India Part 1

(Update from November 24, 2011)

It’s hard to believe that Marco and I have only been in India for a month, because so much has happened and we’ve seen so many things that it seems much longer. I’ve been tapping this email out as we go, and it’s already reached such a length that I think I’d better send it off now instead of waiting until leave India, because if I do that it’ll be truly monolithic!

So. INDIA. It is such a huge and varied place that I almost don’t know where to begin. I’ll start with a little bit about the people. India is full of kind, friendly, vivacious people who are genuinely interested in talking to tourists and want to help them as much as possible. It is also full of thieving, conniving swindlers who view foreigners as walking ATM machines and want to exploit them every step of the way. The ongoing problem is figuring out which people fall into which category. It’s very difficult, and you’re never entirely certain whether you got it right. We found that we were constantly, constantly being told different things by different people, and we never knew who to believe. Something as simple as buying a bus ticket often became a major ordeal. Some people would tell us it was imperative to buy the tickets the day before because they always sell out, other people would tell us that getting tickets half an hour before the bus left would be no problem at all, and still other people would tell us that actually, that bus doesn’t run at all anymore and we’d have to take the train. Every Indian has their own slice of the ‘Tourist Pie’ to collect in terms of commission or cuts, and they want you to take the course of action that will mean the most money for them. Whether it is a rickshaw driver collecting commission from a hostel or a restaurant for taking you there, or a taxi driver deliberately dropping you off a long way from your destination so that you have to pay his waiting friend to act as your porter/guide, the examples are infinite and endless.

Making friends with one of the many cows on the ghats at Varanasi

Having said that, many of the Indian people are also truly interested in chatting to foreigners and will sincerely try and help wherever they can, asking us questions about our home country and giving advice about scams and traps to watch out for. We usually get a fairly positive reception when people discover we are from Australia – though it took us a while to figure out why. The Indians tend to speak very quickly and often with a strong accent, and the first time we told someone we were from Australia he got very excited, and with much head-waggling and gesticulating began talking excitedly about “tricky bunting”. We were very confused and looked it, and the poor chap couldn’t understand why we weren’t following him, getting more and more agitated talking about “tricky bunting”. Eventually we made the connection and realised that tricky bunting was in fact ‘Ricky Ponting’ pronounced through a thick Indian accent! The Indians absolutely loooooove cricket, and when people discover we’re Australian we often get congratulated for being compatriots of Ricky Ponting, or as I’ll forever think of him now, Tricky Bunting!

But I’m rambling so will shut up and get on with it! We had a fairly forceful introduction to India, throwing ourselves right in the deep end by heading straight for Varanasi. To get there we had a fairly exhausting 12 hour bus trip from Kathmandu, which was so bumpy I was forced to stick my head out the window and be spectacularly sick TWICE (once after breakfast, once after lunch). This bus ride took us to the Indian city of Ghorakpur. There, after being assured there were no train tickets to Varanasi available for at least 2 days, we managed to buy two tickets for the train leaving that night from a convenience store owner who was lying on the ground of his shop watching “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. We still don’t know what the story was or how this guy was able to sell tickets for a supposedly full train – our guess is that he must have been a scalper, and he probably made a huge profit out of selling them onto us at a premium… but all that matters is that we got them, were on the train that night, and woke up at Varanasi station in the morning!

Varanasi, I think, is the most intense city we’ve visited on our journey to date. It’s certainly the most crowded, and Marco intensely disliked it. It’s one of the most sacred cities in the world, and to Hindus it’s quite literally the centre of their universe – they believe it was created by the god Shiva, and is a holy ‘crossing place’ where deities can come to earth, and pilgrims can ascend to the heavens. Hindus also believe that if they are lucky enough to die in Varanasi, they will escape the cycle of reincarnation and rebirth and attain instant enlightenment. What this means is that thousands of ill and elderly people come to Varanasi to wait to die.  Once they do die, they are wrapped in bright orange shrouds and carried through the streets down to the banks of the river Ganges, where they are laid out on huge funeral pyres and burned right there out in the open by the water. These funeral pyres burn continuously, and watching them we could quite clearly see the blackened heads, feet and elbows of the bodies sticking out of the flames. They are left there for some hours to burn up completely, and when they are more or less gone the remaining fragments of bone (usually the densest, strongest bones – the hips and sternums) and ashes are collected and flung into the river, thus completing the Hindu cycle of life. It was quite confronting to see death at such close quarters, and also the casual way the cremators went about poking and stirring up the bodies as they burned. Interestingly, the people who have the job of working on the funeral pyres are all Indians from the very lowest caste, most of whom were born to the job and whose families have been cremators for generations beyond reckoning. 

Crowds at Varanasi

In spite of the constant proximity of death, the Ganges is simultaneously a place of very dynamic life. The concrete steps that lead down to the water’s edge (known as ghats) are covered with Indians bathing in the river, lathering themselves up in soap and shampoo, washing their clothes, and generally having a good old chinwag while they’re at it. I cannot understand how they can happily brush their teeth and drink the water when they know that just a short distance upstream the ashes of countless bodies are dumped into the river, but they do. Neither do they seem concerned by the fact that factories regularly dump toxic waste and chemicals into the water. To Hindus, the river water remains sacred with healing and cleansing properties, and most families in India keep ­a supply of Ganges water in their home in case of unexpected illness or injury.

Varanasi city itself is incredibly crowded – the streets were utterly filthy (we learned very quickly not to wear thongs) and it was quite literally impossible to walk for more than a single step or two without having to change directions or halt to dodge the hordes of people, motorbikes, rickshaws and horse-and-carts. It was like being in a constant mosh pit, except that half the people in it weren’t people but cows, bulls, dogs, cats and goats, who also indiscriminately crap all over the pavements. Though, to be fair, quite a lot of the people in Varanasi do that too, because the homeless are everywhere and (I mean this in the most literal sense) beggars can’t be choosers.

And beggars there were, too. In every shape, size and colour imaginable. There was a different beggar sitting on every single step leading down to the river, all side by side with their bowls out in front of them competing for alms. They were very distressing to look at because they all had some sort of deformity or crippling abnormality, and as we walked by they would wave their missing limbs or leprosy-ridden hands at us, so it was like constantly being at the apex of some terrible Mexican Wave of disfigurement. As well as the beggars, the streets were chock-a-block with Sadhus and Hindu holy men who wander around in orange robes with filthy shaggy dreadlocks, white paint smeared on their foreheads and usually no shoes. With all this contrasted against the beautiful, wealthy Indian women who swan about in jewelled sandals and richly ornamented saris, Varanasi really does seem to show humanity both at its loveliest and its ugliest.

After a couple of days we were more than ready to escape the chaos and crowds, and gladly climbed aboard a night train to the much smaller town of Khajuraho. If you’ll forgive a brief diversion I’ll take this opportunity to describe to you the actual process of physically getting around in India. We’ve spent such a lot of time on trains and buses here that you’d think the journeys would all blur into one… but oh no no! Every trip has something that makes it bizarre and memorable, or appalling as the case may be. The trains are like rolling marketplaces, with passengers wedged into every possible seat, corner and crevice of space available, and merchants wandering up and down selling chai, samosas and everything else under the sun. After having ridden both the Trans-Siberian and Trans-Mongolian railways we’re fairly experienced when it comes to long distance rail travel, but we’ve never experienced anything like this. No nice white sheets or pillows here! The ‘sleepers’ were simply triple-decker plastic bunks that looked as though they’d never been wiped down in their lives, and were covered with smears of hair oil, dandruff flakes, suspicious sticky patches and a generous smattering of fruit peelings and food scraps. Not at all pleasant to lie down on. Though there are so many people milling around that it’s usually impossible to get much sleep anyway. There always seem to be more passengers than there are sleepers, so we often drift off to sleep (using our backpacks as pillows to keep them safe) and then wake up to find an Indian (or several) curled up at the other end of our bunk. I spent a whole night with a small kid sharing my bunk while her mother slept on the floor, and her father sat on the end of Marco’s bunk. It all just seems to be totally acceptable, because this is a culture where personal space is an unknown concept. At least we were sharing with people though – one train we were on there was a lady in the next carriage with a baby goat on her lap! The buses are even worse than the trains, because they have bloody awful Bollywood jangly pop music blaring at top volume for the entire journey, often slightly off the station so that it crackles with static and white noise. We never travel without earplugs, but they can only do so much!

Some of the erotic carvings at Khajuraho

But back to Khajuraho! Khajuraho itself doesn’t really have much to recommend it… it’s a collection of fairly non-descript, dusty village streets. However, just outside the town centre are a collection of millennia-old Hindu temples that are world-renowned for being covered in sensual erotic carvings. The temples are all made of pink sandstone that looks absolutely beautiful in the afternoon sunlight, and the walls and elongated rooves of the temples are all covered with phenomenally intricate carvings of well-endowed men performing lewd acts on bendy and bosomy women. Without going into too much detail (let’s keep this PG!) the level of detail was astonishing… after 1000+ years you could still see the manicured fingernails and individual tresses of hair of even the tiniest statues.

From Khajuraho we climbed aboard a bus that took us in the general direction of Agra, which was our first real experience with lengthy road travel in India (rather than rail), and we learned something interesting about driving in India. Indian men seem to believe that honking their horns makes their muscles bigger and their penises longer. I’m sure that’s the case – it’s the only explanation I can come up with for their undying, fanatical obsession with horns. We rode buses where the driver sometimes didn’t take his finger off the button for a good minute at a time, just honking continuously. And we’re not talking normal horns here either… because everyone honks so much an ordinary horn would be immediately drowned in the din. So, to try and make themselves stand out, they all have special, deafening, multi-toned fog-horns specially rigged up to their bus, rickshaw or car, and blast it at top volume. Not only in the busy city streets, either. If they’re driving along a road and a single, lonely motorbike materialises in the distance, even if it’s right over on the other side of the road with oodles of space to spare, the driver will still honk and honk until they pass. It’s unbearable, and we quickly learned not to take any kind of road transport without our earplugs safely in our pockets.

