Mongolia

We arrived in Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia, feeling a little tired after the 36 hour train trip from Beijing. Ulaan Baatar isn't the most attractive city. While it has plenty of facilities like supermarkets and restaurants it feels a little down at heel, with lots of shabby concrete buildings and broken pavements. After dark it doesn't feel entirely safe either...

The day after arriving we signed up with three other tourists for a four day trip in a Russian jeep to the countryside around Ulaan Baatar. On the first day we went to the supermarket at the State Department Store in the centre of town to stock up on food. Wary of what Mongolian country side fare might taste like to fussy foreigners like ourselves, we packed our trolley full of food.

Mongolia is not a country of urban sprawl. Once we passed the outskirts of Ulaan Baatar the Mongolian steppe started. There was an almost infinite expanse of grassland fringed by hills, with a clear blue sky stretching out to the horizon. The only signs of human activity were the occasional ger, which is a tent like home used by nomads, and passing horse riders herding cows.

It was a very peaceful feeling to be in the middle of a beautiful and empty landscape. The only distraction were the very bumpy dirt roads. After a couple of hours driving we arrived at the Gorkhi-Terelji national park, where rocky hills rose up out of the steppe. Our destination was a tourist ger camp, which had very comfortable gers with clean sheets and a shower block.

After our guide mysteriously disappeared for three hours, allegedly he was looking for camels for us to ride, we went on a walk up the nearby hills with the son of the ger owner and his Korean girlfriend. The views were great and the air felt incredibly fresh.

The next morning we went on a horse ride around the nearby village and saw a new born yak as well as the women going about their daily task of milking the horses (yes I did say the horses). We were invited into a ger to try a bowl of fermented mares milk. I don't think that I have ever seen a less appealing beverage. It was mainly white but with big globules of yellow fat floating in it. I tried a sip and it didn't taste totally unpleasant, a bit like sour yogurt. Nonetheless I wasn't tempted to have any more!

That afternoon we went to the Manzushir Khiid monastery which was a bit disappointing as it turned out to have mainly been destroyed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Our guide told us that the monastery had been destroyed by angry locals because the Buddist monks used to sacrifice young virgins to the gods. I wonder if that's what they used to teach in school history lessons in Mongolia...

Our next stop was the Khustain National Park where we spent two nights. This area has been set aside for the conservation of the wild horse, which is actually a different species from the domesticated horse. We were lucky enough to be able to get quite close to a group of wild horses, which looked a little like zebras without the stripes.

Again the countryside was very empty and beautiful. On our second night we went to stay as guests in a family ger. Every inch of the ger was used, with meat hanging from the ceiling to dry and cheese being prepared on the roof. The family owned a second ger, which was vacated for the five of us to sleep in. It had very pretty painted wooden ger furniture and a lined floor.

We thought we were living like the locals, having to go outside on to the steppe to go to the toilet. However later in our time in Mongolia we realised that we had actually been staying with very properous nomads, who had two lovely gers, their own Russian jeep and a large herd of yaks.

It was nice to hang out with the family who were very friendly and kept offering us unappealing looking Mongolian snacks. In addition to the yaks they also had a cute kitten, lots of dogs, a puppy and a baby goat that fell asleep under our van.

Back in Ulaan Baatar the Naadam festival was getting started. Naadam is a two day celebration in which Mongolians compete in the 'manly' sports of wrestling, archery and horse racing. This year the festival lasted three days in order to celebrate the 800th anniversary of Chinggis Khan founding the Great Mongolian State.

We had tickets in the stadium for the opening ceremony which was very impressive. It was the first time that I had heard Mongolian music. The melodies are all in minor keys and are haunting in a way that seems entirely in keeping with the Mongolian landscape.

A whole traditional Mongolian orchestra, dressed in traditional Mongolian coats and hats was present for the opening ceremony. The ceremony also included a lot of excellent traditional dancing. The best bit though was when horse riders dressed as soldiers of Chinggis Khan appeared and galloped around the stadium in armor. Chinggis himself also appeared on a great white stallion and proceeded to lead a troupe doing acrobatics on horse back!

