When the kids had killed the man, I had to break up the band

N 47 54.973 E 106 54.239 - UB - 16 October 2008

So, last time, I think I left you all in UB again. Did I mention the traffic there? It really is manic. At the end of our tour, Dorj, who I imagine is a demon in traffic anyways, I think he was really in a hurry to get home. He hadn't slept much for days, his tooth still hurt and it had been 10 days away from home. It is amazing just how much traffic you can fit down a few lanes.

Our last stretch coming in from the country, a few miles out of town, we got on to paved roads again, but the driving was just as bumpy. I could barely watch the driving, even knowing I was inside and probably quite safe. One mile or so long section, two lane road, just jammed with traffic and lots of intersections to shove your way through (red lights are mostly ignored and the police directing traffic blow their whistles a lot but mostly just seem to hold back traffic until the other side is impatient enough and shoves their way through). A two lane road where everybody is mostly used to driving over anything, at times there were two lanes of traffic on the shoulder of the road racing each other to shove their way back into traffic before they run into a pole or parked car, and a few snuck their way around the back of garages and through parking lots. And Dorj was there with the worst of them.

It is a strange trip, coming back to UB so often. In the three weeks we were there, we were back three different times for a few days. A bit like coming back home again and a strange way to be in a trip where we had just steadily kept traveling east every few days up until then. Two of our group headed off to China then, had to break up the band. It was sad to see them go. 10 days in the desert with them.

The four of us left, mull over options for the rest of our time in Mongolia. We have a little more than a week and really don't want to do lots of driving again, but all the tours that people arrange mostly just drive a day to here, see things, drive another day to here, see that, etc. We pick one that is 4 nights in 3 different places and none of it is more than about 100 km from UB.

Instead of having a driver out of town, we will take the public bus. It is super cheap (something like 拢1) and should take us directly there and somebody will pick us up on the other side. Unfortunately, the buses switched to the winter schedule that day, maybe the day before, and nobody knew. That meant that while we were at the stop, in the cold pouring rain, waiting for the 4 pm bus, the 3 pm bus, the only bus of the day, had left and was well on its way to Terelj. The funny thing is it caught everybody by surprise. We stuck up a conversation with one guy (people who spoke English either wanted to sell you something or were just keen to learn English.) He was in school to learn the tourist business and they were off to a weekend retreat in Terelj and they were caught by surprise by the bus too. They were talking about taking a bus to some other part of town and catching a minibus there. We consider going with them but luckily our tour organizers pull up and pack us in the car to go over to another bus stop, they had heard from the people at the other side who were going to pick us up that the busses had changed.

It all feels like a big adventure. Totally confusing, really messed up but still it seems fine. We will probably get there one way or another. Ahh, except where do we get off? We know the stop name, it is supposed to be the end of the line but the flaw in that is they turn around and come back. Being unfamiliar with anywhere, where have they turned and where are they just going a back way to somewhere. By then too it is dark and snowing pretty heavily (so cool, snow). We ask, this town? We seem to be in the right town but there are a few stops. They seem to loop back around and we get off, hoping for the best.

There is somebody waiting too, that's good. We have about an hour in the car, paved roads most of the way then we head off onto dirt tracks again and at one point get totally stuck. He has a normal car instead of a jeep. We have to get out and help him push a few times and then surprisingly we stop about 50 meters up the road. I guess we were nearly there. It has stopped snowing and the night is pretty beautiful, mostly a full moon. We can't see much but we seem to be right up against a high hill of rocks and a valley out the other way, covered with a glowing snow. This seems to be a good place. The ger is well insulated and they bring us an electric heater too, so will have a constant temperature over the night and not the normal burning hot followed by freezing cold. Things seem good.

El Condor Pasa

N 47 11.795 E 102 51.821 - 12 October - Kharkhorin

On our way out, we stop at an old grave site, sort of vertical standing stones surrounding flat slabs and a few things of deer stone (carvings of mostly deer pictures). The drive is much of the same as yesterday, just in reverse. The drives are a bit shorter and we reach Kharkhorin fairly quickly. Also, there are a few more actual paved roads here, which seems to bore Dorj a bit.

The huge temple complex at Kharkhorin is pretty good. The vast majority of the temples were destroyed by the Stalinists, but a few remain and are nice to see. I finally get more of a handle on Buddhism here too. We have a guide from the temple who goes into great detail about the various parts of the temple. Ahh, so all the various gods, even the blue ones or the ones with lots of arms, used to be people and they have just ended up becoming enlightened. In the complex, we also pass the inevitable line of vendors, stuff laid out on blankets, yelling out, look here as we walk past. I find it interesting what sorts of things they try to highlight in that few seconds, their sales opportunity, will somebody want to see a metal head with 4 faces, or are they a sword kind of person, or a felt camel? I mostly try to ignore them.

Our ger camp is a pretty touristy one. The city is close to UB and a popular destination, so there are loads of camps around. We are there in the off season though. We had arranged a concert, a local musician who does the throat singing comes into our ger and sings and plays various traditional instruments. It is pretty interesting and something I had wanted to see. Although, he is actually a bit rubbish, especially his flute versions of some other traditional world folk tunes. But the horse fiddle is pretty nice though. I do buy one of his cds, although I won't be able to listen to it likely until I get to Australia and have a cd player again.


N 47 47.185 E 105 09.052 - 13 October - Lum

By now, Dorj's toothache is really bad, he has barely slept for 3 days now. we have given him various painkillers but they don't help. He goes to the local town yesterday and gets it pulled out, but that doesn't really even help much, they leave a few pieces in and he has to go back again. Country doctors. It is finally a day or two before he seems more back to normal. But this morning we are quite worried about him and sing songs in the van to keep his spirits up (and try to keep him awake).

We go for a morning walk up to Turtle Rock and Penis Rock. The turtle is pretty cool looking and the penis, well, I guess it looks like one. Apparently put there to remind wayward monks on their way to the brothel to think again.

We have a shorter drive again today and a few short stops. Mongel Els is a sand dune for those who can't make it down to the Gobi. We walk around there for like 30 minutes while Dorj has a nap. We have lunch in another restaurant, along the main road, a tourist sort of place, and then walking around the town, Zola needed to go to the bank to get some more cash, I smash my head probably the worst yet on the really low doorway of the bank. Hate them. Zola laughs at the bank because they give her a stack of notes about an inch thick for 1000 (worth about 1 USD). Country banks I guess.

We arrive in Lum, or nearby. We are nearly out of petrol by then, luckily we just make it. In the confusion and toothache and all, both had forgotten about getting more. Apparently if you pee in a bottle and put that in the tank, it can get keep you going for a while. Dorj and Zola throw a bottle back and forth and joke about who will have to do that.

The nomad family camp in Lum is really scenic and pretty. They mostly have horses and the grass is greener and they seem to have a pretty good setup. The sunset is really amazing and they prepare a Mongolian BBQ for us. A large pan with sheep and vegetables which they put hot rocks into and let it sit and stew for an hour or so. Even though it is more sheep, it is probably the best meal of the trip, a simple meal.

In the morning, we have a short horse ride around the area. These horses are more spirited than in other places so they don't really let us off the lead. We ride over a lovely hillside and then herd a few sheep. Kind of touristy but it is still nice.

Our main destination for today is the Hustai National Park, where they have reintroduced the takhi horses. Most of the time is spent in the visitor center watching the introduction video. Oh well, at least it was a lot of good information. A short drive through the park, there are the horses. Ok, yeah, they are pretty cool looking and it is really nice that they were brought back from near extinction.

We make it back to UB later that day and am annoyed that our promised double room isn't available. So we are stuck in the dorm that night. We also all head to the vegetarian restaurant, Luna Blanca, and are just so happy. Nothing here has even a little bit of sheep in it. We order loads and are so happy. We leave a pretty obscenely large tip, sort of embarrassing in hindsight, but we did have sheep for 10 days. We were in a bit of a state.

Ok, better end this one for now. There is a bit of Mongolia left, and I've been in China for almost a week now and better get to that. Beijing is pretty cool, I'm really loving it here and am obsessing about somewhat about learning Chinese. I need to get to writing about that, especially since we leave Beijing tonight and will be in Pingyao tomorrow. But ok, later then.

Don't go chasing waterfalls

N 46 47.048 E 101 57.964 - 10 October - Orkhon

Ahh, maybe this is the favorite days of the trip, although it does seem to be the day most fraught with sickness and trauma.

Although I am now in Beijing, have been for a few days, am really loving it, so maybe I need to just do summaries of the rest of Mongolia and move on to China.

Quick summaries, I'm not very good at those. Might just do like in my diary, short sentences. Light bulb in the cabin which you turn off and on by pulling the wire out of the switch. Landscape gets hillier and there is a bit of snow out. Lunch in a fancy restaurant with a menu, had the traditional noodles meal. Dorj's toothache comes to light, he looks tired and worn. We have showers in a very strange spa/sanatorium, sulfur water, random naked people covered in mud coming into the showers without warning.

We cross paved road, actual paved road for about 3 seconds before we head onward on the same bumpy stuff, and apparently it gets much worse later on today. We come upon lots of eagles on the road, actually on the road. We nearly run one over. Our book only has European birds. I'm still claiming it was a golden eagle, since they are fairly common in Mongolia, but I've also looked and seen steppe eagles listed there too and they seem to be almost identical. So, I'm not sure, I need to send that out to the bird experts I know. There is a really good picture of one of them in the mass of photos I've uploaded.

Much of the drive is in the dark and from what we can see through the headlights, it looks just really crazy. Vast fields of rocks, thousands of rocks, poking up a foot or two about 10 feet apart. We have to wind and swerve and run over a lot of them. Dorj looks like he is really suffering. We clap when we arrive at the ger. We see the field the next day and it looks just as fearsome. That night, somehow I sleep through a whole lot of turmoil, as everybody else in the camp comes in and out of the ger helping Alex as his sickness reaches its peak, a bitterly cold night out too.

