Mongolia

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)

That pack of cards was all that kept me sane.

The train had ground to a halt at the Russian border some nine hours ago. Within 15 minutes the burly customs staff had turned the the train inside out, quickly pursued by grim military officers reaping our passports and papers with black expressions. Then... nothing. For hours. Nine of them to be exact.

My carriage turned out to be conspicuously full of foreign travellers. A fact which proved a blessing in disguise allowing for conversation, mutual complaints about border crossings and the explanation of complex rules for card games. A life saver that held the gnawing urge to garrote oneself on the emergency stop cord until the last moments before the train shunted onwards. Rattling forward a few meters we unceremoniously crossed the border... straight into Mongolian border control. The brakes screech on and I once again began eyeing the dangling cord.

"Hello!" Comes a voice. "How are you?" Looking around I realise the sound emanated from a jolly plump man at the door to my compartment. There's an awkward silence before i notice the military insignia on his badge.

"May I see your papers please?" Perhaps I'm being mugged, surely this beaming man isn't customs. I reluctantly hand them over. "That looks great." He says returning them quickly. Before disappearing i notice a his mouth contort into a strange upward expression... It almost looked like... nah, couldn't be... did he just smile? I enter a trance that's only broken by his interrogation of the group next door.

"Are you carrying any weapons or drugs?"
"No." Comes a startled answer.
"Why not?" He laughs the reply.

This was my first introduction to the strange phenomenon of friendliness that seems a raging epidemic amongst the Mongolian people.

Ulaanbaatar is a strange place. A big city in a small country it holds over half of the entire population. Even then its only at a million people. At first glance the center appears nothing special, dusty partly run down streets don't quite hold up to the sheer grandeur of cities like St Petersburg. Fortunately this is a city with personality by the bucket-load.

A stroll through the suburbs leads me past construction sites for shiny new apartments that spring up out of the traditional Ger districts. Gers being the fold up felt tents traditionally used by nomads that now cluster in city districts. Amongst this I find religion. The first Buddhist temple I sees a six story gold Buddha staring benevolently down. Peace descends on the place as tangibly as the pigeons who calmly flop around after the generous monks who cast bird seed their way. We peer in on morning prayer, a hypnotising chant that floats about the place. Lost in the music i fail to notice a monk detach himself from a back row and make for the door. As he brushes past i notice him take out, not one, but two, mobile phones, texting on one as he calls on the other. Mongolia is a country on the move. Progress its newly glistening office buildings hint towards. I move on to a second temple.

A quieter affair to the south where i discover Buddhism may not be all it seems. The peace loving, chilled out religion-for-personal-enlightenment I'd always thought I'd known seemed in vast contrast to the murals covering wall and ceiling. Pictures of terrible tortures being exacted upon screaming people. Disembowelments, eternity of nakedness in a freezing cave and being eaten alive by giant worms. This grim procession is presided over by monstrous gods, who stare down with wrathful looks at the entire scene. Slightly lost i ask the caretaker what these people could have possibly done.

"Oh!" she beams back, "they're people who refused to believe in the Chochin lama."
"I see..." Again suspiciously eyeing the pictures
"You are Christian?" she continues.
"No, actually I'm Atheist."
For my confessions i get a sad, its been nice knowing you, smile before returning to sweep the corner.

Paranoia turns the eyes of angry deities towards me. I resolve to move on to pastures slightly less blood soaked. Which in turn leads me to the cities wacky museums. I happy regress into visiting the dinosaurs at the natural history museum. The Gobi is a treasure chest of fossils, a wealth which is displayed impressively here. At the "museum of international intellectuals" (known to us as the puzzle museum) I am shown the expert works of a man who started making puzzles and games at the age of 11. He appears out of no-where at the end of the tour and happily shows me a mix bag of slightly obvious magic tricks before taking me away from his impressively carved pieces to show me his collection of toys. Only on the way out do i see pictures of the man shaking hands with US presidents and other world leaders. The puzzlemaster himself a strange enigma.

Our hostel owner turns out to have a cousin with a farm. He sets up an excursion out there. A bumpy local train and some rough tracks later and I find myself camped up in a woolly Ger nestled in a the sweeping landscape. Hidden in a mountainous valley just above the rolling steppe the landscape holds a grand beauty. The first frosts of winter only intensify this, crystallising the nearby river with blooms of Ice as it starts to freeze.

We ride Mongolian horses (who i discover... don't speak English, a slight problem when you've learned the words for "go" but not "FOR CHRIST SAKE STOP BEFORE WE HIT THAT RIVER"), climb the nearby mountains and explore the creepy ruins of the nearby sanatorium. All the while our host gushes Mongolian hospitality, A hearty laugh, Delicious food and blazing stove make the whole thing feel comfortingly homely. Add to this the good company that I'd now been travelling with since Baikal and the whole experience proved deeply satisfying.

In the evening our host teaches us a Mongolian card game. A shaky start is soon smoothed as we pick the game up, the mongolian measures of "scotch" whiskey also helping the process along. Eventually having lost my share of Twenty Togrogs (two pence, we wasn't quite big money) I escape the biting cold by digging into a camel hair sleeping bag and without quite noticing slip off into a deep sleep.

Mongolia was worth the nine hour wait.

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Lunch: Mutton, Mutton and even more Mutton