arnika round the world

Our final days in Chengdu we decided to get active and headed off bright an early to climb Mt Qingchensan, a nearby holy Taoist mountain. Now when I say climb, I don’t really mean climb, more like walk. As with all Chinese tourist attractions, people don’t really want to have to work hard to do anything so the paved path up to the top also has a cable car running alongside. There is even speakers disguised as rocks so you can listen to the peaceful calming music all the way up!

To get there we took a taxi then a bus, then another bus which was packed with as many people as possible, walked a bit and arrived at the entrance, flashing our student cards for a sweet discount and into the mountain area. First though we had to get through the group of crazy women having a massive punch up at the entrance. Weird you say?Yes…very weird. Probably the strangest thing I have seen in all of China. I have no idea what is was about but something with an old lady fighting these younger women who worked there.It went on for about 30mins and was still going when we left with all sided throwing punches, spitting and kicking each other. No one tried to stop them, instead just crowded round to watch, and in cases getting stuck in making the whole thing this huge massive fight. None of the men stepped into stop them, they just yelled and argues with everyone else. Totally bizarre, eventually we left them to it and began our climb up the mountain.

It only took about 2.5 hours to get to the top, it it a sub-tropical area so very green and jungle-ly, temples are scattered on the way up which we went through to continue up wards. I’m not sure really what Taoism is, but it seems to have the yin and yang sign and gods that are similar to Buddhism around. The temples were pretty cool and made the way up interesting. The views were great a across the other hills, would have been a bit better if weren’t for the clouds which got thicker the higher we went and cut out all sense of being on a mountain top.

When we finally made it to the top, we found, a giant gold cow. Not what we expected but some sort of god I am sure, who knows really how they got it up the mountain?

(us at the top, the giant cow is inside the building behind us, pretty much is the size of the building)

We sped down hill the other way past a few shops and more temples and passed the empty lake before arriving back at the entrance.It was a beautiful walk and a great easy day trip from Chengdu. We stopped on route for some noodles then headed back to the city where we had the only bad meal in China. We listened to the waiters recommendation and ended up with pig snout soup and a fish soup, not so good and ended up being more expensive than anything else! so not so great.

The following day we were all leaving, Rdoc left at lunch time, I jumped on a Kunming bound train at 4 and Ross and Alice headed east somewhere in the evening. So it was the end of our little team and time for me to be really alone. The 20 hour train ride turned out to be great fun as the  5 Chinese people in my section where super friendly and we ended up drinking some horrible liquor all night, lots of beer and pigs ears (which I secretly put in the rubbish) they were so friendly with the help of the lovely Vivian, the only english speaker among them we had lots of fun silly games all night and of course taking about a hundred photos with me. The train was a lot flasher than the previous one so was a good night.

Everywhere I go Chinese people are just so friendly and never let you pay for anything! so good night, a long morning though until we finally finally pulled into to Kunming in the Yunnan Provence where I would spend the rest of my China time. I had decided as there was just so much to see in China I would travel a bit slower and just try see one place better rather than traveling too much. Yunnan is a great Provence with heaps to see, so it was good to be able to take it a bit slower round here for awhile rather than trying to cram too much in.

Chengdu is very famous for panda’s, basically the only remaining wild ones live close by and there is a big panda breeding center in the city. The government has thrown a lot of money into panda breeding the last few years and China and Chengdu are regarded as the place to go and see panda’s.

So of course our first day in Chengdu, Me, Alice and Ross joined up on a trip with our hostel and headed out to see what all the fuss was about. We left early in the morning to get there in time to see what panda’s do best, eat. Now I am not saying panda’s aren’t cute, they are ridiculously cute, particularly the baby ones who look like stuffed toys that move. And you can get really close to watch them which is cool. So pretty much panda’s are cool. But through our education the breeding center we quickly learned how panda’s are actually incredibly stupid animals and through natural selection/evolution/God getting rid of them (whatever way you swing) there is really no need for panda’s to be alive.

For instance

• A panda gives birth to twins 45% of the time but in wild can only look after one baby so the other one will always die
• When a panda first gives birth it often doesn’t recognise the screaming infant and tries to kill it
• Panda’s only eat bamboo, but can’t actually digest it at all so has to eat a stupid amount to gain any nutrition
• A panda eats for 9 hours a day, then just sleeps, often getting too overweight
• It is unlikely that a panda will find a mate that it likes making breeding not very common
• They can’t protect themselves, only using their black and white fun as a deterrence. Basically they are too fat to run away.

