Category: Laura’s posts

The last few days of our travels were a hectic trek across Europe by boat, train and bus. We took a incredibly scenic ferry from Bergen to Hirtshals in Denmark, which we were both able to enjoy as the water was calm. It was full of people just getting from A to B, so we had the deck and the views of the fjords to ourselves most of the time.

We didn’t see much of Denmark, except a small house where Hans Christian Anderson may or may not have lived (the tourist information office says yes, the man himself said no), but we saw even less of Germany (a darkened station when we woke up in the night).

As we were in Denmark for less than a day (on our way to board the sleeper train through Germany to Amsterdam) we attempted to survive with no currency, thinking we could just pay by card. I’m fairly sure I never have any cash in the UK, but it turned out to be nearly impossible. We got around the bus fare by persuading the driver to take Euros (we’d only ended up on the bus by following the crowds of boat passengers like sheep anyway) and the first train by accidental fare dodging. We still didn’t take the hint and find a cash machine, but were eventually defeated by cash-only pay for toilets.

When we arrived in Amsterdam (St Petersburg’s older, scruffier, more studenty sibling) we realised that, in comparison to Norway, everything was ON SALE! Our primary occupation was walking around commenting on the price of things (“this is very pretty… hey, did you see the prices on that menu?!), with eating a close second (“This waffle is only 1 Euro! Lets eat it! Even though we already feel sick from all the other bargain food we’ve eaten!”). We also spent a while admiring the world’s most narrow house (3 1/2 feet) until we noticed the residents smirking at us from an upstairs window, and went off to eat more bargain food.

We made it back to the UK by completely subverting the Hull-Rotterdam P&O mini-cruises. This system is not designed to be used by one-way backpackers and it’s nearly impossible to find the bus stop to get the Amsterdam-Rotterdam transfer, and when you do get to check-in they are baffled by your lack of outward ticket. The north sea was, of course, a bit choppy so we tried to distract ourselves in the onboard cinema. Unfortunately we saw Robin Hood, which had a surprisingly large number of shots of seasick crusaders crossing the channel.

We were greeted by my Mum and Dad, who we waved to manically from the deck of the boat while all the mini-cruisers out for a smoke looked on in bemusement.

The task of writing a blog about the Hurtigruten ship, which we are taking from Kirkenes to Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands, has fallen to me because Ben has been largely a) seasick, b) drowsy or c) seasick and drowsy while we have been on board.

Before anyone worries too much, though, Ben is really OK now. He’s even off the drowsy medication. It was just the first day (1 of 3) when he was unwell, and then yesterday I just woke him up to feed him, if we were somewhere particularly picturesque, or if we were at a port and had time to look around.

The Hurtigruten runs up and down the extremely scenic Norwegian coast from Kirkenes to Bergen, and is a cross between a ferry and a cruise-ship, depending on whether you are a Norwegian trying to get somewhere or a retired tourist doing a two week return journey with fancy meals included.

I think we have been unlucky because when we first got on the ship they were announcing warnings over the speakers, cancelling meals and drawing pictures of terrified seasick people to illustrate the weather forecast printouts.

We are travelling on the smallest ship of the fleet, MS Lofoten, with only 150 berths, to reduce the cruise-contingent and because we were late in booking by Hurtigruten standards! This has also reduced the amenities (notably, no stabilisers…) but it’s exciting to be on such a small ship. When we pass Hurtigruten ships going in the other direction they tower over us like skyscrapers.

Yesterday we visited the northernmost point in Europe, Nordkapp or North Cape, and joined The Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society, something which can only be done in Hammerfest, the world’s most northerly town. Neither of these are quite what they seem.

Nordkapp is forced to qualify its claim by saying ‘mainland’ Europe, because otherwise Svalbard, last stop before the Arctic, wins hands down. So it was quite surprising to discover it is on an island which has only recently been connected to the mainland via a 7km tunnel. And, in any case, it turns out the next peninsular along is slightly more northerly, as the British Explorer who discovered it a few hundred years ago made a mistake (he was also aiming to get to India, so all in all the trip was not a great success). Anyway, as the actual northernmost point is inaccessible to cars and so is quietly ignored. Nordkapp is, nonetheless, very beautiful and we were there at dawn to see a gorgeous sunrise.

