And Now the *Real*Adventure Begins..

I'm sitting in my cabin on a train bound for Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. The coldest capital city in the world.

This is the beginning of my *real* adventure. The Trans-Mongolian route of the Trans-Siberian railway. Beijing to Moscow. The reason I came to Beijing in the first place was to leave on this train.

Up to this point, everything in my trip has been amazing. Beyond all expectations. If I had to go home tomorrow I wouldn't regret a moment of it. But up to this point I've always had some (often inaccurate) idea of what to expect from each destination. Now I'm stepping into the unknown.

I will eventually get to Moscow, but right now I'm heading to Ulaanbaatar where I'll stay for a few days before continuing to Irkutsk in Eastern Russia. I'm beginning to really feel like I'm on the other side of the world. These places don't have the familiarity of Western Europe or South East Asia. I wasn't brought up on photographs of these landscapes and didn't go to school with people who's families came from here. I can only think of one Mongolian person I know, and I only met her this morning because we're sharing a cabin. I still can't pronounce or even read her name properly. One more strange alphabet to confuse me...

The train left Beijing at 7:47am, and will arrive in UB tomorrow night. This is just a taste of things to come - the longest segment of my trip (between Irkutsk and Moscow) is 5 days straight. In the same cabin of the same train sharing with 3 other people. After the mayhem and non-stop energy of Hanoi,Shanghai, Beijing, I'm ready to spend some quiet time chilling, and this train should give me plenty of that.

So here I am, only two hours out of Beijing and already I can't believe what I'm seeing. The landscape is like nothing I've seen before. Impossibly steep craggy mountains with trains popping in and out of tunnels as if playing a giant game of Mega Worm (google it if you don't know). Then suddenly the mountains are in the distance and we're crossing a giant plain, heading towards the next mountain range.

The countryside is grey and beige. Winter is well and truly on the way, but there's no snow yet. Despite being a cloudless sunny day, It looks dry and cold outside, and very windy. The mountains look dead, but things are just dormant. Big piles of coal on the side of the tracks have coal dust swirl around them like plumes of smoke. The architecture can be described only as functional, and tends to be some derivation on the ubiquitous concrete box. Not exactly romantic. But certainly a majestic mix of open spaces, industry and agriculture. Imposing, inhospitable, and beautiful in it's own way. And I bet when the countryside comes alive again in the spring it makes enduring the winter seem worthwhile.

I haven't even mentioned the train yet! It's better than I expected, and definitely a notch above the overnight train in Vietnam, although not to the same standard as the Shanghai-Beijing fast overnight train. It's not new, but has been refurbished and is clean and tidy and now each bunk has it's own little LCD screen that plays dodgy bootleg movies 24/7. Luxury. For anyone planning this journey, I'm currently on the K23 train. I think it's one of the better ones. Sadly I won't be on it for the full journey to Moscow.

The big surprise about this train is the fact it's almost empty. I'm sharing a 4 berth cabin with just one person. A Mongolian lady who is a school teacher in UB. She can speak enough English so we can cover all the conversation basics of where we're from, family, etc.. But I feel so ignorant traveling through countries where I know next to nothing of the language and the people. Sadly that includes almost every country I'm going through on this trip.

My cabin mate (as best as I can say, her name sounds roughly like "Orgungbuya") has more luggage than I've ever seen anyone travel with. I have no idea how she managed to get it onto the train. There must be well over 100kg. She filled the luggage compartment under her bunk, the upper luggage compartment (with pot plants), the entire top bunk, and still has a massive box in the cabin next door! For all I know there may be more; she was already unpacking when I arrived. She's very friendly and helpful though, so I'm not complaining.

I discovered a potential problem with my luggage. The dimensions of my bag makes it just a bit too big to fit under the bottom bunk, so that might cause a problem during other legs of the journey. Maybe I'll look for some kind of duffle bag or something in UB so I can split my luggage if necessary.

Luckily we're about the only people in the entire carriage, so there's plenty of room if we need it. This isn't the tourist season and it seems more people head east on the trans-sib than west, so it might be fairly quiet on the other legs too. Fingers crossed.

I just looked out the window and noticed that the water in a nearby paddock where cows were grazing is frozen over. I guess it's getting colder outside. I'm toasty sitting here in a t-shirt.

Update at 12:30pm - Wow. The great wall of China just came down from the mountains to meet us. We're running parallel with it as I type this. That's so cool! Ooo.. I see little bits of snow too!

Update at 1:00pm - We just stopped following the great wall after running beside it for the last 1/2 hour while it lined the base of a mountain range.

