The afternoon sun over Pudong

I was reading the other day that Shanghai has the highest rate of lung cancer in China. I am not all that surprised. I know that if I leave a white T-shirt outside to dry for more than a day, when I bring it in it will be yellow/grey colour. Oh, also the tallest building in the above photo is the Shanghai World Financial Centre, at an impressive 492 meters high.

Kelly and I are catching a train to Harbin for a week or so, leaving on the 30th. We plan to go check out the Ice Festival should be good, and cold.

Great Value Beer

Generic brand 'Great Value' beer. 1.8 RMB per can which is about 30 Australian cents. Ordinarily I wouldn't have investigated, as there are a plethora of name-brand bad tasting cheap beers in this country, it is just that I was intrigued by the fact that one of them calls itself a light beer. Looking at the back of the cans, I quickly found a disparity. The 'light beer' was actually stronger than the standard beer. A simple label mix up, or something more sinister....? The investigative journalist in me decided to check it out.

I bought both, tasted them, noted down points on there respective flavour and mouth feel, put off posting, lost the notes and then decided to hastily end this half finished blog post.

HASTY ENDING:- They tasted average.

Lately

The Suzhou Hello Kitty Bra Shop, for all your Hello Kitty Bra needs.

The city of Suzhou is known throughout China (and the Chinese say, throughout the world) for its Chinese Gardens. We did visit 2 of the gardens, the two that were hailed as the best in the city in our guidebook (the Humble Administrators Garden and the Master of Many Nets garden. They were okay. They are hailed as the best gardens in the best city for Chinese gardens. To tell you all the truth, I enjoyed the Chinese garden in Sydney better. These gardens were both quite unkempt, and while I did get some understanding of the Aesthetic by trying to imagine the gardens in their historical context, this imagery was consistently ruined by the megaphone touting efforts of the ubiquitous Chinese tour group. Anyway, the photos I took have the advantage of being silent.

A bit problem with the entirety of Suzhou was its audio component. They say that Suzhou is a city renown for its "beautiful stone bridges, pagodas, and meticulously designed gardens."

For Kelly and I Suzhou will be forever known as the 'city of squeaky breaks'. Every vehicle with wheels, when stopping, emitted a sound ten times louder and ten times worse than the most awful nails-on-a-chalk-board sound you can imagine. It was crazy, the traffic was stop and go everywhere and hence I walked around with my fingers in my ears a large amount of the time. I think gunshots would have been a more comforting sound, and the locals didn't even seem to notice. I am convinced that there is wide scale deafness in China (it would explain why Chinese people scream into their mobile phones on public transport.)

Anyway. Enough ranting. I went to an amazing underground electronic night last week, where the highlight (for me) was the Beijing based 8-bit/IDM artist known as Sulumi.

He served up an amazing live performance using 3 gameboys, two effects pads, an iPod nano, and a vocoder ran through a synthesizer. He played an 8-bit set, and it was probably one of the most amazing of any live sets I have ever seen. He made some hardcore inspired 8-bit sounds that had everyone in the place jumping. The man himself often was jumping about with a gameboy in one hand, a vocoder in the other and a torch in his mouth to see the LCD screens.
Nice work I must say.

In violation of the Chinese law...

I went for a bicycle ride yesterday, out to a shipping port on the edge of Shanghai. I headed there because I had heard that Shanghai is one of the most busy ports in the world, and I have always found something aesthetically pleasing about the massive scale of ports and big industrial facilities.

When I reached the port area I came to a massive barrier / checkpoint / guard station. Cars and trucks (mainly container trucks) were pulling up the the windows and handing papers over for inspection. I was concerned that I had rode my bike all the way out here and wouldn't even get in, but was hoping I would stun them with my foreignness. I rode up to the barrier at a fast pace and slipped through the gap between the barrier and the wall. No one approached me or looked at me strangely at all.



The first area I was in was labelled a Logistics base, and seemed to have many warehouses. I passed through this area and found another checkpoint for the Shanghai Chemical Logistics base. This time there was a separate lane with some people on motor scooters getting their passes checked by a guard in a uniform. I lined up, and when I got to the guard I just nodded, smiled and kept riding past him. Once again, no reaction.

This chemicals base did have many interesting smells. After I got my first whiff of a delightful this-place-smells-like-cancer bouquet, the thought did cross my mind that this might not be a good place to hang out in. As soon as I saw the structure below I decided that I would have to go in and check it out, but would refrain from eating, drinking or touching anything here.



