Retrospective: Mongolia II

The next morning we visited a local monastery, apparently of some renown. This involved lots of pigeons, about as many tourists, a strong smell of incense and the eternal hum of chanting in the background - not forgetting a monk or two. Also, feeling distinctly intrusive and uncomfortable during the circumnavigation of rooms in which said chanting was taking place.

After an hour's extremely bumpy bus ride to a point only about half an hour's journey on a smooth road outside the capital , we arrived at the camp, in the foothills of a valley that Simon (team geologist) informed us had been created by a glacier. This consisted of about five four or five-person gers. It was for tourists, so we were lucky enough to have showers and a sort of common area for sitting and eating/drinking just over the next rise (which sounds near, but was in itself a clear 5-minute walk).

The landscape here is something else. Green and tan and grey swoop up into the sky on all sides, mimicking the eagles' flight paths and yet dwarfing them, a swirl of indistinct shades metamorphosing all into sharpness and hard angles. The silence of the place is hard to describe. There's a sense of restrained wildness, benign gianthood. It reminded me a little bit of Mount Sinai...except that where the Sinai was aggressively barren, requiring acceptance on its own terms (well, defining all the terms!) this landscape was clearly inhabitable and inhabited, albeit scantly. It seemed less immediately alien...more tolerant of the beings it plays host to.

After spending a couple of days there, and having come from Ulaan Bataar, it seemed to me that its quiet felt a little like the calm that comes before a storm. Tourism and commercialism are definitely leaving their tracks. They seem a (comparatively) subtle undercurrent still but you wonder how long it will take for it to be ramped up, how long it will be before the countryside is littered with even more of these tourist ger camps offering staged visits to traditional nomadic families while their routes move closer and closer inwards to the city and the old way of life is eventually abandoned entirely.

Nonetheless, on arriving and chucking your things into your pretend ger, you straightaway find yourself striking out for the nearest rocky top. The peaks invite you with their proximity and yet such is the unregulated vastness that you can go up and come down by a route of your choosing and hardly see another soul, let alone bump into another body. The strange emptiness is lulling to a degree that you can hardly believe; it makes you feel utterly, deceptively safe.

Anyway, so over the course of the next two days, our guide introduced us to anklebones and gave us an impromptu display of Mongolian wrestling (eagle-dancing at the beginning = awesome!), managing to beat every guy in the group who agreed to fight him by being extremely quick and only losing to a fellow camp worker who was clearly very proud of his achievement. Apart from the requisite explorations of the scenery, some of us went horse-riding, and we also, after the obligatory visit to the ger of a traditional Mongolian family where we drank fermented mare's milk and ate dried cheese biscuits (reactions varying hilariously thereto), went to Turtle Rock, which I think is supposed to be famous.

We had just got off the bus and were milling about when three fairly young boys rode up on horses looking (like all the other kids we saw on horses) like they'd never lived anywhere else. They started playing games and competing with each other to do chin-ups on a nearby bar - which ended only with the sudden arrival of another slightly older boy of eleven or twelve maybe, on a black horse, quite solidly built, garbed in a white shirt and black trousers and wearing a sort of dark red, lemon-drop-shaped turban on his head, to whom they responded in such a subdued and obedient fashion it was as if he was their leader. Someone, I forget who, later speculated that the turban might be a sign of having won some competition or other, hence the charismatic pull he seemed to exert. Anyway, he was an interesting figure.

Some of the group adventurously decided to climb Turtle Rock. I rather less adventurously sat in the shade of the overhang midway up the slope, and watched a couple of our group play frisbee with some of the local children, whilst the other children messed around on their horses within the same area, just to add to the general confusion, and the young lordly type, now running around rambunctiously with his shirt round his waist - turban and hilariously commanding aura intact, however - at one point attempted to join in the frisbee game on his horse. Meanwhile the grazing cows got progressively closer to my stone and were progressively shooed away by children who must have thought they were bothering me (or maybe it just wasn't good grazing ground) and a pair of horses ambled up and grazed amiably at my feet. One of them was light chestnut-coloured with a blond mane, I have never seen one so striking. (Excuse my ignorance of correct equine terminology) A sizeable pack of tourists from, I think, Japan, had set up camp further up the slope and into the shade, and took pictures incessantly.

