H.J. Hampson's Blog, page 3

Sometimes it is a good idea to get off the boat

… the backpacker boat that is. I am trying to. I am trying to split from the whole fucking programme, just like Kurtz did and head off several clicks north into the wilds of Cambodia*, but in the meantime…

Spliting from the programme

I’ve realised I’m not really a desert island type of person. I’m on Cham Island, off the coast of Hoi-An in Vietnam. It’s ‘blissfully undeveloped’, as the Lonely Planet says, which sounded very appealing until I found myself in the midst of a small village, in a tiny room with dubious dark patches on the walls and electricity that keeps cutting out. The roosters started crowing about five a.m and then the whole village woke up half an hour later and some enthusiastic person started on with a DIY project, hammering away soon after that so I had no option but to get up too. Admittedly, I went for a swim in the calm waters of the South China Sea,

My salubrious dwellings on Cham Island

watching the fishing boats go out and the mist rise over the mainland several miles away and that was very cool. I came back to the guest house hoping for at least a fried egg – there are enough hens roaming around here, but the guest house owner, who speaks little English and obviously wasn’t prepared for an ‘an chay’ (A Vietnamese phrase used for Buddhists who eat no meat) guest and could only brandish a manky potato at me and gesture at a carton of milk. In the end, I had coffee, followed by tea.

I wouldn’t have minded mashed potato, but last night dinner had consisted of a huge bowl of rice, chips with a really nice salty tomato topping and noodles with tofu, a cold soup with potato in it and a plate of greens, so I was feeling a bit ‘carbed out’, a horribly Western concept, I know.

The port of Cham Island

The heat makes me feel so lethargic so I spent most of yesterday afternoon lounging in a deckchair (I’m not really a lounging person), watching the speedboats of Vietnamese day trippers come and go, the women with their sun hats parasols and modest clothing. The last thing they want is a sun tan. They must think us Westerners very strange. It is nice to be away from all those other strange Westerners here though. The train and bus route from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City is firmly on the backpacker trail. It’s got to the point now where I keep seeing people I’ve encountered before in the last city or the one before that.  It gets a bit unnerving, coming all this way to find you are surrounded by other British people, for the British seem to make up about fifty per cent of all these Westerners.

From Hanoi, I took the night bus to Hue. Well, it was more a night and then half the next day bus and I have vowed never, ever to take one again. The seats were narrow, half-reclined things that most people couldn’t fit properly into and it’s impossible to get comfy. The journey was supposed to take twelve hours and set off from Hanoi at eight in the evening, but didn’t arrive until half one the next day. Of course, the bus was full of backpackers. When we first boarded, some people thought the whole thing was amusing and took pictures of the seats with their phones, but by the time we pulled into Hue, everyone was wilting. I feel very sorry for the guy who was staying on until Nha Trang, twice the distance again. The hostel in Hanoi had firmly recommended the bus over the train, and the two Italian guys who were in the bunks alongside mine said their hostel had too. The bus driver was strangely cheerful the whole way, almost mocking, I thought, and I wondered if the ‘night bus from hell’ is a communal joke for the Vietnamese who like to put all these idiot Westerners on them and watch them suffer. I’m probably being paranoid, the Vietnamese on the whole are lovely people.

What can I say about Hue? I stayed at the Imperial Backpackers Hostel, a total

Some temple thing or other at Hue… I was too hungover to care

party place with a twice daily happy hour and fish and chips on the menu. I went out two nights running to a truly terrible, night club, the second night culminating in me licking cake off the face of a gay Irish guy.  I have no idea why I did any of this.

The next day, hungover I decided that I am far too old and cynical for the whole SE Asia backpacker scene and I, yes, I really did want to retreat to the jungles of Cambodia immediately. I couldn’t though as I had arranged to travel from Hue to Hoi-An via motorbike. This was very cool… though I was riding pillion and I was a bit freaked out when the driver asked me to marry him about half an hour into the trip. That made things a little uncomfortable. The Vietnamese countryside is so stunning, and being on the back of a motorbike is the best way to sea it. We passed a lagoon and over mountain passes which looked down on the coastline. He had a portable MP3 player with built in speakers and kept playing The Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams. Over lunch he asked me to write down some British music so he could update his ‘collection’ for other British customers. I was tempted to write down One Direction or Ed Sheeran in revenge for the sleaziness but resisted and then realised I hardly know any modern British music.

Anyway, I arrived in Hoi-An and fell straight in love with the place. It is a wonderfully preserved old town with ochre-coloured buildings and lots of

Hoi-An

temples, lots of beautiful restaurants and lots and lots of custom-tailors, which it is famous for. You can get gorgeous clothes made really cheap, dine of some of the best Vietnamese food in the county and even find places with extensive European wine lists here. Of course, it’s swarming with tourists, but it’s no surprise really. I bought a few totally- impractical-for-travelling clothes and so had to discard some of my more practical ones.

I’m returning to the main land (where I will post this blog as there is, needless to say, no wifi here on the island) and then will make the arduous journey to Cat Tien National Park, and onwards to Saigon, where I hope to wake up after dreaming I am still in the jungle.

* Yes, HJ Hampson has been watching Apocalypse Now, again.

Good night China, good morning Vietnam

I’m sitting in my hut, under a mosquito net, listening to the thunder roll rain fall on the corrugated iron roof. The weather may have taken a turn for the worst but the Tiger Balm I’ve applied to my back is scorching at least. I don’t know what I’ve done to it but it really frigging hurts, and the actual burn on my leg – a result of stepping off a moto-taxi the exhaust pipe side in Hanoi, is looking particularly gruesome. Aside from that, I’ve got a load of insect bites and have just walked five kilometres in flip-flops through the rain, including over boulders in the road where they had exploded it with dynamite. Still, I love Vietnam.

I’m at the Whisper of Nature bungalows on Cat Ba island. It’s all been rather strange – the bungalows are basically tacked onto the end of a small Vietnamese village, and it’s a ‘make your own entertainment’ kind of place, but it’s cool. Cat Ba island is in Hulong Bay and boasts some of the most impressive scenery in Vietnam. The bay has huge limestone krasts, floating housing of Vietnamese fishermen amongst them and emerald waters. Earlier I went kayaking – the only way to get to the beach for swimming. Just go that way and turn right” the guy said, pointing towards the infinite horizon between two huge krasts. ‘Erm, Okay’, I replied. I’ve never actually kayaked before, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard. I felt a bit like Leonardo Di Caprio and those French people in The Beach as I set off in the surprisingly empty waters. Remember that song by All Saints? That was going round and round in my head. The beach wasn’t quite as nice as that one they got to in the film though and the sea wasn’t quite as clear as Thailand, but it was pretty cool, just rocking up on the empty sand in my kayak, swimming and scavenging for cool shells.

Sleepy Hulong Bay is a total contrast to Hanoi. The Lonely Planet promised ‘this is the Asia we dream of’ (though it also says that about Phnom Penh and Laos) and I guess it wasn’t far off. In the sweltering heat the streets are cluttered with street food stalls, child-size chairs and tables where people sit drinking Vietnamese coffee (made with condensed milk- I am totally addicted) or dirt cheap beer. The roads are predictably chaotic – motorbikes and mopeds coming at you from every direction, zebra crossings laughable pointless, people in those pointed hats carrying baskets of fruit and vegetables. I arrived there at five in the morning on the night train from Sapa and the city was already wide awake – a mob of taxi and motor-taxi drivers baying for custom outside the station. I arrived at the Little Hanoi Hostel with a few other sleepy travellers and was so grateful for the coffee and the lovely breakfast they provided. If you find yourself in Hanoi, I can’t recommend that place enough. Anyway, it was too early to check in so I ventured out into the city to go to see Ho Chi Minh… my second pickled dictator on this trip. The mausoleum is only open between 8am and 11am so you have to be keen. Plenty of Vietnamese were – there was already a huge queue. You get a bit closer to Uncle Ho than you do to Mao, you can even see his wispy beard but he looks just as waxen. I did a few other tourist things in Hanoi, but you can read about them in the guidebooks. My favourite thing was the streets of the Old Quarter, each one having a trend for certain items – the haberdashery street, the metal kitchen appliance street, the Buddhist paraphernalia street, and the street of shabby cafés, each one looking straight out of a film set, where you can sit and watch the that Asia you dream of happening over an iced, sweet coffee: the perfect Hanoi experience.