Anyway, we climbed off that first bus at the small town of Orchha. We really only stopped there because it was on our way to Agra, but I’m so glad we did because it was a lovely, peaceful place, and very interesting. It used to be the medieval capital of the Bundela dynasty, and today’s town beetles about in the shadows of the spectacular ruins of royal pavilions, palaces and concubine harems. It must have been a pretty prosperous dynasty in its day, because the palaces and buildings were all very impressive. The royal pavilions were built around a big courtyard with loads of imposing stone carvings (pillars in the shape of elephants holding the roof up by their trunks etc) and had the archetypal Indian minarets on each corner. There were a few turquoise mural tiles still stuck onto the walls here and there, so it must have been dazzling in its day, but now time has stolen the colour and most of it is an earthy red.

Ruins at Orcha

From Orchha we travelled to what is undoubtedly the most touristy city in India – Agra. Agra sits in the central northern region of the country, and is in itself a fairly dusty, noisy and unremarkable city, full to bursting with gimmicky tourist restaurants, cafes and tacky souvenir stores. But it doesn’t matter, because it is home to the Taj Mahal! I was very excited about seeing the Taj, but we’d heard some horror stories about nightmare queues and crowds bristling with pickpockets, so to try and minimise this we went bright and early at 6am, as soon as the gates opened. The guidebooks here claim that the Taj Mahal is the most recognised building in the world. Whether or not they’re right is up for debate, but in any case I’m sure you’ve seen countless photographs of it so I won’t go into great detail here, except to say that up close it is much, much more intricate and elaborate. Every surface is ornamented with relief carvings of flowers and trees, and has beautiful semi-precious stones like lapis-lazuli, jade, amethyst and malachite painstakingly inlaid to create more flowers, leaves, vines and complex geometric pattersn. The brightness of the stones against the translucency of the white marble is very pretty, and some of the individual inlaid flowers are so intricate that they are made of up to 50 individual gemstones, all meticulously mosaicked into the marble. The doorways and pointed arches are adorned with Arabic verses from the Koran, and the whole building was designed to mirror the Islamic representation of Paradise. Primarily, though, it is a mausoleum, built to honour the memory and remains of the favourite wife of the Mughal ruler of the time, and so it manages to maintain the awwww factor of being a lasting monument to romantic love.

Taj Mahal.... corny tourist shot!

Unfortunately Marco was suffering from a bit of a tummy upset on the day we visited the Taj, so after seeing it he retreated to the (relative) comfort of our hostel and I bravely ventured out on my own to see India’s most significant fortification – Agra Fort. A monolith of a structure, built mostly of deep red sandstone with plenty of carved marble ceilings, scalloped doorways, narrow winding halls and dainty balconies jutting out over Agra, providing sensational views of the Taj Mahal. I also explored the absolutely enormous city mosque – a mammoth, 3 domed building that had a prayer hall the size of a football pitch – and spent a happy few hours in the local bazaar, watching the Indian women buy saris and jewelled sandals.

Tummy bugs, I’m sorry to report, have hit each of us quite hard on multiple occasions – indeed much of this update has been tapped out while trapped within our hostel, unable to venture too far from the toilet because of truly torrential diarrhoea. Having travelled through multiple third-world countries, including South America, we’re no strangers to tummy upsets but we both agree India definitely wins the prize for the most consistently dodgy food, and we’ve each spent our fair share of time pale-faced, sweaty and shaky. I must add too that the majority of bathrooms in India have filthy squat toilets, so waking up in the middle of the night in a new and unfamiliar hostel with an urgent need for the bathroom is made infinitely more stressful by having to remember where the light switch is, locate shoes (going barefoot in squat toilets is out of the question), locate toilet paper, and then locate the bathroom itself. On top of that, trying to cope with the gut-wrenching explosion without getting your feet dirty or having a shoelace or the draw-string of your pyjama pants slip in is quite the ordeal. I’m sorry – I know that’s probably too much information. But it’s been such a constant and ongoing part of our Indian experience that I wouldn’t be doing our journey justice if I didn’t at least make mention of it, so I hope you can forgive me!

On this occasion anyway, I’m happy to say that Marco’s tummy bug was reasonably short lived, and that from Agra we headed still further West into Rajasthan. We visited the three major cities of Rajasthan – Jodhpur, Jaisalmer (right by the Pakistani border) and Udaipur. All three of these cities had their own impressive fortresses and palaces, but my favourite was Udaipur. Although it didn’t feel quite as ancient as the other two, it was built around a shimmering lake and the architecture was nearly all white, with turreted buildings and plenty of minarets rising up from the water’s edge. At night time these were all lit up with fairy lights so the whole effect was very pretty. The Udaipur fort was also somewhat more delicate than the ones in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer – instead of red sandstone, as most of the Indian forts tend to be, it was white, with finely carved marble lattice work and fancy mirrored murals of flowers, peacocks and scenes of tiger hunts.

Beautiful Rajasthani Forts

From Rajasthan we embarked on an epic 30 hour bus ride down the Western coast of India, taking us to the city of Jalgaon which had absolutely nothing to recommend it except that we could use it as a jumping off point to visit the Ajanta and Ellora caves, which were each sensational in their own way. They are ancient Buddhist monasteries consisting of immense caves and caverns carved directly out of a sheer rock face. Each cave has a spectacular system of pillars, and ornate relief carvings of giant elephants and other Indian animals, and lots of different representations of the Lord Buddha himself – reclining, meditating, teaching etc. Because it’s so dark and dim inside the caverns the artwork has been preserved remarkably well, and it’s still possible to see the colourful paintings that covered every inch of the walls, pillars and ceilings of the Ajanta caves –astonishing when you consider that they are over 2000 years old. The Ellora caves didn’t have paintings, but were generally deeper and more complex in terms of the decorative carving. I had to keep reminding myself that the caves were all created before the time of dynamite, and that all that rock was removed by some guy with a hammer, a chisel, and maybe some wedges of wood soaked in water. Incredible!

A small segment of one of the Ellora Caves

We’ve since arrived in Goa and are enjoying the much more relaxed atmosphere in South India, lying on the beaches and gorging ourselves on delicious seafood each day. But I will leave the south of India for my next update, as this one has already (as always) defied my best efforts and stretched out to a ridiculous length. If you’ve got any further energy, though, below are just some more of my haphazard thoughts and reflections on India as a country in general, because it is such a vibrant, baffling and ever-changing place. So if you’re game, read on! If not, call it quits here and you won’t be missing much!

India really is a country of contradictions. Take, for example, the humble cow. It is a sacred animal in India, and they roam the city streets at will, wandering unconcernedly through the blaring traffic and marketplaces, nosing through the piles of rubbish and chewing contentedly on garbage. Oftentimes they have garlands of bright orange marigolds strung about their necks, or their horns are painted bright colours and adorned with tinsel. Hindus allow them free run of the marketplaces and town centres, and would never dream of hurting them. And yet, neither do they stop them from eating plastic bags and drinking from obviously foul and diseased water, which is ultimately going to cause the cow a much slower and more painful death in the long run. So many of the cows that we see are in a truly terrible state, dying long and protracted deaths. It’s really quite baffling that the Hindus manage to both respect and neglect them to such a huge degree simultaneously.

On a similar note, many of the people who will fondly pat a cow’s rump as it meanders past their market stall will bellow aggressively at a beggar who comes to ask for food, and we often see animals being treated with more consideration than human beings. Officially it is now illegal for Indians to discriminate against one other on the basis of caste, but it’s clearly still an issue that is prevalent in much of their society – particularly the smaller, remoter communities. The lower castes, considered to be ‘unclean’ by birth, are often forced into doing the lowest and most degrading jobs for little or no pay, and usually end up begging to survive. It seems very sad to me, because according to the Indians we’ve spoken to there is absolutely no way of escaping your caste, no matter how hard you word or struggle to advance your lot in life. In fact, until relatively recently many schools would refuse to accept children from lower castes. It’s clearly a very complicated issue, and something that is difficult for foreigners to comprehend, but I guess it takes a lot of time to change something that has been deeply ingrained in a culture for generations beyond reckoning.

Above all else, though, India is a country that is full of surprises. There are constantly surreal moments – for example, riding in the back of a rickshaw through an ancient city with a medieval fort on one side, an elaborate palace on the other side, and suddenly seeing a caravan of camels stringing their way through the streets. Or a wedding procession with the groom being carried along on the back of an elephant, or a group of almost naked Sadhus on pilgrimage. It can be tear-jerkingly frustrating at times, and both of us have had moments when we’re so irritated and annoyed by the constant chaos that we feel like slapping someone, but it never fails to be interesting. And the beauty – both of its natural landscapes, its monuments, and its brightly dressed people, is continually breathtaking. 

Trying to stay afloat in the crowded streets of Indian cities

Well, that’s it for now! Sending hugs to you all back home – we really do miss you all lots and think of our friends and family all the time.

Mountains, Mountains Everywhere! Tibet & Nepal

(Update from November 7, 2011)

I am writing to you from the complete and utter bedlam that is India, after having spent 2 comparatively calm (though physically exerting) months in Tibet and Nepal. If you have a bit of time to spare, an update on our most recent adventures is below.

