It's hard to describe how strange it is to leave the snow capped Himalaya one evening, sit in a plane for a few hours and then find yourself swimming in azure blue water on a white sandy beach surrounded by dense jungle with Hong Kong's skyline as a backdrop. It seemed a really long time since we said goodbye to the Indian Ocean as it lapped the shores of Kanyakumari with our bikes laden on the first day of our cycle, it was good to see the sea again!
We arrived in Hong Kong bleary eyed, sleep deprived and very dazed and confused! Amazingly, we managed to not only find our little ferry to take us to Lamma Island, where we would be staying, but also managed to drop our passports off on route at the Mongolian Consulate for yet another visa. Lamma is one of Hong Kong's outlying Islands, a sparsely populated (for Hong Kong!) tropical island with a few villages and beaches.
Of Hong King we expected the towering sky scrapers, polished windows, neon lights and global brands but were really surprised to find bustly street stalls and jam packed food markets nestling in the steep alleyways between their ranks. Little wooden junks bobbed in shabby docks next to multi-million pound yachts. Bare chested fishing wholesalers in wellies pulled huge tubs of wriggling fish from their trawler's holds as yummy mummies passed by in their yoga gear with silly designer dogs tucked under their arms. When you've not slept for 36 hours it all seemed pretty ridiculous!
Exhaustion overwhelming us and having missed one ferry, we both dozed on Aberdeen's dockside waiting for our lift to eventually arrive. Things continued on their slightly surreal path when we arrived on Lamma Island and the skies opened and tropical rain fell as we scrurried to our AirBnB. There we met our host who, unbeknown to us, was the local island nudist (fortunately he had all his kit on for our first meeting!). We shared his tiny little cottage and quickly managed to inadvertently break every house rule... he was a very particular fellow! Living by the beach, you would expect the odd grain of sand to infiltrate his sanctuary but we wouldn't have been surprised to see him picking up each stray grain with tweezers after we left! He was a nice chap though and thankfully the only bare bottom shot we got was on his computer desktop (nude selfie walking in to the sea... not a hair on that man's bottom!) He also kindly told us about the island's beautiful places of which there were many!
We spent a wonderful afternoon getting horribly sunburnt on one of the secret beaches he recommended. We still have excellent tan lines to prove we kept our kit on if evidence is ever required! In between the beautiful white sandy beaches were collections of tatty tumble down cottages where little old ladies clung on to their traditional way of life. The Island has a few bigger settlements too, where we found some delicious and unbelievably fresh sea food (splashing about in tanks next to the table!).
On a couple of days we ventured to the city proper and spent our time hunting the tastiest Dim Sum Hong Kong has to offer, visiting the city parks and Aviary (thanks Becky!) and gazing at the night-time city skyline from the famous Star Ferry like proper tourists!
After a few days and with Mongolian visa safely stuck in our passports, we boarded our first long distance overnight train to Beijing.
We jumped on the train like two little excited children with bags full of food and tickets in hand. Each carriage has a hot water dispenser ready to make up as many teas, noodles and porridges as you can stomach, so we were well prepared! We were a little apprehensive about our potential compartment companions but needn't have worried as we had a six berth all to ourselves! Train travel is most definitely the way to go as far as we're concerned. We could not have been happier to say goodbye to Nepalese buses and hope it's a long time before our next flight.
It took 24 hours for half of China to roll by and then, at last, Beijing's 7th ring road (they're already planning three more to make it a round ten!) and 22 million people welcomed us to China's capital. A few hours after arriving we were sitting cross legged on the 11th floor of an apartment block with mum, Tina, and 12 year old Tommy (they didn't even bother trying to get us to pronounce their Chinese names!) enjoying a traditional tea ceremony. Tommy did a great job of translating for us and after dumplings for dinner we went to bed feeling very safe at our first and only Chinese couchsurf.