Update at 4:30pm - The industry has thinned out and the landscape is taking on a more rural look, although there are still random pockets of heavy industry and tower blocks of housing here and there.

The rivers and streams we pass are all frozen now, and more and more snow is scattered on the ground.

The craggy mountains have given way to huge wide open plains, and I'm beginning to get that sense of just how big the world is and how small I am.

I'm also beginning to relax and slow down to adjust to the pace of this kind of travel.

This is the same altered sense of time and space I felt while driving my kombi across the Nullabor in 1997, and it was the unexpected highlight of my drive around Australia back then. This time it's one of the things I came here looking for. I've got another two weeks of this ahead of me.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location: Somewhere in Northern China

The Great Wall

I got picked up at 7:30am this morning to go and visit the Great Wall.  I was part of a small tour group travelling in a mini-van, with only 5 guests, a guide, a trainee guide, and a driver.  The other tourists included a New Zealand couple and a Swedish couple.

As well as visiting a section of the Great Wall, we also had a tour of the Ming tombs and stopped in for tours of a jade workshop, a copper enamelling workshop, a silk workshop, and finally a tea-tasting ceremony.

Although it was pretty clear the primary purpose of the visits to each of the workshops was to tempt us to buy souvineers from there, the tours themselves were pretty informative and there was no pressure to buy anything, so it was still worthwhile.

But of course the highlight of the day was the Great Wall itself.  I won't talk much about it because there isn't much to say that hasn't been said by millions of other people, but suffice to say it is one of those destinations you must visit to really appreciate.

We were very lucky with the weather - it was beautiful, sunny and warm.  There was some haze in the air (as there has been since I left Australia), but visibility was still good.  The haze just added a bit of atmosphere to my photos.

The drive from Beijing out to the section of wall we visited took a couple of hours, and I had a chance to admire the landscape of rural China a bit.  Being the end of Autumn it was stark, but still beautiful.  Jagged hills, leafless trees, and many shades of orange.

I was surprised when I got back to my hotel and started processing my photos from the day just how much they seemed to remind me of paintings.

Beijing is really growing on me

After spectacular Shanghai, I imagined Beijing to be a massive whirlwind of people and culture. A clash of new versus old. I was surprised to find things much more laid back and slow-paced than expected. And where were all people? I was expecting to be jammed in by people on the footpath, but instead was met by wide open spaces and traffic that was manageable. None of the claustrophobia of walking around the Old Quarter of Hanoi or the mayhem of traffic in Saigon.

Central Beijing is unlike any other large city I've been to. Because the center of Beijing is the culturally-vital Forbidden City, the government decided no tall buildings should be built anywhere within a few kilometers. And what the Chinese government wants, the Chinese government gets. This means that all the big commercial and financial institutions are located out where the suburbs might be in other cities. It's feels like an inside-out city.

Strolling around the center feels like a casual stroll through lots of older single story residential areas and small tea houses and shops, with the only large impressive buildings being culturally-significant ones or government buildings. It makes Beijing feel much smaller than it really is.

After feeling a little disappointed initially, this really started to grow on me and by the time It was time to leave, I felt like I was only just starting to hit my stride. I felt like I hardly saw any of the major tourist draw cards, although I think I did see a lot of the real Beijing, and met some really interesting people along the way.

I met some doctors in Beijing for a conference, got a guided tour of the Hutongs (inner city residential alleys dating back as far as the 13th century) from some Chinese students on holiday, chatted with a dude who built a very cool mini-chopper motorbike from scratch for 3000RMB (AU$450), and had dinner with a fascinating Cuban man who is a museum curator in Mexico city.

I also tried some fantastic food in Beijing including bullfrog, jellyfish, snake, red bean sorbet, and some kind of internal organs from a goat. Sometimes it was best to close my eyes before eating, but the food was always delicious. I drew the line at stuffed whole turtle, goose head soup (shown with heads floating in it), spewed pork (i hope that was a typo) and curdled blood soup.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Beijing, China

Leaving Shanghai for Beijing

It was my last day in Shanghai so I thought I should actually book a ticket to get me to Beijing on the overnight train and a hotel for when I get there.

The hotel was no problem, but the train I wanted had sold out of sleeper cabins.  Doh.

Nevermind, I managed to score a cabin on the fast train to Beijing instead.  It was still an overnight trip, but it got into Beijing at 7:30am instead of closer to lunchtime.  Not ideal (I wanted to watch the scenery all morning) but the fast trains are new and have great facilities, so at least it would be comfortable.

By now it was lunchtime and I'm at Shanghai train station. I've got time to kill until 9:30pm.

