Gone East

Time fails to work properly out here.

It seems like months ago i went to a small stationers on a Surrey highstreet to buy a diary. Pocket sized it's tiny strip like pages have a space reserved for every day. So it began, writing in my destination for each day. My timetable. Beijing a wad of pages away, entries stop on November second where my smudged writing reads "Wooh! Arrived in China".

Crossing the Chinese border I stare at this page. Wait... that's today. I'm in China... today. The reassuring wad cushioning my arrival date had melted page by page the last days and weeks. All at once the past weeks had flown by like a short lifetime. Seemingly too long to have been just one month... yet when i count back the hours, the experiences, It's clear to see. It has been a month, and I'm here already.

So my Trans-Siberian travels come to an end. I've made it! This is China. Looking back already I can't believe the ride its been. Travel seems to condense life. Amazing experiences get crammed into such small amounts of time. From exploring abandoned churches, to my own fresh water paradise, it all happens in such short time. Even mundane chores have a new life. My usual robotic responses to daily events just don't work out here. Meals no longer come from my wonderfully static fridge. Failure to switch on is likely to land you with a triple quantity of microwaved Muscovite meals (voice of experience), so you just, do. There's so much going on anyway, slumbering through days just isn't on the menu.

My eyes wander from that last celebratory page to the next. The scrawl that had insisted where I'd be the next day for the last thirty-something previous is conspicuously missing. No trains await me in Beijing. No tickets are booked. No solid dates to meet. Two weeks or more to my own devices. A heady cocktail of exhilaration and panic hit. I haven't planned any further than this. Now I'm here. No music to off, I've just got to play it by ear.

I bid a fond farewell to the last leg.

But that was just the entree and this thing's only just beginning.

Welcome to China.

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Lunch: Still on the mutton... starting to crave green veg, (what has the world come to)