The next day we moved to our Beijing base, a room in a flat in the middle of a Hutong district. The Hutong are Beijing's ancient living quarters which are either being gentrified with minimalist coffee shops playing stark ambient music, uber cool 'lifestyle' boutiques filled with bespectacled 'Hutong Hipsters' and restaurant come art gallerys or being quietly demolished (literally in the dead of night) to make way for the next tower block or shopping mall. We heard crazy stories of secret brick laying assassins who would walk the streets at night bricking up old crumbly restaurant doorways or family businesses which didn't fit the Beijing bill! Even with all this, we couldn't help but love sitting on street corners drinking coffee next to painfully stylish young Beijingites (our tatty wardrobe seemed fairly inadequate!).
We can't really talk anymore about Beijing without mentioning the food. My mouth waters as we write this! Beijing is home to Peking Duck and damn it tastes good, 7 months of being a vegetarian forgotten in an instant! Our main aim each day was to find the smallest little restaurants serving the best noodles, dumplings, dim dum or hot pot Bejing had to offer. The 'numb and hot' Sechewan pepper is something your digestive tract will never forgive you for! Part chilli, part pepper, part local anaesthetic, we had to keep touching our lips to make sure we weren't having some sort of anaphylactic reaction (Sergio, this is surely a match even for your bowels!)!
We decided to hone our Chinese cooking skills and spent a happy afternoon in a Hutong Courtyard Cooking School, chopping ingredients with a razor sharp meat cleaver and making tasty if not aesthetically pleasing dim sum! We could wax lyrical about the food but instead we'll try and cook some when we get home...the Mongolian stews to come certainly lacked the same flavour combinations.
We wished we had our trusty bikes in Beijing. There seemed to be more bike lanes than car lanes and the entire city is completely flat. Everyone cycling on Beijing's, probably better version, of the Boris Bike or if not that, on little electric scooters. In fact, everything seemed to be electrified from the bicycles and mopeds to cars and buses. Instead of bikes, we plodded between the major sites on foot, making sure we knew exactly where the next Tripadvisor recommended eatery was!
In the end, the places we liked the most were the amazing green spaces where the people watching kept us entertained for hours. Beijjngers certainly get up to some pretty peculiar things, well, they seemed pretty peculiar to our untrained eyes. We seemed to be the only ones staring as people walked purposefully backwardsnaround the parks clapping a meditative rhythm while others rehearsed opera singing or strummed traditional Chinese musical instruments. Dancing is a big deal and huge crowds would gather around a boom box as the sun set and practice a Chinese version of a cowboy line dance while couples waltzed nearby. Then there were the elderly designated work out zones where the strictly over 80s would be doing standing pressups against static machines in gardening gloves.
These all seemed relatively normal but then you'd stumbled across four overweight middle aged men in tights slapping each other on the chest and doing hand stands on a breeze block next to a tree screaming encouragement at each other while a nearby Zen master swordsman performed the most beautiful Tai chi with a lethally sharp sword. Just around the corner would be a small elderly fellow holding a paintbrush the size of a broom practicing elaborate Chinese calligraphy in water on the pavement like Penny Paintbrush next to equally elderly and elegant ladies practicing synchronised dancing with fans (Fan Chi!?). The parks were just made for these weird activities with magical secret spots all over the place where dappled sunlight shone on lush green foliage overhanging artfully placed rocks and decorative bridges. Nothing seemed unusual by the time we left.
One day we pottered off to the '798 Art District' of Beijing which some trendy artists transformed from a forgotten industrial zone into a painfully fashionable theme parkesq area for modern art and sculpture. It was hard not to fall for it completely with its amazing coffee shops and weird art installations in renovated factories. Once again, our shabby wardrobe really let us down!
Another 'must see' we couldn't miss was a trip to the Great Wall of China. We headed off on a DIY tour for a three hour local bus trip to Gubeiku to visit a section of the 'Wild Wall' which sadly lacked the cable cars and taboggan rides other sections offer! It was nice to escape the city and have a tiny glimpse of slightly more rural China as we watched the world go by from the bumpy bus. Before long, completely flat, densely populated Beijjng disappareared and we were lost in scrubby rugged hills with the wall snaking off into the horizon, crumbling towers breaking up its never ending length. We scrambled up dusty slopes onto the 'coiled dragons back' and sat in a tumbled down tower drinking cheap instant nescaffe from our Thermos, which has an uncanny nack of tasting like an old ash tray, watching huge dark clouds roll across the sky. It was a pretty atmospheric spot and easy to imagine Chinese warriors on patrol up and down its length.
