if a gang of grizzly cossacks armed with knives had turned up, demanding our passports & cash, we wouldn't have been surprised. We finally succumbed to sleep, hoping that the next day, things would start to become a bit more normal...

...they didn't, but in a bizarre way, they made more sense. Artor came round for us in the morning, telling us we were going on an excursion...so off we went to his fathers pharmaceutical company...after a hearty breakfast in the company canteen, we found ourselves in blue lab coats, wearing hair-nets and plastic bags on our feet, wandering around a colossal pill factory, just as bewildered as we were the night before, but nowhere near as terrified...the next day was spent riding a seemingly endless wave of Artors hospitality, which he wouldn't accept anything for...he took us to an abandoned chemical factory now used as a paintball arena, the edge of a city cordoned off by barbed wire and soldiers which was a "secret" in Communist times, the oldest part of Tomsk, and our first student party for a long time...of course, all his friends have identical I-phones...

We doubt we'll see him again, as he didn't divulge his email address, and he can't actually leave Russia, on account of his not having a passport because he doesn't want to join the military, but we're deeply grateful (and a little shamefaced at our paranoia) that he gave us some of the most memorable experiences of the trip.

Stranded in Siberia

Due to a lack of internet facilities and epic train journeys, alas we have neglected our blog...rest assured, we are still alive.

Mongolia, as Hayley said below, is difficult to sum up in words, and maybe even in pictures. How one can convey a 360 degree emptiness from a single picture is beyond me, and certainly beyond our current capabilities. Lucky folks back in the UK will be subjected to countless photos of hills & goats.

We've been in Russia for about a week now. Our itinerary has taken something of a beating, and we'll probably be back home much sooner than we planned...

So far, the image of Russia as a grey labyrinth of uncompromising slabs populated by uncooperative grumpy people has proved erroneous. We've experienced the legendary Russian hospitality (which I hadn't heard of until reading Lonely Planet Russia) in unbelievable quantities. Today, we are still reeling from one of the most memorable experiences of the whole trip, but, off the cuff as this entry is, I can't really do it justice without sitting down first and thinking about what to write...stay tuned for an upcoming tale of homelessness, emotional turmoil, shrieking paranoia and industrial pharmaceuticals...

Journey to Mongolia in Pictures

Beijing Train Station

Beijing - Ulaan Baatar - Moscow



A 30 hour journey from Beijing at 7:45am arriving in Ulaan Baatar at 1:00pm the next day.

China

Our first glimps of Mongolia when the sun came up was through a big sandstorm.

Ulaan Baatar

Of course we took hundreds of pictures out the window over those thirty hours and this is just a few as it takes so long to upload them. I'll try to put some up of our trip out of Ulaan Baatar soon, maybe one from each day.

The longest train journey so far, border crossing & Ulaanbaatar

China has been by turns, infuriating and rewarding. That which I love about Chinese people stems from what annoys me the most about them. They really don’t seem to give a damn about anyone or thing. Their honest approach to human existence, in all its belching, farting, gobbing, pissing and shitting glory is what makes them likeable. I look forward to reacquainting myself.

We set off at a ridiculous time in the morning, bidding adieu to Beijing and China, surrounded by traders wheeling boxes onto a Moscow bound train, stopping at Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital.

Our traveling companions for the thirty hour journey were two Mongolians – Dr Dashtsevel, a large and grizzled yet tidy and gentle professor of East Asian Studies, and Mina, a young lady with excellent English, who appeared to be a member of the emerging middle classes, kitted out with the usual trappings and spangly accessories. Both clearly veterans of the Beijing to Ulaanbaatar route, they wasted no time in getting some kip.

Not surprisingly, over such a long journey, the landscape underwent gradual but drastic changes – Beijing petered out into jagged yellow sandstone, segued into smooth rolling hills, dotted with lonely mining communities, patches of snow bizarrely juxtaposed with sand, then miles and miles of unbroken Gobi steppe, the train tracks a single line drawn over an otherwise blank sheet of wilderness.

We arrived at the border station of Erlian a little before nine, beginning the arduous five hour customs procedure. I figured earlier that my misplaced departure card wasn’t going to make the authorities too happy. Our shiny buttoned soldier-boy inspector politely commanded me to open my baggage, barking “why?!” even before I’d done so. Of course, my massive rucksack was buried in a tight spot within another tight spot. Once he saw that an actual inspection of my bag would be too much effort, he satisfied himself with an officious grope of my pyjamas, proving a few things I have long suspected of bureaucrats.

