Home sweet home - London

And then it was over - admittedly over 6 weeks ago now, but just allow me to slide into a retrospective frame of mind for a bit and tie up the loose ends of our totally excellent adventure.

We flew into Heathrow on the 29th August to be greeted by sunshine, some warmth and the tube which, I thought was great, until we couldn't buy the tickets on our credit cards, find which District line train to change to for Paddington or find a seat that was not next to a smelly fat person. Geez louise. It got better soon, though as we met Steve at Paddington (he nicked off from work at about 1pm - nice one!) and then went onwards to his new flat in Maida Vale where we were staying until we could find our own place.

From there we headed off to the Waterway pub in Little Venice and drank heaps of beers while regaling the bar with stories of our daring and adventurous travel. At some point Kirsty joined us and I think we may have eaten some nice food too. The next day was a Saturday and we had some tickets to go and see the Chemical Brothers at Kensington Olympia so we had a nice sleep in and a walk around Maida Vale before heading out to see the band - wicked Audio Visual show - and have another great night out.

That more or less set the tone for the next couple of weeks as we sorted ourselves out administratively. We would go to the pub, whilst also finding a nice flat in a convenient if not fantastic part of town and Shell getting a job at Great Ormond Street Hospital. I was being a bit picky with the kinds of jobs I was putting myself forward for which was probably a bit dumb as the 2nd week we were here Lehman Brothers investment bank failed, setting off the stock market crash that engulfed the worlds finances and my prospects for getting a sweet contract.

Ahh well. I have actually managed to get a job with AOL Broadband and get to join Shell in the ranks of the employed, although she is now the breadwinner as she earns more than I do! I took a little longer than anticipated but it looks good for now.

So now we live, according to whom you ask, in either Maida Vale (the Real Estate Agent), Maida Hill (the closest post office), West Kilburn (the A-Z), Queens Park (the local council amenities) or even just good ol' London (the post code checking system on the Royal Mail website). We are sort of in a promontory of nice places in an ocean of crappy council housing. Allow my map to demonstrate the area. The green bits are nice houses with normal people walking along the streets, the yellow bits (which our house is in) are areas that are ok with the occasional dodgy off license or crappy pub but generally nice places. The orange areas are low rise council flat areas but still relatively normal streets but a higher incidence of dodgy off licenses and frequently large groups of people standing around not really doing anything except talking loudly.




The red areas are dyed in the wool council housing a la Atherton Gardens on Brunswick St in Fitzroy or the Lennox Street / Elizabeth Street complex in Richmond, putting even Melbourne's best attempt at horrible state housing to shame. I actually quite like our area excepting Harrow Road which is a crappy way to start the day. It's like Smith St in Collingwood without the charm.

Anyway our house is about a 10 minute walk from either Queens Park tube or Westbourne Park tube which is quite handy for getting around town. It is a 1 bedroom flat in a long row of terraces that has been recently renovated and furnished with a bit of style. We've got a nice kitchen, a big living room and a big enough bedroom AND there's also a rooftop terrace / decking thing on top of our bedroom so we also have an outside area which is really cool. You have to climb an extension ladder to get up there but it is a small sacrifice! We also have a very comfy sofa bed......

The only real problem we've had so far with the house was the small matter of the oven. As most readers would know, we love a good roast and Shell is a dead set genius in the kitchen so our oven generally gets a bit of a work out in normal day to day operations of the house. So we cooked a few roasts and cakes and stuff and we noticed that if we left the oven for over, say, an our or so, the house would gradually fill with smoke until the place smelt like a campsite. The first time we thought it may have been the baking paper that sort of caught on fire when it touched the grill element so we didn't think too much about it, until we had Matt and Eva over for dinner and managed to smoke out the house again.

Finally thinking something might be up I gave the oven a good clean out, in case it was some stray food causing the smoke and gave it another test but, nope, still more smoke. I began systematically dismantling the bit around the oven but not finding anything obvious and since it was neither my house nor my oven I decided to call the landlord. She organised a workman to come over and have a look, so Kevin came around and had a quick look as I explained the problem. He looked at the same things I looked at and couldn't see anything so he pulled the oven out, which actually turned out to be quite easy to do. We got the oven out and lo and behold pretty much the whole shelf was burnt to a crisp! There was a big hole burnt about 15 cm in diameter and it had started to burn through the next shelf down as well. This was not to do with the baking paper.

It turns out the oven was seriously faulty and hadn't been fused correctly when it was installed, so it was basically just waiting for the unsuspecting tenant to nick out to the shop for 15 minutes whilst cooking something for a couple of hours and burning the joint to the ground. Not the sort of excitement we need but the landlady was very good about it and had the oven replaced, by Kevin, on the same day.

Our days are now spent meeting up with friends, going shopping on the high street, drinking Pimms in the sun and generally enjoying life with practically no responsibilities! It's great, although we miss our families, our dogs, our friends and the Australian service industry (so far superior in every respect to the British standard that it is actually shocking) but I guess there is always a trade off to enjoying yourself.

Well until the next lazy Saturday morning when I feel like sharing my thought with the world, au revouir and Cole - can you throw the ball for Lily and give Burns a pat on the head and tell him he's a good boy!

Back to the real world - Helsinki, Finland

To mangle a quote from Tolstoy, all developed countries are pretty much the same, whereas all undeveloped countries are undeveloped (and a bit hopeless) in their own special way.

This was first and foremost in my mind as we cleared customs in our seats on the train from St Petersburg to Helsinki. Yet again it was a case of what a difference a border makes and for the first time in months we were now somewhere that looked somewhat similar to life as we know it.

Russia had been good to us. It was still a bit soviet at times and the wildly skewed costs of certain goods and services boggled the mind ($100 a night for a crappy hostel room with a shared bathroom, $10 for half a kilo of big caviar) but overall we'd had a great time and seen some truly spectacular things:

• Red Square - it was just like my imagination had decided it should be like
• The Hermitage - we actually got a bit bored looking at priceless painting after priceless painting, but there was some other really cool things like rooms where world changing events took place
• The Moscow Metro - these guys know how to build a train station. The subway stations are amazing, with many rivalling museums for their architectural skill and artistry. Being commies, the Moscow city fathers in the 30's decided that the workers should be able to enjoy the cultural highlights of modern Russia whilst on the way to work.

But it was still not quite right. Perhaps it was just the men going to work in business casual suits with socks and sandals, the falling apart look of St Petersburg's suburbs or the conviction of certain tour guides when they tell you that you'd be crazy to talk to a policeman in Russia, but you could just tell that while these guys are doing better than, say, your average Kyrgyz man in the street in Bishkek, Russia didn't have it all figured out yet.

The Finns, on the other hand, have. Whatever "it" is, they have worked it out, made it look good, surrounded it with a nice park and placed a statue next to it. Aside from the obvious stuff such as real prices (in euros! oh no), trams and shops for all the people selling goods (as opposed the junk, which we had seen quite a bit of) there was an obvious feel of prosperity to Helsinki, my impression of which that was no doubt fed by our stay at the 4 star Hotel Torni which was superb.

It's not like they had it easy either. Finland itself was only declared independent from Russia in 1917, which was followed promptly by a civil war (commies vs good guys and strangely for this area the good guys won!) and then a couple of wars against invading bad guys, namely the Nazi's and the Soviets. After the war the Finns, having very little aid from the West due to a couple of treaties signed with the Soviet Union, developed from a agrarian society to an industrialised economy. The US did provide aid on the sly to prevent communist overthrow of the democratic government, but most of their development was through trade, probably reindeer hides to begin with, but these days it's all about Formula 1 drivers and mobile phones.

Helsinki itself is great, located right on the Baltic sea with many lakes, rivers and islands. The architecture is really nice with most of the city built during the 1920's to 1950's in a nice and tasteful way. There's plenty of grand old buildings and statues and an excellent little tourist market they run each day down by the harbour where a lady sells baked potatoes out of one of those black kettle "Victorian Baked Potato" cookers that used to be at every holiday destination of my childhood. They were never as good as this one though, as the Helsinki version was piled high with smoked salmon and doused liberally in either a blue cheese or tartare sauce. Yummo.


There's a really cool old fortress on an island guarding the bay called Suomenlinna which was built by the Swedes in the late 18th century to ward off the pesky Russians, who periodically invaded. Unfortunately for the Swede's Helsinki fell to Russians for good only 6 months after they completed the fortress so now it sits up there with the 17" guns at East Point in Darwin as expensive, ultimately pointless military installations that now make excellent tourist attractions. We had a good time walking around the old walls and drinking "the best filtered coffee in the world", as proclaimed by a tourist magazine we got for free. We also ate some Reindeer burgers, went and saw the Batman movie and generally had a great time.

It was great to be back in the first world too, as we could drink the water out of the tap and eat ANYTHING! In fact it was the perfect way to finish off our holiday and move on the next bit of our adventure - getting jobs and going back to real life. How sad.

Mosques, Medrassas, Mausoleums and Minarets, Bukhara, Uzbekistan

I don't think that this blog would ever be complete without some photos of the majestic architectural sights of Uzbekistan.

