Looking into the heart of darkness

N 10 46.041 E 106 41.461 3m - Saigon - 13 December 2008

In Saigon. Waiting for another mission. It can drive a man mad. Yeah ok, maybe trying to book a cruise up the Mekong can do that too. Saigon is ok and all, big cities kind of feel the same after a while and traffic is maddening and I've seen most of the sights I felt I needed to see. I'm still confused about the US Embassy. We go past it a few times. I have in my head that iconic photograph, the fall of Saigon in 1975 and everybody trying to get to the helicopters, as well as the pictures of rocket damage during Tet 1968 attacks and I can't find that building. There were models of it in the city museum too, that concrete building with the concrete lattice work on the sides. There appears to be one like it next door to the embassy, maybe that's it. Being somewhere that History has happened, I like the connections it creates, but sometimes it is hard to figure out where they actually are.

But tours, our next stop is Cambodia and the Vietnam visa runs out in a few days. There are buses to Phnom Penh, but that seems a bit dull. For just a little bit more, there are 2 and 3 day tours that cruise up the Mekong, cross the border, then take the slow boat to Phnom Penh. Or so it seems. There are about a million travel agencies in Saigon and every hotel and restaurant has one too. They all have Mekong cruises, but with slightly different options (although I think there are only about 2 companies who actually give the tours, each of the others resells that with a similar writeup in their brochure) that don't really tell you much about what you will do and how. One sounds pretty cool, lots of hands on stuff, staying with families, hiking, biking, all that, but it is $140/person. Wow. The rest are like $40-60, seemingly dependent on how much you are actually on a boat.

You get them to describe the tour and you have to be very specific, ok, we go to the rice paper factory on a boat and around these islands then we get on a bus to go to the other town? Even then, they are not entirely correct (lying?), our boat that was definitely going all the way from the Cambodian border up the Mekong would take us all the way to Phnom Penh and drop us off at the waterfront. Somewhat true in reality, however a bus took dropped us off at the waterfront (or at a office a few blocks inland, with tuk tuk drivers surrounding the bus, clawing at the door to get at us as we stopped) from where it picked us up at Neak Loung, 50 km downstream. And other things on our itinerary seemed to have been dropped too. Maybe they hadn't paid off the tour company that month and were being shut out.

So, our first package tour on the trip, a bit scary that the next three days will be completely managed (except for the short periods of free time we will be alloted) but it will also be nice traveling with a group again. Some fellow travelers who we can commiserate with about things and have longer relationships with than just passing conversations in restaurants. But it wasn't much more expensive than traveling the distance on our own and it is three days we don't have to decide what to do.

First day then, up early, too early since the bus is late. It is a Sunday and traffic is horrible and we might have been the last stop to get picked up. Our first bit of excitement is a guy in the aisle across from us ended up on the wrong bus. A bit stupid but I can also see how it happens. When the bus pulls up, they point and say, there's your bus, over there, and point at three buses across the street. He was supposed to be on the one day city tour of Saigon, his dad booked the tour and he wasn't paying much attention. They make lots of phone calls, lots of discussion of extra money, trying to find him a way back to town. It also seems that he is supposed to sit on the bus from like 10 to 3 while we are off doing things. They relent on that at the last minute however. I guess he comes up with the extra $12 somehow.

Dong, our tour guide, is sort of chatty but doesn't give us much actual information about things. When we go through Districts 7 and 11 on the way out of Saigon, he mostly goes on about all the new apartment complexes going up and how they are just for rich people, $300k USD for a 1000 m2 apartment, blah blah. We finally get on boats at My Tho, transfer to a smaller boat to head down the canals to our first sight, a coconut candy factory. Surprisingly, there are opportunities to shop here, not just the candy which we see made but other things. Who would have thought. We have to linger here for a while, I think our group was being punished because we never really bought much of the merchandise on display, we are not leaving until at least X number of things are bought, I suppose. The factory is mildly interesting but I like the boat ride on the canals.

Lunch is another boat over to Tortoise Island. Somehow, during the day, the number of islands we visit is mysteriously shorter than on the brochure, as well as the sights. Maybe just going past them, silently, counts as a visit. They tease us with our one free included lunch of the trip. Dong parades around an amazing looking fish, huge, on a wooden rack, and says we can have that for only an extra 150k (about $8 USD) or we can have the crappy noodles and vegetables. We have the crappy noodles and are still hungry afterwards. We make a note to have backup food supplies after this. On the way back, we take tiny little 4 person canoes. Ours has to go super fast because a few of us got lost after lunch. Dong disappeared and we thought we went back the way we came. He tracks us down and we get our first demerit of the trip. They are rowed by two persons, one front and one on the back. They are pretty cool and sleek boats. Every boat that comes back the other way, empty except for the two rowers, every one of them waves and says hello and "please give money". Huh? Isn't it all inclusive? Must be their not so subtle way of generating extra tips at the end.

Out of the water, done with boats for the day. The group splits, the one day group heads back to Saigon and the 2 and 3 dayers get on a smaller, less pretty bus to go to Can Tho. Every time we got on a new bus after this, it got smaller and crappier. Our 2 hour ride to Can Tho was more like 3 hours and we are a bit grumpy when we get there. The hotel is a bit squalid, but I guess with constant inflow of tour groups, they don't have to care much.

N 10 01.757 E 105 47.215 39m - Can Tho - 14 December 2008

We are up in the morning (aack, 3 days in a row of 6 am wake up for a 6.30 breakfast and 7 am leaving), but Dong still knocks on everybody's door to make sure. Bus to the market and past the stalls on the way to the boat. Lots of pretty vegetable displays and a few not so pretty ones of fish, older ladies chopping up still moving fish. We crowd onto a boat and head out a short distance to the Cai Rang market, a floating market. It is pretty cool and seems like a good idea. Farmers bring their stuff on boats, sell it to stationary boats who then sell it on to boats coming out from the market to take to shore. Each of the boats generally sells just a few things with a bamboo pole on the back of their boat displaying what they are, pineapples or sweet potatoes, or whatever.

We head down a canal and stop at a place that makes rice paper, or rice noodles, or I'm not exactly sure. It is a sort of interesting technique, rice starch and tapioca mixed together to make a sort of paste which is spread in a circle and steamed and then put on racks to dry. Maybe they are cut up later into noodles or are rice paper and are shipped down to the people wrapping up coconut candy, or I don't know. I mostly wanted lunch by now.

But we make a mistake, getting back onto the boat, we get on first and are stuck in the back of the boat with the noisy engine for the next 2 hours. We head up to see the Phong Dien floating market, which we got there too late and is a bit boring. There are only like a dozen boats there, not much to see. A few boats come along side, grappling hooks, or nearly, trying to see drinks. We head up a tributary of the Han River and it is hot out by now (not a covered boat) and the engine is loud and it is a little miserable. The river back there is ok but a bit dull after a while.

Hurray, back to the main river and it can't be long until the bus and lunch. We are switched to a smaller bus, with no A/C on this one, or it doesn't actually work, and are ferried back to the hotel, lunch at the hotel. Must have been some kickbacks paid to the tour company there. Ok, the meal wasn't unreasonably priced and was sort of ok, but still.

We are supposed to have a few hours then on the bus to Chau Doc. We stop at a crocodile farm after 2 hours. It is sort of interesting but also rather depressing. It is sort of a factory farm for skins and meat. There are signs all over saying not to torment the crocodiles but a group of local youths gets great pleasure out of throwing rocks at them and just laugh when we scold them. They also balance on the walls and I'm slightly ashamed to say that I thought maybe it wouldn't be bad if they fell in. The crocodiles seemed pretty dopey but I imagine they could move pretty fast if they wanted to.

Another 2 hours then to Chau Doc and a stop at Sam Mountain. We climb up some steps to the Cave Pagoda. Dong the tour guide didn't seem so great most of the tour but here he actually gave us a pretty good lesson about Buddhism and the different versions in Vietnam and Cambodia and other places. The temple was only sort of interesting and the cave seemed a bit silly, snakes with light bulb eyes. There is some legend about snakes being converted and blah blah blah. The terrace was quite cool and probably the highlight of the day. It looked out over the rice paddies and Cambodia off into the distance. There were nice birds circling (ok, swifts were everywhere but there were a few that looked like birds of prey that we couldn't quite identify) but we were rushed a little bit to go see the silly cave.

The Chau Doc hotel was a little nicer. The city wasn't so exciting. We eat in some random restaurant we run across wandering around, pork ribs were nice, the sour fish soup was sort of good but a little strange, and fried morning glory is always nice.

N 10 42.556 E 105 07.163 11m - Chau Doc - 15 December 2008

Another early morning. These 7 am starts are really early. And there is a loud gecko (barking like sounds) in the room as well as annoying barking dogs outside the window. It will be nice to sleep in again someday. We are scheduled to visit a fish farm and a minority village today as well as take the boat to Cambodia. Apparently it is all on the way so there is no way of skipping them and just sleeping in late. Dong disappears back to Saigon and we are handed off to a new guide. I never get her name but she is nice and enthusiastic.

We make our way down to the water and load our bags and stuff into the boat. This one should take us to the border. On the way, we stop at a floating house. There are loads of these around, each of them has a netted in area underneath where they raise fish. Apparently these farms account for a huge percentage of the fish production in Vietnam. It is surprisingly interesting there. The front porch area has a hole in the middle and our tour guide takes great joy in throwing in handfuls of fish food and watching them go nuts, splashing and going crazy trying to get it. It is funny too, there is nothing to buy at this place, I wonder how they make their money back from the tour group?

