Trans Siberian - China/Mongolia/Russia

Wednesday 31st August

Our train up on jacks I am now in Ulaan Baatar the captital city of the world's most sparsely populated country, Mongolia. Certainly when we got off the train and had a quick look around it seemed that for a city of 600,000 there was only about five or six people around! Jason noted that it looked as if it had been built about 50 years ago and people had just moved back in last week. Almost every building, with the exception of the concrete state structures looked as though it was about to crumble away towards the overgrown footpath. The trans-siberian trip to date has gone reasably smoothly and we departed Beijing without a hitch and started the couple of days journey here on a very comfortable Mongolian train. The highlight of the trip was definately the China/Mongolian border. The Russians and Mongolians guarded against invasion by train so their tracks are a different width than the Chinese. At the border is where they get around this problem by lifting all the carriages up and putting new wheels on them. Cool.

Our ger We started a jeep trek from a ger (large round Mongolian tent that sleeps about four) about an hours drive from Ulaan Baatar our Russian jeeps had all the modern comforts, like seats, a steering wheel and wheels. It seems that communists feel that luxuaries like suspension and seat belts are only for the capitalist scum!

The Gobi desert provided us with some spectaular sunsets, as the dust in the air makes the sky go a beautiful shade of orange as it fades toward twilight. We went for a walk on the back of a camel which was pretty damn uninteresting, but an experience nonetheless. There are more stories to tell but they will be added later as I have a pressing engagement that prevents me from writing more.

Thursday 1st August

My apologies for the the hurried departure of yesterdays story last night but I had to leave the update of this page to go and see the Mongolian 'Hollywood Golden Star' awards with special guest Steven Segal. More on that later..

Accommodation on the Trans Siberian train (or the Trans Mongolian as our route is known) consists of sleeper compartments of four beds (2x2 bunks) and has two guards compartments, a toilet and a water heater for every carriage. The water heater is great for heating the noodles and coffee and tea that are required for those few moments that you are not drinking or sleeping. During stops and border crossings, the toilets are locked which proved slightly problematic when we got to the China/Mongolia border and waited for 6 hours before the two sets of immigration controls were completed. Not good after 10 or so beers.

The walls of The Erdeme Zuu Monestry The package that we got from UB included a jeep trek as I mentioned, which began on our second day in Mongolia. The seven hour 275km ride was made longer by the fact that we had to go all the way back to UB from our ger camp to get the jeeps! Still, we got underway and headed out towards Karkourum the site of the 12th centuary capital city. We noticed that our guide was a little short in the old local knowledge department, when he couldn't describe the meaning of the mongolian flag. (Incidentally, it means strength and vigilance for Mongolians for eternity) This was further compounded when on the next day after the 90km into Karakourum, he responded to the question "when was this monestry built?" by replying "oh, many years ago."! The Erdeme Zuu Monestry that we were looking at, was in fact built in the 12th centuary, but during Stalin's communist purges of 1930's all but 12 of the 68 temples in the 400 square metre complex were destroyed. The rest of the ancient city is being excavated in an archelogical dig presently, and can not be seen at all. The guide was then supposed to take us to a local family, but he was feeling a little under the weather after an apparent large night drinking the night before, and took us back to the camp where he went to bed.

A monk at the monesry, calling worshipers to prayer The ger camps themselves were very comfortable and the service geared towards the large numbers of japanese tourists was excellent. Yesterday we had the bone jarring ride back to UB where we checked into the very plush Bayangobi hotel and discovered that Mr Segal was to be appearing in town. At once I rushed out and got tickets!

The Hollywood Golden Star awards were a showcase of Mongolian modern and traditional song and dance. Possibly the equivalent of the Brit awards (I wondered if perhaps they could be renamed 'the Mongs'?). We saw a traditional Mongolian Long Song which was actually quite short, and some local hip-hop, pop, dance and rock. There was also a martial arts display. After all this the announcer welcomed Steve onto the stage and he arrived in a rain of sparks to hand out some awards and sing (yes sing!) a couple of songs, one bluesy number and the assationation of another. All in all a fantastic night.

Tonight I am back on the train for the 2 day journey towards Irkutsk where we have three days on the shores of Lake Baikal, the worlds deepest lake. It is also in Russia which means only one thing.. Vodka!

Monday 5th August

I am now in the Siberian city of Irkutsk. Our trip from Mongolia here was not particularly long, but it involved two sets of customs officers that seem to want to outdo each other in terms of making passengers travelling between their respective countries wait. We woke up on the first morning of our trip to find that we were just a single carriage sitting sans engine in a Mongolian station. After about 3 hours some officials turned up and took away our passports. We then waited some more. Some people had some difficulties with the fact that the toilets were locked, others that we were not allowed out of our "train". We waited for about 7 hours before the train started to move again, and then arrived in Russia where the new set of guys with machine guns and solumn looks on their faces repeated the dose - giving us our passports back about 2 hours before the train was due to depart. Suffice to say there was a place nearby that sold beer and with some fresh roubles in our pockets we ran happily in that direction. After the sneaky Monglian vodka that we had bought in Ulaan Baatar, I woke up the next morning feeling decidely average but after we got out of the train at about 8:30 there was a full days sightseeing around Lake Baikal in front of me.