My favorite city by far in Uzbekistan was Bukhara, I'm not sure if it was because we stayed in a nice hotel there or if it really was a stand out from Khiva and Samarkand!

A bit of history for you....Officially Bukhara was founded in 500BC, however the region around Bukhara has been inhabited for at least five millennium. The city has long been a center of trade, scholarship, culture, and religion and is located on the Silk Road, otherwise we wouldn't have gone there of course.

The most famous of all the architectural wonders of Bukhara is the Po-i-Kalyan complex, which means "The foot of the Great". This is a square with the Kalyan minaret towering over it at 45.6 meters high. Back when the Uzbeks were still enforcing capital punishment (which is frighteningly not that long ago) they would march their criminals/victims to the top of the minaret, put them inside a sack and throw them from the top of the minaret. Literature reports of sacks twisting and turning through the air as the victim inside struggled to free themselves in vein.

There is apparently a depression in the square below the minaret where thousands of bodies thrown from the top over the years had started to wear a hole in the stone. It was a chilling thought knowing all this and gazing up at the towering minaret, a very beautiful structure with a somewhat grisly past. We did look for this depression in the stone but were unable to find it, but I guess bodies are a lot softer than stone and a hessian bag would have made it a lot easier to clean up the mess.

On the two sides Po-i-Kalyan are the Kalyan Mosque and Mir-i Arab Medrassa , Kalyan Mosque is a massive and beautiful structure and in Soviet times was used to store tractors and other farming machinery. In the 14th century when Amir Temur (otherwise known as Tamerlane) was rampaging across central Asia he slaughtered basically the entire population of Bukhara within this mosque. I read somewhere that once Temur had finished the mass slaughter his men were wading through the mosque in blood that came halfway up to their knees. Disturbing when you know how large the mosque is, its large, so large you could fit a football pitch inside it, I'll let you do the math yourselves on how much blood that would be.

Opposite the mosque is the Mir-i Arab Medrassa which was built in the 16th century presumably by then the population of Bukhara that had pretty much been wiped out by Timur had time to repopulate itself and build this imposing structure. The Medrassa is still a functioning facility for the training of religious minds in Uzbekistan today. It has a beautiful mosaic exterior, the fact that its still a functioning Medrassa means that you are not allowed inside past the entrance hall.

Also of note around Bukhara are the trading domes, where trading still happens. Uzbekistan is famous for its carpets, embroidery and ceramics and there is plenty of that to be found within the domes of Bukhara. I bargained so hard for some ceramics in a store that the lady who sole them asked me "Where are you from?", I said "Australia" she then proceeded to say "Australian women are hard women!" whilst clenching her fists and banging them together. I think I might have got a good deal!

Into the bears den in Russia

Editors note: These blogs have been a long time coming as I have been at the pub for most of the last week. So the programme is Russia today, Finland by maybe Thursday and then a comprehensive London update after that, unless I continue to get waylaid at the Elgin.

We flew into Sheremetyevo UAC, didn't get much sleep last night.
On the way the paper bag was onmy knee, man I had a dreadful flight.
But now I'm back in the USSR, don't know how lucky you are boy
Back in the USS, Back in the USSR!!!!

Or at least that's what it seemed like we were arriving in what with all the invasions, diplomacy, border disputes, talk of sovereignty and insurrections we kept hearing about from the Caucasus on the BBC as we left Uzbekistan for Russia. We were half expecting to see the corpse of Lenin rise, smash its way out of Red Square and restart the Revolution; he would not, however, need to travel far to find the capitalists or even the tools of the bourgeois. He would probably get run over by one in a large black Mercedes or Porsche right out the front of the Kremlin where they scream around the corner flat out next to St Basil's Cathedral.

But, as so often seems to happen with these blogs, I digress. I actually didn't get much sleep that night, owing to a 4:50 AM flight from Tashkent that we arrived at the airport for at 2:35 AM. The previous night we'd planned on getting plenty of sleep but had ended up staying up late eating pizza and talking about pets with our new friends from Perth, Jasmin and Mark.

The lack of sleep affected Michelle somewhat more than me, which I could tell from the serve she gave a armed member of the notoriously corrupt Uzbek customs who dared tell her she was in a line for Uzbek nationals only. Allow me to relate the story, which we will now refer to as When Michelle Lost Her Mind.

When Michelle Lost Her Mind

A True Story

By Brock Mills

It was 2:35 AM when we arrived at the Tashkent Airport, tired and unkempt due to too many beers and not enough sleep the night before. Also weighing on our spirits were our very heavy packs that weighed on our backs. We were cheered by the existence of our flight number on the departures board (a welcome change from Vietnam) and by the nice Aeroflot employee who offered to upgrade us to Business Class for $100 each, an offer we would have taken had we actually had the money.

Having got our tickets and filled out the necessary forms, we headed over to customs where the procedure was mercifully straight forward compared to when we entered the country. From customs we went to passport control where there was a group of about 30 school girls from Russia in one line and about 3 people in the other line. We stood in the short line for about a minute when a young, armed Uzbek customs official came over and asked to see our hotel registration forms (Each hotel you stay in has to "register" you with the authorities and they all give you a little slip of paper, which you have to keep in case a customs official wants to look at them. Why? We have no idea. Blame the Soviets.)

We showed him our forms and he nodded. He then proceeded to tell us we were in the line for Uzbek nationals only and we had to get in the other line with the 30 Russian school girls. At this Michelle decided to give him a bit of what for, pointing out that the same "Uzbek nationals only" sign was above that queue as well, that the other queue was much longer and we didn't much feel like standing in this line any longer than is necessary. All said with the threat of violence in her voice that I sometimes fear. The official didn't know what to say as I'm sure he had never been spoken to in that manner by a woman in his whole life, and certainly not by one at the airport trying to pass through immigration without any problems.

Sensing danger, I tactfully defused a potential international incident, by grabbing my wife and dragging her over to the other line and hiding behind a large pole. I didn't say anything about it, until after we were safely in the departure lounge.

"Have you lost your mind?" I asked.

"Yes. I don't know what came over me.." she answered.

"Well luckily we didn't get shot. You should have a little sleep before we need to deal with any officials again". So she went to sleep and was much nicer to everyone after that.

And that was it. The Aeroflot flight was brilliant, almost the best food we had in Uzbekistan, with good service in a clean, comfortable and almost brand new A321. Some people were pretty surprised when told that we were flying Aeroflot owing to their poor safety record and Soviet standards of service but the flight was very good and there were no annoying holes in the hull, like what you get QANTAS at the moment. People did clap and cheer when we landed so I guess that the cultural memory of Aeroflot is still alive in people's minds, but they do that in Greece for Olympic Airways as well.

Now for all the trouble it took, which was considerable, to actually get permission to travel to Russia, what with all the visa support and quick processing fees and the like, actually entering Russia was so easy it was almost a bit of a let down. We lined up for 2 minutes at immigration (with Shell keeping her mouth shut) and then walked straight through customs and we'd arrived. A short 3 hour bus/metro/walk trip later we were in the heart of Moscow quickly coming to grips with the reality of being in the world's most expensive city.

Moscow is fantastic. We stood in the shadows of the Kremlin in Red Square, savoured the view of St Basil's Cathedral with the Onion Domes and the magnificent GUM department store in what is a place that far exceeded my expectations. It's pretty cool to stand in a place that you know so much about, mostly from movies and Cold War spy novels, and watch people simply going about their daily lives. I was hoping to catch some KGB guy following us from a distance, or perhaps see a dead letter drop in Gorky Park but we didn't get to see any of that. We did get to see the changing of the guard at the Kremlin and there were many large black Mercedes with tinted windows that may have contained Vladimir Putin or Dimitry Medvedev but that was about as far as it went. We did get to see these amazing office buildings they built in the 1950's that seriously look like they are out of Gotham city and there were quite a few gigantic churches.

Most if the stuff I'd read about Moscow said things like "it was a great city, but was ruined by the commies" and "90% of the old parts of Moscow were pulled down and replaced with horrible Stalinist towers". If that's the case then Moscow must have been one of the world's great marvels as it is still really good. It's a large modern city with some great Baroque architecture in the centre of town that has great weather in the summer, even into late August. A bit like Melbourne but not as hot and more daylight. And it has the Kremlin, Red Square, St Basil's Cathedral, Lenin's Mausoleum and all these icons of 20th century history.

We had a great time. We walked around town taking photos, we rode the subway to the souvenir market where we got some great Babushka Dolls, T-shirts and little badges. We managed to buy some train tickets to St Petersburg from a lady who didn't speak a word of English and we even went to the hands down best local supermarket in the whole world on Tversky Boulevard - it's in this amazing old classical building that sells caviar and all sorts of fancy foods we hadn't seen for months like bread and milk. We went through Cathedral Square in the Kremlin and even went and saw a rubbish movie out near the 1980 Olympic Stadium. And, apart from accommodation which is outrageously expensive, it doesn't actually cost that much to do things there. McDonalds is cheap and there's these Pancake places everywhere that will feed you for about $3 and even real food is comparatively inexpensive on a 1 for 1 basis with Australia. We got a really good pasta meal for maybe $8 AUD each, and they do good coffee.