As usually happens, somebody comes in early in the morning and lights the fire. I really like her technique of ripping the wood apart and picking off slivers to use as kindling. Out jam supply just consists then of the one jar of the icky all fruit one (blueberries, grape, pineapple, and about 8 other tastes). We barely touch it for the next few days.

We get ready for horse riding, brief introductions to how horses work, steer them and all that. They are small horses in Mongolia, much smaller than the huge American west sort of horses that intimidated me last so many years ago. These are spirited but it seems to be ok. Slow ramble, maybe not more than a kilometer to the waterfall. They gesture, down there, wow, so close. A steep rocky climb down into the small valley and admire it. The river has also iced over in places and that is almost as pretty as the waterfall.

We walk on, past the camp and over a lot of the plain that we drove over last night. My horse is pretty good and it goes into trot pretty well and occasionally over the edge into a canter. It is a bumpy ride but great fun. The horse man is quite cute, he mostly rides behind us giving the horses a swat and chanting choo-choo. He also sings a bit, nice long song. We go out for another longer ride after lunch and really push hard to get the horses going fast. A pretty nice day out.

Steal Softly Through Snow

N 45 20.039 E 104 00.629 - 9 October - Ongi

It was a cold night and in the ger with the leaky holey felt, it cooled down quickly in the night after the fire died out. I woke up kind of early, like normal, and hoped to get the fire going again. There was some leftover wood from the night before. I fussed with it for a little bit but it just wasn't having it. The stoves that had leaky lids just never really caught all that well. It seemed to go a little bit but it seems that the secret to those is you just have to pack them completely full of wood. Being conservative and just trying to burn a few sticks (to prevent it from getting boiling hot in a few minutes) just doesn't work.

When breakfast arrives, we get fry bread, an exciting change from the normal bread we have been getting before. It is a bit greasy but pretty tasty. It is a one time even though, we never get it again. We pack and say goodbye to the camel guy and head out. We cover the same road we came in on, back through the rocky canyon although this time it looks completely different. It is covered in a layer of fresh snow. It is really pretty and exciting. We see a bustard running around and we go back through those funny looking spherical cactus like plants. And the snow looks nice against the normal brownish dirt and rocks.

We ask if we can stop and see the snow, but that has already been accounted for. We pull off at a stupa (usually placed at high points or other kind of nice areas) and we pile out. There is a bit of wandering around the snow, looking at it, seeing footprints, but it all quickly devolves into a sort of full blown snowball fight. It starts out as everybody one for themselves but ends up as everybody against Dorj which he revels in. He creates a stockpile of snowballs and dares us to attack.

The rest of the drive is a bit dull. It is all the same stuff we covered yesterday and after we got out of the canyon, the snow disappears and it gets dry again. We head back to Bulgan and this time have lunch there. We pull up to a ger in the middle of a wide street (or a large wide dirt area between some buildings with a cow eating out of pile of burning rubbish), Dorj honks and yells and we are told lunch will be ready in 20 minutes, free time then. So free time like this usually means just wander around the town aimlessly until something happens. It is a pretty typical town, dusty, a few Soviet looking buildings and lots of fenced in gers in rows, suburban style. We see Dorj and Zola going into the medical building and wonder why (tooth ache later becomes a major issue, but we don't know anything yet). We also stop at a shop and see what they have. Snacks mostly or types of juice. We are just starting to become addicted to Khan Chips, strange but tasty bits of corn/potato (or so we think) ring things. They are pretty synthetic and the huge puffy bags mostly contain air but they really are the king of chips.

Finally, much longer than 20 minutes, our lunch is ready and we go into the restaurant ger. Walking around town, we had seen them laying out discs of rolled out dough on the top of the ger, drying them in the sun, and those were probably our lunch. There is a gigantic bowl on the stove (removable rings to hold different sizes of pots) filled with a noodle soup. Of course it is a meat soup (meaning sheep) with various starchy vegetables (carrots, potatoes, etc) with the cut up noodles from the roof. It is pretty nice. There are a few picnic tables in the ger but most sit on carpets on the floor.

We head on, drive drive drive, and eventually end up at Ongi to see the destroyed monenesary. There are a lot of them around Mongolia, the Stalinists were busy in the 1930s knocking them down and purging the monks. This one has an amazing setting, the side of a hill looking over a valley where two rivers join. There is also another ruin off down in the valley, part of the whole complex. The ruins look to be made out of mud bricks and there are still bits of broken clay all over. The sun is starting to set and the light on the cliffs gives it all an eerie feel. Large flocks of black birds fly overhead, too far away to be identifiable.

We get back into the van to be taken to wherever we are supposed to be staying that night, about 50 meters on as it turns out. The area is surrounded by tourist camps and they had picked one with small cabins, run by a very savvy looking woman. We are impressed that Zola, so young at 21, is able to handle people like that. As we pull up too, there are two French tourist with their driver sitting in the middle of various engine parts on the ground. I guess they didn't expect to stay there but it appears their jeep had other ideas. And Dorj just can't resist, has to go over and talk engine parts and see if he can poke around too.

The cabin is small, really just big enough to fit 6 small beds into without a stove or any sort of heat. C's bed keeps falling apart, the frame is bowed and some of the boards keep dropping through. I try to push it together the best I can with some crushed plastic water bottles which sort of works. We tell Dorj about it and he is on the case, a minute or two later some guys come in with a bit of flat board to patch it up.

We try to get a shower at the neighboring tourist camp. They said no, then said ok maybe at 9, yeah ok come back at 9. By the time we get back to the cabin, the word has already been passed on that no, can't do it after all. Never mind. Oh well. Zola said she might be able to organize one for tomorrow, so that's ok. Dinner is a nice vegetarian rice dish, Alex is still feeling bad, and it is nice.

Camera Obscura

N 40 47.380 E 102 18.053 - 7 October - Khonger sand dunes

Today is the day to mourn the passing and near passing of some dear items to me. My pen, my favorite one, which wrote just beautifully, a nice helping of ink to show up brightly, halfway through my journal entry for the day it completely dried up. I had been expecting it for a while, the ink level kept sinking, but expecting the passing and dealing with the passing are two different things. And my camera, it suffers a blow and a near death, or at least a debilitating sickness. More of that later though, we have some camels to ride and sand to see.

It is a bright cheery morning. It is windy and cold but still seems nice. The outhouse in this camp is brilliant too. It is amazing how many variations there are of the missing slat over a deep hole there can be. This one has a steel shell and some well designed ventilation system (must be using the wind to good effect) and it really doesn't smell at all.

This is our camel ride day, although not for everybody. Alex is feeling a bit wonky and decides to sit it out for a day. For breakfast, we are quite excited by the addition of apple jam (all the way from Panama no less) to breakfast. We also see a big group of vultures off in the distance as we are scanning the horizon for our camels. I'm pretty sure they are black vultures, although our bird book only covers Europe so we are not completely sure of a lot of the bird identifications since a whole lot of common birds of Mongolia and Asia are not in there. We are still not sure about a lot of the eagles, maybe one of them was a golden eagle, maybe it was a steppe eagle. Not really sure. But the vultures, they were massive and amazingly impressive, devouring whatever it was dead off in the distance and then hop and slowly lumber off into the air.

We go in and out of the ger a lot this morning, looking for our camels. I seriously bang my head on one of these occasions. Stupid doorways, it is one of the few things I really won't miss about Mongolia, doorways about 4 feet tall. Even if you don't hit them 99% of the time, the few times you do just really suck. After one of these whackings, I end up with a huge cut across my forehead, my badge of shame (or of being unable to stoop so much) which stays for most of the tour before it heals. But our camels, a small herd of them are sighted on the horizon, being chased by two guys on motorcycles. Hurray, here we go. We had a taste of camel riding yesterday, but this will be a much longer day on them. I totally love the ears on mine, they just look so chunky and fuzzy and cute. The camel under them isn't quite as cute, they don't have a unwarranted reputation for stubbornness and strong mindedness. Still, they are pretty cool.

We get some basic camel riding instructions and mount up and head out. Camels respond to the same basic 'choo choo' commands that most animals in Mongolia respond to. And by respond to, I mean ignore unless also accompanied by a stick, whip, or kick. Amy's camel later throws her off, or runs too fast and she slips off, or we don't quite know. She is then put on probation and her camel is tied to the camel guy's camel and she doesn't have to steer for the rest of the trip. As it is, they all like getting their head down to get a few bites of bushes as they go past, you have to keep choo-ing them and pulling their head to keep them going. We loose them completely for a while when they spot some water and nothing can stop them from heading over and sucking up a good drink. They make an amazing vacuuming sound as they drink.

We head along the line of the dunes. I keep hoping that we will head up and over them, but we never do. I guess I later realize why we don't considering how much of a struggle that would have been, but I'm still disappointed. Still, it is a cool ride along the edge and then after some time we stop up sort of higher on the dune and get off to walk around for a little bit. The legs are a bit wobbly and crooked after that long on a camel and it takes a few steps to get the muscles back in place. My inner thigh muscles are not that strong and I can especially tell after getting off. Many of the camel people we see have a strange gait, I wonder if that is the effect of years of riding camels.

We head back and although it is a nice ride and fun, I'm kind of glad to be back. We had met somebody who really wanted to do a three day ride across the desert on camels, we didn't go with her because that would have only been three persons and kind of expensive and also we were a bit intimidated by the idea, but I wonder how that would have been. Although it was good to be back and done, there was also something nice and meditative about riding, just watching the scenery go past slowly, sitting up there. It is a nice pace to see things.

We have a late lunch and it is getting on in the day. Alex doesn't seem much better but the rest of us decide we would rather hike up the sand dunes than do the other half of the camel ride. The dunes are there, looking so high and taunting us with what might be on the other side, you can't pass that up. We set out with more time to spare before sunset (and darkness) and head towards the dunes. I would really love to see a lot of the places we saw in a different season now, probably in summer. The travel guide has a picture on the cover of the sand dunes with horses grazing in a lush green pasture, which I assume is just about where we were, except it is brown now. The hike to the dunes is across this land, dry plants with a bit of scattered sand some occasional parts of the river to jump across. There are a few parts of the river that are a bit tricky getting across, jumping from mound to mound but no wet shoes (and no kitten today to have to mind).

