Xian, China

The early morning train to Beijing was a good one - about 36 hours in total. At the border between Mongolia and China we stopped for about 4 hours so that the wheels could be changed on each of the carriages - the gap between the tracks in China differs from the rest of the trans-Siberian route so we watched as each carriage was lifted and a fresh set of wheels was rolled under to replace them.

Once in Beijing we walked a short distance from the train station to the Youth Hostel and checked in for 4 nights. After the compulsory shower we stalked out the local area and realised we were not much more than a mile from Tiananmen Square. We saw close to a million bicycles en route and possibly one or two of them obeyed the correct traffic laws. Because of an arson attack a few weeks earlier all of the Internet Cafe's in Beijing were closed until further notice - hence no messages from China until now.

The following day was drizzling so we only ventured out to the Wangfujing shopping district and around to the Workers Stadium in the east for a late lunch. By late afternoon we caught the metro to Tiananmen Square and were amazed by the size of it. We didn't do much in the way of sightseeing but we needed to plan the best way to spend the remaining three days.

Next morning we went straight to see Mao Zedong in his mausoleum - it's much bigger than Lenin's in Moscow but you can only see him from the neck up - he didn't look nearly as good as Lenin but then again he lived about 20 years longer than his little Russian comrade. The mausoleum is right in the middle of Tiananmen Sq and after wandering around for a little while we entered the Forbidden City just to the north. The Forbidden City has a fantastic display of ancient buildings and the audio tour is narrated by former 007, Roger Moore.

The compulsory Mao photo at the entrance to the Forbidden City

After 3 or so hours inside the ancient walls we headed further north to Jingshan Park and climbed to the top for the best view of the city. As good as the vantage point was, we were now at least 2km from the nearest metro station so we chose to continue heading north until we found one, but not after checking out some of the hutongs (alleys) along the way. For dinner, Sara had chicken and I had the scorpion - deep fried.

Jingshan Park

Thursday we were up super early to catch the 3 hour bus to Jinsangling about 100km north east of Beijing near the Hebei province. Once there we hiked a little way uphill until we found the Great Wall (it wasn't hard to miss, after all you can see it from space), from there we headed east towards Simatai Village about 9km away. This section is known as the wild wall because of the slopes (70 degrees in places) and the cliffs. The walk took us just over 3 hours past about 30 towers some of which looked brand new and others that were spectacular in their disrepair. After the hard work we looked back at what we had just walked over and both agreed that we had accomplished something very special. I would certainly do it again.

The Great Wall of China - wild wall

On our last day in Beijing we had a few hours to kill before catching the train. We walked down to a market area nearby and Sara got a Louis Vuitton handbag, I got some North Face gear and we both got some new clothes. By 6pm that night we were on the train to Xi'an with, what seemed like, half of the population of Beijing. There were no fewer than 66 people on our carriage - compared with 9 on the 3 day journey from Moscow to Irkutsk.
We were greeted off the train at 7am the next morning by the friendly youth hostel staff who helped me book our out-bound train to Chongqing for Monday afternoon on a soft sleeper (only 4 people per compartment with a door) then we quickly checked into our room before being whisked out the door on a full day tour. With little sleep and next to no food we visited the nearby Terracotta Warriors, Black Horse Mountain, Qin Shihuang Ling's Tomb (he's the guy who demanded the warriors be placed in his tomb), and a couple of Goose Pagoda's.

The walk up to Shihuang Ling's Tomb

Tomorrow we are going to hire bikes and cycle around the old city walls and then visit the local zoo to see the Panda's. We also have to spend some time doing some washing. That's all for this edition.

The army of the Terracotta Warriors

Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia

The train from Irkutsk to Ulaan Baatar has been one of the highlights of the trip so far. We shared our cabin with a lovely Scottish lass from Glasgow, Polly, and a Mongolian business man - let's call him Timmy. We had a number of animated neighbours including Timmy's wife, Serge and Karin from France, and an Australian part-time dance instructor called Helga. And so for the next 36 hours we shared travel tips and stories, played cards with some Russian teenagers and learned to count to ten in Mongolian. The border crossing took the best part of 8 hours - most of that was spent on the Russian side waiting for the immigration officials. Without too much bother we crossed into Mongolia and noticed almost immediately a change in scenery. Arid landscape, not quite desert but not very green, rolling hills and small Ger camps scattered all around the place. Mongolia is called 'the land without fences' and for good reason. Many Mongolian herdsmen believe that the land is sacred so they avoid ploughing and harvesting as much as possible, instead they give their animals free reign to wonder all over the place. We saw huge herds of cattle, sheep, horses, yak and even goats and camels. The people are so different to the Russians as well. They were smiling and seemed genuinely interested in meeting and talking with foreigners. It was so warming to finally see broad toothy smiles again - even if only a couple of teeth at a time.
We were met at the railway station by the wife of the guesthouse owner and rushed to our beds. The train arrived at 5.50am so the first point of business was to catch up some sleep. Later that day we arranged a three day jeep tour, leaving the next morning, and then wandered around the town to get familiar with the location.

