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The largest supermarket chain in Mongolia is NOMIN. Kinda appropriate

Their shopping bags are sturdier than average. I’m still using mine, and every now and then I see someone on a platform with a NOMIN bag and ask them when they were in Mongolia.

According to a book we found aimed at teaching English to Mongolians, this is what you might say to a friend you dreamed had died: "You were died by car accident and I was lost it."

The rest of my Mongolia photos are here.

The whole set is here.

Here are some train-related photos from the trip so far:

• Bogie changing in Erlian, at the Chinese border with Mongolia (another photo).
• A "MADE IN USSR" double-unit engine, as used in Mongolia (nameplate here). When I saw it, I thought it belonged in a museum, and indeed it does: there’s a very similar engine pair at the Locomotive Museum in Seyatel.
• Under a Russian passenger car: every car has a generator attached to the wheels that provides power for the car. Batteries are used when the train isn’t moving. This is probably why the Circumbaikal train lacks lighting and ventilation.. I doubt the generator can operate at 10km/h, nor can the batteries last 7 hours.
• A very weird car from the Seyatel museum. Does anyone know what this is?

Right now I’m in Yekaterinberg.. no longer in Siberia but still in Asia. I accidentally booked my ticket out for a day later than planned, which I’ve decided was nature’s way of telling me to slow down. So I’m spending an extra night here and heading out tomorrow. It just means I won’t make it to Suzdal, but that isn’t a must-see anyway.

The main part of my Mongolian adventures was a trip organized by Ger to Ger, travelling with the nomads (and 2 Norwegians I met online) then visiting a few sights by jeep.

June 28, 7:23: Dragon Bus Center, Ulaanbaatar

I don’t see any dragons. Buses, yes. OK. We’re getting on a bus for Rashaant, where we’ll be met by a jeep that will transport us to our first ger (yurt.)

June 28, 14:00: Mr. Byambatogoth’s ger

Our first ger! We’re waiting for camels, and then we’re going to ride around a bit.

When we got here, we were served milk tea and yogurt. The yogurt was made by Mrs. Byambatogoth from milk from their goats. Yum! We played a few traditional games with their 7 year old son, Batgere. These games are played with dried sheeps’ ankle bones.. one was a horse race (Batgere won) and one was somewhat like marbles. Then Batgere found one of the Norwegians’ cell phone, and spent the rest of the time enjoying its much more modern games.

June 28, 20:00

We just finished dinner, which is served late in herder families. The camels were eventually found 3 hills over but they (being camels and therefore stubborn) refused to come back, so we rode horses on our afternoon’s trip. This was a short trip out to an Ovoo, which is a log teepee covered in prayer flags. You worship it by walking around it 3 times, tossing in 3 stones, and making a wish.

On the way back from the Oovo, we helped Mrs. Byambatogoth (who was guiding us) herd the family’s goats into a corral near their gers. It turns out herding goats is really easy. I’m sure she could have done it just as quickly without us Then we played volleyball outside, and a 10 year old neighbourhood kid rode up to join us. I also got to try milking a goat.. it turns out I’m not very good at this.

Later in the evening, they kicked the goats out of the corral and brought in all the small sheep. One of them made a run for it, so Batgere chased it down and grabbed it by the wool. It was too heavy for him to lift but since Mongolia is the country of Manly Men, he couldn’t let us help. One of the Norwegians finally found a solution: he told Batgere to carry the sheep behind his neck, which allowed him to take most of its weight without Batgere noticing

June 29, 13:00: Mr. Otgonbayr’s ger

We rode to this ger on the last family’s horses. Our bags went by Super Mustang, which is a horse of the iron variety. I rode on the family’s prized saddle, which our guide said was worth over $1000. It was really uncomfortable! Mongolian saddles are made of wood, which makes them uncomfortable at the best of times. This one had some extra silver ornaments that served as pressure points inside my thighs. FAIL.

When we arrived, the Otgonbayr family was busy shearing their sheep. Apparently the wool is worth 50¢ per kilogram. They offered to let me try shearing myself, but the sheep were covered in ticks so I declined.

I’ve been misled all my life into believing that Manly Men smoke Marlboros. It turns out that that’s just a marketing ploy. Real Manly Men smoke cigarettes they’ve rolled themselves out of newspaper!

June 29, 20:30

After the sheep were sheared, Mr. Otgonbayr put together an oxcart and we trundled slowly to some nearby sand dunes. Sitting on the oxcart was a nice break from the Mongolian saddle and the sand dunes were neat. We’re pretty far from the Gobi Desert.. this is what they call the Minigobi: a patch of desert 280km long but only 500m-1000m wide.