When we hit the sand dunes, we head straight up. It doesn't turn out to be so far, but parts of it are a bit hard to get up. A few ridges crumble and slide and we have to crawl up them. Getting to the very top is so worth the climb too, and not just for curiosity sake. There are no dunes beyond that nearly as tall as the ones we are on, but smaller dunes stretch off in the distance for 5-10 km and it looks like looking out over a rough sea from a cliff. Very cool. The wind is blowing hard at the top is blinding at times. I know I shouldn't have but I try to shield my camera and take a few pictures from the top. It seems to be ok. We sit on the top for a while just enjoying the view and trying not to slip down the other side, way down, it would take ages to get back up. The crest also keeps disappearing under where I am sitting as the wind continually reforms the shape of the dune.

We head back down again and have fun jumping and trying to sled down the steeper bits. I find that as you slow down, you can leap up a bit to propel yourself just a little bit further. A hike back to the ger, a fantastic sunset behind us, just setting into the dunes. I am completely dismayed to find that my camera is not very happy anymore. No doubt a bit of sand caught somewhere, the lens pops out fine when you turn it on but the bits of metal covering it don't slide back the entire way anymore. Pictures then have two diagonal black stripes on the edge. Crap crap, I should have known better. I'm sad too because the sunset is really nice. I guess I have meant to get a new camera anyways, probably when we get to China, but that's not for another few weeks. If I zoom in slightly, it is usable but what a pain. It does have a sort of happy ending, eventually a few days later, the grit must have worked its way out and the lens finally opens all the way again, but still I intend to get a new camera in China. My lens already has a bad smudge on it and it has had a good life.

Back at camp, we have dinner and a special surprise, some hot water in a bucket in a spare ger. We head off two by two to wash the best we can. It isn't as great as a shower but is still nice, especially after a dusty day.

Why don't we do it in the road?

N 44 10.796 E 103 41.449 - 7 October - Bayanzag ger - continued

So, the ger problem, at least with a lot of them, they ranged from boiling hot to freezing cold. A lot of that varied according to how the ger was put together and what fuels they were using. Tonight, we had a sort of leaky ger and a wood fire. A lot of these gers in the Gobi, they were the guest gers, so they didn't seem as carefully tended as the family ones, so they could be a bit drafty.

Some of the actual family ones we stayed in were really decked out, pretty fabric covering the wooden scaffolding on the walls and have elaborate systems of sand or dirt around the outer edge to keep out the wind. This one isn't so carefully done, although not as bad as a later one where the kitten could sneak in through the numerous holes. Wood fires took a while to get started but then when they were going, they roared and it would get blistering hot for a little bit, then they would quickly die down. Dung as a fuel seems to light very quickly, burns a little smelly but doesn't seem to burn as hot but goes longer. Probably the most terrifying thing I've seen is the fire being stoked up with a huge pan load of coal in a rather well insulated ger. It took a while for it to start burning and didn't get super hot right away, but it slowly built all night, with absolutely nothing on, I was still dripping with sweat until it finally started cooling down (unfortunately about 3 am, not a good nights sleep).

Most of the morning, it was pouring rain and high winds much of the morning as we were sleeping. It sounded pretty fearful from inside and we waited out a bit of it while we were packing up and then finally made a run for it. Another funny thing about a lot of this tour, a lot of nights we would be just a few steps away from whatever was famous in the area and have no idea. We drive a few minutes, just slightly further from where we rode the camels last night, we come across the Flaming Cliffs. That seems to be a pattern, a ger camp basically a short walk away from something, but no idea it was there because it isn't on the schedule to see until the next day.

This morning, it is still pouring rain and is quite windy and cold. We jump out of the truck and look a bit and take some pictures. The museum isn't open, well, the ger is locked and nobody is in the ger next to it to unlock the museum. The Flaming Cliffs are where a lot of dinosaur eggs and fossils were found and kind of made it a famous place. The valley too is pretty amazing. It is red sandy cliffs, a deep gorge, reminds me a bit of a smaller Monument Valley. There is a small table which is either rocks for sale (nobody there to tend it though) or is a sort of museum exhibit. I don't know much about rocks so I'm not sure what they were displaying.

We brave the wind and rain as long as we can and them move on. We nearly have lunch then in Bulgan but it is 10:30 and a bit too early for lunch so we keep going. More electioneering is going here. In UB, I had been seeing lots of posters of some guy, just had that election sort of feel to them. I had no idea what the words were saying but it really did scream, blah blah, look how trustworthy I am, vote for me. This town is covered with the same ones and sure enough, we are in the run up to an election in a few days. Nothing like the American elections which have been in the run up stage for seeingly years. I have to say that probably one of the best things about traveling for the last few months is that I have been almost completely ignorant of events going on in the world and especially in the presidential election. The silence has been bliss. I don't think I have missed anything either. I've been carrying around my blank ballot now since I left London (no way to get an actual ballot mailed to me since I have no idea where I would be), I'll probably send that off then when I get to Beijing. Nobody I ever think is even halfway decent makes it very far through the primaries, so I'll just have to hold my nose and vote for who ever is left. Don't need any of the debates or all that junk to choose though.

We see a fox (probably a red fox) later that day running through the desert. Dorj gives it a slight chase to give us a better view. Not an epic sighting but is still nice to see. Probably isn't quite the same as the truck load we run across later. Even though Mongolia is a huge country, a lot of the routes are the same and the same companies go over the same basic roads, when a driver sees somebody they know, they play chicken to try and run each other off the road and then stop and chat for a bit. We chat with the group from Australia and NZ who tell us their driver chased and ran down a lynx and then put in the back. They think it might be likely that it will end up in one of their meals soon.

Tonight's destination is the Khonger sand dunes, our first really major taste of the Gobi. It is a range of sand dunes which range in height from 200 meters to 800 meters (depending on what guide book you read) and stretch about 100 km long. Our ger is right on the edge of them, a short walk to them and then straight up. Our view is of the range of them and we spend the next day curious what is on the other side and what that looks like over there.

The kitten in this camp pretty much dominates everything. It keeps sneaking in our ger through the holes in the felt and when these efforts are rebuffed, it starts climbing up the side and onto the top and staring down the smoke hole at us. When we move tot he ger where the food has been prepared and eat there (a late lunch), it also sneaks into there and eventually uncovers the meat supply. By meat supply, I mean a whole leg of mutton, which it digs its claws into and refuses to let go. It takes two of us to pull it off and even then we have to cut off a bit of the meat to get it off.

Then when we go for a walk to the sand dunes near sunset, it insists on following us which is totally surreal. We walk there and back for probably two hours and it is fairly dark by the time we reach the dunes and turn around, but it follows us the entire way, just a white blur in the dark. We do have to stop and lift it over some of the bigger streams. Totally strange.

So, we have touched the sand now, hiked around the area a little bit and get back to camp in time for dinner. We pass a really cold night in the ger (much leakage of warm air) and will be ready for more camels and sand tomorrow. Just a warning, if you are a lover of cameras and cringe at gritty treatment of them, you best turn your head away for a bit tomorrow.

Two weeks in Mexico, you think you've seen it all, gringo

N 44 10.796 E 103 41.449 - 7 October - Bayanzag ger

Ok, should be just about caught up with uploading pictures. The rest of Estonia and Russia here and then into Mongolia here. But we are off for 4 more days in the country today, this time closer to UB and not so much driving, so I might not finish all of them. Our last few days in Mongolia and then we are off to Beijing on the train.

But where was I then? Erdenedalai, I guess, after our first night sleeping on the floor of somebody's house. The morning was pretty cold and it was a icy misty morning out. We hadn't seen the village yet and we still couldn't really see it when we went outside (toilet, brushing teeth, packing the van, etc), just a sort of dusty town covered in a nice mist.

Breakfast on the whole trip was pretty consistent, sliced bread (ok, one morning we had fried bread instead) and jam and some sort of Nutella type thing (usually Gold M but there was another one one day), and tea. C and I had also brought along some oats (precious, expensive from the State Department store, imported from Germany) for porridge. Ok, oats soaked in hot water, vaguely porridge but a really nice addition to the bread. Also, it became even more critically important, as the trip went on and the food was pretty much meat (just called meat but was generally something that was once on a sheep) and starchy or not very green things (potatoes, rice, carrots, cabbage), the fiber was kind of important to, umm, help push things through the system.

We had read there was a monastery in town, built in honor of one of the Dali Lamas coming to visit and that it was somewhat impressive, Zola can we go see that? She didn't know where it was but would ask. I guess that brings up another problem with the trip, or maybe trips of this type, the classic routes. When we discussed the trip originally, the guy said, ok, you will go here and there and blah blah, but if you want to change anything, just discuss it with your guide and she can make it happen. The problem is that they mostly just know that route and it doesn't turn out to be very flexible at all. We would be reading the travel guide and see things that were close that seemed nice, oh, we passed that yesterday, or we actually have to get to this other place so there isn't time. And a lot of it, she just didn't really know since it wasn't the normal route. Sigh. But it was still good. There is no way we could have seen everything in Mongolia, there would always be things we missed, so it was good to enjoy the things we did see.

But yeah, the monastery, it was just a short walk across the village, of course it was closed. Zola asked something of the guard outside, but I guess it was still closed. It was pretty from the outside though. Zola gave us a short rundown on Buddism, what the various symbols and colors mean. It does seem to be a sort of confusing religion to get an immediate grasp on. Maybe that's been Christianity's strength, it has a pretty immediate kind of risks and benefits and the basic structure of gods and various religious things seem pretty barebones. Or maybe that's from coming from a culture that is filled with the religion and icons and the rest of that. It took much of the next week to get a really basic understanding of it all, why the gods are blue or red, or have skulls hanging off them, and things like that. The big thing to learn was that all of them, even the blue ones, used to be human until they reached enlightenment and became gods. I really liked the service we saw when we were in UB, chanting and singing and playing different sorts of percussion instruments. There seems to be a cool chaos, lots of people in the temple all doing their own thing but also kind of mixing it all up with everybody else, much more personal than just sitting there focusing on one central person preaching to you and having the church built so that your eye is directed to sort of a central point. The monasteries have all sorts of things, scattered all over, things to walk around, prayer wheels to spin, it does seem much more personal and self directed in that way.

