A Hop, Skip and a Jump

The first leg of our overland journey across the Eurasian continent started in our much-beloved city of Bangkok. Our final destination was London, with five countries and a fistful of visas in between.

The further you get from your travels, the more the experiences evolve into a series of moments. Less “We travelled on a train in Vietnam for six hours between x and x.” and more “A wrinkled, leathery, old Vietnamese man on a train opened the window for a smoke, and when he saw us gazing at the landscape, started pointing things out to us, in Vietnamese of course.”

The appeal of narrative fades and travel becomes verbal recollections of individual fragments of the trip that stick in your mind; one might say the important things - the things that have stayed with you, long after you crossed the border into another adventure.

So here are those kernels of memory that surface like bobbing balls in a wading pool when we think of our lives between January and April 2008. The important things.

Thailand

Returning to a country which is so far removed from your own, and yet comforting none-the-less.

Kamilla. A face of home and also of support and wisdom for our time in Japan just past.

Matt and the observation of a new relationship so far removed from where we are now. (P.S. They are now engaged).

Our familiar Pranee Building Hotel with its blue furniture. It’s impossible to not feel like you’re coming home when you spent six weeks and two birthdays in a place…

Huge air-conditioned shopping centres that are as empty as the ones in Tokyo are full.

Lumphini Park. The heavy air, the yellow shirts, the open-air aerobics, the full stop for the national anthem, the night lights and junk yard gyms. The palm trees. The 100 year old guys who run faster than you. The pretty kratoys that skip along next to you. The soi dogs you feel sorry for.

Going to see Alien vs. Predator in the Gold Screen cinema just for the sake of going to a gold screen cinema, cheaply.

Crunchy pork and crackling with spicy kale and rice for breakfast.

Tom Ka Gai.

Our Lady of the Street Vendor and her life-saving pork skewers and sticky rice.

A Tuk Tuk packed full to bursting with Milli, Matt, Tiff and John. After a hard bargain of course.

The toilet at the train station which reminds you that Thailand is still a third world country.

Discovering that the hockey stick which had been such a necessary companion of John’s in India was still residing at the Pranee Building, where we’d left it nearly a year before. It was posted home to Australia this time.

Arriving at the train station at 4am when everything is still dark. Boarding a train you only think you should be on, and finding a place with your ridiculously huge bags between the foreigners with guitars, the locals with bags of grain, and the children sleeping on the seats.

How invigorating it is to journey on a train through a countryside with the windows open. The smells and sounds become as part of the experience as the sights. And they are shared by all alike on the train.

Missing Thailand the moment you leave it.

Cambodia

Knowing you’re a seasoned traveler when you can spot a well-orchestrated scam 500m from the border – where the tuk tuk dropped us.

Standing in a customs line with your ridiculously huge bags in 38 degree heat, while amazing middle-aged female tourists with your travel tales.

Being told by a Policeman that the visa you need can only be paid for in a currency you don’t have, being taken across the border by a ‘friend’ of an official, to a tiny little money-changing office where the guy checks that the coast is clear before bringing out samples of all the world’s known currencies.

Walking three kilometers in the middle of a Cambodian summer along dusty roads with your ridiculously huge bags, following a sprightly sixty-year old man pulling a suitcase on wheels behind him, in search of a legitimate taxi-stand ‘I just know is around here somewhere’.

John stays put in the shade of a mobile phone stand with our bags, panicking that Tiff has been abducted in the process of bringing back a taxi.

Tiff realizes that the ‘free bus to the taxi stand from the border’ that we didn’t believe in, is actually a ‘free bus to the taxi stand from the border’.

Remembering all the travel advice from every guidebook in existence and having to say ‘no’ when the driver wants to ‘give my friend a lift – very short way’.

Knowing you’re a seasoned traveler when you can fall asleep in the car on the worst road in South East Asia, and perhaps the world – Poiphet to Siem Reap.

Finding out that your hotel really has closed down, it’s not just the remorque-moto driver’s say-so. And he speaks really good English so can understand you when you call him nasty names.

Finding an Aussie-run hotel with a pool table and all – and it being completely booked out.

You know you have more to learn about travelling when you end up at the hotel that the remorque-moto driver suggested originally, in a room with air-conditioning and hot water at twice your budget price.

Ancient Cambodians knew how to make amazing shit.

Standing at the foot of Angkor Wat at sunset, and taking the photo you’ve always dreamt of taking; and having it spoilt by a big green tarpaulin.

Visiting the set of Lara Croft and feeling more like Indiana Jones.

Taking the cheap option and getting more of a ride – remorque-moto for 70km!