To pick up where my last update left off, we had a marvellous time in Tibet. The nature of the Chinese government means that independent tourists are not allowed in Tibet, and as a foreigner you can only get access to the country if you go on an organised tour, and jump through the necessary administrative hoops to arrange a very important piece of paper called a Tibetan Travel Permit. We went through a fair bit of grief organising our tour from Beijing and faxing, scanning and emailing various bits and pieces of documentation to have our permits processed and granted, so it was a great relief to finally pick them up from the travel office in Chengdu in China Proper. Then, it was only a very short flight over the Himalayan mountain range, and before we knew it we were landing in Lhasa!

Beautiful Tibetan lady in the Bhakor Marketplace, Lhasa

I was immediately struck by just how different the Tibetans were to the Chinese people in terms of physical appearance. The Tibetans have yellower skin, and higher, flatter cheekbones, and it was quite easy when walking through the streets to identify people as either Chinese or Tibetan. Also, the Tibetan language is much gentler and not as tonal, so the speakers sound much less brash and come across as quite a bit gentler. We were collected from the airport by our tour guide (it was so, so nice not to have to haggle with taxi-drivers or negotiate buses and metros), and after about an hours’ drive we got our first glimpse of Lhasa. It’s truly a beautiful city – no matter where you stand, you have epic views of the Himalayan mountain ranges, and the local people dress in a dazzling display of traditional costumes complete with ornate headdresses. Monks were everywhere, and there was a continual background noise of gentle wooden clacking as many people go about their daily business with a small, wooden, prayer wheel in one hand that they continually spin to send prayers up to heaven. Looming over the whole city is the tremendously impressive, but also infinitely sad, Potala Palace. An epic monolith of a structure, strikingly painted in deep red and white, it is the palace where the Dalai Lamas lived during the harsh winter months, and where the present Dalai Lama was forced to flee from upon Chinese invasion in 1959. Unfortunately a huge Chinese flag still flutters over it… but I am getting ahead of myself and will get to that in due course!

Although our tour didn’t officially commence until the next day we didn’t want to waste any of our precious time in Tibet, and we headed off to visit the Potala Palace’s counterpart; the Summer Palace, which is where the Dalai Lamas spent the Summer months of the year. It was our first taste of true Tibetan architecture. The rooms were all built around open courtyards that were brimming with pots of wonderful flowers. It must be said that the rooms were quite dim, and must have been even more so before the age of electricity. None the less they were peaceful and lovely – richly embroidered silken tapestries covered the walls, and bright tassels hung from the ceilings. Almost everything was built from some kind of dark wood, and wherever possible this wood was embellished with intricate and detailed carvings of flowers, animals and landscapes. The rooms themselves were filled with murals of the history of the Dalai Lamas, and with Buddhist shrines covered with trailing silk scarves in every colour imaginable (left there by religious pilgrims). There were plenty of monks working their way through the various rooms, praying in a very perfunctory manner at each of the shrines and leaving behind offerings of money. There was cash wedged in every nook and cranny. The monks were mostly very friendly and didn’t seem to mind having tourists in their sacred places at all… indeed they smiled and would stand back to let us pass or get a better view, which was a very refreshing change from the way Chinese travellers treat foreign tourists!!!!

The outdoor areas of the Summer Palace were just as lovely, featuring tranquil lakes with pagodas with meditating monks in their centre, long walkways lined with shady trees, fountains and flowerbeds that were a riot of colour. It was a beautiful way to spend a sunny afternoon.

The next morning our tour started properly. We were lucky in that we had a very small group, with only 3 other people in it. There were a great young couple from Boston USA, and an elderly Brazilian chap who was friendly but decidedly nuts. He didn’t seem to understand the concept that tour group are supposed to stay together and, to the chagrin of our guide, was endlessly charging off on his own. The first port of call for the 5 of us was, as you’d expect, the Potala Palace itself. Governmental regulations are incredibly strict in Tibet, and they insist that no tourist is allowed to spend more than 1 hour inside the palace itself, so there is definitely a feeling of being hurried through it at a charging pace, but none the less it was, unquestioningly, the highlight of our time in Tibet. To get inside the place we had to climb up goodness knows how many steep flights of steps – no joke when you’re at an altitude of 3500 metres and the atmosphere is so thin that even walking up a gentle slope leaves you panting! But eventually, short of breath and sweaty of brow, we emerged onto the Potala rooftop – the Rooftop of the Rooftop of the World, so to speak – and were infinitely rewarded with views over Lhasa and the Himalayas in every direction.

Marco and me at the Potala Palace

If I was going to live in a palace, I’d like to live in one like the Potala. It managed to be beautiful and ornate without being ostentation, glitzy or extravagant the way so many European palaces are. The only gold was on the religious shrines and the tombs of the previous Dalai Lamas – everything else was beautifully decorated, but only through wooden carvings, silk tapestries, paintings and murals. Again, most of the palace is built from stone and dark wood that is worn so smooth that in some places it’s perilously slippery. The ‘staircases’ to get between levels are so steep that they are virtual stepladders, and I’m sure some tourists must have taken terrible croppers down them. The whole palace was a maze of dim passages and corridors between rooms that acted as living quarters for the various Lamas, and religious shrines. Every square inch of the wooden pillars and doorframes was deeply engraved with patters of flowers, peacocks and other images of nature, and brightly painted. Silk covered the walls and hung from the ceiling in draped tassels in every room, and khee candles (made of butter and animal fats) burned in front of almost every Buddhist icon.

We saw the throne room where the current Dalai Lama used to receive visitors of state before being exiled to India, and the small administrative room where he negotiated with the Chinese ambassadors to try and reach a compromise. We also saw the utterly immense mausoleums where the bodies of the previous Dalai Lamas are entombed in mammoth sarcophaguses of solid gold. The 5th Dalai Lama’s tomb was definitely the most impressive – he is credited with pulling Tibet together as a single nation for the first time, and his tomb is constructed from no less than 1.5 tonnes of pure gold. So as you can imagine, it’s quite the sight to behold!

The whole place, though, is permeated with an air of sadness. When you consider the history of the country, it’s impossible for it not to be. Out of respect to the current, exiled Dalai Lama, no one lives in the palace at all now – not even any of the lesser Lamas or Buddhist monks. It’s entirely a pilgrimage and tourist site by day, and is left empty each night (apart from Chinese security guards, of course). Indeed, the Chinese Government go so far as to forbid any Tibetan to have a photograph or painting of the present Dalai Lama – his image is entirely banned throughout the country, as are films like “7 Years in Tibet” and “Kondun” (though that is less surprising). We tried hard to get our tour guide to open up and tell us what life was like for his family before Chinese occupation, but he shut up like a clam and wouldn’t say a word.

We visited several other monasteries in Lhasa, and spent a very happy afternoon browsing through the Bhakhor markets at the very heart of the ancient part of the city. Basically a huge marketplace in an enormous courtyard with a monastery at the centre, it was jam packed with stalls selling traditional Tibetan jewellery, instruments, clothing, scarves, handheld prayer-wheels, religious icons, biscuits, sweets, and pretty much everything imaginable. There were also open air butcheries selling big chunks of yak meat. (Incidentally, yak was a stable of our diet during our time in Tibet… yak dumplings, yak noodles, yak stew, yak curry – it’s actually very tasty). As the streets of the marketplace formed a square around one of the oldest monasteries in Tibet, there were lots of Buddhist pilgrims gradually circumnavigating the temple in a most peculiar fashion. They would take on step, prostrate themselves on the ground, lower their faces into the dust with their arms straight out before them, stand back up, raise their arms up in the air, take another single step, prostrate themselves again, and carry on. It was always easy to tell how long they’d been at it by the state of their clothes and how dirty they were. We saw one chap who was positively black with filth, and had a big scab on the end of his nose and the top of his forehead because he’d banged them against the ground so many times. I hope he got what he was praying for!

So, once Marco dragged me, kicking and screaming, away from all the beautiful jewellery and shawls, we headed back to the hotel for our last night in Lhasa. (That was another great thing about being on an organised tour – staying in beautiful hotel rooms every night instead of sharing dormitories with smelly strangers! It was a most luxurious break, and we loved every minute.) Bright and early the next morning we headed out and left Lhasa behind us, and drove into those colossal mountains. We saw some really remarkable scenery, including beautiful high-altitude lakes that were such a vivid turquoise colour they almost looked fake. Apparently all bodies of water at such high altitude take on that colour, but we’d never seen it before and it was surreal and beautiful. We also passed lots of small Buddhist stupas set up by the roadsides, usually covered with strings of prayer flags, and small villages of flat-rooved houses with lovely carving around the doorways and windowsills, usually with more prayer flags fluttering from their rooftops.

We saw several more monasteries, including one that had the famous Tibetan mandala artwork on display. Mandalas are intricate designs of brightly coloured sands that the Buddhist monks create on the ground using special tools to make elaborate patters with the sand. It ends as a large spreading design that is immensely rich in both colour and texture.  If you’re at all familiar with the film “7 Years in Tibet”, you may recall the scene where soldiers walk through the painstakingly created mandalas of the monks in the Potala.

The second major highlight of our Tibetan tour, though, was our night sleeping in tents at base-camp at Mt Everest. To be honest, our ‘tents’ were made of yak-leather and had yak-dung fires burning at the centre of them to keep us cosy and warm so it wasn’t exactly reflective of the experience that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay would have had on their way up, but it was fun none the less. The weather was a little bit cloudy but with some patience we managed to get a fairly good glimpse of Everest itself, glowering away up there above all the others. I tell you what, though… it’s a mean-looking mountain! Steep and snowy and scary; I can’t believe people actually make it to the top on a regular basis now. You’d have to be crazy to look at the thing and think “Yep, I can take it!”

