Radio Free Suncheon

2007-11-02T03:18:00.000-07:00

Day 154 - ? (going to have to open up my older notebook to find out the day-count)

And now, a brief recap of Syria.

Damascus: The walled old-town here is wonderful. Old stone buildings seems to lean towards each other blocking the sun from reaching the cobblestone alleyways that lay between. Formidable walls hem the area in from the modern capital of Syria and the remnants of what was once a very exotic hustle and bustle linger still. I'm sure that in the distant past there was a different way of life here - that people lived whole lives entirely within the walls.

The Damascus souk (market) is nice also... a sprawling mall of a marketplace.

Ate dinner twice at "Rosini" and nice fake Italian restaurant. Mia and I shared pasta and pizza way too often for my waistline to handle.

Qunetera: I visited this ghost town with Mia and one other Japanese fellow. It's a ghost town in the Golan Heights, originally captured by Israel in the six days war and liberated by Syria in the Yom Kippur war. Destroyed wholly by retreating Israeli forces in the latter conflict it now lies in ruins, abandoned and tainted by land-mines. Despite that danger, a few shepards graze their animals in the fields around teh city sight.

The Crac Des Chevallier: A few hours north of Damascus is this awesome crusader castle. One of the finest castles I have ever seen, it's a feast for the eyes and the imagination, with walls, towers, turrets, a moat.... well, all of that castle stuff. A true highlight of any trip to Syria.

Lattakia: Further north is this hip college town. Not much to see (just a few decent beaches and a middling museum) but it's neat to witness the presence of so many "hip" and "progressive" minded Syrians. Very few Burqas around here - mostly just revealing tops and skin tight jeans.

Aleppo: Further north... again. Much more conservative around Syria's second largest city. But it's a nice town, with a great old citadel and a decent museum. The Christian old town and the souk are similar to what is found in Damascus, but strangely enough they both seem a bit more touristy.

A note for travellers: the Spring Flower Hostel IS as horrible and creepy as the lonely planet suggests it is. Women travellers should avoid it at all costs. If you do stay, make sure to lock your doors: staff WILL come into your room at night for a peek. This warning goes double for Asian travellers.

2007-10-13T04:15:00.000-07:00

Day 153

As you (who?) know, the online journal found here consists of excerpts from my paper journal. It's almost the same as the paper one, except that I (generally) excise all of the personal, emotional stuff. Some shit's private, right?

So, um, I think I'll excise ALL of Syria and post some sort of synopsis here instead. Look for that in a few days.

2007-10-13T04:01:00.000-07:00

Day 152:

The Jordanian people seem very proud of the stability that their country enjoys. There is, here, a longstanding and benevolent monarchy. There is stable governance and economic growth, despite Jordan's relative lack of oil. Indeed, Jordan is a better place to live than many of it's oil rich neighbours. Jordan has also been blessed with some amount of empty space... it's a rather large country, with a rather small population. Things are not crowded here, nor are they overburdened as they are in Egypt. I've noticed, also, that many Jordanian people look down on the fundamentalism found elsewhere in the region (Iran, especially). For good reason.

So, yeah, I'm in Syria now. I got in! I didn't think that I would, actually: visitors are officially required to apply for a visa in their home country, something that was impossible for me to do. But... I just showed up at the border, paid my 56 bucks and thirty minutes later I was on the road to Damascus.

There is one quirk of middle eastern travel that all backpackers know: if you have an Israeli stamp in your passport, you will be denied entry to a host of Islamic countries (namely Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, Qatar, UAE). There was a lady in line behind me who was forbidden entry for that reason. Curiously, she did NOT have that stamp, bur rather officials pointed at some residue from a sticker that was peeled off of the back of her passport. Odd, that.

I spent my first day in Damascus, the Syrian capital, wandering the street of the old, walled, centre of town. Nice winding alleyways, cobblestone streets and tenth century mosques. I saw Saladin's final resting place, a nice complement to my visit to Kerak castle a few days ago I think.

2007-10-13T03:43:00.000-07:00

Day 149, 150, 151

I love it when a plan comes together.

Ahem.

My original plan, to follow Petra, was to spend a day and a night at each of Sarnok castle and Kerak castle - two old crusader castles north of Wadi Musa. Following that, I planned to spend three nights in Amman and then move on to Syria (or Lebanon or Turkey or Israel or whichever country would issue me a tourist visa). But instead of sleeping at those castles, I found a taxi driver who was willing to take me all the way to Amman and was willing to stop and wait for me while I explored each of those castles for a couple of hours. Thusly, I managed to shave two days off of my journey! Fourth months ago I wouldn't have CARED about two nights, but now I am anxious to visit friends in France and then get back to Canada before November sets in.

Those two castles, by the way, were wonderful to visit. The pyramids and even Petra were amazing and awe-inspiring and all of that, but visiting a place that I have spent some time studying (university, yo) is intellectually stimulating. I don't really know who the Nabateans were, nor do I really know what the ancient Egyptians were all about, but I have a pretty decent idea of what the crusaders were up to.

Of the two castles, Kerak played a larger role in the history of the region. It was there that Reynald of Chamblay (wikipedia, yo) commanded his armies and where he died while under seige by the armies of Saladin, whose prowess in battle sealed the fate of all of the crusaders. Today the castle is a crumbling affair, though restoration continues and visitors can clearly see walls, rooms, churches and towers. It's a very photogenic place, and I snapped a few nice pictures.

The fort was built in the early 12th century, I think and was captured by the Muslim armies towards the middle of the 13th.

Curiously, I was interested to learn that the Mongols plowed into the middle east around 1260, around the end of the crusader period here. Truly, in the 13th century, the entire world found it's way to the holy land.

While Kerak has more history (and more restoration work), Sarok castle was much more FUN to visit. This was mainly due to the fact that Sarok has an ESCAPE TUNNEL that visitors can crawl through. Indeed... despite my claustrophobia, I made the 20 minute trip down into the bowels of the earth.... in pitch dark, aided by a flashlight. And fuck, man, REALLY FUCKING SCARY. The crusaders didn't fuck around when it came to digging escape tunnels. Making my way deep into the ground was the scariest thing I have ever done, probably.

Anyways: the tunnel eventually exits at the base of a hill, rather far away from the castle.

Yikes.

I'm at the "Sultan Hotel" in Amman. Like I said, things have really come together. This hotel is great, and my taxi driver put it all together for me, arranging a great price. I'm paying about nine dollars for a great double room with a private bathroom, satellite TV and hot water. That would have cost me 15 or 20 bucks had I tried getting it on my own.

I've visited some of Amman's ancient sights, including a restored Roman Theatre (looking exactly as you might expect) and a pair of small folk museums built in the wings. I spend my evenings here watching BBC world and "Tyra," my new favorite talk show. Ever.

(also: I spent nine bucks chasing a Poste Restante letter from Jennifer all over town. And you know what? I found it. I love it when a plan comes together.)

2007-10-12T04:45:00.000-07:00

Day 148:

"Are they your wives?"
"Nah..."
"I have FOUR wives."
"That's a lot of wives. Are they pretty?"
"No, not any more."
"Oh"
"My father had SEVEN wives."

Is that even allowed?

I spent another day at Petra, gawking at some tombs, monuments and the like. Again, all carved into the cliff side of a hidden and impossibly striking valley. Well... I don't even know if valley is the right word... some of the sight resembles the Grand Canyon, some of it is just a stretch of land hemmed in by rocky hills and mountains.

I'm no doctor, folks.

2007-10-12T04:31:00.000-07:00

Day 147:

D asked me a while ago if I am awestruck when seeing the "wonders of the world..." if I am bowled over.

Sometimes, I said. Not at the Great Wall - it's overly reconstructed and fake. Not really at the Taj Mahal - it's just not that interesting. A little bit, maybe, at the Potala in Lhasa. The natural wonders of the world, generally, are what do it for me... the occasion of staring into the Nile, and up at the peak of Mount Everest are the events that have struck me sideways. Likewise, laying in the sand dunes of the Gobi counting shooting stars by the dozens left me senseless for a week.

I'm at Petra now. It impresses as both a natural and man made wonder. Carved into the sides of a hidden valley are dozens of temples, tombs, palaces... and even simple storerooms and stables. All of it is more than two thousand years old.

It's all stunning. The approach to the sight - a 1.2 kilometer defile - is a sort of canyon, with impossibly high sides, incredibly far from the sky above is incredible. It's like walking through the grand canyon, perhaps, with the expectation that something BETTER is to come. And something even cooler does arrive... at its end, the canyon deposits visitors at the steps of the Al-Khazneh, an impressive facade carved, like everything else here out of the pink sandstone of the cliff side (and yeah, you might recognize the sight from that Indiana Jones movie that was filmed here).

And, well, pictures are necessary in order to describe the rest of Petra. There is the Al-Khazneh... and it IS incredible, and then there are fifty more sights just like it down the road: a 7000 seat theatre, the "Great Temple," and most impressive of all, "Al-Dier" - a massive monastery some 50 feet high into the cliff. Everything is so MASSIVE, indeed.

Anyways. Got up nice and early and took a minibus to get here. Arrived around eleven am. The town surrounding Petra is called Wadi Musa. I found a clean and quiet little hotel without too much difficulty and negotiated a fair price. I'm going to spend tomorrow making a second visit to Petra. I'll leave here the day after tomorrow... I hope to visit a couple of crusader castles to the north. I've decided that there will be no DAWDLING in Jordan.

2007-10-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

Day 146:

I dig Jordan!

Though I paid extra to get on the "fast" ferry to Jordan, going was slow last night. I think I finally made my way through customs on the Jordanian side around seven pm... about five hours late.

But no worries: Jordan is quite nice. It's fairly more developed that Egypt, which makes it cleaner, and more hassle-free. Things are a bit more expensive here, however.

I'm in the city of Aqaba, which is Jordan's only port town (check your atlas, yo). I think that Lawrence of Arabia spent some time here back in the day. It's a quaint town, with only a token few sights for the tourists. I, of course, visited every last one of 'em. First up with the "Ayola" (??) ruins, an archaeological excavation of some old city buildings and temple ruins. That was such a neat "roadside attraction," not much to see - just the outlines of some old walls, and a camel tethered to an explanatory sign - but the roughly two acre sight has a little path that one is supposed to follow, complete with signs that provides a sort of commentary. I found all of it so "small town" and so damn cute.

Next up was Aqaba Castle. Little more than a ruin now, the sight does have some neat history behind it. Originally a crusader castle, it was one of the southern most fortifications that the crusaders built. Eventually abandoned by the crusaders when they were chased out of the regions, it was built up again by the Mamaluks, who held power in the middle east in the post-crusader period. The castle stood for some centuries after that, eventually being destroyed by allied shelling in the first world war. Now restored (a little bit) a Hashemite (The Jordanian royal family) coat of arms adorns it's main entrance.

Nice little history, that. Empires come and go. Castles remain, it seems.

Beside the castle is a small community museum. Like the ruins, it is very quaint and cute. Adorably, so of course... someone is trying really hard to make something interesting with very few resources. The museum reminds me a bit of the Dartmouth Heritage Museum back home, actually; inconsequential, but appreciated nonetheless.

Interestingly, some of the archaeological exhibits at the museum were created by people from the University of Victoria - there has been a Canadian dig north of the city ongoing since the 1980s.

I spoke to my father on the telephone today. We spoke about how nice it is to visit seemingly "inconsequential" cities... places like, say, Saskatoon. I referenced all of those silly cities I spent time at in "Chinese China" between Xi'an and Xinjiang. It's those places that have a real "sense of nostalgia" to them. Though not of consequence, they are places that are very important to the people that live in them. And that makes all the difference.

2007-10-12T04:04:00.000-07:00

Day 145:

Sometimes my Lonely Planet hits on the perfect word. Case in point: it describes the departure procedures at the Nuweiba port as "Shambolic." A perfect word! Damn it, but I think that the greatest accomplishment of the western world is our development of the concept of "lining up." Her in Egypt, as in EVERY OTHER COUNTRY I have visited so far, no one possesses any queuing mentality, but rather a mentality of pushing, yelling, shoving and butting ahead whenever possible. Eeek.

I'm on the boat now. We haven't yet departed. I'm not really sure why. I think that I have inadvertently sat down in the "women and children" section. Whoops. But anyways: the voyage to Jordan should only take an hour.

There is a nice restaurant in Nuweiba called "Dr. Sheesh Kebab." Nice food and nice staff is found there. Everyone should check it out. The place I slept at - "Soft Beach" - is decent enough, but like I said last time the ownership sends bad vibes towards people that don't spend much time at the in-house restaurant.

I tried to write a letter on the beach, but the words didn't come. The letter got away from me, so I threw it into the sea.

2007-10-10T03:48:00.000-07:00

Day 143, 144

People came after me, now they have left. I've been here too long. Every day I stagger around the beachfront. I walk very, very slowly. If I squint, I can see Saudi Arabia across the sea. The staff of the place that rents the huts is angry with me because I don't spent any money at their restaurant.

Going to leave tomorrow for sure.

Ramadan started today. I've been careful to show some cultural sensitivity by not eating in public places. While I was busy being sensitive, though, I spotted a big Russian guy sitting in the Internet place holding a Carlsburg in either hand, with a cigarette in his mouth.

Rock, 'bro.

I've read an entire Michael Chrieton novel. Time to leave the beach.

2007-10-10T03:38:00.000-07:00

Day 141, 142

Ah, Nuweiba. As I wrote last time, Dahab didn't do it for me. Too crowded, too busy. Too urgent.

But Nuweiba is nice. It's got a lot of great beachfront, and not too many visitors. I think that this place must have seen a lot of tourist traffic in the past; near my beach hut there is a strange promenade of unoccupied hotels and shuttered restaurants, along with a few touts trying to move some very dusty merchandise. Where did all the tourists go? I've been told that this place was very popular with Israeli vacationers, and that they stopped coming when some bombs went off in the region a few years ago. I think there was one at Dahab, and one at Taba.

Sort of a ghost town for the time being.

So, yeah. I'm not much of an "on the beach" sort of guy, but I'm enjoying myself regardless. I've procured a little hut, and I spent each day here walking up and down the old promenade and up and down the beach. A few times each day I wander fifteen minutes down the road into town, looking for food and Internet connections.

Meanwhile, the skin on my arms and legs has become quite dark. I could be a local. My belly, though, is pink and irritated. Exposed to the sun for the first time in a millenia, it's having some trouble coping.

Everything seems to have ground to (another) halt. It's nice to linger here. The ferry to Jordan leaves from a port about eight kilometers from here and I expect to be on it soon enough - perhaps in a day or two.

Ramadan begins in a few days. Traveling through the Muslim world during that month ought to be a real treat. Perhaps strange... perhaps a little bit trying.

2007-09-26T02:57:00.000-07:00

Day 139, 140

On the bus again. This time from Dahab to Nuweiba. Dahab rubbed me the wrong way, so I'm on the road again.

There is a pretty girl in the seat across from me. She is going to Damascus to study the Arabic language.

2007-09-26T02:53:00.000-07:00

Day 138:

A do-nothing day today. I am waiting for my bus to Dahab. I strolled a bit, down the main promenade to a nice Internet cafe and then to a pizza and pasta restaurant that I found last night. Good food. Good prices, too.

I took a little boat trip around the river, but cut it short because the boat tout kept making annoying conversation as I tried to read my book. He insisted that we go in his "motorboat" rather than in a Felluca, which also pissed me off.

I'll miss the falafel place down the street from my hotel. The guys that run that restaurant are pleasant and the food I've eaten there has been good enough to help me get my appetite back. I lost it, as you may remember, way back in Dharamsala. I've lost a bit of weight since then, and am looking a bit too frail for my own good.

2007-09-26T02:46:00.000-07:00

Day 137:

I was unnecessarily cross with the hotel manager today! Eeep... I really have reached some sort of breaking point. Gotta get home soon... I've no more patience for stupid people.

Went to Luxor's "west bank" today in a small group. The five of us went to see Luxor's most famous historical sights, particularly the "Valley of the Kings" where a slew of Pharaohs were entombed back in the day (including "King Tut"). Some dozen kings, queens and their children were laid to rest here, and great temples and statues were erected over the years as a means of perpetuating the personality cults of the old Egyptian rulers. Everything on the sight is massive and awe-inspiring (if only for reasons of SIZE) - more so, maybe, than the pyramids. The hieroglyphics readily on display here seem to make the site more humane and literary. Our group went inside three tombs.

One temple that we visited later was built by Ramses III as a way to celebrate his military victories over the Libyans. We learned that defeated soldiers were mutilated by the Egyptians... and such acts are depicted on the walls of the temple. We saw images of women COUNTING trophies collected from enemy soldiers... heads, hands and genitals. Hmmm.

Tomorrow afternoon I will begin a 16 hour bus ride to Dahab. I will be in Jordan in four days time, I hope. For the record I have so far spent nine days in Egypt.

2007-09-26T02:36:00.000-07:00

Day 136:

The museum, last night, was quite striking. While the Cairo museum was a nice old-world affair - very much an "Indiana Jones stayed here" kinda place - the Luxor museum is a modern, well thought out, informative and engrossing place. The history on display really does reach out and grab you. This is a good thing, because the Luxor museum contains the same statutes and pharonic relics as the Cairo museum, which I couldn't really relate to.

If anyone reading this managed to get to Luxor, I highly recommend exhibit 61, "Statute of King Thutmosis III," excavated from the nearby Karak temple. It's one of the finest examples of ancient Egyptian sculpture I have yet to see. It's fine details and wonderful restoration are breathtaking in all of it's essential simplicity. That piece alone makes me want to return to the museum for a second visit.

I spent today taking in the sights at Karak. The temples is all about columns and statutes. And a horde of visitors. It made for a pleasant few hours of walking and gawking under the hot sun. As usual, though, there is little y way of explanation on sight - perhaps to create work for the local tour companies.

The heat here has me moving at a snail's pace, spending a few hours touring each day, and the remainder of the day just reading, writing and napping. Tomorrow I plan to travel to the other side of the Nile to see the famous Valley of the Kings and all of the famous tombs therein. Exciting!

2007-09-22T04:42:00.000-07:00

Day 135:

Luxor, now. I haven't actually DONE anything, but I have located a nice cafe, where I am sitting now... writing in this journal and drinking fine mint tea. The mint tea in India was nice: just regular tea with a bunch of fresh mint leaves stuck in the pot. I wonder now when I started to like the taste of tea, rather than simply liking the IDEA of tea. Perhaps that happened on the floor of a temple in Jeollanamdo.

I don't think that I will spend much time in Luxor. I will see the museum and the temples across the Nile and then move on. Save for the historical sights, the city seems unremarkable and charmless. I was thinking of spending ten days in each middle eastern country I visit (perhaps longer in Turkey) and today is my seventh day in Egypt. Even if I rush to Jordan I will surely end up staying longer than ten days.

Something interesting will happen tomorrow, maybe. I must close now and walk to the museum.

2007-09-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

Day 134:

I lost... I lost track of K today.

Hum.

2007-09-20T02:09:00.000-07:00

Day 133:

Went to the Giza Pyramids (and Sphinx) yesterday. Pretty cool. I love that they charge twenty five Egyptian pounds to go inside Khufu. After paying, one walks down a cramped tunnel for three minutes. That tunnel ends at an empty room. After looking around for a few minutes, one turns around and goes back out.

All for the price of a happy meal, ladies and gentlemen!

The Pyramids are impressive. But what does one write? Who knows, who knows?

The guy who manages my hotel is a twenty-three year old Egyptian national of Saudi extraction. He tells me that he has a girlfriend that he wants to marry, but that his father doesn't approve of. His father has another girl in mind. "I don't love her," he said to me. He also said this to his father, who said it isn't such a big deal, because if they have some marital problems, he can just take a second wife. And a third. And a fourth.