On my last day in the city I did a Vietnamese cooking class at the Countryside Restaurant. I’ll be blogging about that in detail over on my foodie brothers and sisters, the Intrepid Herbivores’ site, but I learnt to cook green papaya salad, vegetarian spring rolls and tofu with tomato sauce. I found I have a knack for rolling rice paper which I intend to put to good use when I return to the UK.

And what to say of my last week of so in China? I went to Yangshuo in the Li Valley – nice krast scenery but nowhere near as beautiful as here in Vietnam. The most memorable event there was walking into the market and seeing a skinned dog hung up over a cage of sleeping (?) ginger kittens. I spent three days in Kunming, waiting for my Vietnam visa and reading The Beach (much better than the film actually) and trying but failing to download Apocalypse Now (much better than any other film ever made, actually) on iTunes. I originally intended to explore Yunnan province more, but reading about South East Asia and knowing my passage to Vietnam would be secure in a few days, I was compelled to head closer to the boarder instead. Yuanyang is famous for it’s rice terraces so I stopped there for a few days, and this turned out to be my favourite place in China. I was the only tourist in the village of Xinjie, but that didn’t bother me as I set off on a hike around the minority villages where the women dress in heavy black clothes with dazzling embroidery. Walking through the maze of rice terraces to get from one village to the other was fun. I had to sneakily follow some school kids, but I think they must have seen my and thought it was very amusing, seeing this pale European tottering along the thin pathways between the flooded pools of rice.

I was the only tourist on the bus to the boarder too, a source of much curiosity to the other passengers and the woman who came on selling drinks who just whipped out her phone and took a photo of me. It felt like I was well and truly ‘off the beaten track’. Even the guards at the border at Hekou seemed to think it was very odd that an English person should be crossing there.

Then I was in Sapa, the mountain town up on the rice terraces of Vietnam (the terraces aren’t as pretty as the China one but the landscape is more dramatic), and firmly back on the beaten track with British accents audible everywhere. I decided to throw myself into the SE Asia backpack stereotype by going out, getting drunk on beer and cheap vodka and being too hungover to really appreciate the gorgeous countryside the next day.

Whilst all this was happening, thousands of miles away in France they were talking about my book, Vanity Game, on national TV along with the likes of John Le Carre’s latest. National TV! Trés super-cool!

Misty mountains, smoggy skyscrapers

Tai Shan is one of China’s most holy mountain, a shrine to Buddhism, Taoism

Ascending Tai Shan

and Confucianism and many Chinese make the pilgrimage up the 6000 plus steps to the top at least once in their lives. I decided to make the pilgrimage too, thinking it would be a nice change for the polluted cities I’d been hanging around in.

A Chinese girl in my dorm, Casey, asked me if I wanted to climb up with her and suggested we camp over night so we could watch the sunrise the next morning. It didn’t mention anything in the guide book about camping, but this sounded cool, so I agreed.

Me, Casey and her boyfriend (both of whom, I discovered after I’d agreed to this adventure, where teenagers), began to ascend. It was raining, but we figured that would stop soon. Well, we figured wrong because it continued to rain all day, all through the evening and most of the night. It was supposed to take four hours to climb to the top of the mountain, but despite setting off at half past two in the afternoon, we were climbing up the final steps, which were virtually vertical, in the dark. Everything was sodden and when we finally reached the temples below the top, it was bitterly cold as well. We weren’t the only ones – there was a little city of tents already set up between the temples.

I was now so cold I couldn’t feel my hands, but we set the tent up and then found there was no zip on the door. Wang somehow procured a needle and thread and stitched it shut, and we hired some old Chinese army coats to keep us warm, which is the thing to do up there. Mine smelt really foisty, you know, a strong combination of Girl Guide tents and a vintage clothes shop, and the sides of the tent were transpiring to be porous and caving in. I used the Rough Guide to China as a pillow and managed maybe an hours worth of sleep.

We got up at four and joined the procession of the green army coats and pastel coloured ponchos making our way to the top temple. Despite it being so misty you couldn’t see anything of the surrounding mountains, the site of the Jade Emperor Temple in the mist, the scent of incense already wafting in the foggy air, was quite bracing. No sun rise though – either we missed it or the sun had decided to take a day off. It was still only 6am, but I felt surprisingly OK as we made our way back down, still, I don’t think I’ll be making a pilgrimage to Tai Shan again any time soon. The next day I was supposed to be off to Shanghai, only I missed my train, due to a station mix up, so I sent the day hanging around the hostel, cursing China and researching my next destination, Vietnam.

But I did eventually reach Shanghai. I wasn’t sure what to expect. My main

The Bund at night

point of reference for the city is JG Ballard’s devastating, brilliant ‘Empire of the Sun’, based on his own experiences of growing up in 1930s Shanghai and then being taken prisoner by the Japanese at the outbreak of war. This 1930s heyday, when Shanghai was a party town for rich Europeans and a sanctuary for White Russians, divvied up into sections run by the British, French and [Russians], and then it’s demise due to World War II fascinates me, and I hoped I would be able to get a sense of that visiting the city.

I only had twenty four hours there so as soon as I dumped my bags at the hostel, I set out to walk to Bund, starting at the Russian embassy. I nipped in the lobby of the Peace Hotel, which used to be the Cathay Hotel, the most exclusive, notorious hotel in the city, to look at the Art Deco ceiling and imagine the fashionable European guests arriving here for cocktail parties as the world edged towards war again.

Now the Bund is all big banks an designer shops, but it still retains an air of classiness. Over the river, the famous Oriental Pearl TV Tower was just about visible through the smog, and you couldn’t see the famous square hole in the World Trade Centre at all, but still, the collection of skyscrapers is still quite a sight. I carried on walking, hoping I’d come to a metro station, but I got lost. I turned down a side road, and found myself in a narrow hutong-like street. There was a man having his hair cut on the pavement, people selling vegetables laid out of newspaper on the ground and the scent of fried meat emanating from the cheap street food stall. On one side of the street rose a huge, traditional Chinese building. It felt like Id walked into a different city. Further on, the road ended and I was now on a street filled with souvenir shops, pop music blasting out from almost every store. This was the Old City, where the native Chinese were effectively ghettoised in the 1930s. I finally found the metro here and headed to the former French Concession , which sounds impossibly glamorous. This was the part of the city that was governed by the French, but they were so lax with law enforcement it became a den for Shanghai’s most notorious gangsters and later, the communists. There wasn’t much sign off all that now – more designer shops, a lot of cheap clothing shops, not a croissant or an opium dealer in sight, which was a shame.

I’d spent the whole day looking for the past, so in the evening I went to the future. When darkness fell, I headed over the river to the financial district, rising from the metro into a landscape of neon, metal and glass, elevated walkways and sushi bars. The smog still curled ominously around the top of the skyscrapers and I felt like I’d being catapulted with supersonic force from JG Ballard to a Philip K Dick novel. I was gutted I couldn’t go up the World Trade Centre to see it all from a great height, but the visibility was so bad, it would have been a waste of a 150 Yuan. Maybe in the real future they will reinvent clean air.

China so far… the good, the bad, and the ugly tower blocks

I am sitting in a spacious, plush red seat on the super-duper fast train,

A room with a view a view, indeed, Tianjin.

waiting for it to hurtle it’s way out of Tianjin. I have spent two days in the God-awful place trying to get out. I came here with the intention of taking a boat to South Korea but have completely failed both to book a passage, so I’m off to Tai’an to climb the holy mountain, Tai Shan, and hopefully realign my positive energy vibes.

