Beijing, China

Monday to Thursday, 16 - 19 October 2006

We stay at the Leo Hostel which is on a market street near Tiananmen Square. It's a full-on sensory experience: lined with neon lights, kitsch shops (with loadspeakers blaring Chinese pop music and mantra-like special offers), pungent food stalls and piles of people, cyclists, rickshaws and cars, all noisily trying to muscle their way through, with the pedestrians coming out the worse for wear mostly. Inspired by Katie Melua's masterpiece "Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing", we decide to take a step up the food chain and rent out bicycles to tour the city. Beijing is a wealthy city, the showpiece of the People's Republic of China. There is alot of construction going on and it is obvious that the city is being given a face-lift before the 2008 Olympics.

Tiananmen Square is not much more than a big square but it attracts thousands of mostly Chinese tourists, many of whom come to visit Mao's Mausoleum. Having already seen one waxy Communist corpse (Lenin), we give this a skip. We look forward to the tour of the Forbidden City (home to 24 Chinese emperors), not least because we have been told that Roger Moore narrates the audiocassette walking tour. Things have moved on since the last print run of the guidebooks, as a lady with a Chinese/American twang has replaced 007. Maybe he fell foul of the old rule that, as a man, you had to be a eunuch if you wanted to enter the Forbidden City. The current entry fee of Eur 6 is pretty reasonable by comparison. The Forbidden City is a labyrinth of palaces with loopy names like "The Palace of Earthly Harmony, Peaceful Equilibrium and Tight Buns". Our favourite spot in Beijing though was the Summer Palace, the summer retreat of the imperial court, which is a bit outside of the city and has beautiful gardens overlooking a lake.

Leo Hostel offers a tour to the "Secret Wall", a bit of the Great Wall which is less tourist-ridden. We sign-up for this and spot the name "Paudi O'Se" on the list of people going. Sure enough, our minibus is almost 100% Kerrygold. The stretch of the Great Wall we visit is off the beaten track. It is less well-maintained than the popular spots and alot of the steps are in rubble making the climb precarious in spots. The views from the watchtowers are spectacular though and you can imagine frostbitten Chinese soldiers looking nervously out over the ranges below for their nasty neighbours, the Mongols.

One of the nights, we take the plunge and go to the Donghuamen Yeshi night market to sample a bit of the local cuisine. It's a 500 yard stretch of food stalls offering such treats as deep-fried scorpions and millipedes. The vendors shout all sorts of things to grab your attention: "hello", "you like squid", "real snake" and "I love you". As our VHI policy doesn't cover extreme sports, we avoid eating the creepy crawlies. With full bellies, we decide to take a rickshaw home. Our driver is a heavily-built fellow who heads off in the wrong direction up a hill and huffs and puffs until a scrawny guy who has been circling around nearby offers to take one of us to lighten the load. Our suspicions are aroused and we ask how much this will cost. We are told "three yuan" (about 30 cents) but take this to mean thirty yuan (3 Euro). We should really have called a halt to things when they take a diversion into a hutong, a maze of old alleyways and slums. They start pointing at bits of rubble and saying "old house". Finally they mutter something to each other and stop in a dark street nowhere near the hostel. They demand 3oo yuan for the 10-minute trip. We insist on 30. They produce a laminated card with a price list on it, including 300 yuan for a "Forbidden City Tour". Not only did we not see this before; we went nowhere near the Forbidden City. We have been scammed and refuse to pay. They block our path, light-up cigarettes and the stand-off goes on for a while. We manage to negotiate down to 150 yuan but have learnt to be a little less trusting of the very smiley rickshaw drivers.

For more photos of Beijing click here.

Ulan Bator, Mongolia and Trans-Mongolian Railway, Ulan Bator-Beijing Leg

Monday to Sunday, 9 - 15 October 2006

We stay at the "UB Guesthouse". The mattresses are like concrete and every crevice in the place has been converted into some sort of room but the staff, headed by the dynamic Korean owner Mr. Kim, are very helpful, arranging tours and train tickets.

Ulan Bator is a bit of an eyesore. As the Mongolians are a nomadic people, the site of the city moved about alot until it fixed on the current spot in the 1700s. With the way the city is treated, it looks as if it might move again: stray goats graze everywhere and the suburbs look like an ever-expanding landfill. The Tidy Towns Awards Committee hasn't visited any time recently.

The Mongolians are a very friendly people though and there are a couple of places of interest: the Gandan Monastery, with a 26 metre high Buddha as its centrepiece, houses the Buddhist University of Mongolia. Here you can do 4 year bachelor degrees, including one in chanting!

