Natalie and Steves Trip

The Everest Region

2006-09-29T02:44:00.000-07:00

At 8848m Everest is the highest mountain in the world. It might not be one of the world's most dramatic looking mountains but what it lacks for in looks it makes up for in sheer height. Ever since Hillary and Tenzing first climbed the mountain in 1953, hundreds of thousands of people have come to the Everest region to take a look at Everest and the surrounding Himalayan peaks.

The plan for our trek was to fly to Lukla, go up the Gokyo valley and then cross over the Cho La pass into the Khumbu valley where we would walk up as far as Everest Base Camp. To get this into perspective Everest Base Camp, which is where the mountaineering expeditions to climb Everest start from, is itself at a height of 5364m. In comparison Western Europe's highest mountain Mont Blanc stands at a relatively tiddly 4808m.

Of course height isn't everything. To get up Mont Blanc you have to climb on ice and rock. Just about anybody can stroll into Everest Base Camp given enough acclimatization time. In fact as our guide and porter Bhola mentioned he had once taken a 78 year old Canadian man up there. Clearly it was going to be dead easy!

The first challenge however was actually getting to the mountains. Theoretically September should be a fantastic time for walking in the Himalayas. The monsoon has drawn to a close while the tourist hordes have yet to arrive. Unfortunately this year the monsoon came very late to Nepal and on 12 September, the date that we were due to fly from Kathmandu to Lukla, it was still pouring down with rain.

Because the tiny planes that fly to Lukla are not equipped with much in the way of instrumentation the pilots have to be able to see where they are going in order to take off. We joined a group of unhappy tourists waiting in Kathmandu airport. As well as small groups like ourselves there were several large organized camping groups, complete with an extraordinary number of eggs in cardboard cartons.

After waiting for six hours our flight was cancelled and we went back to our hotel in Kathmandu. Determined not to squander our precious remaining time sitting at Kathmandu airport we decided to try once more the following day. If the flight didn't leave we would get a bus to Besisahar and walk the Annapurna circuit instead.

The next day didn't look very promising either. It wasn't actually raining but there was lots of cloud in the sky. We had settled down to eat some overpriced biscuits from the airport shop for breakfast when suddenly we heard our flight to Lukla being called. Within literally five minutes the plane was in the sky. I wasn't sure whether to be happy that we were on our way to the Everest region or terrified that we were now in a small plane in questionable weather conditions.

It turned out however that Lukla airstrip was free of cloud and the plane landed safely. As we got off we could hear sounds of clapping and cheering coming from crowds around the airport. Our plane was the first to land in six days! Just behind us another plane landed. Within a few minutes they were both up in the air heading back to Kathmandu with a full contingent of passengers.

"Wow", said a Dutch guy from our plane who worked in luggage handling at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. "We think we are doing well if we can get the planes turned around in an hour".

Outside the airport were lots of young Nepali men hoping to get hired as porters. There were also plenty of wild haired and slightly feral looking western trekkers hoping to be able to get back home. As we walked up the hill, cloud swiftly crept up the valley and had soon completely covered Lukla airstrip preventing any more flights from landing.

Lukla is at a relatively modest 2840m. The whole first part of our trek however had been planned around our need to acclimatize to the increasing altitude we would experience. This meant lots of short and easy days to start off with, which didn't sound like such a bad idea.

Our first night's stop was Phakding, a village a few hours walk from Lukla. The countryside in the Everest region looked very prosperous. Actually with the cozy looking stone cottages, neat stone walls and tidy vegetable patches we felt more like we were walking through the Cotswolds than the Himalayas.

The next day as we followed the tree lined river valley up towards Namche Bazar, the most important town in the region, the villages became further spread out. We had to sign in at the Sagarmatha National Park Entrance and then walked up a hill until reaching a prayer flag clad suspension bridge high above the river. From here it was a long winding climb up to Namche Bazar at 3440m.

If we were feeling sorry for ourselves, then the sight of the porters walking up the hill to Namche put things into perspective. There are no roads in the Everest area, in fact the road ends at Jiri which is another seven days walk out from Lukla. As a consequence most goods, from silly things like beer and Sprite for trekkers to essential items like flour have to be carried in by porters.

The porters, often wearing flip flops as opposed to proper walking shoes, carry a basket on their backs which is attached by a strap to their foreheads. These baskets are usually piled up so high with goods that they end up towering up in the air above the porter. Each porter has a stout walking stick. At rest stops they don't take their baskets off but simply place the stick underneath transferring the load to the ground.

At this point Steve, whether out of curiosity, machismo or masochism I am not quite sure decided he wanted to try to carry the bag of our guide and porter Bhola. I should say at this point that whilst Bhola was carrying our bag, it did only contain the bare essentials for our trip as opposed to six crates of San Miguel and a drum of paraffin and so was not really to be compared to the loads of the other porters. Even so, once the things that Bhola needed for himself were added on it was a pretty heavy bag and Steve lasted all of about fifteen minutes carrying it up the hill.

We were pleased to eventually make it up to the Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar. The Sherpas, now world famous for their role in mountaineering, started immigrating over the mountains from Tibet around six hundred years ago and settled as farmers and herders in the Everest region. The Sherpa language is closely related to Tibetan. In fact in Tibetan, Sharpa means 'Eastern People'.

Many Sherpas have made relatively large amounts of money working for expeditions and running lodges for trekkers and mountaineers. Perhaps due to this money, Namche itself felt like a boom town. Construction seemed to be happening everywhere. In a labor intensive process, largely carried out by workers from other parts of Nepal, heavy stone blocks were being taken from the quarry by porters and then painstakingly hand chipped into the right shape. The resulting flawless stone work looked like something that the ancient Incas would have been happy to put their names to!

After staying the night in Namche we needed time to acclimatize to the new altitude. The next night's stop was therefore planned for the village of Khumjung a short walk above Namche at 3780m. When we woke up in the morning a huge range of mountains suddenly appeared in the mist above Namche but then swiftly disappeared again while we were having breakfast.

Walking up the hill to Khumjung felt pretty tiring at this altitude. Sir Edmund Hillary (the first man to climb Everest along with Tenzing Norgay) helped to set up a high school near Khumjung and we met quite a few students on their way back down to Namche after taking an exam. Unsurprisingly they all seemed to be in pretty good shape. The epidemic of childhood obesity in the UK would probably be solved overnight if British kids had to walk 6km a day to school up and down a massive hill!

During the afternoon as we were relaxing in our lodge in Khumjung the beautiful twin peaked mountain Ama Dablam made a brief appearance through the cloud.

The plan for the following day was to walk up to Dole in the Gokyo valley. A mixture of sunshine and clouds allowed us to spot a few more mountains and it seemed as though the weather might be taking a turn for the better. Crossing a high point at 4000m Steve developed quite a bad headache (a common sign of altitude problems) so we decided to descend and spend the night at Phortse Tenga (3675m).

The first lodge we experienced at Phortse Tenga was on the more basic side of things. Noting the authentically medieval kitchen we decided to order boiled potatoes on the basis that they couldn't go wrong. We were then a little surprised to be served a big plate of potatoes still covered in both their skins and lots of mud. After removing the skins with Steve's penknife however they tasted pretty good. We then descended a little further towards the river where we found quite a nice lodge to spend the night.

After a short walk up to Dole (4050m) the next day we settled in for the afternoon. Going further would have meant going higher and we felt that it would be more sensible to take the increase in altitude nice and slowly. The scenery was starting to change in Dole. The trees were getting smaller with less agricultural land and yaks were grazing on the hillside.

To pass the time I started to read a book by Jon Krakauer called Into Thin Air. Within minutes I was totally mesmerised. It is the story, written by somebody who was there, of the disastrous 1996 climbing season on Everest in which more people died attempting to climb the mountain than in any other single year. The human story itself is so engaging that I think that even people with zero interest in climbing or Everest would find this book pretty difficult to put down.

I later discovered that Into Thin Air is actually quite a controversial book, mainly because Krakauer criticizes the behavior of some of the other people on the mountain particularly the Russian guide Anatoli Boukreev. As Boukreev risked his life to rescue three people from the middle of a storm near the top of Everest while Krakauer lay safely tucked up in his sleeping bag doing nothing, a lot of people think that Krakauer's comments are hypocritical to say the least! While I am inclined to agree with this point of view I think the book itself remains an absolutely gripping read.

Recovered from my late night mountain disaster reading session, the next day we walked on to a small place called Machermo (4410m). With the sun out, the logical next step was for everybody to start washing their clothes. The lodge owner provided us with plastic bowls and soon myself, three French trekkers who had been at the lodge in Dole, workers from the Machermo lodge and several guides and porters were all scrubbing away at an assortment of socks and shirts and table cloths. Perhaps inevitably as soon as the washing was hanging up, the sky darkened and it started to pour down with rain.

Fortunately the lodge owner decided to put the stove on. Although the stove was powered by Yak dung the chimney meant that it didn't smell at all. Soon due to an ingenious arrangement of chairs and trekking poles around the fire everyone's laundry was in a position to get dry.

The French trekkers had, in a very civilized way, brought genuine French whiskey and sausage up to the mountains with them. Combined with a large packet of Pringles they got a very nice pre dinner party going which they kindly let us join in. Feeling that we had to reciprocate their hospitality we bought a not so nice bottle of Everest whiskey to share around and went to bed a little tipsy.

I should say at this point that we had gained the company of a trekking dog. These are dogs that follow trekkers around the main routes begging for food. Not your usual scabby looking mongrels, I think that they are probably Tibetan Mastiffs. In any case they have beautiful thick brown and honey colored coats, presumably a prerequisite for survival in the Himalayan winters.

The dog that was following us was despite his beautiful coat painfully underweight and pathetic looking. Mindful of the notices at the entrance to the national park that warn tourists not to feed the dogs as they pose a hazard to wildlife, we resisted giving the dog any food for quite a long time. Finally however, Bhola cracked and sealed our fate by giving the dog some of my left over vegetable fried rice in Machermo.

The next stop was Gokyo (4800m). To get there we walked through an increasing barren and rocky landscape past a couple of glacial lakes. Gokyo itself was situated by the third glacial lake. There are two main reasons for visiting Gokyo, to climb the nearby Gokyo Ri view point (5340m) and to walk up to the fifth lake (5000m). From both these places there are fine views of Everest and many other Himalayan peaks.

The next day dawned bright and clear so we decided to walk as far as fifth lake. Unfortunately as we walked the sky started to cloud over and by the time we reached the fifth lake the clouds had obscured the top of Everest. We did however get some really good views of Cho Oyu (8201m) which appeared directly in front of us. It seemed surprisingly small looking for the world's sixth highest mountain!

The plan had been to climb Gokyo Ri the following day. However the weather had taken a turn for the worse during the night and when we woke at dawn the visibility was very poor. We decided that there would be no point in trying to climb Gokyo Ri and so had a bit of a lie in before walking across to Tangnag.

The path to Tangnag lay over the Ngozumpa glacier. The glacier was however completely covered by debris and there was no sign of the ice beneath. Interestingly enough, the dog didn't follow us to Tangnag. Presumably it knew we were on our way to the Cho La pass!

At Tangnag we settled in to a cozy lodge for the night. Up in the mountains many of the lodges are owned by Sherpas who have climbed Everest and used the money to open a lodge. Each time that they summit Everest, they are provided with a certificate by the Nepali government. These certificates are usually hanging proudly on the walls of the lodge dining room along with photographs of themselves astride the summit itself.

The next day we planned to cross the 5420m Cho La pass. We set out at six in the morning. The weather was cloudy but at least it wasn't raining or snowing. We climbed on a steep but not particularly difficult path as far as 5150m, being overtaken along the way by two Spaniards and then one Spaniard and an Australian woman.

After descending a couple of hundred meters the path started to rise again and suddenly became much more difficult. It had started to snow and we were climbing over lots of slippery and rocky boulders. I thought that this was bad enough until we started up a very steep slope of snow. The snow was quite deep and we kept falling over. The altitude also meant that we were feeling very tired. Fortunately we could follow the footsteps of the people that had gone in front of us.

I think that at this point we would have just turned around and gone back down had it only been the two of us. I didn't really feel like it was the type of walk that we were equipped for or should have been doing. However Bhola insisted that we should keep going and we eventually made it to the top of the pass.

Once up on the top of the pass sitting amid the fluttering prayer flags I felt absolutely hysterical. Steve was really tired and it was snowing heavily. The visibility was also very poor, approaching a total white out in fact. Not only could we no longer see the path back down the way that we had come, but in front of us there was a lake stretching out onto a glacier where it looked as though the path should have gone. Fortunately we could still make out the footprints of the people who had come before us leading up to the right of the summit and then down on to the glacier.

As we walked on to the glacier we had to jump over a crevasse, which could have been dangerous had the visibility been any worse. The snow on the glacier was knee high and I kept slipping over and having to get back up again as I followed the footprints down the slope.

Steve and Bhola were now apparently feeling happy and relaxed and stopped for a bit of a photography session in the snow. My mind was filled with the scenes from Into Thin Air where the ill fated Japanese climber Yasuko Namba and others waste the precious minutes before the storm breaks taking pictures on the summit of Everest.

"What are you doing", I screamed at them. "Can't you see that the weather is getting really bad? We have to go down now!"

On Everest they call the area above 8000m "The Death Zone" because the extreme altitude makes it difficult for people to survive. As far as I was concerned with our low level of experience and acclimatization, any mountain area above 5000m could potentially constitute our own personal death zone!

After abut half an hour we got off the glacier and started climbing down the rocky slope at the other side. At this point I started to feel much much calmer. We could see the Australian woman and Spaniard resting at the bottom of the slope. It turned out that they hadn't been so far in front of us after all. I figured it was the smoking Spaniard rather than the ultra fit Australian who had kept them down to our pace!

At the bottom of the rocks we stopped for a Mars bar and Chapati. We were now a couple of hundred meters below the pass and the falling snow had turned to sleet. Even better there was now a proper path leading down the hill, one that you could walk down normally.

After another couple of hours of walking in the rain we arrived at Dzonglha. The lodge here was an utterly miserable little place. Damp and dirty it looked no fun to stay in at all but we just couldn't face walking another three hours on to Lobuche. They did however put a fire on in the dining room and we managed to get dried out and warmed up.

Just before dark I was cleaning my teeth outside in the rain when a bedraggled looking young Chinese man staggered towards the lodge.

"Is this Dzonglha?", he asked.

"Mmmmmm", I said with the toothbrush still in my mouth and pointed him towards the lodge door.

It turned out that he had crossed the Cho La pass alone two hours after us. He seemed quite shaken by the experience, but fortunately had still been able to make out our foot prints in the snow and so avoided getting lost.

The area around Dzonglha is supposed to be incredibly beautiful. However when we woke up the following morning the weather had if anything taken a turn for the worse. Nuptse, Lhotse and Cottontail or whatever the surrounding mountains were supposed to be called, were stubbornly hidden behind blankets of black cloud.

After a breakfast of Snickers bars (the rotten eggs and reheated potatoes served up by the lodge proving to be inedible) we set off to Lobuche (4940m). After the previous day, walking to Lobuche felt like going for stroll around Battersea park. We quickly grabbed some lunch in Lobuche which seemed a bit of a depressing place and then started the walk up to Gorak Shep (5170m).

It was snowing steadily on the way to Gorak Shep. Just before the climb up on to the moraine of the Khangri glacier we ran into the Dutch guy who had been on our flight from Kathmandu, coming down the hill.

"Don't worry about the weather", he said. "I spoke to the climbers at Base Camp this morning. Apparently its going to clear up first thing tomorrow and they are already making plans to start ascending the mountain."

After a seemingly endless trudge up and down the moraine, the couple of lodges that made up Gorak Shep finally came into sight. Although very cold the lodge we stayed in was the height of civilized comfort in comparison to the previous night's accommodation at Dzonglha!

Gorak Shep is the highest place in the Everest region where you can stay if you aren't camping. You can walk up to Kala Pattar (5600m) for an excellent view of Everest and the surrounding peaks and also go to Everest Base Camp (5364m). Strangely from Everest Base Camp you can't actually see Everest! However you can see the Khumbu icefall, where the expeditions start their climb and you also get to say that you have been there.