We had only really planned to stay in Beijing long enough to sort out our Belarusian visa, the last piece of the puzzle, but as we made a mad dash to pick it up on the morning of our departure, we felt a real fondness for the place. From its incredible food, to the entertainment in the parks and of course the Hutong Hipsters! We luckily found ourselves staying with some young, friendly expat's who seemed to be making the most of what the city has to offer and it was great to be part of it for a few days. Having said that, we were very excited to be getting on the next train which would take us to the wilds of Mongolia.
Arriving at Beijing Station, laden with heavy backpacks and shopping bags full of the customary noodles and instant coffee, we immediately came across our first obstacle... How to actually get into the building! We eventually navigated security and found our waiting room and sat, expectantly waiting for the train to arrive and our Trans-Mongolian adventure to begin!
A little more prepared this time, we soon made our home in our compartment and settled down to watch China fly by. Slowly the sun went down over the increasingly desolate landscape of Inner Mongolia (an autonomous region of China) but if we thought we were going to get a good nights sleep, we were very mistaken.
Who knew that Chinese and Mongolian railways had different gauge track? So at 2am we found our carriage floating 10ft in the air on huge hydrologic jacks as the rolling stock for every carriage was changed, a worrying position when you're desperate for a pee. Add to this several hours at each boarder waiting for the scary immigration officers to bring back your passport and you have an interesting but very bad nights sleep.
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| This what the Chinese Authorities think of tourists! |
All was forgotten the next morning as we lay in our bunks, huddled under blankets with hot coffee, watching a red sun rise over the Gobi desert falling in love again with train travel.
After hours of trundling through the endless plains of the Mongolian Steppe, flat grasslands punctuated by electricity pylons, bleached animal bones and the occasional herd of goats, we eventually made it to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia's capital.
Craving space and an escape to somewhere remote we had found out about a small provincial town called Tsetserleg, 8 hours south west of UB, which was apparently the unlikely location of Fairfield, Mongolia's best guesthouse, cafe and bakery! Murray Benn, the guesthouse's Australian owner, had already gone out of his way to help us before we had even set foot in Mongolia and as we were too late for the bus, a car was waiting at the station to take us the 8hours to Fairfield.
Mongolia is one of those evocative sounding places that for some reason everyone wants to visit based on nothing more than a few photos of fur clad horse herders galloping over green rolling landscapes. It has a population of 3 million, 1.7 of these live in UB, leaving the remaining 1.3 million scattered sparsly over a country the size of most of western Europe. Beyond this and Rosie's description of her adventures on horseback there a few years ago, we had no idea what to expect.
The UB traffic (not a patch on Kathmandu!) quickly faded away and we were left on empty roads, perfectly straight, stretching to the distant horizon. The empty blue sky was so big it made you feel claustrophobic and you could practically see the curvature of the earth. Not a single tree complicated the view although occasional rocky outcrops, huge scavenging eagles and lonely white gers (traditional nomadic yurts) passed by.
It was utterly desolate but completely beautiful. Wind whipped across the open expanse, stirring up dust devils that crossed our path. Jeeps raced cross country, leaving dust trails highlighted by the evening sun in their wake and shepherds herded unruely flocks on their rickety motorbikes. It felt like you were turning the pages of a Mongolian coffee table picture book as the sun slowly set painting the clouds blood red. Sure enough, the sillhoute of a traditionally dressed horseman crested a nearby ridge to complete the scene.
We arrived at Fairfield Guest House completely broken after 36 hours of continuous travel and happily flopped into the comfy, clean beds after a hot shower and fell fast asleep ready to meet the famous Murray Benn the next morning to plan our mini Mongolian adventure.
After a glorious sleep, we sat eating freshly baked bagels and drinking coffee with Murray while chatting about travels and finding out about how an Australian family of six settled down in a small Mongolian town in such a far flung place. His soft Sydney accent, great knowledge of the local area, obvious love of Mongolia and desire for us to go off and explore was infectious.