As for the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society, it was founded in 1963 so it’s actually rather recent!

Since we last blogged we’ve also been staying in a little wooden cottage in a small place in Northern Finland, Inari, where we learned more about the local Sàmi people, who probably came from Mongolia about 8000 years ago. This wasn’t a big surprise as you don’t encounter all that many nomadic, animal-husbandry enthusiasts living in circular tents these days.

We went on a boat trip on the beautiful Lake Inari (pleasingly pronounced Inari-yari in Finnish) and hiked to a wilderness church built in 1752. It was quite amazing to find a wooden church in the middle of a meadow surrounded by dense forest, and the hiking facilities were quite something. As well as regular shelters/toilets and marker posts along the trail, there were day huts with cooking facilities and wood-burning stoves, and even a sauna! The marker posts were so frequent that we started trying to find spots where you couldn’t see one. This almost invariably went “I can’t see a post! – oh no, wait, actually I can see one… no, two”.

We also went to Kirkenes museum and discovered that Norway had also been quite thoroughly screwed over in WWII. I don’t think we can take any more recent history museums and can quite authoritatively state that pretty much everyone was miserably screwed over. We can confidently state that the whole of northern Scandinavia was utterly destoyed, and perhaps this goes some way to excusing Santa for the sorry state of Santa Claus Village.

Since we left the UK we’ve been having encounters with all sorts of people. Apart from meeting Michael the Wonder Guide in Xi’an, the encounters with people outside the tourist industry have been some of the best.

Here’s my Top 5, in ascending order:

5. The Russian woman on the train from Irkutsk to Moscow

I’m sure some of the Trans-Siberian trains are touristy, but we were the only westerners on that one and seemingly no-one spoke English. My longest encounter was late at night with a woman outside the toilet. She said many Russian words and did quite an impressive mime. Sadly, it was lost on me… But I did establish the important part was something to do with kicking the toilet door.

4. The Mongolia little girls in Sukhbaatar Square, Ulaan Baatar

They came up to us on our first morning in Mongolia as we sat watching some brides in large dresses pose in front of Chinggis Khan.

The first couple of times they ran up, giggled and ran away. The next couple of times they ran up, we said hello, and they ran away. I then consulted the guidebook and attempted the Mongolian for hello, which caused a good 10 minutes of hysterical laughter. Eventually Ben detected a ‘bonjour’ through the laughter and we managed a few minutes of conversation in French. Aged about 6, their French was better than ours.

3. The Russian family on Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal

Mum, Dad and daughter, about 8, were visiting Olkhon Island at the same time as us from nearby Irkutsk.

We visited a number of beautiful, steep, treacherous cliffs where the little girl repeatedly (so it seemed to us) ran a very high risk of falling to her death. This was of course fine – except when she decided to walk along with us, chatting merrily in Russian, before climbing steep cliffs, chatting merrily in Russian, and not coming down, chatting merrily in Russian. At one point she showed us some large rocks she had hidden in her pockets, and I don’t think they were improving her balance.

Fortunately her parents caught up eventually, and told us they once found kilograms of rocks in their overweight holiday luggage. Happily she only gave us a small rock to remember her by.

2. The Chinese teenage girls in Shanghai

They were visiting Shanghai for the Expo and wanted to practice their English when we were all sightseeing on the riverfront.

They explained which province they were from, and because we didn’t know where it was, told us it was where the Shaolin Temple is. ‘Ah yes’, we said, but they were not convinced we had really heard of it. ‘Shaolin monks’, they said, ‘ah yes’, we said. ‘Kung fu’, they said, ‘ah yes’, we said, but they were still unconvinced. Eventually one of them said ‘Bruce Lee!’, and they believed us when we said we had heard of him.