You’ve probably never heard of Tianjin but it is the third biggest city in China and one of those boasting the worst air quality. I was staying in the particularly crap area, Tanggu, near the port, though not, I discovered near enough to get to the ferry terminal. From my hotel window I had a view of lines and lines of new, identical tower blocks, shrouded in a fog of pollution.

A carving at Yungang caves

My first stop in China was Datong, off the night train from UlaanBaator. Datong is the closest city to the Yungang Caves and the Hanging Temple. It was the first time on my trip I felt like the country I’d arrived in was radically different to the one I’d left. Walking out of the station, the first thing I noticed was all the colour. The buses were pink and the taxis a metallic turquoise and all around were garish signs bearing Chinese characters in red and gold, or blinking as neon lights in the sunshine. Nowhere so far on my trip has been quite as vibrant. The second thing was the food. Even though it was just eight in the morning, people were sitting outside cafés eating huge bowls of what looked like very rich soup and piles of flat, fried dough. Street stalls were already selling their fried and grilled wares and traders were selling vegetables from the back of their parked up rickshaws. The Chinese commitment to eating is something I’ll get back to as it continues to impress me, but first a little on the sights, followed by some politics.

As soon as I stepped outside Datong station I was collared by the man from CITS, the state tourism organisation, who had also roped in two more people for a trip to the caves and the temple. They were two academics called Katy and Emily. We piled into a car and off we went. The caves were amazing. From intricate wall pattens to towering stone buddhas, one of which still retrained his golden skin, they could rival any Roman remains. They were carved between 465 and 525 AD and are a testament to the skill and artisanship of ancient Chinese civilisation.

Our driver took us to a restaurant for lunch where we shared broccoli with garlic, black mushrooms, tofu and some kind of Chinese pasty. It was the best meal I’ve had so far on the trip and cost less than three pounds each. My guidebook suggested vegetarians might struggle here in China, but with options like this, how could we?

The Hanging Temple was not quite as impressive. The Rough Guide describes it as ‘one of the most arresting sights in northern China’, but I was a little underwhelmed. After the long drive, and a steep admission fee I was expecting to be a little more scared by the precarious nature of this temple built into the rock, but either my fear of heights has been cured or it just wasn’t that terrifying. What I found more arresting and terrifying was the sight of the of lines and lines of tower blocks built along the waterside in Datong. As in Tianjin, massive development work is taking place. In Datong a whole new area of town is being created, with old homes being demolished and people being moved into these concrete monoliths, each the same as the one next to and in front of it. It’s one the most soulless things I’ve ever seen and every place I’ve passed through seems to have it’s own plague of them in various stages of construction . China has notoriously set out on a plan of development for short term gain, with seemingly little thought to the consequences, hence the criminal environmental damage and pollution so bad in almost ever big city that there are increased rates of cancer and birth defects. In Datong the air wasn’t so bad, unlike Beijing and Tianjin, but it wasn’t exactly pleasant to walk along the huge streets, amongst the cheap, gawdy skyscrapers, breathing in the fumes from all the cars. What does it take for the human race to realise that ‘progress’ with reckless regard for the world we live in is a disaster in the long run? A spate of truly mutant babies? Starvation? War? By then it will be too late. In my opinion, clean air should be a human right. I guess the issue is, there are too many humans and all of them want the full trappings of the West.

Tianamen Square… the smog is not the thing covering stuff up here.

Talking of human rights… I arrived in Beijing on the night of the 4th June. It was stormy, which was appropriate considering the date. The next day I went to Tiananmen Square. Twenty four years ago they would still be mopping up the blood after the massacre but today it was full of seemingly happy Chinese tourists as far as the eye could see (not very far, from the north side of the square, Mao’s mausoleum was a lost in the smog haze). Of course the uniformed and plain clothes police were out in force too. They can put as many cops out there as they want but they can’t see in people’s heads and I for one was thinking about how China’s modern face – all high speed trains and designer shopping malls jars with the fact that there are still people in prison for taking part in the peaceful protest of 1989 and there are thousands of people who have never been able to get justice for their loved who were brutally murdered that day, nor even express a desire to get justice.

Anyway, that’s what I hate about China, but here is what I love so far: the

Yet another food market, Beijing

friendliness and helpfulness of the people… the only good things about Tianjin were that some people went out of their way to help me even though they didn’t speak English (like the guy in the domestic ferry office who sat me down next to him at his computer and we used a Chinese version of Google Translate to communicate), and that I had a really nice meal there – a huge wok of tofu cooked with celery, lots of chillies and pak choi. Which brings me to the second thing – back to the food. I’ve never been anywhere where people seem so committed to eating, and eating anything. Although, as a vegetarian, I baulk at their animal rights record, I can’t help but admire people

Life going by in the hutong

who can even make a delicacy out of insects. Do people ever eat at home here? Every street in seems to have a run of restaurants, always busy, and each evening food markets open selling all manner of snacks. I walked down Nan Luo Guo Xiang, my favourite backstreet, at three in the afternoon and it was rammed full of Chinese teenagers walking around eating meat off skewers, ice cream, crispy fried things, choux buns filled with some kind of green tea cream and much else…and this was only mid-afternoon! So far I’ve gorged myself on tofu most evenings, and never had it the same way twice. And what they do with broccoli is amazing. The food is also about ten times cheaper and ten times better than your average Chinese takeaway in the UK.

The best thing I did in Beijing apart from wandering the backstreets, the hutongs, glimpsing local life in all it’s strange and colourful forms, was visit Chairman Mau in his mausoleum. I failed to see Lenin, who wasn’t open when I was in Moscow, so I am glad to have finally seen one dead world leader. He is very small and looks very orange. Bring on Ho Chi Minh… if I can sort the Vietnam visa out.

The five things I can’t do without…

I’m waiting until I’m out of the country and hanging out in Hanoi before I post my China blogs, being that they are not that complimentary of the government (I find it a bit ironic that Snowdon guy has decided to take refuge in Hong Kong. I’ll post anything I feel like when I’m in the States), so in the meantime, I thought this blog might be useful for anyone planning a long term trip. I’ve been on the road now nearly five months and things are the five things I’d have been lost without:

1. A needle and thread – I didn’t take any sewing stuff with me but when the zip broke on my crappy Vango rucksack in the incredibly non-hostile environment of the Umbrian countryside, I realised this was a mistake. If you are going on a round the world trip, you will need to mend stuff, guaranteed. Not only mending broken zips, but, amongst other things, shortening a cheap dress I bought on a market and fixing up the handbag I bought in Mostar. This handbag is a bit like one of those old cars motor enthusiasts buy to build up again. I’ve had to replace the (unmendable) zip, stitch up the lining, put the outside back together again. So yeah, take a needle and thread.

2.. Swiss Army Knife. Dear Swiss Army Knife, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… You have spread Nutella, fished tea bags out of plastic mugs, sharpened eyeliner, opened bottles, opened cans, accompanied me down dark city back streets, sliced up garlic when there wasn’t a sharp enough knife in the hostel kitchen.

3. Compass – I only realised how useful my compass was when I got the Beijing. Before that, I’d been pointlessly getting lost, my lack of a sense of direction compounded by bad maps. Now I take it everywhere I go… when you’re lost in the hutong it helps to know which way north is, especially when you can’t read the street names because they’re are in a totally alien alphabet.

4. Plastic mug and bowl – you’d be screwed if you didn’t take a plastic mug and bowl on the Trans-Siberian railway, foolish is the person who relies on the buffet car. But it’s also surprising the number of hostels that I’ve stayed in that offer no form of kitchen facilities at all. The most extreme circumstances occurred in Berlin – our room had a fridge, sink and microwave but nothing else, so Liz and I took turns using my plastic mug to make tea in the microwave and eat Lidl cereal out of the bowl while the other was in the shower. Those Euros spent on buying breakfast add up. The mug has also been used as a substitute wine glass or vodka glass. I wish I could include my Spork in this entry but it broke while I was making a cup of tea.