So, back in the truck, rough roads, brown dry scenery rushing by (just going to cut and paste that into a lot of this diary), and eventually end up in Mandalgovi at lunch time. The restaurant gets frozen dumplings out of the freezer and it will be 20 minutes, you all can go wandering around if you want (free time). It is funny, on so much of our journey so far, I have been aware of being foreign, and sometimes of being a tourist, but until now, I haven't really felt so much on display. In Sweden or Norway or even Russia, I'm sure I stood out a little bit but I still felt like I could kind of blend in a bit, not be so obviously traveling and from so far away. Here, everybody looks at you, kids tap you and say hi or one,two,three,four, or just giggle and stare. It is funny having things switched on you. I can go to some other country, stand back and look and maybe see things as if they were on display for me, but here, we also become something to be stared and gawked at. A group of four young girls (probably 8-10 yrs) spots us and starts laying out a plastic sheet on the ground, putting various trinkets on it and invites us into their impromptu souvenir shop. Gotta give it to them, they are good, a few stuffed wool camels end up getting bought.

Lunch, dumplings with fatty bits of meat in them. Kind of taste good and also really don't taste good at all, especially the fatty bits. We try some of the milk tea too, which I don't mind so much, but everybody else pretty much hates it. We don't really get it again, which is fine, I mostly want tea and this stuff tastes more like porridge without the oats and a bit of tea in it. Not a horrible taste in itself but not tea.

iPods come out and there is a bit of music. I don't understand why the Red Hot Chili Peppers are the first thing anybody thinks of as road music. I have flashbacks to CRRU and Gardenstown and the endless Chili Peppers there too.

Running out of time to write, I better go and see a few things before we leave UB again. Ended up that night in a nice valley, near a lake, in a ger with lots of camels around. We take a 1 hour camel walk at sunset, up a hill, looking over the camp and the valley near Bayanzag. Quite nice and pretty. Camels, I should write more about them later, what a way to get around the desert though. We then roast in the ger with a hot fire and have dinner and then freeze later that night when the stove goes out and it dips down to 0 C. But more of that in the next chapter.

Where eagles dare

N 46 00.719 E 104 56.774 - 5 October - Erdenedalai - continued

Ok, so we were heading out of town last time. We had stopped at a fancy restaurant for lunch. We were going to stop at a ger restaurant (ger - the ubiquitous housing unit in Mongolia, felt tents, quite an ingenious housing construction - apparently run about 500 USD for one, which is about two months salary, but enough digression) but they didn't have food so we had to go to the fancy tourist resort restaurant. Ok, that's the other thing, our tour mostly stayed in family guest gers, the tour company has arrangements with private families and we stayed there instead of the tourist camps which were ger camps just for tourists. The restaurant was part of one of those, huge parking area which was completely empty. Mid October is not real prime tourist season, it is getting quite cold and most things have closed (rural museums, ger camps, etc) until the spring. There were some tourists around but probably not as many as I would imagine would be about during the summer. The restaurant also had a very posh toilet, flush one but also with added controls for massage and other things we didn't quite understand. It would be the last one too we would see for a while, most rural toilets being of the wooden floor with a slat missing, or just the wide open land itself. Not that that is bad in itself. Some of the outhouses were quite well constructed, deep holes, well ventilated and just fine. There were a few though, it would be best not to speak of them. Moving on.

Our first stop was Baga Gazryn Chuluu (so many of these places have slightly different spellings for the names, being transliterated from Mongolian. Generally the doubled vowels, uu for example mean the stress is on that syllable, not that really helped us pronounce any of them.) There was one of those ubiquitous shines in near it, a stupa, generally a pile of rocks with blue fabric tied to it or something fancier. We climbed up the hill, the tallest one in the area and enjoyed a nice view of the area. Horses and cattle and goats and sheep wandered around below. The climb was slightly challenging, very jagged rocks but worth the hike up. The most exciting thing was the eagles circling around. White tail eagles, we saw quite a few of those.

It wasn't the best time of year for wildlife but it wasn't quite as bad as we were led to believe. I really would like to come back to Mongolia and see things when it is teeming with all sorts of things and covered with green things, but this was still pretty special. For the sake of completeness and since I like making lists of things I have seen, we ended up seeing during the 10 days, goats, sheep, camels, horses, takhi horses, yaks, dogs, a puppy, cats, a kitten, white tailed eagles, golden eagles, bustards (different than buzzards), black vultures, desert foxes, desert finches, pigeons (and other various doves), ravens, hooded crows, magpies, spotted eagles (I think, we saw those in Siberia too), stilts (C saw one, I didn't), choughs, sparrows, ruddy shelducks, and then probably loads more that we didn't identify like those small lizard things, and the rodents that looked like chinchillas, and the little mice (those seemed to co-exist in the places we saw the eagles), and more I couldn't categorize.

We hiked a little longer than planned and it was feared that the weather was going to be bad and close in on us so we went another 100 km longer than we had originally planned and ended up driving in the dark and got to Erdenedalai fairly late. We pulled up into the town and stopped at a gate in a fence. Ok, so that's another thing, rural towns. Out in the deep country, it is just scattered gers surrounded by livestock. Mongolia does have the lowest population density of any other country. The gers move around, a few times a year, moving a few hundred kilometers with seasons and to let the grass grow again. And winter homes tend to have structures built, places to keep animals warm during the cold winter. In towns, people have gers in the front yard, sometimes built more permanent houses and have rows, blocks, fences with a usually blue gate in front. Then in the bigger towns, they have more Soviet looking buildings, brick and concrete, for the government buildings and medical centers and the rest of that and then suburbs of wooden fenced houses. In Mongolia, it was only possible to own land three years ago. If nobody else is living somewhere, you can set up your ger and make an application to the government to live there. Much of UB has been snapped up now and some of the surrounding areas, but a lot of the countryside is still very open.

We pull up to the gate here, please wait here, they go in and check with the family, dogs barking, and everything is arranged. This was one of the few non ger nights, we ended up putting our sleeping bags on their living room floor while the family moved into their other rooms on the other side of the house. At the beginning then, we were all prissy about getting changed and all that, took turns in the room. By the end of the trip, everybody just kind of looked away and pretended they weren't changing. I guess 10 days, 24 hours a day with the same six people, well, it is a recipe for cooperation or warfare. Luckily our group seemed to do pretty well together over the time and we still happily got along during the entire time.

Zola made the first of her nice meals (really, all her meals, some of them were pretty simple even, were the best food we had the whole time, much better than most of the restaurants we went to), a good soup, and we went to sleep. A pretty good first day then.

Been to the desert on a horse with no name

(I've finally uploaded a few pictures, I'm still way behind but there are some from Estonia and a bit of Russia here now.)

N 46 00.719 E 104 56.774 - 5 October - Erdenedalai

Actually, it did have a name, although they tend to call them by their colors, light tan, black, etc. So, I guess mine would have been called light tan but I have no idea how to say that in Mongolian. Ok, they said how it was but it is a difficult language and I'm still struggling to say thank you. Stupid phrase books, they have it as bayla-laa or something like that. You say it and you just get blank looks, they say it completely different but I just still can't get it right. Way too much goes on deep in the throat.

But the horse comes later, we just left Ulan Batar and have a while until we get to the horses and the desert. Mongolia is pretty huge. When we were planning the entire trip, we had no idea what to do and how long, so we just thought 3 weeks in Mongolia sounded about right. Seeing what I have, I think 3 weeks isn't much to see Mongolia. Just driving to all the different classic places to see takes ages and the roads are not so great either. Ok, I should say roads and then make those quote marks with my hands as I say it. Roads are not really built in Mongolia, they are more just places that people tend to drive on more often than other bits of land. Ok, Ulan Batar has a whole lot of roads but once hit the city border, you can go days without seeing another road, at least a paved one. In a lot of places, you might see 5-10 different tracks all next to each other, going roughly the same direction, all conveying a vague sense of road-ness.

Our group packs up our Russian jeep and we head out of town. We picked a 10 day trip, a classic route, actually a bit on the beaten path. I guess it is a classic route for a reason and it isn't like I've been to Mongolia before and would think, oh, that old thing, I've seen that too many times. I guess it was slightly lazy to go on a tour, have a driver and a guide and all that, but I guess we were feeling slightly tired after Russia and that just seemed nice to have somebody hold your hand, tell you want is interesting to see and handle all the complicated things (well, reading menus in restaurants, for example). I still think in hindsight it would have been better to not driven so much and to have had more time in fewer places but still I'm quite happy with it all.

Outside of UB, the paved road quickly ends and we don't see another paved road for about a week (and then for about 3 seconds as we cross it and head onto more dirt roads). Ok, I'm struggling a bit as to how best write about 10 days, we covered probably about 1500 km, saw so many things, had so many silly conversations about food, "feeling the benefit" (needs its own sidebar), sang songs, were sick, well, let me start over then.

Our team first then. Dorj our driver, is a bit legendary among Mongolian drivers, featured in the Lonely Planet guide (most traveler's bible) and I think he is now sort of my hero. Some of the roads were absolutely crazy, the distances were long and for the last half of the trip, he drove with an infected tooth, had it pulled out (badly done by a country dentist), and still drove on, not sleeping for at least three days. He laughed and joked the entire time, except for that one morning where we were the most worried about him and sang songs to try and keep his spirts up (and keep him awake). Zola, our guide and cook and general arranger person, quite a lot of responsibility for a 21 year old. She did a beautiful job, made really nice food, and was just really nice to be around for 10 days. C and I met a group of people in Russia and then kept the team together for our tour. Alex ("stomach problem", spent a few days pretty sick on the trip) and Catriona and Robyn and Amy (the medicine women, who had lots of painkillers and cold things).