So really the only way the are still alive is because humans think they are cute then spend a crazy amount of money protecting them, when in reality they would have just naturally dies out, not because people were interfering with them (although that has happened to an extent) but because for the reasons above, they are pretty much the most useless animal ever. And what a good way for the government to look like they are nice”but we save panda’s!’

Now don’t get me wrong, they are so cute, and watching them is pretty amazing but really they are so stupid! And so are some people, a girl in our group was a little too excited about the pandas and paid the astronomical fee of 1000RMB (about $250 NZD) to have her photo taken holding a baby panda. I actually didn’t think any one would be stupid enough to pay that, but there you go, cute animals make people crazy! So we got to see baby panda’s, big panda’s, panda’s eating, panda’s lying around. We watched a horribly disturbing and poorly produced (blair-witch style) on panda breeding and graphic shots of every stage. The museum was kind of interesting and of course gift shops were everywhere- the stupid girl brought a panda mouse pad.

So in conclusion, if in Chengdu, go see the panda’ they’re cool….but just think about how stupid they are.

So my train to Chengdu wasn’t nearly as flash as the one to Xian, same class but just a bit crappier. I was settling in for a long night of train crazy-ness, which is a bit more crazy than Russia, no vodka however just an over abundance of tea and instant noodles. Spitting as well is not just restricted to outside, no, no spitting everywhere all through the train on the floor. Best to put your bags up on the luggage racks. By some fluke of nature, Ross and Alice, an English couple were sitting right near me and made the train ride actually kind of fun. They had meet some Chinese guy and his wife who insisted on taking us to the dining car for dinner where they fed us with food and beer and paid for the whole thing- awesome! The rest of the journey was pretty good, as long as you didn’t touch the floor too much. We rolled in sunny Chengdu about 11am where we had a hostel pick up to take us back to Sim’s Cozy guest-house, a fantastic hostel which was really just perfect. Set around beautiful gardens with animals, nice dorm rooms, cheap food, it was great!

Chengdu is in the Sichuan province and very famous for spicy food and panda’s. So naturally we saw and ate both (saw the panda’s and ate the food of course!). Chengdu was actually great and ended up spending 4 nights there. Ross and Alice were great to hang out with and we had heaps of fun. Rdoc came and joined us the following evening so had cool people to hang out with.

Once we arrived though we made use of the sunny weather to sit around and drink tea in Chengdu’s famous tea houses, where for $2 you get a cup of tea with unlimited hot water to keep refilling it. Everyone sits around for hours, drinking, gossiping, all playing cards or mah jong. One guy was even having his ear wax removed! So it was all happening at the tea houses. We sat around enjoying the atmosphere for a bit and checked out a nearby temple and ate some lunch.

Rdoc arrived the following evening after Alice, Ross and myself had checked out the panda’s (see next post) and sought out the best dumplings in town (all the wayon the other side of town). We wandering through the Tibetan quarter on the way back packed full of robed monks and shops selling prayer wheels, I walked back to the hostel via town and through the big Mao square with his statue overlooking the crazy fountains.

There seems to be a lot of people with missing limbs, instead of begging, singing into small sound systems on the side of the road for money…it was a bit odd and saw far too many on my walk.

Once Rdoc had arrived we headed out for dinner, hotpot of course. Chengdu and the Sichuan region are well known for their spicy food, spicier than usual in China and that is pretty spicy! And of course hotpot is one of the most famous meals. Hotpot is where you order a bunch of raw ingredients and get a big bowl of bubbling oil/broth that is heated to cook your food in, you then all sit around and chuck stuff in until it is cooked then fish it out with your chopsticks until its all gone. We found a messy and busy (always a sign of a good place) around the corner with crazy cheap prices, and no english. Luckily the staff were patient and helped us order a bunch of food. Our hotpot was half spicy and half mild,with the spicy side being dangerously overloaded with chillies and peppercorns.

(Alice and Ross get into the hotpot) 

The food was good, very good, but the spiciness was out of control, we sat red faced and sweating ordering more and more milk and beer trying to fight the burning chillies. But its kind of addictive and we got through it all, hot but happy…yum food. Back at the hostel we grabbed a couple of bottles of wine and chilled out before taxing over to an Irish bar where we had a couple of drinks and dancing happily until strangely a leather clad guy turned up and did a pole dance. Very weird.