That formality aside, our cabin mates decided to have a duty-free spending spree, whilst we ended up getting locked on the train after a quick mission for a bottle-opener. The good part of that was having the cabin to ourselves and watching the carriage bogies being changed – Russia and Mongolia use slightly wider tracks than the rest of the world, so the carriages have to be hoisted up on big jacks whilst the right sized wheel sections are attached. The bad part of that was that the conductor locked the toilet for three hours.

The morning brought us insight into Mongolian eating customs. Mina’s sister had met the train at a station we slept through, with a bag of boiled mutton – considerably tastier than it sounds. Dr Dashstevel produced a knife and carved, saying in a responsible fatherly manner that all of it must be eaten, whilst Mina discarded her mobile in favour of gnawing a bone clean. This intensely meaty breakfast was washed down with a few swigs of scotch. As if she hadn’t been generous enough, Mina gave us each a note of Mongolian currency, folded into an origami shirt, apparently a kind of wealth-charm.

What we read of Ulaanbaatar as being an ugly Soviet style grid of blocks probably over-prepared us for what we found – the city isn’t half as unattractive as expected, nor anywhere near as polluted as Shanghai. It’s small, rough round the edges, noisy as any capital, but laid back, lazy even. Just what we need right now.

We’re staying at Khongor guest house for a few days in the hope of meeting some people to join us on an expedition into the wilderness outside Ulaanbaatar. Obviously, there’s no internet facilities. See you in a week.

That was China

OMFG, we're going to Mongolia tomorrow. How on earth did that happen? Let me set the scene...

We arrived in Beijing yesterday, weary after a hard-sleeper train from Pingyao. Pressing on through the suddenly hideous weather, we realised that our hostel was in the arse end of nowhere. No matter, thought we, there are things that must be done. After dropping off our bags, we were back in the thick of it, searching for tickets out of China.

We're learning a lot on this trip. Yesterday, we discovered that you can't buy international train tickets from the train station. We also learned that a slightly misheard direction can cost you dearly in terms of expediency. After a fools errand to the other side of the city and back again, we discovered the place we needed...with a closed sign dangling from it's recently locked doors.

So, Hayley indulged in some retail therapy, and then we got drunk on fifty pence beers whilst Take That's Greatest Hits drawled on in an otherwise pleasant bar.

Morning comes, and once again, we fling ourselves into the madness of Beijing, ready to buy our tickets...one thing our trusty LP guides didn't tell us is that there's only two trains a week between Beijing & Ulan-bator...faced with a week of procrastinating in a massive and potentially expensive city (the decision was pondered over a five quid coffee each), we opted for the impulse border crossing. Bye-bye Beijing.

No Great Wall or Peking Duck, but at least we managed to see the Forbidden City, and description-defyingly-awesome it was at that. Photos to arrive upon discovery of a more cooperative computer.

Pingyao

A thriving merchant town once upon a time, Pingyao achieved further economic clout by establishing China's first banking system. Then in the 20th century it slipped into poverty, probably due to the colossal social upheaval of China becoming a republic, and shortly afterwards, a peoples republic. Consequently, Pingyao lacked the funds to modernise, and has pretty much by accident become an astoundingly preserved ancient city, and a World Heritage site.


Comparisons to kung-fu movies have been made too often in the short time we've been here. To say that Pingyao feels real is absurd, because it is real. Even though the bulk of the city's' income clearly comes from tourism, it isn't crass and Starbucksified in the way that Shanghai's old town was. There is a small-town feeling here - everybody seems to know everybody else. Of course, like many small towns, it's also a little bit strange.


Former capitals like Nanjing and Xian, or Kyoto and Kamakura in Japan, are sure of their positions as important historical sites. Pingyao however seems, whilst confident, unsure of what to do with its' status as a living relic. Museums and places of interest are rough and tumble affairs, hastily thrown together and roped off. Moreover, the relentless symmetry of the place makes one old building much like another. The really interesting sights are the streets, romantic, Ming China, but of course these are crowded with souvenir stalls, hawking essentially the same things, and packs of tourists rallying around invariably shrill-voiced guides roaring through loudspeakers.


Tonight, we dive back into modernity, on a sleeper train to Beijing, a city we won't be doing justice to. Three days isn't enough time to traverse a place roughly the size of Belgium.