The Cham minority village is just further up the river. They live on land but the shore is covered with racks of drying fish. Their houses are also stilt houses. The one we go to has markings on the front showing the water levels during the wet seasons. Generally it was 1/2 to 3/4 the way up the bottom floor but in 2000 and 2002 it went up over the 2nd floor and they must have had to live in a foot or two of water for a few months those years. They do weaving there and have plenty of things on display for purchase. Local kids hang around and all have plastic wrapped cakes they try to sell for a dollar or two. A sign is posted outside the house warning not to buy from them since they sell old expired goods and you might get colic (ok, just saying what the sign said). Not that I would be tempted, they looked pretty nasty. The constant children selling is pretty depressing all through Vietnam and Cambodia. If they are out selling things to tourists then they are not in school and will probably need to continue to sell to tourists when they have grown up.

Back on the boat, we settle down for a long ride. We have a few hours until the border. It is quite nice, just sitting and watching the land roll by. The fields are still quite flooded and parts of it look like gigantic lakes. The landscape will probably be drastically different in a few weeks. We see a few exciting birds, mostly terns and other things.

Then we arrive at the border station, a floating building on the side of the river. Cambodia is just slightly further down the river. We pay our visa fees (I have to pay an extra dollar, a fine for not having a photograph. It seems that the photograph isn't important, just not having one since they don't bother taking one of me) and have an hour or two to wait until those are sorted out and the boat arrives to meet us on the Cambodia side. The food is super expensive (ok, $3 for a bowl of cup of noodle soup) but where else can you go eat?

We load our backpacks back on and walk up the dirt path over into Cambodia and our tour guide shows us some fruit from the trees, sweet but a bit sour, and gives us some to suck on and try. She was pretty enthusiastic about lots of things. Then we are handed off to the boat crew and settle in for a few more hours on the boat heading to Phnom Penh. Again, this ride is also pretty pleasant and relaxing, like 4 hours slowly cruising up the river, looking at the new pointy style of temples on this side of the border, the small subtle changes in housing or fishing boats, and occasionally some nice birds.

Despite what the tour company told us, we don't arrive in Phnom Penh but are dropped off in Neak Puong (maybe better known as the village that was accidentally bombed during the secret bombings and that set off the action in the Killing Fields) and have 90 minutes more on a bus to get there before we have to face the gauntlet of tuk tuk drivers and touts. They were actually clawing at the bus doors when we arrived trying to get it open. We find a guest house, $8 for a double room, seems fine.

N 11 33 397 E 104 54.988 21m - Phnom Penh, Cambodia - 16 December 2008

Our first real package tour (well, maybe Mongolia was one of those too) of the trip. It had a lot of tacky "sights" and the tour company totally lied about a lot of what it would involve, but you know, for like $40, three days of entertainment and transportation to where we intended to go anyways, it seems like it was good. It wasn't exactly a cruise up the Mekong like the companies promised but it was a nice look at some of the Mekong and they way it works and the way people live and work on it in Vietnam.

Next up, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap and temples by the thousands and bleak bits about recent Cambodian history.

Too much monkey business

N 11 25.270 E 107 25.780 125m - Cat Tien, Vietnam - 9 November 2008

Ok, I'm really struggling to keep up with all of this. I went back and started writing about China, but haven't finished much yet. Then I also started about Vietnam but haven't gotten very far with that either. I might just make a list entry and a quick summary.

China we had come over from Mongolia to Beijing (Great Wall, Forbidden City, hutongs), to Pingyao (Raise the Red Lantern town and incredibly touristy, lots of touts with megaphones shouting at you, not my favorite city), to Luoyang (to see the Grottos - amazing cliffs filled with carved Buddhas), to Xi'an (terracotta warriors), to Chengdu (starting point for our bird tour of Sichuan which went to Moxi, Kangding, and Tagong), to Kunming, and finally to Yuanyang (super famous rice terraces), and out of China to the border at He Kou (the bus journey from hell, covered in vomit) and across to Lao Cai, Vietnam.

Then in Vietnam to Sapa (old French hill station) to Ta Phin (home stay with a Red Dao family), on to Hanoi (lots of scooters and yellow buildings and crazy bundles of power lines and mobile phone numbers spray painted everywhere), then to Hue (the old imperial center of Vietnam, the Citadel and scene of much fighting during the war), to Hoi An (the southern part of China Beach, yeah, great beach), then all the way to Saigon (ok, Ho Chi Minh City, even more scooters) and a bus journey to Cat Tien (which I'll try to write about).

We had a few choices for Cat Tien. There isn't much information in any guidebook about it, which seems surprising considering it is a fairly important national park in Vietnam. It has like 800% (ok, I can't remember the exact number) of all the animal and bird species in Vietnam in it. But all the books just give vague things about try taking this bus, tell them to let you off at this stop, and then try and find somebody on a motorbike to take you the rest of the way. Hmm, ok. Or you can go on an organized tour, treking, bird guides, transport there and back, blah blah blah. For only $150/person for two days. Hold on, let me catch my breath there. Vietnam is a little more expensive than the guidebooks are saying, but it still isn't crazy expensive like that. Maybe we will take our chances with the bus which costs a few dollars.

Well, it was an interesting bus ride, I'll say that. The guy running our hotel helped us with the arrangements. Well, actually helped, not just booked a tour like most hotels and charge a big commission. He got two buddies to take us on their motorcycles to the bus station (the north one, 5 km away from the city center), 50,000 each, which I guess is sort of reasonable. And the bus should get us to the town, and there should be motorcycles waiting, and he tried calling the park to see about accommodations, but nobody answered, so we will just take our chances.

We are up really early on Tuesday morning, we need to be packed, have breakfast done and be on the bikes by 7 am. They wake up a little early and make us eggs and baguettes for breaksfast and we finish up as the motorcycles arrive. We have a rather breathtaking, invigorating, or a ride that jolts us awake. Hanging on the back of a motorbike, he is weaving around traffic, tearing across bridges when he has a clear space in traffic, wheew, I'm happy to make it there intact. One of the guys comes in and helps us buy tickets, make sure we have the right ticket window then makes sure we find the bus we need to get on and waves us on our way, baby birds being chucked out of the nest.

Seems like an ok minibus, about 15 seats or so and only a few people there so far, a grandfather and granddaughter. The woman beside us has a huge bag of bread and two boxes full of clucking chicks which she puts under the seat and checks them every time we stop for something. After we get about 10 passengers, we set off. Ok, this seems promising. The ticket says Cat Tien, so it should get us at least close enough to find a ride to the park.

Ahh, minibuses, you always hope it won't happen but it always does. We slowly head north, I think we do. I don't know the way, but I assume we just didn't circle around in Saigon for 90 minutes looking for more passengers. Maybe we did. I have to hope that we did make some sort of forward progress during that time. We stop for about 20 minutes somewhere, the driver and the conductor disappear for a long time and eventually return with 3 new passengers in tow. We keep going, driving slowly, the conductor (don't know what else to call him, the guy who gets people in, collects money) keeps shouting out the window at anybody standing on the side of the road. Sometimes we stop and he jumps out and grabs people by the arm, getting them into the bus. I have to assume that they did want to go to Cat Tien, or in that general direction since even though they seem reluctant at times, they don't deck him, or try to run.

It starts getting crowded, we are up to like 20 passengers and all the seats are full and stools are put down in the little remaining floor space for more to sit. And he keeps shouting out the window and keeps finding more and more people. He yells at us to scoot over, hell no, there isn't any room already. Somehow a few more people crowd into our seat. At the peak, I counted, I think, 28 people in that van. People are standing, sitting on each other, just crazy.

It is then like an hour or so before we start getting nearer and a few people slowly start getting off. Somebody shouts, I assume it is 'stop now', and the door opens and they jump out and the van almost stops for this transaction. The lady gets off with her chickens and then there are only a few left on the van. One last lady gets off in Cat Tien village and it is just the two of us. We ask, here? No, further. Then we sight water and probably can't go any further than that.

We stop at a little roadside cafe (a shack) and get out. The driver and the conductor park and get out and lie down on hammocks. The cafe suggests it might be a few minutes before the ferry guy gets there and offers some food. The noodle soup is pretty cheap (instant cup of noodles with a few extra vegetables) so that will have to do, and a coconut to drink, and a few beers. (Vietnam beer has been nice, I should put together my list of different ones I've tried. I could give away the surprise though, LaRue has been the best.)

The ferry arrives, and so do three coach loads of school kids. They get the big ferry and we wait for the small one after that. We didn't take the bus we thought we were on, apparently this one goes right to the entrance. No motorbikes needed. We walk a few hundred meters and find the visitor center. They have room, a small bungalo (wooden house on stilts) for $20/night. Hmm, prices have gone up, but ok, about what we were paying in Saigon. It is a national park, hopefully the money goes for good things.

There is a small sort of village here. Walking down the main street, it looks like a small urban suburban town. There are little guest houses all along the road, set back with lawns in the front, lit by street lamps. There are two canteens where the food isn't great, one seems worse than the other. Sometimes the food was a little icky, sometimes it was fairly good. After a few meals of all meat things, we try to pick more from their limited vegetable selections which they mostly don't have in stock (I will miss morning glory when I leave Vietnam) leaving mostly fried cabbage or boiled cabbage.

The park is quite amazing. It is a variety of forests, from tropical rain forest to evergreen and semi-deciduous forests. Quite a lot of it was sprayed with defoliants during the war, so those sections are dominated by bamboo, which grows quickly. Sitting on the back porch of our shack, we look out over the river and chestnut headed bee-eaters sun themselves on the roof of the shack next door.

We set up two tours to see some birds. We meet a German couple and decide to share with them. They are reluctant at first, since they have set up the tour first with the guide, but since we have our own bird books and binoculars, they think maybe we won't be annoying and ruin it for them. Both days have a 6 am (!) start. We walk the first day and have a truck the second day, so we can go a little further in the park. The guide is this greying haired Vietnamese, speaks ok English, although the accent is confusing. He totally knows his birds, there are only a few warblers that he can't quite figure out but the rest are instant.