It was raining when we left the next morning! but luckily for us brightened up by the time we got back to Ulaan Baatar, whereupon some people went off to the Natural History museum and a bunch of the rest of us went to the International Intellectual Museum: fun if your mind is in the mood to be thoroughly boggled. The diminutive maker and collector of all these delightfully intricate puzzles gave us a little demo of magic tricks and stood for a photo with us. I bought a puzzle ring to add to my collection of tat from Mongolia, which includes three postcards, three stamps, a card with an ink drawing on it and a delightfully detailed phrasebook with CD.

The rest of the day was singularly uneventful and unimaginative, entailing a return to the Irish pub for a drink, and then to Mongolian Barbecue to eat. Half of the group left first and failed utterly to get served in the first pub they sat down in by the time the rest of us turned up, and this set the tone for the remainder of the evening: one drink in another pub a bit further along, everyone decided that they were tired and back to the hostel we went.

The next morning we were up early to go to the train station, and that was that for Mongolia, for us. But I can say that I left with a feeling of having been somewhere pleasant and friendly, and generally charmed and intrigued, wishing to know and experience more.

Retrospective: Mongolia I

So after the somewhat forbidding impression left by Russia, we were looking forward to Mongolia and the change of scene and culture that it promised, accordingly starting the next leg full of anticipation.

Unfortunately for us, the new train had no air conditioning, which made the long border stops (which always seemed to involve an unnecessarily large amount of shunting around of carriages) a whole lot of hot and sticky fun. In the Mongolian border town whose name I can't remember a pack of feral dogs roamed the tracks, scavenging for food in the rubbish that was everywhere from the trains, and by the time we were finally let off for ten minutes or so, our train (on the inner set of tracks) was blocked from the platform for about five minutes in either direction by one on the outer set, and people desperate for the toilet actually resorted to ducking underneath the carriages and climbing up onto the platform, in brave (or foolhardy) disregard for the risk of getting run over if the train decided to go...

We arrived in Ulaan Baatar in the early morning, emerging from the depths of hilly, rainy countryside. It gives off the aura of some sort of forgotten frontier settlement or well-concealed secret place of pilgrimage, seeming to unfold and stretch out in the morning sun as the train rouns the approaching curve of track - and then just as if it has reached the zenith of its yawn, the clarity of the difference is incredible; one minute there is city; the next minute, nothing, only vast, flat, green, open fields, in every direction. It's a first sighting with a great deal of charm, notwithstanding the fact that one of the first things you see on closer approach is a massive, rusting brown pipe threading its way overland between some industrial warehouses before turning to run parallel to the incoming train tracks!

Spread across a valley plain in the crook of some hills, Ulaan Baatar is a city that keeps its head down, but what it lacks in profile it makes up for in sheer attitudinal sprawl. In architectural terms, a bit of an ugly duckling: an odd mix of Soviet and Western classical-looking architecture, drab blocky buildings and traditional nomadic dwellings, and a temple or two hidden away in the middle of all the concrete; wide-boulevarded but with an occasional uncomfortable tendency to potholes and uncovered manholes. And in Sukhe Bator Square, our honcho proudly pointed out the 'sail' hotel currently being built at one end - in imitation of another, bigger one somewhere else, probably in the Gulf - which will make one of the few punctures of the sky in what has to be one of the flattest cityscapes I've ever seen. In sum, almost the antithesis of our final destination, Hong Kong.