The first day, we headed off road onto dirt roads, gullies, rocks, bumping along. And we stopped for lunch and had various things based on sheep. Oh wait, those two happened every day. I think I'm a bit over sheep now, basically everywhere out in the country smells of sheep in some form, either meat or milk. The special tea they make, based on sheep milk, salt, butter is interesting (sort of porridge without the oats) but a few times was enough and I was ready for just plain black tea again. The first place we stopped for lunch was pretty fancy though. The middle of nowhere and a nice building, actual flush toilets and nice dining area. We had our first meal there and I go away with a coming familiar feeling of a stomach filled with a fair amount of sheep fat and meat. Not to say that it wasn't always tasty, but once we got back to UB, we went to this vegetarian restaurant and were just drooling over broccoli and other vegetables. No more sheep for a little bit then.

Well, as tends to happen, I've written too much about nothing so and should go eat breakfast now and finish up later. So, I promise, I'll get to writing about Erdenedalai and the rest of it eventually.

Crosstown traffic, I dont need to run over you

N 52 16.727 E 104 17.030 Monday 29 September 2008 - Irkutsk

Ok, here I was writing about Olkhon and now I'm back in Irkutsk again and I still haven't written about Olkhon yet. We haven't really had internet except for a brief bit to do a quick email check last Thursday and before that it was back in the cafe in Moscow, wow, I think that was like 7-8 days ago. I'm not really sure. I suspect that Mongolia might have longer gaps, although I am assuming that there will be loads of internet cafes in Ulaanbaatar. We still don't know what we are doing there yet, we leave tomorrow night and then will have to set up something when we get there. Probably we will try to meet up with some other people, maybe some of the people we met on Olkhon, or maybe some people we meet there, and then set up some sort of group thing, find a guide/driver and see what we can do over the next three weeks.

But I'm really starting to see the value, or maybe desire, to start finding other people to travel with, or hang out with, or even just talking and planning together. Scandinavia wasn't so horribly difficult, things didn't feel so foreign. I guess even St Petersburg and Moscow felt ok but sort of more out in the wild, it feels a bit better to group up a little bit, or feel a little less isolated and peculiar. Mongolia especially seems a bit full on, a large span of time (three weeks) and a really large country (one of the largest in the world), it has been comforting to have talked to others who have been there and who are going there and talk about possibly meeting up and trying to travel together for a bit.

Hostels seem to be pretty good for that sort of thing. The first night we were in Irkutsk we met a few couples and had dinner out with them. They might not be in Mongolia at the same time though, some were heading the other way too. The four we met in Olkhon, they had met because two of them heard somebody speaking English on the train platform and just tagged along. The fact they they also spoke Russian probably helped too. Then we met the four of them on a expedition in Olkhon and possibly our itineraries will match up, I guess we will see.

Anyways, I probably haven't had a very representative view of Siberia yet. From the train, what we went through looks vast and barren and covered with lots of pretty trees, but this is probably a slightly unusual part of it. I'm not so fond of Irkutsk yet. It feels a bit like a dumpy town, all the bad parts of a town, horrendous traffic, run down buildings, pollution, and the rest of that. It does have a gigantic statue of Lenin just outside our window. Although I could probably say that about almost any town in Russia. Lenina is the main street as well as Karl Marx Street. I wonder if they will end up changing the street names eventually. There are still quite a few red stars all over Russia too, I guess they will probably remain too. I can't say that I actually have any impressions of Irkutsk yet, a few interesting wooden buildings and houses like in the rest of Siberia (and basically the same sort we saw in rural areas since we crossed over from Finland) and there was what we saw running around trying to get the computer cable fixed.

The real action has been outside of town, by the lake, in the lake. I'm not sure Olkhon, the large island in the middle of Lake Baikal is very representative either. Maybe it is but I guess I see Siberia as having lots more trees, or at least something a bit different. But let's see, Lake Baikal, it is massive. Blah blah, the guidebook says it holds 20% of the fresh water supply in the world, deepest lake in the world, or something like that. Also, apparently you could fit Ireland into it. The island is pretty big too, 100 km long by 15 wide. It has a few hundred people living on it, I think about 1/3 Russian (in the towns) and 2/3 Buryat (a lot of the ranchers/fishermen who live outside the towns in small groups)

It was a former gulag (1000 Lithuanians who were forced to do hard labor in a fish factory. It is funny thinking the island seems so beautiful (or even Siberia) when life is so harsh here and so many people have been forced to live here over the years when it was basically like sending people away to the Moon. They didn't need a whole lot of guards, even though the water freezes up and can be walked over (driven over) for a few months in the winter. Once you get to the mainland, then where do you go, you are thousands of kilometers away from anything and there are plenty of wolves and bears to make your probably short remaining life exciting.

Our adventure started by trying to get there. The bus station is about a 30 minute walk away from the center of town. We went armed with a note, "two seats to Olkhon" in Russian (DBA MECTO NA ONBXOH, I have no idea how to make the letters the way they really were), and a vague time as to when buses leave, or the minibuses. The big bus leaves earlier, is slower, well mostly it leaves earlier. When we get there, we can't figure out where they go from, which one, and it is a bit of a panic. If you miss something here, generally there isn't another one for another day (or more). After showing the note to a lot of people, one person finally points us across the street to a waiting van. It hasn't left yet, in fact it isn't full yet so it won't leave until all the seats are filled (or more). We did time it right and got on early and had to wait but didn't have the risk of having to find another way there.

It was a rather hair raising ride at times. Russian driving is a bit scary and there were lots of incidents of passing on blind corners, blind hills, passing even though the car coming the other way had to swerve onto the shoulder, well, it all seems pretty normal. And then racing on really slippery gravel roads next to sharp drop-offs, well, that made me a bit nervous at times. We did get pulled over by a police officer. Well, I should say that one was standing by the side of the road and merely pointed his baton towards the side of the road. The driver saw him way before, slowed down a lot, and put on his seat-belt before getting there and got waved over. They talked a bit behind the van and then the officer took a peek inside the van and we were off. I wonder how much he had to pay him. We hear the going rate is something like 1000 rubles.

The scenery was really amazing on the way. Once we got out of town, with its mad traffic, well the traffic is still a bit mad on the main road. We pass through pretty flat plains, grasslands (probably former forest land) and small settlements and a few marshy areas with yellowing larch and birch in the distance. The second half, we turn towards the lake and start climbing over the hills surrounding the lake and pass even more large patches of woodland, also in full autumn mode. Occasionally we come across trees with bits of cloth and other things tied to them.

The bus ride is about 6 hours, so we see a lot of trees. Also the passengers are a bit of a cast of characters. There are a few tourists, a Swiss couple who are jammed in the back with the two drunkards. One of them seems to hold his alcohol pretty well, he is dressed in camoflauge and I think of him as 'the mercenary'. He apologizes a lot for his friend, or at least I think that is what he is doing. Both of them showed up already completely drunk (9 am) when they boarded the bus, and they both have enough supplies with them to maintain that the entire journey. The other one is barely able to walk, stand, sit, or really anything. He is three rows back so we can only sort of smell him but we do hear him quite a bit. The Swiss get the worst of it, being by him the entire journey. He blabs the entire time, keeps drinking and is generally just a bit unpleasant. I am quite happy that he never ends up vomiting or anything like that. Maybe that would have been a tragic waste of alcohol.

There was also a sulky goth looking girl, who gets off halfway there. And a few other Asian looking locals, two of them are sick and cough on us in the row behind for the entire journey. In front is a mother with her two small children. And we can't forget our heroic driver, who just speeds and races on the gravel roads and generally makes me rather nervous about it all. Maybe the padded ceiling on the bus (eerily like the inside of a coffin lid) is needed in some occasions.

The journey is pretty ok though. The scenery is really pretty, changing from flat grassy lands (saw what we through were a few eagles, too big to be buzzards we thought but can't find them in small bird book we have) to the hilly forests and onto the island over the ferry which was barren and rocky and also beautiful in its own way. We arrive at Nikita's, which I guess everybody starts out there. We heard a few negative things about it the night before at the hostel so thought we might just stay one night and decide the next day whether to stay there or try a home stay somewhere or what.

I guess it was just easier there. Maybe it would have been a little less expensive somewhere else, and maybe somehow it was all a little less genuine, whatever that means. It was a bit of a tourist center and all. The meals were all included (lots of omul), much of the housing had been purpose built, they put on music events in the evening, you know, here is a gen-u-wine experience. I'm not sure I had much interaction with many locals and things were mostly in English. It was quite nice though for the other people there, and it was in the middle of this amazing island to explore.

The island seems to be a dog paradise. Packs of them wander around all over. Some look quite mean and those seem to be tied up outside as guard dogs, a lot of others seem to be lying around in the middle of the streets, or wrestling with other dogs, all vaguely attached to some or other humans. The homestead seemed to have about 5-6 who seemed to make it their center.

How to sum up a few days on the island then? C had caught a nasty cold and wasn't at her best for those days (I blame it on those guys coughing on us all the way there, even though that's way too quick for something to manifest) so we took it slowly the first few days with some walks around the cliffs and beaches and short walks into the woods. Disappointingly, the nearby woods seem to mostly be plantation trees, mostly Scot Pine, the really pretty larch seems to be on the far side of the island. We meant to rent bikes and have a ride around the island that way, but we never really got ourselves together in time for that.

Probably the nicest thing we did was the tour up to the north point of the island. I suppose most everybody does that one, but it is pretty nice. 10 of us in a big green van, or whatever you would call it. I was slightly worried when the driver was pumping up a tire with a hand pump, but I guess that's kind of normal. Considering the state of the roads we went over and the way it kept going over all of them without any sort of apparent problem, that thing could probably drive over anything. At one point during the day, we pulled somebody in a car out of some deep sand, which due to a lack of much vegetation on the west side of the island seems to drift quite deeply even fairly far inland.