The next day was pretty chilled out, headed to electronics mall where I picked up an external hard drive, then headed for another delicious meal at a little restaurant (food is just so good here!). Back at the hostel we hung out for a bit making use of the table tennis table with a few tournaments then grabbed takeaway burgers and a few bottles of coke (haha, so lame, but good, and chinese fast food, no dirty Maccas) and watched a dvd we picked up at the market. Great day!

Sometimes things are famous for the sake of being famous, much like many ‘famous’ paintings, statues, buildings etc, I have often wondered, why, out of all the things there are, is this particular thing famous? I mean why is the Mona Lisa famous, its not even that amazing, its just a painting that looks pretty similar to other paintings.

So it was with the Terracotta warriors, its probably the second most famous thing in China, so you HAVE to go see it. I contemplated skipping it but then thought I better not. I do remember seeing a documentary on the warriors years ago and thinking that one day I would get to China and see them. And here I was in China doing that. Don’t get me wrong, its pretty cool but so are other things…

Anyway before I get ahead of myself. We were heading to Xian home of the warriors and not much else on an overnight train. Nicer than Russian trains, but essentially the same. Slept a bit then arrived early morning, we jumped on a bus and made it to the Shuyuan hostel, which after Beijing was oozing charm and character. It was really beautiful, set around courtyards and all very nice. As we were essentially there to see one thing we got ourselves together grabbed some delicious steamed buns for breakfast and easily found the bus heading out to the site. Already this was a million times easier than the great wall experience. The bus took us right to the gate for only 7 yuan ($2) and we got a great half price student discount to get in which was good as the full price of 90 is totally ridiculous.

So for those who don’t know what the warriors are, essentially there was an angry king/leader guy who for some reason built thousands and thousands of life sized terracotta warriors, possibly to protect him in death. The cool thing is, is that every single one of them is individual with different faces, armours and shoes, there are horses, archers and all different type of warriors, but mainly the standard soldiers. So in the 1970’s some farmers digging around found the remains and ever since then archaeologists have been painfully putting them back together in 3 huge covered warehouses built over where they were dug up.

The warehouses are almost more impressive than the actual warriors in some points.You can’t really get that close to them as they are far down in these pits. We started with the smallest pit, pretty cool, some horse, soldiers. Then moved on to the 2nd biggest pit ready for more amazing-ness however strangely there was just the pits with no soldier’s in them, or they haven’t actually been uncovered yet, strangely unimpressive….even more strange was all the people taking photos of the empty pits.

The last one was very impressive, had over 6000 warriors all in rows. Very cool. The place was almost set out for the worst viewing for people hough, all the warriors face a high wall so you can’t see their faces and quite far down. I thought they could have done a better job in maximising the viewing. It was pretty cool though mostly just to see them in real life. Upon emerging from pits we headed to the museum which was overloaded with intense Chinese tour groups ( who are super intense…) , it was too much for us and we got out and fought off the people selling all sorts of stupid warrior related stuff. You could even have your photo taken with fake warriors then put on a mug! amazing! We made it out though grabbed some, lunch and headed back to town. Warriors done.

For the evening we headed down to the Muslim quarter which was a fun lively area with lots of Muslim restaurants which equal good bread. All Muslim’s in China seem to sell the same time of delicious bread, grilled with cumin, oil and chilly…very good. As it was our last night altogether as Tom was leaving in the morning to head off to a mountain and I was going to Chengdu, we had a few beers at the hostel bar then headed off to bed.

My train the next day was leaving at 4 and me and Rdoc had a pretty chilled out day, getting some internet stuff done and posting some things home. Went through the muslim quarter again which was really huge and full of alleyways with markets and food, very cool, probably the best part of the city. Then it was time to leave, off on my own (although not really as Rdoc came to Chengdu a day after me), another long 20 hour train ride south to Chengdu, home of Panda’s and spices

The rest of our days in Beijing we saw a lot. We actually began to get up early and ever got back till after dinner after massive days of sightseeing. its actually amazing how long the days really are when you get up and get out of the hostel by 9am! There is so much to see I Beijing and the city is huge (the whole area is the size of Belgium) so it takes quite awhile to get from place to place. Luckily the super efficient metro makes it easier but eve then it can take 45mis to get across town if you have to change lines.

But we did manage to see a lot, eat a lot and shop a lot. The main sight is Tienanmen square, only a short walk from our hostel, so one day we hired bikes and biked over to check it out. Beijing is great for biking as there are fenced off bike lanes and heaps of people on bikes which ca get a way with anything so not too much danger from cars driving into you.