Our plan if it was still snowing in the morning was to walk to Everest Base Camp. Unfortunately Steve had a headache and so it didn't make sense for him to go any higher. Bhola offered to take me by myself but I thought that there wasn't any point as we would all be going together the next day.

As wet and exhausted trekkers from a large organised group gradually straggled in from Everest Base Camp to our lodge in the late afternoon I felt that it had been a pretty intelligent day to pick as a rest day! We set our alarm for dawn the following day hoping that the weather would have cleared and we would be able to go to Kala Pattar. If it hadn't we would just head to Everest Base Camp instead.

Unfortunately, it continued to snow heavily all night and by the morning Gorak Shep was covered in knee deep snow. Depressingly even going to Everest Base Camp was now out of the question as crevasses in the glacier would have been hidden by the snow and the footprints of the previous day's group showing a safe route through would have been covered up.

The question was whether to wait another day hoping that the weather would improve or to start to go back down. The large organised group was about to go to Lobuche so if we left just after them we could follow their tracks. Otherwise if it continued to snow for another day we might just end up stranded in Gorak Shep!

In the end we decided reluctantly to go down leaving only two slightly eccentric looking bearded trekkers in the lodge, playing a game of chess. An English guy had told us that the mountaineers at Base Camp the day before had had a weather forecast predicting that the snow would stop falling at 10am that day. However thinking about the similar and totally wrong prediction that they had made to the Dutch guy two days previously I was pretty skeptical.

The landscape between Gorak Shep to Lobuche had been completely transformed. In fact covered in a thick layer of snow it was almost unrecognizable. Unlike our experience on the Cho La pass however I wasn't in the slightest bit worried. There was a clear and fairly busy path with people in front of us and behind us and we were heading down hill. In fact, although I wasn't tempted to have a snow ball fight with Steve in a lot of ways walking through the snow felt quite fun.

After a quick break at Lobuche we carried on down the valley towards Pheriche (4293m). On way down we passed a series of rock memorials to climbers who have died on Everest, including Scott Fischer who died in the 1996 storm that I had read about in Into Thin Air.

Gradually as we lost altitude the snow became very slushy and I fell over quite a few times slithering down the hill. Eventually as we approached Pheriche the sleet stopped. Then unbelievably the sky began to clear and Ama Dablam and Lobuche East appeared out of the cloud. It was 3pm. The mountaineer's weather forecast had been out by only five hours.

At this point we both felt pretty sick that we hadn't waited in Gorak Shep for one more day. Still there was no way we were going to climb up 1000m to get back up there so we checked into a lodge in Pheriche. Looking on the bright side of things the change in the weather might mean that we actually got to see some more mountains.

The lodge we stayed in was run by Pemba Sherpa whose Dad had once guided former American President, Jimmy Carter on a walking holiday around the region. As the only guests (I guess the flights from Lukla still weren't coming in) we were given Jimmy Carter's former room complete with a photo of him above Steve's bed.

Next to the lodge was the Himalayan Rescue Association Medical Post. Staffed during the peak trekking season it treats lots of tourists with altitude sickness and also provides medical care for local people. Outside was a tasteful looking stainless steel memorial. Naively, I thought it was a memorial to all the people who had died at the Medical Post. Instead it turned out to be a memorial to all the climbers who have died on Everest.

Pemba's lodge was the first one we had stayed in that felt really family run. We sat around the fire drying our socks while Pemba's dad spun yak's wool into thread. The star of the show though, was Pemba's cute eight month old daughter. A true Sherpa Princess she even had her own fur lined cradle.

The next day dawned clear and following Pemba's advice we tried to head up towards Taboche Base Camp in order to get a view of Everest. Although we could see Lhotse, the world's fourth highest mountain, very clearly and had great views of Ama Dablam, Everest was once again covered in cloud.

I was starting to think of seeing Everest as being like spotting a highly endangered species of animal in the wild. Was it really possible that we would end up spending weeks walking around Everest without ever seeing the mountain? Would Steve have to carefully photograph a postcard, Photoshop us into it and put it up on Flickr in an attempt to prove we had actually been to the Himalayas?

After a late breakfast we set off walking towards Tengboche (3860m). Walking in the sunshine the landscape gradually became less harsh and trees began to reappear. From Tengboche, a Buddhist monastery surrounded by several lodges, Everest could apparently be seen clearly on a fine day. By the time we walked up the steep hill to Tengboche in the late afternoon however, the whole area was covered in cloud.

The next morning, Steve got up before me and was soon hassling me excitedly to get out of bed. We had a perfect view of the mountains on all sides. Finally even Everest was there sticking up innocuously by the side of Lhotse.

After we had warmed up from the early morning photo session, we started the day's walk down towards to Namche. Now suddenly, everywhere we looked there were more incredible views of Everest and of the other mountains in the surrounding valleys.

Getting to Namche felt fantastic. Now that we could see the mountains it looked much prettier. We took a relatively expensive room with a shower in the nicest lodge we could find and got clean for the first time in far too long. My appetite was raging out of control and I ate beans and fried eggs and potatoes and toast and still felt hungry for more. Best of all I was able to briefly use the exorbitantly expensive satellite internet connection and discovered that my brother had had a little girl making me an auntie for the first time.

It now just remained to walk back to Lukla and catch our flight back to Kathmandu. The walk was longer than I remembered, perhaps because we did it over two days on the way up. Still at certain points I felt like I was suffering from Low Altitude Sickness. The sudden descent had left me teeming with energy and I almost couldn't seem to walk quickly enough to use it all up.

Coming the other way were hordes of tourists and porters and trains of yaks. By the suspension bridges traffic jams were starting to develop. Despite our bad luck with the weather it made me quite happy that we had chosen to come in September. At least we had had the snowy cloud covered mountains to ourselves.

As we flew back to Kathmandu the views of the Himalayas were magnificent. I felt quite sad though as we flew past. The adventures of the last year were now over and the routine of normal daily life would start up again in only a few days.

Tomorrow we fly back to London and so this is going to be the last entry that I write in this blog.

We have certainly had a fantastic time. If any one wants to get in touch in the future my email is natalie_dillon@hotmail.com.

Tibet

2006-09-04T20:58:00.000-07:00

Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, is a very colorful city. The evening that we arrived we joined the pilgrims circumnavigating the Jokhang temple in the center of Lhasa.

Everywhere in Tibet people walk clockwise around religious sites, which can be anything from mountains to monasteries, swinging their prayer wheels and prostrating themselves on the ground. The circuit around Jokhang temple is the innermost circuit in Lhasa called the Nangkhor and is only a few hundred meters around. On the outermost Lhasa circuit, or Lingkhor, you can spot people dog walking and holding their dog's lead with one hand while they swing their prayer wheels with the other!

After circumnavigating the Jokhang temple we explored the surrounding area, which is filled with market stalls. Tibetan women wearing their distinctive outfit of a long dress with a stripy apron were out shopping while Monks in red robes, some playing drums, seemed to be everywhere. In fact, the only thing that detracted from this fascinating scene was the obvious poverty. We saw lots of beggars in Lhasa, more than in any other city we have visited on this trip, and many of them were clearly sick or had some type of disability

Dominating Lhasa's skyline is the huge Potala Palace, former home to the Dalai Lamas. Due to limitations on the numbers of visitors, in order to get a ticket you have to queue at midday to reserve a ticket for a particular time the following day. I left Steve, having a very late breakfast, in order to go and reserve some tickets. Unfortunately while I was in the queue a taxi ran over a small stray dog with a long shaggy coat. Fifteen minutes later when I got out of the queue the dog was still alive but clearly in agony. The poor thing kept trying to move around, dragging its mangled hind legs behind it.

A Chinese man who spoke some English translated for me and one of the taxi drivers phoned an animal ambulance to come and collect the dog. I managed to give the dog some water but I wasn't really able to do anything else for it as unsurprisingly it tried to bite anybody that got too close. It took over an hour for the animal ambulance to arrive during which time I just had to sit and wait and watch the dog suffer. I was however cautiously optimistic that if against the odds such a thing as an animal ambulance existed in Lhasa then maybe there would also be a decent vet.

Unfortunately the animal hospital turned out to be just a room with a man in a dirty white overall, some tins of dog food and some medicines. With no operating theatre it was pretty obvious that the outlook for the dog was hopeless. The vet could speak almost no English but I tried to explain to him that if he couldn't do anything else for the dog he should put it to sleep or at least give it a pain killing injection. In the end he did give it some type of injection and it lay down quietly. I handed over some money and managed I think to get in return an agreement that they would look after the dog until it died. By this stage I had got quite upset and I hope that in reality the vet was just waiting until I got out of the room to put the dog to sleep. It was all highly depressing, especially because in England it would probably have been possible to do have done something for the dog.

The next day we went to the Potala Palace. To get to the entrance we had to climb up many flights of stairs, which at an altitude of 3490m left us completely out of breath. The palace turned out to be a veritable rabbit warren of rooms, shrines and tombs with some amazing views out across Lhasa and the surrounding hills.

After a visit to Jokhang temple we felt like seeing something of the Tibetan countryside and took a tourist bus to Namtso Chukmo Lake. This is a very large, beautiful, blue salt water lake fringed by snow capped mountains. Our bus took us to Tashidor, a kind of shanty town made up of tents, by the shores of the lake. Having checked into the tent where we planned to spend the night we set off on a walk along the lake shore. We were now at 4800m and as we had ascended 1300m in a few hours on a bus we weren't acclimatized to the new altitude. This meant that shortly into our stroll we both developed splitting headaches!

Both in Lhasa and in the surrounding countryside we saw quite a lot of evidence of the way in which the Chinese Government is taking over Tibet. Although the Tibetan traditions and culture are still very strong there are obvious signs that things are not right. In Tibet you see many Chinese soldiers and police, far more than in the rest of China. There are Chinese flags everywhere, many flying from newly constructed homes. There are also many Chinese immigrants and while it might be an exaggeration to say that they are all driving new looking jeeps, they are clearly much richer than the Tibetans. The Tibetan language has also been replaced by Chinese characters on most signs. If the Tibetan script is there at all it is written in small letters at the top.

One of the things that struck us about Tibet was its uncanny similarity to Mongolia. This goes way beyond both countries having herders that live in tents and raise yaks and goats. You can see exactly the same patterns, designs and colors painted inside Tibetan temples as are painted on the furniture in Mongolian gers. The traditional music is so similar that many of the melodies are actually the same in both countries. Perhaps the explanation is the Mongol invasion of Tibet and the subsequent adoption of Tibetan Buddhism by the Mongolians. Although most Mongolians lost their religion during the period of Russian domination this Tibetan influence must have rubbed off on other areas of Mongolian culture.

Traveling outside of Lhasa is a little bit tricky if you are not on an organized tour. Many areas of the country require special permits to visit and this combined with the bad roads mean that most tourists end up arranging their trip with a travel agency. After our return from Namtso Chukmo Lake we spent a couple of days relaxing in Lhasa and recovering from our headaches. We then decided to take a public bus to Gyantse as there is a good road that leads there (who said the Chinese never did anything for Tibet huh) and no special permits are required.

The buses were like a return to Bolivia, tightly packed in with chain smokers and people who almost certainly didn't have access to a bathroom with hot running water for daily showers! It was quite fun though to get out of Lhasa and see a bit more of Tibet.

Gyantse turned out to be a very nice town where people were if anything even more friendly than in the rest of Tibet. The town itself was quite small and modern but the Pelkor Chode Temple Complex on the outskirts of Gyantse was very interesting as was the adjacent stupa, the Gyantse Kumbum. The town was also overlooked by a medieval fort.

Before seeing the cultural highlights of Gyantse we headed to a restaurant for breakfast called Gyantse Kitchen, attracted by a large sign in English outside which promised Western, Tibetan and Chinese cuisine. Our waitress looked a little out of place in Gyantse as she spoke good English with an Indian accent and was wearing a salwar kameez. Curious, we got into a conversation and discovered that she was from Nepal. She had been working as a chef in Lhasa and had been drafted into Gyantse Kitchen as the owner was unable to find a western chef in Gyantse.

'Gyantse is so dull', she said. 'Nothing to do and I don't know anybody here'. After explaining a little about the trials of life in Gyantse, most common ingredients for the western style food she was expected to cook being unobtainable for a start, she asked if she could come and visit the temple with us.

First though she explained that she would have to change into proper shoes. We waited around for a little while and were surprised to discover that for the walk to the temple she had changed out of her sensible flip flops into a pair of strappy high heeled sandals. Clearly this was a woman far too glamorous for small town Tibet!

Sadly we had only just made it to the Pelkor Chode Temple when her boss phoned saying that a tour party requiring western style food was on its way and so she had to rush all the way back to the restaurant.

While visiting the temple I finally discovered a use for my Footprint Guide to Tibet (don't buy it whatever you do) which I had written off as being entirely useless as it contains almost no practical information. A trainee monk of about eight asked to have a look at it and found an illustrated guide to Buddhist images and deities in the back in both Tibetan and English.

The trainee monk was fascinated and took me on a bit of a tour pointing out the names of the different deities. As he was clearly much more interested than me in the subject I decided to rip the relevant pages out of our book for him
accidentally poking him in the eye in the process. Fortunately after standing with his eye shut and wincing for about a minute he turned out to be ok and gave me a wooden bead bracelet in return.

Tomorrow we return to Lhasa and the next day we are going to get a flight to Kathmandu. We decided to wimp out of the overland route to Nepal after hearing horror stories about dangerous roads and landslides on the way. Nepal is going to be the last stop on our trip.

Eastern Europe

2006-08-27T23:47:00.000-07:00

It was actually quite a relief to cross over the Russian border into Finland. Although the architecture and people in Russia had looked European it wasn't until we got to Helsinki that we felt we had really arrived back in Europe. The supermarkets were well stocked with familiar products, there was a helpful tourist information office with maps and most people could speak a few words of English. Best of all it felt as though there was no chance of getting trouble from any policemen as we wandered around town. In fact we couldn't even see any policemen!

We spent a couple of lazy days in Helsinki just walking around the very pleasant but not massively exciting town center before going to Budapest for the wedding of our friends Jonny and Bettina. We arrived to find the bride and groom not feeling very happy at all. With only a couple of days to go before their wedding there had been a massive security alert at all UK airports and many of the English guests had had their flights cancelled. Fortunately by the afternoon of the wedding all but two of their guests had found a way to make it over from England.

The wedding was held in the Gerbaud in the center of Budapest. Betty is Hungarian and the wedding ceremony was held in both Hungarian and English presided over by a man in a rather cool Dracula style cloak. It was really nice to see so many of our friends again and after a big dinner with lots of wine Jonny and Betty impressed us all with their Hungarian folk dancing. The language barrier made it difficult for the English and Hungarian guests to communicate, though that didn't stop Betty's granny chatting away to everyone in Hungarian regardless!

Jonny and Betty and many of the guests stayed on for a couple of days after the wedding so we got to spend some more time with them. We spent an afternoon at the Szigat music festival but didn't do much actual sightseeing in Budapest due mainly to the bad hangovers that we kept waking up with.

From Budapest we flew to Krakow in Poland to meet up with Roy, Heather and Willi (my Dad and Steve's mum and step dad). We had rented an apartment near the Market Square for the two of us and my Dad to stay in. Unfortunately the apartment turned out to be directly above a nightclub and so we made arrangements for my Dad to stay in a hotel with Heather and Willi instead. This turned out to be a good decision. One night the music was so loud that Steve ended up getting out of bed and going downstairs to the nightclub on the basis that if he was going to have to stay awake all night he might as well try to have a good time.

Krakow is a very beautiful medieval city which was once the capital of Poland. At the very center of the town is the huge Market square which is flanked by impressive buildings, including the lavishly decorated Basilica of the Virgin Mary. The square is packed with bars, restaurants, cafes and market stalls. To add to the atmosphere, every hour a bugler appears in the tower of the Basilica and plays the Last Post. Streets filled with shops and interesting old buildings and churches radiate out from the market square. This whole central area of Krakow is surrounded by a park where the city walls and fortifications used to be.

We spent quite a lot of our time in Krakow just soaking up the atmosphere in the centre of the city, drinking cups of coffee and sampling the tasty polish dumplings. Just outside the central area of Krakow is Wawel Hill where we visited the castle where the Kings of Poland used to live as well as the Cathedral.