My favourite part of Moscow though, was when we were having a beer at a sports bar before we headed off for our 2:35AM train to St Petersburg. We were watching the Olympics and more or less minding our own business when these Russian guys, who were obviously dying to talk to us, struck up a bit of a conversation with us. Before we knew it, everyone in the bar that could speak English was helping our new friend out with his questions as everyone became fascinated with our trip and the fact that we were actually real Australians in Russia. We talked about this and that - this guy used to be an officer in the Army, now was in sales of some sort and was going to buy a new car - and then we did some shots of Vodka. The manager of the bar told us he lived in Sydney for 3 years and wanted to go back and we all generally had a good time when he explained a concept of the Russian language I'd been missing. We were talking about Vladimir Putin shooting that tiger and our friend said "I've got a shotgun" and I said "Kruta" which is Russian for cool. He said "Nyet - Shotgun is not Kruta. AK-74; this is Kruta"

With that we left for St Petersburg, which I will probably write about in the near future!

Fear and Loathing in Uzbekistan

We are in Uzbekistan. Now, as a break from my usual ranting about wherever we happen to be, I thought today I would try to be a little informative about what we've seen and done. So here follows my observations and notes on the stuff out of the ordinary, you know, the little bits and peices that you may not know about Uzbekistan that will hopefully make your next trip there that little bit smoother and more comfortable....

GEOGRAPHY

Uzbekistan is in Central Asia and was formerly part of the USSR (or СССР as I now call them since I mastered the cyrillic alphabet). Some people may not know this.

Uzbekistan is one of only 2 doubly landlocked countries in the world (by doubly landlocked I mean only sharing borders with countries that are landlocked)

Despite being located in one of the more arid regions on the planet, and having only 10% arable land, they grow cotton here. This is insane and you can pretty safely bet once the Aral sea dries up completely they probably wont grow cotton anymore.

MONEY

The currency is the Uzbek Som, of which largest denomonation note is the 1000 som note. The current exchange rate for US dollars is 1331 Som to the dollar. Because of this here one usually measures one's currency in mass rather than cardinal amount. "That will be 2.5 kilos of som" is how one would normally pay for, oh I don't know, a sandwich or bottle of water.

GETTING AROUND

There are two types of cars on Uzbek roads: Ladas or Daewoos. I'm reliably informed that this is due to amazingly high taxes on car imports and Daewoo built a car factory here. The Ladas are all left over from the Soviet era.

Train puncuality must be a serious concern to the city fathers in Tashkent. I assume this lead them to ask the designers of their metro subway system to design some aspect of the trains to ensure passengers alight quickly and orderly. Being soviets and all their solution was, wait for it: KILLER TRAIN DOORS! The way it works is this. The doors for the trains must weigh about 300 kg's each and close at supersonic speed, so if you are passing through them, you make damn sure you are out of the way before they swing into action. People prepare to get on or off the train about 30 seconds before the train stops at the station. Then the instant the doors open people fight, push and scramble for the exit while everyone on the other side do the same thing. Due to the serious consequences of being caught in the doors, somehow everyone gets off or on very efficiently, if a bit scared and flustered. It's actually quite entertaining sitting on the train listening to the doors crash shut as a mass of humanity rushes either way through the portal. Not making it is trouble - there are severed hands and feet littering the tracks at the popular stations! (I may have embellished that last sentence a tiny bit..)

Uzbek roads are infinitely better than the roads in Kyrgyzstan and the Uzbek's get to live out the dreams of their Kyrgyz neighbours by driving as fast, or sometimes even faster, than the road and traffic condidtions or even laws of physics allow. Did someone leave a bit of a gap between them and the car next to it? Great! Invent your own lane by driving right bewteen them. Is there a slower car in front of you? Why not drive on the footpath to get past them. Don't worry about the pedestrians, they probably use the train and will know to get out of the way. Think you can go even faster around this corner? Then do it! The 12 cm wide tyres on your Daewoo or Lada will probably grip.

PEOPLE

There are still quite a lot of ethnic Russians living in Uzbekistan, mostly in the captial Tashkent. Thus whilst a visitor may think there are an inordinate number of prostitutes walking the streets here, they are more likely to be Russian women just going to the shops, or taking their infant child for a walk. In 6 inch high heels. And skin tight lycra. And with about an inch of makeup. Dressed like an actual prostitute.

HISTORY

Uzbekistan is home to many of the most ancient cities in the world, including Khiva and Samarkand which is 2750 years young! Let's hear it for Samarkand. There are also many of the most historically important sites in Islam such as the Registan and Mausleum of the cousin of the prophet Mohammad in Samarkand and the Chor Minor Mosque and Minaret in Bukhara. By the look of things they are also important sources of income for Islam in Uzbekistan as every one of these sites are full to the brim of carpet shops, ceramic vendors and, of course, money changers, conveniently located right in the temples!

FOOD

No meal in Uzbekistan is complete without mutton! Yep it's the national favourite. Usually it's cooked on a Shashlik which is a big metal skewer that they load up with the chewiest, gamiest pieces of meat available and also a nice big tasty piece of fat. Yummers! The places selling Shaslik are pretty easy to find because they generally the place that looks like it is on fire.

In actual fact I, and Shell, have really enjoyed Uzbekistan. This guy in Kyrgyzstan told us that in both countries you get to see the 3 M's (It may have been 4 but I can only remember 3 at the moment). For Uzbekistan that means Mosques, Minarets and Madrassas. For Kyrgyz it means Mountains, Mountains and Mountains, so the difference in countries was stark and a nice change. We have seen some dead set ancient history and had lots of fun haggling for souvineers, wandering around ruins and drinking many, many cups of tea.

But now we graduate from 3rd world to 2nd. Tomorrow morning (at 4:50 am!) we fly to Moscow and move one step closer to the real world, stuff like drinkable water, edible food, paying real money for stuff and, of all things, work. Sheesh. I'd like to say we are going to tourist it up big time for the next week, but we will probably just sleep in and spend most of our time taking photos of the weird stuff we see out the front door of our hostel.

I can't wait! Until next time, when I become your correspondant in Moscow, Bye!

Yurt Life Camp, Tash Rabat, Kyrgystan

We spent a night in the stunning valley of Tash Rabat in "Yurts" (pronounced Yurta in Russian). According to Wikipedia a Yurt for those of you that have not stepped inside Central Asia and seen one or heard of one either for that matter is a portable, felt-covered, wood framed dwelling structure used by the Nomadic people in the steppes (dry and arid areas) of Central Asia .

A Yurt is also known as a: ger in Mongolian, gher in Pakistani, boz üý in Kyrgys, kiyiz üy in Kazakh and Uyghur and last but not least kherga or Jirga in Pakistani.

In Kyrgys boz üý(боз үй), literally means "grey house", because of the colour of the felt. Which I think is a pretty good description except for the smell. It should be more like a "grey house that smells like farm animals" and it would be a more accurate description. Or even better still "grey house that smells like farm animals and will leave you and all your worldly possessions smelling like farm animals".

The family who ran the yurt camp had two boys (lucky them) who were about 4 and 7 years old, as soon as we got there the older boy had his ball out to play catch with us all. We had bought some Chinese kites at the Terracotta Warriors in Xian, these were a hit with the boys and made a pretty good sight with the kites flying against a background of mountains in the evening light.

Our Yurt accommodation was pretty basic but comfortable and in hindsight a lot better than hotels that we were to stay in in the future, we slept on mattresses on the carpeted floor, four people per yurt, we were nice and warm and toasty until all the peat or poo or what ever it was in our stove had all burnt away. We wanted to keep the Yurt camp family's puppy "Miro" cause he was so beautiful and so sooky and cold but I was a little worried that one of us would roll over crush him in our sleep, or he'd leave us a present in the night so we surrendered him to our drivers who thought he was just a cute as we did.

The toileting situation was pit toilets, two of which were full to the brim and particularly scary looking, one however was newly built and smelt of fresh paint, which in my mind makes for pretty good air freshener. Showers were non existent, but there was a mountain stream that I gave a miss and a portable sink for washing your face and brushing your teeth in. The women of the Yurt camp put on a pretty good dinner for us all, the highlight of which was the mashed potatoes and the vodka. Breakfast the next day was an equally good spread of pancakes, fabulous apricot jam, little fried dough bits and bottomless cups of regular black tea (finally).

After breakfast four of us decided to go horse riding for an hour, I still don't know if it was a great idea. No body got hurt or anything, but the horses either didn't understand English or they were just very disobedient and we would have covered more ground if we had of just walked for an hour instead! We were expecting a trail ride where the horses know where to go and for one of the local to come with us, but they literally just handed us four horses took our three dollars each and said see you in an hour. It was an experience none the less, especially for Jasmine who has never ridden a horse before. I led her around for a while until I got rope burn from dragging her horse along and realised that by riding one handed I could only ever go round in circles and had no chance of getting my horse to do anything I wanted. So then I ditched her and left her to work out how to drive herself. Brock's horse had a major flatulence problem accompanied by a hatred of all of us, so I guess you all know how that worked out.