We left our biked locked up and wandered through the surging masses of people around the square. We were there on a Saturday and it seems as it everyone of China’s 1.3 billion people had chosen to visit the square and the forbidden city that day. We pushed our way through snap happy tour groups all decked out in matching red caps. We waited patiently to get out typical shot with the forbidden city and Mao’s portrait in the background.

 (OK Mao’s portrait is just behind Tom’s head…)

The joined the throngs heading into the not-quite-so-forbidden-any-more city. Got a sweet student deal which made it a lot better. Heading through the area you follow this main central bit full of temples and palaces where the dynasties used to rule the country from, until the revolution of course. Its very ornate and impressive but so many people and after awhile it all begins to look very much the same. After fighting our way through the crowds we headed through the gardens, which were probably the coolest part, then we ended up right down the opposite end from where our bikes were. So a long walk back to pick them up the biked over to the sack street which is the greatest street ever. Basically the sell a lot of food o sticks. And if there’s one thing I have learn t in china is that food on sticks is a good time. You can get live scorpions on sticks, starfish as well as usual chicken and lamb, there is also fruit dipped in sugar which is a good time. So we spent a bit of time filling up on various foods before biking back through the hutongs via the impressive opera house all the way back home. It was super cool going through all the hutongs as each area is different, there is more upmarket bits, some set around beautiful lakes.

Our other couple of days we went shopping and got carried away with Mao related souvenirs. I got a sweet Mao watch ad he waves with each second….it broke though. SO much cool stuff to buy but can’t carry it all. It only got worse when we went to silk street, a big market with knock off clothing. So so so cheap and all very cool. We all brought a few things after hard bargaining and fighting with very angry and persistent shop assistants. You can get jeans for about $25 and I got some gold chucks for about $12….sad I don’t have room in my bag for a whole new wardrobe!

We also checked out Mao himself, in all his waxy glory, preserved just like Lenin but in a much grader complex. Its a huge deal to see him and you wait in a very long but fast moving lie with thousands of Chinese seeing their hero, strange China’s relationship with Mao after everything he did. Because there are so many people you don’t get a good a look as with Lenin, but seen him now so done.

We stopped by the night market one evening which had a whole street of things on sticks, much pricier than other places but we tried silk worms-surprisingly good ad some sort of sea snake.

 (Mmmm, grilled silk worms)

It was mostly just a fun thing to go and see and watch what is possible to eat. And that is everything…

We also spent the entire day at the summer palace. A huge palace set around a lake the emperors used to sped their summers in. Its really massive and you walk around the lake for about half an hour before getting to the main temple which is set on this big hill with so many different bits to go and look in.

 Its pretty busy but because it is so big if doesn’t feel so overwhelming and there are lots of bits with hardly anyone there. It was beautiful and so many different things to see. I like it a lot better than the forbidden city By the ed of the day though we were stuffed from walking, but it was back to the hostel to grab our bags and jump on the over night train to Xian.

We had brought our tickets the night before and were ready for a huge ordeal trying to get then, but it was so easy, only 2 metro stops away, a foreigners desk with no one else there, a lady who spoke english, the tickets and beds we wanted and pretty cheap. It took about 2 mins to get them and then we were heading back home. Amazing! I love this country….

So Beijing, great city, so much cool stuff to see ad we didn’t even get to a quarter of it. Food was great, we had some awesome meals, like hotpot, things on sticks, random street food. I can’t even begin to describe everything we did as it was a crazy busy few days with so much going on and so many crazy things. Will definitely be back in this city sometime though- I love it!

Of course being in China there are a few things which are ‘must see’s’, the most obvious being The Great Wall (TGW). It is one of the new wonders of the world as well so I can add it to my list of ones I have seen, only 2 more to go to complete all 7!

The wall is pretty long (obviously) so there are quite a few places you ca go and see it at. I wanted to go to  bit called Simitai which is apparently a bit less touristy, while Rdoc and Tom wanted to do a hike which went from one part across to Simitai. The LP said it was a 4 hour walk up hill which I wasn’t really interested in, I just wanted to see a bit then get back to town to get some other things done. Of course things never work out as planned and the entire day turned out to be a lesson in patience as we somehow got involved in the great ‘great wall’ trasport scam.