Another interesting area of Krakow is the old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. It is a very pretty and atmospheric area of Krakow with an old Jewish cemetery and several Synagogues. Unfortunately Kazimierz is a familiar sight to anybody who has ever watched the film Schindler's List, much of which was filmed here. It was this area of Krakow that was turned into a ghetto during the Second World War and where the Jewish citizens of Krakow were imprisoned before being murdered by the Nazis.

We went on a visit to the remains of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp which has now been turned into a memorial and museum. Auschwitz is just over an hours drive from Krakow, which I must admit I found quite shocking in itself. I had always imagined Auschwitz to be miles from anywhere hidden away in some bleak and desolate region of Poland, not just down the road from a beautiful and cultured European city.

Auschwitz was in reality a number of different camps as well as an industrial complex and was spread out over quite a large area. Today two camps remain, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II or Birkenau. We went first of all to Auschwitz I which was the headquarters of the whole complex. This was the first camp to be set up, initially to hold Polish political prisoners. On the surface, perhaps because it had been converted from an ordinary barracks for Polish soldiers, Auschwitz I looked surprisingly normal.

At least 1.1 million people were killed by the Nazi's at Auschwitz. The great majority (around 1 million) of the people who died were Jewish, though many Gipsys, Russian prisoners of war, Poles and other categories of prisoners were also killed. It is really very difficult to grasp the enormity of these crimes, but the large collections of shoes, particularly the children's shoes, on display, that were found at the camp, get the point across to some extent.

As part of the guided tour of Auschwitz I, we were taken into the punishment block. This was where many prisoners were tortured before being shot and also where in the underground cells the first experiments at Auschwitz of killing people using gas were carried out on Russian prisoners of war. Also in Auschwitz I is the only surviving gas chamber left in the complex. This gas chamber fell out of use before the end of the war because the camp authorities decided that the screams coming from the victims created too much disturbance. Instead prisoners too sick to work were taken to the more isolated gas chambers at Birkenau to be killed. Walking into the gas chamber where so many people had died felt really very sad as was walking out again past the ovens where the bodies of the victims were burned.

Next we were taken on a bus to visit Birkenau. This camp was built after Auschwitz I, initially to house Russian prisoners of war but it was later adapted for the purpose of murdering all the remaining Jewish people in Nazi occupied Europe. At the entrance you can still see the gate, the watch tower and the railway tracks where the trains came in. On the platform SS officers and doctors would divide people into those who would be sent to the gas chambers straight away, such as old people and children and those who were fit for work. The prisoners who it was decided were fit for work would be admitted to the camp. They might stay in Birkenau or be sent to any of the sub camps in the Auschwitz complex to work as slave labourers.

In reality those who were admitted to the camp to work were also condemned to death, only more slowly. The food and clothing provided to prisoners was completely inadequate and after a few months most prisoners would either die of exhaustion or disease or become unable to work and be sent to the gas chambers. Those who did manage to survive until close to the end of the war were made to march back towards Germany ahead of the Russian advance and most either froze to death or were shot by the SS along the way. The remaining survivors were then sent to concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen where many more died of starvation before finally being liberated. Sick prisoners that were unable to move were left at Auschwitz but many died of the cold and starvation before the Russians arrived or succumbed to their illnesses.

Despite all this it is from the prisoners that worked at Auschwitz that most eyewitness accounts of the Nazi death camps come. From camps like Belzec and Treblinka, which were purely extermination camps there were virtually no survivors.

At Birkenau we were taken to look at the prisoner's barracks where they slept in wooden huts tightly squeezed into narrow bunks and also the sanitation facilities. The gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were destroyed by the SS before they left in an attempt to cover up their crimes and so today only the foundations remain.

It might seem a little strange to decide to visit a place as horrible as Auschwitz. I think though that it is important for people to visit in order to understand the past and hopefully therefore help to prevent similar things occurring in the future. I think that even people who are familiar with this period of history would probably gain a greater understanding from visiting the camp.

We went on an organised tour and to be honest we were rushed around quite a bit. I went to the toilet for five minutes for example and found the bus was ready to leave without me. While I think that all visits around Auschwitz have to be guided, for a less frantic experience it might be better to go independently and then hire your own guide or join in one of museum's guided tours.

After one more day in Krakow, during which time I turned 30, it was time to leave Poland and go back to China. You might be thinking at this point that we are not really following a very logical route for a round the world trip! Initially we were actually planning to end our journey in Europe but with six weeks still to go we thought it would be more interesting to go back to China and visit Tibet and Nepal.

Nine hours on the plane were sufficient to arrive in Chengdu in Western China and travel further than we had in a week on a train going in the opposite direction. I have to say that Chengdu is definitely not the most attractive city that we have visited in China! The air is thick with pollution and it is hot and humid. Meanwhile the fetid stench coming from the river suggests its main function is that of an open sewer. A bit like a nightmare vision of environmental catastrophe.

Fortunately it is not all bad. Only 10km outside of the town is a Giant Panda Breeding Centre. Set amongst bamboo groves, not only can you see dozens of giant pandas roaming around spacious enclosures but you can also breath. We were lucky enough to also see some baby giant pandas in incubators. They are extremely small when they are born and completely pink. The ones that we saw were born a few weeks ago and had grown distinctive black and white fur but were still very tiny.

We have also managed to find a computer in a hostel in Chengdu, from where the usual restrictions don't seem to apply and is possible to view and post to this blog. You still can't see the BBC website though!

Tomorrow we are going to fly from Chengdu to Lhasa in Tibet.

Siberia to St Petersburg

2006-08-04T04:56:00.000-07:00

When we woke up on the train on our first day in Russia the scenery had changed dramatically. The Mongolian steppe had given way to a seemingly endless forest of birch trees. Soon Lake Baikal appeared though the window, stretching out to the horizon like the sea.

Lake Baikal contains one fifth of the world's fresh water, which is more than North America's five great lakes combined. We decided to head straight for the lake after arriving in Irkutsk and took a bus to the village of Listvyanka.

It didn't take long for us to encounter the 'Nyet' philosophy of customer service. Nyet means no in Russian and unfortunately it is often the only response that you get when asking a question. It's often accompanied by the person glaring at you and crossing their arms in front of their face to make sure that you get the message!

We didn't like Listvyanka that much as it seemed a bit run down and had a road running along the lake front. After spending the night there we decided to take a boat to the more remote lake side village of Bolshie Koty.

The lake at Bolshie Koty was unquestionably beautiful. In fact looking out across the blue lake and the wooded hills we could almost have been beside one of the Italian lakes. Unfortunately the similarities between Bolshie Koty and Northern Italy stopped there!

Between the wooden houses there were piles of rusting metal and disused machinery. The lake shore was covered in rubbish. In fact, as we found when we went on a walk, all the rubbish and waste from the village just seemed to have been thrown into the woods on the outskirts. There were no restaurants or cafes and just a couple of kiosks selling beer, cola and Snickers bars.

We found some accommodation in a wooden hut but there was no running water and only a smelly pit toilet. To top things off Bolshie Koty was very hot and home to some very nasty insects. Forget anything that we might have seen in the Amazon, these things were like oversized flying cockroaches and even Steve was scared.

After one night in Bolshie Koty we were desperate to leave. Unfortunately we had to sit and wait for a boat out (there is no road) for seven hours. Perhaps we were being paranoid but it seemed like the only thing that brought a smile to the faces of the rather glum Russian tourists (and lets face it if your annual holiday was to Bolshie Koty would you be in a good mood?) was us trying to ask in sign language what time the boat left.

Back in Irkutsk we checked into a youth hostel and felt very relieved. We were back in civilization and there were supermarkets and restaurants! After a day wandering around Irkutsk not doing a lot it was time to get the train to Moscow.

The three and a half days on the train were surprisingly pleasant. We were traveling in second class and so shared a four berth compartment with a Russian couple. It was very comfortable and we were impressed by the efficiency of the Russian railway network which got us to Moscow within a couple of minutes of the scheduled arrival time.

The landscape itself was not particularly exciting. There are clearly a lot of trees in Russia. A couple of times each day the train would stop for 20 minutes and we would get out and stretch our legs. With the time available it was only really possible to walk up and down the platform, which was filled with ladies selling food from baskets to the people on the train. There was also a dining car on the train selling reasonably ok food but it was mainly full with people drinking beer and vodka.

After arriving in Moscow we headed for the center to see Red Square, St Basil's Cathedral and the Kremlin. The Kremlin has many beautiful churches as it is not only the centre of the Russian Government but also of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Red Square itself, is the mausoleum where the embalmed body of Lenin is on display. Sadly we missed our opportunity to see Lenin as he is closed to the public on Mondays!

There are some interesting sights in other parts of Moscow too. In Iskussty Park we saw a display of decommissioned Soviet statues that included Lenin, a toppled Stalin and other Soviet leaders. We also went to the Novodevichy Convent and the atmospheric cemetery next door. Russian VIPs ranging from Checkhov to Raisa Gorbachev are buried in the cemetery. A lot of the grave memorials show what the person did in their lifetime, so there are sculptures of ballerinas dancing and cosmonauts with their helmets on.

On our last day in Moscow we decided to pop back into Red Square to take a better look at Kazen Cathedral before going to collect our bags and leave for the train station. As we approached Red Square we were stopped by some policemen who wanted to check our documents.

Perhaps at this point I should explain a little about the documents that you need in order to travel in Russia. Virtually all visitors to Russia need a visa. To get a visa if you are not on a package holiday you have to obtain an invitation to Russia from a tourist agency. In theory this agency should book your accommodation, though in practice many agencies will make 'virtual' hotel reservations leaving you free to arrange your own trip. Confused? It gets worse.

On arriving in Russia you are given an immigration card. This card needs to be stamped within 72 hours of your arrival in Russia in order to 'register' your visa. Then if you stay in any area of Russia for more than 72 hours your visa has to be registered again. This visa registration can be done by all the large expensive hotels but a lot of the smaller hotels, hostels and homestays cannot register your visa unless they were the agency that invited you to Russia. Well sometimes they can if you pay them some extra money...

When we arrived in Irkutsk we stayed in a hostel which was able to register our visas for a fee. In Moscow however we checked into a cheap hotel (cheap being a relative term) which couldn't register our visas. We had our train tickets from Irkutsk and onward tickets to St Petersburg, so that we could prove that we were spending less than 72 hours in Moscow should we encounter any problems.

The policemen that we met in Red Square insisted that because we were staying in a hotel our visas should have been registered straight away and that the 72 hour rule only applied to homestays. We tried arguing with them but they said that we had broken the law and would have to come with them to the police station and pay a fine.

"Don't worry Madam" said one of the police officers. "The process will only take about four hours. It is such a pity that you will miss your train to St Petersburg."

This was of course a preliminary to suggesting that we should pay them an "on the spot fine" of $80. Eventually Steve negotiated a price of $40 to get them to give our passports back and leave us alone.

This whole experience left us feeling pretty angry, though under the circumstances we didn't really have any choice except to pay. Anyone visiting Moscow should definitely make sure that they get their visa registered before going into the centre of town regardless of how long they plan to stay. Unfortunately if a policemen in Moscow sees that you don't have a Moscow registration stamp on your immigration card they will probably use it as a pretext to try to extort money from you.

Given the complexity of the regulations and the corruption of the Russian police it perhaps isn't surprising that we have come across quite a few other tourists that have run into trouble.

An American woman that we got to know on a tour in Mongolia was not allowed to leave Russia when an official at the airport noticed that on her visa her nationality had been written as Thai. This was clearly just a silly mistake by the Russian embassy in Thailand. As the visas are written in the Cyrillic alphabet, she couldn't have even been expected to spot the error. This didn't stop the official making her obtain another visa saying that she was American (which he knew she was anyway) and missing her flight home!

Getting to St Petersburg cheered us up quite a bit as it is such a beautiful city. It was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 with the aim of rivaling the great European capitals. Architects and skilled craftsmen were brought from all over Europe and the Russian empire and no expense was spared. The result is a historic center that stretches on for miles and positively overflows with churches and palaces.

One of the most magnificent buildings in the city is Winter Palace where the Tsars of Russia lived. This has now been turned into the Hermitage museum, which houses one of the world's largest collections of art. The collection was begun by Catherine the Great, added to by her successors and increased in size still further after the Russian revolution when the art collections of wealthy Russians were "nationalized" by the party. What makes the Hermitage different from other art galleries, apart from the scale, is its setting in the amazingly lavish interior of the Winter Palace.

While the Hermitage displays art work from all over the world the Russian Museum concentrates on Russian art work. We went to see an exhibition of the work of the avant guarde Russian artist Pavel Filonav. Usually I am not a massive fan of modern art, at least not the sort of stuff that wins the Turner prize, but this was really imaginative, interesting and thought provoking.

In the Russian Museum we also saw a more general exhibition on 20th century Russian art. If only from a historical point of view it was fascinating to see all the pictures of buxom young women harvesting corn, workers with rippling muscles forging steel and huge canvases depicting epic revolutionary scenes. There were also examples of underground art showing life in the Soviet Union in a slightly more realistic way.

St Petersburg is as famous for its musical traditions as its collections of art. We had first heard Russian Orthodox Church music in St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow and had been totally blown away. There are no instruments used apart from the male voice. Some of the singer's voices are so low that they sound a bit like a didgeridoo. The harmonies are very complex and the the overall effect is both beautiful and unusual.

We went to see the Male Choir of St Petersburg sing traditional Russian church and folk music at the Peter and Paul Fortress and were both totally captivated. It's definitely something that I would recommend to anybody visiting St Petersburg.

Our plan is to leave St Petersburg for Helsinki on 7th August. That's always assuming we aren't detained at the border for breaking any rules that we haven't heard of yet or pretending to be Japanese.

Mongolia

2006-07-18T21:50:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-10T05:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Hiroshima

2006-06-14T03:39:00.000-07:00

It was a sunny day when we arrived in Hiroshima and on the surface it seemed like any other pleasant, modern Japanese city. It took about 20 minutes to walk across town from our hotel near the station to the Atomic Bomb Dome. This is the remains of the Industrial Promotion Hall and was near the hypocenter of the atomic bomb. Strangely some of the only buildings in Hiroshima to survive the bombing were near the hypocenter, as the explosion came almost directly from above, sparing the walls, though not the occupants of the buildings.

Across the river from the Atomic Bomb Dome is the Hiroshima Peace Memorial park. At the center of the park is the Memorial Cenotaph where all the names of people killed by the bomb are held inside a stone coffin. Also in the park is the Peace Memorial Museum which sets out the details of what happened in Hiroshima.

In the museum are two large scale models of Hiroshima before and after the atomic bomb. It was really strange to think that the whole of the city that we had walked through on our way to the park had been destroyed by the atomic bomb and rebuilt afterwards.

Generally I would say that most English people (and probably Americans too) are given the impression through the media and also to some extent through school history lessons that they were the good guys in WWII. The lesson of Hiroshima's museum, as we quickly realised, is that by the end of WWII there were no good guys.

The official reason given for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan is that the Japanese had decided to fight to the death, would not surrender under any circumstances and that therefore the overall number of casualties would have been much greater had atomic weapons not been used. To be honest it has always seemed unlikely to me that the best way to minimise casualties would be to drop bombs killing hundreds of thousands of people in an instant, and the facts really don't bear this theory out.

There was no attempt made to negotiate with the Japanese other than to call for their unconditional surrender. They were not warned that the Americans were in possession of a new and very powerful weapon that would be used if they didn't surrender. There was no warning of where the weapon would be used so that civilians could be evacuated. There was no 'demonstration' use on a mountainous or less populated area that could have resulted in surrender with a minimal lose of life. In fact there was no indication at all that the allies were anything other than criminally indifferent to the massive and indiscriminate loss of life that they knew the atomic bombs would cause.

For me however the clincher was the discovery that the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki only three days after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. For some reason I had thought that the Japanese had still refused to give in for weeks after Hiroshima and that for that reason it had been decided to drop another bomb.

It is depressingly obvious that the Americans had one hydrogen bomb and one plutonium bomb and that they wanted to try them both out. To add to the impression of the atomic bombings being a sick scientific experiment, Hiroshima was spared bombing before the attack so that it would be easier to measure the extent of the destruction from aerial photographs. The British government of course, was fully informed of and approved the American actions. The only people who come out with any credit are the scientists that invented the atomic bomb, who wrote a letter suggesting that a warning be given before it was used.