To the north of the town was a large National Park where the herders were limited to just grazing their animals. This meant that wild flowers and trees covered the valleys and hillsides, it couldn't have been more different to the vast open treeless plains. Numerous valleys, each fed by fresh water springs, wove down from rocky ridges. With a dodgy GPS track and a compass we set off for five days wild camping in the park, buoyed by Murray's confidence that if we were ever lost, all we had to do was walk south west to find civilisation!
We raided the local supermarket for dried goods, (no noodle soup will ever be the same without dried mushrooms and seaweed) and with bags packed with pasta, porridge and tiny bottles of Mongolian Vodka, we headed off into the hills. We had no map and no paths to follow. It felt a bit strange having nothing to plod on and no real destination. Apparently that's what life is like in the 'back country!' We tried to imagine what Ray Mears would do when he heads off into the wild to rehone his skills and commune with nature... It sort of helped!
We happily spent our days trying to find fresh water and searching out the next ridge or summit to gaze at the utterley amazing views of the never ending Mongolain steppe and snowy mountains which framed the horizon. We'd no idea that we were so high and were really surprised, at our highest point, to look at our altimeter and see that we were over 2400m. That might explain why it regularly drops to below minus 30 degrees Celsius in the winter and is sub zero from November to March each year!
We were lucky to be there in a warm spell, although blizzards in June are common place, and signs of spring were showing everywhere. The forests were a mixture of larch, cedar and birch. The air was so clean that the birch bark was pure sparkling silver and fresh green buds were growing in front of your eyes. The rolling hillsides were also changing day by day and the lush green pastures Mongolia is famed for were starting to appear like a perfect watercolour. As you walked, it was impossible not to squash beautiful yellow, pink and white flowers which carpeted the floor as well as perfect purple and yellow orchids (We didn't squash them Ali!).
As each day wore on, would try and find the next ideal campsite with unobstructed views of the sunset, a little piece of flat ground for our tent and shelter from the wind which seemed to change direction very five minutes.
We spent one afternoon getting completely lost, stumbling through thick, mostly frozen undergrowth in a beautiful circle before actually taking an interest in our compass bearings! Hours before, we had set off from our sunny lunch spot to find a ridge separated from us by a densely forrested valley in which we proceeded to get completely lost. As the evening wore on, we decided to try and head back to where we thought we'd had lunch only to stumble across the very place we'd set out for! We both tried not to think what Roger Moore would've said about the whole debacle! It was a great camp spot though.
We were more successful the next day and managed to summit the highest peak for miles around after constantly checking our compass bearings (and occasionally naughtily triangulated the data with our GPS!). After some great scrambling we had an incredible 360 degree view of this completely stunning place where we'd not seen another soul for five days.
On our last night, after the final rays of sun had disappeared from a cloudless sunset and just a hint of orange glowed behind the silhouette of snow capped mountains in the distance, we heard the unmistakable howls from a pack of wolves.
Snuggling closer to the little fire we'd made in a big bowl hewn out of a huge rock which looked more like a dinosaurs nest, we tried to convince ourselves that it was just a few stray dogs out for an evening stroll!
Thankfully, we woke the next morning without being nibbled in the night and wandered back to Tserterleg (Kat full of snot and cold... very brave little soldier!). We kept asking ourselves why we hadn't decided to stay longer. Mongolia seemed to have so much more to offer, from weeks trekking on horse back to fly fishing for gigantic fresh water salmon. It's definitely a place to come back to, maybe in a 2CV! Our return to Fairfield Guest House was very welcome and Murray was once again a superb host. As we read on one blog, if you ever happen to be in the area, Fairfield is the place to go!
We made it back to UB after an 8 hour journey in a brightly decorated, well cared for bus. Who knew a diamonte steering wheel and gear stick could look so good! When you take away the precipitous drops, terrible roads and crazy drivers, bus journeys aren't all so bad... having said that, we were very happy to board our train the following day to Irkutsk.