While we were in Tash Rabat valley we also managed to look through the old stone ruins there. Tash Rabat means "stone walls" in Kyrgys. The ruins were an old Caravanserai used by the old Silk Road traders, or it also could have been a defensive structure, there are a few theories. The ruins were uncovered in Soviet times and make for some great photos in the morning light with the mountains as a backdrop (detecting a theme here?).

Tash Rabat was an awe inspiring place, it was the best of Kyrgystan all in one place, great food, vodka, friendly people and absolutely stunning scenery.

Yurts, Mountains, Horses, Mountains, Lakes and Mountains!

Welcome to Kyrgyzstan!

At least that's what we thought the sign said... It was written in Cyrillic so it was kind of hard to tell what with all the backwards R's and P's and C's and some other letter that we didn't know what the hell they meant.

Yes we had arrived in the frequently misspelled and rarely heard of back home Kyrgyzstan, and, as regular readers would no doubt be aware, we couldn't have been happier about it. As one of the republics of the former Soviet Union Kyrgyzstan was really only of interest to the Ruski's as a mountain getaway, know it all 10 year olds with the world map on their notebooks that listed all the member countries of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, the 5 million or so people that actually live there and, presently, Michelle and I.

Now to be completely straight with everyone we kind of chose this trip that came to Kyrgyzstan because no one has heard of it or really even knows where it is. There was no avid intrest in USSR history, or central Asian culture or even a firm idea about what was there; we just thought it would be cool to go somewhere that hardly anyone else we knew had, or would, go. The sum total of my knowledge of Kyrgyzstan was garnered from my friend from Renewtek, Djail, who is Kyrgyz and some unrelated reading about the dissoltion of the USSR that mention it in passing.

So it was now that our learning (and yours too, dear reader!) would begin in earnest. The first, most obvious, salient point about Kyrgyzstan is that it is quite mountainous. And I mean mountainous in the sense that the sun is quite a distance from the earth, or French people are rude and smelly. The whole country is mountainous ie mountains everywhere you look. Big mountains, smaller mountains, grass covered mountains, rocky mountains, snow capped peaks, peaks with glaciers, summits with snow on the north face, ragged pointy tops with snow on both faces, just lots and lots of mountains. It is, in fact, 90% covered in mountains. There are basically only 2 flat areas in the whole country, one valley where the captial Bishkek is situated that is perhaps 200 km's long and maybe 30 - 40 km's wide and the Ferghana valley that is mostly part of neighbouring Uzbekistan. For all the driving we did here, there was maybe 2 hours where we weren't encircled by, perched upon, or near the shadows of some fantastically picturesque mountain range.

And inhabiting this mountain paradise are the totally excellent Kyrgyz people. For all the different ethnic groups in Central Asia, such as Uzbeks, Armenians, Tajiks, Turkmen, Khazaks and Kyrgyz, almost everyone but the Kyrgyz are of Turkish descent. Apparently due to their nomadic nature they never really mixed with the neighbouring tribes and have maintained their unique culture since something like 2nd Century BC. Believe it or not, the mountains and surrounding valleys are deeply ingrained in their way of life with many farming horses and cattle and living in these round tents called Yurts. We saw them everywhere and spent our first night in Kyrgyzstan in one (see Shell's blog on our night at Tash Rabat). They aren't exactly backward though with many a post modern Kyrgyz yurt dweller quite happy to tie up his horse next to his Mercedes or BMW that are frequently parked besides the yurt.. There is also a large Russian population whom, despite being ethnically Russian and potentially predisposed to being lets say gruff, seemed to share the laid back and friendly Kyrgyz attitude that we met along the way.

So let's see: mountains? Check. Yurts? Check. People? Check. Aged and crumbling Soviet Infrastructure? Hmmmm, where to start. Lets start at the border. We crossed into Kyrgyzstan from China via the 3700m Torugart Pass. For such a high pass it was not actually that dramatic as to get there we pretty much drove up a valley and then up a mountain road that is not even as steep as the Mt Dandenong Tourist Road. The road up to the pass was typically Chinese: probably over engineered but comfortable and well made. Once we hit the border though, we were in a different world.

Firstly there was the immigration building. This totally 100% matched my expectations of what a Soviet built mountain administrative building should look like, expectations that were in no small part formed when playing the James Bond 007 game on the Nintendo 64, where you have to sneak through buildings shooting bad guys. The building itself looked like it had been on the wrong end of a couple of earthquakes; a roofline that was no where near 90 degrees and bits of concrete actually falling off the walls like water dripping from a tap. Inside it was more of the same: a marble floor with large cracks and peices missing from the pavers, hydronic heating pipes leaning on the walls and a bunch of fluro lights barely hanging from the ceiling that were not actually in use, the light being provided by a single globe dangling from electric wiring strung along the walls.

I thought it was great, although the toilet that I used was even more shoddily constucted than the rest of the place. It was almost as if they designed the shitter to retain the stench and attack the unsuspecting user as they entered. Had they invented the technology to dispense smells via the Internet you could feel my pain, but until then you will just have to take my word that it was bad and I could feel my eyeballs being burnt by the exposure.

However, in the Crappy Infrastructure Olympics that is Kyrgyzstan, the toilets in are no match
for the roads. To say they are bad is an insult to bad roads in the rest of the world, even Laos. You would almost think the potholes were dug on purpose, such is scientific precision and planning necessary to make a road as bad as these were. From gravel roads with spine jarring corrugations to tarred roads with ruts 2 feet deep and everything imaginable in between the Kyrgyz road system has to be felt to be believed. I guess that most of it is caused by the heavy truck traffic that rockets along roads simply not designed to carry vehicles that heavy, but for whatever reason it is hard work.

Generally most of the buildings such as houses and shops (but excluding border posts!) are in better repair than the roads but you wouldn't know it from looking from the outside. In fact lots of the building look as though they had just or were just about to collapse, however they seem to maintain the facade to ward off bad spirits or perhaps criminals as once inside pretty much everywhere was really nice. Special mentions msut go to the homestay in Kochkor whose interior looked EXACTLY like a house in Port Melbourne I went to an open inspection for that was owned by an old Greek couple. The only difference was the Kyrgyz house had carpets hanging on the walls where the greeks had pictures of the Madonna. Scary.

Another legacy of the Russian influence is the use of the Cyrillic alphabet which is inordinately confusing. A breif sysnopsis follows:

A is A
B looks like a 6
C doesn't exist
D looks like an A
E is an E
F is weird
G is a 90 degree angle
H doesn't exist
I is a backwards N
J is sort of an asterisk but is pronounced "zh"
K is K
L is like a square with no bottom with the left side falling away
M is M
N escapes me at the moment
O is O
P is like the aforementioned square without the bottom but is all straight
Q doesn't exist
R is P
S is C
T is T
U is about 60 different characters, all with subtle sounds that are very difficult to distinguish
V is B
X is nothing
Y is probably wrapped up in the U's somewhere
Z is a backwards 3

Complicating matters is the fact that many signs have whatever they are trying to display written in Russian and Kyrgyz (and sometimes English) so you never know what bloody language you are trying to read. Once you get the hang of it it is not actually that hard but geez louise you wouldn't want to be dropped off here your own just with a phrasebook and a smile. I, for one, would not get very far.

So that is a brief introduction to Kyrgyzstan. We saw the mountains, sunbaked and swam in a beautiful alpine lake, went on what must be one of the most scenic drives in the world along side a hydro electric resevoir and dam, watched the Olympic opening ceremony in a classy sports bar in Bishkek, stayed in a Yurt, rode horses through the mountains, drank many glasses of beer and vodka and generally enjoyed ourselves immensely, placing Kyrgyzstan well ahead of the pack of countries we have visited so far and making it our number 1 favourite country thus far on the excellent adventure!

Брок Миллс (Brock Mills in Cyrillic! Cool eh?)

Go West , Young Man!

Hi Everyone (all 47 individual visitors since I installed tracking on the page!)

Well Michelle and I are finally smiling amidst the sunshine again and all we had to do was travel 3000km's away from Beijing! In fact we have left China behind in everything but purely administrative sense by arriving in Xinjiang (pronounced Shin-jiang) which is the westernmost province in China and not, in actual fact, really part of China at all. In one of those imperialist moves that the Chinese denounce when on the wrong end (read Shanghai circa 1927) but are more than happy to start when it suits them (did anyone say Tibet?) the Chinese took "responsibility" for the administration of Xinjiang way back in the day (2nd century BC) but have never really been accepted by the ethnic majority. But anyway China now own a large oil rich chunk of desert that is the home of 10 million Uyghur (pronounced sort of like Wiggar) who are ethnically closer to Turks than chinese.