The first day, we walk a few miles, mostly up the main road, stopping every few feet to look at something in the trees on either side. Starting at 6 or so in the morning, it is pretty cool out and the birds seem pretty active then. We see tons of things, lots we have never seen before. By 10 or so, it starts getting much warmer and there isn't as much activity. We end up trying a jungle path about then, he want to show us pittas, tiny ground based birds, rare, hard to see, hopping on the ground. He sees one but none of the rest of us ever see one. Stupid pittas. I enjoyed the walk through the jungle though, and there were a few groups of gibbons moving in the trees overhead.

The second day, we have a truck and a driver and head down the same road. When he seems something, he bangs on the roof and we stop and look. We cover a lot more distance and have a nice walk on the far side of the park in a small farm on the river's edge. In between, we again go through the jungle looking for stupid pittas. This jungle is much denser and there are so many things, so many things hanging everywhere and sounds coming from all over. A really wild place. We don't see much on this walk (I see a small snake) except a camera crew who won't go past us, they want to take footage of us and make lots of noise for a while so that we are guaranteed to not see anything. Grrr. I didn't sign a wavier, but I suppose they don't care so much about things like that here.

In the afternoons, we nap and sit on the porch watching our backyard, or rent bikes and ride looking for hornbills and peafowl. We are a bit disappointed on those, we see neither but we see other things that are just as nice.

Maybe the funniest animal highlight was in the cafe. They have a patio that looks out over the river with lots of trees just beyond the patio that usually have a few monkeys in them, long tailed something or other, somebody said. Most of them sit in the bamboo eating stuff there and minding their own business, but for a few of them, the lure of scraps on tables and especially a tree with some ripe jack fruit (?) which they sneak up and try to rip pieces out of, alternating between being absorbed in that (upside down, face buried deep in the fruit) and looking guilty with an eye out for the waitress who wields a broom and a stick and chases them off. More entertaining to watch then the tv set on the other side of the cafe, mostly showing badly dubbed films (no sounds except for dialog narration) or loud sports.

So, a nice three days in the park. It is good to be away from crazy big cities and it is nice to just have settled somewhere for a few days. It would be nicer to stay a little longer, to see more and not have to move again for a while, but maybe we can plan to stay somewhere for a week or more maybe in Thailand. Excellent. So, back to Saigon and then quickly on to Cambodia, probably taking a three day cruise of the Mekong and then across to Phnom Penh. Some boring lists to round things out:

Cat Tien animals - 10 December 2008
yellow cheeked gibbons
long tailed something (monkey)
samber deer
barking deer
loads of geckos

11 December 2008
Tortoise
boar and three babies
small black and white snake

Cat Tien birds - 10 December 2008
chestnut headed bee-eater (probably my favorite)
Black drongo
Vinous-breasted starling
striped throated bulbul
black crested bulbul
ratchet tailed treepie
black naped oriole
black winged cuckoo shrike
common tailorbird
common flamebacked woodpecker
Swinhoe's minivet
Asian fairy bluebird
Asian brown flycatcher
common iora
red breasted parakeet
scarlet backed flowerpecker
spangled drongo
two barred warbler (as well as some unidentified warblers)
besra
ashy drongo
olive backed sunbird
vernal hanging parrot
crimson sunbird
ruby cheeked sunbird
needle tailed woodswallow
blue winged leafbird
copper throated sunbird
purple sunbird
white rumped shuma
green billed malkoha
bar winged flycatcher shrike
orange brested trogon
black and red broadbill
Malayan night heron
pale blue flycatcher
large tailed nightjar
oriental dwarf kingfisher

11 December 2008
Green imperial pigeon
black naped oriole
grey wagtail
red junglefowl
stork (oriental, black ?)
shikra
red headed drongo
Saimese fireback
Oriental pied hornbill
Indian roller
chestnut headed beeeater
white throated kingfisher
vinous breasted starling
golden fronted leafbird
common iora
little spiderhunter
puff throated babbler
white rumpted munia
red collared dove
chinese pond heron
common kingfisher
greater coucal
pied kingfisher
scaly breasted munia
either a black eagle or black kite - guide wasn't completely sure

Maybe white crested laughing thrush
Maybe crested myrna and hill myrna
(No bird guide for these, best guesses.)

12 December 2008
a stork (I think, need to find a Vietnam bird book, it was circling like a vulture which seems strange)
some sort of falcon (need to look up also)

I ride a G S scooter with my hair cut neat

N 21 02.238 E 105 50.913 13m - Hanoi - 30 November 2008

Ok, more recent pictures now too. Finished uploading this directory which starts with our near Tibet birding trip, and this which starts with the end of Kunming and our journey out of China and into Vietnam, and here which has the end of Sapa, Vietnam and down to Hanoi.

And I've sort of updated the route map (it does seem to be off, like everything is skewing too far south, I'll have to correct it later). Strange looking at that map, we seem to have covered the majority of the vast distances we will go on this trip. We have half of Vietnam left, Cambodia, Thailand (hopefully Thailand will have calmed down by the time we get there, we weren't planning on flying anywhere from there though), and probably a quick run through Malaysia to get to KL where we have our flight booked on January 12th to Australia. So, the flight will cover some distance but our future overland distances won't be quite so substantial.

Anyways, Hanoi then. We arrive really early in the morning, after a sleeper train (didn't sleep so well on this one and we are both a little crabby) from Lao Cai. There is the inevitable gauntlet of touts to greet the train. We can usually get it to work in our favor, pick one who is in the center of a lot of cheap hotels, let them pay for your taxi to take you to theirs, then look at it and then wander off to the other hotels in the area to comparison shop. Today it is 5.30 am, it is early, we are sleepy, no hotels will really be open to show us rooms, so we just get past them and to a taxi to the place we had a business card for from somebody who stayed there before.

It is still super early when we get there and the front door is open but the night shift guy is asleep on the couch and tells us there are no rooms to show us until 7.30 (meaning, I'm sleeping, come back when the day shift arrives), so we have a early morning to walk around the Old Quarter as it is just waking up. It is amazing how things transform. There are only a few people about, a few stoves cooking things on the sidewalks and doors half opened. Most everything is shuttered. When we come back an hour or so later, we don't recognize anything with all the shops open and stuff put out on the sidewalks.

Each street in the Old Quarter was controlled by a certain guild, metal pipes, fish, woven baskets, rope, packing tape. Ok, maybe not so much now since every other shop is some sort of travel agency, but there is a remarkable consistency to different blocks. The street around our hotel seems to be selling Christmas decorations. Weird, I forgot Christmas was that close, as well as weather that doesn't seem very wintery. There are nearby streets (like every shop on the street) that sell bathroom fittings, or the one I really liked was the entire street of packing tape.

I'm not sure I'll write so much about Hanoi. It was sort of an unfocused few days there, tired mostly and wasn't so motivated to see all that many things. There are a few things that will remain in my memory to represent Hanoi. Ok, the constant background noise of "hello, motorbike", "where are you from?", "cyclo?", blah blah blah. I flirt with different strategies, either waving back at them, saying hello back, saying I'm from America, or most of the time just head down, pretend I don't hear them and keep going. Although if you don't hear them, sometimes they will follow you and keep yelling, tapping you on the shoulder to make sure you hear. The "where are you from" question really gets tiresome, 100 times a day. Stopping to answer just hooks you into their sales pitch. Better to just keep walking.

At least America seems to have redeemed itself by finally nearly ending the embarrassing Bush years. Obama seems popular here. I suffer a bit of guilt or a strange mix of something a few times here. We find a shop that has old propaganda posters, hundreds of different ones from mostly the 60s and 70s and a few 80s. Stylistically, they are pretty beautiful. I really like the public posters I see all over town, most have some sort of Ho Chi Mihn picture leading his people into a prosperous and harmonious future, or whatever, but they just look amazing. Flipping through them, the "Grow more soybean" or "Towards better pig breeding" or other things like that, they are just amazing works of art. The ones from the war years, glorifying the 4000th American jet shot down, understandable giving the circumstances but also hard to stomach. Or a lot of anti Nixon ones, also understandable, but, ok, Nixon was pretty horrible. On the train then from Hanoi to Hue, which was just south of the North/South border and DMZ area, the area of the fiercest fighting during the war, towns have burned out tanks on display in the center square and the cyclo driver yesterday informs us that his father was killed 35 years ago, machine gunned. Gosh. So yeah, Vietnam.

Hanoi though, I think it will remain in my memory as yellowish fading buildings, vaguely French colonial, thousands of phone numbers stencil painted on every available wall surface (I assume they were phone sex numbers or something like that), and just crazy powerlines, massive coils and stray lines, a maze of them barely able to fit on the poles. And then the traffic, sadly not bicycles but thousands of beeping motorcycles and scooters with too many taxis and cars mixed in. Here crossing the street isn't so much like in Ulan Bator where you just have to walk and run or anything to not get run down, here you just start walking, steady pace, don't look, and they will go around you. It is maddening walking after a while, it is so noisy and you just feel so hyped up from all the noise and movement, but it does also kind of make an amazing symphony of movement.

A few days then of that, walking around the Old Quarter, lots of shops and street side food stands. I go see the Ho Chi Mihn mausoleum one of the days. I finally give into a motorcycle ride after walking everywhere else and ignoring them. Some say you should get the price first, another thing I read said that's silly, that length ride should just be 20000 (a little more than 1 USD) and just give it to them at the end. I try this getting there. He says he wants 100,000 which makes me laugh and I say is crazy (which it is). (I can't wait to get to Cambodia where they don't bargain.) He argues how far it is, eventually 50,000. I should have just stuck to 20 but I give him 30 and walk off and end it.

I didn't see Lenin when I was in Moscow or Mao in Beijing, I needed to see at least one frozen communist leader, so Uncle Ho has to be it. It was quite an experience, about 90% of the people there were Vietnamese. The line moved fast and the security was tight, not just explosives and all that but making sure you didn't have your hands behind your back or in your pockets or anything less respectful. You got about 20 seconds, walking around him, strangely lit, looking really white, in a fancy sort of glass case with carved wood. It is rather bizarre experience. Then walking around his old stilt house which maybe he lived in. (The guide book does point out that if he had been there all the time, it would have just been a matter of time before a B-52 would have dropped bombs on it.) The guides are giving tours to other people, he woke up early every morning, walked on stones to massage his feet, clapped his hands to get the fish in the pond to come over to feed them, etc. Maybe some of it is true. National myths, I guess. You know, George Washington chopped down a cherry tree too and then couldn't tell a lie.