5. Metal bottle for boiled water: Cooling boiled water for drinking not save money but it’s also much better for the environment that buying bottled. If you are travelling for a year or more, think of all the plastic bottles you would get through, all un-biodegradable and not recycled in some countries. Boiling water is available everywhere in Russia and China and in hostels that have kitchen facilities.

‘Vanity Game’ selected in’L'Express’ summer crime novels list!

I was really pleased to hear that ‘Vanity Game’ has been picked by French weekly magazine ‘L’Express as one of the crime novels to read this summer!

Trans-Mongolian Adventure part 3: Olkhon Island and Mongolia

I’ve been forced to retreat back to the hotel here in Ulaan Baator as the pollution from the exhaust fumes of all the cars clogging up the ironically named Peace Avenue has sent my hayfever haywire. It’s a world away from the peace and tranquillity of Olkhon Island on Lake Baikal and even the vast empty spaces of the Mongolian countryside where I have just returned from. More about that later though.

Olkhon Island: (No) Whiskey in the jar-0

My Olkhon Island adventure started somewhat stressfully. I set off to get the once-a-day minibus from Irkutsk but due to my own lack of directional sense and miscommunication, I ended up walking round the chaotic market area for about an hour looking for the damn thing and not finding it.

I returned to the hostel angry, tired and a little upset, and sulked for a good few hours.

It turned out though that missing that bus and having to get one the next day wasn’t such a bad thing as my fellow passengers on this bus, Cameron from America and Paul, Françoise and Laurence from France, became my friends and drinking pals for the next few days.

We arrived at Nikita’s Homestead, legendary in these parts, after a long,

Shaman’s Rock

cramped bus ride. I was expecting it to be a Russian version of a Pontins Holiday Camp. Sadly, it didn’t have the bluecoats and the bingo, but it did have log cabins, a communal canteen, a banya and a path leading to the lakeside. The first glimpse of the lake was enchanting. Down the path and beyond the low gate I could see an expanse of whiteness – the lake was still frozen in parts. It made me quicken my pace and hold my breath as I opened the gate and walked onto that strange winterscape – it wasn’t cold, but there before me was a true Arctic scene – miles and miles of frozen water and beyond them some snow-covered mountains. To the right, along the coast, was the much-photographed Shaman’s Rock and this looked even more majestic than it did in the pictures in the Trans-Siberian Handbook. And beyond the rock was a beach, golden sand clashing with the white icy water, like something out of a science fiction film. This landscape was so alien to me, to anything you’d ever see in England, that it was one of those moments when I really felt like that’s what I came travelling for.

Later that evening me and Cameron gate-crashed a camp fire on the frozen beach and joined a load of other travellers, sipping neat vodka and having the inevitable conversations about which way we were going on the rail tracks.

The next day we were supposed to go a tour of the north of the island, but it was raining when I woke up and chucking it down by lunchtime. There was nothing for it but to hunt down some booze and get drunk. I could feel a cold coming on, so really wanted a shot of whisky, but this being one of the more remote parts of vodka-loving Russia, whiskey seemed impossible to come by, despite us trudging around the muddy Khuzir village, going to each off licence and asking (well Paul and Cameron asking, who spoke much better Russian than me). So vodka and beer it was then. Dinner that night in the canteen was, for me, just a vague memory of some disgusting lentil-type dish, and later than night, though sobered a little, I managed to burn my hand in the banya. I should have known vodka and very hot saunas do not mix.

The next day the skies were clearer, though my head not so, but the excursion to the north of the island went ahead anyway. I was glad I wasn’t too hungover because to get there in the ancient Russian van we were all squashed into involved traversing some seriously bumpy dirt tracks. Like bumpy in the sense that at some points the van was at a forty five degree angle and I was contemplating adopting the brace position. The north of the island was cool though – Olkhon Island is situated closer to the south end of the lake and from the north tip the lake looks like one giant, still ocean, for you can’t see the shore so far does it extend north. We didn’t see any of the rare nerpa seals sadly, but the views were stunning.

I was so sad to leave Olkhon he next day but I had a night train to Ulan Ude to catch, and after a night staying in a hostel that was more like a students’ house (think filthy kitchen, people having sex in the dorms), I was planning to get a bus to Ulaan Baator. I got to Ulan Ude though to find the conventional bus had sold out, but was informed there was another, ‘DIY’ way to get to Mongolia, which involved getting a minibus to the Russian border town, hitching a ride over the border then getting some form of transport to UB the other side. There were a group of old Finnish men doing the same thing, and although I knew they weren’t going to be the most compatible travel companions I decided to tag along with them.

Everlasting nothingness…

Getting to the border town, Kyakhta, was easy enough, but when I went through passport control the stern-looking Russian official scrutinised my entry stamp and looked at me repeatedly with narrowed eyes. It was badly smudged, but that wasn’t my fault, however, I got the impression the Russian official thought I had faked it and that I was possibly a spy. She asked me to stand aside and I was convinced I was going to feel a tap on the shoulder and then get dragged into some interrogation room but she put aside her suspicions and eventually let me through. Being hauled off for interrogation however might have been more preferable to the next part of the journey. This involved sitting on the back seat of a 4×4 with three of the old Finnish guys, so cramped I could barely breathe, for the five hours it took to get through the monotonous Mongolian grassland and reach Ulaan Baator. By the end, I was in such a bad mood I could barely be civil to these annoying old codgers and on first impression Ulaan Baator seemed like a dirty, chaotic, ugly hell-hole.

Mongolia:  Gon’ end up a big ol’ pile of them bones

I still think Ulaan Baator is a dirty, chaotic hell-hole and to make matters worse, the second day I was there, it rained, a lot, and then the rain turned to freezing sleet. Me, Pavel, a Czech political science lecturer, and LiHuang, a Chinese girl, left for our four-day excursion to Central Mongolia the next day and the countryside around the city was covered in a white blanket of snow. After going several miles through the wilderness, the snow stopped abruptly and we were back onto dry grassland, and later, desert. Not quite the Gobi, but the Mini-Gobi, a small patch of desert framed by photogenic mountains. To add to the desert effect, we were here to ride camels. I had never encountered a camel this close up before, and the first thing that struck me was how heavy they breathe and how peaceful they look. My shaggy camel seemed happy to trudge along behind our camel leader, though Pavel’s camel seemed to want to get in the front of the train, and kept pushing mine out of the way, still it was cool to get this close to these strange beasts. We were staying in our first ger that night… all these Mongolian tours offer ‘accommodation with a local family’. Well, it’s more like the ‘local family’ has an extra that they rent out to tourists, as we were deposited in ours, and left there with nothing to do.

These long hours of boredom in the evenings would prevale for the next two nights. I was even driven to writing poetry at one point, but all I could come up with was the rather harsh opening line:

“Empty vodka bottles and blank horizons are all your hills offer.”

This wasn’t quite accurate, the hills were to offer much more. On the way to what transpired to be a very disappointing waterfall, we stopped to look at a graveyard, in the middle of nowhere. As I walked up to the headstones I noticed something round and white lying in the grass. My first thought was, improbably, dinosaur eggs, but upon investigating these white forms I discovered that they were actually two human skulls. I was initially horrified, but after looking at them awhile both Pavel and I mused on taking one home, but we weren’t sure if we’d get them through customs. It would be a pretty unique souvenir, no? There was another that didn’t look quite-skeletonised yet near one of the gravestones. God knows how they’d ‘escaped’ from the graves and where the rest of the bones were. Probably best not to know.

Anyway, we left the skulls and continued on our way to the next ger and the disappointing waterfall. Aside form the skulls, I hadn’t really been that impressed with Mongolia until the last day. We stopped for lunch and were given not only a pint glass of tea but I also was served egg and chips, OK it came with some Russian type salad and Chinese style rice, but the tea and the egg and chips were straight from Northern England. Then we visited the Erdene Zuu Monastery, a large complex that survived the communist era when many other monasteries were destroyed. It was interesting learning about all the different deities that were displayed on murals or silk paintings. My favourites were to two skeletons who looked like they were rock’n'roll dancing and are said to protect against thieves.

