Galina's House

We are staying at a homestay in the village of Listvyanka, a village spread out for about three kilometres on the edge of Lake Baikal. The house belongs to our host, Galina, who has been giving us hearty breakfasts (pancakes called ‘oladdy’ with homemade strawberry jam made from tiny alpine strawberries) and lovely dinners (tonight we had a fish called ‘ormul’ which had a thumbs up from everyone). Before dinner we all pile into the ‘baina’, a Siberian outhouse which is like a sauna, and where you mix boiling water from a heater into ice cold Baikal water. It is very refreshing and manages to clean even Harry’s toes, so it must be good.

Another thing for us to get used to is the toilet, which is very much an outhouse. It is also a long drop toilet, so there is no water and all the ‘night soil’ and wee will be used to fertilise Galina’s potato patch in the spring! It doesn’t smell (well, it doesn’t smell bad- it actually smells quite peaty and pleasant!) and Maisie thrills to the novelty of not having to flush- Harry doesn’t notice any difference, as he rarely bothers anyway.

While the children are getting to sleep we watch Russian TV with Galina. We watch the 5 o’clock news at 10p.m. as it is Moscow time and we are in Irkutsk! The TV is a wonderful parade of misery, whether it is the news (Satanists kill four women!) or their version of ‘Surprise Surprise’ where they reveal they have tracked down a long lost relative, only (sorry) they’re dead. We watch the biography of a murdered model and a ‘People’s Court’ where everyone has moustaches (including the women) and shout at a bad guy. No wonder everyone thinks Russians are miserable! Well, Galina and our guide today are not, and have been warm and welcoming hosts for our time in sunny Siberia.

Lake Hike

We have an ex Russian Army guide called Geena to take us on a so-called ‘soft hike’ around Lake Baikal. The lake itself has many superlatives attached to it: oldest lake in the world, deepest lake in the world and more fresh water than any lake in the world (20% of the world’s non frozen fresh water, apparently). Whatever, it is a beautiful lake and the 15km hike we did showed it in it’s best light. It contains lots of different micro climates and more butterflies than you can shake a stick at. The trees are mostly pine and beech (‘Biroza’) and cling to the steep slopes around the lake. The paths are fit for mountain goats, but Harry and our guide lead the way admirably.

We don’t see another soul on the way and stop for lunch on a pebbly beach. Geena makes a camp fire and cooks us sausages and mashed potato which fuels us for the walk back. The brave souls have a paddle in the impossibly cold water- which, as legend has it, prolongs our life for another ten years!

Here is what the experts have to say;

Harry: “The walk was fun. I went all the round the mountain and saw lots of grass grass, lots of the trees and lots of the hills. I had sausage and potato and cucumber and chocolate on the rocks. I went into the lake Baikal and it was freezing cold. It was like I was ice. Our guide made a fire. He said ‘You are a good tourist’ to me”

Maisie: “We walked fifteen kilometres. I saw butterflies and caterpillars, the lake was amazing because it was really big. I went paddling in the lake up to my knees but it was freezing cold. It puts twenty five more years on your life. My legs feel wobbly.”

Marcelle: “The walk was a wonderful, refreshing change after all the polluted cities we have seen. It was great to walk with, and get to know Kevin and Lolita who are from the UK and on their way to Mongolia and Bejing! Thank-you and good luck with the rest of your trip! I was very proud of Maisie and Harry who managed the longest walk they have ever done and thoroughly enjoyed ever step. I was pleased too, I’m fitter than I thought!”

Top Train Essentials

Harry
1 Superheroes (Nightcrawler & Klaw)
2 PSP (Superhero Squad & Monster Trucks)
3 Instant Noodles (especially Curry Pot Noodle!)
4 Bunks to climb on/jump off/hang from
5 Crisps (any flavour)




Maisie
1 Books (Inkspell & my journal)
2 Card games (Uno, Knights and Fluxx)
3 Ritz crackers (Yummy!)
4 Instant noodles (the ones with ‘dog biscuits’?!)
5 A blanket

Marcelle
1 Peace and quiet (rarely gets this)
2 A shawl to keep me warm!
3 Book (Ian Rankin- Watchman at the moment)
4 Snacks (Wasabi crackers from Beijing)
5 Husband (ironic entry)