The Ho Chi Mihn museum then is just incredibly frustrating. It seems like an interesting art exhibit, lots of funky sculpture, like giant tables and chairs with giant bowls of fruit on them. However, as a source of information or insight into his life or Vietnam or really anything about the various time periods, I get nothing out of it. One part of the exhibit, says it is the cave where he spent some of the 1950s planning the resistance to the French, but the cave is "represented as the human brain." Huh? And I couldn't even figure out how the thing looked anything like a brain. I don't know, maybe if I had known lots of stories about him before I got there, maybe some of it would have made more sense.

Maybe my favorite part of the stay there was seeing the water puppet show. It really was pretty mesmerizing. The story is that it started in rice paddies way back, entertainment back in the countryside. It takes place in a pool with a background and the puppeteers hide behind that and use long poles to move the figures around. They are short skits about fishing or planting fields or a college graduate returning to his village. Most of the stories were simple and it was mostly pretty just watching the puppets zipping around the water and dancing and swimming.

Next stop then, the sleeper train to Hue, down in central Vietnam. Better known as the DMZ area.

Our house, in the middle of the street

N 22 24.080 E 103 49.617 1448m - near Ta Phin village

Back in Sapa now, waiting for the minibus to pick us up to take us back to Lao Cai (previously discussed as the China-Vietnam border town, known as the Most Boring City In The World) to catch our train to Hanoi. We had a tiring yet rewarding two night homestay with a Red Dao family up in the mountains outside Sapa.

Sort of by accident, we met a woman from London in the market who has been studying sewing (one of the main crafts they sell in the market) from a local Red Dao woman. We talk and meet her, Ta May. (I don't have all the fancy accents and things for Vietnamese, they have about 35 letters, based on Latin characters with various accents over them or lines through them.) It is still a foreign language but slightly easier to read and recognize than Chinese. Although it is really easy to be totally lazy since so many people here know English.

After meeting, we decide that we will come and visit for a few days this week. It is about 15 km away which we intend to walk but C is feeling a bit rubbish (maybe some food wasn't cooked right or something) and we get a late start heading out. We were also invited to a wedding that day of one of the local families and we needed to be to Ta Phin by like 1:30 in order to make it to the wedding in time. Our fall back plan then is to have a motorbike take us there. We haven't taken a motorbike yet on our trip, so we add to our list of transport vehicles which so far have included ferry, train, bus, minibus, horse, camel, Russian jeep, 3 wheeled motorcycle taxi, bicycle, foot, rowboat, kayak, and maybe one or two things else I've forgotten. I regret not having a yak in there or some sort of buffalo, maybe later then.

When we arrive, we are immediately surrounded by lots of woman with things to sell us. No, we are here to meet somebody. Funny though, Red Dao costumes make it hard to tell the difference between different women. With hair gathered up and inside the pillow like hairdresses and pretty similar stitching on their clothes, I make a mental note to check out the shoes and look there first. Ok, Ta May, tan sandals, got it now. A quick bowl of noodle soup and we are off.

We follow lots of other women in their nicest clothes (the ones with extra silver bells and newly made needle point clothes) up into the hills, over muddy paths, rickety bridges, water powered rice threshing machines with occasionally motorcycles zipping by (much surer than they will be after the wedding and the amounts of rice wine consumed there). 30 minutes or so of walking brings us to a nice sized structure on the side of a hill with tables set up on front covered in bowls and the special red/pink chopsticks.

The only other foreigner there is an American (hometown Denver even), Dave, who has been in SE Asia for a few years now. Everybody else is mostly Red Dao and a few Black H’mong mixed in. We feel a little odd there, but are greeted warmly by a few different members of the family, the groom's brother and the groom goes by looking a bit nervous. 20 years old, not so young as some marriages we have heard about here. Red Dao have arranged marriages, not so much like Indian ones since the bride and groom don't have much of a say in them. They don't even really know who it will be. They meet once and then have a year to make the wedding clothes (or the bride makes them for both). Sewing and embroidery are rather important in their culture.

The wedding will go on for two days, we are there the afternoon of the first day which seems to mostly consist of eating (lots of fancy meat dishes) and loads of rice wine. Mostly the rice wine. Many get drunk rather quickly and are very jolly. There are loads of tables inside which are filled with probably much closer people to the wedding party and out back are tables for the family members. We are out front, which I assume is the foreigner's section, or for overflow guests. We never see the bride, apparently she stays in a room with a friend the entire time and only comes out the next day. Ok, I'm a bit confused by the exact procedures, I think we just attended the reception, although I don't think they were married yet. Still, there was lots of food and wine and everybody seemed pretty happy. On our walk back to town, a few motorbikes pass us, unsteadily, which seems a bit rash for the state of the road and the steep drops not far off the road. One couple goes off the road just in front of us and they have to struggle to get the front wheel back on the road.

We leave at like 5 pm, which is kind of early to leave but we have a long walk to get to the house before it gets dark. In hindsight, I'm kind of glad we took the motorbike to Ta Phin instead of walking because we walk up for at least an hour to get to the house. The really steep parts as we started getting up high were mostly in the dark so we don't quite know what everything looks like until the next day. When Ta May got married, she had to live with her in-laws for 8 years until they could afford to build their own house. The marriage almost didn't survive that period. Once they got out, it seems like the only major problem is rice wine. You know, men, the world over, all they want to do is go out drinking with their buddies, smoke, and do as little else as possible. The women work incredibly hard hustling, selling the market, carrying wicker baskets filled with wood and stones, and lots of other tasks to try and earn money for the family.

Their house is large, a bit like a barn with wooden plank sides and a tin sloped roof. It is mostly open plan, a few dividers for the back bedrooms and a open-ish loft area to store rice and other things. Everybody is gathered around the open fireplace in the kitchen area. By everybody, I mean the husband, three kids, 1 cat and 2 kittens, a dog (plus any other dog in the area that wanders in), occasional chickens, and I guess the pigs never really got to that part of the house, they would poke their head in the door on the other side and eat off the floor there. It does simplify eating a bit, if you spit something out on the floor (a half eaten chicken foot, for example, or a bit of mishandled rice or cabbage that slips out of your chopsticks), some sort of animal is going to quickly get to it and clean it up.

It has been a pretty full day, lots of walking and C is still feeling a bit rough, so we try to make it an early evening but life goes on pretty late (and starts pretty early) there. We have a dinner of tofu in tomatoes and rice and cabbage. I liked the cooking but I would have been happy if there had been some sort of other seasoning than MSG. And 3 meals a day of rice, it was really excellent rice, from their own rice fields, but it was a lot of rice.

We finish dinner and a large pot of water and some sort of branches and leaves are put on the fire to boil for herbal baths. The kids run to get some neighbors who also want to take baths and bring them back. There is a lot of activity by the time the water boils and we are able to take one. They also have a very clever water situation there. They have a elaborate system of bamboo pipes and hoses, bringing water from a local stream into a barrel in an alcove on the side of their house which then drains off down the hill again. She is slightly dismissive of the Black H’mong saying they don't build by water sources and they don't wash their food enough and water is too difficult for them. She also doesn't like that they just chop down trees instead of really searching for dead branches, thus deforesting the area much quicker. But in this alcove they have a big barrel which she fills with the hot water from the pot and we each take turns bathing in it. The barrel is just slightly small for my legs to really fit in but it is still lovely, hot water and a nice woody herb smell to the water. I think this all goes on late into the night, but we are tired and head off to bed a little bit after.

A cold night and at 4.30, alarms go off all over. William Tell Overture, quite loud, snoozed once and then off again. The kids have to be up early. They need to make some food and get things done before they hike off a few miles to school for a 7.30 start. I lie in bed and listen to the cacophony of noise and try to sleep a little bit more. Everybody is hungry and makes it known, loudly. Pigs, chickens, cats, all making a huge racket. Pigs run around the outside of house and squeal the entire way around and eventually they are let in the back door (the one by my bed) and some feed is thrown on the floor and they noisily snarf it up.

It quiets down, the kids go off to school, and I get up. Rice for breakfast, like all the meals. The tea is wonderful. There are a few tea bushes nearby and cuts off fresh branches, smokes it slighty over the fire and then puts those in the kettle to brew. It is really good green tea without any of the normal bitterness, so fresh too.

Gathering wood is one of the main daily necessities. The house has some electrics, mostly to run a few overhead lights and a telephone, but the cooking and heat is all from burning wood in the kitchen hearth. She straps on a wicker basket to her back (we offer to take one too, ha, we would never be able to carry it back) and we hike up behind the house and on the path that takes us to the valley beyond. Her husband and some of the neighbors are climbing a tree trying to pull out a large vine from it. A few others pull hard on it from the ground. When they finally get it out, is is probably 100 meters long, a few centimeters thick. It looks a lot like bamboo but she says it is something different. I guess it will find some use, a long strong rope.

We walk far, to the normal spot she likes to collect wood. She says she tries to only collect dead wood although not everybody does that. In the valley, you can hear the sound of chopping coming from all around as other families gather their wood supply. We look at birds as she goes off to find wood. Mostly bulbuls, can't get away from those it seems. A new sort of crested tit we haven't seen before though. It is funny having the luxury to walk around looking at birds while others have to work so hard just living.

We go back, she makes lunch (rice and tofu), the kids only go to half days at school so they will be back and then they will also go off to gather wood too. We nap a bit and then go off by ourselves for an afternoon walk in the same valley. When we get back, they have laid out plastic sheets on the floor and there are sheaths of rice. This is sticky rice. They store their crops for the year upstairs in the attic area, then process it as they need it. The daughter is working on some of it, taking a sheath and stepping on it, grinding it, then shaking out the grains onto the plastic. Eventually the husband starts on some too, using a piece of wood to pound the stalks and then shakes the loose grains out. The next morning, Ta May will go through the pile, put it on a circular woven mat, fling it in the air to sift off the chaff and be only left with a pile of rice. Then they have in a building a few houses away, a machine that grinds the husk off. Apparently it is quite expensive and the village as a whole owns that. But we will come back to the sticky rice later.