For us the opening ceremony was definately the best bit of Naadam. It was fun to watch the archers but the wrestling was a little difficult to see as the stadium was so big. Before long we were planning another trip to the country side, this time to go further west for six days.

One of the problems with travelling in Mongolia is that the lack of public transport and poor roads mean that you really need your own 4x4 with a driver to get around. As the drivers don't speak any English, you also need a translator to communicate with them. We weren't keen on joining an organised tour and so close to Naadam none of the tour agencies were able to find us a driver and translator.

In the end we left with a young student that we had met on the street as a translator. He spoke excellent English but had very little experience. He had found us a driver who had a good jeep but who was also young and inexperienced and seemed a little grumpy from the outset. We also agreed that our translator could bring his wife with him!

On the first day we drove to Karakorum, a town to the west of Ulaan Baatar. We arrived at dusk at the Erdene Zuu Khiid monastery. Although most of the monastery buildings were destroyed in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the walls with their 108 stupas and several of the temples had been preserved. It was certainly a very atmospheric place. It even had a Buddist ger, complete with robed monks chanting prayers.

That evening we found a quiet spot to camp by the river and settled down for the night. However, just after dark the group of Mongolian campers next to us started to blast music really loudly from a sound system. Our translator went over to chat to them and was told that they worked for the government and that no they wouldn't turn their music down.

We ended up having to unpeg our tent and walk with it in the dark as our jeep drove forwards to provide light. Unfortunately the light attracted hundreds of insects and I soon had moths and flies in my face and beetles crawling over my pyjamas. Eventually we pitched around 100m away from the noisy campers. With the aid of ear plugs we were finally able to go to sleep, only to be woken up by an exceptionally loud blast of hardcore gansta rap music at 7:00am. Not exactly the tranquil Mongolian camping experience that I had been imagining!

The next day it turned out that a countryside Naadam was taking place in Karakorum so we went along to take a look. In some ways it was a lot more interesting than the Naadam in Ulaan Baatar. Hundreds of herders had come into town on horse back, many of them dressed in traditional Mongolian outfits. They sat on their horses outside the small stadium, where they got a good view of the opening ceremony and the wrestling.

In Ulaan Baatar the horse racing takes place outside town but in Karakorum the finsh line was right next to the stadium. The horses ran for 25km from the starting point and we waited with a large crowd to watch them come galloping in. In Mongolia the jockeys are small children, some as young as five. They often ride bare back without stirrups to further reduce the weight on the horse. Despite this some of the horses still collapse and die during the race. Oh and none of the children wear hard hats either!

Later that day we drove to the waterfall of Orkhon Khurkhree along a bumpy dirt track, where we spent the night. The waterfall itself is Mongolia's largest and is hidden in a pretty wooded canyon. It rained for most of the night and the next day when we set off for the Tovkhon Khiid monastery the roads were really muddy.

Tovkhon Khiid was rebuilt reccently but it has a very beautiful setting high amongst forested hills. It soon became apparent that our jeep was not going to make it up the muddy slope, so we got out and walked up the hill to the monastery.

It was getting quite late as we left the monastery, mainly because our guide had disappeared on a long walk up the mountain with his wife. The plan was to drive to Tseterleg, the provincial capital, about 100km away where we would check into a hotel and have a shower. Unfortunately as we drove on it started to rain again and the roads became more and more muddy. In the end perhaps inevitably, our jeep got stuck in the mud.

Fortunately the place where we were stuck was right next to a mound of small stones. The driver started jacking the wheels up to place stones underneath and Steve and I built a small road of stones in front of the jeep. In the end it took 3 hours to free the jeep, by which time we were all soaking wet and covered in mud!