View over Lake Baikal Lake Baikal is the world most volumous lake, it is so massive that you could dump Ireland in it and there would still be plenty of space to go around. The water is very clear though and we were told that in you can see a 20cm disc 40 metres below the surface. In winter the lake freezes about 10 feet thick and trucks can drive on the surface, making it a bit easier to get the accross the 675km length. We went for a walk around the shore for a while and then up to a viewpoint before retiring to our homestay and having a Russian sauna before dinner. The food was unbeliveably huge portions of traditional stodgy Russian fare, and our host kept on pressurising us into eating more, so we waddled off to bed wondering how the Russians dont seem to ever look overweight.

Yesterday was a pretty good example of terrible Siberian weather, and the trek that we had planned was not viable, so we huddled inside played cards, and waited for the rain and wind to clear. When it did we got on board an old Russian ferry and went for a short ride on the lake, before once again stuffing ourselves at dinner time.

Tomorrow afternoon we begin the final part of the train journey, an 86 hour epic that spans 6 time zones before we arrive in Moscow. There are no boarder guards to contend with and we have met many of the people that are going to be on the train over the last few days. It should be a very interesting trip, if perhaps a little drunken.

Saturday 10th August

Moscow, the last stop after nearly 79 hours I'm now back in Europe, a continent I have not been in since I left at the start of this trip in February. We arrived in Moscow last night after our official journey time stopwatch was stopped at 78 hours and 46 minutes. I still feel as though Im rocking back and forth on imaginary tracks. I am also very glad that I broke the trip up with the stops that I made in Mongolia and Siberia, as my liver would not have forgiven another day on that train! It was good that after every three hours they would (sometimes) let us off to stretch our legs for a few minutes.

Today I have been to see old V.I Lennin, and I must say he is looking very plastic in his old age, Ive been to the Pushkin museum of fine arts, the massive Church of Our Saviour, seen the huge GUM department store in Red Square and of course the famous St Basils Cathedral and am now looking for a place to watch the South Africa vs All Blacks game. The local nightlife should be interesting, we've been warned that there is a 99.9% certainty that if you are approached by a girl in a pub she is a pro. Failing to remember this can result in a hefty bloke presenting a hefty bill for wasting her time later in the evening. Hopefully Baltika (the local brew) will be kind enough to let me remember this and the way home so I can report to you all from Moscow again soon.

Tuesday 13th

Tomorrow is my last day in Russia so I will spend the time between now and then chilling out and getting organised for the crazy time in London over the next two weeks. In the last few days I have been on a sightseeing frenzy and have looked around the Kremlin, some of the more ornate metro stations, the KGB hangouts and been to some markets and the busy Arabat area of Moscow. The Kremlin was an interesting morning - we saw the state room where Lennin had his study and where Putin has all his official meetings these days. After the revolution, there was a telephone in the entrance to the Kremlin with the numbers of all the party members on it, so anyone could walk up and give Vlad a call to see if he was free for a visit. We also saw the reminants of various invaders to the area with abandoned French, German and Polish cannons displayed outside an old armoury. The present armoury contains a collection of ornate objects associated with the Tsars such as wedding gowns, carriages and gold plated books. We had a look around that too - and also saw a bell that doesnt ring and a gun that never fired. Great tourist attractions these Russians have! There are four churches in the Kremlin too and as you can probably imagine I rushed entheuastically in the opposite direction. I do like those great big onions that they stick on the top of the spires in this part of the world though. It was interesting to learn however that the Russian Orthadox churches do not have pews or seats of any kind in them, as their belief is that its disrespectful to be sitting in the presence of God.

Yesterday we got a guided 'KGB' walking tour, which provided us with some insights into the internal syping that went on inside the former USSR after the 'secret' organisation was set up in 1918. We walked around an open air park (not to far from the incredibly uninteresting Gorky Park) now converted into an outdoor museum where statues of the soviet era that have been taken away from their original sites are now placed. There are a number of Lennins, Breshnevs and co. and we noted that as the tenure of the leader increased, so did the number of medals and stars on their chests. Some of the statues, our guide suggested had been given larger chests just to fit the number of medals they had awarded themselves. We learnt how Stalin had sent anyone with a remote sign of intelligence off to Siberia and how that had destroyed the ablity of the people to generate food and goods for themselves (can anyone draw any parallels to modern day Zimbabwe?). We also found out that after the disbanding of the KGB, the Russian economy once again fell to pieces. The tour ended outside the old KGB headquaters where there is a stone commemerating the 40 000 people that were killed by the organisation under Stalin.

With my head bursting full of Russian history, we went for a tour of some Metro stations, all built our guide had said, by slave labour under Stalin and subsequent leaders - but nonetheless quite magnificent and very functional. The Metro system there is said to have the largest throughput of any network in the world and it is not hard to see why. The stations are huge and trains run every minute or so without fail. The cleanliness and grandour are amazing. One station that we visited had a small waterfall behind some ceramic art and another had magnificent bronze statues throughout its length. All this in stations with no litter or graffiti. Yeah, Ive got to say I was a little impressed.

The famous St Basils Cathedral from Red Square Moscow is certainly a very different city to the one that I expected and if it wasnt so expensive to get a visa and stay here I sure it would be much higher on my list of cities to return to. There are some difficulties associated with being here however, you need to have your passport registered at every place you stay, and this can be and (judging by the number of police doing this) probably will be checked by officials if you stay long enough. The alcoholics amongst you would fit right in however, it was not uncommon for us to see people lining up at 10-11:00am to buy beers from the numerous kiosks around town.

So thats it from this part of the trip, for the happenings in London and a highlights package, stay tuned and Ill write more from Old Blighty.

Click here for the Last hurrah in London town

Feel free to send any messages to me at ryananglem@hotmail.com