But for all this and partly because of it, probably, it had a relaxed, rough-and-ready sort of charm which was hard not to like. (For one, what other city in the world has yurt suburbs?) Its people seemed friendly and the atmosphere gentle. There was no trace of the recent election unrest, save the somewhat jarring burnt-out shell of the particular party headquarters (which we would pass on the way from our hostel to Sukhe Bataar Square from our hostel and take surreptitious photos of).

Anyway, we did all the standard tourist seeing of sights - the square, the statue, the renovated parliament, the national museum - and purchasing of tat, and then went for lunch to an (I am not sure whether to love or deplore this irony) American-founded food chain called Mongolian Barbecue, apparently very popular locally, where you pick your own ingredients from a buffet and they fry them for you on the spot. It was very good, although having eaten nothing but bread and biscuits for a few days our stomachs had shrunk and (a few of the usual suspects aside) we couldn't really make the most of the all-you-can-eat aspect. While we were there, the staff, who were a cheery lot, randomly decided to have a waterfight, as you do, in which the boys appeared to be exercising an unfair advantage (i.e. they had all the water), to the accompaniment of much shrieking and laughter. Who wouldn't love to work in a place like that? (Unless you were a girl, maybe.)

In the late afternoon we went to an exhibition of traditional Mongolian culture, which consisted of a succession of short songs, dances and athletic displays in fancy costume. One imagines the original context for many of these would not have been a stage bathed in psychedelic lighting to the accompaniment of synthesized music, but I enjoyed it despite the stagy format. There were tiny rubber-limbed contortionists and hoarse-voiced throat-singers, who sounded like bees a thousand times magnified, albeit with more of an ear for melody. When asked how they do it, our guide replied with delightful syntactic ambiguity, leaving us not much the clearer, "they damage their throats". The penetrating drone has to be heard to be believed. It was a most surreal and disconcerting sound to hear a human produce.

Then, expanding on the sparkly flashing lights theme, we ventured out to sample Mongolian nightlife. We didn't make it to Dave's Pub or Arirang, to my disappointment, or even to Isimuss, which would have been convenient as it was right next to our hostel (this had been Simon's choice since he discovered it in the guidebook, solely for the opportunity it would have afforded to dance round a statue of Stalin). Instead we ended up drinking beer under the marquee at an outdoor Irish Pub, where a band was setting up as we arrived and proceeded to perform a five-song set before completely dismantling again and which also seemed to be incubating a suspicious presence of sleazy old men (perhaps on the hunt for Mongolian brides?), before walking halfway across the city, back past all the sparkly lights, across what was some sort of narrow debris-strewn bridge (in function if not in form) and into the run-down darkness of a distinctly less happening district, where after conversation with some shadily loitering taxi drivers, it proved that all the clubs had been closed in advance of being raided by the police. This meant catching taxis all the way back across the city in completely the other direction to somewhere else, which proved to be an imposing club called Mass (I think). I think it may be the swankiest club I've ever been to, actually. Although, bearing in mind that my previous other clubbing experiences have been limited to Durham and Damascus, this may not be saying all that much. We left when the club closed, only to discover - in a turn of events smelling strongly of nemesis - police cars parked outside. At which point commandeered a waiting taxi and high-tailed it out of there.

(to be continued)

Retrospective: Irkutsk

So we left the internet cafe and our guide walked us to what appeared to be a sort of miniature display park for Soviet military hardware, old but fairly sizeable and just sort of sitting there all turned in on itself, an impressive juxtaposition of past might and present uselessness. Am not sure in the light of recent events whether this is better described as an ode to obsolescence or the proverbial sleeping dragon. (Hopefully not the latter, as on the information that clambering all over tanks was permitted, there was a collective regression to an average age of about 5 and flagrant self-incrimination through the photographing of said activities.)