They are also preparing a big meal, maybe in our honor. She makes fried tofu, not the lazy way I've fried it, but turning each piece individually with chopsticks, and they have dried fish (sardines maybe) which they soak and peel the skin off each and then fry, and chop up a huge mountain of cabbage which seems like way too much food for us. However, it makes more sense when the neighbors come over with some cooked bowls of chicken parts, one spicy (the one with the chicken feet in it) and one not so spicy and a plastic water bottle which by now I know means rice wine.

We have a really nice meal with them. The husband, the neighbor husband and I have the rice wine. Well, I try to have just a little bit, they keep wanting to pour me more. It isn't quite as strong as the stuff at the wedding the day before but I think too much of it could do some damage. They keep putting bits of food in my bowl, pouring me more drinks, and it is just really friendly and nice. I hope I drank enough wine to be polite and join in and all. The chicken feet are strange. I tried a few but I'm not quite sure what you eat on them. It seems that you mostly crunch them for a bit and then spit out the rest on the floor. Anything that you spit on the floor will quickly be cleaned up by one of the many dogs or cats. At one point in the evening, the neighbor's baby has a pooh and that is also quickly finished off.

The men keep drinking (they didn't have rice with their dinner, it would dilulte the alcohol) and I move away from the table with everybody else. The bath pot comes back out again and everybody queues up for baths, we go back tomorrow so we would rather go to bed. The night is even colder (a clear night, the stars are beautiful) and I sleep in all my clothes and am still a bit cold.

The William Tell Overture again wakes us at 4.30 am. I sort of go back to sleep and then at 6 I sit in bed listening to the sounds of the morning until I finally get up 45 minutes later. The two older kids have already left for school, the youngest goes a little bit after that. His school is much closer. We have cabbage and rice for breakfast and the husband says goodbye and leaves. He is off to help neighbors find wood for their house. The late fall is house building season and everybody helps out. Ta May also needs to build a structure for their buffalo (if they are able to afford a new one, the 3 they had died last winter in the cold) at some point before the winter, so neighbors will help build that in return.

Che looks a some of her needlepoint items, really beautiful things, a small meter or so piece with months worth of work. She decides on one of them. We also think we should give her some money for all the food we have eaten and just to help out a bit. I kind of had in my mind about what we were paying for our really cheap hotel in Sapa. If we were going to spend that to stay somewhere anyways, I would really like it to go to somewhere good like that, maybe help a small amount to send the kids to school or buy food for the family. When we offer her that, she is a bit horrified, she just wanted us to have some of her rice and meet her family and all that. We get her to take half the amount and Che buys the other needlepoint because of that.

She cooks us some sticky rice before we leave and we take a plastic bottle of tea. She is meeting Hannah in the market and she also takes some for her. The sticky rice really is amazing, sort of sweet, slightly smoky, and kind of like brown rice. Two bits of rice are wrapped in a palm leaf as takeaway packages and then we leave to walk back to Sapa.

So, it is a long way there, lots of rice terraces, a few different villages, we walk about 2/3rds of the way there before coming to the main road and decide to get a motorbike the rest of the way into town. We are quite tired by the time we get back and ready to go to the hotel to see if we can take a shower and get our stuff arranged for our train to Hanoi that evening. We are sad to say goodbye. I wonder if I will be back this way again. What a special (but exhausting) few days we had. If anybody is in the Sapa area, I have contact details. I'm sure we can arrange something. A lot of the tour companies in the area do homestays, but I have to imagine they are a bit like the ones in Mongolia, more staying in a family's guest house, a more packaged experience, not really being in the middle of a family's life for a few days. It was probably the most intense sort of experience of our month's of travel so far. How will I go back to just looking at temples and things like that again.

Beacon sighted through the fog, or I can see clearly now the rain has gone

N 22 19.963 E 103 50.598 1504m - Sapa, Vietnam - 23 November 2008

Well, the fog has lifted, ok only slightly. I can see that there are trees over across the street and there is the hint of a valley and some terraces down over there. Wait, spoke too soon, looks like the fog has covered everything up again. Having been here for two days, I'm not quite sure what I've seen yet.

Yesterday was an interesting day, trying to come to terms with things, seeing things in a new way. Once we have gotten to Asia, Mongolia, China, and now Vietnam, things have changed a little bit. It is so much more obvious that I'm a tourist, the locals are much more colorful and strange. In Europe, you could mostly blend in except for not being able to speak the language or understand their language.

So, there is much more a feeling that I'm gawking at people, wow, look at those colorful costumes and things like that. And on the other side, I'm much more of the tourist who you can pester and sell you things. At times, it gets a bit overwhelming and feels like the Simpsons' persuasion method, "Can we go to Splash Mountain?", "Can we go to Splash Mountain?", "Can we go to Splash Mountain?". Then some of them engage you in conversation, where are you from, what's your name, etc. Sometimes it is sort of a proper conversation, you can vaguely get a sense of them, but in the back of my mind I'm always waiting, ok, when are they going to produce the pencil case or silver bracelet or whatever and see if we want to buy it. It feels like a strange dynamic, locals to gawk at and take pictures of and tourists to swarm around and extract as much money as possible.

Yesterday, we were walking around the market, looking for something to eat. There were a number of long wooden tables, different sorts of restaurants serviced each of the tables, all beckoning us to come over and have noodle soup or whatever else they were serving. A western woman sitting at one of the tables gestures that this one is good, so we sit with her and order what she is eating. Hannah seems good, from Camberwell in London, been here for a month, has met a lot of people here (the cook at the table teases her and keeps teaching her Vietnamese words and calls her honey) and has been learning to sew for the last three weeks with one woman from the market (one of those who keep showing us blankets and things on the street asking us to buy one).

Don't get me wrong, the blankets and all the rest of it are really pretty beautiful, very colorful and really cool patterns and each of them represents months of really detailed delicate work. She takes us to the stall in the market and introduces us to Lyta May (I think that's right, it was pronounced something more like Taam May) who is working on a really amazing piece of needlepoint, for her new outfit, which has taken her a long time and she expects it to take her like 6 months to finish it. We have a nice chat and get invited to stay at her house off in a nearby village, a few kilometers walk there and her husband can take us out walking in the woods for a day while we are there too.

We also see this exhibit in the tourist information center. It is a project that gave lots of local kids cameras and they took pictures and wrote some commentary for them about their lives, their villages, their families, and in a place like this, their interaction with tourists. It is a quite nice presentation. I liked the caption from one kid saying she liked taking pictures of their people because their clothes are very beautiful and she liked taking pictures of tourists because their clothes are not very colorful but that the people were beautiful. The families farm in the villages and have lots of vegetables. Some of them go into the big towns to try and sell things to tourists while the elderly take care of the children. If they then sell something, then they can buy some meat too.

It is funny having your perceptions shifted, at least have new information introduced into the equation, and having what has felt like an adversarial relationship humanized to some degree. I'm excited to stay with a family for a few days starting tomorrow. It feels like a much more interesting side of Vietnam than the normal temples/markets/etc.

I want magic bus - you can't have it, or I call that a bargain, the best I've ever had

N 22 19.963 E 103 50.598 1504m - Sapa, Vietnam - 22 November 2008

(Funny, as I write this, I am sitting in a sort of cafe in Sapa, Vietnam, the day is foggy out, it is early and people are starting to move around, but I can just see out of the corner of my eye two women, in brightly colored hill people sort of costumes just dying to catch my eye so they can get me to buy some embroidery or something like that. This has been going on for at least 10 minutes now.)

Our visas expire on the 21st and we need to be out of China by then. We go through all sorts of different plans for our last week in China to try and get to the border in time yet still see some things. Our bird trip in Sichuan was sort of longer than originally planned, but that's fine, it was great and worth the time, probably the best part of the whole China trip.

But Kunming is the next stop after Chengdu and we don't have a lot of plans for it, hopefully try to get to Dali or somewhere nice. Kunming is more or less another big Chinese city and is mostly nice for just a bit of rest and recovery after lots of travel through Sichuan. There doesn't seem to be time for Dali so we go to Yuanyang instead.

Now to get out of Yuanyang, there is a 7 am bus to Hekou and it is about 150 km to there. Not sure how long it will take. The border closes at 5 pm and we need to be out today. Once we are across, then we can either stay in Lao Cai (hopefully not, apparently it is the Most Boring Town In The World) or try to get to Sapa. Minibuses are supposed to only run until early afternoon and might not be running when we finally make it across. But we are optimistic, it is only 150 km, how long could that take? We have water and some biscuits and nuts and should be ok for food and water.

Well, the 720 bus isn't exactly a 720 bus. It is strange, every other bus we have taken in China, it is scheduled for like 1130 and it either completely full or everybody is on the bus by 11 and it leaves at 1105, so we are taking no chances. We would have missed our bus to Yuanyang from our connection in Guiju if somebody hadn't come to find us to let us know it was leaving. (Of course in Russia, the bus would have just left and it would have taken us ages to find out and the next bus would have been tomorrow.) So, we are taking no chances and we show up at 645.

Funny then, the bus station (luckily it is just about 10 meters from our hotel) is almost completely deserted, except for one woman in the ticket booth (or maybe it was more the parking lot, the bus station was both) warming herself over a small fire. We say we are going to Hekou and she laughs because we are so early. Ok, she also laughs because we mispronounce it badly, which happens a lot, no matter how many times we hear something pronounced, we just can't quite get it.