Ulaan Baatar

The following morning at about 9.30am we headed out on the road to Kharkhorin, about 400kn south west of Ulaan Baatar. Late in the afternoon we reached the city but continued off-road for another 3-4 hours to a place called Orkhon Khurkree. We found horses waiting for us so before dinner we rode around for an hour before pitching our tent on the large valley floor. Nearby is a large waterfall so we wandered around and marveled at our seclusion before falling asleep under the huge Mongolian sky. Later that night we could hear a herdsman riding up the valley singing in the tradition Mongolian throat singing style to himself.

 Our four wheel drive

 No roads around here

 

 With our tour guide, Timmy. 

The following morning we were greeted by a lone horseman who sat with us for a while and watched me boil some water for our morning coffee. He sat in silence for a while before handing me his identification card - he was the park ranger and he had come to collect a dollar each from us for camping overnight. After we paid him he sat and watched for a few minutes more then mounted his horse and retreated back up the valley.

Our campsite

Our driver came to collect us an hour or so later and took us to the nearest Ger camp where we were invited in for breakfast. We were shown amazing hospitality as we tried to communicate using our phrasebook and a lot of hand signals. We shared a bowl of Mutton stew but in all honesty neither of us could come close to finishing the whole thing. Before we left we gave them what little food we had (a couple of oranges) and took lots of photo's, promising to send them back to our guesthouse for our driver to deliver at some future date.

Our hosts in the middle of nowhere

The rest of the day was taken up with the Shankh and Erdene Zuu monastery's, near Kharkhorin before we headed back to the east and towards the northern tip of the Gobi. That night we slept on the sand although we were technically quite a distance from the proper desert.

Kharkhorin

Our campsite

On the last day of the tour we took a leisurely drive back, stopping to pick up a roasted marmot and take pictures of the two humped Bactrian camels. We made it back to the capital in time to meet up with a few friends to watch some of the world cup football. A hot shower was well over due and after three weeks on the road I can still count the number of times I've had one on one hand.

Some of the scenery on the lonely road back to Ulaan Baatar

Tomorrow we board the train to Beijing, further into unknown territory.

Irkutsk

We've been in Irkutsk for the last three days or so and we're ready to move on. The reason for stopping here was to see Lake Baikal, the worlds oldest and deepest lake. Yesterday we took a day trip to the lakeside town of Listvyanka, 60km south east of Irkutsk. There wasn't an awful lot to do in the town which apparently had only one toilet (a hole in the ground) and two cafe's serving marginally edible food - millions of stalls selling smelly fish though. The lake is the attraction - it's absolutely beautiful, crystal clear water, surrounded by mountains and lined with little settlements of wooden villages. We ended up walking for a few hours out to the mouth of the Angara river and up to the Hotel Baikal perched on the mountain overlooking the lake. The Angara is the only river flowing out of Baikal but it's heavily outnumbered by the 336 rivers that flow into the lake.

Lake Biakal

Cars aren't the only things on the road to Listvyanka

After being unceremoniously kicked out of our hotel at 8am this morning by the babushka on duty we ventured to the railway station to leave our bags in the left luggage section so that we could spend the day back in the city. Actually the main reason is so that we can go back to a Sports Bar that we found yesterday to watch some of the world cup football. We're both looking forward to getting on the road again and quietly anticipating what Mongolia has to offer.

 The city of Irkutsk

 

One of the many Lenin statues

The Trans-Siberian

THE TRANS-SIBERIAN
This morning the train pulled into Irkutsk at 3:13am - 77 hours after leaving Moscow. It seems quite a long time 77 hours but we were both sad to get off. We had a very comfortable compartment with two single beds, a table, plenty of storage space and a couple of cups and a teapot so that we could make ourselves coffee and soup whenever we wanted. Our neighbors were a French couple - one a writer and the other a photographer. Each carriage has a samovar at one end so hot water was never a problem. Although the carriage slept twenty, I only counted 7 other people in our carriage during the entire journey - and only three of those spoke English.
Here is what has happened since my last entry in Moscow