Of course it looks easy in the LP, although by now we should have learn’t that it never is as easy as “just change to one of the regular cheap mini buses”. We all headed together for the first part which was easy enough, get to the bus station and take a bus to a town outside of Beijing. Strangely there were some over helpful women showing us the bus but we managed to mostly avoid them and got on our way. Of course though they had lined up taxis at the other end for us and one of their associates had gotten on the bus with us. Once we were getting into this town, we asked were to get off and this Chinese lady on the bus told the driver to tell us to get off at this main road. Waiting were lots of taxi’s and the women from the bus also got off and her car was there (how convenient) and tried to organise us a taxi. We ignored them all and tried to find the shared mini buses to get there. This lady was crazy insistent and followed us around in her car for about an hour making sure we couldn’t get on to a mini bus without her talking to them and then charging us some exorbitant price. It was super frustrating but eventually we got in one for reasonably cheap, although I was charged more than the boys even though it turns out I was only going half as far. Also while the driver said he would take me to the wall he actually dropped me 10km from the wall where there were even more taxis waiting charging more money.

By this time I was super pissed off and just started walking towards the wall getting more and more angry. After a bit a guy stopped ad took me to the wall, he was a photographer and was wondering what I was doing trying to walk the 10km to Simitai. So that was really nice.

TGW was of course amazing, the only downside is that is really just looked just like the photos, I mean really just like every picture you’ve ever seen. It stretched out across he top of this hill ad then once you were up you could look out and see it zig-zagging across the hills. It was beautiful of course and very very impressive, my photos though, look exactly how you’d expect! The best part was it really was quiet, hardly any other tourists, which made a good change from the rest of Beijing. Plus it was hot and sunny with clear blue skies which made it really beautiful and great views right across the wall.

(Really only one photo is needed as it really just looks like how you would picture it)

 Once you are up on TGW you realise that the whole reason of it being a defense thing was actually a bit useless, its not very high or wide at all, certainly not something that would keep out armies. And really it didn’t as Genghis Khan easily broke through the wall a few times I think. Also recently the first Chinese astronaut was sent into space and upon returning was asked by waiting Chinese media if you could indeed see TGW from space as we have always been led to believe….well turns out you can’t. And really why should you be able to. Its long, but so are lots of roads and rivers and mountains. But despite it not really being much use in warfare, it makes a very cool thing to see. Its really steep, with dodgy stairs and crumbling sides. The watch towers break up the sections which have little rooms and windows. I ended up climbing right up the top of the Simitai section and by the time I was heading back down Rdoc and Tom were arriving, turns out it only took like 2 hours to walk ad I probably did just as much walking as them! But having 3 of us made it easier to bargain a lift back to the bus station. Of course there is some monopoly on taxis and we couldn’t get a cheap ride. We eventually found an American couple who had a mini van they hired waiting for them, but the driver refused to let us come unless we paid just as much as they had paid, super frustrating! eventually we gave in and he handed over half as commission to the taxi ‘ring leader’. Very annoying, but eventually we got there, got a bus and made it back to Beijing, quite late by now and didn’t really get to do all the other things I wanted, but despite frustrating transport TGW was very cool and well worth it. I would totally recommend people do an organized tour though as it works out to be about the same price and far, far less hassle.

Yep, I really do love Beijing. Maybe it was the contrast of having average food over the previous 6 weeks and too much wide open space, and the unfriendly-ness, expensiveness and language problems of Russia. And lots of cold weather. Because by contrast Beijing was warm, friendly, food everywhere and good, cheap, english speaking, big buildings, ally ways bursting with character, so much to do and see. Basically it was awesome. We spent about 4 and a half days there which wasn’t enough time to see even half the stuff  there is but we did pack a lot in! For the first time we started getting up early, and actually leaving the hostel before 9am to fill the entire day with stuff and arrive back exhausted in the evening. Needless to say we didn’t actually go ‘out’ in Beijing as we were shattered every day from seeing so much stuff.

Our hostel was not exactly the ambient courtyard as described in the LP, more a hotel with a small courtyard across the road. So our windowless basement dorm wasn’t the best but it was cheap and clean as situated in the perfect location. Beijing used to be all hutongs which are little alleyways, most have been knocked down for high rises but they still remain and we were staying in the best hutong ever (I swear really its the perfect street). It was only about 15 minuted walk from Tienanmen square and pretty had everything you could need down it.

Firstly the food, which is really the best part about China. Down the hutong was full of every type of food you could want. There were little hole in the wall restaurants serving noodles and veges, hotpot places, dumpling places, a guy who made these yum omelet things in the morning. Some people who had seaseme balls in the morning and kebabs in the evening, a Muslim grill which did lamb kebabs and amazingly good bread with chilli and cumin, a place that had egg muffins, fruit shops, and of course lots and lots of duck.  Different times of the day meant different food and the morning was steamed buns, big towers of bamboo steamers overflowed onto the streets and for around a dollar you could get a big plate of vege or meat buns. In the evening the more typical chinese places would fill up with huge piles of meat and vege dishes with hilarious names on their english menus like “exploding pigs belly” and “dressed vinegar potatoes” and more which were so ridiculous I can’t even remember. So of course I love food so I was very happy.

