Wow, I’m inspired enough to write in pen tonight. For a while there I wasn’t sure if It was a passing phase.
Today was the final day in China and the first in Russia (almost part of Europe!). From the beginning the day was not taken lightly given the usual rigmarole involved with crossing boarders. We somehow managed to sleep in till 10am on the train from Harbin to Manzhouli. After being the last ones off the train, because we couldn’t understand the announcements yet again. Then we made our way by (non-metered) cab that we would regret having not negotiated a price in advance. Our timing was perfect as we boarded a bus headed for Zabaikalsk, over the boarder in Russia. There were only about 4 of us on the bus, along with an assortment of mobile phones, DVD players, and other cheap electrical equipment which the Chinese and Russians seem to find anyway (legal/illegal) over the boarder for resale. We were lucky (seemingly not as you will find out below) enough to have a Chinese, English and Russian speaking Russian lady in her mid 40′s on our bus. Thankfully Ellie also had the foresight to ask for advice about crossing the boarder on the Lonely Planet forum (which I downloaded to my shiny new PDA phone). Anyway the Russian lady hurried us along helping us go to the right buildings and desks, pay the correct fees and fill out the immigration cards which were only in Russian and Chinese… I think it was at this point that the Russian passport officials started taking an interest in us as we were unable to make heads or tails of the form. To cut a long story short, we were the first of 40 people (all Russian or Chinese) to get to the immigration desk and the last to leave the room. Before they gave us the magic stamp they proceeded to thoroughly examine every page in the passports with a magnifying glass under a variety of special lights, felt the thickness of ever page (at least once each and there were 5 officials at one stage, not to mention the ones that ran out the back with Ellie’s passport for 15 minutes). Then they closed the only counter open, leaving us in a room with no furniture for 30-60mins with no idea was happening. We used this time as an opportunity to stuff our face with bread and butter, and drink tea followed by a short burst of reading. (the officials walking through found our little camp out for a visa quite amusing). Eventually they filed back in, open a counter, examined our passports a bit more, and gave us stamps. Then it was back on the bus for 3 more passport checks before we got out of the compound, and then we were requested to pay some random official looking guy local money, we had none so that wasn’t a problem and he let us pass. 30min more on the bus through flat snowy desert and we were at the Zabaikalsk train station.

At the station we were so incredibly luck to be approached by the local English teacher as we were attempting to book our tickets to Irkutsk!!! Whom we can’t thank enough for helping us get the last two tickets on the train to Chita, only one more train from Irkutsk. We chatted briefly to her before slipping away to fix some porridge and brown sugar with dates. Several hours later, her husband a well dressed and astute man approached us and introduced himself as Sayan. He ever so kindly invited us total strangers back to his place for tea and dinner, after pondering the offer vs. the 5 hour wait in the train station we gladly accepted.

Sayan’s English was very good, as he had studied in San Francisco, USA after completing his university degree in Russia. Having also visited the states as a boy with family, we discovered we both have an appreciation for the natural beauty of west America. They offered us tea, traditional Russian dumplings (mince wrapped in pastry – v.good), cheese, salami and a range of other assorted nibble food. Then he got out the premium vodka (I could tell it was the real deal because it was holographicly sealed). He gave us a short run down about what and how to have a shot…(the secret is in the exhale). It was a divine evening, the company so fascinating. Sayan had many stories to tell and was pleased to be able to practice his English having no other people to chat with in the town. Turns out he is running the public hospital for the town and has 300 odd staff, his boss is a former KGB agent! When giving us a brief tour of the town he showed us the location where the new hospital is to be built. He said that because the owner wasn’t using the land that the local council (equivalent) had just granted him permission to build on it. No compensation or anything… Amazing, that’s how things are done in Russia apparently. I don’t think land is hard to come by being the largest country in the world.

Lastly he gave us a stern but admiring talk about the dangers of travel and foreigners in Russia. Many of which we are already familiar with from our travels. Though we had overlooked one, theft… As it turns our Ellie’s shiny new digital camera that we bartered so hard for in Singapore was nicked somewhere between Harbin and Zabaikalsk. More on this later no doubt. Arrr….I’m on the train and they just turned the lights out and I can’t see what I’m writing….

Goodnight, but so much more to say.

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Posted on February 6th, 2007 :: Filed under Travel

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(I just typed this post and didn’t save it so I’m trying again…)
I have a confession to make…. Its been over a month since my last blog post. And we also have failed to upload new photos for family and friends. Being the computer fanatic that I am, I attempted all sorts of technical things to get the internet working faster in Laos and China but none could increase the speed of the connection to make it bearable to work with. Now you can find all the Laos and China photos uploaded at www.madteckhead.com/gallery/. Ill also attempt to update you of highlights, both good and bad in the next few posts.