Matt

1 Jar of Peanut Butter (instant hunger suppressant)
2 Doctor Who (end of Season 4, all of Season 5)
3 Sporks (one each!)
4 Water filter flask (filters water from the bathrooms!)
5 Fenix L1D torch (useful when the lights don’t work during station stops)

Life On Board #2

We are really getting into the long train journeys and have a good set of routines to while away the hours of having nothing to do and all day to do it in. The first port of call are the windows, looking out of which is like watching the Discovery Channel. You snap out of gazing at the sights not really knowing how long you have been staring into the middle distance. Then there is the food. Maybe a sweet every half an hour, which is a pleasure to look forward to (“Oooh, a chinese milk sweet please!” or “Can I have one of those bright pink Russian ones!”). Then there is a hot drink to pass twenty minutes or so. And then the joy of meal times! Everyone crowds anxiously round to choose their particular brand of instant noodle and then they might jazz it up with canned fish, or have it with vegetables and a hunk of whatever the local equivalent to bread is. Maybe it will be finished with a course of Ritz crackers with peanut butter if we are feeling particularly decadent!

The samovar provides all the hot water and is nestled at one end of the carriage, bubbling away and looking for all the world like a household boiler, but probably not breaking down and needing fixing for vast sums of money on such a regular basis. On this train we are given ornate metal holders for our glasses and use them to make tea, coffee, hot chocolate and, of course, wine. There are also people getting on the train with cold drinks and beers, but we haven’t yet changed up any roubles to try out their refreshments.


The entertainment (after the views, food and drink) are many and varied, but include making a rocket out of an old cardboard box, chatting to people at stops, read our books, dozing, playing on the PSP, bunk gymnastics, playing with pet shops or superheroes and diary writing. Then there is the dreaded ‘Daddy School’ which consists of making the children do an hour or so of something to prevent their brains turning into mush after nine weeks of no school. Maisie usually submits to this torture in a mild way, but then spends ages sighing and noodling and avoiding doing anything of any real substance. Harry reacts in a much more extreme manner and usually tries to escape the carriage. I haven’t yet chased him over the train rooftops, Indiana Jones stylee, but we still have four days of train journey ahead. He is then dragged to the small compartment table, complaining all the way, but eventually settles down to do fifteen minutes of some low level activity before we give up.


One of the highlights however, has been to watch Doctor Who. We have said goodbye to the wonderful David Tenant and have quite liked Matt Jones. Watching top notch BBC entertainment on a train barreling across the steppes is wonderful and we are having to ration out the episodes in order to make season five last as long as possible. After this we have our fallback position which is Bear Grylls; watching him chew on a live grub makes even Maisie more thankful for her mutton pot noodle...

Ulaan Bataar to Irkutsk Train # 263

Saying goodbye to UB, we board the train just before 9PM. This train had no dining car, so we have to make doubly sure that we have enough food for the next two nights and a day. Things are a little complicated as the timetable for the train is all in Moscow time which is actually eight hours time difference to Irkutsk! Luckily there is a Mongolian Secondary School teacher who speaks good English and explains that the train will get to the Mongolian/Russian border at 6:30am, and that if we were processed fast we will leave on the Russian side at 3pm at the earliest! Sometimes it takes up to eleven hours to get through.

This train is Russian, and is the high standard we have come to expect from these train journeys. The seats and beds are comfortable and the carriage is modern. When the train starts, the air con comes on, and is kept at a very comfortable temperature throughout the journey. We also come across our first ‘Provodnik’ and ‘Provodnitsa’ who are the male and female conductors for our carriage. The first one is a guy who looks like Peter Weir from ‘Robocop’, so we take him quite seriously. The next shift is taken over by a ‘Provodnista’ who is like Les Dawson in drag, only without the jokes. We take her quite seriously too...