It seemed like another night of boredom in the ger was to follow, especially as it was raining, but the ger owner suggested taking a walk up the hill, so when the rain held off, that’s what I did. I was so sick of taking pictures of the empty landscapes I didn’t even bother take my camera, but as I walked up that hill alone, ascending over the vast plain which dwarfed the large monastery complex, it felt kind of God-like, being the only person looking over all that. Then I reached the top… I approached what I thought was a regular pile of Buddhist votive stones, but then saw that actually, this pile also featured about fifteen horses’ skulls. With the grey clouds behind it, it looked so voodoo I had to take a picture. I ran down the hill, which in itself was quite liberating, having nothing at all but rough ground to watch out for, grabbed my camera and

Voodoo rock’n'roll

alerted my tour mates of my discovery. Pavel and I trekked back up the hill and as we reached the top, it started raining again, just spitting at first, so we decided to walk further to where there was another shine. By the time we approached this shine, it was raining heavily, and the shrine looked pretty unimpressive, just a regular pole covered in prayer ribbons, however, there was stones set out in a weird formation and, on rounding the front of the thing, we found a line of more horses skulls. Just at that moment, I also noticed the amazing sunset that was happening behind the mountain beyond. Although it was raining and now blowing a gale as well, the whole plain below us was drenched in a golden light. Within minutes, behind us, a rainbow began to form which would eventually form a perfect arch. It was the most awesome weather I had ever seen and standing by this spooky shrine, it felt apocalyptic. Only in Mongolia, which it’s endless supply of skulls and vast empty spaces could you really have this experience, so, odd as it was, that kind of made the trip for me.

The next day we returned to Ulaan Baator and I was grateful to go to the vegetarian Stupa Café and have a lovely meal of daal, vegetable, rice and raita. The food on the tour had been pretty miserable, but one thing I’ll say for Ulaan Baator is it has a good selection of vegetarian restaurants – three within spitting distance of the UB Guesthouse where I was staying (a great hostel).

To be, or not to be…

The next day I’m off the China, land of no Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, but I’ll be glad to get out of Ulaan Baator though the ‘land of the skulls’ has been a weird trip indeed.

Oh yes, and upon returning from my Mongolian adventure, I discovered I had been famous in France for a day as my interview with Jennifer Lesieur was published in Metro France – how cool is that?

Trans-Mongolian adventure: part 2

It hasn’t taken me long to adjust to life aboard the Trans-Siberian train. I mistakenly thought my journey between Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk lasted a night and most of the next day, but when I realised I’d got this confused with the Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk journey, and the train actually left Novosibirsk in the evening and reached Krasnoyarsk the next morning I was disappointed. Only a night on the train and no day to spend lounging in the top bunk, working on the novel and reading Tolstoy?

I’d opened my can of ‘real Manchester Gin and Tonic’ procured from a

The Volga River

Novosibirskian supermarket, I’d already got talking to an alright-looking Russian guy (alright-looking Russian guy = very good-looking English guy in my Man Value, by the way) from the next carriage and then I discovered this train came with meals included. On the RZD website it had mysteriously said ‘services included’ but hadn’t explained what this meant. So it was a nice surprise when the prodovistra brought in a polystyrene tray with two fried eggs in (and some meat and cheese, but let’s ignore the meat). Unusually for a travelling vegetarian I hadn’t had eggs for weeks and had been right fancying some, so dipping the accompanying sour-dough bread into the yolk was quite a treat.

Just over forty eight hours before I’d been nearing the end of my first Trans-Siberian journey: Vladimir to Novosibirsk, about forty five hours all in all and none of it spent in boredom. I guess you have to be the kind of person who knows how to occupy themselves to enjoy this kind of thing but I loved it. The Russian landscape, so far, hasn’t been that much to look at – mile after mile after mile of Taiga forest (not that you can ever have too many trees), though we did pass over the mighty Volga river after going through rain-swept Nizhny Novograd and passed through the curiously non-mountainous Ural mountains, but it’s still nice to take a break from lounging in the bunk and go and stand in the corridor and look at the biggest country in the world passing you by. I would love to do this journey – the whole thing from Moscow to Vladivostok in winter.

The strangest thing is the time zones. All the trains run on Moscow time, but Russia has seven time zones all in all. In Bryn Thomas’ indispensable ‘Trans-Siberian Handbook‘, he quotes Michael Myers Shoemaker who said in 1902:

“There is an odd state of affairs as regards to time over here. Though Irkutsk is 24000 miles from St. Petersburg the trains all run on the time of the latter city, therefore arriving in Irkutsk at 5pm when sun would make it 9pm. Today I should make it now about 8:30 – these clocks say 10:30 and some of these people are eating their luncheon”

Well, I was one of those people tucking into my luncheon (of crackers and cream cheese). I’d decided to change from Moscow time to local time when we reached Yekterinburg, as I figured that the people who had just got on and installed themselves in my Kupe carriage would be getting up at what I would be thinking was five in the morning. So I went to bed early and got my lunch out when my watch was still saying it was about ten a.m. Otherwise I’d arrive in Novosibirsk having just had lunch and it would be dinner time there. All very strange. I’m going to be on the train to Irkutsk when the Eurovision is on tomorrow, but I am already seven hours ahead of UK time, Irkutsk is one hour ahead of Krasnoyarsk and God knows how far ahead of Central European Time, which is behind Moscow time, so I can’t even figure out what time it’s on here.

Novosibirsk

 

One of the most interesting sights in Novosibirsk

I spent the whole twenty four hours here trying to prepare and post an application to an artist residency in Europe. Two things about this place: one, there is nothing whatsoever to see here anyway and you can’t leisurely walk around because car pollution is so bad that if you did you’d need a lung transplant after half an hour, and two, fuck me, the Russian Post Office leaves something to be desired. Someone needs to come here and introduce the congestion charge and the concept of queuing. Oh, and install metro station doors that don’t swing back with such force it’s nigh-on impossible to not get smacked in the face by them. I do have to say a huge, huge thank you to Anya at the Dostoevsky Hostel though for her help with my postal nightmare. I also had some delicious mashed potato and green beans cooked with garlic at the Fork and Spoon cafeteria as well. It was the only veggie option, but it was nice.

Krasnoyarsk

A ‘stolb’ at Stolby Nature Reserve

Krasnoyarsk, on the other hand, is a great place. They pipe music onto the streets and some of trees are made of plastic. Like, there is a line of real trees and then the one at the end is obviously fake, complete with plastic lemons. I was inspecting one earlier when a local walked past and noticed him knowingly grin, like it’s some communal in-joke. Was this the place that inspired the Radiohead song? It has very cold winters and even now a chilly Siberian wind takes the heat out of the sun, but doesn’t seem that depressing with an instrumental of ‘La Bamba’ putting a spring in everyone’s step as they walk down the street.

Yesterday I went to the fabulous Stolby Nature Reserve. It’s named after some weird rock formations there called ‘stolbs’. Along the 7km road to the main

A fierce little sable

part of a park I came across a sign, which told of the good news that the number of bears, wolves lynx and sables (like a pine martin) have increased, although I was a little alarmed, as I was there alone, to know that there are now about thirty bears, and pack of wolves and eight lynx on the loose in the place. The rocks were cool, the smaller ones were moss and lichen covered and the larger ones were huge – great for rock climbing. I was scrambling up a smaller rock to get a picture of the gorgeous pine covered mountains in the distance when I saw a tail disappear between two boulders. After a while, a cute little furry head appeared and I realised it was a sable. It played hide and seek with me for a while and I thought it was so sweet until it began growling menacingly. Not quite a bear or a wolf, admittedly. In fact, the only other mammal I saw was a chipmunk, but there were also lots of interesting birds and beautiful wild flowers.