Oh to be a Saudi man.

2007-09-20T01:59:00.000-07:00

Day 132:

Alright, here's my story:

I spent the winter of 2004 hanging out with The Kid. The Kid was good to know because she introduced me to a lot of good music. Back then I wasn't very hip, musically speaking. I really liked The White Stripes and The Ramones, and I had once heard the name "Karen O." But, really, that was about the extent of my coolness.

One day The Kid said to me, "do you know Elliott Smith?"

I said, "Is he that guy from The Smiths?"

The Kid's response was one of astonishment and vague disdain. Fortunately I was able to pass of my honest reply as some sort of unfunny Joke.

...

Okay, that's my story.

2007-09-20T01:45:00.000-07:00

Day 131:

I dig that there are Korean restaurants all over the developing world. I dig also that the only people we find dining at them are Korean people. Well, Korean people and former ESL teachers turned wayward backpackers.

I like to visit the Korean restaurants, rocking up in my dirty boots and ripped t-shirt. I like to eat my bibmbap in the style of Mr. Kim, the head of the parent's association at my old, twice a week, country school assignment in Suncheon. Mr. Kim was also a scruffy guy... HE was straight off the farm. Now at my city school post, the parents association was made up of 50 soccer-mom types, but in the country we had Mr. Kim. Indeed, he was a scruffy guy, but we were happy to have him - most of the kids at the country school didn't even HAVE parents, living instead with grandparents and aunts and uncles.

At the cafeteria lunch table, Mr. Kim's eating style was... well... it was all about the spoon. No chopsticks for Mr. Kim. Maybe you won't understand this if you haven't eaten at a Korean school cafeteria... but, yeah, Mr. Kim was rural and awesome. That's all you need to know.

I find that my Mr. Kim impersonation, performed at Korean restaurants in a half dozen countries so far leaves fellow diners mystified and confused.

I ate at the Hana Korea restaurant in Cairo this afternoon. Pretty decent... great rice. The K-restaurants in Delhi all used Indian rice. Yuck.

Spent today walking the streets, both in the claustrophobic and frantic downtown and in the upper-crust neighbourhood of Zamaluk. Mostly I was just looking for a Lonely Planet guide to Europe. After visiting four bookshops I gave up and went for lunch (see above). I saw a few nice buildings, including a big ol' cathedral, and a few nice gardens. From a busy bridge, I stared out at the mighty Nile river.

2007-09-19T04:07:00.000-07:00

Day 130

So here I am, outside of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Educational place. Sort of. It's a big, sprawling complex, packed to the rafters with... well, with "stuff." Really, for the casual visitor it's all a little random, with few information panels to explain the myriad of statues, gold ware, jewelery, tomb contents, carvings, potteries and knick-knacks that are on display. That said, the King Tut exhibition is quite nice and well explained and the centerpiece of the ground floor, two larger than life stone statues of some Pharaoh and his queen are rather stunning - they seem to hold court over the shambolic proceedings of the museum floor.

Lot of beautiful women here. Sort of. Like, they've got big breasts and lots of cleavage and short-shorts. And they speak with silly English accents. It's all sort of "chav," I guess you could say. Err... it's been awhile. I, uhm, got to Manali some weeks ago (months?) and upon seeing all the silly young hippies I proclaimed to S my love of white girls with big breasts. But upon seeing this? Uh... maybe I'll reconsider that proclamation...

2007-09-19T03:57:00.000-07:00

Day 128, 129

Egypt, now. It's been just a few hours so far. Seems okay - usual tout bullshit and price gouging, but not so nearly as obnoxious as in India. I got into an argument with a taxi driver who very much wanted to keep the change.

Anyways... Oman. Oman was pretty nice. Not nearly so hot as Dubai - a pleasant 30 degrees most afternoons, with night times that were breezy and wonderful. R and I spent out first couple of nights walking around Muscat, the capital, checking out the sights. We slept in Mutrah a neighbourhood of the capital district that is little more than a fish market and a gold and silver souk. There is a pleasant corniche (street?) that takes pedestrians and drivers from Mutrah to the old part of the capital... a (historically) walled area that houses some government buildings and the Sultan of Oman's palace. It also houses a very curious "Oman/France" friendship museum. Oman and France seemingly share very little history (about half of the museum's exhibits are about the museum's opening), but it is a pleasantly quaint place.

Later, a five hour bus ride took us to Sur, further along the coast. Sur is a soothing city, very laid-back and under-touristed. R and I visited an old fort on the outskirts of town which is ostensibly Sur's only "sight." Well... I should say that we TRIED to visit the fort; when we arrived, we found it closed up: without any visitors for some weeks, the sole museum, guide felt comfortable closing up to take a trip to the market for the afternoon.

Can't say I blame him...

Instead of visiting the castle R and I sat in the dirt and watched some children play dominoes. Those half dozen kids played the game like they were preparing to be 70 years old... slamming the dominoes in the dirt and actually keeping score in a ragged old school notebook. The eldest kid smoked a cigarette that the youngest fetched for him half way through the game.

And I guess that's Oman, in a nutshell. A few nice markets, a laid back pace, lots of Islam, nice buses, pricey taxi cabs...

R has left for America. I'm on my own again. Some words about Egypt next time.

2007-09-13T02:33:00.000-07:00

Day 122-127

I'm on the Arabian Peninsula! Oman, specifically. I don't really know how this happened.

A synopsis of a sort:

I left Delhi the morning of the twenty-second. I was sick at the airport, actually: one last bout of that bacterial bullshit that has been chasing me since Leh. It was quiet funny, really. At the check in counter I felt myself overcome and told the girl I had to scoot to the bathroom - "just wait five minutes, sir" ... "Nope, gotta go right now... bye!" Planning to throw up, I instead blacked out for a few moments on a bench halfway to the toilet. As if thanking me for getting a flight far away from India's dirty side streets and tourist ghettos my body decided to (finally) take care of itself and using a flash sweat it pushed the sickness right out of me long enough to let me check myself in and board my flight. For once I was able to get by without taking any antibiotics.

Flying with R, we stopped at Bahrain to change planes. R and I made a mad dash through customs so that we could spend a few hours poking around Manama, the capital. The city proved to be a curious, though agreeable city. Bahrain is quite a wealthy country, as is most of the peninsula (save Yemen). It's also a very EMPTY place, with a population of little more than 600,000. As a result, the streets of the capital are wide, clean and well maintained. It's a place full of American chain restaurants - TGIFriday, Chillies and Pappa John's are all well represented on the ground.

The people in the city are friendly, too, seemingly happy to encounter genuine tourists in a place where most people come only for business. We were given a lift by Khalil, a sales rep for Johnson and Johnson who happily explained that he's lived his whole life in the capital and that he loves the town and "knows everyone." Khalil really was a hoot... so happy with his work selling beauty products that he insisted on showing R every single page of his product catalogue while despairing the fact that he had no free samples to hand out.

Anyways, we wandered a bit around the bases of some impressive skyscrapers, sent a few postcards and then hurried back to the airport to get our connecting flight to Dubai. The departure area in the Bahrain airport, like all of Manama is a wide open and empty place, punctuated by high end retail spaces and chain restaurants. There many not be many Bahrainis on this planet, but those that DO exist seem to be in possession of some coin.

And then... Dubai.

Dubai is HOT. Forty degrees in the shade. Fuckin' 39 in the sun. NO relief! The heat is what visitors notice first. Then, one notices the cost of it all... ten dollar cab fares, eight dollar coffees, and the rest. R and I did get a good deal at a hotel by way of an Internet reservation, but I think I spent as much in Dubai in three days as I did in a month of India. Whoops.

But all in all, it's a pretty nice town. It's one of the wealthiest cities on the globe and also one of the most opulent. Fitting the THEME of it all, R and I spent an entire day at the City Center Mall, a sprawling retail complex of several floors. We enjoyed some retail successes at the bookstore and also at the movie theatre. Just getting to the mall was special experience - we staggered through 40 degree heat for about an hour, arriving exhausted and dehydrated, all the while mumbling platitudes about how awesome a guy Lawrence of Arabia was.

Even our hotel was, all by itself, a real fun experience. It was rather enlightening to see middle aged Saudi visitors dancing and getting drunk on forbidden Heineken in the hotel restaurant, all while wearing the usual white sheets and headpiece. We even had a very beautiful Arabic hooker knock on our door, trolling for business. One images that the Islamic world is not always like we think it is...

I'm in Oman now. Have been here for a couple of days. I'll write a bit about that next time.

2007-09-13T02:11:00.000-07:00

Day 120, 121

Delhi and India are done! In five hours time a taxi will arrive to take R and myself to the airport. We will fly to Dubai, as I wrote last time, with a stopover in Bahrain. I'm excited - India has been, largely, a drag. Too loud... too crowded... too dirty... too many demands on my rupees...

I've actually developed a visceral reaction to Hindi pop music; it's so screechy and grating that I actually become ANGRY when I hear it.

China has a sense of decency and a sense of the space that humans require to remain sane. India lacks that sense.

But nonetheless, the last few days here have been okay... I went to the cinema twice with R and spent some hours walking in circles around Connaught Place, Delhi's finest commercial district. I spent a small fortune on food, both western and Indian along the way.

I'll really miss the HBO in my hotel room.

2007-09-13T02:03:00.000-07:00

Day 115-119

Okay, so I WAS going to update, but then I got SICK. My third beat-up, broken-down sickness in the past month and a half. Dammit. This one was a fever, combined with headache and a side of vomiting. I awoke from a restless sleep after the first night of the illness to find my muscles sore all over from the fever. BUT: Ciprofloxacin for the bacteria and ibuprofen for the head and muscles evened everything out.

Have been here in Delhi for the past four or five days. R's stupid bookish self and U's middling good-looks depressed me, as I wrote last time. And now that she has left, he is depressed also. We will fly to Dubai shortly. I turn 25 shortly. Twenty-five in Dubai.

I grow old, I grow old. I wear dirty clothes. The line sin my forehead are deep right now. Will it be possible to age backwards once I get back to comfortable living in Canada?

Delhi remains decidedly loud and unremarkable. I've cashed myself up with enough American bucks to carry me through to Cairo, and I've obtained a fresh passport. Going to try to find some sort of Indian souvenir next. Tomorrow, perhaps, I will buy one of those Rajistani fabric/glass work things. They are occasionally beautiful.

R and I are determined to get ourselves stamped into Bahrain during our layover en route to Dubai. There is also an Iranian island named Kish that might allow us devilish north americans in. Oman remains the main destination for this leg of the journey. Two weeks, tops.

2007-09-13T01:57:00.000-07:00

Day 109 - 115

Yeah, I've recently lost the desire to update. I feel sad. I'm here with R in Delhi, and he's brought his Korean sweetheart with him. They've been travelling together since Pokhara, as I think I have mentioned before. His stupid shy, bookish self coupled with that one reminds me too much of loves lost and loves that never were.

I can avoid being a third wheel by walking in the other direction, but avoiding feelings of longing and nostalgia is a little trickier.

C'est la vie.

R and I will travel together to Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We are sorting out the specifics right now. The Korean sweetheart will leave soon, and so R is also trying to sort THAT out. I spend my hours walking about, eating, and visiting the 'net cafe.

We are all staying in the Korean tourist ghetto. Yikes. Before coming here, the three of us spent a week in McLeod-Ganj (Dharamsala). Not a very exciting place.

Real updates starting tomorrow.

2007-09-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

Day 99-108

At long last, an update! I've been out of sorts, lately... variously sick, anxious and depressed. I've really lacked the initiative to write anything. But, I must keep at it. Whatever "it" is supposed to be. This update will be casual: I'm just trying to put pen to paper.

To catch up:

Srinagar was actually quite wonderful. The Kashmiri touts who haunt all of India and Nepal can be quite annoying away from home, but it seems like when they are in the homeland, they dial back the obnoxiousness a fair bit. Meanwhile, the soldiers at ever street corner are foreboding, the razor wire on the sidewalks in dangerous and the military checkpoint at the front door of the post office is annoying.... but all of it is quite adventurous from the perspective of an outsider.

The town has a somewhat interesting, if incredibly loud "old town," full of architecturally amusing mosques, temples and shrines. The real jewel of the town, however is the world famous (uhhhhh) Dal Lake. which is home to hundreds of houseboats, used by both locals and free spending tourists. The lake also is a home to floating gardens and a morning floating market. It is a stellar place for early morning row-boat trips.

I learned that at one point there was a Hindu Quarter in this time, but that that population mostly left the city following the civil violence of the 1990s. One can see the big old houses of that community on a boat trip around the canals of the old city.

Humorously, as I took a boat trip one day, some souvenir sellers approached me on the broadsides, trying to sell their tat pirate style. Points for originality, perhaps.

In Srinagar, for the first time since somewhere back in CHINA I actually felt quite "at home" in my hotel. I stayed at a big, rambling old guesthouse run by a local family, which was headed by a generous old patriarch who spent most of his days sitting out front forcing apple slices on all who passed by ("he could manage in English, "Kashmir Apples are best"). Cleaning and things like that were taken care of by a 30sish son, somewhat disabled. It made me happy to see him well taken care of by his big family... he was doing better than so many other disabled guys I've seen on this trip.

The tour work for the hotel was done by a 16 year old nephew, a real cute kid. Strolling one night with a French woman I had met earlier in the day I found him hanging out on a street corner with some much older looking dudes. I chastised him for hanging out with such shady characters (especially on a school night), much to the delight of those shady characters. He took it all in stride, and when the French woman kissed me on each cheek in parting (as the French are prone to doing) the kid demanded to know why I wasn't taking her back to the hotel.

Only in Kashmir, right?

More catching up next time.

2007-09-03T07:02:00.000-07:00

Day 99:

So, Srinagar.

I was a little bit lost tonight, trying in vain to find my hotel. I was scared - not of wandering the streets at night and stumbling into a bad neighbourhood, but rather of wandering into a nest of razor wire.

Yikes. It's that kind of town.

Indeed, Srinagar has the feeling of a city under occupation. This was evident to me from the beginning - on either side of the road into town soldiers strolled, carrying automatic weapons and walking slowly, seeing everything. The interior of the city proved to be similar - soldiers, razorwire and pillboxes are everywhere. The region's population is predominantly Shiite Muslim, and the territory is part of what India's 1948 war (and subsequent wars) was fought over.

I didn't explore too much today. Arriving at about 8:00 am after a fourteen hour jeep ride from Ladakh, I sacked out a t a hotel for a few hours before spending the afternoon walking around Dal Lake a bit, which lies at the centre of the city. The lake is pretty enough - full of touristy houseboats and little rowboats it is easy on the eyes. There's a lot of tourist infrastructure in that part of town, though it seems to be catering to only a small number of tourists. It seems that most of the foreign tour groups stopped coming here after the last round of violence, although I spotted a lot of domestic Indian visitors.

It's a shame that the industry is dead, but I'm sure it will come back soon enough. C told me that when the Maoists launched the last general strike in Kathmandu the tourist trade there simply died... but to look at Thamel now one would call her a liar... business is booming.

Oh.... I found a photography shop in town run by a toothless old Indian guy. I went in to buy some postcards (for some reason, postcards are hard to find around here). The guy had an awesome stack of cards left over from the 70s and 80s. I picked out twenty for myself, and as I flipped through the stack I came across a whole lot of old photos, sometimes of Indians and sometimes of westerner: all developed decades ago but never picked up.

2007-08-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

Day 98:

C spent five months living in Nepal. Her gig there was working as a volunteer at a rural orphanage. But much of that time she spent hanging out with the hawkers who work the streets of Katmandu's Thamel district, selling junk to the tourists. So, here are a few facts that she learned which will interest no one save those who have visited Kathmandu:

One: The shops are almost all owned and staffed by Kashmiri people from India, not Nepali nationals. That common refrain of "it's from Kashmir" is actually an honest statement.

Two: Prices are marked up about ten times. The 400 rupee bag was purchased by the vendor for 40 rupees.

Three: During peak season, the shops sell only about three items each day, with a value of about 2500 rupees (60 bucks). Most of this goes back to the owner of the shop... who does not work as a salesman.

Four: The hotel bosses have a set rate for the rooms. The people staffing the place charge whatever they think they can get, and pocket whatever amount is over the set rate. The boss gets the rest.

Five: Before Nepal's royal family was mostly murdered, they hung out in Thamel during the off season.

Anyways. I've really grown to love Ladakh. It's a place of simple beauty, found in it's craggy mountains, dusty valleys, and even in its cities, made beautifully green by age old irrigation techniques. This is a place where I wish I could stay. I wish I could linger. But I cannot... this is a "long way home," not a expedition meant to find a new home.

2007-08-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

Day 95, 96, 97

From Manali, I took a 2o hour jeep trip to Leh. Some of my seat mates suffered on that trip, but since such things are becoming rather routine for me, I fared rather well. Some of the high passes reached altitudes of more than 5000 meters, and I didn't suffer from alitude sickness either - clearly I am becoming some sort of Superman.

Leh is wonderful. The tourist crowd is a little less obnoxious than in Manali (and a bit older) and the backpacker ghetto encompasses only a portion of the town, unlike in Manali where it now covers the entire fucking place (I exaggerate). The city has a population of only 25,000, so it is nice that it has been able to resist that sort of takeover.

Leh's most noteworthy visual aspect is a collection of Gompas and Stopas that ring the city, all of the built on high hills and on the sides of mountains. I visited some of these places with C, a young German woman whom I have been travelling with since the jeep ride here.

The most fun that C and I had was visiting "Leh Palace," an old fort built on a high hill south of the town. It's a crumbling, ramshackle affair, once the seat of this region's "king," but now long empty and stripped of its treasures. While some basic restoration work has been done, it looks a lot like what Lhasa's Potala would look like if it has been left to rot for a century.

Sharing a room with C, each morning we have woken up around nine and taken a wonderful laissez faire approach to each day - the hours are filled with trips through the old town, unnecessary errands, trips to the post office, eating....

Truly these have been idle days, but idle in a relaxing way that was impossible in Manali, with it's horrible, horrible "scene."

Unable to get a jeep to Srinagar as planned (the road is closed to civilians today) I am spending tonight at a hotel in Thiska with C. Thiska is a small village just south of Leh, home to a stunning (and large) monastery... and precious little else.

I must describe C in more detail tomorrow.

2007-08-27T07:20:00.000-07:00

Day 93, 94

I'm in Leh now. I spent twenty hours in a jeep getting here. There were ten of us in that jeep, including the driver, and it would have sat perhaps seven in some comfort. But no problem - I'm becoming a real pro when it comes to dealing with long automobile rides, and spending another twenty wasn't much of a problem.

Some of the passes we crossed were as high as 5000 meters, and it would seem that I'm now pretty good with high altitudes, also. Great stuff.

Leh is a part of Ladakh, which is a part of the province of Jammu and Kashmir, which has been at the hear of India and Pakistan's "cold war" (and occasional shooting war) for many decades. This is a mostly Buddhist place, and I think that is is rather sad that it is included in this longstanding Hindu/Muslim conflict. I've learned a lot, however, about India's multicultural character in the past few weeks, though I'm left wondering how the government here manages to "pull it off." Obviously there are a lot of economic problems and standard of living concerns in India and in the minority regions, but I wonder how decision making is done? Is there a cadre of Tibetan legislators in the Indian parliament?