The train chugs out of UB, and we pass typically Mongolian countryside of rolling steppe that doesn’t really change until the next morning. It has then begun to look more hilly and there are lakes and streams dotting the landscape. At the last town on the Mongolian side (which is mainly built around a sawmill) we spy the last ger of our trip. Mongolian border guards get on and take a few hours to search cabins and process the passports, and then the train moves off again. Then it stays in no man’s land for hours...We sit, we make lunch, we  read, we sit some more and then the Russian border police come on and take the passports in a leather briefcase. The customs official is a bored, blonde woman with startling taste in eye make up, and Maisie says ‘She’s beautiful!’. She doesn’t smile.

As we had been promised, we leave at 3pm. It only took us a mere eight and a half hours...

UB or Not To Be

Ulaan Bataar is a very odd capital. There are all the things you would expect: Ghenghis Khan’s image carved on to a hill? Check. Gers right near the city centre? Check. Mongolian Barbeque Restaurants? Check. However, UB is also a city that is trying to be startlingly modern with it’s stretched Hummers, shopping malls that are so new that they don’t yet contain shops (or shoppers) and the noise of new buildings and apartments going up all the time. The whole place was not quite as post communist as I had feared and although it is a little shabby and dusty it is trying to assert it’s own character. It is also a place that is such a contrast to the stark and simple beauty of the open steppe and as you approach it in the train or by road it does look a little odd to have 1 million inhabitants crammed into a small valley when the rest of the country is empty of people. 

We have been staying in the Bayangol Hotel which, like UB, is a little dog-eared but essentially OK. It is only a stones throw from Sukbaatar Square (where you can see a giant statue of Ghenghis Khan in front of Parliament House and be accosted by drunken Mongolians) and not far from the National Museum (a very good recount of the insanely colourful history of a nation that has been responsible for changing world history) or the Natural History Museum (fossils and badly stuffed animals). The 36 hours we have been in the capital have been enough time to recharge our batteries, catch up on the internet and pick up supplies before the trip into Russia.

Three Weeks In

We have been through five capital cities (Bangkok, Vientiane, Hanoi [well, it used to be!], Beijing & Ulan Bataar) and have covered 5,650 kilometres. It’s time for a map and a recap:

Maisie: “I liked the Gobi. The gers are really interesting and I liked staying in them because  they’re amazing. Mongolian food was OK, but I didn’t like the horse milk or sheep milk. We made friends with Sorcha and Hannah too!”

Marcelle: “My favourite part of last week was Sainshand and being in the Ger. The contrast between hot and cold was amazing. We had a great guide,  great company with people we had met on the tour and the hilarious journeys in beaten up old vans!”

Matt: “I loved the Gobi desert and had a moment of complete bliss sitting in a bumpy old Ukranian van that was being driven at excessive speed across the desert, eating strange berries our driver had just found, whilst listening to Black Sabbath on the iPod speakers. Perfect! I also liked Mongolian mutton, which was good, as there was nothing else...”

Harry: “My best thing was winning van races with the other van. Because Jow Ha goes very fast and took over the other car we keeped winning. I did the bow and arrow and was winning. We played games with bones and I keeped winning.” (a certain theme has emerged here...)

We are now heading off for the Russian border tonight and then Irkutsk, on the shores of Lake Baikal (930 kms) and after that we do the BIG one: trans Siberia for 5,150 kms over three days and three nights!

Mutton Jeff

I had been scaring Maisie about the food in Mongolia, and I think she thought it would be something out of a Bear Grylls nightmare. However, it was more like a disaster for our waistline. Here are a few culinary delights you can expect at a Ger Camp:

Breakfast: doughnuts, rice filled omelettes, plaited rolls, rice pudding, chips & sausage, eggy bread, sandwiches, chocolate filled pastries.

Lunch: coleslaw, consomme, mutton curry, chips, arctic roll, mutton spaghetti bolognese, cherry compote, mutton pasties, egg drop soup, wagon wheels, mutton burgers, vermicelli noodle salad, mutton dumpling soup, banana & chocolate smoothie

Dinner: coleslaw, mutton dumplings, salad, mutton shepherds pie, fresh yoghurt, spatzli & mutton, custard & cranberries, leg of mutton, mutton stock soup, lemon cake

It’s plentiful and also contains more mutton than I have eaten in my life so far. Luckily there  have been no mutton dishes on the breakfast menu...