It was frigidly cold when we went to sleep in our yak-skin tents at base camp, and when we woke up it was to discover that there had been a pretty significant fall of snow during the night, and the snow was still coming down pretty heavily. The tents, cars, roads, prayer-flags… everything was weighed down by a heavy swathe of snow. Being fair-weather Australian dorks, Marco and I got all excited taking photos of each other as the snow piled up on our heads and shoulders. The Bostonians on our tour with us, who are obviously completely used to snow, were much more mature about the situation. I learned one valuable thing that I’ll share with you, though – for a girl, having to do a wee behind a bush in those conditions is no joke!

Mt Everest base camp, Tibet. Ridiculously excited by the snow!

Things got trickier once we left Base Camp. The snowfall at that time of year was quite unseasonable, and as a result many of the roads were blocked and there had been several landslides so our path to the Nepalese border was blocked. We ended up having to unexpectedly spend a night in a small town near the border while we waited for one landslide to be cleared, and then sat in queues in our van the following day as we waited for the next section of road to be opened. So it was tedious, and at times butt-clenchingly terrifying as we inched our way around enormous craters that had opened up in roads, with nothing between our van and a tremendous drop into valleys.

But eventually we made it to Nepal! Once we went through the usual chaos and rigmarole at the immigration offices to get ourselves stamped out of one country and stamped into the next, it was another wild ride from the Nepalese border to Kathmandu. In this section of Nepal there were no paved roads at all… just treacherously slippery muddy tracks winding around the edges of incredibly steep mountain sides. Again, because of the snow and rainfall, much of the ‘roads’ were covered in fast-flowing water that we had to drive through, hoping the current wouldn’t sweep us over the edge! We had to stop and wait a couple of times while excavators pushed the mud that had been swept away back into something resembling a road, but eventually, inch by inch, hour by hour, we made it to paved roads, and eventually to Kathmandu. And for all my bitching and moaning, it was a spectacularly beautiful drive. We worked our way through spectacularly huge mountainsides, with countless long, narrow ribbons of waterfalls gushing down into the river in the very bottom of the gorge below us. Lush and lovely.

Once we made it to Kathmandu we found ourselves a fabulously cheap guesthouse ($2.50/night each!) and settled in to kill time while we waited for a friend of ours to arrive from Australia. Luckily Kathmandu was a pretty entertaining city to spend time in; loads of cheap little places to eat, and endless small shops selling scarves, clothing, jewellery, and endless trinkets. We explored Kathmandu reasonably thoroughly, and the highlight was definitely visiting the sacred cremation area of Pashupatinath, where the Nepalese Hindus go to burn the bodies of their family members and cast their ashes and bones into the Bagmati River. The site is covered in temples and shrines and has big concrete steps leading down to the river (which, needless to say, is pretty scummy-looking and choked with garbage). The bodies of the Hindus are carried down wrapped in vivid orange shrouds, and placed on flat sections of concrete built to jut out over the river itself. Once they are laid out, bright flowers (mostly orange marigolds) are tossed over them, and they have more wood and straw piled up over them. A group of men (we presumed they were family members) walked around the body 3 times chanting prayers, and then set it alight. There were quite a few of these funeral pyres in various states of burning, and as you can imagine the entire place was covered in smoke and the smell of burning flesh. It was a truly fascinating ritual to watch.

Although we enjoyed Kathmandu it did get a little claustrophobic at times as the traffic is horrendous, and the cars, rickshaws, buses and motorbikes all blast their horns continuously. We escaped for a few days to venture out into the Kathmandu valley to explore some of the nearby towns, most notably Bhaktapur. Bhaktapur is an ancient Newar town that, in the 15th century, was Nepal’s capital. It’s a romantic, honey-coloured city absolutely stuffed to the gills with ancient temples and crumbling but intricately carved wooden buildings, all with balconies bulging precariously out over the narrow streets. Interestingly, the day we visited Bhaktapur happened to be the climax of one of the major Nepalese festivals. This turned out to be both good and bad. The good aspect was that all the locals were kitted up in their brightest, most sumptuous outfits with elaborate makeup and jewellery, so they were particularly spectacular to look at. The down side was that a major feature of this festival was slaughtering kid goats to ensure prosperity and good luck. So everywhere we looked there were the decapitated remains of baby goats with their heads hacked off, and more live baby goats tied up just waiting their turn. Poor little things!

The ritual goat-slaughtering at Bhaktapur. It is meant to bring a year of good luck.

After killing a week in this way, my good friend and former flatmate Jane Munro arrived to meet us in Kathmandu – bearing, bless her soul, TIM TAMS! It was lovely to see her and to catch up on all the news from home, and after showing her the main sights of Kathmandu we headed off to the city of Pokhara in central Nepal. Although the city of Pokhara itself is a little bit tacky and touristy, the beauty of the surrounding countryside more than made up for it. The city is centred around a tranquil lake, and the lake is ringed by lush, green mountains which are in turn ringed by the monumental, snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. In fact, 3 of the world’s 10 highest mountains can be seen from Pokhara, and it’s quite something to be sitting in a bar in summery weather, sipping at a cocktail in your shirtsleeves, appreciating the beauty of the Himalayas.

Jane and I actually unintentionally caused quite a stir in Pokhara by deciding to go for a dip in the lake. We’d hired a small rowboat, and spent a happy afternoon paddling about in the lake admiring the scenery and listening to the cacophonous monkeys in the nearby jungle. There were plenty of folk out and about in boats on the water, and lots of the men were swimming but apparently it’s something that women just don’t do. Happily ignorant of this, Jane and I leaped in the water and swam about. I must say that we swam very modestly (fully dressed) but it made no difference – we immediately had a steady stream of boats rowing past us full of Nepalese men with their eyes agog. I can only imagine what would have happened if we’d been brazen enough to swim in actual togs or – heaven forbid – bikinis!

Anyway, after a merry few days in Pokhara we headed back to Kathmandu to meet, I’m excited to report, my Dad! (As you can see, we’ve been absolutely spoiled with visitors on this section of our trip).  So although we were sad to say goodbye to Jane, it was great to see Dad and we didn’t lose any time in getting ourselves organised with maps, boots, permits and trekking gear and heading off to the start of the Annapurna Circuit. Dad has been trekking in Nepal quite a few times before and is as strong as an ox and as fit as three fiddles, so with him to inspire us we decided to be brave and not hire a porter but to carry all our gear ourselves in our big packs for the entire 2.5 week trek.

It was exhausting but satisfying. At first we walked through verdant green mountains, with hillsides covered in rice paddies and little farms, the snowy mountains peeking up in the distance. Days passed and we climbed higher and higher, winding our way through valleys and crossing narrow suspension bridges that swayed in the breeze. We ate our meals in tiny little villages inhabited by only a handful of people, and watched as gradually those snowy mountains got gradually closer and closer, until eventually we woke up one morning and it was snowing!

Tea-break on the Annapurna Circuit.

The climax of the trek was definitely getting up and over the Thorong-La pass, which is at an altitude of 5500 metres. To put that in perspective for you, that is two and a half Mount Kosciuszko’s on top of one another and then some! To get over this beast we got up way before daybreak and began climbing in the freezing cold and darkness. We went up and up through the snowy mountains, gradually shedding layers as the sun came up and we warmed up a bit. Eventually we reached the summit, and triumphantly had our photograph taken with the sign that congratulates trekkers for making it to the highest pass in the Annapurna’s. It was a great moment!

Reaching the top of the Tharong-La Pass, at an altitude of 5,500 metres. Success!

All together we walked for almost 200 km, carrying all our own gear and much of it at high altitude, meaning the atmosphere held much less oxygen and was more difficult to trek in. Feel free to call me superwoman! The greatest reward of all? My legs have never been so toned and shapely!

Once we arrived back in Kathmandu, we left my Dad to do some more trekking on his own in different parts of the Himalayas and we headed off to India, where we are now. But our time in India has only just begun, and I will save it for the next travel update!

In the meantime, as always, we send much love to you all and hope you are happy and well.

Hugs all round from Jenny xxxx

Across the Orient - Mongolia and China

(Update from September 21, 2011)

Ni hao from Chengdu, Sichuan province, south-western China! It’s hard to believe that tomorrow is our last day in China… or at least, in China Proper before we head onwards into Tibet. An enormous amount has happened in the last 5 weeks, so I have plenty to fill you all in on!

My last travelogue finished up after our epic camping trip through the Gobi Desert in Southern Mongolia, and afterwards we spent a good few days back in the capital city Ulaanbaatar in general recovery mode… enjoying sleeping in beds, showering every day and not having to start a fire every time we wanted a meal. After a few days in the (relative) luxury of the city, we decided we’d perked up enough to start planning our next Mongolian camping trip… this time up through the wild Northern Steppes. This time, though, the twist was that instead of travelling from place to place in an ancient, bone-shaking minivan the way we’d done on our Gobi desert trip, we decided to go on horseback!  So with a couple of other people we met in our hostel in Ulaanbaatar, we caught a bus along bouncy, rutted roads to the tiny town of Terelj… a sweet enough place, though not much more than a small collection of ramshackle buildings with brightly coloured rooftops built around a couple of dirt roads.

Upon arrival we met up with the guides we’d organised from Ulaanbaatar, tentatively made friends with our horses, loaded up the poor pack horse with all our food, water and tents, and set off. It didn’t take more than 15 minutes plodding along on our horses to leave Terelj behind and be entirely surrounded by the Mongolian wilderness. The landscapes here were quite different to the ones we’d seen in the Gobi Desert, but again – they were immensely vast, very beautiful, and I’ve never seen the sky so big or so blue. We spent 5 days riding our horses through endlessly rolling steppes and hillsides, and it was all just gorgeous. The hillsides were covered with long waving grasses in brilliantly different colours, and there would often be little patches of forest and woodland to ride through where we could spot animals.