Photos

Please look back down at added photos... I'm trying to enter them in a chronological order, it's only now that we have discovered a brilliant computer, that will allow us to do see our blog and upload photos! Yay!

Terracotta Warriors

Qin Shi Huang (259BC-210BC), unifier and first Emperor of China had certain ideas about holding on to power in the afterlife. Thusly, we have the terracotta army - an estimated seven thousand life-size statues, comprising archers, cavalry, foot-soldiers and generals, standing guard over his nearby tomb.

Emperor Qin was unfortunately a tyrant, and many of the statues were destroyed in a peasant revolt shortly after his death. Those that remained were forgotten about until 1974, when a group of peasants digging a well inadvertantly discovered what is dubbed the eigth wonder of the world. Now, the site has become a colossal museum, packed to the rafters with tourists. I wonder what happened to the peasants...

Xian in Pictures

We arrived in Xian at about 6 in the morning after being on a hard sleeper train, overnight for about 12 hours. We where lucky to have the bottom bunks as the top one is very high and the speaker blasts in your ear and the middle is just a little too like being in a sandwich. With the bottom you do have to wait for others to go to bed before you can, as you share it for seating.

We had arranged a place in Xian, which turned out to be exactly what we needed. It was the first 'Youth Hostel' we had been in, with a huge bar, with big comfy sofas, very cheap beer, massive breakfasts,and cute babies, cats and Ramnstein as Chris mentions below. Our room looked out over the centre of Xian which is a massive roundabout. In the centre is the one of the main attractions The Bell Tower. Tourists are allowed to enter from underground and dong the bell, lucky this didn't happen until about ten in the morning.



Our bedroom was a bit of a fun novelty too with it's see through bathroom...

We had come to Xian with the sole intention of seeing the Terracotta Warriors (another entry) which is about an hours bumpy bus ride out of Xian. But even after reading the trusty guide book, we had no idea what to else to see or do, so we got quite drunk and spoke to some fellow travellers, making for a very hungover day the next day and deciding on this hangover to take a bike ride round the 14km perimeter of the city walls. Ouch! again as we bounced along every inch.

We did find a beautiful place in the back streets of the Muslim quarter of the city too, which we wondered around alot and of course we went here, how could we not.

De Fa Chang Restaurant is renowned for it's superior delicious dumplings

Xian felt like one of the first times we really relaxed and stopped.

Babies, cats and Rammstein

This place knows what keeps us happy.

Nanjing - The Blackpool of China

After a very tiring and quite stressful day there is nothing like a stroll through the quiet street in an old town of a city...

...to turn a corner and discover there's a mini Blackpool was just giggle heaven, it tickled us silly.

Nanjing

Wider, less rugged, friendlier by far than Shanghai, twice the capital of China, the city was occupied by Japanese forces before World War II, becoming the site of an infamous six week massacre, the subject of Iris Changs book The Rape of Nanking. Now is not the time to accidentally slip into Japanese.

At the memorial hall a man, clearly old enough to at least have been a young boy at the time of the massacre, idly wandering through the exhibits, hacked up a huge ball of phlegm, and leisurely spat it out in a cushion of saliva. It landed with a resonant splat, punctuating the pre-recorded machine-gun fire. His manner declared that this was by no means a gesture of contempt, rather of necessity. Not a minute later, he lit up a fag and had to be scolded by a security guard.

This "I-don't-give-a-damn" attitude is something that's struck me particularly hard since coming here. People openly stare at us, blatantly laugh at our （admittedly hilarious） attempts to communicate, queues are formed seemingly by coincidence, the streets are littered with fag butts, bags, phlegm wads, traffic lights are all but ignored, horns are honked at the slightest provocation or appear to be essential to the running of the vehicle, waiters and waitresses seem openly put out that they should have to do anything at all...it's quite refreshing in an odd way, and certainly an enviable attitude to bear. Could this charging confidence be the result of over 3000 years of continuous civilisation?

Recently I've been thinking about a man I once served in the Library. A Chinese student ignored the orderly line in front of the issue desk and went straight to the first vacant booth she saw. The man called after her
"We have a little system in this country called queueing."
I keep wondering how long he'd last here.