He was a pretty good guide, lots of interesting details. He only spoke Russian but luckily there a few in the group who could translate. On the way up, we went past the former gulag, where the former fish factory has since been razed to the ground and is slowly being covered in drifting sand. I found myself caught in thinking it was such a beautiful place, an only slightly cold day in late September, waves washing through the former pier and onto a sandy beach, the high hills across the lake filled with yellowing larches and birch with clouds settling down on the higher parts of the hills. How is it to come somewhere like this on a holiday and think it is lovely when so many others had been trapped here against their will, forced to work long hours in horrible conditions, in extreme weather conditions, with no real hope of ever being able to leave and go home.

The north side of the island looks out over the vast expanse of the lake. The west side, the side we were staying on, it is only a few kilometers to the mainland, while the east side is up to 15-20 kilometers to shore and hundreds to the end of the lake to the north. So much of it here reminded me of being on the coast of Wales or Scotland looking out to sea. The rocks are quite special up on this side of the island too, white granite covered with patches of red lichen. The effect is quite striking and is rather famous. We had stopped 4-5 times at different places heading up here, to look at different things and have short walks.

I had been wondering about the poles and trees covered in cloth. He explained some of that to us at one of the stops, it was a Baryat thing. Poles in the ground, they were used as hitching posts for horses and it was a tradition to leave some sort of indication that you were there, tying on a bit of the clothing you were wearing, or leaving something, a cigarette, or whatever. The poles vaguely memorialize families, a pole per family, and as you sat there, you might think about the families, flick a bit of vodka in that direction. I'm still a little unclear who follows this, is it the Baryat or the Russians or has it just become a little more mainstream and a nice custom? I know the buses and cars, at certain ones of these would slow down and people would chuck out kopeks out the window at it. Considering a ruble is worth about £0.02 and a kopek is 1/100th of that, it is probably a rather cheap thing to chuck out the window.

Ok, I got busy and now it is many days later. I started a bit here, maybe I'll leave that and then sum up quickly since I haven't been in Russia for a few days now and am about to leave for 10 days in the Gobi.

Once we got to the north side of the island, we were let out, hike that way to the tip and then come back through the woods to lunch. So blah blah blah, great hikes, along the cliffs. The lake is amazing looking, so huge. The white granite with the red lichen is really pretty. The hike through the larch forest was good, the needles changing colors and some have already dropped. Just the perfect time to hike through a forest like that. Lunch was waiting for us, a really tasty fish stew and bread and cheese and butter and a nice hot pot of tea (Siberian coffee - I like that Russia is pretty tea mad).

The drive back was pretty, somewhat exhausting though. The roads are a bit mad in places and we were shaken all over. In the drive back, we have acquired some new friends and start planning the next parts of our trip, seeing if we will meet and be able to travel together some more.

It was sad to leave the island then the next day. Although it isn't always easy. We had booked on the minibus which seems to have been overbooked, so a few people couldn't ride on it. The normal bus then had been canceled that day, so the ones on that couldn't come either. They ended up finding other rides to the ferry and then had to wait a few hours for the normal bus on the other side. The bus we were on was mostly the people we had met on the island so it was a totally different time than on the ride up, nice conversations and all that.

The next day, our last day in Irkutsk, the weather turns, it gets cold and finally feels a lot like Siberia. We are not terribly ambitious, a bit of internet cafe trying to sort out what will happen once we get to Mongolia. Just a word of warning, don't send 4 emails to guest-houses in Mongolia asking if they have vacancies and then take off on a train and don't have time to get their replies. We are a bit surprised when there are 4 people waiting for us at 6 am in Ulaanbaatar, ready to take us to their guest-houses. Oops.

Sadly the train ride into Mongolia, we really didn't see much. By the time we got on it and out of Irkutsk, it had gotten dark and was dark all the way around the lake and until after we got to Ulan Ude. We have some pretty scenery then after that but then quickly get to the border crossing and it is all over then. That had to be one of the most surreal experiences in terms of train travel for me. So, it is like 20 km from the last town in Russia to the first town in Mongolia, yet it took us about 10 hours to cover it.

We sit in the Russian station for a few hours, they had disconnected the engine and left only the two carriages destined for Ulaanbaatar sitting on the tracks in front of the station. And then let us sit for a few hours, like 3 hours at this point. Then the train fills up with Mongolians. We had lucked out and our room, 4 bunks, we were alone and had it to ourselves. So, it was a little of an adjustment to having two others in there, and two that we had to work hard to communicate with. Like the Russian phrase book, the Mongolian one is pretty pathetic, and this one doesn't even have a small section of Mongolian to English, just scattered phrases and then an English to Mongolian section. Very frustrating. They were quite nice though, I think on their way back from a big shopping trip, they had many bags of clothes and towels and things like that.

And we sit there. After like 4 hours or so, the Russians fill the train, collecting passports, handing out customs forms and then disappear for another hour or so. Their last burst before they finally let our train reassemble itself and acquire an engine again is a proper intense search. They do search our stuff in a fairly cursory manner, but the compartments themselves get a pretty thorough treatment. Twice they clear us out and they climb all over it searching every where. I wonder what they though they might find there that they wouldn't find in our bags (drugs, weapons, people?). Funny having a search like that in leaving a country.

We creep through the next section, the actual border crossing looks like a real border, barbed wire, towers, the whole deal, and then we sit in a fenced in no man's land for a while before then slowly creeping on over the border and into Mongolia. This part is actually really lovely, hills, water, trees, and lots of pretty things to look at. Our Mongolian roommates are quite excited too, looking a lot and urging us to take lots of pictures of things. Then we reach the first station in Mongolia and it starts all over again. A few hours sitting there, waiting for them to take passports, do customs inspections and the rest of that. Eventually they do, which doesn't then take that long and isn't as intense as the Russian one (or as apparently it used to be, tearing apart compartments, searching absolutely everything, etc) and the inspector even smiles and says welcome to Mongolia when he is done. Our new Mongolian friends then disappear and we then wait and wait until the train will move again. By the time it does, it is 10 pm and way past dark, and we don't see anything more of Mongolia since our train gets to Ulaanbaatar at 6 am before it gets light. We got to that last stop in Russia around 1 pm too and feel totally exhausted from sitting around for so long doing absolutely nothing.

Anyways, that was days ago (now 4 October 2008 in UB), I'll have to finish the rest later. We leave UB tomorrow morning for a 10 day trip around the Gobi with the 4 people we had met in Siberia. They are really nice and it should be really good. We have been in UB for three days now and I have just started to get the hang of dealing with crossing the street (a rather lethal and scary thing to do). The town itself doesn't seem to be much to be excited about. A lot of our time here so far has been organizing things for the tour. But I should see about finishing the packing and getting some sleep, it is a long drive tomorrow (as many of the days will be) and I'm excited to get going.

Back in the USSR

N 53 11.900 E 107 20.386 - Friday 26 September - Olkhon, Nikita's Homestead.

Siberia, I've had an image of it for a long time. It was a place of exile and imprisonment. It is covered with snow and trees. It is somewhere that a comet can strike and destroy thousands of acres of forest and basically go unnoticed. In some ways, those images have stood up to the reality and some haven't. What I have seemed to find, giving away the ending before I tell the story, seems to be amazingly beautiful, extremely harsh and desolate landscapes, completely untouched and primitive, yet filled with industrial blight, covered in broken vodka bottles and tire tracks through beautiful reed marshes filled with plastic grocery bags.

When I last left you, our train had just been invaded by the Russian army on our last 36 hours before Irkutsk. Eventually that night, we made it to bed. There was a few hours of drinking beer (they had 2 1.5 liter bottles of pivo they were determined to make it through) and talking. But we were already exhausted and had already hoped to go to bed before they even arrived. C had been up in the top bunk for most of it, hoping to sleep but it being impossible and eventually moved down to be a little more social. After an hour or so, during Vladim's first smoke break, she snuck back up and put in the earplugs and tried to shut it all out, but it all kept going on despite that.

During the second smoke break a long time after that, after both bottles had been finished, Ora, who had patiently waited and only participated in the small bits of the conversation that were in Russian, she reclaimed her bottom bunk and effectively ended the party. I was then able to reclaim my bottom bunk and also finally sleep. Outside the door, we could hear the rest of the carriage carrying on late into the night.

Sleeping on the bottom bunk, with your ear right there sort of kind of on the floor, the noises are strange. Much of the track is fairly smooth but then sections of it get quite noisy. I wonder how much of the track had shifted and sunk (built on permafrost that then melts somewhat, buildings sink and crack), but parts of the track were very loud with a clacking sound quite similar to a fast beating heart. I would say that is the main sound I will take away from the journey, the sound of the Trans-Siberian. The other sound, my favorite of all of them, is the sound of the safety checks (I presume) that the engineer makes at most of the longer stops. He walks around the entire train with a metal rod (and torch if it is dark), hitting all the springs on the wheels and the brake drum covers (I am guessing), clang, ting, clang, ting. I assume if something is wrong, it makes a different sound.

However, that night, the loud clacking sounds, the ones that sound like a fast beating heart, are quite conducive to a whole series of exhausting running dreams. After a too late night, I wake up even more tired. The landscape had gotten even better here, we were going through not densely packed forests of birch, but at least a great number of them and they were mostly turning. There were seas of yellow with small patches of red and green flowing by, we were also moving through more twists and turns and up and down small hills. It was quite a nice scene to watch.

The major though, once we were up and breakfasted, got out his laptop and decided it was movie time. He had a whole big pack of dvds. It appears that the MPAA has made little headway in Russia, at least in the Russian military. None of the dvds appeared to be actual kind of copies you would buy in stores, although he did have quite a collection of fairly current films. He decided that Kung Fu Panda was just what we needed and started it it up. It seems like quite a surreal moment there to me, sitting there on a train going through Siberia, with this amazing landscape going by outside the window, sitting there watching Kung Fu Panda in Russian. Occasionally the Major would tell us a bit of the dialog, what they were saying, although the plot and the action seemed pretty straight forward. It seems that there was this panda who wanted to do kung fu.