Hearing live traditional music being played in the forests around the ruined temples brought them back to life.

Seeing the ethereal monks in their orange robes drift through the eerie green of ancient ruins.

The things countries do for tourism – finding pristine toilets (the best in SE Asia) amongst the ruins.

Expensive Thai garden restaurants in Cambodia are worth it.

Cows on buses, and pigs in weave baskets on bikes half their size.

The pictures of third world villages are right. Wood-planked huts, palm thatch roofs, dirty kids naked from the waist down running around in the yard with their half-starved dogs and chickens. And all you can do is pass by in your remorque-moto, paying your driver’s living expenses for a week, and give thanks for how lucky you are. And notice that when the locals aren’t staring at you, they’re usually laughing.

Phnom Penh is a horrible city. Dirty, dusty and hot. But we were met at our bus with a smile – and a sign that said “Mr John and Tifanvy”.

The Killing Fields are horrific. The tower of skulls gorily staring down with sad, silent screams - haunting in its seemingly peaceful surroundings. After visiting a massacre site, we would advise drivers never to suggest (as ours did to us) going to a shooting range to kill cows, pigs etc. “But you can use a machine gun, hey! Throw a grenade and blow up a cow!”

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum evokes sickness and outrage. A horrific reminder of how the bloodthirst of a few can effect so many. The whole place has an energy of tragedy and horror. And having just finished a book on the Pol Pot Regime, Tiff was able to describe to John in detail the context of the atrocities. How can humans do these things to each other? How can people with such sadistic tendencies live normal lives between periods of unrest? And how do we allow these people into the position of power where they can live out these violent fantasies on others?

Across the road from one of the most nauseating places on earth, is a tranquil garden restaurant with some of the best food ever.

They keep huge fierce guard dogs in tiny cages during the day, and let them roam on vacant building sites to ‘protect’ them at night.

If the cook is napping and he is woken to make your food, and then gets the order wrong, eat it anyway. Don’t send it back or he’s likely to spit in it. Or worse.

Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh city is full of pretty lights. And motorbikes. And traffic that has you sitting in one spot for half an hour.

Vietnamese coffee ROCKS!

I will not buy books from you if you interrupt my meal! Street sellers also sell in restaurants.

Vietnamese people laugh with you.

Bread sticks are the enduring mark of the French.

You have no idea how much you miss the water until you see it again.

The Mekong Delta is brown, reedy and looks exactly like the setting for a Hollywood ‘Vietnam War movie’. Funny that.

You would not believe how many people have satellite dishes on the Mekong Delta. They have rickety boats, houses on stilts, and dishes that look like they weigh more than the houses they’re perched on.

In the Mekong Delta you can see rice paper and coconut candy being made, wheat being puffed and tourists in pointy hats being poled down a tributary.

We travelled to Nha Trang in search of sun, sea and sand (i.e. our first beach in a year). We got rain and storms.

While sitting on a rainy beach, an umbrella, used like a shield, is the most effective way to ward off weather-indifferent jewellery touts.

German Shepherds in small bookshop-cum-restaurants are nice companions on rainy days.

Hoi An is a beautiful little town with graceful old architecture. And we found some sun too!

Our hotel balcony jutted over a river – a great way to spend a lazy afternoon. However, our room had an unlockable window level with the main staircase – hmmm, not very secure.

Two rusty bikes with no brakes and flat tyres are the best way to see the countryside. Five squeaky kilometres to the nearest beach, through rice fields and views of the pointy Vietnamese hats – yes they really wear them here.

A cold dip in the ocean – liberating.

The My Tom ruins in the Vietnamese highlands are a little anti-climactic compared to the Angkor ruins in Siem Reap and Sukhothai, but the lush, green mountains were beautiful all the same.

Finally feeling confident enough to scour and bargain in a chaotic night market without feeling paranoid is empowering. It’s incredible to think that this kind of thing would have intimidated us no end at the start of our journey in 2006.

Do the train ride from Hoi An to Hanoi during the day - we saw some of the most beautiful and breath-taking mountain and seaside scenery ever. Little fishing enclaves and towering limestone formations alternated before our eyes. The old men smoking out the train windows pointed things out to us as we passed.

Hanoi is a vibrant, pulsing city of 1 million scooters (John only got hit once, which is good considering the odds). Dull grey skies and dirty clogged streets are punctuated by supremely bright flower sellers, lush fresh fruit and flashes of easy-going smiles.

Desperately searching for something other than cold seas and rainy horizons on Halong bay, we and three other tourists took our shirts off at the first sign of sunshine – and ended up sunbathing in the cold.