Nanjing in Pictures

Inside Shanghai Train Station

So at the time of writing and posting these photos we have experienced the Chinese rail system three times. It's been awful everytime. After having bought the tickets we make our way into the station, each time being like a shaken champange bottle wanting to burst. Everyone is on their own in the fight to get through, to WHERE! we're all going to the same place and we all have tickets, why push?, why hit?, why barge?... What? what is the hurry? I have to say that this is worse than any commuter train I've travelled in Japan. Look at the calm before the storm above. We travelled hard seat which was quite soft for only 2 hours to a lovely, and a little less crazy Nanjing.

Nanjing Station

Nanjing is right next to the Yangzi River which is where the Grand Canal links up this river up with the Yellow River, I wanted to see this and to see this we had to get up high. We took the first whole day to explore the surrounding 'Purple Mountians'. We walked and walked and then took a cable chair up and up, and then walked some more. We must have walked over ten miles that day or at least it felt like it the next few days, where we could hardly walk anymore, so we discovered the metro line for the rest of our time there.

A scary half hour trip on the cable car.

At the end of this path down the Purple (more like green) Mountain, we were greeted by two big grumpy men that demanded we pay the steep entrance fee to the end of the park containing a nine storey Pagoda and some interesting buildings or walk back the way we came... we paid and got a bus back down to the city.

Ouch!

Shanghai in Pictures

Our Hotel for 3 nights called the JinJiang Inn.

Yunnan Road (recomended food street), where we saw lots of animal innards and strange fish all being prepared on the streets, plus a man pouring out a load of toads from a bag into a small tub. This didn't really stir my appetite, along with the smells too, until we turned a corner and found a restaurant that had all its food safely behind doors and indoors. What you don't know, won't harm you, came to mind.

Discarded chopsticks.

The Bund


Old Town

The location of the original Shanghai, the oldest part of of the city has deffinately been marked by the present, much like everywhere we've seen, roads ending abruptley, buildings half built, or half distroyed, out with the old in with new we might say, the Chinese say jiude buqu, xinde bulai meaning if the old doesn't go the new won't come.

We did seem to catch some glimpses of the 'real' Shanghai occassionally, but what that is we can't say, everything seemed to be a mash of styles, ages, classes, a confusion as what it wants to be or even what has been.

Shanghai

At the estuary of the Huangpu river, the city rightfully calls itself the gateway to China. It's a city with a million faces, sounds and smells, bustling, noisy, densely polluted; the backstreets of Shanghai are a near permanent construction site, a primordial soup that bore the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, and now the soil from which a new China grows.

Crumbling ramshackle buildings cluster beneath colossal space-age edifices, the roads are rough and the taxi drivers rougher, ploughing an unstoppable madcap furrow, regardless of man or beast, much like the pedestrians themselves.

Shanghai carries itself with a casual, almost slovenly swagger, self-assurance, nonchalance, a seething and aggressive existence. After the clinical theme park that is Japan, Shanghai is like a different planet.

The Su Zhou Hao

This is the Boat we were on for exactly 46.15 hours, Starting last Friday the 4th and arriving on the 6th, and I still have those sea legs now.

Bye Bye Japan! Morning of the 5th

On the boat entertainment

Canteen

Arriving in Shanghai

Last night in Japan

Worse for wear after an overnight bus from Tokyo to Osaka, we find ourselves in the peaceful, yet slightly surreal Nagai Youth Hostel, a gently curving corridor of dorms and guest rooms, peppered with baths and the usual suspects of facilities, at the back end of a gigantic stadium. At the moment of writing, Hayley is relaxing in an onsen whilst I am typing against the clock of a coin-operated computer, slower than a leaden tortoise with a hangover. Soon, we shall go for food in Osaka, the culinary capital of Japan.

Yum.

To Osaka - Leaving Japan

After a tearful and unexpected audience of well wishers wished us goodbye from Oda, we made ourselves at home in Brian and Kaoris lovely place, the hostess with the mostest was Mr Hughes, who fed and watered us with an American style breakfast the first morning and a continental style breakfast the next morning, after a drunken bout of Kareoke with all our lovely friends...


Thank you Brian! x

Wednesday night we had booked for a 12 hour, overnight journey to Osaka, the port we would be leaving from for our ferry to Shanghai. We arranged to have a last minute farewell with a few friends in the crazyness of Tokyo Station. We tearfully said goodbye to, Brian, Jula, Rosie and Kim & Kame, (Katsuhisa) just for the records Kim!

Kim and Kame

Jula

and Rosie