The Otgonbayrs have a bicycle, so I took it out for a ride. Wide open pastures, occasionally dotted by a few gers.. nothing too surprising there

June 30, 13:00: Mr. Idertsogt’s ger

In the morning, we rode to Mr. Idertsogt’s ger on the Otgonbayr’s horses. These were nice horses with great Russian saddles, which are made of leather.. but the ride wasn’t too comfortable for me since I had to carry my backpack, heavy enough to be uncomfortable.

As we were leaving the Otgonbayrs, a truck pulled in (to ask directions) with the parts for a ger on the back. I found out that 2 experienced people can assemble a ger in about 30 minutes. Last time I saw one built was at Burning Man, where it took about 40 people 2 hours and 2 attempts! Herder families move their gers 2-4 times a year, usually less than 10km each time.

June 30, 16:00

We had a good ride in the afternoon. Russian saddle + no backpack + good horse = win. I’m starting to see why someone would choose to ride horses for fun

We rode out to Swan Lake and saw some distant swans, then rode to another part of the Minigobi. Our guide didn’t speak any English but we communicated by drawing pictures on the sand! He also wrestled one of the Norwegians. I’m not sure who won.

June 30, 21:30

The rest of my afternoon was fairly eventful.. we played soccer with a couple of local kids in the family sheep corral, then the kids left to herd in the sheep (bareback.) Before dinner, I went out to climb a nearby rock formation, accompanied by one of the family dogs. In past evenings I’ve been worried about missing dinner (Mongolians refuse to even guess when meals will be ready or events in general will happen) but I realized that it doesn’t matter.. Manly Men are prone to disappearing for hours to herd animals or whatever, and the women are used to that. Dinner will be kept warm until they get back. And it was

July 1

Happy birthday Mom

Last night, I went outside to pee in the middle of the night. As well as "so many stars", there were "so many sheep!" Our ger was surrounded on all 4 sides!

This morning, more shearing.. it was the Idertsogts’ day for it. This time, I helped out. It turns out I’m not very good at the actual shearing, but I’m very good at catching sheep and tying them up to be sheared.

July 1, 19:00: tourist camp near Karakorum

After the sheep were sheared, we went for another horse ride with our excellent guide (described to us as Mr. Idertsogt’s brother.. wouldn’t that make him Mr. Idertsogt as well?) to a local monument. Then we convinced him to go furthur, to the next rock outcropping, and we climbed it.

After lunch, we were picked up by the Ger to Ger van, which drove us to Karakorum, which I believe is Mongolian for "not much left." This was the capital of Mongolia in the 13th century, but there’s essentially nothing from that period remaining except for the temple walls. These now house a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, which was built on the site in 1585. Still, this was nice to see, especially considering it had English signs and explanations, so I got to learn what many of the things I was used to seeing in these temples actually were.

Surrounding Karakorum is a rundown industrial city. We drove out of that and into a "tourist camp", which is like a hotel but with gers instead of rooms. They had hot showers, which was nice (nomadic gers don’t even have running water – Manly Men bathe in the river, or not at all.)

Oh yeah, Manly Men (and women) don’t wear seatbelts. I spent about ½h of our first long van trip digging out the clicker for my seatbelt from under the seat cover, which had been installed without regard for seatbelts. Also about an hour into the drive, the road got really rough and our guide’s unfastened seatbelt was bouncing around and bothering her… so she pulled it over her lap and held it there for about 20 minutes!

After dinner at the tourist camp, the Norwegians did some archery, thus completing the "3 Manly Sports", which are horseracing, wrestling, and archery. They weren’t very good at it.. I didn’t even try, because I already know I’m not good at archery

July 2: Tsinhir Hot Springs

This morning we drove to another tourist camp in the remote Tsinhir Valley. We made it in time for lunch, followed by a soak in the hot springs. These aren’t as nice as a Japanese onsen but are way nicer than the hot springs we stopped at in Tibet, which nobody wanted to use (even our Tibetan guide said they were too dirty!)

And after that… nothing. There’s nothing to do in Tsinhir. I hiked to the source of the hot spring and up a few hills, then it started to rain. I’d already finished my book, but I found a clone of Guitar Hero on my phone.. not that great

July 3: The long trip back to UB

We set out reasonably early from Tsinhir and drove for a couple of hours… then the van broke.

Our guide was able to phone the regional coordinator, who promised to send a car from Rashaant (2-3 hours away) to rescue us. Meanwhile our driver took the engine apart (Manly Men do that) and located the broken piece (a lever that ran between the camshaft and one of the engine valves.) We all walked down to the nearest ger to hang out but after an hour or two, that got boring. To make a very long story short, after almost 7 hours of waiting, a truck showed up with 2 mechanics, the regional coordinator, some food (finally!), and some parts. They spent the next hour fixing the van and we drove out.