So fine, entertaining, kind of, although I probably would have rather sat and read and stared out the window. But I guess I could still look out the window. The film didn't require a whole lot of effort or attention. About halfway through, I went to take a shower. It had been a few days. Ok, not exactly a shower. Ora had ridden the train before, many times, and knew how it worked. She had a huge mayonnaise jar and I borrowed that. Fill it with hot water and you can do fairly well with a wash cloth. The toilets have a mesh rubber floor with a drain in the bottom. It isn't the easiest thing in the world, but you can get moderately clean and wash your hair and feel a bit better about the world and a bit refreshed.

And I was back in time to see the last 1/3rd of the film. If you haven't seen it, I probably won't wreck it by saying that the panda eventually does learn kung fu, but I wasn't worried he wouldn't. Mostly I was wondering why Yoda and Darth Vader were in the film as well.

The rest of the day was quieter. We could retreat a little bit into reading, watch more of the scenery, although the other soldiers were still going, running into our room to get different translations for different words. I assume they were trying to make headway with the foreign women. Cup of soup and tomatoes and cheese and bread and sausage for lunch and I guess a sort of similar thing for dinner. It is hard to believe that it all passed so quickly, we would be in Irkutsk at 6 am the next morning. Ora was continuing on to the end of the line, a few more days on the train. She insisted that we get ourselves packed up and mostly ready to go before we went to sleep.

Nobody really slept much that night. The other soldiers were young and energetic and they kept the rest of the train up for almost the entire night. They tried a number of times to get into our room but the door was locked. It didn't help with the sleep though. And the clacking of the tracks seems so much louder in the night and I was a little worried about getting up and out in time the next morning, it being so early.

I guess I didn't need to worry so much. The provodnitsa was a bit keen, probably really wanted to unload the train so she could have a much quieter rest of the journey, woke everybody up a 5, telling us we would be there in 30 minutes, which was a bit of a fib but we were ready to go by 5.30, and sat and waited until we finally pulled into Irkutsk at 6.

It is funny, after 4 days on the train, I barely explored much of it. I went a few coaches back and one ahead, but never ended up making it to the dining car (apparently not even a small loss) and didn't really engage much with the rest of the English speaking passengers (the tourists). But then I ended up doing much more of that during that first day in Irkutsk. We got off the train, wondering what to do next. We couldn't get our room at the home-stay until 9 so had a few hours. Wandering around Irkutsk in the pre-dawn hours, interesting and all, actually it seemed to present the town in the best light, but the backpacks were heavy and it was a bit cold. There was supposed to be some 24 hour internet cafe, but we never found it and ended up outside the 24 hour pizza cafe with three just graduated Oxford students.

Open 24 hours of course means they close from 7 to 7.30, so we had to wait outside for 30 minutes until they opened, but at least it was somewhere and we had company. Pizza and blinies for breakfast and a nice chat with some English kids and finally we were able to head down to the hostel to have them set us up with our room. Later that day, I picked up a book of matches from the restaurant we ate in, so many times people on the street asked me if I had a light (or at least made that universal sign language of needing a match), I figured at least once I could just give them the entire box of matches. Have I mentioned yet that all of Russia seems to be a smoker's paradise. Tobacco companies seem to even have done very well with rather young children. I have found the smoke to be a bit much at times but do miss actual non-smoking areas.

Our home-stay lady seems pretty nice and the room is good, although another of my list of questions about Russia is what is the obsession with absolutely gigantic pillows? How does one sleep on a pillow that the size of your head and of a great deal of your upper chest? We had a nice conversation and tea with her but it also was one of the conversations that led me to wondering about travel and being a foreigner in a foreign land.

My main accomplishment though, I was rather pleased with how I handled it and what I learned, was repairing the computer. Somehow, maybe the outlets on the train, the power adapter was no longer working. I had asked where some computer stores might be, or better yet, stores with lots of cables and thing who might not mind repairing things. I thought my chances of finding a replacement were pretty slim, maybe there was something similar or could somehow hack something together. It was one of the bigger cities in Siberia, but it is still Siberia.

There was learning about Russian retail too. There are lots of big stores along main streets, disappointingly mostly chains of stores that are all over the world. Does there really need to be a United Colors of Bennington in every town in the world? I kind of think not. Sad about local color ending up being the same boring color as everywhere else in the world. But a lot of the action seems to be in plain buildings, on 2nd and 3rd floors, down hallways with 20-30 doors. If you can't read the signs out front, or especially the signs at the end of the hallway, you would have no idea anything was there.

I was given some vague locations, this street, somewhere on a 2nd floor. The first place, a store just out on the main street, a small one though, I started out in English. The store actually sells Asus too. He speaks pretty decent English and he can't help, but is nice enough to walk me around the block to the service center, where they can't help either. They say they can order one, might take a few weeks, but by that time, I'll be in Mongolia or China or somewhere. Then he walks me down a few blocks to another computer store, another small one. He was very nice I have to say.

That store, I also start out in English. The guy sort of understands, not so much though. It sounds like they also have a service center. Somewhere, I can't understand where and the guy doesn't know how to tell me. He asks the guy at the desk, begs a bit, finally he relents and tells me where it is. He seems extremely annoyed that he has to speak English, which he seems to pretty well. I guess I understand but also kind of don't. Maybe he is tired of being the go to English guy, or maybe he had a bad day, I don't know. But the service center, just around the corner again, they have nothing, but he is nice enough to recommend some other place and prints out a map of how to get there, a few blocks away.

This is one I never would have found on my own, up some back stairway, down a hallway, through one of the dozens of doors. This one looks promising though, very geeky, lots of parts and wires and people standing in line having written down part numbers where a very busy woman types stuff on her computer and sends two people behind her scurrying to get the parts out of some drawer from the back. This might be it. And I've finally planned ahead. I stand in line practicing slomanni (broken), pacheeneet (repair), pahoji (similar). That and pointing at the voltage and all that, she seems to get it, but they have nothing. She can order one, be there Tuesday, which is our last day there, so not great but at least it is something.

Then on the next block, hey, that's the store the home-stay lady recommended, looks like a big proper computer shop. Might as well try there. I've got the routine down, I practice my words again, and although they get hung up on the fact that I had taken the UK adapter off, I come up with eemyet (have) and go back through broken and all that. Ahh, I am saved, after a few people try to help, a proper looking geek comes out and after I also throw in paryes(cut), to cut off the old connector and wire it to something new, then he brings out a voltage meter and start plugging it into a socket and measuring things. Yes, this is much better now. Yep, it isn't working, he confirms that and he has an idea.

He finds an old power cable in back, the right voltage and through somebody else, an 18 year old woman who works there, who is going to school to learn English and is quite keen to translate and practice, he says yes he can try to reconnect things if we can wait a few minutes. Of course, then I won't have to wait days or months, I have a few minutes. When he comes back, after we chat with this woman for a while (seems to be in love with some 25 year old artist from New York, wants to go there, all that), my connector is spliced to this other adapter and it works and I'm so happy. She says then, this man would like you to pay him 500 rubles. We are in the middle of a large chain type computer store, lots of clerks had come over during the whole process until he finally took over. But yeah, if he wants to make a bit of extra money on the side during working hours, when in Rome, I guess. I'm happy, I have a working power supply again (about £11 worth) and the woman was happy (got to practice her English, while she was at work) and the guy was happy (an interesting technical challenge as well as a nice bit of cash). Quest over though, back to normal life, seeing things and writing about them.

Russians in the DHSS

N 52 16.727 E 104 17.030 Thursday 25 September 2008 - Irkutsk

The end of the second full day on the train. It has passed pleasantly. The scenery has been lovely, it is relaxing just sitting and reading, and it is nice that there is no real need to do anything much at all. But it was time for bed. Ora was already asleep in her bunk. She had been coughing a lot the last few days and had slept a lot during the days too, she turned in a hour or so earlier. We got undressed and closed the curtains and were just turning off the reading lamps after reading a bit before bed and starting to go to sleep when we seemed to pull into a station.

At night, it is sort of a shame that it is getting light so early. Reading the guidebook, we seemed to pass through a lot of really interesting areas after dark, like a huge percentage of the Urals. We still make stops at all hours, some are short 2 minute stops, some are the full 15-30 minute ones. During the day, you look at the schedule and figure out which ones will happen when you are still awake, when you can get off the train and wander around for a bit, maybe buy a few things, some food, drinks, or whatever. We were getting to Novosibirsk after bedtime and figured we would just miss it, even though it sounded like the train station was quite interesting and nice to see. But now, since we were awake, let's go out and take a look and see.

The whole journey there so far, there have been a few people getting on and off but really not a lot of change in our carriage. Here, lots of people were waiting to get on, and at our carriage, there was a whole mass of soldiers waiting. Oh no, we have been invaded by the Russian army. Sure enough, getting back on the train, our fourth bunk had one of those huge high topped hats and some bags on it. It was still dark in the room and Ora was still asleep, but the rest of the carriage was busy with movement, lots of soldiers running around.

Up until now, the carriage was probably about 2/3rds full and the majority seemed to be tourists. We had a Russian woman in our room and there were a few other Russians scattered around but not many at all. Now there were 10 new people on, two of them their commanders (Vladim was the one in our room), and 8 other rather young and somewhat wild soldiers. They were just back from 10 days of training and were heading home, or back to their base, and they were ready to party.

We kind of reluctantly got up and gave up some of our space. I was on the bottom bunk at this point (a seat during the daytime). Ora got up too as Vladim got unpacked and settled and his other commander friend (can't remember his name) settled into our compartment with a few bags of chips and a few liters of pivo (beer). I suppose we were actually luckier than the rest. One of the other rooms ended up getting designated as party central and they had soldiers in there all night drinking and talking and I doubt they got much more sleep the rest of the trip.

I was rather tired and really did want to just go to sleep, but I did enjoy the next few hours. Vladim spoke English fairly well, still with some large gaps but considering our almost complete lack of Russian, he spoke pretty well. The other one apparently understood pretty well but wouldn't speak. Yes, as I write this, I'm pretty aware of my own lack of knowledge about Russian and feeling a bit strange about traveling somewhere where I am that ignorant of the language. I've mastered maybe spaseeba (thank you) and nyet russkie (the phrase for I don't speak Russian is still eluding me) and maybe am slightly starting to get Cyrillic down now, but do feel weird about it all.