One glorious afternoon of sun in a sea kayak, paddling gently into a turquoise-watered, cliff-enclosed sea grotto – silence and lapping water – divine.

Overnight in Halong Bay is punctuated by drunk middle-aged Europeans jumping naked into the water. There be whales in Vietnam!!

Being rocked gently to sleep on a junk boat, surrounded by beautiful limestone peaks after watching an iconic sunset is the perfect way to end a good day.

Local women in tiny row boats, weighed down with every imaginable snack made in China, circling like sharks, shriek, “Choco Pie, Choco Pie, You buy my Choco Pie! Why you no buy my Choco Pie? How much you buy my Choco Pie? I die you no buy my Choco Pie!” We reply “Got any Tim Tams?”

Hiking up a hill on an island with the strangest of local guides - who tried to be a monkey (by climbing trees and our tall swedish companion), a soldier (by repeatedly pretending to ambush and shoot us), and a host (by inviting us back to his house and offering us a toke of his strange smoke and…. Bananas).

Vietnamese men are surprisingly good at Pool – finding professional gloves in an open-air, tiled-floor, one-table pool hall on a forest island in the middle of Halong Bay. They are not, however, very good sports. Swedes are better at Pool than Vietnamese men.

Getting bitten by the world’s smallest dog and needing a course of three rabies shots seems a typical way for John to experience a city.

Uncle Ho's Tomb - closed for renovation.

Crossing from Vietnam into no-man’s-land entailed getting all our bags, crossing multiple train tracks, lining up in the middle of the night, at a counter staffed by two people (to process a train-load full of passengers), and waiting in a cold station.

China

Crossing from no-man’s-land into China entailed getting on one train and having multiple attendants process the train full of passengers from the comfort of our bed-berths. The Chinese rail system is a well-oiled machine, run with military precision, the attendants polite and helpful.

However, even the most organized system in the world cannot overcome Mother Nature. And she was chucking a tantrum when we arrived in Nanning. The worst blizzards to hit China in 70 years were in progress and all through trains (like ours, scheduled to go on to Beijing) were cancelled. Most passengers were stranded in a (not uncomfortable) waiting room, while we were given seats on a short train from Nanning to Guilin and refunded the difference between a 1^st class seat and a 2^nd class sleeper. We were happy and impressed customers, thanking our lucky stars that the track between Nanning and Guilin wasn’t closed.

Guilin train station was our introduction to rural China. Toilets are one long continuous drain inside a room which you squat over, one leg on either side, trying not to notice the next person’s butt, but sometimes with the luxury of having a partition between you and the person behind / in front of you. This gives another perspective to the term ‘Communist Society’ where you share everything with your neighbour.

Yangshuo is a magical place. Quaint cobbled Chinese streets and houses, tourist shops, musical windpipe touts playing their wares, limestone karsts in the background – snow-capped when we arrived to climb. Thus followed three weeks of rain and freezing conditions, four days of superb climbing high over rice fields and duck ponds, an inter-country Pool tournament with our Swedish friends Adam and Frida and introducing them to the Great Meat Pie at an Aussie pub, meeting some Israelis that we really liked, dvds in-room, heaters, hotel changes, street webcam images home and colds.

Asking for a ‘Snickers’ chocolate bar and getting snake wine… close but no, not really what we wanted - more chocolaty goodness and less serpentine diahorrea please.

During one of Tiff’s colds, John roamed the streets amid the Chinese New Year celebrations. Dragons, fireworks, thunderous crackers, music, smiles, dancing, cymbals, drums – everything that you’ve ever seen in your local Chinatown, but all day and on a much bigger scale!

Eating the best oranges ever, freshly picked off the tree by a local, given generously.

Enjoying really cheap Tsing Tao beer.

Loving the first class treatment in 2^nd class sleeper rail from Guilin to Chengdu – private waiting rooms with awesome bathrooms and schmick cabins on the train – all to ourselves!

Immediately upon arriving in Chengdu, we made a mad dash to Leshan – the only town in China fabled to do visa extensions in one day (but not if you’re Israeli – poor Omar!).

Eating dinner in the living room of an old couple – the man was giving English lessons to a private student while the woman cooked us dinner. To get to this ‘restaurant’ you must walk down a back alley to the rear of a darkened building, and walk up a pitch black stairwell to the door of a private home, never quite being sure if you’re in the right place.

Oh my Buddha that’s a big Buddha. While waiting for our visas to be processed, we saw the world’s largest carved Buddha. It’s big.