As I headed towards the water, I crossed into a petroleum processing and storage area.

There was an interesting looking Sinopec facility, with guards at an open gate. I tried my old ride-as-fast-as-you-can-through-the-checkpoint trick, but that met with much yelling. I tried to ask the guards if I could have a look around, but I have no idea what they said to me. They weren't saying no to my request, but I couldn't understand what the were saying. As I turned around and rode out I noticed a sign that said "All visitors must sign in for visitor pass". Perhaps they were telling me to go get one, anyway I rode on to the oil terminal.

The oil terminal wasn't that interesting, it was just a series of jetties with what looked like big petrol station hoses on them. There were way more interesting looking huge crane things of in the distance.



I imagine that the hoses plug into the ship somehow and the pipeline takes the oil along the jetty to the masses of storage tanks I had passed. You can see the oil storage silo things in the next photo.



Now, if you look in the foreground of that photo you will see a farm. That's right, there is a series of vegetable fields INSIDE an oil terminal, INSIDE a chemical logistics base. That's just great. There was a number of fields, however the one I was near was cut of from the rest by the pipelines from the oil dock running through it. The pipeline was raised from the ground, and had a massive jet of white gas coming from a seam. There was a massive ring of dead vegetation around the gas jet. I am going to be more suspicious of my local produce market from now on I think.


I decided to try and head for the big cranes I had seen. I imagined that they were container cranes for ships, so I went back through the logistics base to the area I had seen stacked with containers. I soon found a sign labeled 'Port' and followed it to another checkpoint. This checkpoint seemed deserted, so I just rode on through.

Jackpot. Crane city. So I am just about to ride along under the cranes when a guy in a security booth comes out yelling. Both him and a security car come over.

So I try to say to the guy that I am just having a look, we can't get any communication happening and he radios for assistance.

The police that arrived in this car were quite congenial, and when I said I was just looking around they said that was okay, but I couldn't ride a bicycle in this area. They called a Ute over with their radios and loaded my bike onto it. The police didn't speak much English and I couldn't speak much Chinese, so I got into the Ute hoping that they were just giving me a tour of the port by car. We started off, and the driver kept asking me 'which ship?' I just shrugged my shoulders and indicated that I would be happy to see any ship, and then suddenly realised what was going on. They thought I was a crew member, and was going to take me and my bicycle back to 'my' ship!

Now, don't get me wrong. The first thing that crossed my mind was to pick a ship and stow away, as that has certainly been a dream of mine. I did realise however that I had no passport, money or food and if I got on to a ship and was found, all tourist excuses would get me nowhere. I tapped the driver on the shoulder and said 'No ship! No ship'. He stopped the vehicle and called the police back.

I tried to explain to the police that I was a tourist and had rode my bicycle in from Shanghai city. They seemed quite perplexed as to how I got here, and called over a man in a suit who was coming off another ship. He spoke better English and did some translating for us, I told him that I had just rode my bike in to look at the port and no one had stopped me at the checkpoints. When he told the police this they were very surprised. They indicated I had to wait, and after a while more police arrived. There was now four policemen and a number of port security guards around me. The latest police arrival spoke quite good English. He had me repeat my story, and questioned me in length about what I was doing in Shanghai. I claimed to be a student at the university, and showed him an international student ID card. He kept asking me if I had met anyone in the port area or had given anyone anything, The police didn't seem to believe it was possible that I had just rode straight through the many security checkpoints.

The head policeman then spent ages talking on his radio, and finally informed me that coming into the port area was a violation of the Chinese law and that I would have to write a statement about who I was, what I was doing in Shanghai, and how when and why I entered the port.
I did so, gave it to him, and after another 20 minutes of talking on the radio he loaded my bike back on the security Ute. He said that I had to show them exactly where I had been, and which gates I had rode my bike through, and that after this they would drop me off outside the entry gate to the logistics base.

They did as they promised, and I was free to ride back home. I was detained for about an hour and a half I think. It was all quite interesting, I am probably lucky they didn't detain me for much longer and I am definitely lucky they didn't check with the university to see if I was really a student. In retrospect it makes sense for them to be concerned by my presence, I was in an international area, where sailors and cargo are present before going through customs. I think the fact that I was an Australian helped, they wanted proof of that and I believe I would have been treated differently if I was any nationality with which China has major political issues (America)

I have put more photos up on Flickr, including the ones from Latvia and Lithuania that hadn't gone up before due to CD issues.