Elstei Ger Lodge

Just like the Ger Camp at Sainshand, Elstei Ger Lodge feels like it is in the middle of nowhere. Only this nowhere is green and verdant pastures with hills rolling off into the distance and semi-wild Mongolian horses galloping all over the shop. This is Ghenghis Khan’s backyard, and you wonder why he’d want to leave to rape and pillage the known world. There are twenty or so gers which are larger than the ones at Sainshand and more ornate in their furniture and paintings. The food is good and comes thick and fast, but I’ll write about that in another post.

We go riding on the horses, only these ones are more semi-retired than semi-wild, but it is a lovely way to pass a couple of hours and Harry and Maisie are thrilled. We also go and visit an old Grandma nomad, a twenty minute walk across the steppe. She has prepared omelettes in curd, sheeps cheese and yoghurt and ‘airag’ the traditional fermented mare’s milk. It is unpasteurised and has been covered and left to it’s own devices for four days. It tastes like a cross between vinegar and sick and for some bizarre reason, I ask for seconds. I won’t try it again. Harry spends ages on the way back capturing grasshoppers that click and buzz as they fly through the air.

On one of the afternoons there is a summer storm and everyone has to run round and batten down the hatches. The horses are driven from their corral and I rush back to the ger to cover the roof ‘window’. Daytime lightning cuts the sky and I can see why I am being asked to take down the steel chimney in my ger. After the storm a couple of calfs wander round the gers and get inside one belonging to our neighbours, a couple of Mongolian holiday makers. I try to communicate to them what has happened using sign language but they laugh at my attempts. Later, me and Maisie see them cleaning out their ger, their belongings well and truly ‘fertilized’...

Sainshand to Ulaan Bataar Train #289

Leaving the Gobi ger camp, we headed back to Sainshand to catch the train to Ulan Bataar. Sainshand is not the prettiest of towns, and once we poked around the two museums that the town boasts, that was that! One of the museums told the story of how a brave buddhist devotee hid spiritual treasures from the cleansing might of Russian atheism  from the 1920’s to the advent of democracy in the 90’s. The other museum told the history of Sainshand from the time of the dinosaurs to the present day. During our visit there was a power cut, so we took the rest of the tour by torchlight, eerie stuffed camels and caveman mannequins looming out of the dark!

We got on the train at 7:30pm for an 8pm departure. This train was very old, but clean- a samovar boiler at one end of the carriage and another of Ghenghis Khan’s female descendants as our carriage mistress. The air conditioning whilst heading through the Gobi was a window that opened stiffly. A Mongolian family was singing a farewell song and  dancing in a group huddle on the platform; it sounded very forlorn. The train set off and the sun set in a blaze of golden fire. We put the children on the bottom bunks as there was no rail to stop Harry tumbling down in the night. The open window blew a dry desert wind on to my face. As soon as it was dark, an electrical storm of epic proportions began. Lightning stabbing down from one end of the horizon to the other, sometimes arcing back up into the clouds without striking the ground. Weirdly, there was no sound of thunder. At about 1am we passed through rain and I felt large drops of rain hit my face. I wrestled with the window and just about wedged it shut.

We woke at 6am as we had heard the toilets were locked an hour before arrival in UB for some reason. We made some porridge and watched the new greener landscape unfold out of the window. Every now and then we passed a group of gers and then the suburbs of Ulaan Bataar. We had been promised no Starbucks or Maccy D’s in UB, so you can imagine our surprise and horror when Maisie spied a sign for IKEA! IKEA in Mongolia! Is nothing sacred? Do they still have bookcases called Billy and tables called Sven, or are they instead named Ghenghis and Kublai? We shall probably never find out...

They’re Ger-eat!

Harry: “A ger is quite big on the inside but from the outside it looks like small. We saw them making a ger. To get the roof they put some sticks to make sure the roof doesn’t fall down. It is fun inside because there’s a lot of room inside. The insects come in my bed and pinch me. They are stupid. It is a circle in the ger and you lock it with a padlock from the bad guys. Out of the door I can see dust and lots of grass, for a million thousand metres.”