Our first hostel in Chengdu was boutique, with wooden floors and designer furnishings, however we moved because we were getting toxic fume poisoning from the gas heater.

Sims Cozy guest house is the best hostel on the planet!! They have pigs and rabbits and cute little dogs the best food, WiFi, comfy welcoming lounges to hang out in, water gardens to relax in, and rooms with all the things a long-term traveler wants: room under the bed for bag storage, places to hang your essentials, complementary fruit baskets, TV and DVD player with DVDs to borrow, and instructions on the shower so they don’t get bugged a hundred times a day by people saying “my hot water doesn’t work…”.

Of course, noone can go to Chengdu without seeing the pandas. They are amazingly human-like for all their fur and bear-ness. Facial expressions, sneezes, physical behavior. Except they’re very very big; and bear-like.

To go to Tibet, you must have a permit. You can only get this permit through a Tour agency who says you have a tour guide. If asked, you must produce this for the police in Tibet, however you don’t actually get a copy of your permit as your tour guide is supposed to hold it. This creates an extraordinary circumstance for an independent traveler who ‘has’ a permit, but no guide…

Tourists and locals alike were sleeping at the train station, camping out to get tickets to Lhasa. Due to our strict schedule, we didn’t have three weeks to wait, so we flew. Naughty carbon-producing people!

Tibet

Swerving in and around breath-taking mountain peaks from the airport to Lhasa is amazing. Doing it after taking Diamox (an altitude-sickness preventative which is also a super strong diuretic) with a full bladder, is not.

Tibetan landscapes are desert plains and wild rivers, snow capped mountains and bare dirt piles.

When you drive into Lhasa and see the mighty Potala Palace for the first time, you must allow yourself a few tears, and a prayer for the exiled Dalai Lama and his people.

Waking up and seeing fresh snow on the Potala from your hostel roof beats even the first sight.

John suffered with the altitude when climbing the extra couple of hundred metres up to the top of the Potala. Lucky there was an old local handy to give his bum a helpful push up the stairs.

Standing in the Potala thinking, oh my Buddha I’m in the Potala Palace, and speaking to your father / mother back in Australia from the Potala!!

Prayer flags and prayer wheels. Remote-feeling temples. Walking with pilgrims around old ruined buildings, newly-painted buildings, sacred buildings. Children, monks, elders, beggars, Tibetans in traditional everyday dress. Gnarly old goats standing in your path. Colourful Tibetan inscriptions on boulders on desolate dirt mountainsides. Snow in pockets the sun never sees. Prayer flags EVERYWHERE.

Walking the Jokhang Temple circumnavigation alongside pilgrims in the early dawn, ghosting through thick fogs of lush incense, watching gnarled hands finger prayer beads behind stooped backs.

What paraphernalia is needed to worship these days!: hand paddles, cloth mats, knee pads, headbands - to protect body parts and ensure devotion doesn’t fail when sliding repeatedly along the ground in full prostration.

It’s amazing the places you find Pool tables in this world. In Lhasa, Pool tables line the streets, an indication of the Chinese ‘visitors’, felt missing, pockets in strange places, cues of every shape and size – and curve and bend…

Chinatown in Tibet is really a Chinese town – where they’ve stamped hard to make their presence felt.

Watching monks debate is a magical experience. You don’t understand the language, but the concept is fascinating. By debating their sacred texts, their faith becomes stronger. Stamping and clapping, prayer-beads a-swinging, a theological point is made. Smiles abound.

The air is dry in Tibet, so dry. Breathing is painful because your nostrils are dry. Walking and sleeping with mouth and nose covered to re-breathe your own moisture. Your skin gets windburn and everything cracks. I wouldn’t want to be here during the much harsher winter. Oh, and it would help if the heater in the hostel worked…

Loving every minute we were there.

Back to China

Leaving Tibet we took the uber comfy high altitude train to Xian. Say what you will about the motivations and engineering behind the construction of it, it is an amazing ride across the most stunning barren landscapes that stir both imagination and soul. Pristine frozen rivers and lakes are kept company by lonely yaks.

Then we hit China. Where all the ‘pristine’ had been mined into oblivion, where the iron hammer of industry had covered all in dust. Where anything breath-taking would mean a lung full of smog. A developing country in over-drive.

Arriving in Xian saw us land in a sea of misplaced souls leftover from the transport-stop chaos of the blizzard.

Our free ‘pick up’ from the hostel turned out to be a one woman walking escort. 800 meters and four heavy bags later we arrive, greeted by the stoned Jamaican staff telling us to ‘chill’.

Xian = Terracotta warriors! Wicked. Need we say more?