After navigating our way through some more horrendous road we came to a stop at 10:30pm just before dark. There was a Russian jeep stuck on the muddy hillside. The tourists on board had some how managed to light a fire in the rain and were standing around having a chat while they waited for a tractor to arrive and pull out their jeep.

A local nomad came by on horse back and mentioned that there were three gers where we could stay just over the hill. It was pretty obvious that the jeep wouldn't be going any further that night so we loaded ourselves up with cooking equipment to make a hot meal and we set off walking in the dark.

Funnily enough there aren't any street lights in the Mongolian wilderness. Our torches lit up the ground in front of us but we couldn't see the gers. Eventually we came to a stream where the sound of dogs barking identified the location of the gers. I was wet, cold and hungry and the thought of approaching a ger in the dark surrounded by unfriendly dogs almost sent me hysterical.

It was at this point that our translator proved invaluable as he offered to jump over the stream and move forwards shouting 'hold the dogs' in Mongolian. Fortunately a lady came out, the dogs stopped barking and our translator shouted that we should come up to the gers. The first ger that we went to already had six children, two adults and a calf living in it. They had already gone to bed and looked more than a little surprised to see two tourists turn up.

Fortunately the ger next door had a little more space and they were able to offer us some accommodation. This was not however the sort of family ger that we had stayed in on our last trip. The air was filled with smoke and the sour smell of fermenting mares milk, dung was burning on the stove and bones were hanging out to dry. There was also an exceptionally cute new born goat sheltering from the rain. The fact that the new born goat was suffering from diarrhoea, did however detract slightly from its charm!

At this point I realised that I was desperate to go to the toilet. An old man accompanied me outside 'to hold the dogs'. After a brief struggle with my pride I did in fact go to the toilet in front of the old man, it was very dark and he was busy smoking a cigarette in any case! The dog stood half a meter away looking at me curiously but I guess he realised I must be harmless as I was accompanied by his owner.

Dinner was clearly not going to be an option as people were already sleeping in the ger so we ate some cheese and crackers and went to bed. I didn't get a very good nights sleep. The dogs kept barking and the cows mooing. Even the new born goat kept bleating to its mother outside which bleated back.

In the morning the whole situation seemed highly amusing. All the kids came into the ger to get a good look at us getting up. Our hosts did seem genuinely entertained by the fact that some tourists had come to stay, though obviously we paid them for their trouble. Our driver had also made it up the hill during the night and so shortly after getting up we all set off for Tsetserleg.

The last leg of our journey to Tsetserleg was happily uneventful. We arrived in town and checked into a hotel, ready for a shower at last. Unfortunately at this point we had an argument with our driver. There had been some damage to the jeep in the mud the day before which he wanted us to pay for. We on the other hand had thought that he would be responsible for any repairs to the vehicle. In retrospect we really should have agreed this in writing and made sure that the driver had proper insurance before leaving Ulaan Baatar. Fortunately in this particular case the damage was quite minor but if he had crashed the jeep we could have been facing a demand for thousands of dollars...

Pretty quickly tempers became frayed and the driver announced that he just wanted to be paid up to that point and leave us in Tsetserleg rather than complete the trip. The translator's wife pointed out that we were probably only arguing about $15, but sensing that our relationship with the driver which hadn't been very good from the start had pretty much broken down we decided to part company.

There didn't seem a lot of sense in staying in Tsetserleg if we were unable to continue to the nearby lake, Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur, that we had been planning to visit, so we went to the market place to arrange a lift back to Ulaan Baatar. Fortunately we met a nice farmer with a jeep and two little boys who was quite happy to earn some extra dollars driving us back to Ulaan Baatar. Very unusually, he had been learning English during the winter and had learned to speak it quite well. The boys were very well behaved and sang along beautifully to the Mongolian music playing on the tape recorder. Despite the things that had not gone to plan we had really enjoyed our second trip into the countryside.

We have now spent a couple of days in Ulaan Baatar relaxing and making arrangements for the next stage of our trip. Tomorrow we get the train to Russia.