Our guides were 2 brothers; the elder one 25 and the younger one 15. Neither of them spoke a word of English but they were both incredibly sweet, and rode their horses with that loose-shouldered, slack-hipped, easy grace that all natural horsemen have. In fact, many of the families who live in gers (the white, circular felt huts that the nomadic tribes people live in) are so isolated that they are totally reliant on horses to get from place to place,  so many of their children were riding before they could walk. The older guide had a very ancient looking rifle slung over his back, which he’d use to shoot their food for the day. Every now and again we’d bump into another Mongolian on horseback, usually completely in the middle of nowhere. If it was in the evening and we’d already set up camp and lit a fire he’d typically stop and have some tea with us; but if it was during the day when we were still travelling he’d just ride along with us for some time chatting genially with our guides, and then head off on his own merry way again, resuming his journey from who knows where to who knows where!

Marco with our friend Kim, our Mongolian guides, and a Mongolian we met in the wilderness.

By the end of our 5 days on horseback, we were all feeling decidedly tender and sore around the rump; especially because we hadn’t been given proper saddles to ride on. Instead, we had the Mongolian version, which is basically just a saddle-shaped bit of wood with a slight layer of padding that constantly needed to be smoothed and evened out to prevent it bunching up into an uncomfortable, knotty lumps under the backside.  Because we’re not as tough as the Mongolians, we’d wind up mournfully rubbing our behinds each evening and doing strange yoga-esque contortions to try and stretch our sore muscles. It took me a good day to stop feeling bow-legged after returning to Ulaanbaatar!

Marco looking particularly dapper on horseback.

So upon our return to the city and civilisation, we had 2 days to wash the smell of horses off ourselves and our clothes before embarking on our last leg of the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which would take us into China. I was sad to leave Mongolia… we spent a month there all up, and though much if it was very ‘rough’ travelling (no showers, sleeping in tents, gathering our own firewood and cooking our own food) it was really good fun and the landscapes we saw there were extraordinary to the point of otherworldly. Pickpockets aside, the people were really kind and helpful, and it was mostly very easy to navigate. It’s certainly not a country I’d recommend to everyone… to enjoy it you definitely need to be willing to just sit back and roll with the punches because it’s not the most organised place in the world. But if you’re willing to rough it and don’t mind getting your hands dirty then I’d put Mongolia on your list of places to visit, because it’s cheap, beautiful, and tremendous fun.

So after a tearful farewell to the great people we’d spent most of our time in Mongolia with, we climbed back aboard that train (yet again) and chugged off into China. We crossed the border at the town of Earlian, and headed straight for Beijing. My immediate impression of China was that I was surprised by just how different to Mongolia it was. I didn’t realise it until we got there but for some reason I’d been expecting it to be quite similar, considering that they are both Asian countries right next door to one another. But China had a very distinct, different feel, and both Marco and I noticed it straight away. The most significant difference was the pollution; Beijing was covered in a blanket of smog and so humid we were both dripping sweat as soon as we stepped outside. I really enjoyed Beijing, but I must confess that I think that the location of our accommodation influenced my opinion because it certainly didn’t feel like the huge metropolis I know it is. Our hostel was in one of the small ‘hutong’ districts that are tucked into the city here and there. The hutong districts are basically small pockets of the city that are filled with a labyrinth of small, winding dirt alleyways that only have room for pedestrians, bicycles and rickshaws. So it’s a kind of oasis from the busy streets loaded with cars and trucks that rattle by in the city proper. The small dirt lanes of our hutong were crammed with street vendors frying all sorts of delicacies, groups of men playing dominoes and mah-jong at outdoor tables, fruit sellers and an ample selection of dogs, cats and chickens that meant the area managed to maintain a true ‘Asian’ feel.

Outside the Trans-Mongolian train ... and 

...inside the Trans Mongolian train!

We did all the things you’d expect in Beijing… first up, we trooped like dutiful tourists through Tiananmen Square. I must admit I was actually a little disappointed in it. Perhaps it was just because the day was so smoggy we could barely see past the ends of our noses, but it was so hectic, full of traffic and polluted that I couldn’t grab hold of that feeling I usually get in places where real, serious History has gone down. It was so thronging and teeming with busy, ugly, modern day life that I couldn’t imagine that student in the white shirt who so famously faced down the tanks. Still, it’s always interesting to finally see a place that we’d heard so much about, and it would be impossible to visit Beijing and skip Tiananmen Square, so I’m still very glad we went!

Much more rewarding was simply strolling through the city itself, which in spite of the chaotic travel was actually quite pretty. There were lovely lakes with small paddle boats going across them, and willows hanging down over the footpaths surrounding them. We’d wander along beside these lakes and watch as the Chinese men had swimming races and then argued furiously with one another over who had won as they stood there dripping in their underwear. We also visited the Birds Nest Stadium and the Swimming Cube that the 2008 Olympics were held in, and ventured out to visit the mammoth Summer Palace that lies on the outskirts of the city. Built centuries ago, it’s acted as a political hub for Beijing for many years. It’s a gorgeous place with lush, lavish gardens and grounds that are still maintained, and loads of temples and buildings all with beautifully Buddhist names,  like ‘Courtyard of Wisdom and Serenity’, ‘Temple of Fragrant Incense and Perfumed Blossoms’ and ‘Hall of Eternal Peace, Enlightenment and Harmony. I’m making these up, but you get the gist!

We didn’t visit the Forbidden City at that time as we knew we’d be returning to Beijing and wanted to save something up, but instead leapt on the bullet train and, in a ridiculously short 5 hours (look at a map – it’s a bloody long way!), we shot to Shanghai. Shanghai was a busy and bustling city with lots of European influence, and one of the most truly remarkable skylines I’ve ever seen.  It’s filled with very distinctive sky-high buildings, including one that looks like several bright purple spheres on a skewer, and another that looks like a giant twisted sail with a gaping hole in the middle of it. Shanghai didn’t have as many distinctive sights as Beijing, but none the less it had a very vibrant atmosphere, and at times felt almost like New York with massive neon advertising everywhere and hoards of people. We spent 3 very pleasant days there, strolling along what’s known as the ‘Bund’ – the stretch of boardwalk along the river that affords the best views of the city skyline, and poking through jam-packed marketplaces. Another feature of Shanghai was the shamefully stereotypical Chinese hawker, standing on every street corner with a laminated card showing pictures of watches and handbags who would grab me and holler “Missy Missy!! Come my shoppy!!  You buy bag, watch, DVD, jewellery!!! Come with me, looky looky looky!!!!!”  I know that’s a shameful stereotype and I’m sorry, but it’s not an exaggeration! Everywhere we turned we heard “Looky looky looky” and saw Chinese salesmen desperately trying to entice us into their store. Luckily they weren’t too aggressive though, and it was easy to shake them off.

One of the absolute highlights of our time in Shanghai was an evening at the theatre to see Chinese Acrobats perform. They were absolutely amazing, and so flexible they seemed to have no bones in their bodies. To mention just one of the acts, we saw a woman play the clarinet while balancing an entire, multi-level tray of full champagne glasses on her nose, at the top of a ladder. To add to the incredulity of it, there were no safety nets or wires at all… these people were really up there whizzing about on trapezes and riding unicycles along slack-ropes without anything tying them on – if something had gone wrong, it would have been immensely ugly. Luckily nothing did go wrong, and it was a great performance all round. The only other thing I’ll mention is that those acrobats wear very, very tight, lycra outfits with not much underneath. And by not much, I mean nothing! So by the end of the evening, I knew those acrobats. Intimately. Every knobble, crease and crevice of them. That’s all I’m saying.

Another point that deserves mention is the bamboozling Chinese approach to riding the metro. To give credit where it’s due, the metro systems in the major cities are a credit to the engineers who designed them… cheap, clean, and efficient. When the metro pulls up and opens its doors, though, the Chinese adopt the following approach: CHARGE!!!! For such an incredibly intelligent country, they haven’t yet figured out that it’s better for everyone if you stand back and allow people to finish getting OFF the metro before shoving your way ON. So at every single stop, there is a huge clash in the doorways as people try to simultaneously barge their way in and out. It’s always bedlam, and gets quite savage. They also have their peculiarities on long train journeys…. they seem to love bringing their laptops/video games/various noise-making devices, and playing movies or games at absolute top volume, seemingly immune to the fact that not everyone might enjoy listening to roaring artillery fire, or the blood-curdling screams as some dastardly villain is slowly decapitated in a knife fight. The Chinese love their slasher flicks!

From Shanghai we began working our way back up the coast and headed to Qingdao, which is a small seaside town and apparently has lots of attractive German and Bavarian architecture. Unfortunately, though, we had very bad smoggy weather the whole time we were there and could barely see a thing! Frustrating, but you can’t win them all. From Qingdao it was back to Beijing where, excitingly, we met up with a good friend of ours from Australia – Blake Shaw. Many of you know Blake - for those of you who don’t: he is a great chap, shared a house with us for several years, and also happens to speak very serviceable Mandarin! So as well as being excellent company, he’s made much of our time in China infinitely easier in many ways by helping us communicate with bus drivers, food sellers, and locals in general. The other remarkable thing about Blake is that he happens to be very, very tall and very, very blonde…. both things that the Chinese are most definitely NOT. So he constantly walks through a kind of parted sea of open-mouthed, gaping Chinamen and women who stare up at him and blatantly take photos. Marco also cops quite a bit of attention on account of his fairly heavy facial hair – another area where the Chinese are comparatively challenged. Seeing them stare at us in the subway, when everyone is jammed in together, is particularly hilarious!