Another hour then in the dawn and cold people start showing up and loading onto the bus. We are happy we are the first stop because buses fill fast and getting on later might not go so well with a full bus. We leave at like 8, or maybe it was later than that and start heading down the hills. The fog that surrounded Yuanyang for most of the time we were there seems to have lifted and it is quite pretty. We stop at the main bus station for the town, already an hour late there, see some really tempting looking sleeper buses and then head on.

We have another hour going down to get to the new town. Yuanyang is split into new town and old town. The scenery is still nice, starting to get more tropical, the beginning of bananas and all that. In new town we drop off a few passengers and pick up some new ones. One family looks like they are moving house, huge bags and a room fan. (Take note of this family, they will be important later.) Twice in China, once in Beijing and then again in Kunming, we posted a whole lot of things out of our bags back to Australia and the decrease in weight has been lovely. This last time was finally the end of the camping things, our sleeping bags and a few other things like that. Up until China, I had been a bit embarrassed by how much stuff we were carrying, but on all the buses, we generally have had the least amount of stuff, their loads consisted of gigantic builder bags which took two people to carry.

Outside of new town, we stop again for quite a while. There is a convergence of our bus and a few minibuses and a whole lot of passengers and baggage. We must spend at least 30 minutes here as the driver smokes and people argue about who will get on the bus and what bags they can take, or whether they will take a minibus. The Chinese woman in front of us yells let's go in Chinese. We wait longer and finally there is a bit of movement. A few more passengers load on with their seed bags and mud covered spades and hoes.

Then this next part of the trip is quite a blur for me. We go for hours on really bad roads. It is the smokiest bus we have been on in China, most everybody smokes, not just a chain smoking driver. At least we can open the window to try and get some of the smoke out. (Also note this point for later in the story.)

The most frustrating part of the trip, well, ok I have to put C's sweater against the window frame (another point to note for later) and lean on it instead of banging my arm in the same place for hours as we go over bumpy bad roads. The most frustrating part though is that we spend almost this entire time driving under a really plush looking expressway. I see a sign, Hekou is still 87 km away, according to the sign on the expressway. We slowly come to 83 km and I stop looking after that.

In a way, this expressway sort of symbolizes a lot that I found in China. There is this luxurious road, raised up on pillars for miles and miles across the land, bulldozed across the landscape. It looks nice and brand new but also it appears to be cracking and falling apart already. We don't use it, I assume it isn't finished yet or is too expensive for normal people (or people who ride on buses instead of taking their own car). The road isn't used by locals who have had their road destroyed by the heavy traffic using it (and probably by the traffic required to create a huge road like that) and live underneath the pillars out of sight of those on the expressway.

We continue under the expressway for hours, along side the Red River on one side and miles and miles of banana trees on the other side. There also appear to be pineapples and huge plantations of some sort of sap tree, not maple as far as I could tell, or maple that I know, with collection cups on each of them. We stop a one town and the child behind me leans out the window and throws up, into my window. I get some on me but C's sweater gets the worst of it. She is completely pissed off, I'm mostly just a bit shocked. She finds a plastic bag to wrap it in, we clean up the best we can and she scowls at the kid for much of the rest of the journey.

Ok, it is just too long and too much to write about the rest of the bumps and the rest of that. Hekou, finally at like 4 pm, after about 8 hours of traveling. I guess that does sort of average about 20 km/hour. We rush through Hekou, do we cross first to get it all done and out in time or find something to eat?

Our last Chinese meal is some fast food place, they put bits of different dishes on a place, I guess an all you can eat thing. It is all a bit cold but isn't horrible. I'm pretty tired and out of it by now, so it doesn't really matter much. I will miss Chinese food though, what a great run of great food we had there.

The road leading up to the border is quite fantastic. There are hundreds of different sort of handcarts, big wagons, fully packed bicycles, and anything else that could carry anything by hand filled with boxes and vegetables and all sorts of goods, all lined up to cross over into Vietnam.

We pass through customs and exit the country, not such an ordeal as I might have expected. They x-ray our bags and then ask to see what books we have. The rumor is that they are confiscating Lonely Planet China guides, not liking some of the content, mostly at the Hekou border crossing. No idea why they would do it leaving the country, maybe just because they can. Searching for other Hekou border crossings seems to bring up lots of tales of woe. But we flummoxed them, I pull out a Birds of China book as well as two Chinese dictionaries (we love China, you know) and we had also posted our China guide from Kunming and switched over to a generic SE Asia guide. So we didn't have anything for them to take. Ha.

We cross the bridge to Vietnam and we are out. No visa worries now for about a month when our Vietnam one will run out, but we should be out of here way before that.

Outside of the border, we are immediately hit upon by the touts. Motorcycle taxis, buses, loads of crap to buy. We know the minibus to Sapa should cost about 30,000 dong (about $2) per person but don't quite know where the bus station is or where to catch the bus. We get loads of offers to get us to the bus station and then to Sapa starting at like 100,000. The guide says the station is like 3 km away, which probably isn't so bad to walk but no idea what way it is. We finally get one guy down to 75k (yeah, totally overcharged us but we are tired) for a ride to the station and then to Sapa on a minibus. A security guard watches the whole transaction is amused by the foreigners getting ripped off. Ok, it is only about $1, but the principal of the thing really annoys me.

I think he goes off to find the minibus to bring it to us, which makes it a little less painful, instead of just flagging down a passing one with Sapa clearly marked on the front of it. At least I hope so. We have a bit of a commotion paying him, making sure that he actually pays the minibus instead of just taking the money and running. He does run because he gave me 2500 for change instead of 25,000. Ok, I can handle bargaining badly and getting ripped off that way but getting short changed, that sucks. We get the minibus to circle around looking for him and C goes and yells at him to get the correct change. Yes, that's pretty cool. He laughs and gives us the correct change then and thinks we will do ok in Vietnam.

The minibus then goes to the bus station. Ok, figures. Then cruises around town to look for more passengers, another 30 minutes of that, picking up a few locals and finally head off towards Sapa. Sapa is straight out of town and up a mountain. We climb and climb and head back into the fog. The roads seem a little bit more civilized than in China and get excited to see a couple riding up the hill with my panniers and a nice looking touring bike. Sigh, if we could have done that. China, I think I would have been scared riding on those roads, but here seems like it would be doable.

In Sapa then, hostel touts appear out of the fog and mob around us. We try to get a different spirit about them, instead of getting down about it, see if it can be nice. A group of like five of us head over a few blocks towards the hotel section of town and we tour three different rooms to see what they have, get the different option packages and make a choice. They all seem like nice rooms, range from $8-10, then you can have a heater for another $1-3, or a dvd player or better windows, or internet in the hotel, etc, etc. Friendly Hotel seems fine, the host is helpful, let's just stay there. We also look at the Lonely Planet recommended ones for fun, but they are all full. I guess it is a bit lazy, just picking the ones in there, but it must be like gold when a hotel gets a mention in there.

The town is foggy and we can't see anything. We walk around town looking for dinner and have a a look at a lot of menus, most of them are pretty expensive (ok on a relative Vietnam scale). We wrongly pick the less expensive one and the meal is pretty boring and bland and not great. But we are so tired by then it doesn't really matter. It was something and now we can go back and go to sleep. In bed by 9.30, does it get any better than that? Welcome to Vietnam. I better get my bargaining skills honed quite quickly or I will be in trouble.

I'm livin' on Chinese rocks

N 23-something, E 102-something - 20 November 2008 - Yuanyang

Well, an abbreviated post, I'm in an Internet cafe in Yuanyang (no internet at the hotel or room) and don't have my diary and notes with me. We just stuffed ourselves with our last Chinese dinner and have an early morning tomorrow, catching a 7 am bus to Hekou to make sure we are out of China by tomorrow when our visas expire. It will be sad leaving, especially the food. Up to now, Mongolia had been my favorite place we had been but China has been just really amazing, great food everywhere, cool things to see, really nice people, and a rather challenging but compelling language.

Yeah, maybe I'll write up our bird trip eventually as well as the rest of the month in China that I haven't written about yet. There is so much yet to write about. But then, Sid already wrote about some of our bird trip and Tibetan adventures here, and there are lots of good pictures there and all that, so I can let that stand for a bit.

Today we spent the day in the back of a small motorbike taxi going around seeing rice terraces. Ok, it is better than it sounds, except for the motorbike taxi. A lot of the way was on really bumpy roads and it took a few hours to go there and back and we were here for one day when the fog decided to roll in and cover the whole region. BaDa was clear and was really amazing, DuoYiShu was completely covered in fog and we couldn't see a thing. In MengPing, we had barely stopped before hawkers were shoving stuff into our faces (and into the vehicle), look postcards, needlepoint stuff, blah blah. My only regret there is that I didn't take a picture of them, it was just so funny, about six of them all yelling at us, pushing their stuff at us.

Well, I'm sure there will be more in Vietnam to take pictures of. This has been the first place in a while with really aggressive hawkers (actually just that one stop today) everywhere else in Yunnan has been pretty mellow. We are a little more off the tourist route now and it isn't really high season now. Not like being on the Great Wall and being followed for miles by persistant hawkers, "waterbeercoke" while pushing t-shirts and postcards in your face. After Beijing and Pingyao, it was mostly just the scrum at train stations and bus stations and if you happened to go down a especially touristly street, followed by lots of "hello, look here" and the standard followup question, "where are you from", I guess to engage you in a conversation before the sales pitch.

But rice terraces, they really are pretty amazing, entire hillsides, looking like an OS map, contour lines and shining rice paddies with different colors of water, from black to tan to silver. Even the fog was nice, when it wasn't too much to obscure everything. It added a nice atmosphere and highlight. We might have flumoxed the driver a bit, a little distracted sometimes from the terraces by something flying overhead. Sorry Sid, I'm not sure we learned our lessons very well, we can't identify them immediately like you. Some sort of buzzards, maybe, or there was that one with the distincive wing shape, curved like a bow, which I can't remember now of what it is distinctive. Or the one with the clearly spread fingers on the wingtips. The shame. But they looked cool circling over the terraces and were nice to watch with binoculars as we tried to ignore the hawkers pushing stuff in front of us.