By the time you read this, my name may be written on the side of a house somewhere in Gansu province.

As part of my travel from Xinjiang to Tibet I passed through Gansu province, stopping at the oasis city of Dunhuang. I had caught an overnight train from Wulumuqi in Xinjaing and had heard that Dunhuang was a nice place to spend a while, so I checked into a dodgey dormitory for a few nights. I say dodgy, but you do get what you pay for. I paid around $4 AUS per night. For that I got a bed in a room with 4 other beds and a squat toilet in the hall. They were kind enough to throw in a coating of old plaster every day (fallen from the roof to the bed) and as much black Chinese hair as I could find in my bedsheets. I decided to sleep in my sleeping bag.

There were 2 other people in the room with me, a Swedish dude named Chris who had just turned 18 and finished school and a Japanese dude who had been travelling for 8 years. They were both pretty cool, Chris and I happened to be both planning the same route to Tibet, so we travelled for a while together, he was actually with me up at Namtso when I got altitude sickness.

Anyway, one of the days we were in Dunhuang Chris and I hired bicycles and set of for the Mogao caves. It is 20km out of town, and in the first kilometer or so my tire became flat. This meant that every time the tire rotated onto the valve, it jolted the bike enough that the bell rang. This combined with the old rusty nature of the bike meant that the soundtrack to this particular ride was something like "thud scrape DING! thud scrape DING! thud scrape DING!"

After about half an hour of riding we realised that there was no way we were going to make it to the caves before they were due to shut, so we turned randomly off the path and road along a dirt track.

We stopped our bikes by a cotton field and were standing by when I saw a family in a field that were looking at us. I waved, they waved back, so I decided to go say hello. They seemed thrilled that a laowai had broken up the monotony of bending down to pick cotton, so I stayed a while and helped them. Below is a photo of a woman showing me how to remove the pluck the cotton from the stem.

Passing back along the highway to Dunghuang, I noticed a what looked to be a brick works to one side. Given my experience getting down and dirty with the locals I thought I would wander in.

The only westerners these people would have seen would be rapidly passing them by on a coach to the local tourist attractions, so we were quite a scene. It seemed that I could go pretty much anywhere in the place. I walked around the joint and sized up the brick making operation.

First a bulldozer type thing pushes a big pile of dirt towards the machinery. The picture above is of the guys keeping an eye on said machinery. The bulldozer is located behind the dirt piles seen in the background. There is a hole somewhere underneath and a conveyor belt carries crushed dirt out. This dirt is mixed with a percentage of charcoal and moistened. It is then fed into a machine that extrudes it and presses it through an array of wires, to cut it into bricks. Please see below.

The wire cut bricks are taken by cart to a drying rack. The people who were working the machines and working the carts were typical young Chinese. Below is a short video I took of the process.

You can see the boards that are taken from the stack on the right hand side of the video. The bricks are extruded onto them and then they are carried to a cart. The cart, when full, is wheeled off to be unloaded in the drying saw. Men, women and children were stacking wet bricks in piles like the one below.

The wet bricks seemed to just sit in a stack. I walked around the entire ground and checked everything out, Seemed like a stack of wet mud bricks turning to dry mud bricks. Even the driest of the bricks were pretty damn average in my opinion, and I was wondering why they were bothering. I only say this as I picked up a brick and tested its strength (against another hard object, yes...) and it smashed very easily. The bricks only seemed as strong as dry mud.

After destroying and defacing (see the picture at the top of this article) a few bricks, we waved goodbye and walked back to our bikes. Before you get all sanctimonious on me, there were many many piles of discarded reject bricks smashed all over the place.

When we were up on the highway again, I could see that the brick works continued across the other side of the road. There was a tunnel. By watching, I could see people load up the dry weak bricks (I am sure there is a pottery term applicable here... perhaps green?) and take them through to the side with the kiln.

I couldn't resist seeing how the rest of the process worked. We walked down to the kiln side of the brick works. The bricks seemed to be wheeled into a queue, then moved from the queue to a massive kiln like structure with smoke coming from it. Below is a cart man who has just left the kiln.

A woman from an office looking structure came out and stared at us meaningfully while we were near this side of the kiln. She looked at me meaningfully, as if thinking about what action the management should take. I looked at her, waved my hand and shouted hello (Ni Hao) in Chinese. She walked back inside her demountable style office and closed the door. End of issue...