1. Nikita on the tram in Irkutsk, Russia

We met Nikita as we attempted to cross Irkutsk with all our stuff. We were the only westerners on the tram, and the only ones Nikita had ever seen on an Irkutsk tram. He’s studying science at the local university and was on his way to a birthday party with a guitar on his back. This turned out to be a birthday present which he and his friends had clubbed together for and then disguised as Nikita’s own guitar to surprise the birthday boy. What a nice guy!

When we told him we were from London he said “wow” and when we told him Ben’s name he said “woooow” and looked astonished. Still not exactly sure why.

We’ve just had a fantastic few days in my new favourite city Moscow, and a pretty good few days in St Petersburg (where I spent quite a lot of my time trying to forgive St Petersburg for not being Moscow).

To do St Petersburg justice, it is a beautiful, grand, aristocratic city with lovely buildings in pastel shades and picturesque canals and bridges. Even the sky looked a sophisticated shade of grey. And there were quirky cafes and restaurants and some frankly crazy concepts (like the gym in a large mock pirate ship across the river from the Winter Palace).

But it was all just not quite Moscow! A bit less quirky, a bit less cool, a few less potential secret service agents for Ben to follow round…

Moscow’s architecture was spectacular. The Kremlin is amazing, especially with the large numbers of military uniforms wandering around. And Stalin did some terrible things (and we spent a stomach-churning, heart-breaking hour at the Gulag Museum learning exactly how terrible they were…) but he certainly had a way with towers and the ‘Seven Sisters’ are spectacular!

And best of all is St Basil’s, which is the most insane, fabulous example of religious architecture, and surely the only cathedral in the world to take it’s primary inspiration from an ice-cream sundae.

And everywhere you go there are quirky bits of graffiti and art, and wacky shops and cool cafes. We spent a brilliant few hours at the Art Muzeon where, alongside the modern statues there are a lot of old Soviet statues of Lenin and Stalin and general Communist propaganda!

The sculpture park was overlooked by an incredible statue of Peter the Great dressed as a pirate, which is described in the guidebooks as controversial but which is actually quite wonderfully hideous and truly in the ‘worst paaassible taste’ (But you couldn’t help but love Moscow for it. No half measures. If it’s going to be tasteless, it’s going to be The Most Tasteless. And huge. So huge. At first we thought it was a Gorky Park ride. It is so much bigger than everything else it has aircraft warning lights on the top).

And last but not least, there were brides and weddings everywhere! This goes for St Petersburg and in fact Irkutsk and Ulaan Baatar too, but Moscow takes the lead because it has the most brides, the biggest dresses (although this was a tight contest and all the dresses were enormous) and the brightest red stretch limos. The newly-weds go on photo tours around the city in their red stretch limos, sometimes with entourages including accordion players, stopping at a range of city locations. Some of were quite normal – St Basil’s, the Kremlin – but they also included statutes of revolutionary heroes and The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow (which has a giant stone soldier’s helmet and a three foot flame on it).

Here’s a St Petersburg bride:

Best of all was the padlock bridge, which we stumbled on as we were walking to Art Muzeon. Overlooked by Peter-the-Great-as-Captain-Hook, the happy couples attach a padlock with their names on to the bridge or to a metal sculpture of a tree and throw the keys in the river. Then they have photos, drink champagne and drive off in their stretch limo. At one wedding we saw the bride’s older sister and her husband posing for photos with their padlock, which was buried under layers of new padlocks.

We’re now in Helsinki, which is pretty good so far because it’s the only place where we’ve splashed out on a decent hotel!

Lake Baikal holds a lot of records – the world’s deepest lake (holding 80% of Russia’s freshwater and 1/5 of all the unfrozen fresh water on the planet), world’s oldest lake, the only lake with it’s own species of seal. I am going to go ahead and award it ‘most beautiful lake’.