I was exhausted after trekking through the forest and over the rocks so was relieved when a bus pulled up just as I reached the stop. The 19, which I figured went back to my part of town as that was where it had come from. But no, as I sat there and the city scape we passed through changed from tower blocks to retail parks to industrial warehouses and then open country I began to think maybe this wasn’t heading back to the Opera and Ballet Theatre where I had boarded the bus in the morning. It terminated in some strange, desolate bus park and I had to explain in my rudimentary Russian that I was totally lost. The helpful conductress put me on another 19 bus which was going back into town, and the conductress on that bus virtually held my hand until I could change onto a bus going to the right place. Fear not though, Englanders, as I was waiting to get off, I heard her telling two other passengers about the stupid tourist mistake this ‘German girl’ had made, so your country has not been shamed in the city of Krasnoyarsk!

I was absolutely starving when I finally arrived back but found a great USSR-themed restaurant. They seem to have a few here, along with a record count of three Lenin statues and a little section of the art museum devoted to him (but the region gave Putin 50% of the vote, apparently). The restaurant not only did a vegetarian salad (a lot of mushrooms and soy sauce, but nice) but also some delicious potato fritters with sour cream. Someone had also scrawled ‘Go vegan’ in the English on the menu board outside.

It was back on board the train he next day to head to Irkutsk and then onto Lake Baikal. Only a few more days in Russia and I’ve not even been properly drunk on vodka yet!

Trans-Mongolian adventure part 1

Saint Petersburg of the Winter Palace and Summer Cholera

Lenin faces out to the river, mid-speech, arm-raised, cap tucked in his pocket, oblivious to the harsh wind blowing off the Neva. There are some dying carnations at his feet and behind him, the red flags with the hammer and sickle fly confidently in the wind and the façades of valiant workers on the front of Finlyandsky Station can just be made out. No, I’ve time travelled back in time to the USSR, I’ve just trekked over the river to Lenin Square. As a lover of Soviet retroness, I wanted to see a Lenin statue still standing and I was not disappointed. Admittedly, the hammer and sickle flags aren’t actually USSR ones, they are a modern variant put up for the Victory Day celebrations in a couple of days time which celebrate the Red Army’s triumph over the Nazis, but I like the ambiance it creates. It wasn’t easy to get here, earlier it had chucked it down and my trainers are still soaked, and a cold wind blasted me as I trudged over the bridge, but it’s worth it. The only tourist, I take a few pictures then head into the station to get the Metro. I am rooting through my bag to find my purse and when I look up, I’m confronted by a huge mural of the little dictator, a worker at his feet handing him a pitchfork. I had to smile, this was more Soviet retroness than I had bargained for.

Sure, Saint Petersburg in beautiful and The Hermitage has a whole load of mega-star artists in the gorgeous setting of the Winter Palace, but this is one of my favourite Saint Petes memories. This was my first day in the Motherland. Out of all the countries in the world, Russia has been the one I have most wanted to visit. I’ve grappled with the language, read (some of) the great novels, studied the history, taken up some of the politics and wasn’t quite sure what to expect at all. I’d heard Russians are cold and unfriendly, but the girls running the hostel treated me like an old friend. I thought I would struggle with the food, but so far, I was doing OK. I’d already discovered the blini fast food chain Teremok’s ‘Blini Email’, a pancake filled with delicious creamed mushrooms and cheese, and I’d already figured out the Metro.

Just walking the streets of the city was fascinating, there were traders with boxes full of eels, Russian girls teetering about in pin-thin stilettos and old babushkas with bright coloured head-scarves selling vegetables and eggs. Outside the hostel, an old man in military fatigues was loitering who bore a passing resemblance to Fidel Castro and the Nevsky Prospekt is decked out in the red, white and blue flags, Red Army badges, red and yellow stars for the Victory Day parade, above the designer shops and Western fast-food chains.

Dostoevsky’s study

So I’d paid tribute to the history and the art, but couldn’t not pay tribute to St. Petersburg’s greatest, adopted, literary son. The Dostoevsky House and Museum is located in a building where he spent some time when he was older, married and successful. The apartment has been faithfully recreated and the museum is designed to reflect his fantastical, dream and nightmarish-like visions of Saint Petersburg. I left feeling awed and also slightly depressed because however hard I try as a writer I know I’ll never write anything as good as The Devils (which featured Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky who liked to complain of the aforementioned ‘summer cholera’) or Crime and Punishment. I understand why Dostoevsky was so drawn to the darker side of the human condition though as I am myself. He didn’t have an easy life, being banished to a labour camp amongst murderers and thieves (which proved to be a great inspiration) and getting tied into crap publishing contracts, but I got the impression he was a man with a great sense of humour and a real devotion to his family. Great taste in wallpaper too if the apartment is really authentically recreated.

On my last day, before the midnight train to Moscow, I hunted down a vegetarian restaurant, The Beautiful Green, where I had some ‘pelmeni’, Russian dumplings. Maybe this is going to get the FSB on my case, but I have to say, I preferred Polish ‘pierogi’.

It was my first taste of Russian night trains, and I can only hope they all live up to this one. As I struggled along the platform to my carriage with my backpack, smaller rucksack, handbag and bag of food which contained half a quart of Lithuanian vodka, I was suddenly serenaded by rousing, triumphant orchestral music. Cymbals crashing, brass, that kind of thing. Music for a solider returning from War, or a girl on the start of an epic Russian adventure.

The train was gorgeous. All red and yellow inside and I had a whole kupe cabin to myself. The bed was ready-made to climb into and I slept so well I woke up and wondered where the hell I was and why was the bed moving. It was a pleasant surprise when the provodnista (the stewardess allotted to each carriage) came and brought me breakfast – an aeroplane style box full of bread, cream cheese, yoghurt, orange juice. Ok, so there was some kind of meat with gherkin and olives that I couldn’t eat and don’t think I’d have fancied even if I was a carnivore, but it a nice touch.

Moscow Maddness

So, to Moscow. I arrived at rush hour and navigating the Metro was not fun. I didn’t even notice the ornate decoration at Komsomolskaya station, I was too busy trying to figure out the system,which seemed totally confusing. There was no time to recover from this ordeal though once I’d reached the hostel because I had to SIGHTSEE and there was no time to lose. I’d realised three days in Moscow wasn’t going to be enough even before I got there. So I valiantly hopped back onto the Metro and heading to the flea and souvenir market near Izmaylovskaya Park. I was still searching for a Russian stacking doll of the Soviet Leaders, staring with Gorbachev and going back chronologically to a tiny Lenin. I’d seen them in Berlin but they were too expensive there. Well, it seemed that Gorbachev is out of favour here. There were dolls of Lenin, a large, nine piece set starting with a large Stalin (perfect for any mantelpiece), followed illogically by Putin, but none of Gorbachev! Why have the Russians rejected their Nobel Prize winning, perestoyka-introducing last Communist leader? By the end of my time in Moscow I can’t help but think it’s because they deem him responsible for breaking up the USSR. Anyway, not only was a really disappointed not to find my coveted Soviet doll, but it was from here on in that Russian food took a turn for the worst. I chanced some street food, a pasty type thing that was supposed to be cheese and ‘ne meerca’… no meat. It was tasty but halfway in and I discovered a strange substance that was definitely flesh-like. I was convinced I was going to get food poisoning and throw up on the metro or in the Kremlin which I was visiting that afternoon. Thankfully, this didn’t happen.

Finding the Kremlin ticket office was easy, but reaching it was not. Because of Victory Day, Red Square and half the streets and Metro exits around it were closed. After a detour that had unintentionally taken in the Bolshoi theatre, Lubyanka, home of the KGB HQ, G.U.M department store and Revolution Square, I stood on the other side of the road, remembering how in Rome a Canadian woman in my dorm had warned me of the Moscow traffic and said ‘I was like, I can see The Kremlin, but it’s over ten lanes of traffic’. My God, I totally got this now. I was ready to strangle someone by the time I finally managed to get to the other side of the road. Sod the churches, I thought, and just bought a ticket for The Armoury. At the princely sum of seven hundred roubles it wasn’t cheap. ‘It had better be good’ I muttered to myself, ‘or else I’m going to… smash up my audio guide… or something’.