It is a picture postcard place of stunning mountain ranges, alpine grasslands, forbidding deserts and oases. I think it looks like the Flinders Ranges (minus the snow capped peaks) but Shell reckons it is like Syria. The houses are all built out if mud bricks - you would love it Dad - with much desert and wilderness. It's also got extremes of everything, with the highest mountain in the region the mighty K2, topping out at about 8600 metres, a large desert basin that is the 2nd deepest point on the earth at 152 metres below sea level and some wicked weather that sees Turpan with an average tempreture of 11 degress C, but a 40 degree + and 30 degree - varience. It was about 42 when we were there and these dudes are all getting around in long pants! A great place and they grow excellent grapes, ie ones that you actually want to eat instead of the standard Chinese grape which looks good but tastes like a sour apple (or something. Suffice to say there are not good.)

Anyway after being in the real China for so long we loved the change - it was as good as a holiday! We got off our 36 hour train ride from Xi'an at 6:30 am in Turpan, but the train station is about 80k's from the city so we sat on the bus for another hour or so and then arrived. There is quite a bit of historical sight seeing to do around these parts so we did that including:

• the Flaming mountains, so named because they look and feel like they are on fire;
• the irrigation system at Karez which is a really cool series of tunnels they used to bring snow melt water into the desert via tunnels that were dug about 1600 years ago (And I can't even get my storm water drainage right).
• an ancient city called Jiaohe which is a really old city built out of mud and clay that was quite rich when they used the silk road for silk, rather than tourists; and finally
  
• a Uyghur cultural show was the best example of a cultural show we have seem on our trip so far
  

The next day we got another long train to Kashgar which is way out west. When we arrived the next day we kicked around town for a bit; Kashgar is probably one of the strictest muslim towns in China and there are quite a few women getting around wearing their carpets over their heads. And I'm not being culturally insensitive! They are actually wearing carpets and it is about 45 degrees. Anyway we ate some bagels and also at this great restaurant called Intezar which is legendary amongst locals and tourists alike for serving the most massive plate of chicken in existence. It's pretty good and we go to try other specialties such as yoghurt and bread (yes! finally real bread!!! It was a great day) and Laghman noodles and mutton dumplings which unfortunately taste like mutton.

The rest of our time in Kashgar was spent with me hanging out on the toilet thanks to a bug I'd aquired in Turpan and Shell sleeping, although we did manage to drag ourselves along with the tour to the animal market which is a big saleyard for Cattle, Sheep, Donkeys and Goats. Pretty smelly but lots of fun. Oh and we bought a totally excellent Fur hat at the main bazaar!

Anyway the next day we were to head for the border and Kyrgyzstan which we did despite a pretty nasty terrorist attack in Kashgar. For a detailed report check this out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Xinjiang_attack. This happened at 8am Beijing time (about 6am in reality but non official Kashgar time) and we left our hotel at about 10 BJT.

We didn't actually notice anything obvious rather than more than the normal amount of police cars tearing around town and a big road closed off. We had seen this occaisionally for dignitries and the like so we didn't think too much of it until Sandra, one of the members of our tour group, got the news on her Blackberry that said there was an attack against Border Security police in Kashgar. Now we were in Kashgar and heading for the border so we were a little concerned but we kept getting through the checkpoints so we figured there couldn't be too much going on at the border itself. And this was what happened:- we drove to the border, went through a great many number of checkpoints and eventually made it to our personal Shangri-La, KYRGYZSTAN!

So finally we had finished with China and frankly we were both sick to death of it. It is an amazing, brilliant, infuriating place filled with the nicest and meanest, most beautiful and most disgusting people and places on God's great earth. There was a great many things to admire in China and even more things to hope to hell they clean up, fix up and remove altogether before they take over the vacant Super Power of the World job. But happily for us we were done with it, although the insurgency that was present in Kashgar had spread to my stomach so I still had a couple of persistent reminders about our trip through China.

Next stop - KYRGYZSTAN, where we marvel again at the difference a border can make, go horse riding through the mountains like Jenghis Khan, get our preconceptions about Soviet Infrastructure brutally confirmed in a Kygryz toilet and wonder why they still use Asbestos Cement Sheeting for roofing in the year 2008! All that and more the next time I can be bothered using the Internet!

China - bringing out the worst in us!

I'm not sure if our loyal blog followers out there have detected a change in tone in our last few posts? Just in case you have I thought that we might owe you an explanation.

We have been in China for a month now and I think that we have a developed "China Sickness", this disease is caused by a combination of factors, including but not in order of importance:

• the pollution
• Shanghai zoo
• having a sick belly most of the time
• the inability to speak the language
• being pushed out of the way
• being stepped on
• the sound people make before they are about to spit
• the sound people make as they spit
• slipping over in peoples spit
• China Dailys (newspaper) view of the world according to the party
• people staring at you
• people ripping you off
• being poked in the eyes with umbrellas
• oily Chinese food
• CCTV9 the only English TV station
• taxi drivers pretending not to understand you when you only want to go a few km's
• weird STD lotion sachets in hotel rooms
• smoking, especially in internet cafes
• not letting people off the train before you get on
• the little green man not meaning that its safe to cross the road

In order to combat "China sickness" we have in turn developed a few strategies to make ourselves feel better, including and not in order of importance:

• eat lots of steamed buns
• keep your elbows out at all times
• lower your shoulder when anyone walks into you
• if someone whacks you in the head with their umbrella, whack them back
• laugh at the badly translated English signs eg "*$%# the vegetables" and "carefully slipping"
• take it in turns to be sick
• cry at the post office
• see Kungfu Panda at the movies
• say "nehow" to little kids that are obviously dying to talk to you
• make friends with little girls on overnight trains
• eat sunflower seeds
• spit whenever/wherever you need to
• visit sights where there are no Chinese tourists
• drink Carlsberg beer in a Aussie sports pub
• drink Aussie beer in an Irish pub
• eat home cooked lasagna served with mash potatoes
• Starbucks and KFC

Despite all these measures after a month in the country and visiting 3 big cities in a row unfortunately "China sickness has taken a grip on both of us, its kind of like when the "nothingness" destroys Fantastica in the Neverending Story. I can think of no other way to describe our helpless situation.

I had a little altercation with a lady and her umbrella in my eye yesterday at the Terracotta Warriors, just in case you were wondering no it was not raining! This was the last straw for me. I do realise that in a country where the population is over a billion getting what you want could sometimes be a tad difficult. It seems that people here are so obsessed by the fact that they are one of a billion that they have somewhere along the line forgotten that they are one of a billion (ie that other people exist too). They are too obsessed with pushing everyone else out of the way to realise that other people matter. Not to mention the spitting.

So what to do? I think the Village People had the answer when they sang "Go West". So tonight we head off on a mega train journey (36 hours) from Xian to Turpan in search of blue skies and a Chinese tourist free zone.

Don't get me wrong here, we are having a great holiday. However dear reader please realise that the cultural awareness that we have developed in China has bought out the worst in us.

But as they say "if you can't beat them join them!" (imagine the sound of me hocking up some phlegm in the background).

The Great Wall, Simatai, China

What holiday to China would be complete without a visit to the great wall?

We thought ours would so we traveled 3 hours by mini bus to the Simatai section of the wall. I had heard from a whiny American tourist that it had taken her 3 hours to climb to the top of this section and it was the hardest thing she had ever done, once I got a look at her trashy make up and her stick insect legs I figured that it couldn't possibly be that hard. I was almost wrong.

We started climbing at 9am at the car park and made it to tower 12 (the top) at about 10.45am. It was almost 2 hours of very hot sweaty slogging up uneven steps or very slippery ramps. Luckily we were aided by Action Man and his friend, middle aged farmers from the village down the road. The local farmers earn some extra cash by helping tourists up and down the wall and then getting them to buy souvenirs from them at outrageous prices.

Action man had the biggest calves I have ever seen on a Chinese man, his real name was Li Cheng Jun, he was Brock's mascot for the day and thought that I was incredibly beautiful, even when I had a big sweat patch on the arse of my shorts! He did a great job at taking photos of both of us posing all over the wall though, thanks Action man (Mr Li).

My mascot for the day was his friend the lovely Wan Xuo Ping. Who held my hand up and down all the steep bits and kept asking me if I was OK even though she was puffing and panting more than I was. I swear by the time we reached tower 10, I could hear her heart beating. I was a little worried that she was going to have a heart attack and we would be carrying her down to the cable car.

No one had a heart attack and the view from tower 12 was pretty amazing. But I'm not sure if I have ever sweated that much before. Eventually we bought an over priced T-shirt that says "I climbed the Great Wall" and very over priced post cards from our mascots and then took the flying fox across the lake back to the car park which cut a whole 10 minutes walking off our journey - yippee! Actually the flying fox was very exciting mainly due to the fact I though I was going to plunge to my death as they hadn't screwed my carribeena closed! They have different standards of OH&S here in China, that and hygiene and personal space.......the list goes on but I shan't continue.

The great wall was a wee ripper, I also won't mention the smog that it was shrouded in as I think Brock already has that covered.