Our first night we headed straight out to check out the Olympic park. Everywhere you look is Olympic stuff, from coke cans and snickers bars to billboards and street sellers. Everything is Olympic branded, and why not as the Olympic areas are truly amazing and you can see why Beijing is so pumped about it. We went in the evening on the newly expanded metro, the Olympic line was pretty empty but you can just imagine it being packed with people during August. Coming out into the Olympic park the huge birds nest stadium was all lit up, looking even more spectacular than on tv screens, the tv tower had different light sequences lighting it up and the swimming pool, blue bubble thing was mind blowingly cool. There were still a lot of people hanging around taking photos and buying merchandise. The whole thing was really really amazing. Hard to see how any other Olympic city could compete with this. And it wasn’t tacky over-the-top amazing, it was all well done, stylish and just cool. Despite the fact they probably made thousands of people homeless to build it, it was very impressive.

On the way back to our hutong for dinner, I suddenly felt very, very hungry and a bit dizzy, mostly because I had hardly eaten anything all day as we were on the train and back in Mongolia I was too lazy to go buy train food. So feeling a bit faint I had to sit down on the subway platform for a rest, while I said to Tom and Rdoc that I really thought I was going to faint. Well turns out that I did faint, I just couldn’t remember the last few minutes. So as I lay on the ground spinning out a bit and getting funny looks, Tom ran off to get me some coke.  Coke made me feel a lot better and soon we were back, sat at the first restaurant we saw and had an awesome dinner with duck, spicy veges, tofu, beer, tea, all for about $5 each. Awesome.

(Before)

(After)

So came the end of our Mongolia trip. 2 weeks, mostly spent out in the country side…which really is most of the country. Pretty much UB is the only city in the country with the rest being mostly the odd Ger dotted around and a few towns. The food wasn’t as bad as I thought as I was able to eat happily every day by picking out the bits of floating mutton. However I was keen for a bit of spice and flavour which I was expecting from China.

Once we arrived back to our guest house I was just way too tired to cope with doing anything. After showering and washing some clothes (so dirty….) I watched BBC and we ordered pizza to be delivered. So lazy! Turns out I should have gone to change money as I am now stuck with about $15 of useless tugregs (Mongolian currency) which I can’t change in China. I am really keen to come back to Mongolia to see more of the country and try to do something where you spend a bit more time with local people as most places we stayed we didn’t have that much contact with the families. Although from speaking to a few people who did family stays it sounds a bit intense, as in slaughtering the animals and preparing it…might have to train myself to like mutton before then.

I think in the summer it would be good to come back and take a tent and go camping and hitchhiking around as there is not really anything as private land so camping is the best way to do it. Paulin the french guy we had meet in Russia was pretty much doing this, although he is much more hardcore than I could ever be. Him and another guy were trekking and hitchhiking through the snow and finding Ger’s along the way which would take them in. Randomly we came across them in one of these towns along the way were they were waiting for a lift. Very funny to see someone you actually know in the middle of Mongolia!

Our train for China was leaving the morning after we arrived at 8am. So we just got ourselves together and went to bed, thankfully picking up our passports compleate with Chinese visa’s. The train in the morning was another forcibly expensive train in 2nd class. A big train this time, lots of foreigners but all spread out and we were the only foreigners in our carriage. The train ride took us back south through the Gobi then a long drawn out border crossing where they had to change all the wheels (or whatever trains have) as Russian/Mongolian trains have a different gauge than China so every carriage has to be lifted up and changed. It was around 5 hours in the middle of the night at the border before heading off into China, we arrived in Beijing at 2pm the following day and in the morning had great views of the Great Wall as we followed it along for a bit then through some amazing mountains. Beijing started far before we arrived into the station and high rise apartment buildings and highways lined the tracks. Finally pulling into the station we stepped out into the amazingly warmer Beijing air and went head first into the mass of people that is China.

(for a more complete and probably better written account of our trip check out Rdoc’s blog here)

We survived our 13 hour drive through the mountains to arrive in a small town. Petty exhausted from the drive we didn’t leave till late the next day. The drivers spent most of the morning practically rebuilding the vans, when we asked what was wrong our driver said “too much Gobi!”