They started in on the pivo and we had a nice conversation for a few hours, although a bit frustrating given the communication gap. We had a small phrase book with us (a very very very small one, with just barely enough words in it to understand some basic menus and signs) and we would have to keep referring back to it. Or Vladim would grab it and try looking for something, get frustrated and try to find another word that might actually be in there. Stupid phrase book. Sadly enough, we seemed to be the only one in the carriage who even had one. The next day, some of the soldiers would come in and look up things in it to help them with their conversations in the other rooms.

I'm still somewhat confused about what it was that Vladim actually does. Between the two of them, they seemed to be the commanders or teachers of the 8 others, although they didn't really bother much with enforcing a whole lot of discipline on them on the train. The second night, Vladim bolted our door shut when we went to sleep to keep them out, which turned out to be a good move because they were up all night and you could hear at least one of them going up and down the hallway trying all the doors to see if he could get in to chat, drink, or whatever. The provodnitsa was furious the next morning at them, yelling at them for all the cigarette butts and bottles through out the carriage. The two commanders though, one of them was the one who trains them on all the army stuff, rifles and artillery and whatever else. He seemed pretty burly and looked the part pretty well.

Vladim, after 15 years in the military, I guess was a software engineer by training, but doesn't do much of that. I think he was a major and he tried explaining what he did, but I still don't think I get it. I think in the Soviet army, he would have been the one who kept the military under the government/party line, the political branch of the military. He wasn't the commander of the base, or I think even the second in command, but seemed to be just under that but maybe telling them what the President wants to happen. In the New Russia, I'm a little less clear what people's roles are, how they have changed, or if they have changed much at all.

The military does seem to play a huge role. In St Petersburg, I flirted briefly with trying to buy some sort of jacket. We are heading into Mongolia soon and China after that and I suspect that it is going to be really cold. I have a lot of layers, goretex stuff and fleece and thermal layers, but I don't have a big thick jacket. Our guide on the walk in St Petersburg though that a nice thick wool navy jacket might be just the thing. We even went to the military store later to take a look, but when I saw the whole store was filled with young men admiring the display cases of medals, stocking up for their first military posting, and just really looking the part, I got a little shy and intimidated by the whole thing. To me, it would have just been a really warm jacket (and a fairly inexpensive one at that).

I might have even gone through with it if they had more historical (i.e. more army surplus sorts of things) jackets, but I think I would feel quite weird wearing something current and being seen as trying to play the part. The military seems to be present everywhere in Russia. There is universal conscription here, I'm assuming all males (Russia seems to be generally pretty conservative about attitudes towards women's roles, gays, etc), and they have to serve at least one year. Whether everybody that serves likes and supports the military, I don't know, but it does seem to be constant presence everywhere.

But I digressed quite a bit there, we were still up late talking about stuff. The other thing I have become quite conscious of while we have been traveling, especially in Russia is the attitude towards travel and especially long journeys like we are on. When we say we have been here and there and we are planning on going there then and we have been gone this long and will not finish traveling for a few more months, there seems to be a mix of wonder and excitement but also a bit of questioning why you would want to travel and maybe even some horror over it seeming a bit obscene and extravagant.

It has lead me a bit to wonder why I am traveling like this and what I hope to get from it. I'm already painfully aware of being very foreign, knowing almost none of the language and not many of the customs. Have I just come to look at the pretty sights and gawk at the natives? Am I just ticking off an impressive list of places I've been, not understanding any of them any better? Was it exotic and exciting to be in a carriage with two Russians trying to communicate and figure out what the world is actually like for all sorts of different people? Or was it just sort of a brief encounter, communication on a rather shallow level. Ora was lovely and it was sad saying goodbye to her, but what is it beyond that?

We have on one hand encountered different Russians, sort of amazed at our journey who also seem sort of horrified by it, why would you go somewhere that you don't speak the language? There seems to be something in that, that troubles me as well. There is also some attitude of quite strong nationalism. Why would you want to go to Mongolia? That's a horrible place and Mongolians are awful. As we have gotten further east, there seems to be a lot of underlying prejudices. I can understand the attitude of some we have talked to, a deep love of Russia, maybe a slight desire to see other places but always wanting to come back to Russia as the main priority and desire. I also find it troubling too, a desire to create a really homogeneous society, the reports of lots of racial attacks against Asian looking people, the attitudes we have seen towards them, wondering why we would even want to go see somewhere like Mongolia. Although all of this does seem like quite a lot for me to conclude from a very limited amount of time in Russia and relatively little contact.

On the other hand, it is strange then to fall in with other small groups of travelers, mostly couples and a few small groups of friends, many making almost the same journey as we are, or just spending a year or more traveling and living different places. After feeling so foreign for so long, there is a great comfort in finding a little oasis, even if English is a 2nd or 3rd language for them, is there a greater commonality, a greater chance for some sort of actual interaction, relationship, or whatever. We had dinner the other night with a couple from Melbourne (our eventual end destination), we had also encountered them a while back in St Petersburg. Maybe it is just a short comfortable conversation, a bit of decompressing from so much travel and feeling foreign, but then part of me wonders too if they (or some of the others we encounter) could be actual friends then when we make it to Melbourne. Ora, the grandmother on the train, was really nice and a lovely person, but could that have been any more than just a nice few days and a bit of sign language and stilted conversations?

Anyways, this entry has gone on far too long, and I haven't even made it off the train yet.

Train train, sixteen coaches long

N 56 18.297 E 68 50.818 - 23 September 2008 - Tuesday 14.34 Moscow Time

Not exactly sure what time it is now, local time that is. I think we recently crossed over our third time zone in two days. The next one should probably be sometime tonight when we are sleeping. Our train might be running about an hour late, but it is hard to say. The timetables are confusing and they run on Moscow time, and it is hard to say what time it is anyways. I guess it doesn't really matter so much anyways.

We have another about 36 hours to go. The last mile marker I saw was about 2800 something (kilometers). I'm starting to get better at sighting them. They are just along the tracks, you really have to scrunch down and press up against the windows to see them. You also have to watch carefully for them. I generally sit there, count slowly, if I see one flash by then counting again to like 35 I'll see the next one. The guides (one of them, we have two with us) have different points of interest and towns listed by the kilometer markers. There is this tension between being a little obsessive about seeing where you are all the time and just sitting and letting it flow by.

For a 72 hour train trip. it is easier to just let it flow by. Fall is in full flush here and it is very yellow outside, little flashes of red and green. The landscape changed quite a bit from what it was yesterday. It was more pine sort of forests yesterday, a little more dense than it is now. We passed through and over the Urals mostly last night while we slept, although they don't seem to be super high and spectacular of a mountain range, and passed into Asia (my first time in Asia) and into Siberia. The trees turned more into birch, become more sparse, the land is more meadows (apparently bogs) with numerous small lakes and reed marshes. I haven't seen much wildlife, but then we are whizzing by. There are occasional fields of crows and some ducks on lakes but I couldn't say about much else.

Ora (maybe Aura or something similar) is asleep in her bunk. We are sharing the cabin with just one other woman. The other bunk is unfilled. She is on her way back to Vladivostok or I think she said she lived somewhere near there, her seventh trip from there to Moscow. At least I think that is what she said. Her knowing almost no English and between C and I, our Russian is about the same. Our phrase book is only useful to a point. I wish we had bought the full dictionary. It makes communication very frustrating and extremely limited (not to mention very time consuming).

She is pretty nice though, a grandmother, she bought a few toys from vendors on the platform at different places we stopped. We disagree a little bit on the heating and the music. Have I mentioned the music yet? It is very cheezy, a strange mix too. It sounds like Russian pop (not quite as sickly sweet as Japanese pop, slightly more folk music) and some rap and even English language R&B/rap thrown in occasionally. One was singing about her lady lumps earlier this morning.

But when we got on the train, we noticed two things immediately. One, it is stiflingly hot and two, well, there was blasting cheezy music. We were happy to discover a volume knob in our cabin to silence it, but Ora seems to like it, so we turn it off and on occasionally. She is a brave woman, she is headed all the way to the end of the line (8 days worth) and she didn't bring anything to read. As for the heat, there are no controls that we can find. The first night was a sweaty one, until probably about midnight when the heat went off all together and it cooled down until they turned it on again sometime in the morning. But you can open the door into the corridor and cool the room down a bit, but I think Ora is also a bit sick (coughing a bit) and has been cold, even when the heat is blasting.

The provodnitsa (well, two of them but since they are on 12 hour shifts, we mostly just see one of them) runs a tight ship here. Open a window in the corridor and she shuts it for you. You have to sneak into the toilet to open that window and poke your head out. Well worth the view mostly and the fresh air. But she keeps things running well and nice and clean. The samovar is fantastic, loads of hot water all the time for tea and soup and I've just been drinking hot water most of the day on its own. She went through today sweeping (whisk broom) and fixing the carpet in the corridor and swept into our compartment. The nicest thing, they seem pretty proud of the carriage and their domain. Every time we stop at a station and get off and wander around the platform for 5-15 minutes, first thing, she heads right to the plaque on the side of the train (says Russia, Moscow to Vladivostok, or something like that, of course in Cyrillic) and she gives it a nice wipe down. The other provodnitsas seem to concentrate on wiping down the handrails as their first task off the train.

Time is strange on the train. It seems like a long time but is strange to think we are already half way there. It seems to pass quickly, especially since it has started getting dark fairly early, so much of everything passes by after dark (like the marker marking the beginning of Asia). I will probably just get into the rhythm of it all and we will be there and have to adjust to normal life again. Here you wake up, see where you are, make porridge and tea, read, get off the train when we stop at stations and see what they are selling on the platform, read some more, dig in the food bags for lunch (we stocked up before we left Moscow, cups of soup, bread, sausage, etc), read and look out the window more, find dinner things, etc. It is an enjoyable time.

I might head out into the corridor, sit on one of the seats there next to those windows and read there for a little bit.