China

We arrived in Shanghai from Tokyo by a rather circuitous route via Hong Kong and Beijing. Shanghai is mainland China's most modern city. That means lots of shopping malls selling designer clothes, restaurants where you can buy very expensive coffee and high rise buildings.

After a brief detour to buy replacements for some of our more horrific looking clothes we went to the Bund. This is Shanghai's riverside walkway flanked by colonial period buildings. What none of the guide books mention is that there is a huge noisy motorway between the riverside walkway and the colonial buildings. In any case, the stifling heat and pollution made it no fun to walk anywhere so we headed across the river to Pudong.

Jinmao tower is the tallest of Pudong's skyscrapers, in fact it is the tallest building in China, and looks like a very long modern pagoda. Extremely fast lifts took us up to a viewing platform on the 88th floor where we got a great view out across a hazy Shanghai. There was also an amazing if vertigo inducing view down through the atrium to the bar in the Grand Hyatt hotel on the 54th floor. We were soon looking at the view from the other direction, as we sipped long island iced teas!

From Shanghai we flew to Xian where we met up with two friends from London, Lin and Andy. Although Xian was the ancient capital of China not much remains of the old town within the city walls. The real attraction are the Terracotta warriors just outside of Xian. These are thousands of life size statues of soldiers and horses who were buried underground to guard the tomb of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang.

At the site we looked around different pits filled with hundreds of soldiers. Some were unbroken, some had been restored and some were lying in pieces in the pits, fragments of heads and hands sticking up at funny angles. The soldiers were undeniably interesting but the site itself could have been a bit better presented. Each soldier was for example originally buried with a realistic life size weapon but not a single one was shown, not even in the adjacent museum. Apparently they are all in storage somewhere!

In Xian itself, an unexpectedly beautiful place was the Great Mosque. To get to it we walked down a narrow alley way, where strange odds and ends like Mao's little red book and Mao watches with waving arms were on sale. The mosque itself was in a Chinese style with gardens but with Arabic inscriptions, a very calm place to relax away from the heat and noise of Xian's streets.

Our 'hard' seat train tickets from Xian to Pingyao seemed incredibly cheap for a 12 hour train journey. As we tried to push and shove our way on to the train we worked out why. The carriage was heaving and our reserved seats were already filled with people who didn't look like they were particularly interested in getting up to make way for us. Fortunately the miniscule but assertive train guard, shouted a lot and shoved people until our seats were vacated. She then organized the rearrangement of everyone's luggage until places were found to squeeze our ruck sacks in. I put mine beneath our seat but had to move it when Steve noticed that some one had moved in to sleep next to it.

We finally arrived in Pingyao late at night absolutely exhausted and covered in the dirt that had flown in through the train window. Driving through the streets to our hotel though was a magical experience. Pingyao was built during the Ming dynasty (1368 - 1643 AD) and I don't think that it has changed a lot since. There were no lights in the streets and as we drove through the old city walls we could just make out the old buildings and gates in the narrow alleyways. Our hotel was itself very beautiful and we had to walk through a series of courtyards to get to our room.

Pingyao was a different sort of China to the one that we had seen in Shanghai and Xian. It was nice just to wander the streets and watch people playing cards and hanging out. We also went for a walk right round the still intact city walls. There were many small museums and temples in Pingyao. For us the highlight was the Pingyao County Government Office Building. More like a small town than a building there were law courts, a prison, accommodation for officials, gardens and exhibitions of torture instruments as well as modern photography.

I should say at this point that we were spending quite a lot of time eating. I have always thought that I didn't like Chinese food because most of stuff I have had in England has been heavily laden with mono sodium glutamate and basically not very nice. Instead in China we were ordering lots of very tasty different tofu and vegetable dishes as well as different types of dumplings to dip in vinegar, all for next to nothing!