Anyways, as I always seem to say, more later. Too much stuff to see, too much already seen and not enough time to write.

Just for you, here's a love song

N 30 41.010 E 104 05.103 - 16 November 2008 - Chengdu

Ok, more directories of photographs, this should get us through the current part of China now. Sorry, just bought a new camera last week so I took a whole lot of pictures. And lots of them were of birds, which are hard to get before they fly away and you end up with empty tree pictures. Oh well, sorting later when I get to Australia.

Anyways, I know I haven't written about Beijing, Pingyao, Luoyang, Xi'an, or even Chengdu yet, really not a lot of time to write and I've spent a lot of time trying to get better at Chinese. I'll try to get back to those and write about them at some point. But this last week was quite a nice trip through Sichuan and over nearly in to Tibet (umm, ok the Xizang Autonomous Region) up over the Tibetan Plateau looking at birds and seeing the countryside.

C had been determined to find some sort of birding trip, especially since we missed our opportunity when we were in Sweden (stupid English test) and spent (much to my annoyance) a lot of time searching for different sorts of bird trips in China and stumbled upon Sid and Meggie who said they could lead us around and gave us a quote that seemed pretty reasonable for 5 days, straining our already way over budget journey but then again so much else has. We jettisoned the idea of the Yangtze river cruise (already rode a lot of ferries and saw lots of fjords in Norway and didn't fancy the idea of sharing crowded cabins on a ship with lots of smoking Chinese tourists) so that freed up some money we had thought we would spend there. And we are in this amazing place in China, when else would we get to do something like this. Happily it lived up to our expectations and was a great five days.

Chengdu is yet another huge Chinese city. We half heartedly went through some of the temples but mostly just kind of chilled out and also spent a lot of time shopping for a camera (C's camera died and mine isn't so great anymore). China isn't a great place to buy electronics and it took a lot of looking and bargaining to get it down to about what you would expect to pay in London. But the camera is nice and I loved having it on the trip.

On Tuesday, we were up and ready for our 8 am start. Sid and Meggie were caught in traffic and were a little late. Traffic has been rather mad all over China as more and more people ditch their cycles for cars or even just electric scooters. It was a bit sad to be here and not see the masses of bikes that had always heard about here. China has become just another crowded motorized city and we spent a whole lot of time stuck in traffic or really lost. Road building is booming here and so much is torn up or old signs haven't been taken down and no new signs put up that reflect the changes. Also, the roads seem to be falling apart so quickly too, roads that have been barely used. I suppose either shoddy cheap materials or just overly used by lots of traffic and lots of heavy trucks.

Our plan is to start out slow, get us out sort of into the country, see some birds and get us into the rhythm of what to look for and just how to do it and then plan the rest of the trip after that. Since we are in Chengdu, everybody who comes here goes to see the pandas. But it is also a park and Sid thought there would be some good birds for us to see there and we could see the pandas as well.

Sichaun suffered some pretty devastating earthquakes a few months ago and there is evidence of it all over still. The panda reserve was almost in the very middle of it all and suffered a lot of damage and much has been moved around since then. It seems like this region has suffered quite a bit since then, especially since a lot of the tourist trade dried up pretty quickly. But yeah, there were still pandas there, the beloved national symbol of China and featured on countless products all over the region, even cigarettes.

The birding was pretty cool. You know, you can just go random places, they don't even need to be pretty and there are birds around to see. A lot of our trip was just stopping by the side of the road and wandering off a few meters and there were lots of things. We would even wander around people's backyards, in their farmland, which was a really interesting way to see China. C was totally into the birds. I liked it but don't have the same capacity for watching them, but the other things to see certainly kept my attention.

I have lists of birds from the trip, but I'm not quite sure how to present them in anything but a boring list that would mean nothing to anybody who hadn't been there or who isn't just super tweaky about birds. In the panda reserve, we see Mandarin ducks, wild ones who haven't had their wings clipped and Sid gets really excited about that. We tromp around the back areas of the reserve seeing kingfishers and loads of small little things that somehow Sid could instantly recognize even before I could find them in my binoculars.

The other interesting thing about the back areas was the laborers. China might try to project an image of being very technologically advanced, cutting edge and all that, but really, almost all the work in China is done by that guy with a shovel and a wicker basket on his back. The amount of manual labor we saw was just overwhelming, I guess since it is cheaper to hire a worker than any other way of getting work done. Labor costs are almost negligible.

The pandas, yeah, they were pretty cool. I actually think I like the red pandas better. It was a bit sad seeing endless tourists (mostly Chinese) taking flash pictures of them and all that. Seems like a sad life for a panda, but they seemed to just move slowly and seemed happy having bunches of bamboo chucked at them for their meals.

We leave the park and head over to a nearby lake with a boardwalk around it and have a picnic and plan our route for the rest of the trip. Going to Moxi tonight, Kangding the next day, then over to Tagong and then work our way back to Chengdu over the next two days. A lot of this area is just slowly opening up again after the recent events in Tibet, it has all been closed to foreigners and only in the past week or two are the roadblocks starting to come down. We still see hundreds of police cars and army vehicles (funny, they are mostly white Land Cruisers) over the five days, especially as we get closer.

Much of the rest of the day was spent getting out of Chengdu through the horrible traffic jams and then started on the expressway climbing up into the mountains and stopping for the night in Moxi.

So much more to write about, but no time today to finish. Didn't even get to the subject, the mountain that had been commercialized with "The Love Song" written all across it which annoyed Sid to no end. And Tibet...

But another day.

I am just a new boy, a stranger in this town

N 39 53.420 E 116 22.349 - 25 October - Beijing

A lot more pictures now, here and here and other directories in that same area. This should finish up Mongolia and gets us into China pictures.

Arrival in Beijing after a long train journey. Last night was a late night. The border crossing was tiring, they kept waking us up for different parts of it. Even then if you could sleep, the boogie changing (putting different sized wheels on the train) was loud and there were lots of jolts and bumps. One of them was so strong that it nearly knocked me off my feet when I was standing in the corridor watching and had knocked all sorts of things off the table in the compartment.

Our cabin mates were late sleepers which is a bit annoying, I had to creep up the window shade early in the morning and could only peer out a small crack at first and then a little more as we went along. I watched the sunrise and caught my first glimpse of China.

Then land is vaguely the same as the last part through Mongolia but the buildings have really changed a lot. No more gers and no more wandering flocks of animals. There is a lot of agriculture, mostly corn, and it seems to be harvest time since all that is left in the fields are dry stalks and there are yellow ears of corn stacked up, hanging up, spread out on the sides of roads, drying all over the place. There are a lot of adobe looking squat houses and when we go through towns, they are quite spread out and have lots whitish drab looking buildings.

At like 9 am, we start going past sections of the Great Wall. It is nice our cabin mates are sleeping but you really have to see this, so I open the shade the whole way and wake them up, look, the Great Wall. You know, the Great Wall is one of those huge attractions, so totally hyped, talked about, millions of photographs, but really, it deserves it. Even from a distance, the section we can see, a few miles of wall winding through the mountains and up and over, damn, that is really cool.

It disappears over a mountain range then after a while and we head on, into more hilly regions, through tunnels and past lots of terraced hill sides. The group of us share some beer and peanuts and practice counting in Chinese, especially the various hand signs for different numbers.

Then Beijing, we head through more industrial areas, more built up areas and eventually arrive at the station. I was sort of expecting a rather bewildering experience. Billboards, words, are all over the place. It is strange being somewhere that the words are just completely different. In the rest of the places, Russia included, they were all in different languages but at least you would work out what they say. Here, it feels like what it would be like to not be able to read at all, that letters and words are just strange squiggles.

Fortunately for us, the Olympics rolled in here a few months before and I don't know what Beijing was like a year or two ago, but I suspect it wasn't so English-izied. Most useful signs are subtitled, or at the least they are also in Pinyin. So at least instead of looking for a symbol that looks like a tv set with radiation coming off the bottom of it, you can just look for Chong Jie Tang, or whatever, to just throw some random words out there.

The thing that doesn't quite come across though from looking at maps and trying to work out how to get somewhere before you try it is just how big it all is. Roads are enormous and wide, public squares go on for miles, and walking what looks like a few blocks on the map takes a long time.

We take the subway a few stops, to the closest stop to the hostel, walk a really long way, get a bit lost since we are staying in a hutong and those are not on normal streets, and finally make it there quite tired. Hutongs seem to be unique to Beijing, the sort of neighborhoods that a large percentage of people live in in the city. They are small little streets off the main streets, like little worlds hidden back out of view from the main streets. The fronts have shops and restaurants, people are out front playing cards or games with big round pieces, pushing around carts of food, bicycles and mopeds are racing down the streets weaving around everything, and behind it all, in courtyards are lots of residences. I think a lot of Beijing Bicycle as we walk around these areas over the next few days.

But our hostel is right in the center of one of the hutongs (I think it means 'similar whiskers' but I'm not completely sure, it might have some other meaning) and we spend lots of time wandering around them. We pick a restaurant at random, have a very nice waiter who speaks English fairly well, who tries to correct our really bad Chinese and help us out a bit, and order far too much food (although we eat it all) and pay not so very much for it. The food prices are fairly cheap but I suspect that if we spoke Chinese it would be even cheaper. The prices printed on the Chinese menus and the ones on the translated picture ones are different, we pay the tourist prices.

So, first day in China, it seems exciting, people have been really friendly and we are tired. There will be a lot to do and see.

Where the streets have no name

N 47 42.914 E 106 57.242 - 20 October - Zuun Mod

I didn't sleep much this night. If you see somebody pour a pan of coal into a stove in a ger, run. Run fast. The temperature will slowly build to about the surface of the sun and stay that temperature for most of the night. I had the misfortune of being closest to the stove. I melted until about 3 am when the coal finally started burning down. That's even worse too, covered in sweat all night and then it starts getting cold. Still, the stay in this ger was one of my favorites.