The ride here included a lot of stops at military checkpoints along the highway, all because of the security situation. My passport is still back in Delhi getting renewed, a situation that caused a few questions to be asked of me, but every time I was able to continue on my way. My original plan was to turn around and go back to Delhi from Manali to pick up the new passport, but since every checkpoint officer so far has told me that continuing on to Srinagar is possible for me, I might just do that instead.

Leh is not only part of Kashmir, but it is also close to the border with China. Because China occupied a swath of Indian territory some years ago, the Indian military presence here is doubly strong. And along the sides of the road leading to Leh we saw literally HUNDREDS of fuel tankers.

The crowd here does not have as many dreadlocks as in Manali, and that makes me very happy. I think I should like to spend a few days here.

2007-08-10T01:36:00.000-07:00

Day 89, 90, 91, 92

Manali is just about done for me; a taxi will arrive to take me to Leh in a few hours. Leh is a seventeen hour drive away.

(and I haven't even written anything about Manali).

I read in a 1990 Lonely Planet for India that even at that time there were droves of hippies living in the hills around town. They are all gone now, and the town is very commercalized. It's more of a scene now, with lots of dreadlocks and scruffy facial hair on display. Yuck. Tony Wheeler used the word "scene" back in 1990, though, so maybe things are exactly like they used to be.

It's a little sad, though, that the hippie sub-culture is just about dead now. I've been reading lots of Kerouac, these days, and it's sad to think that the beat generation, also, is long gone. Ginsberg's been dead for more than a decade now.

(by the way: the depiction of Ginsberg in "Dharma Bums" is pretty hilarious)

It dawns on me now that this journal is not what it was a month ago. I suppose I've stopped writing about what I've been doing. Perhaps this is because I don't really enjoy travel in India that much. I don't really DO anything except take walks and read books and eat decent food.

The walks in Manali are nice though. I have spent my time here with a nice Swedish guy, strolling around the three "villages" that constitute modern Manali. We saw a few decent temples and some residential areas, and even some trees and some water!

I found a copy of Kerouac's "Mexico City Blues" and read through it. I don't entirely understand K's meaning, and frankly, all of the references to Nova Scotia are particularly perplexing.

The Palak Paneer here is very well done. Spinach and cottage cheese... delightful!

My Swedish pal is nice. He's 30ish, and very new to travelling. He's a bit of a lonely guy, and works in a factory in a rural part of his homeland. His factory makes spare parts for forklifts: "not even a whole forklift," he told me. "Just a part. A single part. And they won't even tell us what it does."

2007-07-19T20:56:00.000-07:00

Day 88:

I'm sitting in a little restaurant in Shimla: eating, writing postcards and reading an Agatha Christie novel. Listen to how Christie described Tuppence:

"Tuppence has no claim to beauty, but there was character and charm in the elfin lines of her little face, with its determined chin and large wider-apart eyes that looked mistily out from under straight, black brows. She wore a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair and her extremely short and rather shabby skirt revealed a pair of uncommonly dainty ankles. Her appearance presented a valiant attempt at smartness"

I'm in love!

...

Shimla is a nice place, my favorite so far in India and I am now very happy to be travelling in this country. Thank G-d for that. I've spent my time here with a couple of Swedish guys (both have now left), taking in the sights and eating lots of nice Indian and continental food.

I visited Shimla's monkey temple. The monkeys there, like the monkeys in town are quite vicious, with finding a particular enjoyment in snatching at the glasses of visitors. It's fun, though, to observe them playing in a little pool placed on the temple grounds for their enjoyment. It seems as if the games they play have actual RULES, as they hop from place to place in a sort of ordered fashion. It's also great fun to watch the smallest of monkeys sit on the side of the pool, slowly working up the courage to join in the game.

Shimla has a great post office and I found some really wonderful philatelic stamps there. The bookshops here are also top notch.

Tomorrow morning in Manali.

2007-07-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Day 87:

I want to write, but my room at the local YMCA is so damp and musty that my eyes and my nose are rebeling against me. I'm all stuffed up, and also blinded by itchy tears.

But in short, Shimla is a decent town.

2007-07-19T05:30:00.000-07:00

Day 84, 85, 86

I've escape Chandigarh! I was expecting to stay for a few days, but the temperature was too hot, so I left after one night. I met in the train station dormitory there an English guy who has been living in the city (in the dorm) for a whole month. "Nothing drew me to Chandigarh," he said to me, "I just happened to be in this city when I felt the need to stop moving around so much." The guy hopes to write some travel books, and has the crazy (interesting) idea of buying his own motor-rickshaw and driving all around the country in it.

I left the big-C on a ten a.m. train, switching engines in the tiny town of Kalka. There I boarded a cute little toy train (maybe ten cars, each seating about 30 people) that runs on a narrow gauge up to altitudes of about 2200 meters. The landscape on the train was, as usual, really stunning, with big tall trees unlike what I saw in Tibet and Nepal. Also, India has an overcrowding problem that doesn't exist in those countries, and along the way I spied lots of homes and even cities running up and down the side of the mountains. Quite different from the settlements in the mountains of Tibet, which run along a single street that snakes along the side of the hill.

Here in Shimla about 150 000 residents cling to the side of the mountain in that "up and down" way. It's quite a sight, all those boxy concrete homes on a crowded diagonal incline. The city itself is a treat. The weather is blissfully cool, and in the places I have visited so far there are no touts, no taxis, no rickshaws and no hash dealers. Walking around without any hassles I am reminded of distant China! There are also big fines for littering and spitting in the streets. There are even garbage cans with the words "USE ME" painted on them in neat letters.

But while the streets don't have any annoying PEOPLE wandering them, there are some annoying simians. The town has a monkey problem. Rather brave, sometimes viscous, hundreds of monkeys roam the streets, looking for food and making an occasional grab at a tempting bag or purse. Each night I have spent here I've been woken up by monkeys banging on my windows, trying to get inside. It can actually be a little frightening to be woken up by a crazed monkey...

Humorously enough, the monkeys also terrorize the stray dogs of Shimla, which are almost as common. It's very funny to see a tough, scrappy looking dog cowed by a monkey barring his teeth.

The food here is wonderful, if expensive. I sat in a nice chain coffee shop for a spell, alternately writing in my journal and gawking at the beautiful people passing through for drinks and snacks. Hanging out at yuppie coffee shops is a habit I picked up in Suncheon during that fateful "year two" (really just the last eight months) and is one of the many habits that I hope to kick (along with many feelings, ideas, mannerisms, successes that I will throw over my shoulder). Going to be my old self, you know...

...

Back on the home front, my dear friends X and Y are having a baby! X sent me an e-mail saying "Good news, Mike, you're going to be an uncle! Yahoooo!" This makes me happy... you have no idea.

But back in Korea, Z is feeling really bummed out. This makes me sad, because Z is very important to me.

...

Couple more days in Shimla, and then I press further north.

2007-07-19T01:56:00.000-07:00

Day 83:

Chandigarh, now. It's still hot here, but it's getting to be a little cooler as I move north. The city is not quite as interesting as I thought it might be, but it has some charm. It's still too hot to put in a lot of effort, so I've just done the usual walking tour. This city is fun to walk about. It's a planned town, built on a field of green - from the ground up - by a French architect/city planner in the early 1950s. Fitting the whims of that designer, the city is full of big concrete government buildings ("temples of democracy," they say) and a grid of roads, all intersecting at 90 degree angles and laid out into 40 or so "sectors."

This is a rich town, and a clean town.

I paid a visit to the National Portrait gallery, which houses a display of photographic and textual exhibits depicting the Indian Independence movement from the 1850s to the time of partition. The exhibit includes some delightfully grizzly dioramas, as well as the text of articles written by both Marx and Engels decrying atrocities committed here by the English in the 1850s.

2007-07-19T01:48:00.000-07:00

Day 82:

Another day, another train station. I left Agra on a standing room only ticket, since I was so late booking my passage. I managed to upgrade to a seat after a half hour, though.

I'm heading north now. First to the 1950s planned-city of Chandigarh, and then further north, to Shimla, Manali and Leh - back into the Himalayan mountains. I really, really want to get away from this heat.

I finished reading "On the Road." It's a compelling book. Kerouac takes all the madness and depression and loneliness of being jobless, future less and itinerant in the 40s and blends those things with occasional moments of joy and exuberance. In doing this he seems to create a picture of a life that seems to be ultimately unfufilling, but yet so romantic as to be desirable.

There's a wonderful description of Sal's reasons for being on the road that I've scrawled into my notebook... he's "shambled after... all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time..." Well, he goes on for some time, about the people that he loves to be near.

But regardless, maybe life is the same no matter where one is. Kerouac wrote in a diary one time that "all of life is a foreign country."

Hmm.

2007-07-19T01:44:00.000-07:00

Day 81:

I visited the Taj Mahal today! It carries a steep twelve buck admission charge, though I suppose it's worth it in a Great Wall/Forbidden City sort of way. Who visits India without taking a peek at the Taj, right?

This massive monument is a visual treat, though that's about all it is; there isn't really any interior access allowed. There are some nicely manicured lawns around the building, and some smaller mosques along the periphery of the thing.

I mailed a package today, as well as a few postcards.

I've decided to beat the heat by heading north, back into the mountains.

This morning I moved to a new hotel. My room resembles a solitary confinement cell from "Prison Break," but my bathroom is outside, on the roof of the building. Good times.

This afternoon I saw a cow kick a stray monkey right in the chest. The monkey, who had it coming, when flying into the air, but walked away on his own two feet.

2007-07-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

Day 80:

Here I am in Agra. I'm sleeping in some dirty flop. It's dirty, but it has hot water AND it is cheap, so I can't complain. Well, the light flickers, and the squat toilet sort of smells, and there is noise in the hallway...

I've got a reservation on a cheaper place for tomorrow night.

Agra is home to the famous Taj Mahal, but I haven't visited yet. I'm not in the MOOD. Instead I spent the day writing a letter to J and I did some marathon internet chatting with K. And I called my grandmother, too.

I've gotten the hang of keeping my money inside of my wallet. So that's good. It's nice to say "no" in a sarcastic or mocking way.

The mercury hit forty today. Myself and my clothes are covered in a veneer of sweat because of the humidity. Washing clothes seems to be pointless, because they get smelly mere minutes after being put on. Showering seems similarly pointless. It's a damn good thing I'm travelling solo again.

2007-07-18T22:37:00.000-07:00

Day 79:

Weird. I found myself with a free driver and a very nice a/c car today. We drove around alternating between running silly errands (post office, consulate, supplies, bookshop...) and stopping and surreal shops selling carpets and silks, all of which paid my driver a few bucks for putting me through the door. "Look like a proper tourist," he told me before we set off, "bring your camera." It was certainly strange - the staff there all assumed me to be interested in purchasing overpriced carpets and all gave me the hard sell on those, and also on three thousand dollar jewelry. Of course, all of the "Kashmiri" handcrafts they sell for a hundred bucks a pop are available on the streets of Kathmandu for three or four dollars.

I now know (and am trying to forget) all about how carpets are made, all about "knots per square inch," and how many Kashmiri families are employed in the carpet-making racket (thousands). Similarly, I know all about precious stones and semi-precious stones, which are which and how the earth creates them. The jewelry guy at the last shop was a sad little fellow who clearly dropped out of geology program at a local university in order to sell junk to tourists. He spent more time talking about the science behind his wares than about the beauty of them. There was such sorrow in his eyes.

C'est la vie.

In addition to my errands, my driver and I managed to visit a few of Delhi's tourists sights. Our first stop was at Qutub Minar, a mosque complex (historical and ruined... not alive) on the outskirts of the city. It proved a compelling, if dead place, home to India's very first mosque (built in 1193), and a 73 metre tall Afghan style minaret (Turpan's was cooler). The complex also contains some nice gardens.

We later visited a temple of the Baha'i faith, the architecture of which looked rather space-age. I must admit that that religion is a mystery to me - the signage indicated that the faith encompasses all forms of religion as well as science. They've got some nice gardens too, but no benches.

In between our last few silly shop visits we visited Delhi's National Museum. That is a very wonderful sprawling complex of three floors and many interesting exhibits. It contains the usual pottery and ceramic artifacts, but also some neat displays on the history of currency in India, and on fabric making in the country. Getting lost in those corridors I felt a little bit more of that sorrow that's been chasing me around these past few weeks - I thought of a visit to the sprawling AGNS with L sometime ago, before that relationship got all topsy-turvy.

I left the museum around five and headed over to the main post office. I found there a letter from J sent to me Poste Restante a few weeks ago, the second of her letters to find me since I started travelling. I'm madly in love with both letters and with J, and so reading it really chased AWAY the sorrow for a bit.

Later on I booked a train ticket OUT of this town. On to Agra and the Taj Mahal tomorrow afternoon.

2007-07-18T06:58:00.000-07:00

Day 78:

"Lucille would never understand me because I like too many things and get all confused running from one falling star to another until I drop" (120).

I've been feeling very sad lately. Back in the bad old days I once said "I don't really suffer from depression. See, I'm sad for really good reasons." Over the last few days and weeks I've been chased by some sort of sorrow and I don't know what's fueling it. But it's only been for a week or two. Surely it will pass. Or maybe it's just an effect of reading Kerouac's stuff; "On the Road" is ultimately a very sad, very lonely book.

...

I think I'm getting the hang of India. It helps to be dominant and sort of "alpha" when some idiot is making a play for your money. A rickshaw guy asked me for 150 rupees to get me to my hostel last night and I was comfortable in saying something to the effect of "that's fucking insane... I can get across the whole city for that amount. Take fifty or nothing." Cheerfully, I told him he was lying when he told me later that his meter was broken and offered him sixty rupees.

And so on...

See, this is what the tourist to India does. So much financial bullshit. I'm happy that I started this India thing in Varanasi, which is so much more intense than Delhi, and so gave me an early warning of the nonsense in the capital.

...

A lot of my hatred of India has recently been transferred to that other most odious nation - Canada. Getting a new passport has proven to be a complicated and costly endeavour. My application requires that I supply FOUR references, and that I have my application stamped by a local notary public, in addition to handing over the usual photographs and wad of cash. You know, Americans don't have such difficult requirements, and they can also get extra pages taped into the passport when the document is all filled up.

Damn it.

Oh, when I was going to the theatre, a taxi driver offered to take me there free if I first agreed to spend ten minutes at a couple of silk shops. So I did, and he really did take me there after pocketing some commission money for getting me in the door. Such a stupid scam, but I guess if you can't beat 'em, you can only join 'em...

...

Anyways, India could be good. It could be a real kick. I've lost a lot of my inhibitions about dealing with the unequal social and financial exchange that is a big part of travelling in the third world. Knowing that everyone is trying to rip me off, I no longer have any problems fighting to get the "local price." I could be doing more to benefit the local populace... but spending and spending and spending... but the local populace is so fucking adversarial.

Uhm, so I'm going to stop blogging about cab fare now. Sorry. And about money, also. Sorry.

...

I'm sleeping in some dormitory near the local diplomatic enclave. It's a nice little flop used mostly by domestic tourists. The last foreigner came here three days ago, according to the guest register. I'll stick around here for a few days as I fight for my new passport, but there is probably a better place deeper into the city.

2007-07-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

Day 77:

I'm in Sarnath, just north of Varnasi, and the place where Buddha have his first "sermon" to his disciples. I'm in a park, and there's a pack of Korean tourists to my left having a singalong. A few moments ago they performed a fan dance of some sort. Man, Korean tourists - as I have said - are such a delightful sort. They are so charming and ridiculous. Almost as much as the average Canadian backpacker. The Korean tourists can do no wrong, and the Indian visitors to this park are in awe of this group of madmen and women. I think it will take some time to shake lose the Korean sojourn from my consciousness. I feel like I'm "in the club," or more accurately "in on the joke."

I'll head back to Varanasi this evening. Shortly thereafter I'll catch a train to Delhi. Varanasi is, without a doubt, the most horrible place I've ever visited. One simple CANNOT find a moment of tranquility there, which is odd considering that Varanasi is one of the holiest cities in all of India. The only quiet time is spent locked inside of a hotel room, and even that is a tenuous proposition considering how many times someone has knocked on my door to "sweep up" for a few rupees gratuity.

As I sat at the ghats (places along the Ganges river to bathe and to cremate bodies) a particularly annoying guy sat down beside me trying to sell me on a tour of the area. His pitch was thirty minutes long, and when he got to the part about "showing the burning bodies" he included such patter as "burning and learning... cremation education!" The dude wouldn't go away, and I really wanted to smack him and point out that he was in a holy place. But that's not for me to say.

Even my driver on this side trip to Sarnath has been making desperate lunges at my wallet. I had to firmly request that his "friend" NOT "explain Buddhism" to me in Sarnath in exchange for a donation to his "charity."

...

Now the Koreans have moved on, and so I shall pack up my things and do the same.

...

Delhi tomorrow morning.

2007-07-18T06:23:00.000-07:00

Day 76:

I've been reading "On the Road" lately. Ginsberg's "Howl and Other Poems" has been in my kit on every voyage I've taken in the past few years (including Korea), but strangely enough I've never bothered to check out the stories of his good buddy Jack Kerouac. Odd, that.

In the dedication to that book, he says that Kerouac "spit forth intelligence into eleven books... creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature" (3).

Kerouac's book makes my heart ache. Here I am travelling across Asia, when 50 years ago, Kerouac told everyone quite clearly that the REAL action is in North America. Back in Korea, M spoke often about going to England and Australia on a working holidaymaker visa... spending nights at hostels and days working various odd jobs. How romantic would it be to do that in Canada or America? Impossible because of all of our rules and regulations regarding work and employment, I'm sure, but it FEELS easy enough... moving from town to town by greyhound. Hostels are cheap, you know?

But it's impossible. A contemporary "On the Road" is rendered impossible by the trappings of twenty-first century government and bureaucracy. C'est la vie.

And, of course, I haven't actually finished the book, so maybe it's not quite so romantic as it is presented in the opening few chapters.

Interestingly enough, travelling in Asia makes voyaging in Canada and American seem a little bit easier that it would have seemed in the past. Rough sleeping, either in a dirty hotel or on a train station bench is no longer so intimidating, and fifteen hour bus rides are no longer such a hassle. Wandering around all night a la "Before Sunrise" in an American city instead of paying for a hotel seems quite safe and a smart idea, now. And going three weeks wearing the same clothes every day? No problem!

Anyways, I really want to see Canada. I want to see Nova Scotia, which is a place that is quite foreign to me, actually. I want to "go west." I want to visit friends. I want to count my final dollars.

What I want, desperately, is to have a job.

Sarnath, shortly. Then Delhi.

2007-07-18T06:09:00.000-07:00

Day 75:

They say that with India, you either love it or hate it. I don't think it's quite like that. For me, one moment I hate it, and then a few moments later I love it.

The bicycle-rickshaw guys are annoying, the guys selling silks on the streets are annoying... but every so often someone is NICE, helpful, or even charming as they go about the business of making some money off of the passing tourists. When this happens the general annoyance I feel with this place washes away. Of course, the hate comes back a few moments later.

Hate, hate, hate, love, hate, hate, hate, hate, love, hate.......

One particular peeve I have is how the walking guy is constantly asked something to the effect of "what are you looking for?" No matter what one says - even "nothing at all" - the questioner will saddle up beside with directions to some shop, or a spiel about some silly product they are selling. Fuuuck.

In Varanasi, the walking guy has literally one request on his money every five minutes. This ain't a good place for the traveller who likes to stroll just for the heck of it. And as the previous 50 entries in this thing suggest, I'm a guy who likes to stroll...

So Varanasi has lots of cows. Cows in the streets, cows in the alleyways, cows all over. It's sacrilegious to kill a cow, and I guess Indian people really like cows. Accordingly, cows wander freely in the streets, all over the city.