Matt: “Gers, confusingly, are built of walls. These are sections of lattice that are bent round and lashed to the next section in order to make a circle. The ones we stayed in at the Gobi ger camp had four walls which is the default size in Mongolia. Families might have one of these for the adults, one for children and one for cooking. Up to forty spars and two vertical beams attached to a central ‘wheel’ make the roof and the whole lot is lashed together with bands and ropes before felt and canvas are heaved over the top. Putting one together is a whole family affair!”

The Sea of Gobi

We are driven to our Ger camp, forty minutes outside Sainshand, in ancient Ukranian UAV vans. They are like ugly VW campers on steroids and Jow Ha, our driver, puts it through it’s paces.  It feels cold and it is raining in the middle of the day. I am not expecting this. The Ger Camp consists of   24 gers in neat rows (apparently all ger doors have to face the south) with a permanent restaurant and toilet block behind them in the shape of a giant ger, although it looks more like the mother ship of an alien race as we approach it, bouncing and bucking over the endless grass.

It is early morning and the steppe looks magnificent in the dawn. We are tired after another night of four hours sleep, so get our heads down for a couple of hours before a hearty breakfast. After this we are taken out to see temples, dinosaur fossils, meditation caves and a circular patch of red rocks that are said to have recuperative powers. To get to all of these places we cross the Eastern Gobi where steppe and desert mingle and merge. There are no roads and no signs, and in every direction it looks the same. We realise that it is more like the sea than land.

The similarities continue. On the top of one hill we easily make out the shape of a beach and the green waters of a massive estuary that are optical illusions. The tufts of grass look like the tops of waves to complete the illusion. At night a row of lights come on at the front of our ger camp which look like a promenade, and in the distance, lights from a couple of other gers and the very occasional car look like ships out at sea. Just like the sea at night, you can feel the immensity of the steppe and a desert wind moving through the scrubby brush sounds like waves breaking on a shore. This is all the more paradoxical as we are now in one of the furthest points from the sea that you can be on the planet.

Two Weeks In

We have been traveling for a fortnight, so it is time to see what have been the highlights of the week and the trip so far:

Maisie: “The Sihe Hotel is very peaceful and I could read my book. There are also cats to play with. They are kittens and a mum and we sort of played around with them. I like River, she is one of the hotel assistants and she can speak really good English.”

Harry: “I liked going to acrobatics. There were thirteen people on one bike! A guy was like a monkey climbing up a stick and no one held it. Another guy got out some string and then rode on his head on a bicycle. I also liked the metal tuk tuk things because Maisie was screaming and mummy and daddy was really scared, but I wasn’t. They went on the pavement!”

Marcelle: “I liked visiting all the different areas of Beijing and looking at all the cool Beijingites. I was pleasantly surprised by the yummy food available and totally knocked out by the size of the place. I liked meeting Ariadna- meeting new people is one of the unexpected pleasures of travel!”

Matt: “I liked exploring somewhere new and leaving a place knowing I have to come back to explore it some more! My favourite part of week two was just taking in the atmosphere of the hutongs and getting lost down all the backstreets with their secret doors and red lanterns.”

Next week we hope to cover 850 km from Beijing to Sainshand and then 440 km to UB.

Beijing to Sainshand Train #23

An early start after four hours sleep and a couple of bottles of atrocious ‘Great Wall’ Chinese wine is not to be recommended. The early start did mean that we could reach Beijing Central Train Station with no traffic jams. We watched a crowd of early morning commuters lining up to go through the security checks for the subway and waited for our fellow Monkey Shrine travellers. There are eleven of us altogether, a British teacher from Hong Kong, an older teaching couple from New Zealand who are teaching in China and a British family who live in Hong Kong with a couple of teenage girls. Everyone is thoroughly lovely and we are glad to have diversions for Harry and Maisie!

The train leaves at 7:47am and we are once again on the move. So far we have been travelling North East from Bangkok to get to Beijing. Now we start to move slowly but steadily to the North West as we move towards Mongolia, and the direction of home. This train is very modern and is probably one of the best we have been on so far. The Mongolian cabin attendant is lovely and smiley, not the strict dominatrix types we had been warned about. We watch Beijing’s cramped apartments and factories fade into the countryside. There are still a lot of green fields and trees, but the soil looks more yellow and dusty as we head towards the Chinese/Mongolian border.