We’d deliberately saved up some of the best tourist spots in Beijing in order to visit them with Blake, so after we’d had a good quality catch up on everything that had been going on at home, the three of us headed out and attacked the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City is a mammoth complex in the heart of Beijing, surrounded by an enormous stone wall, which is in turn surrounded by a broad moat of water. It was China’s imperial palace for over 5 centuries, and housed emperors, empresses, various nobles, countless concubines and endless streams of eunuchs to serve them all. Although it received a small amount of damage during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, an entire army battalion was swiftly sent to protect it and as such it came through relatively unscathed. It’s a sprawling palace, absolutely vast in terms of both scale and detail. The buildings in it are all single story and arranged around beautiful courtyards with gardens and water features. Tourists are not allowed inside the actual buildings themselves, but we could peer through the windows and open doorways so we spent a good half day wandering through the various wings of the palace. The detail is quite incredible… the rooves are all tiled with golden, circular shingles that interlock into one another and curve up at the corners in the quintessentially Chinese fashion. Underneath, the eaves are painted in intricate patterns of bright red, greens, yellows and blues. At the very top of the palace was the beautiful imperial garden, which is still lovingly tended and has glorious juniper trees and lovely, peaceful temples. It was a very interesting place to be, and crazy to imagine all the intrigues and debauchery that must have gone on there in its heyday.

As enjoyable as the Forbidden City was, it still didn’t hold a candle to what we did the next day, which was undoubtedly the greatest site we saw in all of China (no prizes for guessing what!). The Great Wall. How aptly named it is. With Blake’s language skills we cleverly navigated a train and 2 buses out to visit the area of the wall in Jinshanlin, about 4 hours outside Beijing. I’m sure you’ve all seen photos of it so I won’t harp on, except to say that it’s definitely one of the highlights of our entire trip. We walked along it for 10 kilometres, and though some areas were much more run down than others, in general the whole stretch was in pretty incredible condition, especially when you consider that it’s been standing there for centuries withstanding attacks from the weather, Mongolians AND swarms of tourists. We were lucky in that there weren’t actually that many people where we were, so we were able to walk for whole sections without seeing other people, which was marvellous. The scenery it runs through is stupendous, too. Enormous mountain ranges in every direction, and the Wall snaking its way along the top of the very highest ridge of all.

We also took Blake to visit what’s archaically known as the Peking Night Markets, which feature an assortment of incredibly exotic foods, adventurous even by Chinese standards. Tentacles feature heavily. Loads of things like deep fried starfish, raw snakes on skewers, sheep testicles, disgustingly sloppy, slimy sea slugs, entrails of all kinds and an abundance of creepies  and crawlies. Marco and I each ate a scorpion, among other things, and Blake was particularly brave and ate a baby shark, just thrown into the fryer as it was, eyeballs and all.

This brings me to another major point about China – the FOOD!!!!! Oh my sainted aunt… ye gods and little fishies, and bless my socks and whiskers...  it is AMAZING. It scores the trifecta – cheap, fresh and delicious. SOOO much better than the ‘Chinese’ food at home. Our first week here I ate so many dumplings I thought I would wake up wrapped in pastry. Dumplings are a little piece of heaven on a plate – I could eat them all day long without a break. Also the noodles… there are so many cheap, colourful little corner food stalls that have a counter out the front with a massive pile of dough and a cheerful little Chinaman beating it up, rolling it around, tearing it into noodles and throwing it into a wok right there.  I’m talking Kung-pao chicken, juicy tofu, hot-pots full of chilli, and stir-fried anything you can think of. It’s not only delicious; it’s EXCITING because there always is an undeniable element of risk … especially in places with no English menu. Intestines seem to be a dietary staple here, and we often eye unidentifiable bits of meat on our plates with great suspicion. None the less, we have been gobbling and guzzling away like mad, and though we can’t necessarily identify everything we eat, none of it has made us sick yet. Touch wood!

It does sometimes put you off your meal, though, when the waiter carrying it to your table clears his throat, and with much juicy hacking casually hurls a giant gobful of saliva onto the restaurant floor right by you. If the smell of China is its delicious food, then the sound is undoubtedly the rich, throaty hocking and hacking of phlegm from the locals, followed by the slap of a spitball hitting the pavement. It’s not considered rude to spit in Chinese culture, and they do it with gutso and pinpoint accuracy… indoors, outdoors, on trains, busses and even (or it seems especially) when they’re either preparing or carrying food! Putting a backpack down on the ground becomes a tricky business in itself, with all those shiny little oysters to avoid!

But I’ll get back to the point. From Beijing we boarded the overnight train and headed to the quaint and picturesque town of Ping’yao. The Chinese overnight trains are very similar to the Trans-Siberian railways, except the beds are arranged in triple decker bunks instead of double deckers. We travel in the class known as ‘hard sleeper’, which is the cheapest available excluding the ‘standing cabin’ (we’re stingy, but not that stingy!) It’s somewhat noisy with the snoring Chinese all packed in together like sardines, but infinitely more comfortable than a bus.

Ping’yao was a beautiful place, albeit very touristy – and teetering on the edge of tacky. The city was built in the 1300s, and the ancient part of town remains more or less unchanged architecturally. The buildings are all low, with curly-cornered rooftops, and are built along a tangle of narrow, twisting streets. Unfortunately, many of these little streets are now lines with stores selling crappy Chinese souvenirs, so a certain amount of imagination is required to really picture how the town would have looked when it was newly built. Nonetheless, it was like stepping back in time, and we hired bicycles and enjoyed riding through the alleyways soaking up the ancient feel of the place.

From Ping’yao we headed to a much larger town… Xi’an. Xi’an is a booming metropolis, and one of the most visited places in China for one reason and one reason only – the famed Army of Terracotta Warriors. We arrived in Xi’an very early after an overnight train ride and were buzzing with eagerness, so after dropping our packs off at a hostel we decided to head out to see the warriors straight away. They are a fair way out of town, so (again with the help of Blake’s Mandarin skills) we cleverly navigated our way there on local buses. Now – the irony of the situation was that in order to actually SEE the terracotta warriors, we had to virtually BECOME warriors ourselves, and do battle with the endless swarming, charging, bullying, barging, TYRANNICAL groups of Chinese tourists. I realise that this is one of their national treasures and of course every Chinese person has a right to see the warriors, but they seem to adore travelling in large, organised tour groups. They all wear dorky matching hats or tee-shirts (if not both), and follow a Chinese tour guide who yells at them through a crackly megaphone and leads them around like sheep. Individually, the Chinese people seem to be nice enough, but when they are in packs batten down the hatches and prepare for stormy weather because they morph into unforgiving, brutal mobsters!! Elbows come out and gloves come off as they shove their way to the front. They seem to subscribe to the view that Might equals Right, and that as they are in a group they take priority over single tourists like us… perhaps it’s a Communist thing? ANYWAY!!! I’m ranting, so will go onto say that with much pushing and shoving on our own behalf we did finally manage to get a good look at the Terracotta Armies. They are in three pits, in various states of excavation, and a kind of aircraft hangar has been built over each pit so tourists can walk around and view the warriors from above. Many are still in pieces embedded in the ground, but there are lots of rows of completely excavated, more-or-less flawless warriors and horses that stand in their battle formations. The remarkable thing about them is that no two warriors’ faces are alike – they all have their own unique features and expressions. They were built by a Chinese emperor almost 2000 years ago, and in spite of the bedlam that reigns around them, there was something wistful and almost sad about them. The thought of them standing there for millennia, so silently and expressively, made me feel a little nostalgic for some reason. At least…I think it did. It was hard to properly form an opinion because I’d feel nostalgic for a moment, and then be jabbed in the ribs by an umbrella-wielding Chinese tourist, so perhaps my judgement is a bit off!

The day after our trip to the Terracotta Warriors we explored the centre of Xi’an, and spent most of the day wandering about the Muslim Quarter. This is a couple of blocks of the city where the streets are lined with absolutely amazing food stalls selling an incredible array of cheap, freshly cooked meals and snacks. The area also had loads of outdoor butcheries, where young fellows would sit on the pavement and merrily chop up a cow carcass with a machete. The butcher stalls themselves had outdoor tables loaded with raw meat, kidneys and livers the size of watermelons. There were also huge tubs of intestines, which (queasy stomach alert!) the vendors would blithely plunge into up to the armpits, stirring in herbs and who knows what with their bare hands. We ate some really delicious food there (including the best beef noodles we found in all of China), but also had to skip smartly over the streams of blood that ran down the gutters from the butchers’ stalls and raw food preparation. It’s one of those places that seem so honest about the food – you can see absolutely every stage: from the whole cow or sheep head that’s been hacked of and is lying casually at the back of the stall, right through the process of preparation, and finally the cooking itself. Smelly, but I love those kinds of markets!

From Xi’an it was back aboard the overnight train onto another famous Chinese city – Chengdu – which is where we are now, and where, sadly, we said goodbye to Blake earlier today. Though we’ve only been here 2 days, we’ve already seen a couple of the best things Chengdu has to offer… firstly, one of the world’s best breeding programs for the desperately endangered Giant Panda. We got up bright and early as we’d heard they were most active in the cool of the morning, and were lucky enough to arrive at the research centre just in time for breakfast. We got to see groups of giant pandas gorging themselves on bamboo, climbing trees and generally rolling around looking cute. We also got to see some 6-week old baby pandas, covered in new black and white fuzz. Gorgeous!

We also took a 2 hour bus ride to see the largest Budda statue in the world, built over 1200 years ago. Although it was another situation where we had to face the onslaught of the merciless Chinese Tour groups, it was a beautiful statue to see, with a tranquil eyes and a calm, serene expression on its face. It’s carved into the side of a cliff, over a running river, and is utterly epic in scale. Over 70 metres high, his earlobes alone are 7 metres long!