It is genuinely breathtaking and it is not at all possible to do it justice with photos or words, so I think you’ll all just have to brave the Russian visa system. It has infinite shades of blue stretching off to the horizon and it changes every hour. In the sun the deep parts of the lake turn an inky purple, and it’s so clear and flat you can see the reflection of the clouds. We went out yesterday in weather that can really only be described as drizzle – and it was otherworldly.

We are staying on the lake’s biggest island, Olkhon, where the dominant religion is still Shamanism, and it is not hard to understand why.

The people here are Buryat, closely related to Mongolian, and lots of aspects of the culture are the same. Most people in the region (though not on Olkhon) are Buddhist and the same piles of rocks and ribbons on trees are everywhere.

There is a tiny Orthodox church though, with church bells on a wooden stand just outside, and when we went out to see the sunset a few minutes ago a man was ringing a series of discordant and slightly eerie peels. The lake had a thin layer of bright white mist across it, and the shores were gradually fading into midnight blue.

What could improve a location like this? Well, a species of utterly delicious fish found only here and served at all meals, and an incredible, wooden, fairytale hostel/village with towers, fountains, crazy buildings and carvings everywhere. And for Ben, large numbers of extremely friendly dogs and cats, including two kittens and even (yes, really) a puppy!

So Ben finished at our horse ride at the White Lake. I will let you all in to my secret method of getting a good horse. When they are dishing out the horses, look very alarmed, ideally frightened. This encourages them to give you the best horse, after which time you can smugly plod along with a horse which obeys left, right, go and stop, while everyone else gets stuck in bushes with horses trying to bite each other!

If you can look frightened enough, you can even get the best camel later in the trip! This is a huge bonus, because the camels are certainly taller and less stable, and seemingly rather less keen on being ridden. As they are controlled through their noses, who can blame them?

Ben called his camel (can you guess?) ‘Boris the Camel’ but sadly their bond was not as strong as the bond between ‘Boris the Horse’ and Ben. Trouble set in when Ben wobbled Boris’ hump. Boris was not amused, and gave Ben a look of terrible disappointment.

We rode the camels to the sand dunes in the Gobi just before sunset, which was a magical experience. Climbing the enormously high dunes wasn’t in itself magical – more sweaty and snotty and hard work – but the view from the top was utterly breath-taking.

Another spectacular Gobi experience was seeing the Flaming Cliffs at sunset, when they really do glow with a fiery red light.

The wonder truck really took us everywhere. We went 3000km without passing a fence. We saw waterfalls and canyons and amazing rock formations which were originally created on an ocean floor. We stayed in gers of all sizes (but not all shapes, round being pretty much your only option) with their own individual quirks. Quirks like beds made of everything from boards to springs (mattresses not included) and a whole variety of animals from spiders to guinea pig sized unidentified rodents!

We met lots of lovely families who welcomed us with Mongolian tea (tea, milk and salt), biscuits, yoghurt and snuff. In return, we desperately attempted to abide by the terrifying list of ger etiquette we were presented with on the first day, including such gems as:

– Do not put one leg over another, or people will think you are looking down on them.
– Women cannot sit in the place of honour.
– Do not pass the place of honour while going out of the house, therefore you pass clockwise by the side.

(As we were not given details about what or where the place of honour was, this was made all the more stressful!)

– If one gives praise to the wife, the husband dislikes it and the wife feels ashamed.
– Never put your hat upside down or place it on the floor. A man or woman’s hat represents his or her fortune.
– Do not whistle inside gers. If we whistle a whirlwind will come and destroy our home.

(Ben whistled in a ger twice. Fortunately we don’t really have a home at the moment!)

Mongolia is really on the cusp of change. After a century of upheaval and yoyo-ing between China and Russia (and we saw the detroyed monasteries and heard about the massacred lamas as a result of this) 40% of people, maybe more, still live traditional nomadic lives. But in the last ten years the nomads have started to have vans, satellite dishes and solar panels. After 20 years of democracy life is getting harder in the cities because prices are rising, but it’s hard to know if people would return to the land… But even in the grounds of the biggest, poshest houses we saw, there was a ger or two.