2007-07-16T03:48:00.000-07:00

Day 74:

I remember at the beginning of this trip, back in Samcheock, I was so shy about asking the adjuma pimp running my hotel to give me a five dollar discount.

Funny.

I'm in India now, and the whole tourism industry exists only to extract money from travellers as quickly as possible. I'm steeling myself. I'm not looking forward to what it will be like to be in Varanasi or Delhi. China has a bit of that, Nepal has even more. India, it seems, has a hundred times as much money-related bullshit as Nepal.

It's amazing what I can now, compared to what took a lot of courage back in Samcheok. When the rickshaw guy at the border changed both his price and his currency at the end of our ride I was confident enough to tell him that he would take what I was offering, or he would take nothing at all.

(And in between the last two paragraphs, I was comfortable letting lose a stream of expletives to the guy who sold me a bus ticket for a bus that he now says will not arrive... no refund)

So the latest news? I'm in some nasty border town between Nepal and India. I overpaid for a package to get me from Pokhara to Varanasi, and I'm about halfway there. I waited an hour for that aforementioned bus, with the guys insisting that it would come "in a few more minutes." Eventually they said it wouldn't come because they didn't sell enough tickets, and then told me to go buy a ticket for the local bus. And here I am on a crowded local bus... it rather resembles an American prison bus....

...Thank G-d for my earplugs.

2007-07-16T03:33:00.000-07:00

Day 73

Still feeling a bit anxious. I've got some unanswered questions. India remains a bit of a sore point... I think I'll just go to Delhi and get a new passport, since my current passport is just about out of pages. But that's a motherfucker: It will take three weeks to be printed, at least, and I will have to pay $105 for the thing. And I have to have some photos taken, I have to adjust my itinerary to pick it up, I have to get some references... and worst of all I have to travel without a passport for three weeks.

And I don't know how long I will stay on the subcontinent. I know that I really ought to leave India sometime around August 14. It seems that I can enter Pakistan around that date, and stick around for a month after I enter. But honestly, I have NO IDEA how the Pakistani visa really works. I might get 30 days of stay following my entry, while I might have to exit on August 14, no matter WHEN I enter. The latter possibility would really force me to move fast, if true, while the former would allow me to stick around that particular war zone until the middle of September. But do I want to be in such a horrible place for a whole month?

And what happens after Pakistan. I have been denied entry to Iran, with no hope of appeal. So my overland trek will have to end in Islamabad. One possibility is to fly to Bahrain, which is a hub for flights heading to Europe and the middle east. And if I take a short layover in that city, I can actually save a few bucks on a flight to Turkey or to the continent.

But where can I connect to? I would want to get back on land as soon as possible, so I could fly to either Istanbul (the original plan for post-Iran travel), or even to Cairo, and work my way up to Europe by land or sea.

Europe, meanwhile, is not a real destination for me. When I get there I plan to visit a friend in Paris, and to take a cheap Thomas Cook flight to Halifax from London.

Anyways... I'm still in Pokhara. I've leaving to India first thing tomorrow morning. I wish I could stay here for a bit longer, since it's a really great "hangout" (like Kathmandu, but cleaner). And while food/Internet/supplies are more expensive than in the Big-K, my hotel is pretty cheap, and stuff away from the backpacker ghetto is quite affordable.

2007-07-14T08:04:00.000-07:00

Day 72:

I'm feeling very anxious today.

Earlier, as I walked down Pokhara's main strip, I got the peculiar impression that I was walking past the same group of Japanese cyclists over and over again. I got the impression that everyone in the city was Japanese.

...

backpackers belong to a sort of scene. A sort of subculture, I guess. If you don't fit into the scene in the right way, people can be apprehensive and mean. That sort of sucks.

2007-07-11T21:41:00.000-07:00

Day 71:

Seven hours spent on the bus has left N and R and myself in the city of Pokhara. Pokhara is a soothing respite from the honking car horns of Kathmandu. It's still a very touristed place, but with fewer touts, rickshaw drivers, souvenir vendors and hash dealers per square kilometer.

N and I walked around the main strip for a few hours and took a little rowboat trip to an island temple in the middle of this town's beautiful lake.

Now, an early night.

2007-07-11T21:32:00.000-07:00

Day 70

Seventy days! It's the beginning of July...

.....

There was a certain toothless old man at the Indian embassy. A real old dude with a shock of white hair, no shoes and an American passport. He said to me:

"What's the news from Baghdad?"

I didn't know how to answer such a perfect question. Such a great "old salt" question from such a perfect old man. That's the sort of old man I hope to be, if I must be an old man sometime.

Today was my last day in Kathmandu. Not too much to report. I bought the last of my needed supplies and packed up my bag. Looking for some kitchy fun, R and I spent a few hours at the "Casino Royale," a rather charmless casino in the Indian part of town. We were hoping for a place with 25 cent blackjack hands, but were disappointed to find a place with a three dollar minimum and lots of Indian high rollers.

Lots of short skirts, though.

In contrast to the shelpy madness of Thamel, the main backpacker hangout, the area where Indian tourists hang out is very classy, calm and subdued. Backpacker hotel rooms cost about six bucks for a double, while beds for the Indians cost about ninety for a single. eeep.

I forgot to mention in yesterday's entry that N and I visited "Freak Street," which was the original hippie locale (backpackers have since moved to Thamel district) in the 60s and 70s. The place is a quieter alternative to the hustle and bustle of Thamel. It's empty now, but some old business linger on - we walked around one guesthouse that has been in operation since 1960. That place had a lot of history in it's musty rooms and shabby walls. I brought me back to the first places I stayed at, that out of fashion backpackers hostel way back in Gyeongju, Korea... thirty years ago a first-class hangout, but now just a shabby shadow of it's former self.

2007-07-11T21:15:00.000-07:00

Day 67, 68, 69

I've been in Kathmandu for a week now. I've been hanging out with R. He's a cool guy, and we share a similar approach to the world and to travelling which makes spending time together east. We spend a lot of time chatting about current events and the world political scene. Good times.

So, Kathmandu:

A lot of my time here has been spent organizing for the next few months. Procuring an Indian visa took four days, while shopping for some supplies filled up a fifth day. But Kathmandu is a good city for that sort of thing. The city was, at one point, the ultimate hippie destination. The hippies have all since departed (most of 'em anyways... one still finds the occasional zoned-out graybeard walking a dog around Thamel...), but the city is still a "hang out" city Food and lodgings are cheaper here than anywhere else, and the souvenirs are pretty cheap too. The mood on the street is not one that encourages the tourist to get out and see some VERY IMPORTANT SIGHT, but rather one that encourages chilling out.

The touts touts and hawkers here are a tad obnoxious however. Particularly the "shady" drug pushers. But they can be funny, too. When I turned down one guy who offered hash, heroin and cocaine he gave me a determined look before suggesting I buy some crack.

Who comes to Kathmandu to buy crack?

The streets are wonderful here. The whole city is a bit of a maze of alleyways and bazaars. Maps are rather useless. The dirty streets twist and turn, while the low rise brick buildings on either side seem to lean in towards each other, blocking out the sun. The roads themselves are a wonderfully congested mess of pedestrians, bicycle rickshaws and a few motorcycles. The usual street vendors conduct business at all hours, and all over the city are small mandalas and temples, both of the Hindu and Buddhist type.

And the sounds... oh... the car horns... the honking of the car horns.... it's an endless cacophony. But it's not just cars... the rickshaw drivers are constantly ringing bells or their own homemade horns (something about a plastic bottle). Everyone is constantly making some sort of "get out of the way" type sound. It's a noisy city!

...

With my whole Tibetan group I visited Katmandu's famous Monkey Temple. Not much to report - it's a vaguely Tibetan style temple. With monkeys. Sort of neat. Later, with N, I visited Katmandu's Durbar Square, a central area containing many small temples and things of that sort. Sort of neat, also, but sort of incomprehensible.

I think it's time I moved on to investigating a new religion. Maybe Scientology?

What else? Lots of wandering with R. Lots of walking and talking. I find that sort of thing delightful. The two of us managed to sample lots of cheap street food while walking. I dig that, also. Today we spent an hour or so at a sheesha bar, smoking, talking and eating.

This reminds me: R spent time in Cairo studying Arabic. Sheesha became a great past time of his. And my great pastime from MY time overseas? Eating Korean dol-sot bimbmbap. There's a fine Korean restaurant in this town, and I've visited three times already.

Daily updates again soon. I hope.

2007-07-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Day 64, 65, 66

Okay, so its the twenty-seventh now, and I'm in Kathmandu, but since this journal is getting behind, I'm actually trying to write about what went down last week.

So, last week I was in the Tibetan countryside. Myself and my five new friends piled into a minibus around 8:00 one Monday morning and set off, with a driver and guide along for the ride.

The company was nice. But really, as a trip, the whole thing might have been a little ho-hum. We visited three monasteries over the first few days. They were nice, but all of the temples and monasteries sort of blend together after awhile. And also, the whole temple experience is tainted by the obnoxious presence of touts and hawkers at the entrances... and also by the exorbitant admission prices charged by the Chinese regime.

We drove along the "friendship highway" to Nepal, with the border to that country being our ultimate destination. Along the way we visited a few nice towns. Tibet seems to be an empty place, and most of the settlements inside the territory are quite small. Many are just one street, with homes and shops built along that street in a straight line that stretches for a kilometer or two with expanses of crumbling highway plugging into each end. Restaurants in these places are a treat, each looking rather identical to the last (dirty, with big padded seating along the walls) and with identical menu items (noodles, fried greens and rice with egg).

After a few days of driving through the small towns and monasteries we hit the big time - Mount Everest Base Camp. The clouds parted long enough for us to snap a few pictures, and also long enough to give our group ample time to gawk at the awesomeness of that 8800 meter peak, which is made more impressive by the fact that the mountains on either side reach almost as high.

P,D and N decided to spend the night in a hotel near the camp, while O,R and myself stomped four kilometers uphill to reach the "camp" (really a tourist trap of sorts, since the climbing season is long over), at an elevation of 5200 meters. There we spent a very cold night sleeping in a tent hotel dubbed "Hotel California" by its operators.

And that was sort of the end of out journey. The next day we spent a good 15 hours on the road pushing through the town of Zeungmu, the last stop on the Friendship Highway. The last three hours were a harrowing trip around the side of a mountain on a road where a skid a few meters to one side would result in a 3000 meter fall down a sheer cliff. This drive we made through the dark, through the fog and through enough mud to require us to get out and lay down rocks and branches to make a road, at one point. I was more than a little scared of dying, so I passed my Beatles CD to the driver and we twisted and turned along the mountain side while singing along (bravely) to "I want to Hold Your Hand."

After getting through THAT, we spent one night in Zeungmu, I made a trip to the post office to send some final Tibetan postcards and we walked down to the Nepalese border post.

Next time: Kathmandu!

2007-07-05T23:28:00.000-07:00

Day 62, 63:

A bit more about Tibet, now. Too much is happening, and I'm getting backlogged in the journal. So, to sum up:

I did a bit more touring around Lhasa with my three friends. Eventually they all had to leave on a tour to Mount Everest Base camp and back, with me sticking around the city trying to find a tour that would get me to Everest and beyond (to the Nepali border, natch). Lots of promises to keep in touch were made, and E promised to let me crash on her couch in Paris come September.

Eventually I did find an organized tour to the border (six days and then we cross). I signed up with five other tourists. They are: O, a Dutch guy of 33, D, a Serbian of 31, R, a young American of 23, N a Frenchwoman of 27, and P, a 50-something French hippie.

These guys are decent. Of course, I like to travel alone, but the five of them make me laugh. I chat most often with R, who has spent some time studying and living in the Middle East, and has such a great knowledge of that region - we have conversations that are mostly just me asking questions about twentieth century Arabic history.

The rest are nice people, also. N is very sweet - twenty-seven and on a break from art school in Brussels, she hope to become a children's illustrator someday. That makes her quite irresistible, I think.

A bit about what we've been doing in the next entry.

2007-06-30T09:11:00.000-07:00

Day 61:

These blog thingies are usally just transcritions of my paper journal with all of the personal stuff taken out. When I penned this "Day 61" entry, I wrote an illegible mess about love and attraction. Escwing my tendency to keep the personal stuff to myself, I give you the following:

"It was in the Gobi desert that I encountered C for the first time. My falling in love with her was a consequence of having read "Breakfast at Tiffany's" several times while driving to this particular location. Upon seeing C stepping in the sand before a particularly red cliffside I felt a Tourettic urge to write this in my journal: "HOLLY GOLIGHTLY IN THE DESERT." So I did that seven times.

C was wearing pants and a shirt that revealed her dark nipples and an overwrought hat that she clutched to her head, doing battle with the desert winds."

Ahem.

2007-06-30T08:38:00.000-07:00

Day 56, 57, 58, 59, 60

Some of my Tibetan experience, now. It's the morning of the twentieth, so I'm writing about stuff that happened four days ago...

What to say?

Lhasa is nice. The streets are busy - as the city is the centre of Tibetan Buddhism, there is a constant stream of visitors and pilgrims from the countryside. The town takes on a feeling of carnival, especially when a few thousands of tourists are thrown into that mix. I spent my time in the city with my three friends from Golmud - J and K, Americans (K a student of Chinese language studying in Beijing), and E (a Frenchwoman and consummate traveller). Those three people made such wonderful company.

J is a sarcastic guy. K is his girlfriend, a gentler soul, but very accommodating of her boyfriend. J tells really hilarious stories about being "just friends" with K for a whopping THREE YEARS. He's also got an impressive collection of stories detailing a plethora of romantic failures from his high school and college freshman years. His stuff is so wonderfully self-deprecating to be funny, but I can also identify with most of it. And while I play the self deprecation card with the driest of wit (I like my sarcasm to be undetectable), this dude is truly in love, and can diminish himself with a pleasant joie-de-vie. I hope to, someday, be able to tear myself down in such a way. K, meanwhile, endures J's sense of humor quite well, though since they've only been a couple for six months, maybe this is all new to her.

Wonderful stuff.

You (you?) have no idea how happy it makes me to see that goofy, NICE guy get his girl. THAT girl, specifically.

Wonderful stuff.

E, also, makes a superior companion. She's French, though to North American ears her accent sounds like something from Manchester, while Europeans usually place her somewhere in South Africa. She's a constant traveller, having visited all over, with a collection of fine stories to tell. She maintains a flat in Paris, and has promised me a few days tour when I pass through there next.

So...

The four of us visited some of Lhasa's sights, and ate some nice food together. With E, on the second day in Lhasa, I visited the Jokala, Lhasa's primary temple and the most important temple of Tibetan Buddhism. It's an odd place place - this sort of Buddhism is very intense when compared to Seon in Korea. There, temples are small places, sparsely furnished with visual intensity found only in the main temple halls which usually contain three rather subdued statues of the Buddha. The Jokala (and other temples), though, is a labyrinthine place with many random seeming furnishings and statues, with the smell of burning Yak butter permeating the place, with candles everywhere, with money stuck to every surface, with pilgrims circling the rooms, with beggars inside and out...

The bow here is more complete, we can say, than what is done in Korea; some of the devout have callouses on their foreheads from banging against the pavement outside the temple a few times too often.

Oh... there's also a pantheon of gods and deities and reincarnated monks and oracles. I'm not sure I'd be able to get behind a religion where the leader is a reincarnated god. Not sure at all. The fun thing about Seon Buddhism is that the most respected monks are those who are most intelligent and who can communicate ideas in the best way. These guys often live deep in the mountains away from civilization. Past Dalai Lama's, meanwhile, have lived Vatican style in a 1000 room palace in the capital.

Anyhow, yeah, the Jokala is a pretty intense place. More subdued was Same monastery, a quiet place located about five kilometres north of the city center. E and I reached that place by bicycle. The scene there is quieter, as I said, and more contemplative.

Two days after visiting Same, I got back to the big show of Tibetan Buddhism... that 1000 room palace. It's called Potala, and has been home to most of the incarnations of the Dalai Lama throughout history. It was pretty neat, but the admission ticket was steep (13 USD), for a self guided tour that included access to maybe 5o of those 1000 rooms. But hey, it included a peek at the Dalai Lama's bedroom....

2007-06-25T04:23:00.000-07:00

Day 55

Tibet! Lhasa! Shangri-la??

The train ride was okay. It took about fourteen hours, reaching all those high passes with great gusto, ending up at Lhasa, at an elevation of about 3800 metres. I got a little sick towards the end, but playing cards with my three new pals helped keep me in one piece (barely).

I did a bit of wandering around the city with E today, checking out Lhasa's sights (though saving actual entrances for tomorrow). Lhasa is a visually striking city with a style I've not encountered any time before. It's divided into a strongly Tibetan old town and a strongly Chinese influenced New Town. Both are very busy places. The old town is a maze of restaurants, shops, hotels and a general morass of tourist stuff that keeps it from getting gobbled up by the more commercial and boring new town. That place contains a collection of shops targeting the city's upper crust.

The people of Lhasa are really something special. In addition to the Tibetan and Han residents of the city, the streets are overflowing with visitors from the Tibetan countryside. These people, visiting mostly on pilgrimages to Buddhist holy sights are wonderfully dressed in the bright heavy tunics that are practical in the cold countryside, but merely curious in the city.

The smell of the city, too, is nice. The whole place smells of incense and yak butter which is burned as part of the religious tradition of the region. E and I saw great concrete "burners" (something like incense burners in temples) along a river in the new town. As we stopped to take pictures, many pilgrims stopped to add yak butter to the fires inside.

And the geography? Also rather nice. The city seems hemmed in by great mountains which forever seem to be "twenty minutes" away as one walks the street. And in the centre of town is a great hill, upon which sits the Potala Palace, a massive 1000 room building that was once home to all incarnations of the Dalai Lama.

Uhm... more next time. I'm awfully tired right now.

2007-06-25T03:57:00.000-07:00

Day 52, 53, 54

It's early in the morning of the fourteenth of June. I'm on the train to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. I was hoping to take the bus over the 5500 metre high passes that this trip requires, but with this NEW train service (it started last year), the bus is going out of style, and only runs a couple times a week.

The train originates somewhere in the west. I got on in Golmud, the last stop before the train spends 17 hours crossing the Tibetan plateau. Golmud is a STRANGE place. A 1985 edition of Lonely planet says this:

"Locals will tell you that from Golmud to Hell is a local call."

Twenty years later, my current edition says something like this:

"Unless you are an engineer or an escaped convict on the run, there is little reason to visit this strange outpost in the oblivion end of China."

Eeeep.

Really, though, Golmud is odd. It's very clean, with wide streets lined by landscaped gardens and cute little pools of water, covered with stepping stones so that pedestrians can reach the sidewalks. The shops suggest some kind of wealth. The town IS reach, I suppose, because of the resources extracted from the surrounding countryside. Honestly, it's all quite pretty, despite what the Lonely Planet books say.

But God, it is really out there. I was wrong when I said that Vladivostok and Kashgar were at the ends of the earth. THIS place is the end of the earth... those places line up with borders and oceans and trade routes. But this place lines up with nothing but nothingness... mountains and desert. Those places have neighbours!

There's nothing to DO in Golmud, no reason to visit... but it still has a three star hotel. How does that happen?

Moving on:

I've been travelling these past couple days with an American couple - J and K - and E, a solo French woman. Some company made the boredom of Golmud easy to bare.

And thank God for that, because Golmud serves as a sort of bottleneck for travellers to Tibet, easily trapping the unwary for an unplanned stopover of two or three days. The trap lies in the paperwork required to enter Tibet, specifically a 120 dollar "permit" that takes at least one day to arrange. It's just a sort of moneymaker for the Chinese tourism industry, but everyone is supposed to have it.