The great [ed.] American President Mr R. Nixon himself on his historic 1972 visit to China also managed to take in the sights of the great wall, although I'm sure he would have gone to the Badaling section as that is the more touristy bit. He was here on a 8 week public relations extravaganza with his wife. When asked to make a comment about the wall he said "I think that you would have to conclude that this is a great wall," I think that he was pretty on the mark with that one, and then to top it all off "and it had to be built by a great people." I'm not sure if he knew that Emperor Qin who ordered the wall to be built and also the construction of the terracotta warriors in Xian was a tyrannical megalomaniac or if he just didn't say so because it would have been bad for PR!

President Nixon and the "Week that changed the world"

Zaijian Beijing

Today we say goodbye to the host city of the 2008 Olympics and the centre of the entire Chinese universe, Beijing. Whilst we have enjoyed some parts of it, the pollution in this city is enough to make someone want to stop breathing, or at least write a few ranting postcards (sorry HB).

We have had a great time trying out the local delicacy of Beijing Duck (Peking Duck as we know it), shopping for iPods and cool looking jackets at the fake markets, climbing the great wall and meeting up with mates to watch the footy, but everything we have done has been shrouded in an ever present cloak of pollution - a think hazy smog that reduces visibility to about 500 metres on a good day and about 100 metres most days we've been here. Ask any local about it and "Oh that's not pollution, it's just the weather here" or "it's a haze due to the heat and some cloud" or some other line of rubbish they are fed by the local media or party official.



In fact it is largely man made emissions made up of vehicle exhaust (mostly nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide), volatile organic compounds (aldehydes, benzine, hydrocarbons produced by things like building materials, paints and smoke) and direct sunlight that reacts with the other 2 emissions in a complex ballet of chemistry that someone other than I can probably explain, to produce ozone. The ozone merrily hangs around in the air and staunchly refuses to dissipate until something like rain or wind turns up to clear the air. Beijing is at a natural disadvantage when it comes to airborne smog as it is partly encircled by mountains that are effective at keeping the wind away in summer. Basically until it gets windy or starts to rain the smog will sit around over the city slowly but surely killing it's inhabitants and friendly tourists, like Michelle and I.

And this is the impasse I have arrived at in Beijing. It is a huge city, literally falling over itself with magnificent, ancient cultural relics, steeped in history and should be on the verge of becoming one of the great cities of the world. But it is completely miserable because you can hardly see your hand in front of your face at noon. Anyone who has been in Melbourne when there is a really big bushfire going around Victoria will know the feeling of looking up at the sun and seeing its pale gold outline through the smoke. Beijing has been like this for the last 5 days and will remain so until it rains. Perhaps I'm being harsh, judging the city on a such a brief stay but I am here with their Olympics pollution controls in full effect and I can't wait to leave. The rest of the world will no doubt judge Beijing on the 2 weeks of the games and if it doesn't rain and get windy soon all anyone like me will talk about is the fact that you could hardly see any of the events for the pollution. Frankly I think they are on a hiding to nothing - I mean there's a freaking coal power plant the size of Yallourn B and Loy Yang put together 10 or 15 km's from the centre of the city so they could probably take every car off the road and ban people from burning anything (they use coal for cooking!) and the smog would still come...

As you can probably tell this place is getting me down, but things are looking up. We have officially started the 3rd phase of our trip with the joining of the tour along the silk road. From Beijing to Tashkent in Uzbekistan we will travel about 50,000km's by train heading west into Central Asia.

Tonight we board a 12 hour train trip to Xi'an, which is the home of the terracotta warriors and the ancient capital of many of the Chinese Dynasties up until the 14th Century. Apparently the cloud of death extends down there as well, but it's meant to be a super place so I'm looking forward to the change. And from there, we strike west again on a 36 hour train trip to the Gobi Desert and Turpan and Kashgar. Apart from actually being in China these places have almost nothing in common with the China we have seen so far which is extremely exciting!

We have heaps more unreal adventures to blog about so stay tuned for some more stories about our excellent adventures!

Beijing Pollution Links and reading for those interested

Pollution China
Age story about Chinese Pollution

Giant Panda Research and Breeding Facility, Chengdu

We chose to make Chengdu in Sichuan our stop off between Yunnan Province and our Yangtze river cruise. It was a relatively short train ride (4 hours) to Chongquin the starting point for cruise, but more interestingly its the best place in China to see the Giant Pandas in captivity.

We headed out to the Panda park at 7.30am to get there in time to see them feeding. The first Pandas that we saw were a group of juveniles that were between 2 and 4 years old, two of them were sleeping and the third was running around poking them trying to get them to play.

The next group of Pandas we saw were 4 adults who were of mature breeding age, they were munching on their bamboo and having a great time wrestling and pushing each other into the ditch that surrounded their enclosure.

What stole the show though was the enclosure with the 1-2 yer old pandas. There were about 10 of them and they were all very keen to play, they chased their keeper around the enclosure and wrestled and chewed on each others ears. It was very entertaining stuff, we could of watched them all day except they don't play for much of the day, they mainly eat and sleep so I guess that would have got a bit boring eventually.

We checked out the Red Pandas as well, which kind of look like a bear crossed with a racoon, they are about the size of a medium dog but their long tails and striking markings make them very beautiful creatures.

There are abuot 2000 Giant Pandas left in the world, 500 of them are in captivity. The Chinese have set up a sucessful breeding programme and now have an almost 50% survival rate for cubs born in captivity (in the wild it is much much less). They use artificial insemination in most cases as Pandas will not mate unless they are "in love". So a Panda in the wild that does not meet its ideal mate and fall in love will just live and then die a solitary life. Another problem that faces the wild Pandas is habitat, every 20 years or so the bamboo that they eat flowers and dies, this destroys vast areas of bamboo and if the Pandas are not able to find another bamboo forrest they too will die. Because the Chinese have cleared so much land for buildings and farmland it is nearly impossible for the Pandas to move from one area with bamboo to another as they just aren't connected anymore.

We were very impressed by the breeding programe that they have in Chengdu and the Pandads seemed very happy in their enclosures, even with all the smog around them.

We got some excellent photos, enjoy! (click on the panda - he's a link to the album)

Chengdu - Panda Park

Halfway!

Hi Everyone

Well today (or perhaps last Wednesday..) is our halfway point in the trip! We've now been in China longer than any of the other countries and geez do we know it. China is great, but it's hard work.

The blog is coming along nicely, you will no doubt have noticed the slideshow on the right hand side with a link to all the photos we have uploaded so far. We've recently begun to put captions on the photos, and there's some pretty funny stuff let me tell you.

We've also added a map with places we've been and a rough timeline which I think is pretty cool so check it out! Eventually I may cross reference the posts with the little markers and embed some photos, but not today.

As a brief non in depth update on what's been happening, we're currently in Shanghai until the 22nd of July whilst our visa's get an extension. I guess 5 working days means 5 entire working days to the Chinese Bureaucracy...

After the bus trip from hell we spent 3 days in Kunming (check the map) where we walked around and went to the movies twice and then got a bus with a very sleepy bus driver to Dali which is a nice old city. We spent about 2 days there and then travelled to Lijiang where we checked out the sights, went on a death march around town and then walked Tiger Leaping Gorge - post from Shell coming soon ;)

At Lijiang we had organised a cruise through the 3 Gorges along the Yangtze river starting the 11th July so we saved oursleves a couple of days travel by flying to Chengdu on the 9th. We went and saw the Panda's, learnt to play Mahjong and hung out and then got the train to Chonqing where the cruise started.

The cruise was pretty ace (deserving of its own post) and we made some excellent friends including Sandra and Camilla from Denmark and Dan and Andrea from the US, who live and work in Tianjin and bought a cot off my cousin who is the principal of the school where thier children go. My aunty also teaches there.. small world, eh?

Once the cruise was up we got a 25 hour train from Yichang to Shanghai (post on the way from Shell!) and now we are in Shanghai, staying a little out of town in a pretty crappy hostel. We thought we'd be here for maybe 4 or 5 days but that got set to 7 by the PSB who currently have our passports while they extend our visas.

Our chinese is coming along nicely, we are a bit sick of the oily food and the spitting and general manner of the man in the street is different to what we are used to. Which is strange as every time we've had the chance to talk to someone they are all really nice and extremely interested in what we are doing and do we like China and all that sort of malarky. Yes China is a strange place. But I'm coming around to it....

The First of Many Great Chinese Sleeper Train Journeys - Yichang to Shanghai

After 3 days relaxing on the Yangtze river in style aboard the President number 6, we rushed to the train station in Yichang for some ancient Chinese "sitting in plastic chairs and waiting for the train" torture only to find all the chairs were taken yet again so we had to settle for ancient Chinese "siting on concrete floor and waiting for the train while everyone stairs at you" torture instead.

The Chinese seem to have got in their heads that catching the train is like catching an international flight. They all rock up half a day before their train is due to depart and just sit around waiting, which is not at all my idea of fun, however seeing the hoards of people sitting and waiting for a train that is due to leave in 5 hours is quite a phenomenon.

On this occasion there was no friendly university students wanting to practice their English on us so we just sat on out bags, had staring competitions with the hoards and waited. About 45 minutes before the train is set to depart people get up and start queuing at the designated gate in the waiting room which is also quite a phenomenon. We choose to wait till the gate is open and then just tack on the end of the line and walk straight thought the gate and onto the train, but hey what would we know!