Then we headed to the river where we encountered in about its umpteenth iteration of the trip a phenomenon, possibly peculiar to summer but I'm not sure, whereby merry-making wedding-goers dressed up to the nines may be observed flocking around plazas, famous landmarks and other public places like a ubiquitous species of bird. They are usually seen at day but also to be spotted at night in stages of progressive inebriation... (St. Petersburg had previously granted us the entertaining sight of glamorously clad revellers stumbling tipsily out of a car that at home we might charitably call a piece of junk and according to Natalya our guide are commonly known here as 'capsules of death'.)

Meanwhile, people basked in the sunshine around the edges of a vast plaza, small children played among the (non-metaphorical) pigeons, and an elderly gentleman did some patient, solitary fishing down at the shore. We took our regretful leave of this idyllic scene and - pausing only to mislay a couple of comrades who had vanished in quest of ice cream - headed to the supermarket (which had a car parked outside that clearly thought it was from outer space) to stock up for the four-day train trip ahead.

So that was Russia. Six days and we saw it through a kind of strange kaleidoscope: a perplexing whirl of tourist attractions and transit systems in which glimpses of cosmopolitan glitz and extravagance and the grandeur of empires and ages past contrasted with the utter emptiness of much of the landscape and tales of stark poverty in the areas outside the predetermined lines of our trip. It probably had as much to do with the style of travel as the country itself (short bursts of activity interspersed with long stretches of sameness), or was any rate accentuated by it, but my overriding impression of Russia was one of incohesive vastness. There was colour and splendour, but it was fragmented and dominated by a certain bleakness, in which everything - the weather, the buildings, the people, the subways, the statue parks and the treatment of animals - occasionally seemed to conspire.

Hong Kong!

This is just a quick post from Hong Kong to apologise for the lack of update since Irkutsk. My mental arteries have become clogged with what I suppose is the equivalent of fast-food travel - too much, too quickly! - and shut down from sightseeing overload. I'm still trying to process everything. I've got as far as Ulaan Baatar in my write-up, but I can't quite say what I want to say and the ger camp, Beijing and Shanghai just seem to loom ahead like the Hong Kong skyline - even more daunting up close. I think they may end up being detailed after I get back home - I'm sorry.

Avoiding the whole problem altogether for now, I'll just say that Hong Kong has been very enjoyable for the almost two weeks I'll have spent here by the time I leave. For the first week we were staying in Sheung Shui, a town in the north of the New Territories, in a unused apartment belonging to Ken's grandfather, which entailed a daily half-hour train ride into Kowloon. The second, my solo week, I've been staying in a hostel at the top of the (in)famous Chungking Mansions (edit: notoriety entirely justified, stories I'll tell some other time.)

Certain incidents notwithstanding, and notwithstanding the slight aura of risk that it seems to carry as a place to live, I like Kowloon. It's chaotic, colourful, and scruffy, a heaving mass of bodies that the dump-like high-rises daily expel onto the streets and at the weekends into the parks: shoppers, touts and workers from everywhere, here, China, India, Africa, Indonesia, the Caribbean, the Philippines. And signs that neon-pulse their advertising into the night, so many of them that the eye naturally registers only the most ubiquitous (helping, so I am told, to earn the city the delightfully dubious nickname of City of Seven-Eleven). All of this behind a shoreline that's like the poor cousin (or else a hopeful echo) of the one across the harbour.

Central Hong Kong itself, at least when you first take the plunge into the labyrinth of towering buildings and malls dominated by expensive shops and frequented by importantly hurrying people all in office and/or designer dress, makes you feel like offspring of said cousin, especially if you've just spent four weeks living out of a rucksack. I can't say that this feeling diminishes much on subsequent visits, but you get used to it, and it's presently somewhat ameliorated by the Olympic-induced deluge of tourists, who actually seemed to arrive on the typhoon! Something about the other side (or certain parts of it) I find profoundly disturbing, though. The glitz, the money, the lack of proportion - it feels artificial and inhuman, on some level. And without foundation, built on sand and as easily swept away. One feels it could so easily become a monument to hubris. I prefer this side, which feels more real.