The other trap is getting train tickets for Tibet. For the four of us, that was a real nightmare. Acting on a tip, we lined up at 6:00, two and a half hours before the ticket office opened. We waited and waited and then, at 8:30, all hell broke loose. The Chinese, you see, aren't so big on the concept of a queue, and the mob that appeared two hours after we arrived weren't so big on the prospect of not getting a ticket (limited availability, you see), so they sort of broke out into a mob with everyone pushing and kicking and shouting and swearing and really trying hard to get ahead in the line. Two hundred people fought for about 40 tickets. Myself and my three comrades had to literally shove back the masses as they tried to get ahead of us.

You ever see "Dawn of the Dead?" Where the zombies really want to get into the mall and bang away at the glass doors? It was sort of like that. But with living, breathing people. I actually grabbed some guy's wallet and told him I would throw it over my shoulder into the crowd if he didn't go back to his place in line.

In the end, we managed to purchase three tickets (the last three!) and paid an extra twenty bucks to get one on the black market and the 150 people who showed up after us went home unhappy.

And now I'm on the road to Lhasa. Just five minutes out of town, looking out the window I saw a very barren landscape. The LED display at the end of my carriage says that our current elevation is 2833 meters, while in the distance some very high peaks loom. Like I said, we will reach heights of 5500 meters before the end of this trip (as a comparison, Mount Everest is 8200 at it's peak, I think) .

Sitting a couple of seats down from me is a trio of Korean retirees who are taking a year long trip around the continent. They are a very odd bunch, with the guys sporting a pair of very long and very un-Korean beards. The beards are about as long as the one that the guy on the 1000 won note has, which is pretty damn long. They are all hippies of a sort, and when I dropped a few references of Hongdae district and the "Art Free Market" they were duly impressed. Hee.

Okay. The train is picking up speed...

2007-06-25T03:40:00.000-07:00

Day 51:

Okay, so I visited, for a few hours, the town of Shizahuang (spelling?). That translates, literally, as "Asbestos Mine." The town contains little other than some housing, a couple of eateries, and also the biggest asbestos mining operation in the whole world. Apparently most of the miners have serious lung disease.

Who the fuck uses asbestos in this day and age?

It's a pretty grim town. The guys who work in the mine look pretty sad - and all used up. There was one guy at the "restaurant" I ate at who seemed completely apart from the world around him. Not simply zoned out, but really somewhere else... he had the saddest eyes I've ever seen. Most tragic of all, perhaps, is the fact that Shizahuang is not just a mining operation but rather a little frontier town - many of the miners are here with wives who work in small shops, and also with their children.

Getting to this desolate outpost was tricky. Working my way across the southern "silk road," Shizahuang was a necessary stop to get to a place called Golmud which acts as an entrance to Tibet. Of course, there aren't any roads to the mine, so I crammed myself into some guy's SUV (14 souls in a car meant for 8) for the generous fee of 10 bucks. We made a harrowing passage through rocky terrain and some inches of river, around the side of a mountain (high enough to reach a snow cap), and along some desert. We suffered one blown tire during the trip, and I suffered some really horrible neck pains. It took eight hours to reach the mine.

When we arrived, I stayed only long enough to get a bite to eat and find a car heading further east. A couple of engineers were en route to the next town, so we shared a cab for the remaining seventy kilometres. And then? Drinking with Asian people! Korea redux!

I don't know what it is about the continent... maybe it's the lack of a US styled protestant church, or maybe it's all the hardships of the twentieth century, but people really love to drink. And they are pretty good at it, too. Yeah, I've got a few stories to fill this space someday...

Anyways, so I arrived in the second town with two engineers who were sent 3000 kilometres (one way) from Shanghai to fix some sort of mining tool in the mountains to the north. One of the pair spoke a bit of English and later when having dinner and drinks with him, his buddy and three "customers" he asked what I would like to drink. I said that I was flexible, so he said to me "I think that foreigners like whisky, would you like some whiskey?" I told him that maybe that was a little bit strong, so he offered wine. The idea of a nice glass of wine got me excited, so he went to the store to find some. Of course, wine to this fellow is some some sort of clear liquid, with about 50 percent alcohol content. Oy....

So, I learned that the dude works for CAT, and that the device he was travelling to fix was used to mine for iron in the mountains.

Eventually, my engineer and his friends got very drunk and went whoring in the back streets of the town. I went to the supermarket for a candy bar and hit the sack. An eventful day.

It's now the NEXT day... about 3:15 in the morning. I'm at the Golmud hotel, having reached my final destination before going to Tibet. I'm in the lobby trying not to wake the counter attendant, who is asleep at his post. If I hold out until 10:00 am I can check into a room and keep it for 26 hours and avoid paying for tonight's sleep. My neck is KILLING ME... fucking SUV.

2007-06-25T03:38:00.000-07:00

Day 50:

A traveler "Shijazhuang has three things: the asbestos mine, the dorm where all the miners sleep, and a big pile of asbestos."

Yeah, I visited the largest asbestos mine in the world. I want to write more, but today was yet another installment in the "drinking with Asian people" saga, and so I'm a little sleepy right now...

2007-06-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

Day 49:

Continuing from last time:

I spent two nights in Kashgar, The real highlight of that city, as I said, is the labyrinthine Old Town, and it's maze of adobe walled homes. I visited with an American traveller for an hour or two. Visitors to the sector are charged 30 yuan admission (three bucks... you gotta pay for EVERYTHING in China), but it's worth the price; certain homes that are actually lived in are open for a quick peek. We were able to see, candidly, a couple of homes of varying styles, one of which had a meal of local food laid out on a table (it looks like Uighur people sit on the floor to eat, like Koreans). We also had a wonderful guide to the town who explained everything to us. That was actually a first in China - historical sights charge massive admission fees, but without any guides, English signage, or active restoration work ones is left wondering where all the money goes.

Kashgar also has a very famous Sunday Market. It's the usual Chinese market stuff - carpets, silks, food, junk electronics, hardware, surplus from the factories supplying Wal-Mart - but as in Turpan, merely the sounds and smells of the place make a visit worthwhile. I bought a wall-hanging/blanket thing from Kirghistan (or maybe a factory in the Suburbs of Shanghai).

After visiting the market, I spent a couple of hours at a Kashgar cafe planning the next few weeks. As it exists now, my plan is to get to Tibet within the next week and a half. I met a Korean guy in Kashgar who wants to do to the same thing, but getting there from Kashgar, however, is tricky.

That guy is taking the most direct route: southwards through the mountains, directly to Lhasa at an elevation of about 5000 meters. It's illegal for foreigners to take that route, but he thinks he can dodge the cops because he looks sort of Chinese. It's been recommended to me that I take the same route - bribes and fines are easy enough, I guess - but as a solo traveller, I'm not very eager to deal with the cops here.

So... here I am now on the slow road to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. I'm in a city called Ruoqiang, a dusty outpost in the middle of nowhere, on the south east fringes of the mighty Taklamakan desert (the largest sand-only desert in the world). My route to Tibet follows the "southern silk road" from the city of Hotan to the city of Golmud (along the desert) and then south through the mountains to Golmud by bus, through mountain passes at heights in excess of 5500 meters above sea level.

To that end, I took a 10:00 pm bus out of Kashgar, arriving in Hotan twelve hours later. I quickly hopped on ANOTHER twelve hour bus that got me to Qiemo. Twenty four hours on the road left me quite tired, but I tried my best to add another six hours to the tally, but was unable to get a drive onwards. So, I spent the night in an overpriced bed and caught a 10:00 ride onwards...

And here I am.

The ride here was decent enough. The book and website that I consulted suggested that it would be a long, bumpy fifteen hour marathon, but I guess the roads have been paved in the last year, so I did it in five.

This town is something else... it's all big wide streets and dusty (so dusty) sidewalks. The storefronts that line the streets have a big coat of sand blown in from the Taklamakan, as do all of the street signs. At first it all seemed so underpopulated... with just a couple of strangers shuffling around I felt like I was in some sort of bad post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick. A little more walking, though, lead me to find a rather pleasant little downtown core, some nice boutique shops, more wealth than I thought was possible in this region, and a population mostly Han Chinese rather than Uighur.

Nice, nice.

Next stop: a big ol' asbestos mine.

2007-06-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

Day 45, 46, 47, 48

Laid up by a bit of illness lately, I've not had much enthusiasm about writing in this space. The twenty-four hour train ride from Turpan to Kashgar was rough. The usual Chinese railroad bullshit, when extended for twenty-four hours, was a bit too much for me. The constant smoking is what started it off - my bunk was beside the smoking section (just the end of the carriage), and so I had the smell of 50 cents/pack cigarettes wafting into my lungs for a whole day. That, combined with the general smelliness of the carriage, people spitting on the floor and children peeing into whatever sink or floor drain they could find make me a little queasy. Later on, a plate of fried vegetables pushed me over the edge.

You know, the only thing worse that shitting into a dirty squat toilet is vomiting into one. Yow!

That said - puking up with two hours to go was a smart move: it cleared my systems long enough for me to enjoy a day exploring Kashgar.

Kashgar is a visual and auditory treat. I spent my day wandering the streets with an American graduate student on a break from studies in Beijing. Kashgar, even more than Turpan, feels like a middle eastern city; the local Uighur people keep quite separate from the Chinese residents of the city, who are numerous. Strolling down the streets of old Kashgar one sees, immediately, such wonderful clothes - the women wear long, colorful (and sparkling) clothes of a local style. The men all look very smart in long overcoats and square hats, and most sport some very compelling facial hair. Older Uighur men look particularly sharp, abandoning none of their heavy clothes even in the heat of the summer.

The commercial life of the city is quite busy. Everywhere are carpet dealers (this place is famous for its carpets, though all are quite shitty in this age). There are also a thousand hat sellers in the city, men sharpening and selling knives (another local specialty) and men banging out shiny copper ware. And, of course, there are millions of food vendors, selling mostly lamb kabobs and flat breads. I've noticed that like in Chinese-China, there are many vendors of packaged food products, but they only sell drinks. Getting a bag of chips or a chocolate bar in China requires a bit of looking...

The best "sight" in Kashgar is it's wonderful "Old Town," a sprawling, labyrinthine collection of adobe homes and cobblestone streets. My American comrade and I explored that place at length, peeking into some homes (and being given tours of others) all along winding streets that took some hours to explore. The homes are very old, running the gamut from dumpy to luxurious.

And one more thing: the city is FULL of little dentist shops, all possessing only one or two chairs , and looking like little barber shops. They are as common as, say, corner convenience stores in Suncheon. I asked my guide to the old town about this - she said that it's because of the local diet; Uighur people love sugary sweets and tooth staining dates and prunes. And, I guess, they like to look good, too...

2007-06-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

Day 44:

I went to the post office and they didn't have any packing material. But I knew this ahead of time, since they didn't have any packing material in Beijing, either. So I brought a big bag of newspaper to stuff the box with. But the lady told me that it is illegal to mail Chinese newspapers to Canada.

What?

2007-06-02T07:26:00.000-07:00

Day 43:

I'm in Lanzhou now, which a few years ago was named the most polluted city in the world. What fun!

The hotel I'm staying at here is a real treat. It very much encapsulates what is great about hotels in this country... that they have something for every budget. This place has nice single rooms starting at 10 bucks, doubles for 15, and a number of deluxe rooms starting at twenty (as well as a 150 dollar "Presidential Suite.") But it also has a number of five dollar "common" rooms that are very clean but lack a private bathroom. Unlike many places, the staff here were happy to give me a common room, though I am sure they are confused about why ninety percent of the rich western travellers who show up in Lanzhou ask for the cheapest bed in the joint.

Lanzhou is a decent enough town, and other than some haze across the afternoon skyline, I can't really see any signs that this place is the epicentre of modern pollution. I strolled around a bit in the afternoon, first to Dongfanghong Square, which is a very modern, very green public square with lots of trees and large and immaculately tended lawns. I was struck here, as in other towns, by the LACK of a Mao statue. Lenin is everywhere in Russia, even after the USSR fell apart, while even with communism going strong here, Mao is nowhere. Odd.

Later on, I went to Wuquan Park on the edge of town, near one of the mountain ranges that hem in Lanzhou's urban jungle, but with the zoo and the bumper cars and the "magic cave" the place was TOO MUCH and I wandered back to the hotel for a nap.

And here I am! Tired, because last night was spent in the hard seat carriage of the train leaving Xi'an.

2007-06-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Day 42

I've eaten Korean food in three different cities since leaving that country. Polishing off a bowl of bibmbap at this very moment. Old habits, right?

Busy day today in Xi'an. I got up early and went to the Muslim quarter to find a souvenir. I've purchased hand-made blanket (blanket type things, anyhow) in a number of places I've visited over the last few years, so finding something like that was my mission for the day. But I had to give up on that mission early when the first seller I approached opened negotiations for a used blanket at $1200 usd. Yeah... twelve hundred bucks for something at a stall in an alleyway in Xi'an. The guy was full of shit, so I got the hell away from the markets, giving my shopping money to a a beggar child hanging out at the exit.

I taxied down to Xi'an Shaanxi History museum for a few hours of peeking at cultural relics covering the whole of China's pre-civil war period. The exhibits were very impressive, thought after awhile the whole pottery theme that most Asian museum have going is sort of tiresome.

After a lunchtime snack I walked down to the Big Goose Pagoda. Not sure about the origins of the name, but the ol' Big Goose stands a very impressive 64 metres tall, and is filled with lots of neat Buddhist relics. Tourists can climb up and get a nice view of the city (charge: four bucks).

Later on, skipping a visit to Little Goose Pagoda, I taxied over to the Forest of Steles Museum in the centre of town. That place exhibits a library of texts engraved on massive stone tablets created during the Han dynasty. The museum is a curious place, being simply room after room filled with these big stone tablets... and nothing else. I suppose it's mainly for big stone tablet enthusiasts, though the sureallness of such a place makes it worth a visit for the non-enthusiast traveller.

Xi'an, they say, is the beginning (or end) of the old silk road, a series of trade routes connecting Europe and China, used for the transport of silk products and other commodities. There were many paths traders used, some going through Pakistan, India, or even by sea, but they all passed through Xi'an. I'll be exploring some silk road sights in the coming weeks, starting with an overnight trip to Lanzhou, which will begin in a few hours.

2007-05-25T18:38:00.000-07:00

Day 41:

Okay, this hostel is pretty nice during the day. It's got a relaxed atmosphere and very clean facilities. And although the breakfast is bad, everyone sleeps late because of the nighttime boozing, so the morning are quiet. Overall, I'd say it is a bit nicer than Saga Hostel in Beijing.

The name, for Google's sake is "Bell Tower Hostel." It's beside the post office.

Xi'an, also, is nice enough overall. For more than a thousand years, Xi'an was at the heart of the Chinese nation, serving as capital for many, many centuries. Past emperors have left behind many tangible signs of power, including the famous army of Terracotta Warriors and an impressive 16 kilometer wall that surrounds the central city.

There is a very nice Muslim quarter here, which is where I spent most of my morning. There's a strip of merchants selling the usual trinkets, but also a slew of wonderful alleyways and cobblestone paths to explore. Those pathways contain a lot of great local eateries and I was able to gorge myself on tofu, squash and cabbage for about seventy-five US cents. This town's mosque, the largest in China, is also a treat, with pretty gardens and a massive prayer hall.

More of Xi'an tomorrow, as well as a train into the west.

2007-05-25T18:33:00.000-07:00

Day 40:

Fun local festival today!

I got up nice and early today and took a local bus to Jiezhou. Jiezhou is a very small city, but is famous as the possible birthplace of Guan Yu, a fourth (third?) century Chinese general, whose exploits in the "Three Kingdoms" era earned him reverence as a sort of God of War (and a place as a character in lots of video games, like "Dynasty Warriors" and "Destiny of an Emperor"). There is a temple to his honor in Jiezhou called Guandian Miao. It's a neat spot for a day trip, and I was lucky enough to arrive during the annual Guan Yu festival! The festival was very charming in it's localness: outside the temple, the streets were filled with the usual merchants selling the usual clothes and household implements, while inside the dancing and musical performances were charmingly amateurish.

Finishing up my day at the temple, I hopped on a five hour bus to Xi'an, where I am writing from. My hostel is nice, but sort of loud. It's sort of a bar with some beds upstairs. "Drop it like it's hot" is the song of the moment. Oy...

2007-05-25T18:20:00.000-07:00

Day 39:

I spent today and yesterday around the city of Yuncheng. I've gone off the map a little bit - this place gets scant few inches of text in my Lonely Planet, and NO street map. I've come to see a pair of temples, so far having made it to one, which was very impressive.

The city here is dirty. Both environmentally and, shall we say, aesthetically. There's lots of industry in the suburbs - big chugging coal plants and the remnants of a salt industry that crapped out in the 1970s. There is no "keep our streets tidy" mentality here (and in much of the Chinese countryside) - litter goes not in waste baskets, but rather on the ground. This is natural and normal. At night, the streets are a sea of plastic hubris and food remains. But while the streets at night are very dirty, they are also quite alive and bustling places. This is good. But the nightlife here is not vibrant like in a bazaar, or youthful like Beijing at night - it's more an expression of common people doing very plain things. Again, this is good.

So, yeah, late last night I tried to tell the non-English speaking hotel staff that I wanted to get to a temple to the north of here. Of course, she couldn't help me, but at about ten that night she sent to my room another hotel guest, who was able to fill me in on the details. The guest was a university professor from Leiden University in the Netherlands, and a fluent speaker of Chinese. He's presently travelling in China with his son, for pleasure and a bit of research. He was also kind enough to let me tag along with him to Yongle temple (my desired destination) for the day.

The Temple proved to be an impressive sight. It's a twelfth century Taoist creation that is best known for it's great murals - large, detailed and continuous (wrapping around three walls) depictions of Taoist figures and of twelfth century Chinese life. Reasonably well preserved, the architecture of the temple is similarly impressive, but it is almost entirely that artwork that draws people to the temple. And making it more compelling for me, my guide filled me in on the history and unanswered questions that surround the site. Curiously, he pointed out that while the Chinese are very good at preservation,m they aren't so skilled at researching what they preserve. They can say "this is very old and beautiful," but can't say much about what a historical sight MEANS.

So, that took up most of my day. I did a bit of planning for the next few weeks (more on that later), and then went back to the hotel. One more temple (and a festival, perhaps) tomorrow, followed by a fast bus to Xi'an.

Day 38

2007-05-25T18:13:00.000-07:00

Day 38:

Pingyao proved to be a real treat! It is, indeed, a very historic feeling place. While Beijing's old alleyways and courtyard homes are being demolished in anticipation of the 2008 Olympic games, Pingyao has been declared a UNESCO heritage site, and remains now and forever a ramshackle collection of cobblestones, courtyard homes and narrow streets, all surrounded by a six kilometer city wall constructed during the Ming dynasty.

The town is very touristed, but unlike Beijing that isn't so distracting. The touts and hawkers are more relaxed here, which helps a lot. Feeling quite content, I spent my time hobbling around the town, poking my head into "antique" shops, eating lots of food and tracing the path of that very impressive city wall.

This morning I boarded a train south to Yuncheng. That trip was yet another railway adventure. I purchased a standing room only ticket, which was cheap and the only ticket available. The Chinese rail system remains both cheap and accessible by way of this "fourth class" ticket which is sold in unlimited quantities. Fitting upwards of 100 people into carriages made for 40, passengers board at the whistle stops in a flurry of pushing, yelling and elbowing, as everyone desperately clamors about looking for a place to sit, or lean or even stand without suffering too much stress.