The first section of the Hiroshima museum looked at the background to the bombings, the destruction that occurred and the aftermath. There was then a section on nuclear weapons in the world today. After witnessing the extent of the destruction in Hiroshima it was really scary to think that the average nuclear weapon today has 1000 times the power of the bomb that exploded there.

The final section of the museum showed the victims of the bomb as people rather than just a sad statistic. It was all quite harrowing and included depressing exhibits like a charred pink dress that once belonged to a baby girl and photos of people suffering from radiation sickness. There were also videos in which eye witnesses described the horror they saw in Hiroshima, as badly charred people stumbled around and threw themselves into the river.

When we first arrived in Hiroshima, I had wondered a bit what we were doing there as a tragedy of this type obviously shouldn't be a tourist attraction or a form of entertainment. After visiting however it seemed to me that Hiroshima had tried to come to terms with what had happened by using the disaster to warn of the dangers of war and call for peace. We were certainly convinced. I think actually that it's a place that everybody should visit.

In the evening we went out to watch Japan play Australia in a bar in the town centre. Initially it was great fun. All the Japanese fans had their faces painted and were singing. However after leading most of the way Japan let in three goals in the last ten minutes leaving the whole bar thoroughly miserable.

The next day we caught the train down to Aso in Southern Japan to see the volcano. The main Aso volcano crater had been a bit ruined by stalls selling camera film and a very ugly cable car station. It was possible however to follow a footpath round to the neighboring Nakedake crater where the landscape was very beautiful and unspoiled.

We are now back in Tokyo after quickly popping into Nara for some more amazing gardens and temples on our way back. We are leaving Japan for China on Sunday and will be sad to go as we have really enjoyed it here. We have spent a fortune though so maybe it is time to move on!

Rumor has it that the Chinese government has blocked access to the web site that I use to write this blog so it may be some time before I get to post again.

Japan

2006-06-08T01:14:00.000-07:00

When we arrived in Japan we quickly realised that it was completely unlike anywhere that we had been before. In fact, just finding our way across town to the hostel that we had booked turned out to be a pretty confusing experience.

With most of the signs written in Japanese characters and a local transport network diagram that looked like a plate of spaghetti, getting to the correct metro station was a bit of a challenge. Once there we discovered that Tokyo addresses don`t include street names. Instead they have the name of an area and a number, which makes them pretty much impossible to find. Fortunately the Japanese are used to lost and confused foreigners, so the station guard quickly came up to us with a map showing the location of our hostel.

Seeing as it was a Saturday night we decided to go to Shinjuku, a lively area in central Tokyo. The whole area was lit up in bright neon and there were dozens of small streets packed with bars and restaurants. Lots of the restaurants didn't have English menus. In fact in the first place that we went in to our inability to communicate meant that we ended up having a beer and then making a swift exit.

Plastic food turned out to be the way to go. Many Japanese restaurants have incredibly realistic and detailed plastic models of the food and drinks that they sell. Picking one of these places is a good plan as if in doubt you can always take the waiter outside and order out of the window. Almost immediately we were judging restaurants based on the quality of their plastic food!

At the end of the evening we took the last train back to our hostel. Just like London it was absolutely packed with very drunk people. For some reason I had never thought of Japanese people as being binge drinkers. Still the evidence was all around, including a man in a suit lying in a pool of his own vomit who Steve bravely helped to his feet.

The next day we had to get up early and move to another hostel. Cheap accommodation gets booked up very quickly in Tokyo and we had not been organised enough to get things sorted out in time. Having mastered the public transport system we arrived near the hostel with out problems but clearly couldn't find it due to the crazy address system.

The area turned out to be full of homeless middle aged men, one of whom took us to the hostel. We later found out that nearly everybody is guided to the hostel by one of the large number of very polite homeless men in the area, some are even met at the station. Again I had`t thought of homelessness as being a big issue in Tokyo, it seemed a real shame especially as the city as a whole is clearly so prosperous.

After dumping our rucksacks we went to Harujuku. This is an area of Tokyo where people go on Sundays dressed up in strange costumes to have their photographs taken. We arrived at the station to find lots of teenage girls dressed either as Goths or Little Bo Peep having their photographs taken by middle aged men. When we came back later in the day after exploring the surrounding area things seemed a little less creepy. The teenage girls had been joined by a rock band and some middle aged transvestite Bo Peeps. Meanwhile lots of tourists and Japanese families had turned up to watch the spectacle.

Steve was taking lots of photos, so I decided to go and get a coffee. It was at this point that I had my first experience with a high tech Japanese toilet. Confusingly it had lots of buttons on it with signs in Japanese characters. I pressed one at random thinking that it might flush the toilet. Instead it started spraying hot water over the toilet floor. I got into a bit of a panic and pressed all buttons until eventually finding the stop button. By this point the toilet floor was completely covered in water. I opened the door to find a queue of people waiting and made a quick get away.

Near to Harujuku is the Meiji Shrine, a large Shinto shrine set in a peaceful park. The beautiful wooden temple and courtyard was our first sight of the traditional side of Japan. There was a wedding procession passing through the courtyard with both the bride and groom wearing elegant kimono. It was actually hard to believe that the Bo Peeps and Goths were from the same country, let alone only a few hundred meters away.

We decided to finish our first full day in Japan by eating some sushi in a traditional looking place near to our hostel. It was small and wooden lined with seats by the counter and also a Japanese style seating space with cushions on the floor, a low table and tatami (reed) mats. We sat by the counter and watched while the chef prepared the sushi in front of us. Soon we had got into a chat with the owner who was in there drinking with one of his friends. Before we knew it we were being offered sashimi, strange pickles, more sushi, beer and sake all on the house.

Japan is crazy about vending machines, which sell drinks and cigarettes on every street corner. At the hostel where we were staying you had to pay for a night`s stay or a clean towel at the vending machine in the corner of the lounge. It even sold pot noodles!

Staying at the hostel was a bit like participating in a non nasty version of Big Brother. The lounge was a time warp in which people surfed the net, chatted, drank beer and eat boxed sets of strange food stuffs from the nearby Seven Eleven. All sorts of plans were made in the lounge for everyone to go on big nights out together or visit early morning fish markets, but none of them ever came to anything.

In fact no matter what your intentions it was almost impossible to get around to going to bed before the early hours of the morning. Unfortunately the hostel had a rigorous program of morning cleaning so we ended up feeling pretty tired.

Tokyo is home to some really good modern architecture. Steve had marked lots of the interesting buildings on a map and we went on a bit of walking tour. We started with the Prada Store, a cool futuristic building with bubbly glass. We also saw a Toyo Ito building, pink with windows like holes in a cheese and the Hermes building which has a facade like one of those glass brick walls that people sometimes put in bathrooms. We finished up at the Tokyo Forum Building, a monumental and impressive space the size of a cathedral which didn't seem to serve any particular purpose.

Japanese people undoubtedly deserve their reputation for politeness. People bow and say thank you and go out of their way to be helpful. In fact in Japan even the machines are polite. Ticket machines say `Arigato gozaimasu` (thank you very much) out loud when issuing tickets. Shops have loudspeakers broadcasting `Irasshaimase` (welcome, how can I help) at their entrances. The bowing in particular is totally infectious, as I realised when Steve caught me bowing to a ticket machine.

The next day we went to Yokohama the port near Tokyo. Steve was interested in seeing the new Yokohama ferry terminal. Inside it was a bit dark with large empty spaces. The outside was however pretty cool. The roof is like a huge interestingly shaped park with lawns and benches and steps where you can sit and look out to sea. We also went to visit the brightly colored and immaculately clean Yokohama China town where we had some amazing Chinese food.

During the rest of our time in Tokyo we went on an out of town trip to a town full of temples called Nikko, visited the traditional district of Asakusa to see the shops and went back to Shinjuku to get some more of the bright lights.

On our second visit to Shinjuku we discovered the pachinko halls. These are halls full of machines where people obsessively play some sort of game where large quantities of ball bearings are poured away into strange looking slot machines. The noise is absolutely deafening, the lights are garish and the prizes are useless things like biscuits and cuddly toys. We were being driven mad after only a few minutes so it can`t be the most relaxing thing to do after a long day in the office!

From Tokyo we decided to go to the small mountain town of Takayama. This involved a short ride on a shinkansen, one of Japan`s super speedy and impressive bullet trains.

Takayama itself is a very pretty town with streets of traditional wooden buildings. There are also temples and sake breweries and we looked around an old town house that used to belong to a family of merchants. Seeing the traditional Japanese buildings and interiors was really fascinating.

We had opted to stay in a ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) which was quite an experience in itself. At the door we had to take off our shoes and change into the slippers that were provided. The room had sliding doors and was covered in Tatami (reed) mats. It was divided into two sections. One had a low table and cushions where green tea had been laid out for us to drink. In the other, futons were spread out on the floor for us to sleep on. There were also cotton kimono for us to change into. Best of all downstairs there was a large tub filled with hot water for soaking in. The atmosphere was extremely calm and relaxing. It`s difficult to believe that the ryokan and the pachinko hall were both invented by the Japanese.

After Takayama we caught a bus to Kamikochi in the Japanese Alps. The scenery was picture postcard perfect with a bridge over a pretty river and snow capped peaks in the background. In fact it looked exactly like a typical Japanese painting of mountains, possibly because this is where many of them were painted.

Proving that it isn't challenging to get off the beaten track in Japan we were the only non Japanese people in Kamikochi. In fact as we pitched our tent we became a bit of a tourist attraction with people stopping to take a good look at us and say hello.

The paths around Kamikochi were filled with Japanese people visiting the area. Lots of them were drawing, painting or photographing the landscape. With all the impressive photographic equipment on display Steve began to develop lens envy. A stand had even been set up by the river bank for those all important group shots with a mountain backdrop.

Due to the large amount of snow still up in the mountains we decided to stick to the valley floor for our hike. A short way out of Kamikochi on a footpath we were practically alone in a beautiful and wild looking mountain landscape. For a country as populated as Japan it seemed surprisingly easy to get away from it all.

At night in our tent it was absolutely freezing, so much so that even Steve was cold. The large frozen blocks of snow lying around probably should have alerted us. I decided to warm up in the morning by going for a dip in an onsen (a bathhouse). I was the only person there so I got to swim round a hot pool by myself. They even had hairdryers. By the time I got out you would hardly have known that I had been camping at all.

Our next stop was Kyoto, Japan`s original capital and home to more temples than there are churches in Rome. Kyoto is quite a strange place where the old and the new the ugly and the sublimely beautiful all mix together. The area around the station for example is a terrible town planning disaster of nasty grey blocks and horrendous traffic. The downtown is a bustling area with lots of shops and restaurants and arcades. The outskirts are filled with temples set in beautiful parks. Then there is Gion, the traditional entertainment district where you can still see geishas walking around wearing their traditional kimonos and white face make up. Not to mention the tiny winding streets and wooden houses in the area around the Yasaka Pagoda.

It would probably take weeks to see Kyoto properly. We are giving it our best shot but there are only so many temples that it is possible to visit in one day. One of our favourites so far was the Nanzenji Temple in north east Kyoto. This temple has some stunningly beautiful Japanese moss and stone gardens. The stone gardens, although designed in the 17th century, look surprisingly like modern art, with stone boulders of different shapes and sizes placed in a sea of raked gravel. Inside the temple itself there are rooms with tatami mats and intricately painted screens showing tigers and bamboo shoots and other traditional Japanese designs. Overall it felt like a very calm and peaceful place.

We plan to stay in Kyoto for a few more days before going to Hiroshima. World Cup fever doesn't really seem to have struck in Japan but we have found an English pub that will be showing the England v Paraguay match tomorrow night. We have even bought ourselves English shirts so that we look the part!

Bangkok and Hong Kong

2006-05-25T22:36:00.000-07:00

Koh Samui's airport looked like it had been converted from a beach resort. For a start all the airport buildings were bamboo huts. For another thing all the tourists were driven out to the plane on a little wooden train instead of a normal bus. Moments later Koh Samui was a dot in the ocean and we were on our way to Bangkok.

First impressions of Bangkok, were that it was very hot and very polluted. After 20 minutes of walking down a main road I felt like I was going to have an athsma attack and so we dived into the Siam Paragon shopping mall. This is a shopping mall so large that you could fit a small town into it. It even has a Lamborghini show room. As for the food court, with its nearly never ending selection of different types of interesting things to eat it makes Selfridge's food hall look like a poorly stocked seven eleven. It was a bit depressing in some ways though, to think that the out of control air pollution and traffic meant it was actually more fun to spend our time in a spacious but sterile air conditioned glass box than exploring the streets below!

The next day we went to the Grand Palace and the shrines of Wat Phra Kaew and Wat Pho. These shrines were very incricately decorated and the giant reclining golden Buddha at Wat Pho was very impressive. It was actually quite strange to see these culturally interesting buildings which were so at odds with the other parts of Thailand that we had seen.

We arrived in Hong Kong in the pouring rain and got on to a double decker bus that was the spitting image of an English bus. The resemblances stopped there. Despite the sky scrapers, the life at street level in Hong Kong is very vibrant. Streets in the center are overflowing with shops and stalls and cafes and people and shrines. There is also slightly run down look to a lot of the sky scrapers away from the central area. They look like they were built back in the 1960s and haven't perhaps been aging so well.

The cityscape viewed at night from Kowloon across the harbour is pretty amazing. Each sky scraper seems to be competing to put on the best light show. Another great view is from Victoria peak, in the centre of Hong Kong island which we took a tram up to yesterday. We also went to visit Ten Thousand Buddha Monsastery, which as its name suggests has ten thousands buddhas on display, most of them very small.

Tomorrow we are flying to Tokyo and are going to spend the next three weeks looking around Japan.

Koh Samui

2006-05-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

After a couple of days in Kuala Lumpur we made for the Perhentian islands off the north east coast of Malaysia. We decided to stay on Perhentian Besar, which is the slightly larger of the two tiny Perhentian islands, and found a room in a bungalow beside the beach.

As we were settling in, I noticed that the towel in the bathroom had a large black ant mashed into the fabric. I presented the towel to the bungalow owner, thinking that he might like to give me another one. Instead he said 'ant no problem' and in one swift move picked the dead ant off the towel with his fingernail put it in his mouth and swallowed it. Then he handed me back the towel with a smile. Needless to say I didn't bother him with any more requests!

There aren't any roads on Perhentian Besar, so without taking a boat we were restricted to two beaches. Unfortunately neither was very good for swimming. The first beach had polluted looking scum floating on the water. The second beach looked just like a tropical paradise from a holiday brochure except that the water was filled with tiny stinging jellyfish. Cabin fever set in after only two days and we decided to go swiftly onwards to Thailand.

After a long and hot journey we arrived on the island of Koh Samui. Eleven years ago Steve spent three months living in a beach hut on Koh Samui. However as we drove from the ferry terminal to the main town Chawang, he failed to recognise almost anything. In the last ten years Koh Samui has changed from a small tropical island where most people worked growing coconuts to a huge holiday resort with plane loads of holiday makers arriving every day. Driving around the island the first impression was pretty unattractive. There is loads of construction work going on and with the heavy traffic and lack of decent pavements, going for pleasant strolls in the countryside was never going to be an option.

The beach at Chawang though is fantastic. A long bay with white sand and clear warm water, it's an ideal place to chill out. My stepdad Ian came out to meet us from the UK and we have been spending our days swimming and sitting on the beach. As I had lost my swimsuit in Kuala Lumpur, I spent the first week on the beach looking very uncool in a pair of men's swimming trunks and a tshirt, until I finally got around to buying some more normal looking swim wear.

We have however managed to drag ourselves away from the beach to do a little bit of site seeing. We went on a day trip to the very pretty Ang Thong National Marine Park which is where Alex Garland set his best selling novel The Beach, a kind of Lord of the Flies style tale with backpackers.

We also went on a visit to see one of Koh Samui's waterfalls. It was far too hot to be walking and none of us made it up to the pool at the top of the waterfall. The most interesting bit of the outing was listening to our taxi driver talk. He pointed out the newly built prison (looks like a hotel with big walls) and told us stories of murdered tourists, revenge killings and the Koh Samui mafia.