Right now we are at the Harbin Ice World Festival. Its very impressive, and we are still to come back at night and see the ice structures lit up from the inside… So far we have walked under the city wall (entrance), walked up castles only to slide on our freezing backside all the way down the other side. Just now we have stopped for a hot chocolate in one of the cafes.

Over the past month have curved our way from Laos, over China. Passing through some great spots. Dali, Chengdu, JiuZhaiGou, Xian, Beijing stand out from the rest.

Dali was in the Yunnan province. We stayed in a Tibetan style hotel as it was very warm and I was sick. We mostly rested and drank lost of amazing tea. On our last day we went on a adventure to the lake, after being informed we could charter a fishing boat back to Dali via the lake. This would have been possible if we didn’t get lost walking around the country side, through vegetable fields and a couple of villages looking for the jetty. We were also plagued by immense trouble trying to communicate our plan and find the fishermen. After arriving at the jetty we learned that it was to late and we wouldn’t make it back in time. So it was that we set of back to the hotel by bus, content with the sight we had been awarded for our efforts.

Chengdu (Ellie)
I spent my birthday in Changdu, the capital of Sichuan province, famous for its spicy food. The moputofu and spicy roast potatoes from the hawker stalls will be going in our personal cookbooks. It was a pretty weird feeling when we first arrived in the city as it was the biggest we’d seen in china, actually since Bangkok I guess. And compared to places in Yunnan it seemed so much more prosperous (neon everywhere!) at somewhat of a lost as to what to do (we had intended to head straight to JiuZhaiGou on arrival) we decided to visit the world class panda bear sanctuary. It was a very memorable thing to do for my birthday. I never really understood the panda’s appeal until seeing them up close. They where fantastic! We found a great Italian restaurant for dinner which topped off a great day. It was hard to leave the next day (and not just because we had to wake up at 6am.

JiuZhaiGou (back to Nathan)
We headed for JiuZhaiGou, desperately in need of mother natures warming embrace. We risked the fact that the National park was a 10 hour trip through high mountain ranges, and that we might have to take the same road back before continuing north (effectively a +1000km detour trip), and lastly we were not even sure the park would be open as it is off season here, and many of the mineral lakes freeze over. Our gamble paid off and we found ourselves in a valley between high snow covered mountains peaks. Where the valley forks off into two is the entrance to the national park, this was about 3km from our hotel. Which we wouldn’t have found without the help of our new friends David & Angle, who we shared our time in the park with and a delightful sample of vegetarian Chinese food on our last night. We spent two days in the park and it can only be described as winter wonderland. Many Tibetan tribes still live in the park and we were lucky enough to have traditional Tibetan tea (which they have for breakfast and is actually quite thick) in a very colorful Tibetan home. Our timing was quite fortunate as many of the hotels were closed being the off season (only 4 were open), and the park was effectively empty. The prices were also good as we got a 4 star hotel for AU$28!!! Our time in JiuZhaiGou wouldn’t have been the same without the amazing company that we found, thanks David & Angel for making our stay a pleasure we hope you come visit Australia some time.

Xian (Ellie)
In the end we had to come almost all the way back to Chengdu in order to catch the train north again. The bus ride was an adventure in itself. We just made it to the bus station in time and felt ourselves quite lucky to get seats together but and hour or so into the trip we hear a bang and theres glass raining down on us. The window, brittle from the extreem cold had just exploded in on us! I was the first to get a cut and then kinda lost it freaking out about the whole situation. Nathan managed to get us both off the bus and shook most of the glass off our clothes and belongings. Our window was the o nly one affected and the driver seemed to be ancitous to keep going so we were hurried back on the the bus where they had made a vague attempt to clear our seat of glass. This was when nathan got his first cut and let it be known that he was not very impressed with being hurried back on the bus. We finally maded a stop where the driver and his lackys “fixed” the window with some cardboard and we swaped seats. We were not very impressed and proceeded to take it out on anyone who attempted to light up a cigarette for the rest of the trip. Appart from that the trip was farly uneventful. We managed to procure tickets for the train to Xian that night and so ended another long day of travel.

I had originally though we would cut across the south of china and head up the coast traveling through Shanghai but it proved quite easy to travel straight through the middle of the country. No matter which route we had taken I’m sure china would have provided beautiful natural scenery and a plethora of cultural experiences. The country is jam packed with wonderful sights.