I, of course, stood (cramped) for all of the five hour journey.

2007-05-25T18:03:00.000-07:00

Day 36, 37

Yesterday I left Beijing on a lunchtime train heading west to Shijazhuang. I got up early, though, and was able to fit in a bit more sightseeing, primarily at a public park just north of the Forbidden City. It was a pretty sight, with it's immaculate gardens and plastic paddle boats zipping around an artificial lake system, but again, it's all a little emblematic of how Beijing can sometimes be a turn off - big crowds and souvenir hawkers everywhere. I don't mean to suggest that Beijing is a place to be avoided, but rather that it takes a bit of work to enjoy one's self there.

Past noon-time, I boarded a fast train to Shijazhuang. That was a treat! The short haul trains from the capital are FAST and very comfortable. In two hours I covered as much ground as would have taken six on any of the other trains I've used so far. Arriving in Shijazhuang, I was greeted by a very pleasant downtown core. Even the area surrounding the train station was clean and quiet, something that is rare in ANY country.

So, other than the provincial museum (I skipped it), Shizahuang's sole "sight" is it's Revolutionary Martyr's Mausoleum. That, fortunately, is the sole reason I decided to visit the city. Entombed here is Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor and communist party member who served in the Chinese army during the war against Japan. Bethune was a True Believer - he lead the Canadian medical mission in the Spanish Civil War before coming to China. Since his 1939 death of blood poisoning (picked up in the field due to a lack of surgical gloves), he has become a hero to many Chinese communists - there is a medical school named for him, and his tomb is very impressive, complete with life sized statute and Chairman Mao quote (bilingual). Mao actually penned an essay on Bethune's life and for a time made it required reading for all Chinese students.

I'm moving west again right now, this time on a very slow, very dirty hard seat ticket to Pingyao, which I am lead to believe is a very historic sort of city of about 90,000 souls.

2007-05-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

Day 35:

Today was my last full day in Beijing. Typically, I spent it doing a bit more wandering, mostly in and out of the hutongs (alleyways) that criss-cross the inner-city. I poked about the shops around the hostel, buying a neat t-shirt and a few jazzy CDs for the next long train ride. The markets are good for buying stuff, but are wonderful for people watching. That's a good thing, since this city is full of beautiful and interesting people.

The people who clamor around the alleys closest to the hostel are all of the working class. Most travel on rusty bicycles, often carrying a young passenger on a rack behind the bicycle seat. Many of these people have dirty faces, and look quite tired. But it's important to remember that they are the Chinese working class, and not the urban poor, who are in much more dire straights, and live lives that are quite separate from the working class (I think).

Everything is loud around these parts... car horns blare incessantly, and so much business is done on the sidewalks that fill the streets with chatter. Some people have only a blanket for a storefront, though those who own shops have such small amounts of retail floor that both merchandise and employees invariably spill into the streets.

Away from the hostel (though not too far) the alleyway shops give way to more upscale boutique shops. They sell the same sorts of things, but of a higher quality and price. Most of the customers of these shops are young and fashionable, though in a trashy sort of way; short skirts, silly t-shirts and bad hairdos are the dress code of this area. Sort of like Korea, actually, more more "ghetto."

Back on the train tomorrow.

2007-05-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

Day 34:

Some hours at a section of the Great Wall today. I went with a van full of Americans to a restored section some hours to the north of the city. That proved to be a very pleasant experience. Like the Forbidden City and so many other popular places in Beijing it is all a little bit overdone (witness the ski-lift to the top of the wall and the big 'ol slide back to the bottom), but looking out at the surrounding mountains, one does get a sense of history, and a clear sense of the wall's purpose, and the reasons for it's successes and failures in delivering on that purpose.

The lot of us scrambled up and down the steps of the wall (the whole thing is steps), peeking into ocassional sentry towers as we went. Later, at the bottom of the wall, we ran the usual gauntlet of vendors selling gaudy tourist trinckets (Chairman Mao tote bags are IN this year). My companions had fun bargainning for the junk, but I still find the process sort of tiring. I guess what makes it especially tiring is that I don't actually want any of the stuff.

2007-05-22T02:12:00.000-07:00

Day 33:

Busy day today! Another twelve hours of walking the streets of Beijing, essentially, but at least this time I actually visited more than one sight.

First stop was a Taoist temple a few kilometers from the hostel. Sort of neat, though I think that maybe now I've had my fill of places of worship. This temple was designed in a sort of courtyard style (just like in the movies... a square yard surrounded by living quarters on three sides). Around the sides of the temple are a series of rooms called "departments." The departments all have odd names - "department of animals," "department of three month meditations," "department of longevity," "department of inflicting 15 kinds of violent death" - along with manikins that serve to represent each department's theme.

After that I went to Beijing's main art gallery. It had some nice stuff by local art students (including lots and lots and lots of nudes) as well as a very nice exhibition of the works of Rene Magritte.

After leaving the art gallery, I went to a park just north of the Forbidden City, for a nice hilltop view of the area.

Listen, everyone around is rather loud right now, so I need to close for the night. I will visit the Great Wall tomorrow, and will leave town in two days time.

2007-05-22T02:01:00.000-07:00

Day 32:

I got my visa! I guess that my hundred bucks was enough cash to forgive whatever sins I committed by not applying back in Korea. Chinese nationals, curiously, get the visa for free, and the bunch that were there to pick up their visas at the same time as me all looked rather wide-eyed as I handed over my cash, enough to live on for a few months in this country.

This is good news, but it turns out that there is a whole lot of civil conflict happening right now in Pakistan. General Mushareff who is Pakistan's leader and George Bush's dear friend is trying to subvert democracy, and the Pakistani people have been starting a lot of riots and general strikes in response. There were 30 people killed by government forces at a recent demonstration. I'm not sure what I am going to do. In the past, I've not given too much thought to my personal safety when travelling, but these days I feel like I might actually enjoy my return to Canada, and would like to return in one piece.

Oh well. More on that situation as it develops.

I went to Niukie Mosque (cow-street Mosque) this afternoon. Visiting there was so pleasant, and it is my favorite place in the city so far. Dating to 996, the mosque is the largest and oldest in the city, and it has just as much (chronological) history as the Forbidden Palace. At present, though, it has none of the tiresome crowds that plague the Forbidden City. When visiting, I was able to explore the grounds very thoroughly, but was also able to spend some quiet time in contemplation.

The Mosque is a visual treat. The exterior of the buildings are very Chinese in style, looking very much like a Buddhist temple, rather than an Islamic Mosque. But inside of the buildings, everything is Arabic in style. That makes for a neat fusion of history and culture.

There was a young boy begging for money outside of the mosque. I think he was begging in Arabic. I gave him lots of money.

More temples and things tomorrow.

2007-05-22T01:40:00.000-07:00

Day 31:

The guy at the Pakistani consulate was a real dick to me today. My chances of getting an onward visa out of China are looking sort of shitty. It went something like this:

Him: So what do you do for a job.
Me: Ah, I teach English in Korea.
Him: So why didn't you get a visa in Korea?
Me: Well, I've been away for awhile, and I didn't really want the validity of the passport to expire
Him: Honestly, that is a very horrible excuse.
Me: Oh?
Him: Yes it is. You didn't get it because it didn't suit you at the time.
Me: Oh?
Him: Yes. If a Pakistani person went to the Canadian embassy in Beijing and asked for a visa, they would throw him out.
Me: Oh, yes, you're probably right. I'm sorry.
Him: Okay, come back tomorrow and see if you are approved.
Me: Okay. Thank-you, sir. Goodbye, sir.

Oy! What the heck does it matter where I file the application This was the boss of the entire consular mission, and he was a total dick! He's famous on Internet message boards, apparently, for being such a man. But is he willing to turn away my 100 dollar visa fee just to be mean? Who knows...

...

I put my writing on hold just now to chat to an American couple from Virginia. They are long retired, and have been staying at this hostel for the past few weeks. Just a little holiday, they say.

Increasingly, I find that I like talking to older travellers much more than I like talking to the young ones. Like Kaplan said in the passage I quoted earlier, older travellers are often much more intelligent than the young backpackers, and much more informed about the local culture and history. Us kids are sometimes so preoccupied with being pretend hippies that we don't have the time for learning and critical thinking.

...

Anyhow. Back on track. That trip to the embassy took up most of my morning and afternoon. I got out of there around lunchtime, had a bite, and then taxied over to the Forbidden City. I spent about three hours poking around there. It's quite informative, but sort of uninspiring. It's a nice museum, but that's all it really is - a big museum, rather than a representation/simulation of the past. It suffers, also, from being located near Tiannamen Square and Mao's mausoleum. That whole place has been turned into a sort of Maoist wonderland... and visitors to the Forbidden City must first pass under a MASSIVE portrait of the great helmsman.

More impressive than all the regular sites are the People's Liberation Army guys who wander around the square (and everywhere else in the city). Sometimes they march alone, sometimes in pairs, and sometimes in packs of a few dozen. They look really smart in their uniforms, and they never really break character, remaining steely and serious at all times. I saw a troupe of about two dozen marching around the embassy section of town. They all marched two-by-two in perfect formation, and two guys at the very back held little stop signs. When the troupe came to a crosswalk, one of the rear guys broke formation to stop traffic with his little sign. When his fellows had crossed safely, he gave a salute to the front most driver and rejoined formation.

So cool. And it's not just a show for the tourists; these guys are EVERYWHERE.

2007-05-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

Day 30:

Beijing, now - writing on the front step of my hostel, because it's too bloody crowded in there. I'm at "Saga Youth Hostel." It's quite modern and clean and cheap, but I''m more accustomed to staying at dirty flop-house type accomidations. All of the "backpackers" here give me the willies.

When I fist started travelling, I sort of pretended to be some sort of dirty super-traveller. Conversations on the home front would often go like this:

pretty girl: Oh, you went to Mongolia? That's so remote. How did you manage?
Michael: Ah, you know, I just sort of showed up, and got a driver and a jeep and we went into the desert for a few weeks.

Of course, at that point, I was still clueless about how to do anything on the road, so I really just stumbled into the desert, leaning heavily on my driver and guide for help.

But fuck, if we pretend to be something for long enough, we just sort of become that thing. All that bullshit endured between Mongolia the first time, around to Timor island, to Tynda's train station, to the shittiest flophouse in Hohhot....

Well, these are the reasons all of the backpackers with the official second-hand chic University of Kings College uniform give me the willies. Go get stabbed, motherfucker.

I guess this journal is covering all the bases except for what I've actually been doing on the road. Sorry for that.

So what did I do today? I walked around a lot. Yeah, when not facing danger head on in Dili, I mostly spent my holidays walking around. I arrived at Beijng about 6:00 am today, and hopped into a taxi to the hostel, and found a nice cheap dorm bed. I took a shower for the first time in 75 hours, and set out to explore a bit.

Beijing has a lot of cool sights - the Forbidden City, Mao's Masoleum, Tianammen Square, The Summer Palace, The Great Wall... but MY first stop was the Oriental Plaza movie theatre for a matinee showing of Spider-man 3. But of course! See? I'm a hardcore traveller. I dug how they had Harry and Peter fight in costume but without masks, just as they did so often in the comics.

After that I spent about ten hours wandering the streets. I'm not sure if I like this town, though - it's all a little garish. Tianammen Square is some sort of Maoist wonderland - my guidebook describes it as "all a little Kim-Il Sungish"." And so many of the neat old buildings and alleyways are being demoslished right now to make things tidier for the 2008 summer Olympics, which will be held here in a few months.

The food her is spiffy, though. All sort of super-spicy Sichuan tofu dishes are on offer, and are so delightful! The foreign languages bookstore, also, is massive; about the size of a smallish "Chapters" store, though unfortunatly they don't have the Central Asian phrasebook that I want for my time in Xinjiang provence next month.

Honestly, though, I'm a little underwhelmed: I've yet to find any of the cosmpolitan charm or any of the rougish attitude that was on display in Shanghai when I visited there last year.

But maybe tomorrow...

2007-05-18T02:44:00.000-07:00

Day 29:

I'm on the sleeper bus to Beijing! It's pre-departure time. I must admit - the third class sleeper in Russia was foul, but this - this is ridiculous! What we've got here is a regular sized bus, stuffed with 24 bunks. And as you can expect, that makes for a sweaty, smelly, noisy affair. But it IS cheap - the twelve hour journey costs about twelve US bucks.

But oh... fuck... the guy behind me has the worst foot odor I've yet to encounter. It's so bad that I'm no longer sure that the cost savings are worth it.

Aw, fuck... this stench is overpowering... I can't concentrate enough to get my thoughts down on paper... maybe when the bus starts moving the air coming in from the windows will blow it away from me and I will be able to continue...

(later)

Okay. It's a little better now. We're still stationary, but the guy to the right of me just lit up a cigarette. His tobacco smell is overpowering the other guy's foot smell.

So. Back on topic. The train from Ulaanbaatar took about twenty-five hours to reach Hohhot, in China. As I mentioned before, Hohhot is the capital of Outer Mongolia, which is the name given to the ethnically Mongolian part of northern China. Curiously, there are more people of Mongolian descent here than in Mongolia proper.

Anyways, we arrived around 9:30 pm, and I set out with a couple of American travelers (Mika and his extraordinarily cute girlfriend Megan) to find a hotel. And it wasn't easy!

The touts outside of the train station pulled out the usual mob shtick to shuffle us into a place that would give them a good commission, but being in a group of three, it was easy enough for us to shrug them off. Eventually, though, unable to find the hotel that we wanted, we followed a non-threatening looking female tout to her "hotel." We followed her down the street... around some corners... into an apartment building... up some stairs... up some more stairs... down a hallway... up some stairs... onto the roof... back inside... up some more stairs....

Eventually we reached a door. The tout pounded on the door for a good five minutes before someone answered. The woman who answered the door looked rather tired, was wearing a VERY short mini-skirt and was holding the largest banana than any of us (the tout included, surely) had ever seen. Needless to say, we promptly left that place.

The three of us eventually spent the night in a grotty place across from the train station. We paid three bucks a piece for a pair of really disgusting rooms without showers.

Over dinner that night (Sichuan hot-pot with tofu and vegetables!) I found out that Megan and Mika were like me, fresh from a stint of teaching English in Korea. They had spent a year (ending this past February) working in Gwangju, which was pretty close to my old HQ of Suncheon. Pretty cool. We spent a few hours eating and drinking. I was made very happy; the combination of good food and good conversation is always a treat for the solo traveler.

The three us us puttered around Hohhot a bit this morning. Mika and Megan had to depart in the early afternoon, so I spent a few hours here by myself. We had all agreed that Hohhot was a pretty gross place, but once I managed to get far away from the train station, I found some nice sites. The museum here is pretty cool, actually. It has a great dinosaur exhibit, and some neat displays on traditional Mongolian culture. One sad note though: Mongolia was the stomping grounds of Roy Chapman Andrews (the famous archaeologist who inspired the character of Indiana Jones). He, and others, found loads of dinosaur bones and fossils in Mongolia. It strikes me as sad, though, that the Mongolian museums have such pathetic collections, and that all of the really compelling stuff has been sent abroad, and to China.

Anyhow, another highlight of Hohhot is a visit to the Muslim quarter. A few blocks in south-central Hohhot (near the mosque) are home to a plethora of buildings designed in a sort of Arabic style. This is also a great place to eat street food, and to scare up some tasty meat-less snacks.

I also managed to find Hohhot's sole McDonald's franchise. It's curious, but ever since I visited Shanghai last year, McDonald's has always seemed to me to be a rather Asian institution. Back home, we've got so many McDonald's stores - maybe one for every 100,000 residents. And they are all owned by upper-middle class franchise holders, and patronized by middle and working class people. Accordingly, McDonald's in Halifax is a dumpy sort of place. But in Asia, there is perhaps one for every million residents, and they are patronized by people who earn a decent wage. The Mickey D exists here as a sort of palace of capitalism - a shining, glimmering, beckoning palace surrounded by a sea of grungy communism and menacing poverty.

Fuck! Enough!

2007-05-18T02:40:00.000-07:00

Day 28:

I've been in Chinese territory for the last couple of hours. Those hours have been spent rumbling along the railroad tracks in the Chinese part of the Gobi Desert. I like my bunkmates more than all of my previous companions. They don't speak English so well, but they've kept me filled up with cheap Chinese bread and beer.

I intended to write more last night but I managed to fall asleep in the middle of the last paragraph. I notice now that I prefaced that summary of recent Mongolian politics with the word "first." This suggests that I had more points to make, but I'm afraid that I can't really recall them right now.

2007-05-14T06:18:00.000-07:00

Days 25, 26, 27

I met a guy from Mississippi at the Chinese embassy who has been living in the Mongolian countryside since 1997, working on an agricultural aid project. He lives with his American wife and his five (!) kids. Four of those kids have been born in Mongolia. The Mongolian countryside, he says, is "home" to his kids - moreso than America, even.

That's such a wonderful life, I think. He's taking his family back to the 'states soon, but those kids should grow up into very unique, worldly adults. The oldest is twelve - all of them have spent their entire lives as residents of this place. They'll have great stories to tell as adults, but also have a more complete perspective on how the world operates than most of us dolts. And they get special insight for being the children of aid workers, rather than the kids of mining company executives.

So, anyways: I'm on the train to Hohhot now. That's in China. I'm stuck on a top bunk, and accordingly, I fear that when I fall asleep, I might roll over to my death. There's no railing on my bed, you see...

But the railway operation here is so much nicer than in Russia. The train is cleaner, the staff is friendlier, we get an "in flight meal," and best of all, we don't have to pay an extra two bucks for clean linens. It remains to be seen if there are any bloodsuckers in my matress, but the lack of any visible bloodstains is a good sign.

Really tired at the moment, but because it's been days since I last wrote, I'm going to soldier on...

First, I'll write the final word on Mongolian history. This will be my last history essay, since those are sort of self indulgent, I think:

(this is from memory, rather than from notes, so the dates might be wrong)

Mongolia remained a territory of imperial China for 150 years. This didn't come to and end until Imperial China came to an end. With the overthrow of the emperor by republican forces, the Mongolian people proclaimed thier independance, and threw out thier Chinese bosses. Curiously, at this point Mongolia became a theocracy - the "Boghd Khan" (eight time reincarnated leader of Mongolian Buddhism) became head of state.

Things didn't work out so well for the new Mongolian state. The Chinese came back in force. But the White Russian army (the guys who were fighting against the Bolshevik takeover of Russia) came to liberate the Mongolians. But, not suprisingly, the White Russians had an agenda of their own, and turned out to be just another occupying force.

And then came the Bolsheviks.

The Russian commies "saved" the Mongolians from both the Chinese and the White Russians, and in 1922 Mongolia became the world's second communist state. Of course, this state proved to be little more than a puppet plaything of the Soviet Regime. When Stalin came to power things got really bad, and people started dissapearing. The purges hit Mongolia full on.

As the Soviet Union twisted and turned throughout the second half of the twentieth century, so too did Mongolia. Communism went away at the same time in both countries. But not really - the "former communist" Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party has dominated the free elections since communism fell in 1990. Acussations of corruption are common. The thugs who managed the dictatorship of the past so well have been very skilled at "managing" the parliamentary system of today. If the situation sounds similar to Russia of today, that's because it IS similar.

But, like in Russia, the people aren't taking this garbage lightly. The 2004 elections produced a parliamentary tie, and historic coalition government, shared between the Democrats and the Thugs. This lasted two years before the thug party made a powerplay, achieving a majority by purchasing the services of a few Democratic members of parliament. But when this happened the Mongolian streets filled with angry protestors.

The angry voices didn't really accomplish much, but they were a sign that things are quite so bad as they were in the past...