Well, The Armoury is a unique museum of decorative items and the sum total of all the dazzling gold, silver, diamonds and other gems in there must be worth more than Roman Abramovich: there were medieval filigree gold bible cases, ostentatious Baroque cups decorated with solid gold fruits, gold candle holders with figurines of nymphs and Greek Gods, Ostrich feather fans with jewel encrusted handles and all sorts of other treasures. My favourite things were the Fabergé eggs though. Sadly, the one mentioned in my guidebook, dedicated to the Trans-Siberian railway, with a little train inside, was out on loan, but the others were so beautiful – like the glass egg decorated with hundred of tiny, sparking diamonds, with a little ship inside, a gift from one of the Emperors to his wife. Oh, to find a man who gives a girl Fabergé eggs!

That night me and some of the others from the hostel ended up at the Propaganda nightclub. If there was one nightclub in the world I’ve always wanted to go to it was this one, even if it was playing house music. No stiletto heels and micro-skirts here, I was totally at home in my jeans and Converse trainers. I even accidentally smuggled the Lithuanian vodka in (long story). I stayed out until half two and then had to get up for nine because the next day was Victory Day! Me and Ros, another English girl from the hostel, went to try to see the Victory Day parade. We hung around at the end of the road where a load of locals had assembled, but after about forty five minutes realised there was actually nothing to see here and we’d be better off watching it on TV back at the hostel. On the way home we did, however, see the fly overs: the Russian air force showing off all their best planes, I think. All round the city, stages had been set up with WWII-themed entertainment and the street stalls were doing a brisk trade in little Red Army hats. Some Russians even donned the garishly

A Victory Day reveller

coloured, fake fur Cossack hats with the Soviet badge on that I though were only for stupid tourists. I saw a man in a white one passed out in front of the souvenir shop he may well have bought it from down on the Arbat.

Best thing in Moscow though? For me, the Memorial Museum of Cosmonauts. As a result, I have become obsessed with the Soviet space programme. The building it’s in is impressive enough: the roof turns into one giant metal ‘whoosh’ rising about a hundred metres up and tapering at the end where there is a little metal rocket. Along the sides of the building are one of the best Socialist Realism tableaux I’ve seen. Some people knock this somewhat contrived genre of art, but the composition of this scene of all the workers involved in getting Yuri Gagarin to the stars, including one of the dogs, flowed so well. And it was so touching, it almost brought a tear to my eye.

Inside the museum, although most of it’s in Russian, there are the stuffed

The Cosmonaut Museum roof

bodies of Belka and Strelka, two dogs who made it back from space, real space suits, Yuri Gargarin’s electrogram showing his heart going haywire the night he went up, and lots of photos including one of Yuri meeting Che Guevara. Whilst I don’t agree with all their practices, particularity the use of animals, it is staggering that the scientists and engineers managed to invent space travel at a time when there were no computers, mobiles phones, internet, just a few years after a crippling war. And how cool must it be to go into space. The pictures of the Cosmonauts training and on missions made it look like fun, though I know some of them (Astronauts at least) go a bit mad or join weird cults when they come back down, still wonder if I too old to be a cosmonaut when I grow up.

Afterwards we went to the All-Russian Exhibition Centre Park. Today was another public holiday and it seemed the whole of Moscow had come out. As

we approached the entrance, a huge neoclassical arch topped with some victorious workers, we passed people selling puppies, a competition to see how long someone can hang onto a metal bar, people dressed as Red Indians playing pan-pipes, lots of flashy-looking motorbikes, including one with a real live monkey on the back and all sorts of other madness. Inside the park, in front of huge there was a fun fair, stalls selling Victory Day flags and hats, and USSR ice cream for sale. I had one – it was like Mr. Whippy but encased in chocolate, delicious but it fell apart towards the end as ungraciously as the Soviet Union itself did. There were even Soviet-style water dispensers. Yulia, my new Ukrainian friend, had told me about these the night before when we were having a pint by Red Square– back in the old days they didn’t have plastic cups so one cup was placed under the dispenser and constantly reused. This, so she told me, became known as the ‘cup of the USSR’. The two Russian guys who’d attached themselves to us looked too young to remember communism but still knew about ‘the cup’.

On the boulevard leading to a huge building with Romanesque columns and a

Go-Kart Lenin

hammer and sickle crest, guys walked with their girls who were wearing heels far to high for a sunny day in the park, as rollerbladers tried to weave through the crowds. Others sat around the fountains and drank beer. There was a kids go-kart track, built around a large statue of Lenin. We walked though all this – we were looking for the Friendship Fountain which had been mentioned in my guidebook as something to see, well, nothing can quite prepare you for the first glimpse of it. It is a Socialist-Realist/ Neoclassical monster of thing, the audaciousness of which is only matched by Rome’s Trevi Fountain. Golden maidens, each representing one of the USSR republics stand around the giant centrepiece, and enough water gushes out that I’m sure, if you stood on the right side, on a windy day would give you a great shower I loved it. Around it, buildings fashioned on Rome’s Imperial Fora, but with the obligatory communist touches, rose. The place was epic.

If I hadn’t got David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ stuck in my head, I would surely have had ‘Back in the USSR’ after today.

That epic fountain

Afterwards we went to a terrible restaurant which had nothing vegetarian on the vast menu but a ratatouille and left me thinking I should stick to pizza and pasta for the rest of my time here.

Towards Siberia

The next day I bid a sad ‘dosvedanya’ to Moscow and headed to Suzdal, a Golden Ring town, that despite only being a few hours out of the capital felt like a world away. No metro rush hour here, to reach the hostel I walked down a cobbled road, past a wooden bridge over a sleepy river, and down a dirt track. The only sounds here are birdsong, the regular chiming of church bells (Suzal has more churches per person that anywhere in the country I think) and a strange squawking noise that I at first thought was ducks but then surmised was coming from hundreds of frogs hiding in the river reeds. I have a phobia of frogs so it’s a credit to Suzdal’s charm that this didn’t put me off the place. A quick glance at a restaurant menu that had not a single vegetarian item on it told me I should head to the supermarket instead. Ah, slices of cold pizza were available in the chilled section! But then I discovered that even the margarita had chicken on it! I had to make do with some dry bread, some cheese spread and a disgusting ready made beetroot salad (this hostel had no kitchen… I hate hostels which have no kitchens). I think it’s only going to get worse. I was glad I’d stocked up on instant noodles and porriage oats for the two day train I was about to take to Novosibirsk.

A hangover worthy of a any good British tourist to the Baltics; Russian classes

I’m writing this on a coach as it travels along the bumpy Russian highway to St. Petersburg, cutting through pine forests and vast open spaces. We’ve just passed a village of wooden houses, some of the older ones looking like they are straight out of fairytale. I’ve been stuck on the coach for knocking on for ten hours now, all the way from Riga, via Tallinn, with a revolting on-board toilet and only disembarking to go through Russian passport control, which was nowhere near as scary as I thought it would be.

My Baltic sojourn started in Vilnius, Lithuania. I would say it’s a quaint little

The constitution of Užupis

city but one of the guys who was staying in my hostel got pepper-sprayed and robbed when coming home from a club one night, so it’s not that quaint. Still, they a little area of artists, bohemians and other open-minded types that has discovered has declared itself a republic. The Republic of Užupis has it’s own quirky constitution and a plethora of small art galleries of varying quality. They also have a street dedicated to writers, which I think everywhere should have. Oh yes, and then there is the very quaint Museum of Genocide Victims, set in the old KGB-HQ. After the Museum of Terror in Budapest, the Stasi exhibition and the Third Reich tour in Berlin and Auschwitz I wasn’t sure I could hack any more of the Twentieth century’s bloody violence, but it started raining so I thought I’d give it ago. The museum mainly focused on the story of those who were sent to labour camps in the USSR but you could also go down to the prison cells and into the old execution chamber where a very explicit video reconstructing of what happened there was playing.