By the time we reached Rashaant, it was dark and there were no more buses back to UB, so we had to spend the night there. Rashaant is even less interesting than Tsinhir, and really not a nice place in general. UB is surrounded by suburbs of fenced off yards with gers and rundown bulidings.. but in Rashaant, that’s all there is!

July 4: UB, finally

In the late morning, we took the first bus to UB, arriving mid-afternoon.. only 18 or so hours behind schedule. Luckily I had just enough time to do laundry, shower, and buy groceries before my train to Irkutsk.

So… well… mixed feelings about Ger to Ger. The first part of the adventure was fun, but the last few days were quite boring, with not enough to do at all. Also, I’m really unimpressed with yesterday. Why did the coordinator spend her time finding mechanics and van parts rather than sending another vehicle to pick us up and worrying about the van later? Good thing my train didn’t leave until today…

Train from Krasnoyarsk to Novosibirsk, 3379km to Moscow, 7495km to London

Every overnight train I’ve taken since Beijing has involved another time change. This one is no exception, changing from Krasnoyarsk time (Moscow +4) to Novosibirsk time (Moscow +3.) You get to thinking in terms of offsets from Moscow time on the Trans-Siberian since all long distance trains run on Moscow time. My train left at 18:15 (really 22:15) and gets in at 6:20 (really 9:20.) Confused yet?

Krasnoyarsk is a nice, laid back city.. a good place to spend a day and a half off the train. I saw the sights of the city, including the church on the 10 rouble note and the regional museum. The museum was OK, not great, mostly because general museums aren’t really my thing. This one is supposedly one of the nicer ones so I figured I’d check it out.

Yesterday I hiked to Stolbi National Park. A stolb is a granite rock outcropping jutting up out of the woods for inscrutible geological reasons. I took a bus to the park then hiked around to a few stolbi, climbed one, and ate lunch at the top. Great hiking! People also go rock climbing on the stolbi.. not much of that today though, since it rained heavily last night and was threatening to rain all day.

This is my first platskart (3rd class) trip.. it’s been sold out or nonexistant on every train I’ve taken so far. Hopefully it will be my last though – I did not get a good night’s sleep. Like "hard sleeper" in China, platskart squeezes about 60 berths into one carriage, but it does it in a different way. Rather than stacking the berths 3-high, there are 4 berths on one side of a hallway (perpendicular to the direction of travel) and 2 on the other (lateral.) The problem is that the berths are too short. I had to either dangle my feet off the edge of my berth (where people walking down the hall can bump into them) or sleep curled up (which my legs didn’t appreciate at all after a day of hiking.) It was still much better than the sleeper bus Robin and I took from Hekou to Kunming a couple of months ago, but I’m sticking to kupe (2nd class compartment) from now on. Kupe tickets are easier to get anyway.

So now I’m stopping for the day in Novosibirsk, mostly to see a railway museum (the good kind of museum) then onto Yekaterinberg.

My first overnight stop after Mongolia was Irkutsk, the usual jumping off point for exploring Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world.

I toured around town on the first day. Unlike Naushki, Irkutsk is less than 50% rundown, and there are some beautiful old wood buildings still standing. Also some churches, one of which I went inside to find beautifully painted ceilings, including some paintings of bird-people: the body of a bird with a human head. Very creepy.

On my second day, I did some errands.. getting Russian train tickets is fairly complicated if you don’t speak Russian, since the station staff are really unhelpful. I finally found a way, which is to buy them online via the Russian Railways website. They give you an e-ticket number that can be exchanged for a real ticket at the station, and all you have to say is "bilet elektronika." Visiting the pharmacy was also fun. I don’t think the pharmacist figured out I didn’t understand Russian. I think she just thought I was stupid. She sold me what I wanted though, which is all that really matters, and I’ve since learned how to say "I don’t speak Russian" in Russian.

This is all a bit of a change.. in the rest of Asia, my skin colour made it obvious that I wasn’t a local even before I opened my mouth. Here, it’s more like being in the non-English speaking parts of Europe, where you’re assumed to speak the language until proven otherwise.

Actually, it feels a lot like Europe in other ways: the products you find in supermarkets, the way traffic actually follows laws, and just the general vibe of the place. Makes sense.. Siberians are Europeans who just happen to live in Asia

Anyway, yesterday I set out to finally see Lake Baikal… the slow and scenic way. I took a local train (elektrishka) back along the Trans-Siberian to Sludyanka, then changed to a small diesel-powered train the locals call the "matanya", which means dangling. The reason for this is that it serves a very small branch line dangling off the Trans-Siberian called the Circumbaikal Railway. It used to be part of the Trans-Siberian until the 50s, when a dam raised the level of the Angara River and flooded the Port Baikal to Irkutsk section. The Trans-Siberian now runs along a more direct route to Irkutsk that bypasses Port Baikal, leaving it with only a few "matanya" trains a week.