We reach the border at 9:00pm and head off the train for three hours while they process our passports, but more importantly, change our train bogeys to a different train gauge that is 10 centimetres wider. A few Tsing Tao beers, games of Uno and chats with our fellow travellers and it is midnight and time to depart. The Mongolian border paperwork is all done on the train and we are processed by a female official who looks like Ghenghis Khan’s big sister. She smiles at Harry, so I think we’re fine. At 5am we have had four hours  sleep and nine of us (the NZ couple are travelling through to Ulaan Bator) are the only passengers alighting at Sainshand, a crumbling, ugly town that is capital of East Gobi. It is dawn, and we are are welcomed by Khirli, our guide.

We are in Mongolia! It has been one of my life’s dreams to come here; one of the most remote, romantic and stunning of all destinations. And we are here!

What’s My 798?

The last day in Beijing is an alternative to temples and monuments as we head to the Railway Museum and the 798 Art District. It is a half hour taxi ride out of town and our driver has to keep asking for directions. The museum is in a massive hangar, but the thirty or forty trains are in a disgraceful state of dusty, rusty disrepair. They were once impressive, many from the 40’s and 50’s, wearing many coats of the blackest enamel paint and capped off with a golden face of Mao Tse Tung. One of them is Zhou En Lai’s state carriage containing a board room, chaise long and bathroom. Some of them are open for the children to clamber on, which they duly do. Unfortunately, there is very little information on any of the trains; I was sure we’d find a retired Trans-Siberian model, but who knows if there is one here?

A short distance from the museum is the funky, boho 798 Art District. It is set in an old industrial park that still spews out steam and odd smells, the galleries are all in old factories, complete with Maoist slogans still covering the walls. We find one of the many excellent restaurants and cafes and have a late lunch of very untraditional paninis. Like everything else in Beijing, the place is vast, and we get hopelessly lost down all the industrial alleyways. The art ranges from the painfully pretentious to plain wonderful. Much of it is surprisingly political in quite an overt way. The children especially enjoy the giant outdoor sculptures of dinosaurs, fat men and caged monsters. Today is a really hot day though, and we admit defeat in the afternoon sun, heading back to the cool courtyards of the Sihe Hotel.

Secret Service Swoop in Tiananmen Square Shocker!

We headed out towards the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in the perennial smog (we haven’t seen blue sky or sun for six days now!) It was a little bit tricky getting out of the taxi as it was busy and the driver had stopped on the other side of the road, which meant Harry had to get out first. Then a car behind started blaring it’s horn. As a result, it wasn't until we had all reached the pavement until Marcelle said, “Camera! Not here! In the taxi!” Even though a few kilos overweight, I was out of the stocks like a Walthamstow Greyhound, and down the street leaving a trail of fire behind me. Immediately fifty CCTV cameras were tracking me and several alarms must have been going off in Tiananmen Square Nerve Centre.

“TAXI! STOP! AAARRRGGGHHH!” I ranted as my little legs pumped beneath me like tiny pistons, weaving in between revolutionary guards. I wondered if this was a wise course of action in one of the highest surveillance zones in the world, and whether I would start to see small red lights cover my chest. The taxi slowed down to take a corner and was about thirty metres away from me as I took the same corner like Seb Coe chasing a medal. The cab was even further away now, and I could imagine all the photos and that lovely SLR disappearing forever. Just then a brand new black Audi pulled up beside me and a young Chinese guy in designer glasses said “Get in.” I did so, without a question.

Feeling like Jack Bauer, I pointed and gasped, “Taxi. Blue. Camera.” and off he peeled. I suddenly realised that this guy was probably secret service and had been sent to see what the Alan Carr lookalike lunatic was doing running through his patch. Ten seconds later we saw the taxi doing a three point turn and screeched to a halt in front of him. I staggered out of the black spook car and pointed to the camera in the back seat. The taxi driver looked worriedly at Audi Man and said something in his own defence. I patted the taxi driver on the shoulder and gave a secret service style thumbs up to Audi Man who nodded nonchalantly and did a big U-turn back to HQ.

After that, the Forbidden City seemed a bit of an anticlimax, as I kept checking over my shoulder for men in suits talking into their sleeves...