Absinthe… just say no

After that I needed a drink and fortunately, on returning to the hostel, found that everyone else in my dorm did as well: Denis from Italy, Niklas and Daniel from Germany and Jerry from Hong Kong, yes, all guys but I’ve always thought I can keep up with the boys when it comes to drinking. We ended up in some club that fitted every stereotype of an Eastern European nightclub, and then a bar where we did some very nice tasting absinthe. After that, it’s all a bit of blur and the last thing I remember was chewing poor Niklas’ ear off back at the hostel, lamenting why people are so evil.

I was supposed to be getting the twelve o’clock bus to Riga, but I set my alarm wrong and woke up at twenty to twelve with a sore head, around which that Carly Rae Jepson song was firmly circulating. Way after that twelve o’clock coach had gone, when I finally got to the coach station and went to buy a new ticket, I found my purse was full of Euros. How the hell did they get there? Must have happened when I was drunk and I couldn’t work out if I’d been scammed out of Lithuanian Litas. I was too hungover to think about it. Having experienced severe ‘coach sickness’ numerous times on the rail replacement bus back to Runcorn the morning after wild nights out in Manchester I dared eat nothing but a few Tuc biscuits and so the several hours long, hot, stuffy journey was somewhat painful. I was so grateful to discover, upon reaching Riga, that there was a branch of Latvia’s version of Pizza Express just over the (admittedly very wide) road from my hostel.

And then the Russian classes started. This was why I’d come to Riga, to brush up on my ‘nemenoga’/ not-very-much-at-all Russian. By a coincidence as huge as the one towards the end of The Place Beyond the Pines (which I went to see at Riga’s multiplex), my hostel was in the very same building as the Russian school, and my room was one floor below. What a result. Not that there was any need to stay in bed until ten minutes before class… there was no partying at this hostel. Thank god. Trying to learn Russian would be excruciating with a hangover. I only had one classmate, Maria, and she was German so had learn it in school a bit. Most of my knowledge came form a textbook I picked up from a charity shop with dated from the days of the USSR and instructed you to call everyone ‘comrade’. I struggled with those pesky, and may I say, nonsensical adverb and article endings.

But Riga, wow, who would have thought it would be such a fabulous city for vegetarian food? The first day Maria and I went for lunch to Double Coffee, a sort of Latvian Starbucks, I was shocked to find the whole lunch menu featured not a single scrap of flesh. There was bean soup, pancakes with vegetarian toppings, and all sorts of other delights. I found the nicest hummus ever in the supermarket and there was a really cheap Hare Krishna café, serving wonderful vegetarian Indian food.

Riga… veggie capital of the Western world?

I have to commend Riga as well on having the most impressive Indian restaurant of my trip so far. Yola, a girl I met off couchsurfing, and I sampled this one evening and my vegetable Jalfrazi was genuinely spicy. Later we sampled the local drink – Black Balzam. It’s some kind of spirit made with lots of herbs and spices. I had some with hot blackcurrant and it tasted like Lemsip. Better was the a drink called Green Day I had in a coffee shop – gin, warm apple juice, honey and a stick of cinnamon and fruit: really, really delicious. I declare that warm cocktails are the way forward!

With that revelation I shall finish, tune in for the next installment to find out whether my Russian is proving good enough for navigating the mean streets of Moscow and Saint Petersburg.

Transport so far:

63 bus from East Dulwich to Kings Cross, Eurostar to Paris, Paris metro to Odeon, bus to Gare du Lyon, overnight train to Florence, train to Assisi, car up the winding roads to the artist residency.

4×4 back down the mountain, Assisi to Rome train, the notorious number 64 bus, number 23 bus.

Train from Rome to Ancona, overnight ferry to Split, coach from Split to Mostar, coach from Mostar to Sarajevo, coach from Sarajevo to Belgrade.

Train from Belgrade to Budapest, overnight train from Budapest to Berlin, lots of travels on the Sbahn and Ubahn and numerous trams.

Night train to Krakow, day train to Warsaw and then too many long, long coach journies through the Baltic States. Missed this off the last post… is any actually bothered??

Concentration camps and subterranean labyrinths in Poland

I never thought I would be running around a bus station asking around where the bus to Auschwitz was, but there I was in Krakow, doing just that. I felt that if you have the opportunity, it’s important to go and bear witness, but it was a strange experience and I’m still not really sure how to put it into words. First impressions: the car park was surprisingly rammed with tour coaches, just beyond this car park there is a hotel boasting three stars – who on earth would stay there? And the Albeit Macht Frei sign is smaller than I imagined.

I read Primo Levi’s ‘If This is Man/ The Truce‘ some years ago and to be honest, I think reading that was a more powerful experience than actually being there, in the museum part at least (there are two sights – Auschwitz I, the museum, and then Auschwitz-Birkenau, the more intact and more harrowing site).

The guide hurried a herd of us round, past the piles and piles of suitcases, shoes and human hair, and then before I knew it we were standing in the gas chamber. It would have been nice to have spent some time alone, processing it all at one’s own pace, but I guess the sheer volume of visitors prevents this.

At Birkenau you see the intact train tracks running under the entrance building and stopping abruptly a few hundred metres from the destroyed gas chambers, which is the thing I found most chilling. We were standing, the guide told us, on the place where the ‘selections’ were made. Part of me felt they should have just raised the thing to the ground, such an awful place is it, but I guess there are good reasons for keeping it there.

I fell asleep on the bus back to town and woke up to find that the radio was playing ‘Runaway Train’ by Soul Asylum, a song I used to listen to incessantly when I was a young teenager. God, but now, all I could think of were those train tracks and in my mind I saw the pictures in the museum of the kids and teenagers who were sent there, flashing by like the pictures of runaway American kids did in the pop video. I had to put on my sunglasses and turn to the window to save myself from drawing strange looks.

Krakow main square

I won’t remember Krakow for just Auschwitz though. I was couchsurfing with the lovely Agata and her boyfriend, Piotr. We discussed Lech Wałęsa over beer, Agata told me what it was like being a kid under communism and they took me to a great Polish milk bar (milk bars are cheap canteens that survived the Communist era). I was expecting Poland to be tough for vegetarians so was delighted by the ‘pierogi’ – a staple Polish food of dumplings, they come with meat fillings but also ‘rushki’ (potato and cottage cheese) and with spinach and cheese. Only a few zloty and super cheap! Potato pancakes with a creamy mushroom sauce was another great veggie Polish dish.

The next day I arrived in Warsaw. I’d read it isn’t the prettiest city, but wasn’t

The crap ‘botel’

expecting it’s ugliness to almost bring me to tears. At first glance it seemed to be dominated by hideous shopping malls and huge roads. I was staying in a ‘botel’, a boat turned into a hotel though hotel would be rather a rich word for this particular place. It sounded nice on paper, being on the river and all that, but I wasn’t expecting this stretch of the river to be separated by about six lanes of traffic from the ‘mainland’. Warsaw is not a pedestrian friendly city and God help you if you’re in a wheelchair. It takes about twenty minutes to cross a road, and often pedestrians are forced underground where they must navigate subterranean labyrinths of cheap shops and fast food joints, just to get from one side of the street to the other. I badly needed to do some laundry but after three hours of walking around, only to be told by some snooty woman in the pay-per-item laundry I had been mistakenly directed to, that ‘there are no launderette in Warsaw’, I was so frustrated I felt like committing a random act of violence, or just plain bursting into tears.

The next day, Warsaw grew on me. The botel gave me a really useful map, which directed me to the best paczki in the city. Paczki are sort of like doughnuts. The bakery was down a very gentrified street, but there, just as the map described, was the grubby awning and the queue of people outside the hatch. Unable to decipher the labels, I pointed at the type that looked nicest. The one I got was was so fresh it was still warm and contained cherry jam and some kind of sweet cream cheese filling. I almost forgave Warsaw for having no launderettes. Then I went to the Zacheta art gallery and checked out their cool textiles exhibition which featured an Cold War-and-space-themed installation and a rug-crossed-with-Space-Invaders thing. By the end of the day I wished I could have stayed here a bit longer. I think Warsaw has something cool going on under the underground subway hell.

 

Groovy art installation