Today is our very last day in China (at least, it is if you count Tibet as a separate country), and so it marks the end of our epic overland journey from Moscow in western Russia, to Chengdu in southern China. We have spent a ridiculous number of hours on trains – days on end, sometimes – but I really love overland travel. Tomorrow, though, it’s back on a plane and we’re off to that most romantic Shangri-La … TIBET! It should be magnificent: all the more so as we’ll be meeting our good friend Jane Munro at the end of it, and after that my Dad, who is coming to meet us to go trekking in Nepal! So not only have we been treated to Blake’s great company, we have even more faces from home to look forward to.

Hoping you are well and happy, and sending much love. We miss you all.

Jenny xxxx

Adventures in Russia, Siberia & Mongolia

(Update from August 22, 2011)

I know it’s been a long while between updates, but the break is over because, after a lovely visit home to Australia to see family and organise visa paperwork, I’m happy to report that Marco and I are back on the road and the travelogues are recommencing! I’m also pleased to announce that we made the investment of a little laptop (thank you, e-bay) so I’m now typing this to you in the comfort of our guesthouse, rather than banging it out on a greasy keyboard in an internet café somewhere.  Much more pleasant!

We began what we refer to as ‘Phase 2’ of the trip in Russia. And wow – what a country it was. It’s so enormously vast and varied that I feel I should say a few words about the place in general before getting into the specifics of it. It’s truly like nowhere I’ve ever been before – we met people who went miles out of their way to help us, and also people who were utterly unsympathetic to the confused traveller and would blatantly roll their eyes at us trying to negotiate complicated Russian trains and metros. We saw villages that were as ancient as the hills and cities that were the ultimate thriving, modern metropolis. We both bore a furious grudge against the old people in the country who seemed (without fail) to shamelessly push in front of us in EVERY SINGLE QUEUE WE GOT IN until someone pointed out to us that they’d lived most of their lives in the Soviet Communist era, and that in those times if you didn’t push in you missed out. We saw the tombs of WW2 war criminals covered in roses, and spent days on end on trains. We spent 4 weeks in Russia, and yet I still don’t feel I managed to gain any kind of proper understanding of the place.

St Basil's Cathedral, Moscow

But, I have to start somewhere, so for want of a better idea I’ll begin at the beginning! Our first stop in Russia was Moscow, and as Marco and I had spent some time apart applying for visas (me with my family in Australia, him with his parents in the USA) it was absolutely lovely to see one another again, and to feel a fresh sense of excitement to have our packs on our backs and be back on the road once more. I must confess that we approached Moscow with a bit of a sense of trepidation… after a cushy time period spent living in the same, English-speaking place and enjoying home comforts we were a little worried that we may have lost some of our travelling ‘smarts’, and had heard plenty of stories about Russians being fairly unfriendly to foreigners… not to mention the difficulty of the language. I’d been doing my darndest to learn a word a day before leaving, but even the simplest words seemed to have about 8 syllables that tied my tongue in knots and had me spraying spit all over the place.

Anyway – that may be too much information! Luckily, we fell back into the swing of miming and pointing before too long, and we managed to negotiate the utterly insane Moscow subway systems without too much trouble (thanks to Marco’s totally awesome map interpretation skills). Although it was a very big, quite dirty, fast paced city that was mostly unremarkable, it was still absolutely worth the visit because it contained a few sights that blew our minds – namely, The Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and the Red Square. Conveniently, they were all located pretty much right next to each other and we lost no time in checking them out.

The Red Square was about 2 subway stops from the poxy shithole they had the nerve to call a guesthouse we stayed at, and the sight of it made our jaws drop. It was an absolutely vast courtyard flanked on one side by the red wall of the Kremlin, on another side by the vividly colourful St Basil’s cathedral, and on the remaining sides by yet more magnificent buildings and cathedrals. Taken all together, it was very impressive, very beautiful and very, very Russian!

View of the Red Square

St Basil’s cathedral was definitely my favourite, and I liked it even more when I learned the fabulously gruesome story behind it… Ivan the Terrible had it built centuries ago to commemorate a military victory, and was then so delighted with it that he (purportedly) had the architect’s eyes plucked out so he could never design anything so beautiful again. How’s that for payment?!?! The cathedral itself isn’t actually very big, but it’s a marvel to look at, topped with multiple onion domes painted the brightest shades of red, blue and green. The whole thing is just about the craziest kaleidoscope of colours you ever saw from the outside, and the inside is just as lovely: dim rooms with walls covered in old, peeling religious murals and a lovely choir of Russian men in crisp white shirts singing hymns that echoed off the walls in a very ethereal manner.

Just next door to St Basil’s was The Kremlin – Russia’s political heart and hub. The complex was enclosed by an enormous, turreted red wall, above which towered the onion domes of plenty more cathedrals (this time in shiny silver and gold). We bought ourselves tickets and lined up with the rest of the tourists, watching the official looking cars as they whizzed in and out ferrying goodness knows who. Inside it was almost like another world away from the dirt and noise of Moscow in general. There were lovely, peaceful, shady gardens to sit in, and several gorgeous old cathedrals to explore. We also visited what’s known as The Armoury, which is more or less Russia’s equivalent of the Crown Jewels and houses their national treasures. We saw the dress that Catherine the Great wore at her coronation, the crown, orb and sceptre that belonged to Ivan the Terrible, and enough jewels and gold-encrusted objects to knock your socks off. Those Tsars sure knew how to live!!

One very small part of the Kremlin

We were very lucky during our time in Moscow and had brilliant blue skies almost every day, but the downside of that was that the sun was so strong we had to return to our guesthouse to take a nap most afternoons as we were so worn out by the heat. We didn’t stay long in Moscow as it was a hellishly expensive place, and also I’m afraid I admit that we did find the stereotype to be true… the people in Moscow really weren’t the friendliest. As practically nothing in the city was in English we needed to ask for help quite a bit, and often we’d have to stop 2 or 3 people before we found someone who was even willing to give us the time of day and look at our map or watch our sign language. Many of the people would quite literally turn around and face the other way when we approached them, or simply shrug us off, even when we were wearing our friendliest, most charming and beguiling smiles. But to give credit where it’s due – in terms ofappearance the Muscovites were absolutely stunning. The women in particular. It seems to be a city where women dress to the nines, style their hair and slap on heels and makeup just to go down to the shops to buy a bottle of milk. They also seemed to have some strange aversion to wearing bras… it was extremely common to see some beautiful woman clad in designer clothing strutting down the street in stilettos with her top half totally unrestrained, bouncing about and jiggling like mad. And we saw it A LOT, too, not just a couple of times. At least, I should say I saw it a lot... Marco assures me he never noticed it once!!! ;-)

So, after only 3 days we left the heat and haste of Moscow and took the train to St Petersburg. Now, I don’t say this so unreservedly very often, but this is a case where I feel I can hold nothing back. I LOVED St Petersburg. I mean I LOVE LOVE LOVED it. It was a beautiful, timeless, romantic city and so elegantly European. I’m sorry – I know I’m gushing, but it really was just gorgeous. For starters, it is so far north that the sun stays high in the sky almost all day. We were there pretty much at high summer too, so we’d watch as the sun finally sank below the horizon at about midnight, very briefly enjoy a kind of purpley twilight, and then watch as the sun came right back up! Utterly surreal, and very strange to get used to.

St Petersburg is built on the river Neva and has an intricate system of canals running through the entire city, so many of the streets are on the water and have graceful little bridges running over the canals, with boats floating along underneath them. The architecture is very European, and it’s a place where you can literally feel the history – I found it really easy to imagine the streets full of horses and carriages instead of cars. Most of the city is in beautiful condition, but every now and then we’d stumble across a street where the stone edifices on the buildings were crumbling and blackened with grime and with a jolt I’d remember that the history of the city wasn’t all Tsars and grandeur…. in the Second World War, when the city was called Leningrad, it was held for siege for 900 days, and the citizens had to eke out an existence as best they could under continual Nazi bombardment.

Anyway… enough of the history lesson! For us, the highlight of St Petersburg was right in the very heart of the city – the Winter Palace. Basically the place where the Russian Tsars would spend the harsh winter months, it was a beautiful, bright blue palace built on the river that is absolutely stuffed to the gills with gold encrusted furniture and priceless works of art. We spent a happy day fighting with the other billion tourists to get a good look at all the luxury, and trying to snap photos in the millisecond when there’s no one else in the background.

The Winter Palace, St Petersburg

Palaces were certainly something St Petersburg wasn’t short of, and we visited several, some of which were slightly outside the major city. The most beautiful was the palace owned/built by Catherine the Great, known (not very originally) as Catherine’s Palace. It was, in my opinion, even more ostentatious and grandiose than Versailles in France. You honestly couldn’t fit one more bit of gold leaf in there or I’m sure the whole place would cave in on itself. Even more amazing is the fact that the place was totally ransacked by the Nazis in WW2 and nearly burned to the ground. We saw old photographs of what the palace looked like after their retreat – totally derelict with the ceilings and floors destroyed and many of the rooms devastated by fire. It’s an absolute credit to the Russian government how well it’s been restored. A similarly impressive palace was Peterhoff, where Peter the Great used to spend his time. Peterhoff, though, was impressive because of its grounds more so than the palace itself.   Peter the Great had a thing for fountains, and had hundreds of them installed through the very elaborate gardens, and as it was summertime they were all playing beautifully!