(I've cheated a bit with this post which I have just found buried in my e-mail account and backdated it to the approximate time of writing and saving, seeing as I had intended to post it but for some reason never did so - possibly because of the tortuously long sentence about Kowloon... Anyway it’s the only other thing I wrote while abroad, so for the sake of completeness here it is, next year… 11/1/09)

From Russia With Love

I'm not used to updating on the move! There's no time. I don't think I can do this trip (and the characters on it) justice without more of it, so I'll just give a really quick run-down and hopefully things will slow to a more leisurely pace once we reach China and Hong Kong and I can include all the stories and sightings.

I'm currently in an internet cafe in Irkutsk having spent a couple of days by Lake Baikal; we're soon to head off for a wander and another two delightful nights on the train, the Trans-Mongolian this time. St. Petersburg and Moscow were fascinating but with so little time we obviously weren't able to get much off the tourist trail. I can now say that I have seen Lenin, if that was indeed him, and been whistled at by a Kremlin guard for walking slightly in the wrong direction (this was surprisingly effective - you should have seen the jump and abrupt right-turn we made with no other warning necessary).

Four days on the train was - let's say, entertaining. On the first night the group managed to get thoroughly told off for being noisy, via the bemused translation of a Russian fellow passenger obviously grabbed for the purpose, by our very dour provodnitsa, including and culminating in a threat to call the police. We ate lots of noodles, played lots of cards, read a lot, and looked out of the window a whole lot. Siberia was very, hypnotically flat for two days (the horizontal equivalent of vertigo) and then became hilly overnight. I quite enjoyed having the excuse to be so ridiculously idle overall, in general you'll never be in another situation where you have so little demand on you, although not so much the lack of proper washing facilities.

Lake Baikal is beautiful, the scenery was awesome, the weather was gorgeous and we did enough walking/hiking up steep hills to old Soviet observatories guarded by angry dogs and to various other vantage-points (trees and railings adorned to the hilt with knots of ribbon and cloth tied by the locals for good luck), to make up for the four days of enforced inactivity on the train. And managed to fit in a chair lift ride and a boat trip as well.

The initial period of the trip was exhausting for various reasons and there was almost too much to take in while we were going round St. Petersburg and Moscow, but I think everyone's beginning to settle into the rhythm of it now. Lake Baikal's been a good place to stop and catch our breath a bit. Next stop is Ulaan Baatar. Goodbye, Russia! Bring on the gers!

Mamma Mia, Here I Go Again

Testing, testing...just checking to see if this works (posting by e-mail, that is)...

St. Petersburg, here I come!

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p.s. A qualified yes! There's an irritating Yahoo ad in the footer that wasn't there in the e-mail, which somewhat takes away from the point if I have to remove it via the blog site. (Anyone want a new e-mail address? No? Didn't think so...) Off to mess around with settings...

The Mirror Beckons

Happy (white/grey/green, depending on where you are) Easter! Unfortunately I'm not back in Damascus, although I wish I were. Instead I'm stuck in the staid domains of home, relishing the miserable weather in a masochistic sort of way - it's got a kind of dour, in-your-face, sink-your-teeth-into-it quality, so solid you could cut it with a knife. Like a grumpy jailer, although you probably wouldn't want to sink your teeth into a jailer.

The sun may have come out for a bit just then. Anyway, pathetic fallacy notwithstanding, I'm really just posting to remind myself of something to look forward to, and somewhat pre-emptively revive this blog. That something being, travel is once again in the offing: in July I'm going to be heading out with some college friends on the Trans-Siberian railway from St. Petersburg to Beijing via Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bataar (and afterwards from there to Shanghai and Hong Kong and surrounding area)!

I don't know how much access I'll get to the internet, at least on the train journey, but it seems a shame to leave this blog dormant indefinitely, even if it was originally for the year in Damascus, so I think I'll try to keep some record of the trip here. I don't know when I'll next get back to that region, but assuming I do - call it an Interlude!

The End

Goodbye...!