While it's obvious that a few dodgy things do go on in Koh Samui, there are lots of girly bars for example, I had most of what out taxi driver said down as the product of a hyperactive imagination. Still after looking at the article Danger in paradise it does seems as though crime is becoming an issue on Koh Samui, even though we haven't experienced any problems ourselves.

Last night we went to the full moon party at the neighbouring island of Koh Phangan. The ride over in a speed boat at night was quite good fun in itself. The whole beach was packed with people dancing, with different sound systems competing to draw in the crowds. There were a few new age style things going on as well, with people throwing flaming brands into the air. All together it felt a bit like being back at a rave in the 1990's.

Steve though, who had really been there in the 1990's, was quite shocked. The full moon party beach, that had previously been in the middle of nowhere along a dirt track was now in the middle of a busy town with at least 15 bars showing the FA Cup final!

We are planning a few more days relaxing on the beach before flying up to Bangkok.

Sydney to Singapore

2006-04-27T04:11:00.000-07:00

Although the area we were staying, Kings Cross, was a little bit seedy we really enjoyed our visit to Sydney. Almost half of the central bit of Sydney is a park. That alongside the harbor, the Opera House, the cafes and the sunshine made Sydney a pleasure to be in.

I was very impressed to find that in Sydney there are lots of Olympic size swimming pools that open to the public for next to nothing. This must be the reason why ordinary Australians swim incredibly quickly even in the slow lane. Steve and I went for a morning dip in an amazing pool overlooking the harbor and ended up in the "special" lane for the elderly or unfit.

If you want to see bats by the way forget Transylvania, Sydney's business district is the place to be. At dusk hundreds of bats take off from trees in the park and fly up towards the skyscrapers. Surreal but beautiful.

We were due to visit Caines after Sydney and see the Great Barrier Reef. Apparently its pretty hard to see much of the coral in torrential rain as it disturbs the water. As torrential rain was all that was forecast for the foreseeable future we changed our flights and after a brief stopover in Caines flew on to Singapore.

My preconceptions of Singapore were that there was no litter or chewing gum or crossing the roads at red lights because that sort of behavior led to a lengthly jail term. Steve had been to Singapore 10 years ago and had felt that people were looking at him disapprovingly, possibly because he had waist length hair and wore a sarong.

Singapore turned out to be very nice surprise. It's very clean (though there is some litter) and very green. Trees seem to have been planted in every conceivable space and Steve ended up taking nearly as many photos of the Esplanade arts center on the Singaporian water front as he did of the Sydney Opera house.

Orangutans now only live in the wild in Borneo and Sumatra. We had thought about making a quick visit to one of these islands to see the Orangutans but as we didn't really have enough time we decided to take the easy way out and go to Singapore's zoo instead. Singapore's zoo has one of the world's largest collections of captive Orangutans which they have been successfully breeding. The Orangutan enclosure is spacious and they are allowed out for a few hours each day to hang out in some nearby trees. We really enjoyed watching them, especially seeing the baby Orangutans play fight.

Singapore's zoo is definitely one of the better ones in terms of the way that the animals are kept. However we still saw a pair of distressed jaguar's pacing neurotically around around a tiny enclosure. I wasn't too sure about the ethics of keeping a polar bear either. There was a sign up proudly announcing that it was the only polar bear ever to have breed in the tropics. Personally I think that there are excellent reasons why polar bears don't breed in the tropics. I mean Steve and I were extremely hot in the zoo, even with frequent stops to sit down and have water so imagine being a huge furry bear!

Another great place in Singapore are the beautifully laid out Botanical Gardens. They have a lovely collection of orchids in the gardens and are responsible for breeding new hybrids of orchid. The VIP orchid garden is quite entertaining. It seems that in Singapore new orchid hybrids are named after visiting VIPs. Women's names seem to be preferred so they are usually named after a female VIP or the wife of a VIP, though some men do get lucky. Margaret Thatcher, Elizabeth II, Laura Bush and Nelson Mandela are all on display though Margaret Thatcher was looking a bit withered.

Singapore also has an enormous number of huge and fiercely air conditioned shopping malls. Unable to withstand the bright shiny lights Steve bought a Playstation Portable (clearly an essential item to be carrying on a round the world trip) and I bought some new clothes.

We have now moved on to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where we are going to spend a couple of days in a posh but relatively inexpensive hotel pretending not to be backpackers before heading on up the peninsular.

Melbourne

2006-04-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

We flew into Melbourne to spend a relaxing week with Steve's family. Steve's aunt, Marlene, lives in Melbourne and Steve's mum Heather and her husband Willie had flown out from England so that we could have a family reunion.

The last time that we saw Heather and Willie was in London at a farewell party the day before we flew to Lima. Strangely it seemed entirely normal to meet up with them in the St Kilda area of Melbourne (which is quite similar to Clapham where we live in London except beside the sea and nicer) and go out for a coffee.

A lot of our journey so far has been spent either in the countryside, in small towns or in mega cities with unbreathable air. So in some ways arriving in Melbourne with its trams and water features and parks and works of modern architecture felt like a return to civilisation.

In the centre of Melbourne is a new development called Federation square. It's a mixture of different styles with four different types of facade one of which is multi colored. In fact, it almost looks as though four different architects came up with ideas for the square and unable to agree they decided to do them all at once. Everyone seems to have a different viewpoint about the square. I thought it looked like a giant funfair while Steve was staggered by the complexity, likely cost and the fact the client had agreed to it at all.

Across the river from Federation square is an area that reminded us very much of the south bank of the Thames in London. Melbourne's main art gallery and opera house are located there as is an unusual looking bridge. Walking down along the river side there are cafes and fountains and it all seems highly cultured until you arrive at huge temple to capitalism in the form of a mega casino, shopping and entertainment complex.

After betting 2.5 dollars at roulette and losing, I resisted the urge to gamble away all our travel money and went for a stroll around the casino with Steve. The casino was enormous, far larger than any other I have been in and absolutely packed with people. Most of them were playing away on coin machines with blank expressions on their faces. Although it was a nice sunny day outside in Melbourne there was no natural daylight in the casino so it could have been the middle of the night. Quite a scary place really.

Heather has some newly wed friends from Bombay who live in the Docklands area of Melbourne. Docklands is a newly developed area of Melbourne with sky scrapers and trendy restaurants. We went round to have dinner with them in their highrise appartment. Apparently in Bombay the tradition is that you drink and talk until about midnight and then have dinner before going home. It was great fun but we all ended up horribly drunk through four hours of drinking on empty stomachs and suffered for it in the morning!

On Easter Sunday we had dinner at Marlene's house in the Melbourne suburbs. Marlene and her husband Richard might have emigrated to Australia from India in the 1960s but Marlene can still cook excellent Indian food. We even got given an Easter egg each to take away!

Easter Monday was our first wedding anniversary. As we aren't planning any time in the Australian bush, to see animals the hard way, we decided to celebrate by going to a wildlife sanctury with Heather and Willie where we saw all the Kanagaroos, Wallabies, Tamsanian Devils and Koala bears that anybody could possibly hope for. We also checked out of our grotty hostel and moved into a nice hotel room instead!

While in Melbourne we tried out a couple of different places and have decided that the Australian backpacker scene definately isn't for us. Actually it's probably not for anyone with normal hearing who doesn't fancy drinking themselves into unconciousness every night. Unless of course your idea of fun is lying awake at night scratching your bed bug bites while listening to very drunk people singing, or you appreciate mould growing in a bathroom!

This morning we said goodbye to Heather and Willie at the airport and are now in Sydney where we are staying in a hotel in the red light district, Kings Cross. The sun is shining and it seems pretty lively with lots of bars, restaurants and some dodgy looking 'gentlemen's clubs'.

Doubtful Sound

2006-04-06T18:47:00.000-07:00

Against all our expectations, as we took the bus from Christchurch to Queenstown the sun came out. On the way we got a brilliant view of Mt Cook, which at 3755m is the highest peak in Australasia, soaring above Lake Pukaki.

Queenstown has a pretty setting by a lake and has a reputation as a bit of a party town, with lots of young English people drinking themselves comatose. We spent the first night in an eight bed dormitory at the YHA hostel and the heavy snoring of three of our inebriated room mates as well as the sounds of a drunken fight coming from downstairs ensured that we had a truly terrible nights sleep.

The next day we walked up the hill beside the town and watched all the paragliders floating down. It's possible to try out practically every adventure sport that you can think of in Queenstown but as it costs lots of money and I'm afraid of heights anyway, we decided instead to take a bus on to Te Anau in Fiordland National Park to walk the 60km Kepler track.

Having learnt from the back breaking load that we carted around Torres del Paine National Park in Chile we started off down the Kepler track with relatively light packs.

The first day of the walk was sunny and the path lead around Lake Te Anau through the woods to Brod Bay. From Brod Bay we followed the track on a steep climb up through the forest and past some limestone cliffs to the top of the tree line. We then walked up across scrub land until we reached Luxmoore hut where we were spending the night. There were beautiful views from Luxmoore hut over Lake Te Anau and the South Fiord.

The second day of the walk was undoubtedly the most dramatic as we walked for four hours along a ridge surrounded by mountains with stunning views of the South Fiord. As the day went on it became clear that it was going to rain quite heavily and after a 1000m descent through woodland we made it to Iris Burn hut just as it started to pour. The hut was surrounded by lots of bird life and we could hear Kiwi birds calling during the night.

At dawn on the third day we were woken up by Keas screeching. The world's only Alpine parrot Keas look extremely cute but have a reputation for stealing hiking boots and just about anything else that they can find.

It rained pretty much the whole day as we walked through the forest and around Lake Manapouri to the road at Rainbow reach. The forest along the Kepler track is temperate rain forest, bursting at the seams with vegetation, and actually looked very pretty with the ferns and moss glistening in the rain. Still by the end of the day we had pretty much had enough of the rain and once we reached to the road we gladly took up the offer of three Swiss backpackers to drive us back to town in their camper van!

Wanting to get a closer look at a fiord before leaving Fiordland national park we decided to splash out on an overnight cruise on Doubtful Sound. The weather was very cloudy but in some ways that actually added to the dramatic and moody scenery along the fiord. Highlights were watching a pod of bottlenosed dolphins swimming, taking a kayaking trip and being fed lots of tasty food. We also saw New Zealand fur seals and some blue penguins, which briefly whizzed past our boat in a group.

Currently we are in Mount Cook national park, though Mount Cook itself is buried in the clouds. The plan, if the weather cheers up is to do some more walking before catching our flight to Melbourne on Monday.

Travels in Kiwiland

2006-03-26T19:47:00.000-08:00

We got a flight from Santiago to Auckland, skipping out the 14th March altogether as we passed over the international dateline. The short film we were shown on arrival in New Zealand was quite amusing. Complete with the sound of a prison door slamming shut, it made it clear that a tourist trying to smuggle an apple into New Zealand would be treated in much the same way as an international terrorist or a drug smuggler in other countries. Forewarned, we handed our tent in for inspection, just in case any foreign mud was accidentally sticking to it.

Initially, we were both quite disoriented in Auckland due to our lack of sleep and it seeming strangely like England but not like England at the same time.

After a good night's sleep we headed straight off to Matamata to look at the place where Hobbiton was filmed for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Most of the original set had been removed but you could still see some of the Hobbit holes and the tour took us on a pleasant walk around the area, which was very pretty. Though we didn't realise at the time, this was the only day so far in New Zealand where we would be lucky enough to see the sun shine!

After Matamata we took the bus to Rotaroa which is famous for its Maori culture and hot springs. Rotaroa is a pretty ugly looking place, if you thought of Milton Keynes smelling of rotten eggs (because of the sulphur) then you wouldn't have it far wrong. We dived straight into the pools at the Polynesian Spa and soaked in the hot water which was pretty good fun.

The next day we went to the Wai-O-Tapu thermal wonderland near Rotaroa. With its bubbling mud pools, geyser and weird colored pools it should have been spectacular. However somehow the hordes of other tourists, modern visitors centre, safety notices, fences and well marked paths seemed to detract from the experience. It was the complete opposite of our trip to the Bolivian Salt flats where tourists posed unsupervised for photos standing on the edge of boiling pools of water with geysers shooting up all around them!

Our next move was to Turangi, a little place with just a few houses and a gas station spread out around a roundabout. We were there to walk the Tongariro Crossing, an 18km trek across volcanic landscape that is supposed to be one of the most spectacular day walks in New Zealand. It was in this area of New Zealand that the scenes of Mordor were filmed in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

We were dropped off at 8am in the morning at the start of the trek. Unfortunately so were about three hundred other walkers, making the track more like Oxford street on Christmas Eve than a walk in the wilderness. Initially we saw quite an interesting volcanic landscape with Mount Ngauruhoe (Mount Doom) on our right hand side. Unfortunately as we climbed higher into the cloud, we saw nothing whatsoever and walked past all the craters and other sights none the wiser.

The following day we got a bus to Wellington where we went to stay with Eleonora, Marco and their daughter Elena. Eleonora is the sister of a friend of ours from Italy, Giambattista, and she kindly offered to put us up. After a delicious Italian meal Steve quizzed Marco about his job, he works as a computer animator for the company that did the special effects for the Lord of the Rings and King Kong. As I know very little about graphics I probably only understood about 50% of what they were talking about but I was dead impressed by the large model figure of the King of the Ring Wraiths that Marco kept on a shelf!

The next day, after making that upsetting discovery that after spending five months talking Spanish I can no longer talk Italian properly, we headed into the centre of Wellington. It was raining so much that we ended up wearing waterproof trousers as well as rain coats. We went to the Te Papa museum which had very interesting exhibitions on the flora and fauna of New Zealand and its history, complete with a large Maori war canoe. Maybe it was the rain, but I didn't find the centre of Wellington very appealing. Apparently most of the historic centre was knocked down in the 1970s to make way for a shopping centre.

It was still raining the next day when we took a ferry to South Island. After a bit of a choppy crossing we arrived in Picton, where we took a water taxi to Hopewell hostel in the Malborough Sounds. A very nice holiday resort masquerading as a backpackers hostel, Hopewell hostel is set in a very beautiful and isolated location
in wooded fjords. We spent a couple of days relaxing at Hopewell, our room looked out across the bay and we could hear the waves lapping at night. Although the weather was pretty gloomy, we went sea kayaking along the coast which was fun and relaxed in the hot tub. We also ate lots of mussels, which the hostel provided free in large quantities to guests every other night.

From Hopewell we went back to Picton where we got a train to Kaikoura further down the coast. Kaikoura is famous for its marine life because of the currents that bring nutrients to the area. The continental shelf rapidly drops to over 800m off shore from Kaikoura, meaning that whales can be spotted not far out to sea.

We booked onto a whale watching trip which initially felt more like a whale hunt!
The captain was in radio contact with other boats looking for whales and also had a whale listening device. The boat would stop to listen for a whale for a while and then shoot off at great speed, in quite a stormy sea, towards its supposed location.

Eventually, we were rewarded with sightings of two sperm whales, one after another. Our boat stopped at a reasonable distance away from the first sperm whale and we were able to watch the large brown creature, lying like a strange sea monster, on the surface taking in air. After a few minutes he dived back down into the ocean flicking his tail into the air as he went.

Every one was then hurried back inside to see another sperm whale that had been spotted nearby. It was difficult to really get a proper idea of the scale of the whale from the surface (they are about 18m long and dive deeper than any other whale) but it was great to get an opportunity to see this magnificent creature in real life.

Sadly, while whales are protected in New Zealand waters a number of nations including Japan, Norway and Iceland continue to catch them in ever increasing numbers. Japan even goes into supposedly protected Antarctic waters where it catches endangered species of whale for allegedly scientific purposes. Perhaps not surprisingly most of these whales seem to some how end up on supermarket shelves.

While we have been enjoying our time in New Zealand, so far we haven't had much luck with the weather and the scenery for which New Zealand is so famous has been almost entirely obscured by low lying cloud. The people here are very friendly however. The tourist industry seems to be mainly run by cheerful and motherly middle aged women who do everything from driving mini buses to serving free extra portions to weary looking travellers at late opening fish and chip shops.