We do a day trip to Hustai National Park to see the "Takhi" horse. This horse disappeared in the wild 30 years ago. It has since been successfully re-introduced from captivity into the park. The park is 100 km from Ulan Bator and the hostel arranged for a guy to drive us there. We set off in high spirits, humming the air of "My Lovely Horse". Little did we realise that we ourselves would be threatened with extinction before the day was out. Our driver's nickname in Mongolian sounded like "whiskey" and he drove like he had drunk a gallon of it. We zig-zagged at breakneck speed through Ulan Bator's morning rush-hour - coming within inches of hitting dozens of pedestrians and a few breakfasting goats. On reaching the open road, he kept up a speed at which the engine of his Hyundai sounded like a hairdryer in great pain. He had to slow down a bit when we reached the park - it took us two hours of driving around dirt-tracks and squinting through binoculars before we spotted two of the Takhi (there are over a hundred in the park). For wild horses, these two didn't move much. At least it made it easier to get them on camera.

For the rest of our time in Mongolia, we stay with a family in a "ger" camp in Terelji National Park. The "ger" tents and camp are fairly basic - the toilet is not for the faint hearted: a wooden hut with a few planks over a very dark and very smelly hole in the ground. Civilisation is not too far away though. The "Genghis Khan Golf and Country Club" is a mile from the camp. The green fees are astronomical by Mongolian standards - $50 for 18 holes. This is a bit rich for our blood. As if to prove that members' clubs are the same the world over, when we ask could we walk the course for free, a committee member clad in a salmon-pink polo neck and tartan pants a few sizes too small, snorts and gives us a very stern "No". Revenge is sweet though, as we use the pristine toilets of the country club for the next few days.

The scenery there is spectacular - alot of Eastern European film makers have used it to film cowboy movies - and, much to Leahanne's joy, we do a bit of pony-trekking. The saddles used by Mongolians are different from those used in the western world and don't appear to be designed for sitting on as they immediately cut off the circulation to your arse - the arses of the ponies are alive and well though as they fart machine-gun-like for the whole of the trek. "Columbia", the head of the host family (socalled because of the yellow Columbia T-shirt he wears every day), can't speak much English but is a good communicator. There are a couple of Americans staying in the camp and, on learning this, he describes a recent flying visit by George Bush to Mongolia. GWB's war against terror does not impress Columbia as he concludes, with a sweeping thumbs-down gesture, that "George Bush bad".

We make our last big train journey for a while on Sunday: Ulan Bator to Beijing. At the first station in China, each carriage is lifted so that the bogies of the train can be changed (the Russian railways have a wider guage than the Chinese). The Chinese bogie-men work to the tune of the Vienna Waltz and the Bee Gees' hit "If You Leave Me Now" blaring from loudspeakers. We're not in Kansas now.

If you want to see more photos of Ulan Bator click here and more photos of the ger camp click here.

Trans-Mongolian Railway, Irkutsk-Ulan Bator Leg

Saturday to Monday, 7 - 9 October 2006

The train journey to Ulan Bator takes 2 days. We share a cabin with Marina, a Russian lady. In spite of the language difficulties we get on well - having seen our 3 consecutive meals of cream crackers and Russian Easi-Singles cheese, she takes pity on us and gives us a mammoth roll of salami, insisting (by way of head-shaking and casting-of-eyes-up-to-heaven) that we take all of it, as we clearly needed it more than her! We try to return the favour by offering her the only edible thing in our food stash - a Ritter Sport chocolate bar - but she must think that we are on the poverty-line as she politely refuses.

The journey itself is unremarkable. However, the 6 hour border-crossing between Russia and Mongolia is a fitting farewell by Russia's bureaucracy to the tourists it has befuddled for the last few weeks. 5 of the 6 hours consist of complete inactivity by the customs and border officials, only to be then followed by a uniformed hurricane of cabin-searching, form-perusing and document-stamping. On the Mongolian side, the whole procedure takes about an hour.

Irkutsk and Listvyanka, Russia

Tuesday to Saturday, 3 to 7 October 2006

Irkutsk is sometimes described as the "Paris of Siberia". We are not sure why as we have yet to see a single beret or baguette. Perhaps it's because the pitched battle between the crowd and the maniac taxi drivers in front of the train station looks like they're trying to re-create the storming of the Bastille. Having opened up a flank to get to the tram stop and managed to squeeze ourselves into the fourth sardine-tin that passed by, one lady started pointing and screeching at us when she spotted our backpacks. We understood none of this but the other passengers seemed to think that this was nothing out of the ordinary. This tirade went on for about a minute until she had vented enough commuter-fury and resumed quietly reading her newspaper. A very Parisian dressing-down for us!