Once our gate was open we headed for the train, which was about 800m long, it was amazing. We had tickets in a hard sleeper carriage, bunks are 3 beds high, 6 beds per section and 66 beds per carriage with toilet at each end, wash basins and hot water and a friendly lady conductor who did her best to keep the toilet smelling nice, the bins empty and swept and mopped the floor so many times that we lost count.

We boarded the train at 1407 and found that somehow due to the lack of our ability to read or speak Chinese we had 2 top bunks in different sections, we sat on a lower bunk for as long as we could but as the train got fuller and fuller were evicted from our relatively comfortable positions.

We retreated to the little seats along the ailse and started playing connect 4 (thanks Nicole) a young Chinese guy (now known as YCG) who had a bed opposite mine invited himself to play with us, so Brock taught him the game and then I played him for the next 3 hours untill he started to beat me!

At this point where my game was faltering the 10 year old Chinese girl (who will now be known as Kylie - I'll explain this later!) who was sharing a bed in Brock's section had got out her how to speak English reader and was staring at me longingly. So I ditched the connect 4 and YCG and engaged in some impromptu English lessons with Kylie, the whole carriage was fairly well entertained by our English lesson, people walked past and smiled, others stared and the condutor lady stopped for a chat and to watch for while. Once we had exhausted the possibilitys of the Engish reader we did some maths which Kylie was exceptionally good at, she was faster at working out multilication than I was at checking her answers!



Once we were exhausted with sounding out words and arithmatic it was time for dinner, everyone filled up their paper prepackaged noodle soup bowls with boiling water and slurped away. Kylie was so pleased that she had bought the same green packet of chicken noodles that I did. It was sweet of her to get so exceited over noodles that wern't that great because I could taste the MSG, but for 80cents for your dinner you can't really complain too much I suppose.

After dinner we took some very funny photos, Kylie took care of the fingers protruding from the back of peoples heads in every photo. Once again the friendly condutor lady stopped to have a look at what we were doing and a giggle. After the photos there was free food, from YCG - the trumpet NBA chips were the best. And from Kylie and her grandma we got given little jelly fruits things that you suck out of the packets, fresh peanuts that Kylie shelled for us, sponge cake covered in chocolate and rice crackers.

Kylie insisted that we give her an English name as she didn't have one, so I picked Kylie as its such a good Aussie name. Her actual Chinese name is Luo Yan Ran, Brock and I have a terrible memory for Chinese names so we were pretty happy when she wanted and English one. We asked her to give us Chinese names, so for me she picked Li Li (beautiful, beautiful) and for Brock she chose Nan Nan (man man), I guess the names sum us up pretty well!

At 9pm we reatreated to our bunks at the top and slept very well suprisingly. In the morning I stayed in bed for as long as I could before I had to get up to go to the toilet which was still astonishingly clean. Then it was more fun and games with Kylie and another pretty little girl Arty, who was 5 but unfortunately had rotten teeth (we have seen lots of little kids like this!). We made paper cranes and drew pictures, and had more snacks. I thought the train was going to arrive at 10am in Shanghai but when 10am came and went ant we were still chugging along I went back to bed for a couple of hours. I woke to find Brock reading his book with the two little girls perched up on his bunk jabbering away at him in Chinese.

We had time for a few rounds of thumb wresting before we reached Shanghai at 2pm. We said goodbye to our new little friends and headed off to Blue Mountain Hostel for a very well earned shower - yes we both smelt very very bad!

The Bus Trip from Hell, part 2

We are sitting around waiting for a Typhoon to hit Shanghai after having had a great time in the last couple of days and a lazy Saturday morning in bed reading Huckleberry Finn and the paper and eating Wontons. Lovely. So I think I can again bring myself relive the horror of the Laos Bus Trip!!!!

So where was I?

That's right - blazing through the Laos roads (I refuse to call them highways so as not to offend real highways throughout the world) at warp speed but not actually getting anywhere. On and on we went. Around and around. Up and down and just generally jerking to a fro in a rather unpleasant manner.

Finally at about 11 am the bus driver thought it was time for a piss and simply stopped the bus in the middle of the road on the side of some mountain and the boys got out and went to it. This wasn't too much of an issue for me, what with me being an old hand at pissing in public, but for Shell it was a bit much. We were, as I said, parked in the middle of the road on the side of a mountain and there weren't any of the facilities one would generally associate with a bus toilet stop. There was the road, a mountain, some jungle, a bus and 12 leery Chinese guys trying to get a glimpse of a white woman's arse. All the blokes got to weeing on the mountain side of the bus, so poor Shell was out the cliff side and had to tramp through the jungle to get to a spot out of view of the said 12 leery Chinese.

I finished up and got on the bus, where Shell had returned in a bit of a state. To top off the stresses of having to go to the toilet off a cliff with these guys staring at her, a leech had managed to make it's way onto her shoe. She flicked it off and then couldn't find it until it reappeared on her leg! Again, she flicked it off and I heroically squashed it, but now we had to check her bum for leeches as she was convinced she'd picked up millions of them whilst taking a whizz. We did that and there weren't any but it was overall pretty difficult way to stop to go to the toilet and did nothing for Shell's parlous state of mind at the time.

By and by we got to a town called Odomaxy (or something) and stopped for lunch. The Chinese guys (from herein referred to in the non racist form of the collective noun Chinamen) jumped off the bus and stormed, or perhaps ransacked, their way into another Chinese restaurant where they proceeded to order by barging into the kitchen, shoving each other, pointing at vegetables and shouting orders at the poor waitress. We stood by watching in horror. Finally after the scrum had died down we got to ordering some fried rice and a can of Coke and sat and ate our lunch, again a bit shocked at the way these people behaved.

After about 1/2 an hour it was back on the bus and back to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which allowed us some escape from the cold, hard reality if the bus trip. So far we were about 6 hours into our bus trip and had covered maybe 120 km's and still had about 60 k's to the border which shut at 4:30pm. The road seemed to improve but I think it was just the mountains were a bit smaller and easier to navigate and by about 3:30pm we were close enough to the border to get boarded a couple of time by Laos PDR officials seeking some loose change off Chinamen that didn't have their papers in order. The bribing seemed to take a while and there were some heated arguments in a number of languages that seemed to be about the buses insurance. The Laos police didn't seem to worry about us too much but the Chinamen copped it, until finally they dragged a couple of them off the bus and machine gunned them on the ground to the cheers of all the decent people in the world!

No, wait, that didn't actually happen. That was the dream I had, having fallen asleep waiting for these clowns to get us going again. Finally we got to the border where the Chinamen all pushed in front of us at the immigration desk and then got shirty when we were the last ones to have our passports cleared, for apparently we were taking too long. This was a bit much and we called them some names in English that they didn't understand and I wont repeat here, but I think the border guard thought it was pretty funny.

So back on the bus and through the Chinese customs and immigration which was where we met the first nice Chinese person of our trip, in the guise of the guy who checked my bag for contraband and Lonely Planet guides: seriously, they confiscate LP guides as they don't include Taiwan in their map of China. Anyway I'd done a pretty good job of hiding our copy and he didn't find it, but they unwrapped everything in Shell's bag and it took a little while to get it all over with.

By and by we were back on the bus and the change country's was as stark as it was instant. All of a sudden there were 2 lanes either way on the roads and actual cars and trucks and then we drove over a bridge and through a tunnel! Amazing stuff and the next 50 k's took us about 40 minutes as opposed to the 97 hours it would have taken in Laos.

We stopped for dinner at a town called Mengla and had some nice food and a beer and a welcome break from the Chinamen, who we thought probably aren't going to rob and kill us anymore. We had dinner and went back to the bus where some females joined our intrepid crew which had a bit of a civilising effect on the Chinamen. About 8 we were back on the road and it was back to HHGTTG on the iPod. We'd now listened to about 10 hours of radio play and luckily the batteries were holding up well. Zaphod and Ford had just stolen a spaceship from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe when we both sort of fell asleep as the sun set.

The next 11 hours passed with out me really knowing what was going on or having any conscious thought, but my addled mind recalls some weird stuff.

A bus/truck parking area with perhaps 1000 trucks all sitting there idling. We stopped to put more water in the bus. I have no idea why but each time we stopped the driver would get a hose and put lots of water into the bowels of the bus.

Another toilet stop that, again, didn't have any toilets but plenty of trucks and buses to hide amongst while you did the biz. This one was good as when we were walking back to the bus the driver lit the engines and took off with about 15 people not actually on board. Apparent;y he was just moving off the water point 30 metres but it caused a decent amount of excitement in everyone who wasn't on board.

And a market along the side of the road where we stopped for about 20 minutes for no other reason I could see than the driver wanted to smoke a few cigarettes. The market was strange as it was right on the highway, like pretty much in the overtaking lane, sold junk like t-shirts and some food and was fully staffed by people at 3:30 AM.