The matanya left Sludyanka at 13:30 and soon turned onto the Circumbaikal. It was a slow ride, averaging less than 10 km/h, through lots of stone tunnels built at the turn of the century. The views of Baikal were spectacular! It’s big enough that it looks like the edge of the ocean, but calmer and without tides.

6 hours after we left, the matanya poked its way into Port Baikal, the end of the line. I got off the train and discovered that the schedules I’d found online were wrong and there were no more ferries to Listvyanka. I was contemplating spending the night in Port Baikal’s only hotel, but then met a Russian named Sergei who spoke a little English and also wanted to reach Listvyanka (and then get home by road) that night. He found a local who ferried us across the Angara River in a very small inflatable boat for 200 roubles (about $7) each. I then walked for about an hour to Listvyanka proper while he looked for a ride the opposite direction to Irkutsk.

I checked into my hostel and discovered that there was nobody else staying in the dorms… so I had a cheap 5 bed private room I was considering going for a swim in Lake Baikal despite its water being about 5°C (it’s so big that it never really warms up) but it was cold in Listvyanka and cold in my hostel room so I left it for the next morning. Also, I had arrived too late to use the hostel’s banya (sauna).. it takes 2 hours to warm up and it was after 22:00 by the time I asked to use it.

This morning I woke up reasonably early to find it cold and pouring rain. OK, no swimming in Lake Baikal for me. I dipped my toes in (yes, definitely cold) and filled up my water bottle, then caught the bus back to Irkutsk, stopping off in Talsty to see the Museum of Wooden Architecture.

And now I’m on a train again, heading to Krasnoyarsk. Currently only 9122km to London, and I’ve passed the point of no return: even if an emergency calls me home sooner than August 2, it’s faster and cheaper to continue journeying west rather than crossing the Pacific again. Yay round the world trip!

(Entry written July 9, 2010)

On the way back to Beijing, I stopped in Chengdu for 24h to see the pandas…

Giant pandas are endangered, mostly because of habitat destruction, and there are active attempts to breed them in captivity. Chengdu is home to the research centre where most of this takes place.

Now that I’ve seen them, I think the biggest problem with giant pandas is that they’re depressed. They sit around all day doing nothing, it’s hard to interest them in mating, they only eat a food (bamboo) that they can’t properly digest… I think the researchers should add some prozac to their bamboo and see what happens!

…or not.

Panda photos are here.

(I was in Chengdu on June 20. I’m currently in Irkutsk.. it’s not just a place in Risk!)

I’m on train 363 from Ulaanbaatar to Irkutsk, exactly 9800km (by the route I’m following) from London. This is a 36 hour train ride, including several hours at each of the Mongolian and Russian border stations. I got off the train for a few hours at Naushki, the Russian border station, while they spent over 2 hours shunting carriages back and forth for no apparent reason. Not much to see or do there though.

The car is a very new Russian 2nd class (Kupe) unit. Much nicer than Chinese train cars.. for one thing, the beds convert into really comfortable seats with cushioned backs and lumbar support. Still no power for my laptop, but I’ve spent so much time sleeping, chatting, and looking out the window that I’ve barely used it anyway.

So far Russia is scenic but a bit rundown. For example, we just passed a few broken concrete power poles. They’ve replaced the poles, but the old ones are just lying there, and it looks like they’ve been there for years. Naushki had lots of rundown Soviet-era buildings and parks full of litter.

Hey, one hour to Ulaan-Ude, where we stop for 46 minutes… time enough to see the world’s largest Lenin head!

(Written July 5.)

I’ve finished uploading my Tibet photos.. in this batch: more prayer flags, more mountains, more better.

Here are the new photos.

Here’s the entire set sorted by date.

(I was in Tibet from May 28 – June 15, 2010. I’m currently in Ulaanbaatar, leaving for Irkutsk in 2 hours.)

I’m back in Ulaanbaatar briefly.. the first part of the tour was great, the second part was OK, but the trip home involved an unplanned 8h stop in the middle of nowhere and an overnight in Rashaant.

My train is in a few hours and I have some errands to do, but I’ll post more if I have the chance. If not… talk to you when I get to Irkutsk!

Also: happy birthday to Mom, whose birthday happened while I was away!

I’ve uploaded most of my tibet photos.. they’re here.

Yes, the sky really is that blue at altitude

I’m heading off to travel with nomads until July 3… see you when I get back!