We wandered down to a local shop to stock up on chocolate and bread for the next few days. It was freezing cold, and very windy so we spent a long time in the shop trying to avoid going outside. he town was another non-descript, dirt road, big fences type place. Soon we were back in the vans and driving to our next destination. There was still lots of snow on the ground and we drove past (and through) lots of frozen rivers.

That night was spent in an amazing location set in the hills all covered in fresh pure white snow. The snow in Mongolia is the whitest most powdery snow I have ever seen. We were close to a waterfall which was totally frozen in motion, very cool. We also loaded up on horses and went for a bit of a token ride around which was kind of cool. Generally I am not a big fan of horses but Mongolian horses are different in that they are strangely small so not so far to the ground if you fall. We rode our horses around a bit, even getting them running for a bit. But I was glad to get off after an hour as my butt and toes were getting numb. Eventually we were on the road again stopping via a monastery in the hills.

During Stalin’s rule most Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia were destroyed but recent years has seen lots of them restored. This monastery is really in the middle of nowhere, then a hour walk up a hill to where i is built among snow covered hills with amazing views. A young shy monk lead us up to the buildings and let us in the rooms where they pray. We climbed right up some vertical cliff face to a big rock pile covered in blue ribbons then back down where there are some tiny caves a guy lived in for 11 years. The whole place was beautiful, mostly because of its remote location. Back down the hill it was a long drive to the next town of Karakhrum, the old Mongolian capital.

Now its just a small dusty town, but it does have a big monastery which we checked out in the morning. Lots more monks around, and some nice buildings. The other van load left us at the point to head back to UB while we pushed on through for another 4 days. It was day 9 by this stage, that is 9 days with no shower, no running water, toilets that are really just holes in the ground. I can’t say I wasn’t a little jealous when the other group headed back to civilization. But of course the next 4 days were great.

(our whole group on some random fake yak’s)

We headed north towards the white lake stopping on route at our drivers family house. We picked up some bottles of arag to try, which is fermented mares milk. People sell it all along the road for a couple of dollars a bottle. It was pretty disgusting, although not quite as bad as the fermented camels milk we tried on the first day. We also picked up some yak cream which kind of had the consistency of cream cheese and tasted surprisingly good. Over the next few days we came up with multitudes of uses for it. Yak cream and jam on biscuits. Cream on chocolate, in coffee, on bread….it was good and a bit addictive.

We had 2 nights at the White lake which was a beautiful big lake, partially frozen over. We were supposed to go horse riding again on our full day there, but the horses never turned up…apparently they didn’t know where they were. But we walked over to a volcano crater instead which was pretty cool. From the top you could see where the lava had spilled out and spread over the country side.

(Our van load with our awesome driver)

From the white lake it was a 2 day drive back to UB. 2 very long days. Our last night we stopped at a place known as small Gobi because of its sand dunes and gobi like scenery. The man whose Ger we were staying in was really funny and kept coming to check on us. In the morning when we asked to take a photo he disappeared inside to put on his ‘photo jacket’. We had picked up Gana (our drivers) wife who was coming back to UB. On our last day we all stopped at some Mongolian restaurant on the side of the road where the boys all ordered big plates of fatty mutton…I stuck to a salad.

Finally we arrived back into UB, back on paved roads, back in traffic. UB was even uglier that I remembered after 13 days of amazing scenery. It took us an hour to navigate the traffic back to the hostel.

A shower has never been so good

Space is likely to be the thing I most remember about our 13 day Gobi trip. Lots of flat, open space. While beautiful not altogether helpful if your a female trying to find a toilet spot.

Through our guest house we had arranged a van and a driver to take us for 13 days through the Gobi desert in lower Mongolia then up through central Mongolia before heading back to UB. We had meet an American couple,  Stuart and Tina, who would split the cost and join us for our very long drive. For the first 9 days we were also joined by another van load from the guesthouse who were doing basically the same trip but not the last part of ours. The green van had Miriam and Rick from Holland, Stephan from Belgium and a Korean guy who we never really learned his name. So after just managing to get our visas into the embassy to get a Chinese visa and getting our train tickets for the day after we arrived back we load up our vans with 13 days worth of supplies and headed out into the wilderness.

I am not sure how to convey everything that happened over the 13 days into a blog post but I will try and maybe write 2. Our driver was Gana, a tough Mongolian guy who looked like he could fix anything. He also giggled constantly like a little girl. His entire english vocabulary centered around the word ‘good’, and a few others: van, Gobi, sleep, Ger, lunch. Most of our conversations went something like this.