After that I fell asleep good and proper and didn't stir until Shell woke me up as we pulled into the Kunming bus station. We got the hell off the bus and vowed never to take another overnight bus as long as we lived. In the end, the sum of the parts of this particular bus trip were much greater then the individual events. Taken in isolation there really wasn't much to it, but put together and placed on a bus with the 12 Chinamen it was all a bit much. Put that bus in Laos and China and it was THE BUS TRIP FROM HELL!!!!!!!

Shanghai Zoo

I'm not going to say too much otherwise I will start crying. What I will say is under no circumstances go there. No actually I won't say don't go there. You read what I have to day and then you can decide yourself if its worth the visit........

After seeing the Giant Pandas at a very slick operation in Chengdu we figured that the zoo probably would be a "fun day out" as described in the Lying Planet. We wanted to get another glimpse of the Giant Pandas and there are some crazy monkeys and bright yellow mountain goat things that are native to china that we thought might be worth a look see.

So yesterday we toddled off to the zoo, we took the metro to the end of the line and then were going to walk the rest of the way. One of us forgot to pack the map which we thought would be OK as we knew we just had to walk south form the metro station. After we had walked for long enough in the blazing sunshine and 37deg heat that we thought we might like to kill each other, we hopped in a taxi and drove the rest of the way. The zoo was 40 Yuan entrance fee (about $7.50) which we thought was pretty cheap compared with Melbourne Zoo's extortionate prices. Little did we know that it was going to be cheap and crap!

Highlights or low lights of the zoo depending on how you look at it were:

• Seeing Siberian tigers
• Mislabeling of the panther and leopard (this made Brock very mad)
• the concrete waterless prison cells for pet dogs and cats including: poodles, Maltese, collies, Persians and other very sad companion animals
• seeing a boa constrictor eat a chicken
• grown man banging the glass in the aquarium to get the sea turtles to look at him
• parents forcing their children to climb the enclosure fences to get a photo closer to the animals, man eating or not
• large gonaded mice running around oblivious to their fate in the snake enclosure
• seeing the golden mountain goats that you find in north of China
• seeing Eastern Grey kangaroos (labeled as Pademellons!)
• watching a woman pour a whole bottle of lemon ice tea into the mouth of a sun bear
• watching a grown man and a small boy feed potato chips and biscuits to the golden monkeys
• the giant pandas that looked like they were so hot an miserable they would rather die

Just when we had seen enough misery and careless/ignorant human behavior, I plucked up one last ounce of courage or stupidity and went in search of the big lipped monkeys that are found in Yunnan province. We didn't find them, what we did get to see as our parting glimpse and memory of the Shanghai Zoo was 6 small Grey monkeys fighting over an empty coke bottle and a pink plastic bag that had been kindly thrown into their enclosure by a very generous passer by!

...........so you still want to go there?

The Bus From Hell - part 1

Well I promised a post on this and it has been almost two weeks, so I think I can now face up to the horrid memories of our arrival to China on - dum dum de dum - THE OVERNIGHT BUS TO KUNMING!!!!!

Frankly, looking back now with 20/20 hindsight, it seemed like a smart move. As regular readers of our adventures will know, our unexpectedly early arrival to Luang Prabang had given us some easy time in Laos and we got used to things working out. Perhaps as a result of our good fortune we wandered down to the local travel agent in LP and asked about a famed and mythical flight from Luang Prabang to Kunming in China, our next major destination. I say mythical because, although it appeared on a couple of websites and advertistments we had seen, we hadn't actually seen any proof of these flights taking place - you know, a website that would allow you to book the flight, that sort of thing.

We were keen to get on to the flight, as it would have made things super easy for getting to China. It takes just 1 1/2 hours, the planes are reliable (in warm, non icy conditions) and, for those unaware of Laotion geography and road conditions, would have prevented us having to experience first hand the untold agony of bus travel over a extremely mountainous country that doesn't have the money for expensive government spending like repairing roads built by cash from other countries.

So down to the travel agency we went and asked about the flight. "Oh no" said the lady, "that flight only operates in the busy season", which we knew we weren't in as we hadn't had to wait for anything yet in Laos (except more tourists for a tuk tuk to the waterfall).

"There's a bus direct to Kunming", she offered, which actually suited us quite well as it would have dodged the numerous problems involved in booking tickets on local buses and crossing foreign borders with no one to point us in the right direction. The only catch was that the bus took 25 hours and left at 7:30 am in the morning.

"Deal" we said and handed over the cash, to which she responded with numerous phone calls and conversations with various people in the office and standing outside on the street. Eventually we got a bit of paper and she says

"The bus leaves from the Chinese restaurant and a tuk tuk will pick you up at 6:10 AM".

Ok we said and walked off with our tickets. Only later as we walked around town did we think about what had just happened:

1. Why does the tuk tuk need to pick us up at 6:10 for a 7:30 bus? Hmm
2. Why does a international bus leave from the Chinese Restaurant? Hmmm
3. How could a 800km trip take 25 hours? Hmmm

With other activities like hill tribe treks and boat rides on the Mekong to distract us we didn't really worry too much about any of these questions and got on with life.

Until the bus trip day.

We got up early for our appointed pick up at 6:10 AM and checked out of our nice, friendly hostel and jumped into the tuk tuk that turned up pretty much on time. Now having considered the question of why the pick up was an hour and a half before the bus left the previous night a few solutions were offered. Maybe the Chinese restaurant was heaps out of town. Maybe they were going to cook us a nice breakfast before our long ardous trip. Maybe the tickets we had didn't gaurantee our spot on the bus and the only way to make sure was turn up really early and make our way onto the bus by force. Bingo!

We arrived at the Chinese restaurant at 6:20, which included a detour to the office where we had booked the tickets (thus denouncing the first theory). We walked into the dining area that was a kind of open air restaurant with a roof. Now allow me to describe the scene we were greeted with: It was a bit like a bar in an old western movie, with lots of gruff, in this case chinese guys, sitting around smoking and playing cards. At a table were a couple of mean looking guys with phones (instead of 6 shooters) and a girl with a small metal box who appeared to be the bursar for this operation. At the front of the restaurant there were about 6 big, clean looking buses with Luang Prabang - Kunming written on the sides, so at least that much was promising, but instead of seats they had beds, which we didn't know when we booked the bus.

Anyway no one really paid us any attention at all, including the waiting staff, so we sat down and watched a strange ballet performed by the gruff looking men with phones and our tuk tuk driver who immediatly got into a loud and protrated conversation in Laotion, apparently concerning our tickets for the bus, that involed many loud shouts and gestures, puncuated by frequent phone calls. We were midly concerned but we'd paid our money so we thought there wouldn't be any problems. I was hungry so set off down the street in search of some sticky rice for breakfast since there didn't seem to be any chance of anyone at the restaurant serving us. That much was easy and I got some rice and returned expecting Shell to have the tickets but no dice. Still the tuk tuk driver argued and made funny facial expressions and still the gruff Chinese guys talked loudly and smoked cigarettes.

It was getting on to about 7 AM now so we were starting to get a bit anxious. Finally the tuk tuk driver came over smiling and handed us our tickets saying we had seats 7 and 9 and with that he shot through. One of the gruff men had started to put one of the buses through its warm up paces (which include filling part of the undercarriage with heaps of water. I have no idea why...) so we thought this might not be that hard after all.

About 7:30 there seemed to be more Chinese guys materialise and head for the bus so we followed and got on board. Now here I need to explain the sleeper buses are a bit strange. They have a sort of bunk array with beds that are about 5' 9'' in length with a sheet, a small doona and a small pillow. The left hand side of the bus was double beds, about 4 foot in width and the tight hand side was single beds that were maybe 2 1/2 feet wide, both sides with a row of top bunks that were just low enough to prevent a human sitting up.

Maybe here I should introduce our China bus companions. There were 10 stinky, fat middle aged Chinese guys that smoked incessantly (in the bus!) and talked loudly with plenty of leering in our direction. We were, again, a little bit worried but didn't think too much of it. We took our double bed/seat and, with the iPod and some books at the ready, thought we were good to go.

But we didn't. We sat there for 20 minutes while the stinky guys carried on until eventually, about 8:40 AM a tuk tuk turned up and 2 more fat, stinky, middle aged chinese guys got on the bus and allowed us to leave. Thanks for being on time guys!

The bus took off at warp speed through the crowed streets with some really amazing driving. This bus was obviously far more powerful than the avarage Laotion tractor or bronze age, kerosene powered mini bus and this guy made full use of it. Flat out on the wrong side of the road around every blind turn, overtaking through crowded market places and generally keeping the trend of the morning going. It did, however, have a calming effect on the passengers and at least they shut up and stopped smoking for a bit. We were both feeling a bit too ill to do anything other than lie there so I put the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy radio play on the iPod and we both zoned out.

The bus carrerred onwards through the Laotion mountains.

Coming up next in part 2 of the bus trip from hell, the bus stops for a toilet break in leech infested mountains, we stop at another Chinese Restarant for lunch and we hit the border!

We are both hungry now for a Sichian hot pot so I will finish this some other time....