JUNE 9th
Got up at 8am and packed our room, , then put our packs in storage at the hostel. While Sara went shopping for food and drink for the following days on the train, I went back to Red Square with our friends Ronnie & Erika so that I could tend their bags while they went to see Lenin. Met Sara back at the hostel in the afternoon then caught the Metro to Komsomolskaya where two key railway stations are situated - i) Leningrad Station for trains to St Petersburg and ii) Yarlslavl Station which is the beginning of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After a short wait at the station we boarded train no. 2 bound for Vladivostok, carriage 7, berths 9 & 10. I took a few photos of the train and then we took off, right on time. It was a wonderful evening watching the first few towns and hamlets roll by as we sat there glued to the window drinking coffee. Bit of a panic after two hours when we heard breaking glass and two people running through the compartment. We saw blood on the floor throughout the hallway and the glass on the door to the neighboring carriage was smashed. We could only assume that someone has slipped and hit the glass, maybe with their head, and run off in a panic. The initial route was slightly different to the one in my guidebook - we stopped at Vladimir for 20 odd minutes and then close to midnight we rolled into Gorki.

Train #2 headed to Vladivostok

Our carriage

JUNE 10th
During the night we made a few stops (Kirov, Glasow) and awoke to find us stopped at Vyatka. The countryside in between the towns was very flat and many of the towns were no more than a few hundred people, the majority of which were farming their own land. Coffee and soup for breakfast, then we left our door wide open and read for much of the day waiting to see the Urals later that evening. Quite a long stop at Perm (which was at one time called Molotov, after the cocktail guy) in the early afternoon but already we were caught out with the time changes and the day was passing much quicker than expected. We had gone forward two hours already. The Urals were quite frankly not worth writing about. I've seen bigger mountains in Dallas. At about 8.30pm Moscow time (everything train related in Russia runs on Moscow time to save confusion with the time zone changes) we pulling into Sverdlovsk which I mistakenly called Yekaterinburg. Same place I thought - just a different name. It was here in 1918 that Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and children were murdered by the Bolsheviks in the basement of the house they were being held in. Their remains were found about 10 years ago in a shallow grave nearby. No time to do much at the station - it was raining and we had an important backgammon tournament going on.

Inside out two berth sleeper

JUNE 11th
Woke up just before the train pulled into Omsk. Got a few provisions at the station and then had coffee and chocolate for breakfast. Most of our more wholesome meals were either soup or yummy Russian noodles. On the south side of the tracks are kilometer markers so that you can tell exactly how far from Moscow you have come - or have left to go. Some of them are tricky to spot because they can be very close to the train but I spied the 3010km maker and knew we were over half way to Irkutsk (about 5,200km). At 5pm Moscow time, 8pm local, we crossed the River Ob and into the sprawling city of Novosibersk - the biggest city in Siberia. It's a typical Soviet city with huge industrial centres and very gray. Once we got moving again we decided to try the dining cart for dinner - we shouldn't of bothered. The food was disappointing and it would ruin Sara's morning the next day. Forward another hour.

 

One of the many station stops along the way - cannot recall where this is

The utilitarian toilet

JUNE 12th
With Sara diving between our compartment and the toilet she missed some of the better landscape. We stopped at Krasnoyarsk in the morning, another town closed to foreigners until recently because of the secret nuclear weapons cities located nearby. Heading out of the city we crossed a 1km long bridge over the Yenisey River. A short while later the countryside changed dramatically. Flat prairie land gave way to lush rolling hills. Tiny hamlets clung to the hillsides and all about the place people were out farming, walking and going about their business. Later in the afternoon we stopped at Ilanski - another pretty station. It seemed that for the rest of the evening the scenery just kept getting better. Sometime in the evening I put the clock forward another hour to Moscow +5 - by my reckoning we should stay in this time zone for the next month at least. More pretty station stops at Taishet and Nischnevdinsk and then it was time to try and get some rest. The train was due to arrive at Irkutsk at 10:13 Moscow time - 3:13am local.

The train station at Taishet

Small communities in Siberia

Checking the wheels at one of the stops

And that's about it for the train journey. It was much more fascinating than I ever imagined and now we can't wait to get on board the next train - a 36 hour jaunt around lake Baikal, then south to Mongolia. We have a few days to explore Irkutsk but the main reason for stopping here is to see the lake. That's the plan for tomorrow.

Trans-Siberian Route

We were a little rushed at the Internet Cafe last night so I am back again today to outline the next few days of our trip. We managed to make the Bolshoy Theatre last night but only for the last 10 minutes of Giselle. The show was a sell-out so we waited outside the theatre until a couple of gentlemen came out. I offered to but their tickets from them but they just handed them over and said 'run'. Although we missed most of the show it was great to get a look around the theatre. In the evening we hung around Manezhnaya square next to the Kremlin and had some food and beer.