Next we are heading to Queenstown in the Fiordland National Park which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful areas of the country. Unfortunately for us the weather forecast is predicting showers and cloud for the week ahead...

Easter Island (Rapa Nui)

2006-03-12T20:54:00.000-08:00

We flew from Santiago in Chile to Easter Island, which is one of the most isolated places on earth.

Easter Island was settled by the Polynesians who arrived in wooden canoes from across the sea. As the nearest inhabited island Pitcairn is over 1200 miles to the west they would have had a pretty long journey. The triangular shaped area that was settled by the Polynesian people is bounded by Easter Island in the east, Hawaii in the north and New Zealand in the west.

Easter Island is famous for the huge stone statues or moai found across the island that were erected on stone platforms called ahus. It's believed the moai represented important chiefs from the different tribes. At a certain point deforestation began to occur on Easter Island. Eventually there were no large trees left on the island at all. This meant that the moai could no longer be easily transported from the quarry to their ahus. More importantly large sea faring canoes could no longer be built, effectively trapping the people on the island. By the time the first Europeans arrived on the island on Easter Sunday 1722, many of the moai had been toppled during warfare between the different clans and the population of the island had fallen to about 3000 from a peak of around 10000.

The Rapanui people did not fare very well in the years after contact with the Europeans. As a result of introduced diseases like smallpox, slave raids and forced immigration by the beginning of the 20th century only about 100 islanders remained.

Today there are nearly four thousand inhabitants on the island, including immigrants from mainland Chile. Most of the Rapanui are of mixed descent but are still proud of their traditions learning to speak the Polynesian Rapanui language as well as Spanish. Tourism has also made many islanders wealthy!

On our first day we went on a tour of the main sights of the island. To start off with we saw some ahus that had been preserved with the moai still toppled over. We then went to the moai quarry which was pretty amazing. You could clearly see the shapes in the cliffs where the moai had been carved out.

The quarry area was littered with moai that had been broken in transit. There were also perfectly formed moai that had been buried in the ground at different heights making the whole area look like a surrealist sculpture garden. The most likely explanation is that by the time these moai were carved there was no longer enough wood to transport them to the ahus so they were buried where they stood.

We then went to visit some restored ahus at Tongariki and Anakena where the moai had been placed back into a standing position. It was quite strange to think that people who lived on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere and didn't even know how to make ceramics had gone to such trouble to make these enormous stone monuments.

During the remaining two days on the Easter Island we saw quite a few more moai. We also climbed to the highest point on the island, at the top of the now extinct Terevaka volcano. The 360 degree view of Easter island surrounded by the sea was very beautiful and confirmed that we were in fact in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

One remaining highlight was the bird man village by the side of the Rano Kau crater.
The village was made up of round stone houses with tiny entrances and turf tops with magnificent views both out to sea and into the volcano crater.

The bird man cult became popular at some point after the toppling of the moai. Chiefs of the different tribes, their representatives and the priests would gather at the village at the beginning of spring. Eventually a representative for each chief would climb down the cliff from the village, swim 2km to a nearby island and wait to find the first egg of the sooty tern. The first to return with a egg (unbroken clearly) would win the competition and his chief would become birdman for the next year.

Since we got back from Easter Island we have been relaxing at Hostal de Sammy in Santiago. The hostel is named after the owner´s dog Sammy who sadly died shortly after the hostel was opened. However, they now have a cute puppy called Sausage who was found abandoned on the street outside. The only problem with the hostel is that the collection of DVDs available to watch is so large and the atmosphere so friendly that it´s hard to actually get around to going out and seeing Santiago.

Tonight we are flying to Auckland in New Zealand. We are now half way through the trip and we both feel quite sad to be leaving South America behind as we´ve had such an excellent time here.

Queens of Mendoza

2006-03-12T09:45:00.000-08:00

Quite accidentally we arrived in Mendoza, the heart of Argentina´s wine growing region, just in time for their annual Vendimia (harvest) festival, which made finding a hotel room quite tricky.

Each year 16 girls are elected to represent the different areas of the province of Mendoza. This tradition apparently started when the prettiest girl picking grapes would be crowned Queen of the harvest. Nowadays the 16 chosen girls take part in processions through the streets of Mendoza and after a huge sound and light show in a theatre near to the town the winner of the competition is elected Regina Nacional (national queen).

According to some girls that we spoke to, hardly anyone now wants to enter the competition as winning means having to take a year off college to represent Mendoza. This didn't stop this years winner, Andrea Regina aged 18, (strangely her surname actually means queen in Spanish!) starting to cry and saying that she had dreamed of this moment ever since she was a child.

We quite enjoyed watching the beauty queen parade. The streets were crowded with Mendozians of all ages and booklets were handed out with pictures of the 16 competitors. Each region had a different float to transport its beauty queen on, one float was complete with a live cow in a pen looking on while four dead cows were grilled and steak sandwiches handed out to the crowd.

We managed to get tickets for the grand finale of the competition, which is known as the Acto Central. The theatre was packed with about 20 thousand people with more sitting on the hills above. The first sign we had that it wasn't going to be so fun was when we realized that they didn't sell wine, strange for a party celebrating the grape harvest, and that everybody else had brought a picnic.

The actual show had the theme of Tierra Magica (magic land) and was apparently something to do with nature and grapes acted out in dance and mime by hundreds of people. It was a bit like an Olympics opening ceremony crossed with a school play. Mainly my attention was caught by the painful spectacle of a truck dressed up as a beetle that got stuck on stage for ages, interrupting other scenes, before finally managing to reverse off.

After the show the Queen was elected, which unfortunately involved slowly reading out all the votes that had been cast over a one hour period. Eventually the whole spectacle wound up with some pretty good fireworks and everyone in the stadium joining in enthusiastically to sing their local song, Mendoza, Mendoza, Mendoza...

Ushuaia, nearly the end of the world...

2006-02-28T08:39:00.000-08:00

We are in Ushuaia in Argentina, right at the southern tip of South America, on the island of Tierra del Fuego. Ushuaia is the starting point for cruises to Antarctica and claims to be at the end of the world with lots of souvenir shops selling end of the world t-shirts and postcards.

In reality, the world´s southernmost permanently inhabited town is the Chilean naval base of Puerto Williams, just across the Beagle Channel from Ushuaia on Isla Navarino. The world´s southernmost permanently inhabited settlement, Puerto Toro, is also on Isla Navarino.

But I guess that as the Ushuaian´s aren´t about to start running a regular ferry service to the real end of the world, Ushuaia is as close as most people are going to get.

It certainly has the right weather to be the end of the world. Its really cold with strong winds and this is supposed to be the summer!

Steve and I have been overtaken by laziness and have just been sitting around eating, reading books and trying not to get too jealous when we meet people about to set sail for Antarctica.

Yesterday we went on a boat trip down the Beagle channel where we saw lots of seals, perched on rocky outcrops amongst the moody scenery and sailed past the End of the World Lighthouse.

Steve is now engrossed in Ernest Shackleton´s account of his attempt to visit the South Pole. From the excerpts he has been reading aloud, so far it seems to consist mainly of a blow by blow account of the starving sailors reluctantly being forced to shoot and eat their dogs.

The style is kind of, "Smith poor chap, looked away as I dispatched Lucky with a single bullet to the head. He felt the loss of his faithful companion dreadfully but there was no room for useless mouths to feed. Later we dressed Lucky for dinner, he didn´t taste too bad, quite like beef but awfully tough"

Tomorrow our journey south ends and we fly up to Mendoza in northern Argentina, where it should be a lot warmer.

Torres del Pain

2006-02-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

We have just spent five days walking in the Torres del Paine national park in the south of Chile. Its a very beautiful place that looks almost too magical to be real, the lakes are too blue, the mountains too oddly shaped. In the end we decided it most resembled the films of the Lord of the Rings, so I guess like a digitally enhanced version of New Zealand!

The main access town for the park is Puerto Natales, just across the border from Argentina. A small, cold and windy place set in a beautiful bay it feels slightly gloomy and trapped in the 1950s, perhaps because of its remote location.

In Puerto Natales we stayed in the warm and cozy Hospedaje Gabriella run by a lady in her 60s, who unusually for the owner of a B&B actually seems to enjoy having guests. Over breakfast Gabriella was happy to refute the stereotype that Chileans are more reserved than Argentines, by spending a couple of hours explaining to me her whole family history, illustrated by the black and white photos on the dining room wall.

Having heard that it was impossible to take too much food to Torres del Paine and not wanting to waste money in the overpriced refugios that sell food in the park we stocked up on food in a super market in Puerto Natales.

By the time we added large quantities of pasta, packet soup, dried soya, cereal, mashed potato powder, dried Parmesan, milk powder, hot chocolate, nuts, biscuits, cake, dried fruit and chocolate bars to the tent, stove, cooking utensils, sleeping bags, rollmats, waterproofs, water bottles and warm clothing our packs were seriously heavy!

The next day we set off at 7:00 in a bus going to the park. Our plan was to walk the five day trek which is known as the `W´, due to being approximately the shape of a very large `W´.

The bus dropped us near Guarderia Pehoe where we took a boat across Lago Pehoe to Refugio Paine Grande arriving at lunch time. From here a 13km trail leads up past Lago Grey towards Glacier Grey, the largest glacier in the park. Pretty soon it started to rain and the clouds and the craggy, black mountains to the right made the scenery look very dramatic.

After a not too difficult walk, we arrived at Refugio Grey in the late afternoon. There are six refugios in the park, which are like quite basic youth hostels with hot showers but without sheets or blankets, but that take advantage of their location in the park to charge the same price as a nice hotel anywhere else in Chile!

We had taken the strategic decision to spend the first and last night of the walk in refugios which I was pretty glad of when we got to Refugio Grey, as it was freezing cold and drizzling with a very strong wind blowing. We did however bravely stand outside with our hands going numb preparing ourselves a not very delicious dinner of tomato soup mixed with pasta and soya.

On Day Two we managed to get going at 10:00, which was pretty good for us, though the other people in our dormitory were gone just after dawn. The weather was much better and we started by walking up to Campamento Los Guardas about 4km from the refugio. From here we clambered down some rocks for a wonderful view over Glacier Grey. We could see the whole ice field stretching out into the distance with snow capped mountains behind.

The first stroke of the `W´ completed, it was back to Refugio Grey to pick up our heavy bags and retrace the route of Day One. By the time we got back to Refugio Paine Grande it was late afternoon and in the sunshine Lago Pehoe was gleaming a beautiful and weirdly strong shade of blue.

We took a rest by the lake and had a chat with a middle aged Frenchman who I vaguely remembered overtaking the day before. He had a very large and unbalanced pack, which basically wasn't a proper pack at all but two large rucksacks tied together, and was worried he was too tired to walk the 8km along the lake to Campamento Italiano. After assuring him the walk was supposed to be dead easy and that he would have no problems we set off along the trail.

Soon we could see Los Cuernos, the distintive horn shaped mountains of the middle section of the `W´, rising up in front of us. About half way through the walk I started to feel extraordinarily tired, clearly the result of walking over 20km wearing a heavy pack, and started walking more and more slowly. Now it may surprise anybody who knows Steve from London but recently he has become quite fit and has taken up striding ahead of me on his newly acquired Nordic walking poles. With Steve nowhere in sight I was close to sitting down and starting to cry, when fortunately I spotted him coming back to look for me. Having transferred a sizable quantity of food into his pack I was then able to walk to Campamento Italiano without too many problems.

We set up the tent and just as it was starting to get dark, Steve had a horrible thought. What had happened to the French guy we had given such bad advice to? Should we go back and look for him? Fortunately just as Steve was getting ready to put on his head torch and go back down the trail, the Frenchman came staggering past our tent in the twilight, having gone the wrong way and started heading up the mountain.

As soon as nightfall came it was bitterly cold and there was nothing to be done but get into our tent where I slept in my thermals, fleece, hat, sleeping bag liner and sleeping bag and still didn´t feel particularly warm!

On Day Three we couldn´t be bothered to get out of bed for quite a long time. It was overcast and raining a bit so rather than rushing up the Valle del Frances where we thought the mountains would probably be covered in clouds we decided to stay in our tent and drink hot chocolate. This proved to be rather a good idea as the sun came out shortly after we started our walk at 13:30.

It is hard to describe or even to photograph the beauty of Valle del Frances as it is a kind of 360 degree visual experience. Walking up, on the left is Glacier del Frances. Every now and again a big bang comes from the mountains above and an avalanche of snow flows like a huge waterfall on to the top of the glacier in the most amazing spectacle. To the right are the huge black tipped Cuernos that tower above the valley. Behind is Lago Nordenskjold and in front are black snow covered mountains.

We reached a viewpoint near the top of the valley in the late afternoon. At this point a previously unknown form of summit fever came over Steve and leaving me sitting on a rock eating nuts he headed up a slope to a ridge between the mountains hoping to be able to see into the next valley. Unfortunately after a long climb to the ridge all he could see was another ridge and he was forced to come back so that we could get back to Campamento Italiano before dark. After a bit of speed trekking down the hill we made it back to camp with plenty of time to spare.

Day Four and it was back on with the packs for an 18km walk down Lago Nordenskjold to Refugio Torres. The afternoon was very clear and looking behind us we could see as far back as Glacier Grey.

The scenery was very pretty but the strain of walking for four days was begining to tell and by the time we reached Refugio Torres my ankles and knees were throbbing. At the refugio reception was a sheet with the day´s menu saying that they had tomato soup, salmon with vegetables and chocolate pudding for dinner. At the thought of going outside to prepare mashed potato with cheese we instantly caved into temptation and ate in the refugio. Never has a shower or a bed felt so good. We were soundly asleep by 2030 and not awake again until 0900 the following day.

Day Five was clear and sunny and we could see the Torres, after which the Torres del Paine National Park is named, from our bedroom window poking up behind some black snow capped peaks. With our packs safely stored in the refugio we started the 800m four hour climb up to the Torres viewpoint. The last hour involved a steep climb scrambling over rocks but just when I thought I couldn´t take it anymore the three Torres suddenly came into view, the rock sloping sharply downwards into a beautiful light blue lake.

After lounging around taking photos in the sun by the Torres we began the descent back to Refugio Torres feeling rather smug. We had nearly done the `W´! We passed the Frenchman on the way down, still struggling with his pack but looking rather pleased with himself. He knew he was going to make it too!

So 80km after getting off the boat at Refugio Paine Grande we had made it to the end point back at Refugio Torres, happy but with aching limbs. We still had about half the food left, including despite my best efforts quite a lot of the chocolate!

Next move is Ushuaia back in Argentina and nearly but not quite at the end of the world.

Parque Nacional Los Glaciares

2006-02-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

Parque Nacional Los Glaciares is a national park in the south of Argentine Patagonia, which as its name suggests, has lots of glaciers and also some pretty dramatic mountain scenery.

From Bariloche we flew to El Calefate, a town in the park, with the Argentine military airline LADE. It isn't an experience that I would recommend to a nervous flyer. The plane looked pretty shabby with visible dents and they didn't even bother with the usual safety demonstration!

El Calefate isn't the most charming town in the world but it makes up for it with the nearby Glacier Perito Moreno. While Glacier Perito Moreno might not be the biggest glacier in the park it is certainly very impressive. Our bus took us to viewing platforms opposite the glacier and we also went on a boat trip near to the front of the glacier.

Glacier Perito Moreno looks like a huge, frozen, blue river coming down the hill and finishing in cliffs of ice. The most amazing thing was watching the huge chunks of ice that would periodically fall of the glacier and crash into the lake with a loud bang.

After visiting the Glacier Perito Moreno we traveled up to El Chalten in the north of the park. This tiny town is surrounded by the most dramatic and beautiful mountain scenery. The peaks of Monte Fitzroy and Cerro Torre that tower above the town have cost the lives of many mountaineers attempting to scale them. Fortunately we didn't have anything so ambitious in mind just some walking and camping around the bases of the mountains.

On the first day we walked up to Laguna de Los Tres, which is pretty much the closest that you can get to Monte Fitzroy without climbing equipment, and were rewarded with a superb view of the mountain. The next day we continued to the Glacier Piedras Blancas. By this point it had started raining heavily and the wind was blowing. As getting up to the glacier meant climbing over huge, slippery boulders with our big ruck sacks on we eventually decided to turn back. We retraced our steps to the campsite where we had spent the night and then climbed up to a viewing point on the other side of the glacier where irritatingly we could see that we had actually only been a few meters from the glacier when we had made the decision to go back! Fortunately the sun came out to cheer us up and we carried on down the valley until reaching a campsite and the next day walked all the way back to town.

