Ben and Laura's Awesome Blog (BLAB)

Category: Mega Trip 2010

  • Extra Pictures

    Here’s a collection of pictures that didn’t make it into the blog (until now!):

    China

    Shanghai skyline
    Another great wall photo
    ‘Forbid to beam on’ notice on Beijing underground platform

    Mongolia

    Sitting in a ger
    Standing in a ger (yes, that is the front door!)
    The last gers we stayed in
    ‘Much Freshest Deep’
    Hot milk and a biscuit in Ulaan Baatar
    The 11 hour wait on the train to cross the Mongolia-Russia border…
    Continuing to wait
    Near Olkhon Island in Russia!
    The ferry to Olkhon Island

  • Kaaaaaaahn!

    Though our trip around Mongolia was mostly about seeing the landscape and meeting the locals it’s pretty hard to travel around Mongolia without hearing about Genghis Kahn, the founder of the Mongol empire which caused so much trouble in China, Russia and Europe (he’s actually called Chinngis Kahn here and as he’s Mongolian I think we should go with that!)

    He’s a national hero here and most of the family gers we’ve visited had a large picture of him hung in a prominent place near the place of honour. Even our hotel in Ulaan Baatar has this one hung up in the breakfast room:

    Most of the biggest mountains we visited have a story of Chinngis kicking some enemy’s butt there, usually against the odds because he was apparently so awesome.

    The view of him from nearby countries seems to be mainly that he was a trouble maker with a bad habit for massacres. Though I think every leader worth their salt at that time had a few massacres in their repertoire so it’s not too suprising. Mongolia itself has been the victim of a few in recent history (the Russians took it on themselves to destroy all the temples and massacre all the Lamas they could find during their recent occupation.)

    We also discovered how the Mongolians got through the Great wall of China and it’s pretty simple! They just rode at it quickly on horses throwing dirt at the bottom until they’d made a ramp to get over. Genius!

  • Squat Thrust

    Warning – this post may not be suitable for anyone who doesn’t like reading about toilets!

    I think it’s about time that we acknowledged that Mega Trips aren’t just about the sights, people, animals and food. They’re also about the toilets.

    The hotels we’ve stayed in so far have all had western style toilets but, venturing out, almost all the other toilets in the cities are squat ones. I’ve used these before but have always been a bit sceptical about them. However, after some practice (and some tips which Hannah in Uganda passed onto Laura while we were there – thanks Hannah!) I’ve decided they’re actually pretty functional and probably more hygienic than their western style counterparts as public toilets. Laura disagrees and thinks that if you’re going to go to the trouble of making a flushing toilet you might as well go the whole way and add a seat.

    Once we went into the countryside any large rock or mound was fair game while we were on the road or camping. The tourist camps we stayed in for a couple of nights had western toilets and even showers, but we spent most of our nights in gers owned by families which usually came with a drop toilet (and no shower or running water). A drop toilet is an, initially deep, square hole in the ground with a couple of planks to stand on and anything from a small fence to a very basic shack around it. Some of them even had doors though most didn’t and the doors that were there were often just lying on the ground nearby. As a result, most of them had pretty impressive views! Like these:

    Fortunately, once you’re used to the squat toilets the transition to drop ones is pretty painless.

    My most memorable toilet based experience so far happened at the family ger at the White Lake. This particular toilet had only three small fences around it so offered little protection from the elements. It had spectacular views of lightly frosted mountains in the distance and the rolling grassy plain leading up to them. Just below the mountains were some gers with smoke from the stoves rising out of their small chimneys and not far to the right the clear waters of the lake lapped against the shore while nearby horses ate the grass.

    Having got up early one morning I went to relieve myself in the morning twilight. At that moment the sun peeked over the top of the mountains in front of me and I witnessed a truly incredible sunrise. It just didn’t seem right to be squatting there as the sun rose above the mountains and their shadows crept across the grassy plain, and I realised just how incredibly beautiful my surroundings were. Fortunately, just at that moment a nearby horse relieved itself too, and I didn’t feel so bad after all.

  • Mongolia Highlights Part 2

    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.

  • Mongolia Tour Highlights Part 1

    So we’ve made it back from our trip into rural Mongolia! It’s been quite a trip. When Khishgee (said as ‘Hish-key’), our guide, turned round from the front of the truck to us just after we set of holding a large bag of non-descript meat and said “sheep head meat?” we knew we were in for something special! We were initially a little hesitant (unsure if we were looking at a bag of brains or not) but she was having none of that so we all ended up having a piece and agreed that it was actually pretty tasty.

    The culinary highlight of the trip was watching Ulyiibayar (he liked to be called ‘Byra’) our driver blowtorch a marmot for lunch outside the van after the traditional method of stuffing it with hot rocks and waiting an hour or so had failed to cook it sufficiently. That was also tasty (it turns out blowtorching meat has pretty much the same effect as barbecuing it).

    Apart from Byra and Khishgee our companions were Florian, Amy and Katrina who were all from Australia. The small group size meant that we fitted into a single truck. The truck had a forward and a backward bench seat in the back with only 4 seat belts. This meant the forward facing middle seat, which someone had to take each day, had great views but also involved a certain no seat belt risk element. We thus named this the Seat of Scenic Death.

    We spent most of our first day driving to a monastery. The asphalt roads quickly gave way to full on dirt tracks. It had been raining and was pretty bad conditions for driving, though Byra and his wonder truck (an awesome Russian built mega off-road version of a VW camper van) made short work of it.