“Lunch?”

“Lunch? Good now lunch?”

“Yep, lunch good”

And for looking like he could fix anything, well he could, really he managed to drive that van over anything, through anything and every day get it going again, He could light us fires, find us shops and even brought us biscuits along the way which became somewhat addictive. As we discovered in Mongolia, men are real men. No challenge was too great for Gana, whether it was reattaching the steering wheel after it feel off (while driving), rebuilding the entire gear box, navigating through snowstorms (which is difficult) and digging us out of icy roads. Awesome.

So our first few days were spent driving into the Gobi, which appeared after about fifteen minuted of leaving UB which is essentially the only main city in the country and pretty much has the only paved roads. We did come across paved roads about 9 days later but they quickly disappear into dirt tracks. Mongolia is the least populated country in the world so it doesn’t take long to get out of the city. The first few days were just huge wide open spaces, which was incredibly beautiful, our two matching Russian vans raced each other across wide fields, occasionally we came across herds of camels or horses. Looking through photos in our Lonely Planet was exactly the same as our views. You don’t need to be a professional photographer to take amazing landscape shots in this country. We passed gers, guys speeding across on motorbikes or riding horses rounding up sheep. Sun sets were incredible, the sky was always blue. It was awesome.

Every night we stayed in ‘Gers’ which are the traditional Mongolian tents. Most of the country are still nomadic and all live in these gers which are spread out through the country side. Each van load got our own Ger and the family would bring us in food and hot water and get the fire going for the night. While the fire was going they got hot but around 2 am once it had burned out it was cold, Very very cold. Part of the reason seems to be the fires aren’t really designed well enough to hold the heat, no chimney blocker to burn it more slow and given the lack of trees (as in none) there is no wood so you burn dried poo…..always a hilarious joke and taking turns going poo collecting. Every so often we would do an activity of sorts, like wander through an ice canyon (without the ice, but still nice), or check out some dinosaur excavation sights where they have found hundreds of dinosaur bones preserved in the Gobi.

The food wasn’t too bad. I had prepared myself for the worst, as from what I had heard food doesn’t get much better than mutton and mutton. We cooked our own lunch then got dinner which varied from mutton with noodles to mutton with rice or pasta, but mutton was easy to pick out and I was pretty much able to eat every night. I did have a bit of back up food for the few nights where there was just too much meat to handle. There was this strange taste to everything which quickly became the ‘Mongolian taste’, they have this weird hard cheese tastes like it, plus all the meat, sometimes the water and every house seems to smell like it. Kind of weird. But not as bad as expected. Rdoc seems to have had a bad reaction to something though as one day he got ridiculously sick and spent the whole night expelling everything from his body while totally spacing out. Luckily he recovered and pushed on through with the journey.

We did stop in a couple of towns along the way which are just dirt road small dusty towns with lots of Gers behind big fences, nothing too special and the open country side was much nicer, although the town gers were always a bit nicer inside with more blankets, better fires, closer toilets (always the outside hole in the ground variety) and electricity which kept our ipods charged to avoid listening to too much Mongolian music which our driver loved.

One night we spent at these massive sand dunes which stretch out in a long thin line across the Gobi, we road camels over too them in two groups, myself being in the second group, they left us on the dunes while the others rode the camels back to our site.

The dunes were beautiful but pretty soon it began to snow and it got cold. It was amazing watching the snow pile up on the dunes but an hour later when the camels never returned to pick us up we got a little worried. Luckily from the distance our van was bouncing over to rescue us, while it seems they just forgot to come back and get us. This is Mongolia and things work differently.

The next morning we awoke to a full on snow storm. The white gers blended in with the white sky and the white flat ground. We loaded up the vans and the drove in circles for 2 hours while the drivers tried to find the road (or track). Really it is amazing how we ever made it out of there as really all there was was white around us, no landmarks, we had no compass or anything but some how our drivers got us out of there, straight into a mountain pass where we spent about 5 hours digging and pushing ourselves out of snow banks and skidding across icy hills.

By the end it was a bit worrying and stressful and we were all glad we made it out alive. I did start to think how long we could survive in the van with no heater….but of course the drivers are super amazing and we got out. Of course we still had another 5 hours of driving to go in the dark to our next camp site. We were all tired and over it, especially our driver Gana, by the time we arrived at our campsite 13 hours later. A huge day that had totally stuffed the vans but had brought us out of the Gobi and into central Mongolia.