The highlight of our time in El Chalten however, was undoubtedly our trip to Glacier Viedma, the biggest in Argentina. We approached the glacier in a boat across Lago Viedma which was full of beautiful, blue icebergs. After that we went trekking on the glacier itself. It was the first time that either of us had ever worn crampons and I found the way they made my feet stick in the ice so that I could walk down steep slopes of ice really, really cool. A nice touch of the tour operator was to give everyone a shot of Baileys near the end, made with real glacier ice!

Next we are going to Puerto Natales in Chile where we plan to do some more walking in the Parque Nacional Torres del Paine.

Bariloche and the Argentine Lake District

2006-01-31T14:27:00.000-08:00

We have been staying in Argentine lake district around Bariloche. Its a stunningly beautiful area of lakes, forests, mountains and Swiss chalet style buildings. The only thing that stops it from being picture postcard perfect are the annoying horse flies that live up in the mountains and aren't in anyway detered by our 100% deet repellent.

After spending a night in Bariloche we went straight off on a three day trek from Lago Gutierrez to Villa Catedral. The first day we walked along the lake and up through the forest with our rucksacks. Steve moaned his way through the first day but cheered up on the second when we left the forest behind and arrived at Refugio Frey, next to a beautiful lake in the mountains. The third day was a pretty steep climb with some breathtaking views but also some frightening scrambles over rocks and snow. Eventually we arrived very tired at the Catedral ski resort to find lots of kids playing on sledges in dirty snow, a cafe selling snacks and cold drinks and a ski lift to take us down to Villa Catedral.

Exhuasted we spent a couple of days recovering in Colonia Suiza, a small village on Lago Nahual Huapi, founded by two Swiss brothers and complete with a tiny Swiss style chapel. We also went on a boat trip across the lake to visit the Parque Nacional Los Arrayanes which was created to protect Arrayan trees, which are very weird looking orange and white native trees.

We then decided to go on another hike, this time up from Colonia Suiza to Laguna Negra in the mountains, where we camped for the night. Although the lake was very beautiful it was a little bit of an anticlimax after the dramatic scenery of the area around Refugio Frey. Also there were so many horse flies that we spent most of our time there swiping each other to keep the terrible little pests at bay!

We are now back in Bariloche. The plan is to do yet another hike, around Mount Tronador, and some kayaking before we fly down to El Calafate early next week.

Puerto Madryn and Trelew

2006-01-23T09:46:00.000-08:00

We have just spent a week in northern Patagonia exploring the area around Puerto Madryn and Trelew which is famous for its wildlife.

We met up with some friends Mo and Pete, who we last saw at their wedding in August just before they set off on their own round the world trip. Despite making the arrangements it was pretty mad to have them knocking on our hotel door in Trelew, even stranger to discover that Pete had grown an enormous Brian Blessed style beard.

Trelew is a small town that was founded by Welsh people who emigrated to Patagonia in the 19th century to get away from the English. There is a Welsh village called Gaiman near to Trelew where we went to have afternoon tea and cakes. The cakes were gorgeous but Gaiman didn't feel much like a Welsh village. It´s a small, windswept, little place laid out in a grid and surrounded by the flat, desolate Patagonian plains. We did however have a taxi driver called David Hughes, which isn't a typical Argentine name!

From Trelew we also went to visit Punta Tombo, a nature reserve with around two hundred thousand Magellanic Penguins. Everywhere I looked there were penguins, in fact it was hardly possible to move without tripping over them. The fluffy, juvenile penguins hang around their nests, which are usually either in bushes or burrows in the ground. The adult penguins take it in turns to go to and from the sea to catch fish which they regurgitate into the months of the baby penguins, who fight like mad with their siblings to see who can get the most! You can see the adult penguins waddling down the hill slowly, then diving in under the surf and speeding off like underwater bullets.

One of the things that surprised me was how friendly and inquisitive the penguins at Punta Tombo are. Some of them walk right up to you to get a good look, others hang out in the car park or in the middle of the road. Sadly there were a few tourists at Punta Tombo who seemed unable to understand that they were visiting wild animals. One family brought in a dog, not even on a lead, which terrified the penguins until it was removed. Another man, who unfortunately didn´t get bitten, was trying to stroke the penguins. I think because of this it would probably be better if visitors to Punta Tombo were kept away from the actual nests on a raised walkway. That way curious penguins would have still have the option of coming to visit the tourists, while the others were left in relative peace.

Our next stop was Puerto Madryn, a pleasant seaside town, where lots of Argentines go for their summer holidays. We went on a windy walk down the coast to visit the EcoCentro where there are interesting exhibitions on marine life in Patagonia. The EcoCentro also has a viewing tower with sofas and books on wild life where you can contemplate the ocean and in the autumn see whales in the bay.

From Puerto Madryn we visited the Reserva Faunistica Penisula Valdes on a day trip. There we saw Southern Elephant Seals, Southern Sea Lions, Rheas, more Magellanic Penguins and some crazy looking hairy Armadillos running round a car park.

The most spectacular thing we saw were the hundreds of Southern Sea Lions at Punta Norte at the top of the peninsular. There are constant fights between the huge males over who is going to get the most female sea lions for his harem, nearly squashing the cubs in the process. Apparently Killer Whales (Orcas) are often seen at Punta Norte particularly in late February and early March. There had been a sighting of a group just two days before we visited but unfortunately we weren´t lucky enough to see any.

We have now said goodbye to Mo and Pete, who are back off to England via Buenos Aires and Rio, and we are heading off to Bariloche in the Argentine lake district.

Raining in Buenos Aires

2006-01-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

My first thought when I arrived in Buenos Aires was that I no longer stuck out quite so much as a foreigner because so many Argentines are of European descent.

Unfortunately, I pretty quickly realised that the women here in Buenos Aires are very well dressed. My hiking boots, quick drying t-shirt and kakhi trousers that are supposed to cleverly convert into shorts, make me as obviously a tourist as if I were in a small Bolivian village!

Buenos Aires is not really comparable to European cities like Paris, Rome or London in terms of the sites to see or the beauty of the architecture. There is a pretty area called San Telmo with cobbled streets and antique shops and a tree lined residential area with lots of parks called Palermo. However much of central Buenos Aires is made up of quite ordinary streets and boulevards laid out in a grid, with plenty of traffic and not too many squares or green spaces.

The most fun thing about Buenos Aires are all the cafes, bars, restaurants and shows. There is a cafe on every corner and some of the restaurants look pretty much like trendy places in Notting Hill Gate, Islington or Hoxton in London. The big difference is that you can have dinner with wine here for $10. Argentine wine is really good too!

Before getting to Argentina we had met lots of hungry backpackers in Bolivia raving about Argentine steak and how amazing it is. I dont eat meat, but Steve´s impression is that the steak here is very nice but not actually any different to a good steak in the UK or anywhere else. Maybe it all depends how into steak you are...

We have also been to see some tango. Both the dancing and the music were really good. The traditional cafe we were watching it in felt like it probably hadnt changed much since the 1930s. Surprisingly Steve, who usually hates this type of thing and wanted to leave the one ballet we have been to in the interval, enjoyed it as well. Tonight is our last night in Buenos Aires so I think that we will probably go again.

Our next move is a 20 hour bus ride (this country is huge!) down to Puerto Madryn in northern Patagonia to see some penguins.

Adios a Mexico

2006-01-13T05:14:00.000-08:00

We spent our last few days in Mexico staying in Merida in the Yucatan Peninsular. The most interesting thing we saw was a Mayan site called Chichen Itza which is a couple of hours drive from Merida.

I got quite bad vertigo climbing up the Pyramid of Kukulkán in Chichen Itza. The stone steps go directly upwards without any landings. This seemed ok on the way up, but after avoiding the issue for a while by chatting to other tourists, I ended up by coming back down on my bum.

There is also a large ball court in Chichen Itza where the Mayans used to play their favourite sport. There are faint pictures around the court that show ball game players being decapitated. The information sign says that the winning team in the ball game would gain the honor of being sacrificed to the gods. Personally, human nature being what it is, I bet it was the losing team that got sacrificed. Otherwise it would have been a pretty boring game, with all the players trying really hard not to score!

On the 6th January we got up early to get our flight to Mexico City from where my Dad had a connecting flight to London. Unfortunately it turned out that I had actually booked the flight from Merida to Mexico City for the 1st June and the date printed on my eticket receipt was in American date format (where they put the month first). Fortunately there was still some space left on the plane so it all worked out ok.

Palenque

2006-01-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

We spent a couple of days relaxing in San Cristobal de las Casas before moving on to Palenque. Palenque is a small, modern town surrounded by the Mexican jungle.

This area of Mexico is called Chiapas and has quite a different feel from the rest of the country. There are a lot more indigeneous people and quite a few of the women wear traditional dress. Strangely this includes a furry skirt, which seems ok for San Cristobal but not so useful in Palenque which is hot and humid.

Chiapas is also home to the Zapatistas, a left wing guerilla movement that wants more rights for indigeneous people. They briefly took over San Cristobal in the 1990s before being removed by the Mexican army.

The Zapatistas have now renounced violence and their leader Sub Commandante Marcos has just started a tour of Mexico, due in Palenque the day after we left, according to our bus driver. We spotted a truck full of Zapatistas while taking a taxi ride in San Cristobal. The black balaclavas that they wear dont make them look very friendly!

The main thing to see in Palenque are the ruins just outside of town. Lots of pyramids again but this time many have existing buildings on top. The big difference though, from the other ruins that we have seen in Mexico, is the beautiful setting. The surrounding forest and waterfalls make it a beautiful and relaxing place to be.

On New Years day we went to the Misol-Ha waterfall and then Agua Azul, a stretch or waterfalls and river about an hour from Palanque. Its a brilliant place for swimming and I stayed in for ages. You have to be careful not to go near the rapids though, crosses on the bank mark the places where unfortunate people took their last dip.

We have now reached Merida on the Yucatan penisular which is going to be our last stop in Mexico.

Oaxaca

2005-12-28T10:12:00.000-08:00

We spent Christmas in Oaxaca, pronounced wa-hacker, which is a beautiful colonial town in Central Mexico.

On Christmas Eve after dinner, Steve and I went to midnight mass in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo. Unfortunately the mass actually finished at 23:30 so we just arrived in time to hear Silent Night sung in Spanish and the priest wish everybody a Merry Christmas.

Christmas Eve is the main event in Mexico and walking back to our hotel we could see lots of families in their living rooms sitting down to midnight Christmas dinner.

We stuck to the English way and had lunch the next day by the pool, cooked in the little kitchen attached to our hotel room. Steve made lots of mojitos and by the evening we felt totally bloated, tired and tipsy just like we usually do at home. The Fellowship of the Ring even came on TV in English, for us to veg out in front of.

On Boxing day we went to Monte Alban , a historical site near to Oaxaca. Now if we hadnt been anywhere else like it before, we would have probably thought it was amazing. However to me it seemed a bit like a smaller, less impressive version of Teotihuacan.

Probably Pyramid fatigue is setting in. Similiar to the Cathedral fatigue you get when travelling around Europe, where you walk in to the twentieth stunning cathedral in a row, wander around aimlessly for a few minutes and then decide it would actually be more fun to go and get a cup of coffee.

We are now in San Cristobal de las Casas, a pretty town in the hills with very clear light.

Feliz Navidad

2005-12-22T11:02:00.000-08:00

Well its nearly Christmas now and there are lots of tinsel and people dressed as Santa Claus around in Mexico. However it is quite hard to believe that it can really be Christmas time because it is hot and sunny and not dark all the time.

We spent a couple of days in Mexico City which was a lot more fun this time around.

One of the best things was the Museo Nacional de la Antropologia, which is a really nice modern building in a park in Mexico City. It has a bewildering British Museum sized collection of exhibitions on the peoples of Mexico and Central America before the arrival of the Spanish. There were lots of amazing artifacts to look at but particularly the Aztecs, who used to live in Mexico City, didn't seem particularly appealing. I think this is mainly down to their enthusiasm for human sacrifice. They used to constantly sacrifice slaves and prisoners to their gods, sometimes as many as 20,000 at a time.

We also went to Teotihuacan, a pre Aztec city about an hour's drive from Mexico City. There are two enormous pyramids there the Sun Pyramid and the Moon Pyramid. The only two pyramids in the world to be larger than the Sun Pyramid are the Cheops Pyramid in Egypt and Cholula also in Mexico, which is in disrepair and apparently looks more like a hill.

The whole site was concieved on a huge scale and took ages to walk around. The strangest thing for me was that the Teotihuacan's built the Pyramids first and housing and other public buildings came later. That made me think, what made a group of people, living presumably in wooden huts, decide to build what were at the time two of the largest buildings in the world! Also how did they know how to do it? Maybe time for someone to come up with another alien theory....

After Mexico City we went to Taxco which is a pretty little town on a hill, unfortunately blighted by a serious traffic problem. We stayed in a beautiful former monastery. The local taxis were Beetles which Steve cleverly managed to pack my Dad, me, him, two big rucksacks, three little rucksacks and a big suitcase into.

We are now in Puebla, a beautiful colonial city, where we are relaxing for a couple of days. We are heading off to Oaxaca tomorrow, to spend Christmas there.

Just remains to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Mexico City

2005-12-15T16:53:00.000-08:00

After Arequipa we headed for Nasca on the coast of Peru. There are some mysterious lines on the pampa near Nasca showing pictures of animals and strange geometric shapes. Steve bravely got into a very small airplane to look at the lines, while I stayed on the ground drinking coffee.

There are lots of theories about why these lines were made, as a kind of giant calendar, to request rain from the gods during a drought etc. The alternative theory, by an American, is that the lines, which can best be seen from the air, must have been made by aliens.

Next stop was Huacachina, an oasis in the Peruvian desert near the town of Ica. Its a really nice chilled out place and one popular activity is sand boarding down the dunes. I stuck to going down on my bum which I found quite frightening. Steve went down feet first and wiped out getting a nasty bump on the head!

Then it was good bye to Peru and Bolivia as we flew off to Mexico City. We spent a couple of days in Mexico City, which was dirty and expensive, before heading off to spend some time at the beach in Zihuatanejo on the Pacific coast.

Unfortunately first I got flu and then Steve had it quite badly, so we have spent a lot more time in bed than on the beach! Tomorrow we are going back up to Mexico City to meet my Dad who is coming for Christmas, which should be fun.

Arequipa

2005-11-30T13:11:00.000-08:00

After arriving from Bolivia we spent a couple of days relaxing in Arequipa. It is Peru's second biggest city and quite a cosmopolitan place with lots of nice bars and restaurants. The highlight of our time in Arequipa was a visit to the incredibly beautiful Santa Catalina Monastery.

Founded in 1575 it used to be home to about two hundred nuns and their three hundred servants. None of these women were ever allowed to leave the monastery which is in the middle of the city but surrounded by huge walls. In 1970 the nuns opened the majority of the monastery to the public who were allowed in for the first time since it was built. There is still a corner of the monastery though where the remaining 30 nuns live in seclusion from the outside world.

Walking around all the courtyards, streets and rooms the monastery felt like a small town in its own right, even though in places you could hear traffic noise from outside. There was a really creepy room where the nuns used to be laid out before burial complete with portraits of about 15 nuns, all painted after they had died!

After looking around Arequipa we headed off to the Colca Canyon about 200 kilometres away. The Colca Canyon is one of the deepest in the world and we were planning to do a three day trek. The plan was to descend to the bottom of the canyon on the first day, walk across it on the second day and back up it on the third day. Unfortunately we hadn't factored in Steve's legs!

The first day went reasonably well but by the second day Steve was hobbling along like a wounded dog. We had brought along a guide called Joanna who got into quite a bad temper when she realised we weren't going to be walking fast enough to stick to her preplanned schedule. She didn't actually say anything to us directly she just asked us what time it was every ten minutes and then sighed loudly until we were both ready to nudge her off the edge.