So I wander around looking for somewhere to have lunch.  No shortage of restaurants around the train station, but most are a selection of eastern and western food franchises of the McDonalds/KFC/etc variety.  Meh.

I wander into a dusty old shopping mall that doesn't look much bigger than a supermarket, past a couple of cheap trinket shops, and I see a staircase going up with a sign indicating it had something to do with photography.  So I wander up to see what was up there... And I couldn't believe what I saw!  Dozens of camera shops!  In fact 2 entire floors of this mall were dedicated purely to photography, but you would never know from street level.  Most shops sold pro-level video and still cameras and lenses (very few consumer products at all), but there were also shops dedicated to large and medium-format film, 2nd-hand collectables, pro lighting, photolab printing, etc, etc.  Canon and Nikon reigned supreme with most stores dedicating at least one full wall to one or both of these brands, but the more exotic brands also got a mention (Hasselblad, Rodenstock, etc) and a number of stores had entire shopfront window decked out with Leica gear.  Heaven!

But this wasn't some glitzy tourist trap - it was tucked away from the public eye and presented in a very matter-of-fact way.  It didn't really cater for the compact-camera user.  It was a supermarket for pros.

So I wander into a couple of stores and check their prices against what I know I could get the same stuff for in Australia.. hmm.. pretty good..  And now I come to think of it, I really do need to get a wide-angle zoom for my GF1...

So after a bit of shopping around and price-checking, I settle on an Olympus 9-18mm micro 4/3 lens for my Panasonic GF1.  It's a fantastic little lens and I got it at a great price from my new friend Lee who ran one of the shops.  He said the lens would take about an hour to arrive at the store, but instead of telling me to come back later he sat me down and made me tea and we chatted for an hour about photography, China, and Australia.  He's such a nice guy.

So an hour later I was packed up with my new lens and jumped into another taxi.  I needed to find a post office to send a package back to Australia.  Luckily I had plenty of time as this took longer than expected.  I've discovered that my miming gesture for "posting a letter" seems to be easily confused with "handing over money". Each time I ask where the nearest post office is to send packages, I end up getting sent to a bank.

With the package sent, I went off wandering around Shanghai's glitzy shopping district.  It was getting dark now, and the neon lights of Shanghai were coming alive.  I didn't buy anything except a few glasses of some rediculously expensive whiskey, and then I headed off to the railway station.

The overnight fast train from Shanghai to Beijing (train D302) is modern, comfortable and efficient. It reaches speeds of 250km/h, but you'd never know as it speeds so smoothly through the darkness of night.

It was so comfortable that I slept for almost the entire journey.  The new Shanghai Hongqiao railway station (which only opened mid 2010) is beautiful and a joy to travel through, but the Beijing South railway station I arrived at was a bit more chaotic, with only one of the four taxi ranks in operation meaning a wait of over an hour for a taxi.

Shanghai Museum, Chinese Tea, and The Bund

(Click on this panorama of The Bund to see a larger version.)

Ok now that I had my little culture shock moment arriving in China, I was ready the next day to roll up my sleeves and tackle it head on.  So I jumped in a taxi to head for the Shanghai museum.

As soon as I jumped out of the cab I was greeted by the scene of a man running in front of me flying a kite.  I scrambled for my camera and grabbed the shot just in time.  It was going to be a good day.

The museum itself was amazing.  Artifacts dating back thousands of years, all in seemingly perfect condition.  It's a beautiful museum with an even more beautiful collection.

After the museum I wandered towards the river, to a famous promenade called The Bund.

This was the Shanghai I had imagined before arriving here, only it was much more than I expected.  Shanghai is an amazing fusion of old and new, Eastern and Western cultures, and nothing captures it more spectacularly than The Bund.

On my side of the river was the old financial district - a long road of huge majestic stone buildings that could fool you into thinking you were in 1920's New York or London.  These days they are the homes to exotic designer-label clothes stores and the like, but they have been maintained faithfully to the point where you expect the cars to morph into horses and carriages in any moment.

Then on the other side of the river is the new financial district, a futuristic scene straight out of The Jetsons dominated by a huge sci-fi tower and flanked by skyscrapers, some of which turn into huge 50-story video screens when the sun goes down.

And the Huangpu River divides the two sides, equally busy with tourist ferries featuring garish flashing lights and no-frills freight ships which are the lifeblood of this famous port city.

While wandering around The Bund I was befriended by a couple of Chinese ladies who were on holiday in Shanghai from Beijing.  They were on their way to a Tea tasting ceremony and invited me along.

It was remarkable to get an insight into the science and craft behind Chinese Tea, and I got to sample some very interesting ones.