Apart from this, Irkutsk is a pleasant place to stay and feels very different from big Russian cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow. Alot of the houses are still old-style Siberian log cabins and we do a "homestay" for one night with a Russian family. The lady of the house is called Gala, proudly telling us that this was the name of Salvadore Dali's Russian wife. The room we stay in is surreal enough: it is ruled over by a cat which stubbornly refuses to be moved, and has a loud droning acquarium with some very inquisitive tropical fish. So the night was spent in alternate staring matches with the fish and the cat. Gala does a great breakfast though, complete with monster Russian blini pancakes, so all is forgiven.

To see more photos click here.

We also spend a few days at Listvyanka, a village 60 km from Irkutsk which looks out onto Lake Baikal. The lake itself is fairly remarkable - it is larger than Belgium (which may not be saying much), and on its own, could provide drinking water for the world for the next 20 years. Definite table quiz material. The village is very scenic but there is not a huge amount going on - in fact, there is a real Fr. Ted Crilly Craggy Island feel to the place: on more than one occasion we have passed a local standing idly by the roadside staring at small rocks and returned an hour later to find them still at it.

We stay in a log cabin hostel and bump into alot of tourists - everyone we meet now is doing the same route: Siberia, Ulan Bator and Beijing. These include Jean, an English lady in her late sixties, who is doing the Trans-Siberian trip on her own. She is a real character, has a great booming Home Counties accent and tells us about all the "simply splendid" people she has met on her journey. She toured Ireland once in the 1960s in a Spitfire convertible so we don't think Siberia should pose any challenge for her.

Until our last night in Listvyanka the weather is balmy 0 degrees celsius. Then a storm whips over the lake, the temperature drops 10 degrees, the power cuts out and we see our first snow in Siberia. I wouldn't like to be here in December - temperatures go down then to -50 degrees celsius.

We return to Irkutsk to stock up on Pot Noodle and get on the train to Ulan Bator on Saturday night.

To see more photos click here.

Trans-Siberian Railway, Moscow - Irkutsk Leg

Saturday to Monday, 30 September - 2 October 2006

We get on the Rossiya train on Friday night, with a 4-day, 5000 km journey to Irkutsk ahead of us. This is the longest time either of us has spent on a train. The dilemma is between having a 2-berth cabin to drive each other beyond the edge of reason, and sharing a 4-berth cabin with two wild-eyed cross-dressing axe-murderers with personal hygiene issues. We opt for the 2-berth cabin.

The cabin is plusher than we expected and even has a TV. We are now avid fans of Russia's reality TV show "Celebrity Dancing on Ice" and are devastated to find that the TV, like 1 in 3 household appliances we have tried to use in Russia, is banjaxed. Each carriage has two bathrooms. However, there are no showers so, by Day 4, we look, and Dara smells, less than fabulous.

We get one meal a day as part of the train ticket. The kitchen door was left ajar one day to show the chef: a huge shaven-headed bulldozer of a man who likes to cook wearing just his y-fronts. "Pierre" does not do haute cuisine but the food is generally good until we get hit on Day 3 with a delightful ensemble of unidentifiable fish battered to within an inch of its life, watery smash potato and some kind of sauerkraut that has been stewing since Lenin was in short pants.

Next door to our cabin are an English/Australian couple, Phil and Vicki, who are moving to Perth, Vicki's home town. P & V have come prepared and have a decent bottle of vodka (unlike the blinding moonshine sold in the dining car) which we share. We swap stories about the various mini-calamities we have had on the journey through Russia so far - as always, it's good to hear that other people are in the same boat as ourselves!

We hop off the train to stretch the legs at grim industrial towns with great names like "Balyezino" and "Perm". We are disappointed to find that Perm isn't some sort of 1980s theme town inhabited by shoulder-padded, big-haired extras from Dynasty. Generally the train stops for 20 minutes but we have heard stories of travellers stranded in the middle of nowhere when the train leaves a few minutes ahead of schedule. At most stations babushka swarm the platform to sell souvenirs and food (dried fish, sweets and, when Pierre has an off-day, the lifeblood of any traveller, Pot Noodle).

We arrive in Irkutsk on Tuesday morning. We're a bit train-lagged (the local time is five hours ahead of Moscow time) but have really enjoyed the few days.

To see more photos click here.