We drive to Zuun Mod, an hour or so away and pull up behind some buildings where there are a few horses tied up. Today we were meant to ride horses for a few hours, go hiking for a bit, and then stay with the tour organizer's aunt in her ger. I am a bit annoyed to find out that my horse isn't there, it is somewhere else. While everybody else mounts up and rides off, I get back in the car, we drive around town, unpack the bags into a ger, and drive up towards the mountains, passing the others riding across a field, and then get out and wait at the border of the park. So much for a whole lot of riding. They are still like 30 minutes away and this sucks. Finally they get me on a horse and a kid leads me down to meet them. I also get scolded a few times for holding onto the saddle. But I guess everybody else gets scolded too for doing the same thing. My horse is rather unruly and I'm decidedly grumpy from the whole let's go find you a horse adventure.

Still, I guess the ride out through town and across that big field wasn't so great, but that's not the point. When we get into the park, we have a nice ride through some woods, an hour or so and then stop and the horseman tells we can go off hiking, meet back in few hours. I was trying to zoom through these days so I can get to writing about China, wasn't I? So, another ruined monastery, Manashir Khid destroyed in the 1930s along with most of the rest of them by the Stalinists. So, more ruined mud brick buildings, but in a quite cool setting, the top of a valley up against a large rocky hill. We eat lunch and spend time hiking up the rocks, great views of the valley from the top, a bit of snow in the woods behind.

We hike back and pick up the horses again and make the trek back to town. We get in a bit of fast riding on the flat field outside of town. It wasn't a mammouth horse ride but it was enough for me. The hiking was my favorite part of it today and besides my horse really didn't seem to like me much. The ger is in the middle of town, so it is our first urban ger. In one of the fenced off bits of town. And actually the streets do have names there, but they are usually something more like 8B or 3.

The next morning, we get dropped off again at the same place, outside the park and we hike in and up over some of the hills. We don't hike all that far or very fast, the woods just on the edge of the park are filled with some cool birds, loads of nuthatches, woodpeckers and even a goldcrest.

Ok, I started this entry weeks ago, maybe I'll just quickly summarize it and publish it as is. Gotta get to writing about China already.

We had a good day hiking, not too strenuous, just sort of wandering around up the hills, through some woods, seeing some interesting birds and enjoying walking through patches of snow.

We have one last night in a ger, the last of the trip and it is a short drive back to UB the next day. A few last days in UB, trying to see a few of the sights, trying not to get run down by traffic and shopping at the Black Market (a huge outdoor market filled with lots of cheap stuff). Next up is the long train journey to Beijing and China.

There are 9 million bicycles in Beijing

Well, it has been ages since I've written much. I had more to write about Mongolia, but I better move on now. I've been in China for almost two weeks and there is so much there to write about too. China has been really amazing, maybe my favorite place I've been on this trip. There is just so much to write about, I'm not quite sure where to start.

N 43 39.269 E 111 58.916 - 23 October 2008, somewhere over the Chinese border.

We caught the train early in the morning from Ulan Batar and rode most of the day across Mongolia towards the border. It was beautiful, the entire area was covered with a light snow. I was so used to seeing Mongolia all brown and dusty, the white really suited it. The landscape was slightly hilly and our train wound up and down a bit and gradually left the snowy parts and onto flatter browner areas again.

We had new people in our compartment, an English couple who were traveling until probably April. Our entire carriage was mostly western travelers, we were on the tourist train. Our other friends, who we had traveled through Mongolia and the end of Siberia were a few compartments down. When our compartment-mates produced some ayrag, the fermented mares milk we had been hearing about for a few weeks but never quite saw anywhere, we sampled some and passed it on to everybody else so they could experience that before they left Mongolia. I can't quite decide if it was vile or if it wasn't so bad. We had tried to find it all across Mongolia, but it seems you can only really buy it from kids on the street selling it in old reused plastic bottles. It was a funny last taste to leave in your mouth has Mongolia passed by for the last time.

We spent most of the rest of the journey all practicing Chinese, trying to be ready. Basic things like counting and hello and the rest of that. What a really difficult language. The characters are difficult enough, thousands of them (I believe that 8000 is the common amount the average person uses) which make up compound words but then the sounds are really difficult too. The sound 'ma' can be pronounced 5 different ways, with a rising inflection, downward then rising, high inflection, etc. Each of the inflections is a completely different word. In addition, each of the sounds (which maps to a character) usually has a bunch of different meanings based on the context.

Then the words themselves are generally composed of two characters, put together to create some sort of meaning. Bei-jing means north capital, lunch is composed of noon-rice, China is middle-country, America is beautiful-country, etc. Wow. At least the grammar is totally easy though. Translations into English you see commonly make more sense now, considering how sentences are usually composed in Chinese characters. Although I have been quite amused by them. I might have to compose a list of my favorites, I've taken loads of pictures of various ones.

I have to say, that I have been completely fascinated by Chinese though, I might try to learn it over the next few years. I would love to come back to China some day and it seems like it would be even better with a better command of the language, feel like it would make it more accessable. And you would be able to tell better when people are calling you a foreign devil or some such thing like that. Yeah, I'll still standout totally as a tourist, but even a little bit of Chinese seems to go a long way in conversations.

The border crossing was quite interesting. It wasn't quite as intense in terms of official stuff, searches and passports and stamping things as coming out of Russia. It was night by the time it started and was very late when it all finally finished. The customs man was quite nice and funny, knocking on the doors, please wake up, I have your passports.

The most time consuming part of it was the boogie shed. Mongolia and China have different sized train tracks, so before we cross over, they need to change the wheels on our train. It takes like an hour or so. They move the carriages into a special shed, like 4 parallel tracks with lots of lifting equipment, separate each of the carriages, bash them around back and forth for a while pulling them apart (we were still in the carriages, some people trying to sleep) and then they pick them up and slide different wheels underneath and put us back down again. It was fun to watch the different carriages on other tracks being lifted up and watching the Chinese workers dancing around outside (it was freezing cold that night). Finally by midnight or so, we had new wheels and our passports back and headed into China.

I'm hungry and we need to do some things in Xi'an today, so the rest of this will have to wait until later. But next stop, Beijing.

Start Choppin' or Milk Cow Blues

N 47 39.019 E 107 26.545 - 19 October - Near Terelj

Then probably my favorite place we stayed the entire time we were in Mongolia. We were supposed to stay with a nomad farmer, help them out with tasks, and all that sort of thing. We thought we were leaving at 9 and when 10 rolled around, hmm, maybe something is wrong. Not sure what to do but then near 11, our driver shows up. The same one who picked us up at the bus stop the other night. Sigh, we will have less time at the farm now, but ok, I guess when in Mongolia...

We make a few stops on the way, a cliff formation across from somewhere that has a few sad looking animals, camel, yak, and donkey. Cars stop and people can ride them around in a circle for a few minutes. We look but are totally unimpressed. But he has something better, the rock formation actually has a pretty impressive and deep cave up towards the top. We scramble up and look at that. Seems nice.

The next stop is the big Chinggis statue. Really, it is just really tacky but also slightly impressive too. As we drive up from one angle, he does sort of appear to be riding his horse. So yeah, in the parking lot, mostly actually filled with Mongolians, this thing is crazy, like really huge statue of him riding a horse, all in shiny steel. The ticket office tells us it is 10000 to get in (拢10) which is crazy. That sort of money should buy you food for days, so we give it a pass. A quick look around the parking lot and please take us on.

Our last stop is one of the rune stones, we had seen a copy of it in the natural history museum in UB. Seemed impressive, written in Turkish, super old and all that, sort of Rosetta Stone for the languages on it. It was just in the middle of pasture land. And as a bonus, we could see Chinggis way off in the distance too, shining in the sun.

We stop at a nice valley, a few gers in a camp. He waves at an old woman in the fields, Mama, and we pet the dogs. He says it is his ger and dogs and all that. Hmm, it starts to dawn on us, not just a driver but he is the nomad rancher. He and his mother also run sort of a B&B on the side. It does make sense, there isn't really any money in ranching. He was probably one of the wealthier of them, he had about 600 sheep and 600 cows (1/10 of that would be a nice typical family herd), but they have to barter for everything. There isn't really a source of cash, so tourism helps with that. Most seems like they can do quite well with their flocks, they certainly have survived a long time without tourism.

Mama is a real character. She has a great cackling laugh and is really nice. But she also looks as though she could (probably has on many occasions) wrestle down a cow and butt heads with the sheep. Amazing for like 70 years old. She makes us a really delicious noodle soup and then we help make dumplings out of the fresh mutton he has been slicing off the bone earlier. We make them laugh with our incompetence, but we do get a bit better. We are ok at stuffing them and folding them but never really get the hang of rolling them out. There are hundreds of them and we are then expected to eat them all for dinner later (think I had like 12-14 of them). They are delicious, the best dumplings I had in Mongolia.

We also make them laugh by "helping" with the wood chopping. That is hard work, not splitting wood, which isn't so bad but chopping the long branches in to stove sized pieces. We have some beer with them, try to have conversations with them. They have a stack of photographs and we show them some of our own.

At 9 pm, Mama gets up, have to milk the cows now. It is very dark out, just a slight glow from a full moon. The whole front area of the ger camp has filled up with hundreds of cows. It is funny how they all come in for the night. I guess it must be habit and must be warmer. At other places, you would go out at night and there would be large herds of goats or sheep just outside where you hadn't see them at all during the day. He and mama had a system, grab a calf who was nursing, pull it away and mama would get her stool under there and milk away, 1/4 pail worth, until they got too unruly and they moved onto a new cow. About 8-9 of those and there was enough milk for all the various things we ate that had milk in them, yougart, cheese, etc. We were taking pictures of the milking by torch light, we are quite surprised then when he pulls up the car and shines the headlights so we can take better pictures that way. They seem quite pleased and amused by the results. What a nice pair and a nice place, it will be sad to leave here tomorrow.