2007-05-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

Day 24:

Correction: There are only 1,000,000 people in UlaanBaatar. About 700,000 live in the ger districts.

Okay, with a lot of repitition from last time, here's a brief territorial history of the Mongolian empire:

In 1206 Chinngis (Gengis) Khan united the various tribes of Mongolia under his leadership and founded the Mongolian empire. Together they conquered a whole lot of land. Chinngis was succeed as emperor by two of his sons, and more importantly by this grandson, Kublai Khan. Under Kublai Khan's leadership, the empire was at it's largest: stretching from present day Korea to the Ukraine, south into Vietnam, and all over the middle east.

That year, when Kublai Khan died, the provences of his empire became formally independant states, but ruled by Mongolians, of course. The Persian and middle eastern Mongolian states didn't last very long before being conquered by outside forces, so two main successors to Kublai's empire emerged: The Golden Horde in present day Russia, and "The Empire of the Great Khan" (really, the "Yuan Dynasty"), back in Mongolia's heartland and China and the Russian Far East.

In 1445, The Golden Horde split further, into eight pieces. This happened because of infighting, and also because of the growing strength of the Russian princes, intent on forming thier own empire. In the 1500s, most of the Mongolian states were swallowed up by the Russians. The largest state, the Siberian Khannate, was subjugated around 1605. Two states limped into the 18th century... the remate Khazak khannate was absorbed into the Russian empire in the 1730s, while the Crimean Khannate survived as a vassal state of the Ottoman empire until it too became Russian in 1783.

Meanwhile, back in the homefront, the Mongolians became thoroughly Chinese, declaring themselves emperors of the Chinese, as the "Yuan Dynasty." But thier rule was bound to fail: numerically rather small, they were much very dependant on the co-operation of their Chinese subjects. In 1368, the last Mongolian emperor capitulated to the Chinese, handed over his throne, and all the Mongolians went back to the motherland. And back to the state of never-ending civil war that they enjoyed in the years before Chinngis.

But, nevertheless, Mongolia continued on as an independant state into the 16th century. They showed a bit of muscle when united under the rule of Altan Khan, but with his death in 1583, this unravelled a bit more. Mongolia's northern lands became fully Russian, as the imperial army reached the Pacific Ocean in 1639. In the 1680s, the Chinese entered Mongolian lands with cannons. Moving in with the permission of one of the clans locked in a civil war, the Chinese set about conquering BOTH sides in that war. They did this around 1732, and the great Mongolian empire ceased to exist.

2007-05-14T05:54:00.000-07:00

Day 23:

I learned a bit more about the Russian Far East and Siberia today. I guess this is the final word on that:

So. Chinggis Khan (we call him "Gengis Khan") created the Mongolian empire in 1206 by uniting the various Mongolian clans under his leadership. This empire of his lasted until the death of his grandson Kublai Khan (we know him from the "pleasure dome" poem). At that point, the Mongolian empire was pretty big - the biggest empire in the history of man, actually, encompasing all of present day Russia, China, down into Viet Nam, most of the middle east, all of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Khazakstan... and west into Belarus and the Ukraine.

The point, though, is that Siberia and the Russian Far East were Mongolian.

But in 1294, the empire was divided up into four independant states. One of those was controlled by the "Golden Horde," and was made up mostly of what is today called Russia.

By 1445, the Golden Horde was in disarray, and it split once more, into eight parts this time. One of those eight parts was the "Siberian Khannate." Ove the next couple hundred years, the Russian empire emerged, and conquered the former lands of the Golden Horde. Most of Siberia was put under Russian control in the late 1500s, and the final Khan of Siberia died on the run from Russian forces in 1605. Meanwhile, the Yuan Dynasty (one of the 1294 creations) was in disarray at the same time... it's claims on the far east were diminished when the Russians reached the pacific ocean for the time in 1639.

2007-05-08T02:44:00.000-07:00

Day 22

Walking around Ulaanbaatar again. UB is good for that. Not exactly a picturesque city, but it does the trick.

I started today with a walk to a Japanese place around the corner from Tselmeg's apartment. They sell a toasted egg and cheese sandwich with a dollop of salad and a drink for about $2.25 US. Best deal in town!

Followed that with a trip to the Internet place to upload a few photos and update the journal.

Later I took a tour of some of the city's temples and monasteries. Those are all crumbling affairs... it's sort of sad, really... they haven't had proper maintenance since the 80s, at least. But the sadness isn't really warranted: the monasteries in the city aren't really living places. They are just museum pieces. The real spiritualism is happening at facilities in the countryside. Stalin had most of the monks of the monks of his time murdered or integrated into secular society, but it would seem that religion has been enjoying a resurgence since the breakup of the USSR.

I made a mistake earlier. Some of the temples in this city are older than 100 years. One palace of the Bogd Khan (he was head of state when Mongolia was briefly a Buddhist theocracy in the 1910s) survives. It was built in 1903. Also, parts of the Ghandan Khiid, a monastery on the outside of town were constructed in 1838.

Buddhism here is of the Tibetan mode. I dig the difference in iconography as compared to western Europe's Zen Buddhism ("Seon" in Korea). That model is pretty minimalistic in terms of temple images and representations of deities and protectors. Tibetan Buddhism is quite different. A highlight of my trip to Karakorum this past August was going to a temple and seeing a female idol wielding four swords and sporting a chunky necklace of human skulls. Not exactly the smiling fat-man at the urban temple I worked at in Suncheon.

I learned that it was one of the later Mongol Khans who created the title of "Dalai Lama." Altan Khan was converted to Buddhism in the late 16th century, and later named Tibetan leader Sonam Gyato as the third Dalai Lama (while designating the first two posthumously) (31). Curiously it was Altan Khan who would later lead the last conquest of the crumbling Mongol empire - a war against the kingdom of Tibet.

But back on topic: my wanderings today took me into the ger-district ghettos on the outside of town. Those places are pretty sad. Living conditions are quite shitty... everything is dusty and sanitation is medieval. The "ger," as I wrote earlier is the traditional yurt that Mongolian people have been living in for the past 1000 years.

One assumes that that unemployment in the ghettos is very high. People are poor in the countryside, also... but the nomads have possessions (herds of animals) and they live in a clean place. Not so, the urban poor.

Tselmeg tells me that about 70% of the urban population lives in the ghettos. Math tells me that is about 30% of the national population. The government, she says, wants to build apartments for the people, but first they must agree to sell their land. She says that people are hopeful, but building affordable housing for one million people would be a tall order in ANY country.

Anyhow, after checking out the districts, I wandered over to Tsagaan Tolgoi hill, to hopefully enjoy a nice view of the city. But without success. That hill contains a collection of stones called an ovoo (literally, a pile of stones with, perhaps, some prayer flags). Unfortunately for me, a trio of locals were enjoying a drink on the hill when I arrived. Upon seeing me, though, they all put down their drinks and picked up really large rocks.

So, obviously, I went back down the hill.

Dave pointed out yesterday afternoon that one difference between when he first visited Mongolia and today is the existence today of a significant anti-foreigner sentiment. I experienced a bit of that last time also (more on that in a later entry!) but I was hoping it was an isolated incident.

Guess not.

Everyone in our little ex-pat community in Suncheon used to giggle at the silly xenophobia of the Korean people. We were right to laugh at that, but I never, EVER felt unsafe in that country. No matter where I was, no matter what time. Here though, and in other countries, I have felt extremely unsafe.

Such a funny world we live in.

11:00, UB.

2007-05-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

Day 21:

Another day in Ulaanbaatar. I'm starting to feel a little stagnant.

Tselmeg's place is in one of the Soviet block apartment buildings near the center of town. It's one building down from where my hostel was last year.

As I walked the street to the building a couple of nights ago, I thought about how easy it would be to live here. Financially easy, since rent on one of these places is about 200 USD a month, utilities are cheap and food can be cheap also. But not just easy is that sense - the town is a nice size. It's easy to get a handle on the best place for a plate of food, the best place for a drink, the best book stores and supermarkets...

A bit like Halifax, in that regard.

I saw a posting for a teacher wanted at an NGO in the western countryside. It was all I could do to not jot down the contact information.

Longer one next time. Rather tired now.

11:30 pm, UB

2007-05-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

Days 18,19,20

Three days in Mongolia, now. This is my second stay in the country. Last time I was at a hostel, and this time I staying at the apartment of my old friend Tselmeg.

I'm in the capital, Ulaanbaator. Since this is my second time here, I'm just sort of hanging out. I'm not exploring much this time, and I'm not really thinking critically.

So I don't have much to write about. Regardless, here are a few notes:

Ulaanbaator has a population of about 1.5 million (another 1.2 million people inhabit the Mongolian countryside). The city is a sprawling low-rise affair. In true ex-soviet fashion, the center of town is dominated by a huge public square. Most of the buildings in town are of the soviet style - there are a few grandiose (sort of...) government buildings and a whole lot of concrete block apartment buildings for the populace. And there is one statue of Lenin, of course.

The center of town suggests a certain amount of wealth and economic development. There are a few decently made buildings, and a whole lot of stuff for the tourists, of which there are many more than in Russia. Away from the city center, though, we find the ger districts - ghetto quarters where most of the local population lives in the traditional style of housing... a sort of yurt/teepee home called (of course) a "ger."

There is nothing particularly old in town. Before communism hit in the early 1920s, the capital of the Mongolian state would often move. I don't mean that different cities would be named capital, but rather that the capital city would physically move - a rather simple thing because pre-communist Mongolian cities consisted mostly of gers. Accordingly, nothing in this town is more than 100 years old.

So, yeah. That's the history of the town. More on that later, when I can find the words to write more about the overall history of Mongolia.

At the present, the weather is very cool, but not cold. It's nice. Tselmeg and I have spent all of today sitting outside of "Dave's Place," which is a very nice Irish bar located right off of the main square. The titular Dave is a neat guy, and has run this business for a number of years (four? five? I can't remember). He's lived in the city even longer (seven years? eight?). His bar is a popular ex-pat hangout.

Incidentally, there's a whole lot of Korean influence in this city. Lots of Korean restaurants and hotels, lots of beauty salons and a whole lot of Hyundai Cars. I noticed last time I was in the city that even the arcade games at the local cinema are Korean cast-offs.

Oh, and fuck... it's also a very dusty city. No one has thought to plant grass or flowers around the streets, so whenever the wind picks up the dust gets everywhere.

So, I'm not sure when I'll leave here. Maybe I'll stay for a week. Maybe two. Maybe I'll venture into the countryside. Maybe not.

Ulaanbaator

2007-05-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

Day 17. May Day.

Ginsberg's America is the final word on Russian and American relations. Everyone lost the cold war. In 1956 Ginsberg wrote:

"America when I was seven momma took me to Communist cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1935 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Ampter plain. Everybody must have been a spy" (42).

I read that in Tynda. Ginsberg's nostalgia made me tear up a little. Everyone lost the cold war, but the honest communists in America took a hit so many decades before the wall came down...

"When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?" (39).

The Russian socialists got their chance and blew it. But, regardless, everyone here insists that the poor are worse off than they were in the USSR.

"America you don't really want to go to war" (42).

And so on.

"America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel" (43).

"The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages" (43).

"This is the impression I get from looking in the television set" (43).

Ginsberg was already nostalgic for a workers movement back in 1956! In 2007 we must all be doomed!

A couple days of rest and then some Mongolian thoughts. I arrived a few hours ago.

Ulaanbaatar, 8:35 pm, Dave's Place

2007-05-04T23:37:00.000-07:00

Day 16:

Yesterday and today in Ulan-Ude. It's a pleasant city. I think about thirty percent of the population here in Mongolian. Not strictly "Mongolian," actually - the people here are of the Buryat culture, which is one of the two dozen ethnic groups that constitute present day Mongolia. If I remember correctly from my visit in August, Mongolian people constitute about 82 percent of the 2.7 million people in Mongolia, Khazak people constitute another six percent, while the other groups make up the rest. I believe there are 60,000 Buryat people in the country. It would seem, then, that there are more Buryat people outside than in.

In addition to an eclectic cultural milieu, Ulan-Ude also possess what claims to be the largest statute in the world of Vladimir Lenin's head. Not the whole body of that great man - no, just his HEAD. Sort of creepy.

There are some enjoyable walks around town to be had, and some exquisite old buildings to check out. The old opera house is a treat, as are the traditional wooden structures.

While walking yesterday, I met a young man (seventeen years old) and his father, travelling by train to the nearby city of Irkutsk. They had spent the past week on a rollerblading (!) trip in China. I asked them, too, about Lenin's death - back in Canada, Karen insisted yesterday that it was a big deal at home, and she couldn't believe it wasn't such an item in Russia. The younger of the duo insisted that young people simply don't care, while his father proclaimed that Yeltsin "broke the country." Curiously it was also a big deal in China; the pair told me that one Chinese man frantically tried to mime the news to them when he heard it on the radio, only to be met by a shrug of indifference.

Anyhow.

Ulan-Ude seems a tamer town than Chita. Chita was full of rather stereotypical young Russians: young men with closely sheared heads and surly (cheap) black leather jackets. And open bottles. My God, the open bottles! Everyone... young, old, male, female strolls around Russia with an open bottle of booze (usually Vodka). It's sort of horrible. But it's not so present in Ulan-Ude. That makes the city much nicer, I think.

While strolling today, I encountered a couple of young Russian university students. They didn't speak much English, but we were able to communicate a little in French. That felt pretty cool. The elementary and high school French lessons I endured always made me feel (very, very) anxious, but when I get back to Canada, I might give some lessons a shot. I was able to sit through an entire YEAR of University French instruction. Sybille Bedford said at the end of her last book (I paraphrase): "remaining monolingual is akin to limiting one's mind to the straight path of a streetcar."

Mongolia tomorrow.

-A cafe, Ulan-Ude, 6:00 pm

2007-04-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

Day 15:

Now leaving Chita! Neither time nor money enough to dawdle, I'm afraid, though I would have liked to. Chita has a lot of positives: more beautiful streets, a more cosmopolitan atmosphere, and a bigger public square than all of the eastern cities. I have a sense that Chita has been rewarded for its place in Russian history - rewarded with largese and construction projects (in true Soviet fashion, right?)

For good reason, perhaps. In 1905, Chita was at the heart of tiny "Chita Republic." That year, in the midst of the revolutionary fervor that followed Russia's military defeat at the hands of Japan, Chita socialists proclaimed their independence from the Tsar's Russia. The leaders of this movement were detained and punished, but the spirit of Chita - long a place of exile for political rabble-rousers - would not be crushed. Following the revolutions of 1917, Lenin created the "Far Eastern Republic," which was a pseudo-independent nation covering some 1,300,00 square kilometres. This nation was about the size of modern day Quebec, and acted as a buffer between the new Soviet Union and the empire of Japan. Bolstered by American, French and English troops, the Japanese managed to occupy and loot both Chita and Vladivostok, but the buffer served it's purpose: the enemies were repelled and in 1922 the Far Easter Republic was absorbed back into the USSR.

This demands another trip to the library, though: there were American, English, French and Japanese troops aiding the white army against the Bolsheviks in the east. Were there any Canadians? Did we go to war with them bad Russians?

Afternoon, on the train.

Scorecard: Chita to Ulan Ude, 8:30 am train, 8 hours.

2007-04-29T19:58:00.000-07:00

Day 14:

Just about finished this 27 hour train journey. Except, with the time zone change, I think it is more like 28 hours.

Not so much to report his time. Second class is much nicer than third. Each carriage sleeps about 36, within nine closed-off compartments of four bunks each. One each of these second-class journeys, I have been lucky enough to share my compartment with only one person.

Oh... I'm now in Siberia. Chita is close to where (politically, anyways) the Far East ends and Siberia begins. In both regions, there have been lots of prety sights from outside my carriage window. I particularly like the old shack/log cabin communities that cluster around the tracks every few hundred kilometres. They seem to me part American-west ghost town and part Soviet pipe dream.

So, if all goes according to plan, I should be in Mongolia in three days. There's a place in UlaanBaatar that serves the most wonderful chips. I can't wait.

2007-04-29T19:48:00.000-07:00

Day 13:

Rumbling along to Chita, right now. This ride will be about 27 hours... at the moment, I am dealing with hour number six.

Sleeping at the train station wasn't so bad. I was really only unconscious for two or three hours. And I wasn't alone, as quite a few locals had the same idea.

Tynda was actually quite neat. Though very small, it's the headquarters of the famed BAM (Baikal-Amur Mainline) railroad, which is a sort of second Trans-Siberian line, that runs to teh north of the main line and is intended to provide access to more of the bountiful natural resources of Siberia and the Far East.

The local museum in Tynda is dedicated mostly to showcasing BAM's (sometimes rather sorry) history. When construction began in the 1930s, BAM was declared a "Hero Project of the Century" by the Soviet regime, but it was not finally completed until 1991, just as the soviet union came undone. The Tynda museum sums up the construction history quite nicely - one delay had to do with the fact that during the Second World War, the line was dismantled, and the rails were used to build a support line into Stalingrad, during the German's long siege of that city.

Exhibits at the museum also spotlight the culture of indigenous Russian people. Not surprisingly, those cultures seem very similar to those of indigenous people of Canada's north. I think those links demand a trip to the library for further research when I get back home.

Also: Tynda sports some rather cool graffiti on the footpath near the train station:

"Punks not dead" and "Sex Pistols" and (curiously) "Art School!"

8:05 pm, on the train

2007-04-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

Day Twelve:

Slept on a hard bench at the railway station last night.

As I've said before, Russia (particularly the Far East, but elsewhere also) is not very tourist-friendly. My guidebook observes that this, the largest country in the world, contains only THREE tourist information centres.

Three! Even the last couple of Korean stops on my journey (Samcheok and Sokcho, each with a population of 90 000) has helpful, English speaking information kiosks.

Believe me when I say that at most, Samcheok probably receives 200 English speaking tourists in a year - mostly Japanese nationals. But still, the city has an information desk with English materials and a staff of two (!) English-speakers. Khavarosk as a population of 620 000, and they don't even TRY to make things easy for tourists.

But that doesn't really matter. The silliness of it all makes me feel like Marco Polo with a stylish backpack and muddy boots. No, the real problem here is something else. It's the paperwork! Oh, the fucking paperwork!

See, I got off the train at about midnight, after a 30 hour ride. It was too late to go wandering the streets looking for a hotel, so I set about getting a cot in the train station's rest area.

But no dice.

See, in any other country, one would just pay some money and then flop down for a quick nap. But not Russia. In Russia, there is paperwork to be done before one can sleep. There is the showing of proper identification. And then there is the ubiquitous ledger. Even the Russians on hand that night were having a tough time jumping through all of the hoops - filling out the forms, showing the ticket to prove they had just arrived, being catalogued... when I came to the head of the line, the clerk shrugged and with a curt "Nyet," sent me away. It would be simply impossible for a foreigner to even THINK about filling in all the proper forms to get a bed.

And it's not only a problem when trying to get a cot at the fucking train station. See, even native Russians need to use a passport to travel domestically. And when I went to the post office to mail an old t-shirt back home, I had to fill out three forms. Three IDENTICAL forms! I don't even know what the forms asked for, since I just passed them to the guy standing behind me in the queue to fill out. The kicker is that I didn't get to retain one of the forms, which leads me to believe that from now until the end of time, three forms in three separate filing cabinets in Russia will record that once upon a time I mailed my favorite punk rock t-shirt back to my Grammie in Nova Scotia.

And... And... fuck, it just goes on...