We also found people in China extremely friendly. Initially China was a bit of a shock after Japan, as people don't spend any time bowing and saying thank you. Rather than forming neat lines as they queue they are more likely to elbow you out of the way as they push in front of you! That said in some ways it was a bit of a relief as we didn't have to put on too many airs and graces ourselves.

A lot of Chinese people seemed very curious about us and wanted to chat even if their only English was 'England, Beckham good'. We found ourselves helping to correct English essays and admiring people's babies. Andy's feet, which are a size 16, caused quite a stir whenever they were noticed.

Children are made a big fuss over in China. Most kids, male or female, look extremely well looked after and are constantly being hugged or kissed by somebody. One thing that I found a little difficult to get used to however was that babies don't wear nappies. Instead they have holes cut in their trousers. I couldn't work out how this worked. I mean how do the parents know when the baby needs to go to the toilet? We watched one baby score a direct hit on his mum's lap, proving that whatever the system it doesn't always work!

Although China is not a democracy, as visitors the only tangible evidence we saw of this were the restrictions on internet use, which we nicknamed the Great Firewall of China. The choice of sites to be blocked seemed a little odd. We couldn't access this blog or any BBC sites including BBC Sport but we could get through to the Guardian web site. This left us reading relentlessly negative coverage of England's performance in the world cup!

After Pingyao we caught the train up to Beijing, fortunately we had a decent bunk each this time! I visited Beijing with my mum and brother as a child in 1987 so I was quite interested to see how much I could remember and how much Beijing had changed. At that time you had to come on an organized tour so in addition to all the usual tourist sites we went to visit a silk factory and a kindergarten. I was ten years old and everywhere I went people wanted to take my photo and touch my hair, which was blond when I was a kid. I thought that China was great!

The most obvious difference I noticed was that where once the streets of Beijing were crowded with bicycles they are now crowded with cars. Lots of the traditional areas or Hutongs have also been demolished since the 1980s to make way for high rise buildings and the shopping malls are definitely a new arrival!

One of Steve's friends Chris, who also works at the same architecture practice, was in Beijing with an Engineer called Tim, as they had been working on a bridge project together in Xian. We met up at our hotel and after a brief stop in Tiananmen Square we took a taxi to look at the construction site where they are building the Olympic Stadium. Personally I thought that it would be better to wait and come back and see it when it was finished, but the others had a great time!

There are some amazing sites to see in Beijing. The most impressive for me was the Forbidden City. This is where the Emperor of China used to live. It's called the Forbidden City because ordinary people did not use to be allowed in and because it really is the size of a city. We walked round a whole series of courtyards and gardens and temples and throne rooms as well as the living accommodation of the Emperor. His principle wives all used to live quite close to one another, which must have made for a difficult atmosphere. Some of the buildings were closed for restoration, but there was still so much to see that we couldn't walk round it all in four hours.

After visiting the Forbidden City we went to a bar by Houhai Lake to watch England go out of the World Cup to Portugal. Lin and Andy had been completely oblivious that the World Cup was even happening until we got them interested just in time to watch England lose on penalties as usual!

We spent the next day visiting the Summer Palace which is a enormous complex of gardens and palaces with a huge lake in the middle where the Emperor used to spend the summer.

On our last day in Beijing we took a bus to see the Great wall of China. It was exactly as I remember it except a lot steeper! Unfortunately the weather was not that clear but we still got the idea that the wall went on for a long way. Whoever got the idea of building a wall across the mountains of Northern China must have been completely mad. Not only must the construction work have been nearly impossible to carry out but as it is nearly vertical in places it was hardly ideal for rushing troops along.

After a final evening watching acrobats do impossible looking things in a Beijing theatre it was time to say goodbye to Andy and Lin and move on to Mongolia. We passed the Great Wall and the mountains in the train and then went through the desert in Inner Mongolia before arriving at the Mongolian border after 13 hours. The trains have different gauges in Mongolia so we spent an hour in a shed having our train lifted up and the bogie (wheel assembly) changed before finally crossing the border.