Overnighter train to Beijing – cheap, fast and luxurious. Not bad for cheap, ‘roughing it’ travelers.

Tianamen Square is as large and epic as we had thought. Lined by thousands of red flags and dotted with iconic communal living, hard working, gun slinging, inspiring statues, comes alive at night with bright lights and shades of colour not seen during the day.

Forbidden Palace – closed for renovation.

Summer Palace – lakeside.

Giant Mao pictures guarded by the ultra disciplined, straight-standing, mega-phone wielding Red Army. Mao is everywhere, they love Mao…or seem to….mmmm.

Mao’s tomb – closed for renovation.

Knowing we were heading into ultra-cold Siberia warranted some bargain-hunting at the famous Silk Markets. Cheap brand rip-offs abound; but you have to know the right price. We did. Haggling a price from US$300 down to US$80 with a bottle of water thrown in, is a long, but eventually rewarding process. We saw a tourist contemplating a pair of wind-proof pants for US$50 that we had just bought for the equivalent of US$5. US$50 is still a good price compared with back home but we tipped him off anyway…

We did a day tour with a Beijing-er we had met on our boat tour in Halong Bay - went to a Tao Temple he’d not seen, ate a mega-meal at a food court he’d not been to, and saw the Olympic buildings in construction from the road island in the middle of a motorway (with lots of other people).

Learning that all the wonderful ‘Chinese’ delicacies from Australia, eg. Yum Cha and bakery goods, don’t exist in China.

After many attempts, an hour wait for a bus to leave, followed by two hours in Beijing traffic, we finally got to see the tourist circus which is The Great Wall at Badaling. A garish plastic toy train to the top of the wall, captive sunbears, shops and derelict stalls set the atmosphere of incredibly tacky tourism – until you walked off the beaten track to the steep sections. Then you were alone to contemplate the approach of imaginary enemies, shoot imaginary arrows off the ramparts, and pass artisans selling their wares. Tiff was a tourist attraction in herself – random Chinese tourists asking to have their photos taken with her…

Unfortunately due to time restrictions we didn’t get to go to any other areas of the Great Wall. Because it was time to go to:

Mongolia

The first snow flurry to test our imitation ‘Canada Goose’ jackets was stepping onto Ulaan Bataar station. We were hot!

Ulaan Bataar is a town of soviet buildings, empty building lots filled with Ger tents (traditional round nomadic felt tents with real wooden doors), icky food and shopping(!?).

Our cosy hostel was one floor of a dodgy-looking cement apartment block with heavy iron doors like those of a bomb shelter. It speaks for the neighbourhood – one of the guests was mugged for his camera as he was putting in the entry code to get into the building.

Visa restrictions meant that we could only do one trip into rural Mongolia - Terelj National Park it was. We had intended to do this independently, but our hostel organized trips that were comparable in price and made the travel a helluva lot easier.

The car dropping us in Terelj was then picking up Adam and Frida – the Swedish friends we’d made in Yangshuo. We’d been basically trailing them all through China, but we’d not been able to coordinate a meeting. We had ten minutes to exchange hugs, stories and plans before they were whisked away to their next destination.

We played in the small patches of snow littering the rolling yellow hills. The next day the ground was covered in snow and we danced in it!

Trying to avoid this possible headline may have kept us alive: “Stupid Australians, inexperienced with snow, die while hiking up a steep snow-covered peak 30mins from their Ger tent.”

The most magical horse ride ever is over yellow hills, down into brown valleys, the ground turned silver by snow in the sunlight.

Five days in a Ger tent, horse-riding everyday, hiking the surrounding hills to your heart’s desire, eating the same food as the caretaker family, marveling at the rock formations: Terelj.

Our grumpy little horseman stoked the pot-belly stove every night with all the wood available. We would need to open the door of the Ger to balance the heat (35 degrees inside, -5 outside), but then he would get grumpier and close the door. By the time we woke in the morning the Ger was freezing and no wood would come til mid-morning. And we were not allowed to stoke the fire ourselves. We took to stealing and stockpiling the supply so he couldn’t put so much in at night, and we could warm ourselves up in the morning.

Happy Mongolian warrior on the side of a juice carton.

When we arrived back in Ulaan Bataar we learned of riots in Tibet. We had friends who were still there and we had left not two weeks before. Thank you guiding spirits.