By the second night Steve was barely able to walk from our bamboo hut to the dinner table, so we decided that we weren't going anywhere the following morning, let alone on a 5hr hike up to the top of a huge canyon. To our relief Joanna went back alone that morning leaving us to relax. The hostel that we were staying at, at the base of the canyon, was quite a fun place to hang out with a slightly grubby swimming pool, two cute baby ducks and an amazing view.

In the end Steve´s state forced us to suffer the indignity of having to hire out two mules to take us to the top of the canyon. For a reason we couldn't quite work out the mule owner would only take them up at 3am in the morning. So today we got up in the middle of the night, got on to our mules and started heading up the canyon. To start with I was convinced this was a horrible form of animal torture with the added disadvantage of potentially dropping off a cliff edge. However we realised that our mules were as hard as nails when they started racing each other in a competition to see which one would be in front. Steve hung his head in shame as we passed fellow hikers walking up the canyon the old fashioned way. However, the view into the canyon at dawn was pretty spectacular.

We are now back in Arequipa recovering for a day before heading off to Nasca tomorrow night to see the ancient lines in the desert.

Rurrenabaque

2005-11-24T10:23:00.000-08:00

We spent a week studying Spanish in Sucre at the Academia Latinamericana de Espanol.
Steve learnt how to name many different types of furniture and was given a small woollen llama by his teacher as a birthday present. I watched videos about Che Guevara and listened to my teacher talking about Bolivia´s problems, it has quite a few!

We then headed off to the Jungle in Rurrenabaque. The flight from La Paz was in a 12 seater plane, which felt a bit like being in a flying minibus, but we got some amazing views of the mountains and the jungle. The airport in Rurrenabaque consisted of a grass runway and a hut and the town felt very hot, humid and sleepy.

Our first stop was the Chalalan Lodge inside the Parque Nacional Madidi. In order to get there we had to take a boat for five hours upstream of Rurrenabaque. The further we got from Rurrenabaque the more pristine the forest started to look and we spotted our first Capybara on the river bank. Capybaras are the worlds largest rodent. They live on underwater plants and look like an oversized guinea pig.

Chalalan Lodge is about half an hours walk from the river bank, by the shores of a beautiful lake. It was set up by the charity Conservation International when the national park was created. The local community of San Jose de Uchupiamonas live in a protected area near the park where they have rights to hunt, fish and carry out traditional slash and burn agriculture. The idea of the lodge was to provide the local community with a sustainable way to supplement the income from their traditional lifestyle. It is now run by the local community who take it in turns to work in the lodge and by all accounts has been a big sucess.

Certainly all the staff were incredibly friendly and enthusiatic. After arriving we were given an absolutely delicious lunch and felt more like we had arrived in a luxury hotel than the middle of the jungle.

During our time at the lodge we were taken on walks into the jungle, one lasting five hours, and boat trips on the lake. As well as lots of amazing plants we saw capuchin monkeys, spider monkeys, macaws, hoatzins (a weird looking bird that looks a bit like a prehistoric chicken), bats, frogs, caimans (which are like black crocodiles) and a tarantula. Our closest encounter with the wildlife was when we went on a night walk and the frog we were staring at jumped on to Steve.

On our last night the staff organised a traditional party complete with chicha (a beer made from corn which in my opinion tastes a lot like off milk), coca leaves and a band. The most enthusiastic party goers were the staff themselves who continued long after all the tired tourists had gone to bed!

After our trip to Chalan we headed off on another trip to the Pampas of Yacuma. This is an area a few hours by truck from Rurremabaque which is mainly grass and swamp land. The same types of animal live in this area as do in the rainforest but because there are fewer trees they are easier to spot.

One of the reasons why the area is not rainforest is because it is grazed by cattle. For me one of the strangest things in the jeep on our way to and from the Pampas was seeing domesticated animals like cattle and horses along the road. Then spotting wild ones alongside them including an armadillo, a sloth and a pair of ostrichs.

Our lodge was alongside the river Yacuma. It was nice enough but this time there was no chance of mistaking it for a luxury hotel! The wet season had got underway and all the swamp land in the Pampas at this time makes it a perfect breeding ground for mosquitos. Despite wearing 50% deet insect repellent all over my body and wearing long trousers and a long sleeved shirt and putting 50% deet insect repellent all over my clothes and hair I still managed to get about 250 bites, as counted by Steve. Our guide explained to us that in the height of the wet season in January he has tourists that come for a three day trip and are begging to be taken back after two!

However the wild life that we saw made the trip definately worth it. It felt like we had been transported to a kind of animal Disney Land. In boat trips along the river we saw more Capybaras including a whole family with baby ones. We saw loads of Cayman, Bolivian Cocodrilos, Turtles and many types of birds.

The most friendly animals were the pink and grey dolphins that live in the river and seemed almost to be showing off around our boat and the Squirrel monkeys who came down to see if they could get anything to eat. With the shyer animals though, we did end up feeling a little like animal papparazzi. Our guide would often ram our boat into the shore causing whichever animal we were looking at to make a quick exit while we tried to photograph them.

We were taken to fish for piranhas. I thought that as I eat fish it would be hypocritial not to join in the fishing but felt rotten after catching a catfish and watching it slowly suffocate to death. In the end no one caught any piranhas but we caught five catfish which we ate for dinner. On the way back on the river in the dark there were so many fire flies that the whole sky seemed to be twinkling.

On our last morning we went to a road in the grass lands behind the river to look for an anaconda. Our guide joined forces with another guide, leading a group of Japanese tourists, to improve his chances of finding one. Eventually they found a baby anaconda, which was still impressively large. We were all looking at the anaconda when one of the Japanese tourists in a shocking example of ego (as opposed to eco) tourism decided to kick the anaconda sending it slithering off.

After our trip to the Pampas we flew back up to La Paz and then went on to Copacabana near Lake Titicaca. Unfortunately our 30 day Bolivian visa was nearly about to expire so after stopping briefly we got the bus on to Peru. At the moment we are in a town called Arequipa in the south of Peru where we plan to relax for a few days.

Tupiza

2005-11-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

We were still in Tupiza, the town in southern Bolivia mentioned last time, on 2nd November which is the Catholic holiday of all saints day and a big event here. It seemed like everyone in town got dressed up in their best clothes and went to the cemetery to put flowers on the graves. Outside the cemetery there was a big party going on with stalls, food, drink and music.

The next day we went horse riding in Tupiza which was really good fun though my backside is still suffering as a result. They have great wild west style landscape around the town and the horses were really calm apart from when mine was chased by three dogs and went for a bit of a run.

After Tupiza we went to Potosi which at 4100m is the highest city in the world. It was built at such an inhospitable location because of the mountain next to it which had huge silver deposits. The Spanish brought local people from all over the Andes to work there as slave labourers and as a result both Potosi and Spain became incredibly rich.

There are still local people, including children, who work in the mine even though the average life expectancy for a worker is apparently only 15 years because of accidents and lung disease. Strangely the most popular tourist tour, which didn´t appeal to me at all, is a trip down into the mines crawling on your hands and knees and breathing in the toxic dust.

The reason that we were enthusiatic about going to Potosi was the amazing Spanish colonial architecture mentioned by our guidebook. What it didn´t mention was that all the colonial architecture would be covered with grafitti and falling to bits and that it would be possibly the most filthy city in South America.

Both Steve and I took an instant dislike to Potosi and so after looking at the old Spanish Royal Mint, which was really quite interesting, we moved on pretty quickly to Sucre.

Sucre is the offical capital of Bolivia (in case any one ever appears on Who Wants to be a Millionaire and it comes up) even though the government and most other things usually associated with the capital of a country are actually in La Paz.

So far it seems like a really nice town so we are planning to spend a week here taking some Spanish lessons.

Bolivian White

2005-11-01T11:47:00.000-08:00

We arrived in Bolivia last week. First stop was the capital La Paz. It is a city with a pretty dramatic setting, in a valley with huge snow capped mountains around. There is nothing particularly exciting to do in La Paz, but it has a good atmosphere and is a nice place to wander around. There are loads of markets and stalls with indigneous women selling things.

Our next stop was to Uyuni to visit the Salt flats and the Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina. We went on a three day trip in a jeep with four other tourists, the driver Carlos and the cook Marianna. Marianna was the only cook we saw dressed in the traditional Bolivian way, with a bowler hat and plaits down to her waist.

On the first day we went out on to the salt flats. The salt flats near Uyuni are the biggest in the world with an area of about 12000 m2 that used to be covered by an enormous prehistoric lake. We drove to a catus covered island in the salt, Isla del Pescado, and climbed to the top. From there all that you could see was this white salt desert that looked like snow in all directions.

The area around Isla del Pescado seems to attract lots of different people. Apart from the expected tourists there was a film crew and group of dancers dressed like Incas (except in very short skirts) recording a music video in the middle of the salt. There was also a ballerina being photographed dancing around and some one doing a headstand by themselves, presumably just for fun.

At the island we sampled Marianna´s cooking for the first time, which was quite nice if you didn´t eat the meat, and discovered that the best way to spot our jeep from a distance would be to go to whichever one had the bonnet up.

After lunch we drove out of the salt flat to a small village to spend the night. On the way we saw some vicunas, a small endangered wild relative of the llama that looks like a deer and has beautiful wool.

The next day we drove into a strange high altitude desert with bizarre rock formations. We went to several lagoons where there were lots of flamingos eating algae, proving that flamingos don´t just like warm places like Florida. We also saw some Viscachas which look pretty much like rabbits until they move, when you see that they have long tails and hop like kangaroos.

The second night we went to stay at a basic lodge inside the National Park at Laguna Colorada, a bright red lake at 4500m, which two of our group fell into to.

In the morning Carlos woke us up at 5:00am in the freezing cold to go and look at some Geysers. Unfortunately the jeep wouldn´t start so Carlos decided to unfreeze the engine by starting a fire with paper under the bonnet. That got it going for a bit but when it stopped again he got the gas cooker off the top of the jeep. At that point forseeing the headline, six tourists plus cook die in explosion, we got out of the jeep. It turned out though that Carlos just wanted to remove a piece of the engine and heat it on the gas fire rather than sticking the fire itself under the bonnet. Strangely after that the jeep did get going again.

The geysers at 5000m (the highest we went) were really spectacular and after that we went to some thermal pools where I defrosted my feet. Then it was on to Laguna Verde (green due to natural arsenic deposits apparently) and up to the Chilean border. At the border we droped three of the group off before driving back to Uyuni. Altogether a pretty amazing trip.

Today we came down to Tupiza a town right in the south of Bolivia near the border with Argentina, that is surrounded by desert that looks like the wild west. We are planning to stay for a couple of days before heading north again.

Machu Fleece-you

2005-10-22T15:51:00.000-07:00

We went to look around Machu Picchu today. Its probably the most famous tourist attraction in the Andes.

Machu Picchu is an Inca city that was abandoned after the Spanish conquest and lay hidden under the jungle until it was rediscovered by an American at the begining of the 20th Century. As the Spanish didn´t know about it they didn´t have the opportunity to deliberately knock it down, so it is in a lot better condition than most of the other Inca remains!

Incredibly Steve and I woke up at 5am this morning to try to see it at dawn before the tourist hordes. Only to discover about 200 people queuing at the bus stop already to go there. It was definately worth the early start though. The setting is really beautiful with cloud forest all around and you get a really good feeling for what the city would have been like.

However if anything could detract from Machu Picchu then the industry that has sprung up around it would. It seems calculated to get the most money out of you while annoying you as much as possible. Half way through the day we went to try to get a coffee at the cafe near the site only to discover that you had to buy a ticket for a minimum cost of $24 per person before being allowed through the door. Not great if trying to travel on a budget.

The town near the ruins Machu Picchu Peublo is also a pretty dispicable place. It is a kind of shanty town for tourists where you can be over charged for inedible pizza in many different locations and thats about it.

Next move is to Bolivia!

Stone Me

2005-10-16T19:34:00.000-07:00

Weve been in Cuzco for a few days now and have been overwhelmed by how clever the Incas were (apart from the fact they never discovered the wheel!). If you ever want a patio laid, call an Inca, they dont need cement and the gaps between the stones are 100ths of a mm wide.
Were off to Manchu Pichu in a few days time, mud slides permitting, but will be taking in more ruins and some incredible looking salt terraces in the mean time.
Adios

On to Cusco

2005-10-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

Went on two really good walks in Huaraz though we weren´t brave enough to camp out as it rained most evenings.

The first walk was up to some ruins at Wilkawain. It´s a pre Inca temple near Huaraz. Nobody knows that much about it but its built out of stone on three floors and is still in surprising good condition. The strange thing about it is that the doors are tiny and the ceilings very low almost as if it was designed by very small people. Nowadays local children act as guides. I assume because they have a lower risk of bumping their heads.

The other walk we went on was from a village called Liupa then on to the boundary of the national park at Pitec. We were then supposed to go up to a lake called Churrup at 4500m. We started by getting a communal bus to Liupa at 7am and walking from Liupa to Pitec through some really beautiful countryside. At Pitec we were at 3900m and completely out of breath so it seemed infeasible that we would be able to climb any higher. The mountain that the Lago Churrup was on was also covered in cloud so we decided to wimp out and walk up the valley instead.

Even that high up there were still some indigenous indian villages where people seemed quite suspicious of strangers. Steve got into trouble with an Indian women for taking a picture of her sheep. Past the villages we went into the national park and the scenery looked like it hadn´t changed since the time of the dinosaurs. There were snow capped mountains on either side and a valley floor covered in big boulders. We saw two condors flying across the valley.

Yesterday we flew to Cusco. The flight there was pretty spectacular with great views of the Andes. Cusco is in a valley surrounded by mountains so the plane has to make a really rapid descent in order to land.

Cusco used to be the capital of the Inca empire and is very pretty. It looks almost like an Italian city and has lots of little streets and cafes. It is a massive contrast to the other two Peruvian cities that we have seen. Huaraz isn´t unpleasant but was rebuilt in the 1970´s after being knocked down in an earthquake. Lima is pretty unattractive, not sure specifically what went wrong.

Steve is in bed with a stomach upset so hasn´t seen much of Cusco yet. However he is starting to feel better so we should be taking a good look round this afternoon

Huaraz

2005-10-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

We´ve arrived in the mountains in a place called Huaraz. We´ve been walking around in our new gortex raincoats pretending to be hikers and drinking cups of tea in cafes while we acclimatise and work out how to use our GPS. Tomorrow we are going on our first walk. Unfortunately it has just started to rain.

Bienvenidos a Lima

2005-10-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Just arrived in Peru safely after a long and tiring journey.

After getting a pretty good nights sleep we were eventually woken by the sound of a demostration outside the front of our hotel. On inspection there were dozens of riot police with shields and battons lining each end of our road keeping everything in order.

There is also a large tortoise in our hotel walking down the corridors.

Just heading off to the the museum of the Spanish inquistion (Lima was the South American inquistion headquarters for nearly 500 years). Plan to go to the mountains soon.

Bread and Poses

2005-09-30T05:03:00.000-07:00

Thanks alot to eveyone for coming to see us off last night, was a really good evening. I've attached a few pics just to remind some of you that you were there incase you're having trouble filling in the gaps....

Last day at work

2005-09-28T01:17:00.000-07:00

Its my last day at work today.

So as I have already lent out my laptop for the year that means that the next post I make will be from somewhere much more exotic.

Steve moved all the things out of our flat yesterday. I actually think it looks much better (and larger) with out so much in it.

Not sure how happy my dad and stepdad are though, as all our junk is now cluttering up their houses instead....

Arquitecto

2005-09-20T02:44:00.000-07:00

Steve passed his Part III exams yesterday so is now officially allowed to call himself an architect.

Its a really good thing to get sorted out before we go away and means that he never has to take any more exams again.

Start

2005-09-15T02:35:00.000-07:00

Less than three weeks to go until we head off, getting quite excited but have a long list of boring things to complete first.

Steve's bridge in Wembly has started going up after a bad start when the crane broke. You can see it in the photo

The current plan is to go to

Peru-Bolivia-Mexico-Argentina-Chile-EasterIsland-NewZealand-Australia-Singapore-Malaysia-Thailand-Japan-China-Mongolia-Russia-Finland-Hungary

We are expecting to be away for 11 months