I took the apparent freedom of whiteys to walk around the entire operation. Whenever someone would look at me in surprise I would wave and shout 'Ni Hao!' and they would smile. I didn't think anyone would stop me, so me and Chris walked into the brick kiln. It was reasonably warm inside, but not as hot as I thought it would have been. There were portholes in the walls, and a team of workers stacking at one end, and unstacking at the other. I thought we were between firings. I walked up to the workers stacking wet bricks into the corner, see below.

The workers as you can see, were surprised at seeing us. But not surprised enough to stop working. All the jobs in this entire place looked like they would suck, unless you enjoy doing the same 3-6 second operation over and over all day. I walked out of the kiln and climbed up a bamboo ladder onto its roof. I was very surprised that someone didn't stop me, as the office woman from before had come out and was watching me. The man below was watching many all smoke orifices in the roof of the kiln.

One thing I don't understand about the layout is, where was the fire? I was inside the kiln and it was no more than 70 degrees, which was far less than the temperature of the smoke coming from the holes in the roof. I touched one of those holes in the roof you see above, and believe me it was scolding. There was no way I could have lifted one of those metal plugs.

Anyway, the finished bricks seemed just as hard as western ones. They were a little rough round the edges at times, but given how they are made that can be forgiven. It was quite interesting to see what looked like ordinary dirt turn into a finished, fired brick.

Acetazolamide

Okay, so after my last experience with altitude I thought I would get prepared for the next time I went that high. I recently took a trip around Tibet, where the majority of the travel was above 4000m and the highest point was at Mt Quomolonga (Mt Everest) base camp at 5200m.

Before leaving Lhasa I thought I would try to track down some Acetazolamide (trade name Diamox), which works to lessen the severity of AMS through allowing hyperventilation and hence increasing the oxygenation of the blood. I checked many pharmacies all over Lhasa before being directed to the Peoples Hospital, where I managed to purchase a bottle of 100 tablets for 14 RMB. The reason I made the effort to get the tablets was that there was a nights sleep planned at the Rhongphu Monastery guesthouse, Wikipedia says that its at 5200m, however while we were there someones altimeter watch said it was around 5000m. Either way, its damn high. Sleeping at altitude is very difficult, and I didn't want a repeat of my last altitude experience.

I should mention that I have actually tried Diamox before, while I was sick up at Namtso. I didn't mention it in the last post, but one of the people I was with gave me a few tablets which I swallowed with no immediate effect. This makes sense of course, as Diamox takes 6 - 12 hours to become effective. The one thing I did notice was the side effects the next day, my face tingled intensely for half a day.

The first half of the trip involved sleeping around 4000 meters, and that all seemed to be okay. I was a little short of breath while exerting myself, but nothing too serious. Then we got to Shigar.

Shigar is a picturesque Tibetan town in the shadow of a monastery and ruined hill fort, after leaving our bags at a guesthouse we decided to check out said monastery and ruined hill fort. (see left for monastery and right for hill fort)

The town is at 4400 meters, and the top of the fort was about 300 meters above the town. It was very hard work getting to the top, out of 8 of us that attempted it, me and 2 others made it. It was probably a bad idea but the view was fantastic.

In the evening I started to feel a little ill, a familiar altitude headache was coming on. I think I made the same mistake as I did at Lake Karakul, by going up high then climbing higher. Given that the day after we had planned to go to Everest base camp, I decided to start taking the Diamox. I felt pretty average in the night, and at one point my oxygen starved brain thought there was a small Tibetan child hanging from the roof of our dormitory (it was a jacket).

I expected to wake up with a tingling face, as that was a side effect I had experienced before. I also expected to wake up with my vision intact. That was not the case. As soon as I woke I found that the whole room was blurry. I rubbed my eyes a few times to no avail, I couldn't see more than a foot in front of me clearly. I could only read text if it was a few inches from my eyes and as for seeing into the distance, forget it. I had read somewhere that blurred vision was a possible side effect of Diamox so I wasn't totally freaking out, however since I had hoped to see Everest that afternoon I was a little concerned. We had a 5 hour bus trip up to Rhongphu Monastery and Everest base camp, in which I spent the beginning vainly attempting to discern the scenery we were passing through. One of the women on the bus offered me her prescription glasses saying they were a 3.5 correction factor, whatever that means. I tried the glasses, and to my amazement everything suddenly regained sharp focus. Praise the lord, I could see!