Saving your pee until 10 minutes before the scheduled toilet-close time is not useful if they close the toilets 10 minutes early. If you then have a six hour stop over with closed toilets and no possibility of leaving the train, you would be like Tiff too: sick with needing to pee and ending up crying in distress. Trying to leave the train to pee was not an option either with the whole Russian Army waiting outside…

Smugglers on the train to the Mongolian border meant that women (including the train hostesses) were wearing five layers of clothing and asking to put things in your bag – and getting very shirty when you refused. They were also very sneaky – putting a plastic bag on your bed as if it was an absent-minded placement, but then disappearing when the Russian border guards came through. Oh, and the bag of ‘tea’ they insist (and by insist we mean covertly unpacking your bag and stashing ‘tea’ in the bottom) you carry, is probably not Lipton’s Yellow Label, so it’s best you strongly refuse.

Russia

You know you’re in Russia when the border guards look like they might kill you with laser beams out of their eyes – or the AK47s in their hands.

You know you’re in Russia when an old man comes into your cabin and forces whiskey shots into you within five minutes of crossing the border, accompanied by cow tongue and cream cheese. Said man also thinks: “Australia good” (thumbs up), “England phht” (thumbs down), much to the offense of our English travelling companion (who was now in the cabin with two drunk Australians and a towering drunk Russian getting physical).

We were headed for the tourist hub of Listvyanka. We found a town, frozen and dead as a Russian winter, on the edge of the world’s deepest lake.

We stayed in a beautiful log chalet, run by a middle-aged Russian lady who looked like she wanted to bite your face off - even as she smiled sweetly dressed in a tiny short-skirted maid outfit that really should only be worn someone 20 years younger and about 30 pounds lighter.

Smoked omul, bread sticks, and champagne on the edge of a frozen lake, watching drunk Russians ‘picnic’ in winter furs.

Sitting down in a dog sled means getting snow, mud, dog poo and dog vomit on your face. Exhilarating ride though – who knew they could run so fast carrying two people!?

Learning to snow mobile in Russia from someone who only spoke Russian, consisted of: *motions with hand to rev the engine as in a motorbike* *motions forward movement*; *motions with hand to brake with hand squeeze as in a bicycle* *motions stopping movement*; *thumbs up with a questioning look on face*; *we thumbs up back, smiling* and off we go…

Frozen lake walks are amazing, slippery, and scary as the moving, gnashing ice thunders three metres below your feet.

Omul and champagne for breakfast.

Walking downhill with 30kgs of bags each is not fun when the road has iced over.

On the train from Irkutsk to Abakan, we shared the cabin with a big jolly fat man who snuffled in his sleep and made the ‘limitless’ weight restrictions on bunk beds look questionable.

Eight hour stopovers in the middle of nowhere, with the engine car detaching from the passenger carriages, is not unusual on Russian Railways.

If a big lady boards the train in the middle of the night, is billeted in your cabin, and then proceeds to stay sitting on your feet on your lower bunk bed (while you’re trying to sleep), she probably just doesn’t know how to get to the top bunk. Maybe you should give her some help…

Greasy men in wife-beater singlets and tracksuit pants with hairy chests, gold chains, gold teeth and wedding rings still pick up the chicks. And then leave the train immaculately attired in business suits.

All men in Russia are called Sergei. Of this we are certain.

Shared taxi from Abakan to Kyzl means shared experiences. Passing through a military checkpoint, the soldiers couldn’t figure out why two Australian tourists (spies maybe?) would want to come to Kyzyl; neither could our travelling companions. When we pulled up at a run-down communist concrete block as our final destination, everyone was nervous for the two Aussies. A pat on the shoulder and a serious “good luck” from the driver summed up all our feelings.

Convincing our travelling companions that we were meeting a friend (Tania, a colleague of Tiff’s from Japan) was not helped by being greeted by her sister, someone we’d never met, who was a round Mongolian-looking woman in a tiny short skirt.

The Communist concrete block got worse as the entrance to the stairwell was a 30cm thick metal door with a huge key – like something from Wolfenstein 3D. The stairwell was dirty and filled with rubbish. The door to the apartment where we were staying (Tania’s brother’s house) was steel as well and more like 50cm thick. But it was cozy inside. We wondered how we would get out if there was a fire. Of course on our last night there was a fire in a basement flat. We got ready to jump out the third floor window if need be.

It helps to have friends in a remote city like Kyzyl. It makes buying onward train tickets and learning how to use the supermarket much easier (you have to ask for everything – it’s all behind different kiosk counters – especially difficult if you don’t speak Russian and the servers can’t follow your pointing finger).

Toora Khem is the tiny home village of Tania, deep in Siberia, closer to Mongolia and Kazakhstan than Moscow. The road to it can only be driven on for about four weeks of the year, between the blizzards and metres of snow in Winter, and the thawing of the ice in Spring. Outside this time, you must go in a Russian Army Helicopter – a daunting thought at the best of times. The helicopter was broken when we needed to travel.