Now we’re safely in Mongolia it seems like a good time to recap on some of the more negative elements of our stay in China. Of course we knew about the human rights atrocities and the corruption and the lack of freedom of speech… But it was still rather disconcerting to come face to face with the system.

In Tiannamen Square our local guide welcomed us and quickly told us we should not take photos of the (ubiquitous) police and military presence, and that we should not under any circumstances take photos if any ‘re-education’ had to be carried out. As we were confused, he helpfully acted out what ‘re-education’ could entail with a mimed left hook! Shortly after that, his every word was monitored by some mysterious Chinese attendants. He mentioned the ‘student uprising’, and said facts were confused, but that was is certain is that the square is a place for peace now.

We met an amazing young guide who told us he hadn’t found out about Tiannamen Square until a tourist on one of his first tours told him. He told us about the corruption in the education system (doing well does not guarantee good grades for the children of those outside the party), the ins and outs of joining the communist party and the wonders of Chinese news. He was pretty inspirational and I hope he turns 23 a free(ish) man still.

With another guide we had a bizarre conversation about Facebook, where he claimed it wasn’t ‘exactly banned’, just no-one used it and it had a less than 10% market share! As it is in fact banned, we think any market share is pretty damn impressive. It was also slightly distressing to have all the warning messages on our iPhones which essentially said: everything you do is being filtered through China’s firewall.

And back to the wonders of the aptly named CCTV (China Central Television, or something like that). We were able to enjoy this through their English language channel, so I can confirm for myself that every half hour news programme contains ten minutes about how great China is, ten minutes is about how crap the rest of the world is, and ten minutes of sport. It’s not lies, it’s just a terrifying distortion of the truth.

One thing for sure is that China is not a communist country, it’s just a dictatorship. It’s a capitalist dream! Every brand you can think of, everywhere, all the time. Practically every person we saw in the three cities was dressed to saunter down Upper St on a Saturday afternoon (though Xi’an wasn’t quite so trendy). The UK’s welfare state is far far closer to communism than anything there. And in Shanghai we were told something astonishingly like the American dream… This is where poor men come to get rich, and where millionaires risk their millions for billions!

We’re spent the last two days on the train from Beijing to Mongolia. In Northern China there was wilderness but you never went for too long before coming across a power station or a factory, and once a wind farm covering miles. Mongolia though, was nothing but vast plains (extremely flat even by Lincolnshire standards!) and eventually some gently undulating hills, with the occasional white yurt and herd of wild horses.

Ulaan Baatar is an extraordinary and unexpected city, emerging from the wilderness with suburbs of yurts and wooden houses. Even here in the centre, glass skyscrapers are overlooking yurts and tarmac roads are disappearing into piles of sand (with the well dressed urbanites of Ulaan Baatar walking over them in high heels and smart clothes!).

Our window overlooks a Buddhist monastery – this is it at dusk, but all the monks have gone inside.

Here we are in Starbucks Beijing, amongst the endless high street shops and conspicuous consumption (though you may be pleased to hear the Starbucks in the Forbidden City has been closed), on our iPhones, surrounded by people with iPhones. The facebook app isn’t working though…

We had an interesting visit to the Forbidden City and nearby landmarks today but more on that when we get to Mongolia.

Mainly though, we have been eating and eating, and learning to cross the road. This is a complicated business requiring considerable courage and excellent spacial awareness, so needless to say I would probably be hospitalised by now without Ben. You weave between the traffic, picking gaps which allow traffic to pass in front and behind you! Like Frogger.

I think Ben mentioned our insane five-hour Xi’an bike ride but he didn’t mention my favourite part, when the bemused stallholders in the market gave up trying to sell anything to us and started haggling to buy the bikes!

And we’re off. It’s been a crazy week of packing and planning and packing and, did I mention packing? But we’re now at the airport with a hilariously small amount of belongings in comparison to the two van loads residing at Big Yellow storage!

Also, Ben got green food colouring all over himself and had to set off with wet trousers. But that’s another story.

Next stop China!

P.S. Edited to add some menus from the flight!