I visited the railroad museum in Tynda today. It was a great place to visit, but I took me about ten minutes to get past the front desk, since the Babushka manning the desk had to sell me separate tickets for each of the four rooms of the museum, and then another one to allow me to take some pictures! And while I had to spend time finding enough pockets to store the stack of ticket stubs she handed me, she had to busy herself recording my presence in five separate ledgers!

And, well... then there are the public toilets. But. Well. Another time.

8:51, Tynda

2007-04-26T17:24:00.000-07:00

Day 11:

Boris Yeltsin died two days ago. I asked my teenage friends what sort of national mood that news lead to. They said that it wasn't a big deal. Most young people, the said, are largely indifferent to politics. Old people, when they think about politics, are mostly nostalgic for the Soviet Union. Poor people now have no help, while back then everyone was taken care of, in a fashion.

I noted how powerful those images of Yeltsin standing on a tank, standing up to the Russian military remain in the western world. Still, my friends insisted, his death was not a big deal to the average Russian man.

Still on the train, right now. In the book I'm reading, Robert Kaplan quotes Paul Fussell on the art of travelling:

"the explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered for him by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity (185)."

furthermore, he says that travel is a lot of work:

"Etymologically, a traveller is one who suffers 'travail,' a Latin word deriving in its turn from Latin 'tripalium,' a torture instrument consisting of three stakes designed to rack the body. Before the development on tourism, travel was concieved to be like study, and it fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement. (185-86)"

Meanwhile, Kaplan disagrees a little bit:

"I have learned as much as a tourist as I have as a so-called traveller. In the 1970s, I knew young people travelling along who could put up with the cheapest hotels and the most arduous conditions, yet who were less concerned with learning about the local culture than finding a place to buy hashish; even as I met senior citizens in large groups, staying at antiseptic hotels, who were walking encyclopedias of archaeological sites (186)."

Kaplan's observation brings to mind a quote (paraphrased) from the travel novel "Are you Experienced" that sums up my feeling about much of South East Asian travel:

"Anyone who says that he wants to expand his mind and then goes off to Thailand for three months is talking out of his arse-hole."

2007-04-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

Day Ten:

Speaking to Paula in Korea via an internet connection:

"How DID Nabokov end things for Lolita and her man?"

"Ah, probably a place in the suburbs and a couple of brats."

I'm back on the train. Twenty-nine hours and I'll be in Tynda. The Russian far east is so empty - I'll be on this train for almost thirty hours, and I'll only end of in a city of 39,000 souls. I could go south for 13 hours to get to Vladivostok, but travelling west? It would take 65 hours to get to the closest major city.

It's clear that the Soviets and the Tsar both tried so hard to turn this wasteland into something. Both regimes built so many cities from the ground-up. The Tsar built this awesome railroad, and the Soviets constructed so many "purpose-built" shack-towns to harvest the resources of the region. The Tsar fought a war with Japan over essentially barren islands and territory. With a headquarters a world away, they fought (albeit unsuccessfully) the big, bad Japanese army, for a place described by Russians as "the gateway to hell."

Moscow and St. Petersburg are so European in character, I have been told, but this place is something else entirely. My friends from yesterday described Khabarovsk as "an Asian city."

It sort of confuses. Why go to all of this effort? Well, yeah, empire building is obviously desirable. But, the Far East is so removed from the dynastic intrigue of Europe... what connection does the settlement have to the European world? Or what lasting influence does Chinggis (Gengis) Khan leave on this territory? This was all part of the Mongol's "Golden Horde." I guess the adverse question is possible - what influence did the Mongols have on the shape of the European world? It's fun to note that just as the Roman Empire endured and influenced Europe in some form until the fall of Trebizond in 1461, the last of the Mongolian empire kicked around until the 1783 destruction of the Crimean Khanate.

Oh, anyhow: Today was pleasant. Khavorosk is a great city. While Vladivostok was sort of old and dirty, Khavarosk is rather clean and youthful. The main streets have a certain energy about them; children do skateboard tricks in Lenin square while a woman with a nosering busks American pop-songs on her saxaphone to earn spare Roubles. Sitting in that square to take it all in is quite a pleasant experience.

And, duly, I had tea with my new friends. I professed a desire to stay a few days with them, and while that was the truth at the time, I'm not sure how long I could endure them. Giggly teenages make me feel pretty damn old.

After tea and a lesson in Russian curse words, I said goodbye and got on the train. Second class, this time. Much more comfortable.

9:45 pm, on the train

2007-04-23T18:39:00.000-07:00

Day nine:

The blood on the mattress was the first sign that something was amiss.

In today's reportage: third class rail travel, and totally hot 19 year old Russian girls! And that blood on the mattress? Yeah, that was on the train. Fucking Russia!

So, Lonely Planet likens third class train travel to living in a refugee camp. Third class is, really, where the poor people of a generally poor country go when they need to get around. The carriages sleep 55 people in a dorm setting.

Pretty awful, that third class. Awful, awful, awful...

Uh... where to begin? Okay, 55 bunks to a carriage. There are bunks at floor level, and there are raised bunks. I was assigned a raised bunk, of course. And there aren't any ladders or anything. One is required to sort of haul and shimmy into the upper bunk. And everyone gets a roll-out mattress to sleep on. Mine, as I mentioned, was bloody. How the fuck does that happen? Passengers are given clean linen to cover the mattress, but I didn't get any, since it's easier for the attendants to just ignore the weird foreigner than to ask if he wants some comfort.

So, anyways, yeah, I spent thirteen hours on my dirty mattress, without enough room to move around. I slept occasionally. And occasionally I was bitten by the bugs that lived in my mattress (really).

I was on the super-cheap train, so I wasn't allowed to leave the carriage to visit the dining car. I just laid down for hours and hours and hours.

Coming up tomorrow, though, is a 31 hour voyage in SECOND class. Luxury!!

But today wasn't entirely bad. See, I met some pretty girls! Upon arriving in Khabarovsk, I set about finding a hotel. That proved difficult... I wandered around and around without finding my preferred cheapie. But after a few hours of wandering, I was approached by some pretty teenage girls who wanted to help me find my way. And then did - they found me a hotel, knocked the price down by half AND booked my next onward train ticket.

Those girls are Carol and Karina, both 19 and blond and language students at the local university. We chatted a bit about this and that:

"Does Khabovosk have a decent cultural scene?"

"Well, we have vodka and borcht."

"No, like youth culture for you guys. Do you have some nice bands?"

"Sort of. We have music, but it's all rock music. We like pop music more."

"Like what sort of music?"

"Well, we APPRECIATE bands like Abba... Duran Duran... George Michaels... but the newer singers are better: Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Justin... (dreamily) Oh, Justin forever!"

Eventually, I had to send those girls on their way, so I could do some exploring. I found Lenin Square, eventually. These ex-Soviet cities that I have visited all have wonderful public squares. I only wish that I will be able to see some sort of rally or public even sometime. Maybe May day?

I had a late tea with my new friends just a few moments ago. I kept thinking like I was suppose to like... make a move or something. But I didn't. Apparently, 19 year old Russian girls aren't my bag. And also, I never got around to finishing my Nabokov paperback, so I don't really know how such things turn out.

scorecard: 11:30 train, Vladivostok to Khabarovsk, 13 hours

11:30 pm

2007-04-23T18:32:00.000-07:00

Day Eight:

Last day in Vladivostok.

I sat down on a park bench to way my lunch (cheap supermarket cheese and crackers, of course). After a few moments, three old ladies sat beside me. Two of them, continued the conversation they were having while walking in the park, and the third sat on the end of the bench and sang. She just sat and sang a quiet song. Neat.

I took a stroll along the city waterfront today. That made for a few pleasant hours. So many of the men here are tough looking: shaved heads and leather jackets (black and shiny and cheap). The women (young) all wear leather boots and very tight jeans and too much makeup. They all look like they are living in 1992. But they are all really pretty, regardless!

Snapped a few nice pictures, wrote some postcards, and did some internet stuff at the central post office. Today has been all about killing time. But also: I lightened my load! I abandoned a couple of t-shirts and my sweater and my Korean lonely planet and a few odds and ends. I think I've got the backpack about where I want it to be for the rest of this journey.

Perhaps I will remember this city as the city of crusty bread and processed cheese slices. Everywhere, one can buy bread. And it comes by the piece, rather than the loaf. I haven't even SEEN a loaf of bread... I think that all the bread is baked in big Soviet-era factory ovens in 100 foot loaves, and then sliced up for delivery to canteens across the country. In any case, 30 roubles is enough to buy four hunks of bread, two slices of cheese and a cup of horrible coffee. Good times!

Vladivostok, 5:30 pm

2007-04-23T01:00:00.000-07:00

Day Seven:

Said one French traveller I encountered at my hotel in Vladivostok:

"I went to the service centre to buy a train ticket. They said to me that they could help me out, but that I would need to pay a 200 rouble service charge. I said that I didn't need the help, since I can speak Russian, and that I was only looking for a timetable. They said that they could tell me the train times, but that it would cost me fifty roubles."

He concluded, "Now I know that I am in Russia!"

Indeed, Russia is really draining my wallet. So much so, that I will cut the Russian voyage short by a couple of days. I know that this is partly because the American dollar has dipped so much compared to the Russian rouble. Whatever the cause, I am paying fifty bucks for my super-shitty hotel. And earlier today I spent twenty-eight bucks on lunch without even thinking about it. Fuck! I will have to stick with self-catering and sleeping on trains to make up for all of this.

Oh... I did save a few bucks by buying my first train ticket for third class. They tell me, though, that it is quite rancid. We shall see.

This is a port town, both in civilian and military terms. The Russian military men are interesting to look at: big men, with bulbous sort of noses... from all of the vodka, perhaps. Many of the older sailors sport the same beard and side burn styles seen on the men celebrated in the local historical museum. That's cool. The Indian navy is in town right now, and those thing, immaculately dressed young men cut quite a figure beside their swarthier Russian comrades.

What else? It's a ruined kind of town. It's got the same very old, once-great buildings from the early twentieth century that were on display in Shanghai's suburbs last year, but also the same cheap concrete monstrosities of Ulaan Baatar and other post-communist cities. But there are also lots of beautiful things; colorful storefronts, the over-polished train station, and so many young people. And, of course, like everywhere else, there are hints of money and wealth and opulence and all those cosmopolitan things. Well, the people aren't exactly cosmopolitan, but they are really pretty...

*;35, Hotel Moryak.

2007-04-23T00:48:00.000-07:00

Day Six

Still on the boat. It turns out that a lot of these Asian Russian nationals are Koreans. I've been told that there were many Korean people living on Sakhalin island as Japanese laborers (read: slaves) during the occupation of Korea and the territorial tug-of-war between the Russian and Japanese empires in the early twentieth century. When the Russians took the island after the second world war, many of the Korean people remained and became Russian citizens.

This was explained to me by Yulia (not the same person as Julia, from last time). Yulia is a twenty-two year-old Korean-Russian who is travelling on the boat with me. Her grandmother was a member of the first generation of Korean laborers sent to Salakhin by the Japanese. Not suprisingly, Yulia now identifies more strongly with her Russian heritage than with her Korean background, although she has visited Korean seven times in the past twenty years.

Yulia, by the way, is quad-lingual (a real word?) and works for a French bank operating in Vladivostok. She hopes to immigrate to America in the near future.

The other Asian-Russian people here are of Kzech and Mongolian ancestory. Yulia supposes that the Korean authorities recently carried out oa sweep of illegal workers, since so many of the passengers are carrying huge amounts of baggage.

Interesting woman, that one.

Anyhow, the ferry took about 100 passangers (plus lots of cargo containers) to a little town called Zarubino. Everyone got off there and took a bus to Vladivostok; only Julia, myself and a quiet young Russian man remain on the boat for the last leg of the journey. We should be arriving there in about four hours.

It's really spooky here with no one around.

5:22 pm, Dong chun ferry.

Scorecard:

3:00 pm ferry, Sokcho to Vladivostok, 30 hours

2007-04-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

Day Five

On the boat to Russia! I think we're moving, finally. It's a big boat, so it's sort of hard to tell. This shall be, by far, the longest period I have spent at sea. My previous best is about six hours between island in Indonesia. This time should be about thirty.

I'm silaing third class, so I'm in a partitioned room that sleeps five people on some very thin floor mats. I'm sharing my room with four Russians (there seems to be only Russians and Koreans on this boat). There is a woman here, Julia, who worked the past two months in a jeans factory near Seoul. It's remarkable to note Russia's decline - from a superpower and world menace in the 80s, to it's current status as a supplier of cheap labor to a second-rate country like Korea. Heck... China supples factory labor for the same industries in Korea. Are these two countries equal now? What would Stalin think?

Russia seems to have a lot of Asian people. Well, on this boat, anyhow. I wish I knew a little about the demographics of the country... perhaps they are indigenous, which would make sense, because Russia IS mostly in Asia. I would ask, but I think that "so, are you, like, Asian?" might be a little inpertinent.

2007-04-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

Day Four

Scorecard: Samcheok to Sokcho, 4:30 pm bus, three hours

Oh, my hip is so sore. My first injury of many, no doubt. So a short entry.

I saw a pretty girl on a scooter in Samcheok. I though "Yeah, she must be a coffee girl." And my eyes followed her... right into a "coffee shop."

Fucking Korea!

See, Korea has these women called "coffee girls." Lonely Korean men call a "coffee shop" and then a pretty woman drives to his home on her scooter to deliver some coffee. And if he likes what he sees, he negotiates the price of sex with the woman. Yeah, prostitution is everywhere here.

Samcheok is small and charming. I went to the municipal museum and to an exhibition on cave sciences. Now in Sokcho. Russia tomorrow!

9:28 pm

2007-04-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

Day Three: April 17

So, Gyeonju is sort of cool. It was the captail of the Silla dynastry (one of the three kingdoms in Korea in the BC years...) from 57 BC to 668 AD, at which point Silla conquered the entire pennisula and it became capital of all Korea (until 918, anyhow). Accordingly, it has a lot more visible history than most Korean cities.

Yesterday, I joined forces with some travellers at the hostel (two European students studying in Seoul and a Malaysian tourist) and visited a few sites. Some highlights:

Tumuli Park: a collection of Silla tombs; large grassy hillocks containing remains and treasures. These are similar to the "civilian" tombs in the hills, but a whole lot bigger.

Wolesong Park: containing a neat seventh century astrological observatory.

Anjapi Pond: Picteruesque artificial (though very old) pond created in 674 ad.

Gyermin Forest: A forest? A forest!

Earlier today I set off with Ming, that Malaysian gentleman to visit some sites a little bit outside of the city limits. We visited Bulguksa temple, which (again) sort of blends into the whole Korean temple junket, but also Seokguram Grotto, which is a very impressive statue of the Buddha surrounded by images and statues of more than three dozen dieties and protectors. Getting to the site of the grotto required a bit of work, but it was worth the effort.

I'm in Samcheok now, which reminds me that I should include a scorecard for today:

2:30 pm bus, Gyeongju to Samcheok, 3 1/2 hours.

I hunted around for a Yeoinsuk (sleep on the floor, share a bathroom) that the Lonely Plent tells me has beds for twenty bucks a night, but I don't think that it exists anymore. I was able to find a Lovel Motel, though, with thirty dollar rooms. It's the cheapest in town, I think, and the private bath will allow me to do some laundry later on.

Samcheok, 8:38 pm

2007-04-17T02:58:00.000-07:00

Day Two:

Stuck indoors in Gyeongju now. It's really raining out there. Still in the same hostel as last night - Han Jin Jang. This is an odd place. I've been told that it has been operating for more than three decades, and accordingly, it's got a lot of character. These days, though, it doesn't seem to enjoy much traffic.

The hostel is contained within a two story building, with about 15 rooms for let. There's no dorm beds, but for a few bucks less, travellers can get a room with shared facilities. The rooms are kind of shabby, and the building is furnished mostly with the detritus of it's thirteen years.

All that junk gives the joint some character, of course. I ran into a Polish travellers (a student in a Seoul-based business program) who said to me "you can feel t7he history here... and it's so interesting that no matter where we go, these backpacking places are all the same... same beds... same toast with jam in the morning..."

Like I said, this place has been going for thirty years. The pictures all over the walls suggest that its heyday was sometime in the mid-80s. There are photos everywhere, but the most recent I can find is from 1997. There are many photos from the 80s showing of the owner of the place (Kwon Young Joung) performing yogic feats, but these days he seems to shuffle around rather slowly.

I understand that the hostel was heavily promoted in some old Lonely Planet editions; an excerpt posted on the wall behind me says:

"This is one of the friendliest hostels I've ever come across in my travels and, from the letters which we receive, many travellers agree... the rooms are spotlessly clean, the hotel well maintained... I can't recommend this place enough and travellers from all over the world who have stayed here keep in touch with Mr. Kwon."

Meanwhile, my current book says:

"People don't stay here for the rooms; many are rather grotty. However, the kitchen, courtyard, meeting room and roof deck are great places to commune and plan forays with fellow travellers" (186).

Anyhow, the common areas feel a little bit haunted by the past guests. The current guests, like the owner, tend to shuffle quietly through the hallways.

That said... this IS a thirty year old backpacking joint! I think that age affords it some sort of "legendary" status, and staying here allows me to check off a box on my vagabonding checklist.

Over and out.

April 16, 9:30 pm, same as above.

2007-04-15T20:22:00.000-07:00

Finally! Hostelling in Korea. After two years, even.

Anyways, here's the scorecard for day one:

8:10 am bus from Suncheon to Busan, 3 hours
7:30 pm bus from Busan to Gyeonju, 50 minutes

I suck at goodbyes. But last night I did my best. I cried a bit, despite myself. I think, however, that this diary is supposed to be about my travels, and not the life beforehand, so let's move on.

Left Suncheon on the second bus of the day to Busan. Travelling by bus is almost always the best choice in Korea. The trains are comfortable and fast, but the coverage and departure frequency of the bus routes are tough to beat.

I took my friend Hal-Lan with me to Busan. We work together. She's a really nice kid, about two months into her first teaching job. Hal-Lan is sort of inexperienced at life and work, but is learning rather quickly. And there is some travel in her future also, with a month in Europe pencilled in for this coming summer.

Today was my second trip to Busan. Last time, I concentrated on some urban sites: the Busan aquarium (nice), the "famous" Haeundae Beach (horrid and fake), Napodong Market (delightful) and the Busan Museum of Modern Art (pretty nice). So, this time around I went with Hal-Lan to a place outside of the city. We escaped the urab jungle to Beomeosa, a rather wonderful Buddhist temple complex. And yeah, all of these giant Korean temples all sort of look the same, but they usually impress if one is in the proper mood and if the weather cooperates - Beomosa also has some nice hiking opportunities.

Another note abuot Busan: my Lonely Planet says that Busan's populace has "a quirky custom of banging into strangers in public places" (208). That statement is hilariously accurate! Navigating crowds is always fun for Koreans and tourists alike.

Anyhow, Hal-Lan asn I walked a bit, and had a couple of nice meals. She took a bus back to Suncheon, while I took a 7:30 bus on to the city of Gyeongju. And hey, I know I said that the bus system is top notch here, but beware nigt time buses: the heat is always on, and the windows never open. A hapless tourist can find himself trapped in a sweat box for an overnight journey. Yuck!

So, yeah, I'm in Gyeongju, in one of Korea's few hostels. It's called Han-Jin Jang Hostel. It's a tatty place, and a bit too expensive, but it seems sort of sup-ercool, in a shitty sort of way. But more about this place when I explore some more tomorrow morning.

April 15, 9:43 pm, Gyeongju, Han-Jin Jang Hostel

Creation

2007-04-05T22:26:00.000-07:00

And on the seventh day, God re-activated this blog.