Rural Asian toilets are generally a drop hole reached by a hole in a raised wooden platform. Rural Russian toilets are a cube of concrete to shelter from unwelcome eyes. That’s it. No hole, no platform; just standing on other people’s poo. And in the ladies “toilet”, other women’s bloody sanitary items.

So the 4wd to Toora Khem entailed high mountain passes, snow fields as deep as your waist, driving through blizzards and trying to keep ahead or beside it, crossing a frozen river and hoping every second that the ice didn’t break. 100km in 10 hours. Super-props to the driver! What a wicked ride.

We were the first Aussies in Toora Khem!!

Toora Khem is one of those villages you read about, or see in documentaries – you never think they really exist. All wood, central heating is all metal pipes inside the walls, connected to the central fire place, which is also the stove. You have to go to a central pumping station for water, and they have real ‘banyas’ or bath houses in their yards. The banya is basically a big wooden sauna, cracks stuffed with moss, which they heat up in order to be warm enough to get naked and wash themselves. There is no shower, or running water, but the contraptions invented to give the same effect were amazing. A small central electricity plant gave electricity at night. Wow.

We met Aleksandr Sandanovich (Tania’s dad), Vasilij Duvendeevich (Tania’s Grandad), and Andreevna (Tania’s Grandad’s companion). Andreevna was a real Russian Babushka we thought, though she was from the Ukraine. She cried at seeing us, saying “I used to have heart troubles, but I don’t anymore, because I see your faces, smiling all the time, and it makes me so happy.” We were smiling because of her.

We were fed real Russian fare - Reindeer from the surrounding forest, local fish from the frozen river, peroshki, vegetables grown in their garden, Borsch soup - all from this self-contained little village.

On our last night in Toora Khem there was a fire on the opposite end of the block of six houses that Tania’s granddad lived on. They were very lucky that there was no wind that night, and the fire did not spread. The local fire truck was broken and two people died…

We stayed at Tania’s Aunt’s house while she was in Kyzyl, and met a dog. This dog started off growling and being scared and defensive. Little by little we fed him, and John peed (marking his territory?) and Kupi became our friend. We gave him lots of hugs and cuddles and when we left, he made a mark in our memories so strong we can never forget it. He put his paw and his muzzle through the lock hole in the gate, and whimpered. The most heart wrenching good-bye of all.

Then came the 4wd trip out. After the blizzard, the roads were waist-deep in snow and indiscernible from the surrounding countryside. We marveled at the winter wonderland, so foreign to us, but were harshly reminded by the severity of such conditions by seeing multiple troop-carrying trucks bogged in the snow and frozen mud. We found out that they had been carrying families, and had been out in the freezing conditions overnight. Our little 4wd took two kids to the nearest shelter to await their parents and retrieved transport.

We hot-footed it from Kyzyl to Abakan, always mindful of possible delays en route, and arrived four hours early for our three-day train to Moscow. Waiting at the station we thought we’d been transported back in time to the 50s and 80s. Fur coats and colourful hats, mullets and ‘punk fashion’.

Our chant as we entered our cabin was: “Quiet, clean, friendly, non-stinky people; quiet, clean, friendly, non-stinky people.” – our wish for cabin-companions. The universe obviously didn’t hear the “non” to our “stinky” part, as we got a man with rancid B.O. and a bandaged up wound which stank to high heaven. He also had a daughter who was rambunctious, though fell asleep on Tiff’s lap as she was reading ‘War and Peace’ out loud to her (in English). But then, War and Peace would make anyone fall asleep.

As a last desperate measure, John used his deodorant in plain sight of stinky man, and, under the pretense of being ‘friendly and courteous’ offered it to him to use. He respectfully refused, but when we insisted, forcefully, he seemed very unsure of what to do with it; squirting a tiny puff (that wouldn’t even have dusted his aura) to the outside of his shirt under each arm. Perhaps he was afraid of the ‘Lynx Effect’?

Then came Moscow. Ahh, Moscow madness. Hundreds of people – vagabonds, tourists, touts, policemen, fashionistas, businessmen, and two Aussies with giant back packs.

The Moscow subway escalators seem to take you to hell. The sunshine stops at the threshold and the dim olde-worlde lanterns light the grim faces of those come up from the underworld. The gothic architecture is beautiful, though depressing. The most surprising thing about the subway in Moscow was the politeness of the passengers. In subways the world over, people push and shove to board, disembark and fit on the trains. Here we saw people giving way, moving for others, giving up seats two stops early and generally being courteous. What a contrast to the world upstairs!