Xian is an ancient city with a modern city growing in and around it. There is a walled area with fully restored bell and drum towers and ancient university and traditional architecture still intact but peak hour traffic is horrendous and we didn’t see the sun for 3 days due to shocking air pollution. We got out of town one day and visited the site of the terracotta warriors’ excavation. It was as impressive as we had been told and we were impressed with the care and dedication taken in the excavation of the 3000+ life sized warriors.

(back to Nathan)
Last night we were pondering over our experiences in China and come to some interesting observations. Overall our travels through China have been of a wildly different nature to those through south east Asia. In the south of Asia English was more proficient, and the native languages were not to difficult to grasp, the climate was warmer, its more frequented by other like minded travelers, and from my experiences the local people warm and friendly. To contrast in China, you can go days without seeing another westie, 99.99% of signage are unintelligible, and the depth of communication and understanding is limited by the narrow range of commonly understood body language and the often limited patience of the other party. All this makes the most basic of tasks overly complicated and taxing.

Another observation is the indifferent lack of consideration toward strangers and a high degree of self focus. I saw this in the endless queue jumping (if a cue even exists), getting in buses and getting seats on buses, total blatant disregard for smoking in non-smoking areas (after being reminded and asked several times to stop). Perhaps this has behavior has become a social norm, deemed necessary to make it to the ‘top’ given the shear number of people. To me however the behavior seems counter intuitive as an approach to living because the focus is put on the ends not the means perhaps leaving a majority of the population miserable, at the very least fighting it out to the ‘top’.

One last observation was that when we got ripped off in Thailand and Maylasia, the person usually did it with a smile, and was tactful. While in China when we got ripped off there was no smile, no tact, and the person usually seemed to feel justified in doing so. After chatting about it briefly we’ve decided we would prefer to be ripped off smiling than left feeling rorted on the side walk.

We have learned and experienced many different things along the way, and in China we definitely learned how to stand up for ourselves.

Would love to hear more from you all, comments, emails, sms or phone calls all welcome.

From the edge of Siberia,

We send our love,

Nathan & Ellie

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Posted on February 4th, 2007 :: Filed under Travel

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Ok well nathan has just set me up here with his new phone and a portable keyboard to write the latest blog post. It’s too cold to go outside… My toes are still thawing from the last time) so it’s a perfect opportunity to fill you in on the last few days.

We realise that we’ve been slacker that we wanted to be with this trip tracker. It’s been a combination of really dodgy internet access in china and that we’ve realisdd there’s a life away from the computer screen (i know… It was a shock to us too!) but now we’re well and truly in the cold end of the journey and the only thing I can imagine doing is drinking hot chocolate (on the rare occastion that the chinese get it right) and snuggling inside. We have some very long train journeys to come (a couple are 40hrs). So this protable computer set up is going to come in handy as we try to update the blog and add comments for places we’ve skipped along the way so stay tuned!

Anyway enough of that. what have we been doooooing? We just arived in Harbin. Capital of china’s most northern province and bloody cold. They have an ice festival here in january and the ice sculptures last until thaw. So aside from being a convienient stop over between Beijing and the russian boarder (we decided not to go through mongolia to save on visa hassles) and on the official transmanchurian rail line this place is a destination in itsself and if we get up the courage to go outside again no doubt we’ll find out why.

The Fact that we’re here means that nath obviously suceeded in getting his russian visa!!! (now there’s a story… For another day) but that was about the only thing that went right for us yesterday (our last day in Beijing). admittedly we shouldn’t have left our trip to the great wall untill the very last minute, but we did. And we shoudn’t have just believed the first bus driver when he said he’d take us there, but we did that too. In the end after packing up and picking up the visa it was about 1:30pm when we left. But we ffigured about 3 hours get out there and back and we’d have a couple of hours out there and make our way back for some dinner before getting on the train which left at 9pm. Well at 4:30 the bus finally “arrives” at it’s destination (I won’t go into the flat tire) a full 60KM short of the great wall and we’re informed that we’ll have to take a taxi the rest of the way. Well. Let’s just say we weren’t happy. I may have cried and nathan may or maynot have threatened phisical violence on a certain bus drivers property. So we came very close to the great wall. But unfortunatly, while you can see it from space you can’t see it from 60km away. Next time I guess. We turned around and headed straight back to Beijing, ate dinner (i lied earlier we had excellent middle eastern for dinner the 2nd good thing to happen that day) and got on the train. We’d been sold tickets on two different carrages so didn’t even have each other for comfort as we left beijing.

Another day another city. We’ve found a nice hotel in the middle of town so I’m looking forward to some fun adventures in Harbin!

ellie

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Posted on February 2nd, 2007 :: Filed under Travel

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