The mountains and valleys that had been just coloured shapes now had texture and contours, and I didn't have to guess who people were by their general body shape and clothing colour.

The woman in question was wearing contact lenses, so I borrowed her glasses for the day. It would have looked quite amusing, me wearing narrow euro-style women's glasses, but for clear vision it was worth the price. I used the glasses several times during the bus trip to see various sights of merit, but I didn't keep them on continuously as I didn't know if they would adversely affect my vision in the long term.

My vision slowly recovered over the day, to the point where I could see Everest without the glasses in the afternoon. (Everest image below)

The real proof my vision had returned was that in the evening wearing the glasses made everything blurred. I had a decent nights sleep, and the next day stopped taking the Diamox.

It was a very interesting experience having impaired vision, especially as it seemed to mimic the common sight disorder of myopia. It only lasted 6 hours or so, however I really noticed how much lack of sight affected my life. I couldn't read signs or tell the time. It would have been interesting (albeit annoying) if the side effects had lasted for longer, so I could have seen how I adapted to blurred living.

Too high

The first time I had altitude sickness was up in the mountains between China and Pakistan. We had driven from Kashgar up the Karakorum highway to Lake Karakul. Lake Karakul is at 3600 meters high, the highest I had ever been on land (at the time). Kelly and I were were staying in a Kyrgyz family yurt on the edge of the lake, and after leaving our bags we set off for to circumambulate the lake. I was feeling pretty good at this point, the air seemed a little thin and it was harder than normal to walk, but I didn't have any symptoms of sickness at that point. As I was feeling fine I decided to climb a mountain overlooking the lake to get a better view. It was very difficult to climb as the thin air meant that I had to rest every couple of hundred meters, but I finally reached the top. Exercise at altitude is unwise as it greatly increases your chances of suffering from the altitude, by the time I was near the top I was defiantly affected. I had climbed another 800-1000 meters and my mental faculties had diminished significantly, I was talking to myself and felt rather dizzy. To the right is a photo of Lake Karakul taken from the top of the mountain I climbed. Below is a photo of me at the top of a survey marker tower on the top of the mountain





After getting to the bottom of the mountain, a headache set in that was to get progressively worse all night. Even though I was very tired I couldn't sleep, and was too mentally tired to read a book or conduct much of a conversation. When I arose to use the bathroom (a ditch near the Yurt) I got lost in the dark and nearly stumbled into the wrong Yurt. The stars were fantastic however, probably the best I have ever seen. Too bad I wasn't really in a state to appreciate them. In the morning we drove back down to Kashgar and after a few hours sleep I felt much better.

My second experience with altitude sickness happened recently in Tibet. I had been in Lhasa for 3 nights and had been experiencing mild discomfort due to the altitude. Lhasa is at 3650 meters, and at that height there is only 65% oxygen available, compared to sea level. It was not so bad, I had a slight headache in the evening and interrupted sleep. On the 3rd day in Lhasa, some people I had been travelling with were planning on going up to Lake Namtso and spend the night, so as to see the sunset and sunrise. I arranged for them to buy me a ticket without really thinking about acclimatisation. Namtso is the highest saltwater lake in the world at 4720 meters, at this height the oxygen is down to 56%. The night before going I still had a headache and was beginning to think that an extra kilometer of altitude was a poor idea. The next morning I had resolved to only go to Namtso if I could get back the same day. Altitude sickness is always worse at night, and by being up high for only half a day I would avoid the worst of the sickness without wasting my ticket. The driver of our vehicle indicated that it would be possible for me to return the same day, so I boarded the bus and we departed Lhasa. I wasn't sure that I would be able to return, as the driver didn't speak English and our discussion was mainly conducted with the Chinese word for today, and hand motions.




On the way up to the lake, the highest pass we crossed was at 5190. The air was very thin and I didn't feel totally normal but when we got down to the lake I was feeling fine, out of breath and tired, but that is pretty normal for the height. We walked a kora circuit around a rocky hill near the lake and checked out the Buddhist trappings of this holy lake, there were the ubiquitous prayer flags strung from every possible place and carvings and devotional objects in the caves.