    We looked around the monastery and a monk told us a story about the fourth Bogd which I found very confusing. Apparently his father had been killing people to put his feet in their stomachs, but fortunately the Dalai Lama was on hand to point out that this wasn’t appropriate behaviour. There was also a Stupa next to the monastery which we climbed. Though it wasn’t really clear what that was actually for, it was a building on the top of a hill which is always fun. Our guide told us the monks had recently held a festival which apparently involved a lot of rice, sweets and vodka which were all over the monastery and stupa making it look more like they’d had a massive house party! She also said the monks had to clear it up now.

    We spent the next couple of days driving to the White Lake. At the end of the first day Khishgee asked where we wanted to camp and I jokingly pointed to the top of highest hill in view. Khishgee and Byra took this as a challenge so we all headed off to the top of the mountain in the wonder truck to camp! They decided to put the tents below the top. It seemed like a good idea to be shielded from the wind but did mean we were sleeping at a 20 degree angle, sideways.

    Near the White Lake are some extinct volcanos which last erupted about 10,000 years ago but look like they only blew up a few years ago. We climbed to the top of one and looked into the crater at the top. Then we had milky tea with meaty dumplings in while an eagle sat and watched.

    We then stayed at the lake for two nights. It was a beautiful setting. We stayed in a family ger which is a large round tent made from wood and felt. It was very cold by the lake, especially at night, but we had a stove which made our ger toasty warm.

    While we were there we rode some horses to some nearby caves. I called my horse ‘Boris the Horse’. We had an understanding that if I let him eat grass a lot he’d do what I asked most of the time. Laura enjoyed riding the horses a lot and wants to ride them when we get back, but then she also wants a ger…

  • China

    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!

  • Monky Business

    We’ve spent the last 4 days in Ulaan Bataar. The capital of Mongolia which no one seems to be able to agree how to spell the name of (in Latin characters anyway). There isn’t too much to do here, our guide book stops at 2 days, so we’ve been to ALL the museums here (apart from the one that doesn’t exist) and seen all the sights within walking distance that aren’t on our tour which starts tonight.

    Fortunately there are two english movie channels and our hotel room looks out over a monastery so we’ve been spending the rest of the time on Monk Watch (while watching bad films). Even after 4 days we still haven’t worked out their routine. Sometimes they line up, sometimes they slide down the slope outside the monastery (and look very pleased with themselves) and sometimes they even form a line and walk around the perimeter of their monkdom humming. The rest of the time they spend in the main building or just moseying around outside. We just never know what they’ll do next, or if it’ll be something we haven’t seen yet. Anyway, they are much more entertaining than the films we’ve been watching!

    We’ve also discovered a very nice vegetarian restaurant that puts all others to shame! Everything we’ve had there has been really tasty.

    From what we’ve seen so far and (via the museums and city) Mongolia has recently (in the 90’s) emerged from a long period of occupation by the Chinese and Russians to from a democracy and is currently enjoying a period of growth in the cities (there is building work going on all around). Mongolia’s population is only a few million and the country is massive! Ulaan Bataar is a pretty small place (about a million people live here) and a lot of people who live here actually live in gers (traditional large round tents used by Mongolian nomads to live in which can supposedly be fairly easily moved – though judging by the size of them I think it’s probably still pretty hard work!) in what seem to be pretty smart shanty towns around the outskirts.

    About half the population lives outside the cities as nomads moving their (large!) gers around with their grazing animals so they get fresh pastures. That’s what we’re going to see for the next 10 days along with some pretty spectacular scenery. We’ll also be in the territories of Gobi Bears and Snow Leopards though i doubt we’ll be lucky enough to see either of them. I also doubt there’ll be wifi so there might not be any posts for a while!

  • Journey to Mongolia

    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.

  • The Great Wall of China

    Today we visited the Great Wall of China. We took a 2 hour bus ride from Beijing to the foot of one of the parts of the wall which is open to the public. We took a chairlift up to the wall (because we’re lazy) and then decided to climb the steepest part of the section of wall (because we didn’t think it would be as steep as it actually was) and took a toboggan ride back down from the wall (because we’re EXTREEEME, at least until we got stuck behind the definitely not extreme really slow person about half way down!)

    The wall itself is massive. It’s about 12 metres high and 6000 miles long (of course we only saw a small section of it) and was built over 2000 years ago by emperor Chin and was renovatedand extended during the Ming dynasty about 600 years ago. The bit we were on is only 600 years old (apart for the bits that were built in the 80’s while it was being restored). At the very end (at the top of so many steps…) it met up with some of the mega old wall which hadn’t been restored. That looked very old and overgrown.

    The wall was built to keep out the barbarians in the north (so it’s a bit like Hadrian’s wall max) in this case the people to the north were the Mongolians (known as the Huns at the time) who ruled in China for a long time after the wall was built so I guess it didn’t work.

    Apparently the original (Chin dynasty) part of the wall took 1 million people 20 years to build and at that time the population of China was only 5 million so it has to be the biggest failure ever! Though our guide seems to think that they wanted to stay is just an example of how awesome China is!

    Mongolia is our next stop so I’m looking forward to hearing how they did it…

    P.S. Sorry if the numbers are incorrect. The population of Shanghai seems to vary from 16m to 27m depending on who you ask so you might need to look it up and apply the same error margins! Maybe someone should comment with the real one?

  • Mao and me

    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!