Russians generally seemed to be either drunk, getting drunk or hungover; picking a fight, in a fight, or beat up after one. This is a generalisation of course.

Russian women are the most beautiful in the world. This is also a generalisation, of course.

In Moscow we found our most expensive hostel to date. It was one floor of a larger hotel. The hotel staff wouldn’t let us check in. There was no staff at the hostel. When they did arrive, we couldn’t check in despite our reservation as we were only two in a room for four. On the advice of the hostel staff we awaited the arrival of our third room-mate ‘Tony’. He was from Melbourne, but didn’t end up showing. Funny that. Oh, and the women who ‘attend’ to guests on each floor are total bitches. This is not a generalisation.

What an amazing place the Red Square is. It contains of course, the Kremlin, which contains many cool buildings with lots of paintings of sorrowful women with halos around their heads; and outside the Kremlin are other cool buildings, such as St Peter’s Basilica. Or was it Saint Stephen, or Saint Basil? Maybe it was even Saint Sergei, or St Tony from Melbourne. Very cool though.

Lenin’s tomb – closed for renovation.

We were so keen to get out of Moscow we arrived at the train station eight hours early. We wiled away the time reading (Tiff was still trying to finish ‘War and Peace’), sleeping (and sharing the benches with homeless men who masturbated while they slept), and trying to make the matrons and their extensive broods realize that we could not sit with our massive backpacks on our laps.

The Super overnight train to St Petersburg was the best ever. Tastefully decked out, carpeted, even the pillow slips and doona covers smelt new. The toilets were clean and plush and were open all the time. It was a pity we slept the whole way of the 12 midnight to 7am train.

Entering St Petersburg, the people of Russia went from angry and hostile to angrier and more hostile.

The architecture was beautiful, and frenchly-gothic, and we would forever after look at architecture in Europe and say, “Hey! That reminds me of St Petersburg!” Clearly what the Russian bourgeoisie and their French obsession had intended to achieve. Bastards.

We saw a cannon fire upon the ramparts of St Peter and Paul’s Fort, and planned an attack upon St Petersburg.

We had a crepe restaurant dinner with Tania and husband before they left to return to Japan. What an experience!

Our hostel customer service was less than ‘below average’. Tiff slayed the manager with words over the prices listed and quoted on the website upon which our reservation was based. John stole eggs from the other places set at the breakfast table by the breakfast nazi – who provided us with old cheese, off eggs, stale bread and cereal.

We also spoke to some English travellers at the breakfast table who had had an awesome experience with Russian people. And then they said that they were much friendlier and helpful than the English customer service people. Wow! We thought, the English must be beasts with pitchforks and horns.

The breakfast table being the centre of all gossip, we heard the night escapades of a fellow traveler who was beaten and robbed (and had a broken nose to prove it). He had however, been drunk and looking to score weed.

We were never out after dark.

Although we appreciated the experience of Russia, we were happy to leave. We had a flight to London with a two hour stopover in Copenhagen, upon which we had our first luggage mishaps. As we checked the luggage we were told that our ‘AV’ (audio-visual) bag was too heavy. In fact it had in it all the things you must take on board and cannot check (e.g. camera, laptop etc.). We had to check our other carry-on bag with other inexpensive valuables. This bag we then saw toppling 10m from the top of the steep loading conveyor belt in the transition between the St Petersburg to Copenhagen plane and the Copenhagen to London plane.

England

The newspaper on the plane on the way to London showed us a beach in Cornwall April 6 2008 as sunny and hot; it then showed the same beach in Cornwall April 6 2009 (the day before) as snowy and freezing. The sun was shining as the plane touched down…

The Rest

Throughout our journey there are the little episodes that travellers take for granted; the little things that keep you on your toes and make everything unpredictable. So much so that you expect nothing to go as planned as the norm: hotel bookings you’ve made but have never been written in the hotel’s records, taxi drivers who ‘don’t have change’ or take the long route to your destination, ticket offices that are not open to foreigners, or just not on the day you need it to be... And then there are the small moments that touch your heart: a local who goes out of their way to help you, the taxi driver who accidentally takes the wrong turn and gets lost but then gives you a discount, the sun shining silver on snow, or making up news headlines that begin “Two Stupid Aussie Tourists…” and nervously laughing and hoping it won’t come true.

We’ve learnt a lot – like we have waaaay too much in our backpacks, that sometimes taking a tour with other people is not the worst way to experience something, and little dogs can bite very hard – and will continue to learn. Always. Forever and ever. Amen.