Our train leaves at 5:16 this evening and here is a quick outline of the route.

• Sunday: Through Sergiev Posad, Yaroslavl and Danilov.
• Monday: Through Vyatka, Perm (a military town formally closed to foreigners), the Ural Mountains and across the imaginary border between Europe and Asia and into Siberia. Yekaterinberg is the first big town, home of Boris Yeltsin, then Tyumen.
• Tuesday: On and on through Siberia and the town of Omsk and the city of Novosibersk. Wednesday: Through Taiga, Mariinsk and Krasnoyarsk.
• Thursday: Past the Western Sayan Mountains and on through Tayshet, Zima (whose name means Winter), and then to Irkutsk.

This morning we said goodbye to Veronica and Erika after spending the best part of the last four days with them. They are heading back to London tomorrow evening. It's been great traveling with them not in the least because of safety in numbers, but also to share some of our other travel stories.
Next mail will come from Siberia.

Baltica Beer is Best

BALTICA BEER IS BEST
Tonight is our last night is Moscow. We arrived here at 6.20am on Tuesday morning after catching the overnight train from St Petersburg. As luck would have it we met two lovely New Zealand girls from Auckland (Veronica and Erika) staying at the same youth hostel in St Petersburg who were booked on the same train and ended up shared a four berth sleeper with them. We've spent the last three days together seeing some of the sights of Moscow, enjoying the great weather, cheap beer and some of the football World Cup.
I had been to Moscow before in 1999 so I knew my way around but it took some time to get familiar with the Metro system. For those with a Moscow Metro map handy, we're staying near Prospekt Mira, north east of the city center. On the first day here we had to catch up on some much needed sleep but then it was down to Lubyanka (the old KGB HQ) and Red Square to see the heart of the city. The sun sets quite late (about 10:30) so we stayed out and made the most of the daylight. The next day we went out with Veronica and Erika to get tickets to the Moscow Circus and Bolshoy Ballet. Sara and I decided to pass up the Ballet in the hopes of getting a cheaper price on the night. We stopped for close to three hours for lunch at a Russian chain called Yolki Polki to try some of the local food but ended up sampling more beer than food.

St Basil's cathedral in Red Square

In front of Lenin's tomb in Red Square

Yesterday we spent the day at the Kremlin and the evening at the Circus. It's been sunny and hot in Moscow and already we are feeling a little worn out with all the walking. There are loads of cafes everywhere so it's been very easy to sit, relax and have lunch. We have struggled a little with the language but we're both now pretty good at reading Cyrillic script.

Spires inside the Kremlin

The Assumption cathedral inside the Kremlin

Sara in front of the Tzar bell inside the Kremlin

Today we went straight down to Red Square to see Lenin's tomb and then out to Ismaylovsky Park to do some shopping - Sara found a wonderful Sable Hat at a bargain. This evening we've been trying to catch up on the latest news including the situation in India/Pakistan which could potentially effect our future plans. We're just across the road from the Bolshoy waiting to see if we can get ourselves in to Giselle.
That's all for now - tomorrow we board the train for Irkutsk.

The Moscow Circus

So It All Begins In St Petersburg, Russia

SO IT ALL BEGINS
With the world at our feet our trip begins. Without knowing if this will be a success or failure we took the first and hardest step of all. Where it will lead we don't quite know but we can only imagine all the places we'll go over the coming months!

WHITE NIGHTS
Our flight was delayed 30 minutes leaving Gatwick yesterday morning, but we arrived in St Petersburg only a few minutes behind schedule. Once on the ground we quickly passed through immigration, changed some money then caught the bus to the nearest Metro Station. The Metro is very efficient and before too long we were at our station and heading up the escalator. It took me a while to gain my bearings but once I found a familiar landmark I remembered the way to the hostel I had stayed in three years prior. By the time we were settled in the room it was 7pm. Had a quick meal at the cafe next door and then tried to get some sleep - easier said than done. It didn't get fully dark until after 1am and the curtains in the room didn't seem to block any light whatsoever. Eventually the day caught up with us and we fell asleep for a well deserved 11 hours. This morning we've validated our visas and now we have to book our train tomorrow night to Moscow. The computer here is not the best and for some reason we've been unable to get into Hotmail to check or send any messages.

 Church of the Savior

Outside the Hermitage

 St Isaac's cathedral

Sara in front of the Bronze Horseman