Another event I’ll always remember as one of the highlights of our time in St Petersburg (and my life!) was a wonderful evening Marco had organised for us at the Russian Ballet. We went to see Swan Lake – the most Russian of all the Russian ballets! The performance itself was fabulous enough – the dancers superb, the costumes ethereal and dreamy, and the live orchestra absolutely perfect – but the icing on the cake was that it was performed in the breathtaking, centuries-old Alexandrinsky theatre! A theatre that the Tsars themselves used to go to, and watch the performance from the ornate, elaborate ‘Tsars Box’ that is still the best seat in the house (when we were there it was filled with a collection of tubby Japanese tourists). The chandelier in the theatre was about the size of our old living room. And if all that wasn’t enough, Marco had arranged for us to watch the performance in sumptuous golden-tasselled, red-velveted style from our very own, private box! I just loved being there imagining all the Russian nobility sitting in that very same place hundreds of years ago, engaging in goodness knows what debauchery and carousing.

Our wonderful evening at the Russian Ballet - thank you Marco!!

When we left St Petersburg it was to embark on our first stint along the Trans Siberian railway. We travelled third class, naturally, but we were amazed at how comfortable and convenient the trains were even so. Third class meant we were in a big long carriage where everyone was shoved in together rather than in private compartments, but none the less every passenger had their own sleeper bunk and with the rocking motion of the train it was marvellously easy to sleep. After the ghastly bus rides in South America, the Russian trains seemed like the height of luxury!

So we rode the train to the city of Vladimir, and spent 3 days staying in a guesthouse in the nearby ancient little village of Suzdal. In medieval ages it used to be a monastic centre, so it’s absolutely chock-a-block with convents, old cathedrals and churches. Everywhere we looked we saw bright onion domes, spires and church steeples. Women are forbidden to enter the Eastern Orthodox churches without covering their heads, so I invested in a lovely little silk head scarf and felt very Audrey Hepburn as I strolled through the cathedrals and convent grounds. Another thing about Suzdal was that it was absolutely filled with wildflowers. In some meadows they were so thick you couldn’t see the grass below them, and the nuns in the convents tended huge patches of sunflowers and cultivated gorgeous, madly out-of-control flowerbeds that exploded over the pavements and paths in beautiful swathes of colour.

A lovely convent in Suzdal, complete with  glorious garden

From Suzdal we leaped back aboard the Trans-Siberian and stopped at Nizhny Novgorod, which was a very unremarkable place, though I do have to give special mention the very friendly (though extremely drunk) young man we met in the train station there. He was on his way home from a football match and standing behind me in the tickets queue; he noticed me nervously clutching our phrasebook in my clammy hand, trying to figure out which phrases I was going to have to use to buy a ticket. He tapped me on the shoulder and politely informed me that he spoke a little English (his English was flawless!) and that he’d be happy to translate for me and help me buy the tickets if necessary. Not only did he help us buy the exact tickets we needed for the cheapest price, but he also helped us navigate our way through a new city, and personally escorted us to the doorway of our guesthouse (which we later discovered was in a very dangerous area). This guy single handedly managed to make up for the rudeness of the Muscovites!

3rd class carriage on the Trans-Siberian Railway

From Nizhny Novgorod we did our first real, long leg on the train – 44 hours into SIBERIA!!!! Now, I’m lucky enough to have an auntie who comes from Siberia, and though she now lives in Australia with my uncle she just happened to be there at the same time as we were, visiting her family. So we spent a very happy few days staying with her in her home city of Novosibirsk. It was during this time that we really got our first taste of traditional Russian food, because my aunt Margarita is also an amazing cook! We were royally feasted on delicious dumplings, spiced/picked vegetables, traditional salads and fresh melons and berries. As well as just generally spending time with family, the highlight of Novosibirsk were definitely our trip to the Russian circus, where we saw people and trained animals perform feats that made my jaw drop. Until you’ve seen a hot-pink poodle ride a unicycle across a tightrope towing a beaver in a basket, you haven’t really been to the circus. That’s all I’m saying!

The Russian Circus

From Novosibirsk, we headed to the smaller, university-town of Tomsk. We probably would have skipped Tomsk altogether if it hadn’t been for some absolutely lovely Russians we met in a backpackers’ hostel in Colombia last year, who invited us to stay with them. And I’m so glad we did, because Tomsk was a great place. It’s filled with old, crumbling, ramshackle wooden buildings bedecked with wooden lace, painted in bright colours and some so old they’re literally falling apart at the seams. Our friends were kind enough to take us to the ‘dacha’ of a friend of theirs – meaning the patch of land handed out to all families by the Communist Party to allow them to build a second home and grow their own produce. This family’s dacha was beautifully nestled in amongst row upon glorious row of furiously growing vegetables, fruits and berries. We spent hours happily grazing like animals, eating berries straight off the trees in the afternoon sunshine. To top the day off, we all sat around on the grass as we grilled marinated chicken and fish over a fire pit and ate them along with freshly grown vegetables picked minutes before. A very authentic Russian experience.

Marco picking berries at the Dacha

From Tomsk we headed back to Novosibirsk to leap back aboard the Trans Siberian, and after another 24 hours on the train we reached the little town of Irkutsk: a very pretty place with lots more of the ramshackle, timber buildings adorned with wooden lace we’d seen in Tomsk. It was at this point that we really noticed the faces of the people in the streets looked significantly different, and the city definitely had a much more Asian feel about it. I think that was when we really first realised just how far we’d come along the train line, and that we really were close to the border with Mongolia.

We had a bit of an anxious time here and I must confess I began sweating bullets for a few days as our Russian visas were perilously close to expiring, and we still had to wait for our Mongolian tourist visas to be processed at the consulate in Irkutsk for the next leg of our journey. Just getting visas for Russia was a complicated enough process (think official Letters of Invitation, sponsored Tourist Vouchers and an ongoing process of registration) – the last thing we wanted to do was accidentally overstay and end up in the country illegally! To take our minds off the potential looming catastrophe we left our passports with the consulate and went to visit the nearby Lake Baikal, which is the both the largest and the deepest freshwater lake in the world (it holds 25% of all the fresh water on Earth). Our anxiety about the visas didn’t stop us from appreciating the beautiful lake, and though it was quite touristy and expensive in the area it was lovely just to walk along the banks of a lake so vast it looked like an ocean. The water in Lake Baikal is drinkably pure, a vivid crystalline blue, and the shores are flanked by beautiful natural vegetation and wildflowers.

Upon our return to Irkutsk we gratefully picked up our passports from the Mongolian consulate, and – with quite literally only hours remaining on our Russian visas – hightailed it outta there and crossed the border. I think Marco and I both felt a little frazzled and emotional at leaving… Russia really was unique among all the countries we’ve visited on our trip so far. It was also very expensive (at least, it was by our backpacking standards) – at one point we described Russia as feeling like one constant trip to the ATM. But though it was definitely challenging and at times frustrating because of the language barrier, it was also tremendously rewarding.

Irkutsk

Our train chugged into the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar very early in the morning, and upon disembarking we were relieved to find ourselves walking down a street where many of the signs had the English alphabet as well as the Cyrillic. People in general seemed much more willing to approach and offer help to bemused looking backpackers, and to top it all off Ulaanbaatar is blissfully cheap! Unfortunately, though, it is also absolutely teaming with pickpockets, and practically every traveller we’ve met has had something lifted from their pack. We’ve been ridiculously lucky so far – I realised a split-second too late that I had a chap with his hands elbow-deep in my backpack, but through sheer dumb luck nothing was taken. I had my jumper at the very top of the pack which blocked his access to any of our valuable stuff, but we’ve learned from the experience and now always keep our backpacks on our chests. Let’s hope we stay lucky!

We didn’t lose any time in setting out to see the sights of Mongolia, and began by teaming up with 3 Israelis and a Danish chap and embarking on a 7 day tour of the Gobi desert. We camped every night, didn’t have a single shower in the whole 7 days, and were driving around in a minivan so ancient and beat up it was like sitting in a washing machine. But although we were all extremely hot, dusty and looking forward to a comfortable night’s sleep by the end of our Gobi Desert exploration, we really saw some of the most spectacular scenery we’ve seen in our entire 14 months travelling. At times it was like being on another planet. Much of the desert isn’t ‘deserty’ at all… we drove for hours and hours through endlessly rolling, grassy hillsides with not a tree in sight, we saw slowly moving herds of yaks, horses, goats and camels being driven by Mongols on horses or on foot dressed in traditional costume. As well as that, we saw phenomenal, flaming red cliffs that towered and stretched out along the horizon for miles, rode camels along mammoth sand dunes, and camped out under the stars on the flat plains known as ‘steppes’.

Camel riding on the Mongolian sand dunes 

Outside the cities, Mongolia really seems to be a country that is frozen in time. Many of the Mongols still live traditional nomadic lifestyles, living truly in the middle of nowhere in white felt huts called ‘gers’, which they dismantle when they’re ready to move on and then reassemble at a new spot. The landscapes are endlessly vast – I’ve never been in a country where the sky looks so big. Most of Mongolia is treeless, so it’s just hillsides covered in grass that seem to roll away for ever. It’s quite a lonely landscape in some ways, but also very, very beautiful.

I now also have another reason to love this country. Right at the top of a beautiful waterfall in central Mongolia, I turned around to find Marco down on bended knee with a lovely ring that used to belong to his mother. So after over 6 years together and an epic exploration of the globe that has, to date, lasted 14 months, I’m pleased to say that we are engaged and feeling very happy.

Well, that’s about it for now! We have another week left in Mongolia, during which we think we’ll head up to the North and spend a couple of days riding horses and soaking up some more of these stupendous landscapes, and then it’s back on the train to Beijing to tackle China.

Once again – if you actually read this entire travelogue, then thank you thank you thank you, and I’m grateful to you for your time! As always, we really miss you all at home, and think of you all very often.