We now felt like seasoned train travellers and settled into another 24 hour journey. Train travel is a little different here, as well as the usual activities of staring out of the window, listening to music, reading and stretching your legs at infrequent stops, you can also see the carriage attendant stoking the coal fired samovar and chopping huge chucks of mutton with a meat cleaver in their little living quarters (double take definitely required!). With only 5 hours left of a day long train journey, you become strangely aggitated that there isn't enough time to do all those little things you had planned, whereas a five hour journey from Truro to London seems unimaginably long. Even so, we were a little nervous of cabin fever, so decided to have one stop in Irkutsk, Siberia, to break up the 5000km journey to Moscow.
After crossing the Russian boarder in the early hours and surrounded by silver grey skies and the occassional flutter of snow, we skirted Lake Baikal. It is the world's biggest freshwater lake, over 1000m deep, holds a 5th of the world's unfrozen freshwater and it is on the verge of becoming the world's next sea (if you're able to visit again in a few million years!). It looked very pretty as we glided past on its banks.
Irkutsk was apparently once described as the 'Paris of Siberia' and after a day of wondering its grand but faded streets of beautiful but slowly collapsing wooden buildings, we were happy to have stopped for a little visit. The covered food market was worth the visit alone! Each little stall offered cheese, sausages or pickled goods, all sold by warm wrinkly Russian old ladies who looked like they'd survived a Siberian winter or two, enough to satisfy even the most voracious Polish tastebuds and we happily stocked up on supplies for the journey ahead. We were staying in a 'proper hostel' and felt sadly a little out of place with the 18 year olds on their gap years playing drinking games!
We escaped and found what has to be the best bar in the whole of Siberia. Old dusty books filled each window sill next to yellowing lamp shades squeezed alongside a cosy wooden bar, black and white Russian films playing in the background. Each oil cloth covered table was surrounded by old men drinking from bottles of vodka, constantly pottering back and forth for cigarettes outside, while groups of friends drank beer and nibbled on yet more meat and pickle based goodies. It felt like you'd just popped in to an old friends front room! After Beijing's futuristic style and Hutong Hipsters, we felt a little more at home with Irkutsk's 90ies based fashion trends...where shell suits, dodgy hair cuts, double denim and roller blading are the norm.
We boarded the next train, this time aware that we were in it for the long haul, 80 hours across Siberia to Moscow. We had slightly wussed out and gone for the 4 berth hard sleeper instead of the 60 berth open carriage that is apparently often full of drunk Russian soldiers returning to civilization after months in the frozen wastelands of Siberia.
Our two travelling companions, who we were to share a space 8 by 6ft wide with, had certainly created a fruity aroma to welcome us! The younger of the two wasted no time in ascertaing our relationship status as he pointed at me and then in Kat's direction as she left the compartment and rhythmically gyrated his hips smiling a gummy smile! Our other companion refused to make any eye contact for the entirety of the journey despite offers of chocolate and the fact that he happily invaded our bottom bunk bed space to eat his pungent meals... an obvious complete disregard of compartment etiquette!
Our window view offered endless silver birch and pine forests, occasionally broken by small villages made up of mismatched little wooden houses with high pitched roofs and lovingly tended gardens. At any stops longer than 10 minutes, we hopped onto the platform to buy goodies from the waiting ladies, shopping trollies laden with biscuits, noodles, random fruit and veg and more pickled items, and then dare each other to run as far away from the train as possible hoping we'd read the timetable correctly!
There wasn't much idle chatter in our carriage and it aas always a bit of a trial negotiating the angry looking, wrinkled old ladies guarding the corridor to the loo, fierce doesn't do them justice! Bed time was the best though, when you succumb to the drowsiness and let the swaying of the train rock you into a dreamless slumber knowing that tomorrow the pattern will simply repeat. The train runs for the entire journey on Moscow time and crosses 7 times zones from Vladivostok to Moscow. All sense of time is completely lost (we still can't get our head round the time zone thing!) and with the long daylight hours, everything naturally resorts to revolving around your tummy clock which is superbly accurate!
We rolled towards Moscow under clear skies, food stocks suitably depleted ready for a good wash and keen to have a little explore before our train exploration continues on to see family in Poland and a date with Matt and Lou in the Julian Alps in Slovenia.
Loads of love
Ed and Kat xxxxx
P.s A shout out for Jen, Tom and Lizzy... Thank you so much for saving our house from the Great flood of 2017!
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