A headache was coming on, so I returned to our guesthouse and lay down for a few hours. The pain in my head was getting stronger and stronger as the afternoon ended, however I really wanted to see the sunset and the rest of my companions were on top of the hill watching, so I slowly tried to walk up to the top. As soon as I started walking up the stairs I knew it was a bad idea, I was so out of breath and dizzy I had to go back down. I still wanted to see the sunset, so I staggered round the base of the hill to sit by the lake. I made it halfway round before collapsing down behind a rock out of the wind. By this time I realised that I wasn't in any fit state to make it any further. I decided to try and get back to the cabins, and with difficulty stood up. My head felt like it had been pierced by an ice pick and any movement I made twisted the pick, sending debilitating waves of pain through my brain. After standing I took a few steps before intense nausea resulted in me throwing up my lunch of instant noodles and yak cheese. I threw up a few more times on the long painful trip back to the cabin, there was no one around when I got there so I crawled onto my bed and waited till the others came back to the cabin. Mark, one of my companions at that point had some Diamox with him and had left it on the table in the cabin. Diamox is an altitude sickness medication and I had heard it would alleviate some of the symptoms of altitude. I messaged Kelly and asked her to find out what dosage I should take. She was naturally alarmed to hear I was sick, and did some research on the Internet. She reviewed my symptoms and found that they fit the description of Moderate Acute Mountain Sickness. According to http://www.princeton.edu/~oa/safety/altitude.html "At this stage, only advanced medications or descent can reverse the problem. Descending even a few hundred feet (70-100 meters) may help and definite improvement will be seen in descents of 1,000-2,000 feet (305-610 meters)". Without descent my symptoms would only get worse, and would eventually progress to Severe AMS (Acute Mountain Sickness) and the potential fatal conditions of High Altitude Pulmonary Edema and High Altitude Cerebral Edema (HAPE and HACE respectively, basically meaning water on the lungs and water swelling the brain).

My mental faculties were severally diminished, and the massive pain in my head distracted me from taking any definitive action on my own. Luckily Kelly insisted that I find a way to descend immediately, otherwise I may have sat in pain as I became sicker and sicker. Once the rest of the group I was travelling with arrived, they helped by finding our driver and insisting that he take me down. He was very reluctant to drive down through the mountains in the night, and charged me 600 RMB to take me to a lower town. To get down to a lower altitude however, we had to go back up to the 5190 meter pass. Mikko, a Finish man bought a small bottle of oxygen from a woman at the guesthouse and gave it to me for the trip. I lay in the back of the van and breathed the oxygen as we left. I had an agonising headache at the lake, and that only got worse with the ascent to the pass. Every bump of the road was an agonising jolt to my head, and the twisting of the road exacerbated my nausea to the point I had to stop the van and throw up several times. After an hour and a half we reached a town at around 4200 meters and the driver checked me into a hotel. I went to sleep despite my headache and slept for 10 hours.

When I woke up it took me a while to realise where I was, but when I did I also realised that my headache was gone. I still felt lethargic and slightly nauseous, but the improvement over last night was dramatic. Returning to Lhasa, I slept for the rest of the day and awoke feeling better than I had when I had left for Namtso.

It was foolish of me to have gone up to the lake so not as to waste my 120 RMB ticket, when it ended up costing me much more than that in the end. I now think I have more of a healthy fear of altitude sickness. I am glad I spent the money to get down lower, when I returned I met someone whose friend is still in a coma in a chinese military hospital with HAPE and HACE. That could have been me if I hadn't of got down when I did.

I am still in Tibet at the moment, and have started to upload some new photos to flickr. Click the link to the right to check them out.

Kashgar

This man tried to pick my pocket.

I was on a local bus in Kashgar, going from the city to the outskirts to check out the Apak Khoja tomb. Like usual in China, I stuck out something hefty. I couldn't stand straight up on the bus, and when I boarded, every single person looked at me like I was Godzilla.The bus was crowded, and I was watching the rural scenery pass by. It was quite interesting to see blacksmiths making shovels and turners carving wood right on the main street out of town.

I turned to the right, and saw that the man in question had a bag pressed against my hip. Noticing his hand withdrawing quickly from the general area, I checked my pocket to find my wallet half out. The felon was looking forward nonchalantly, but I was sure there was no way that my wallet could have found itself in such a position naturally. I asked Kelly how I would say "thief" in Chinese. The man looked Uighur, but still I pointed at him and proclaimed him "Sha To" I am sure he understood me but he continued playing it cool, everyone else in the vicinity looked at me and I mimed a hand going into my pocket while saying "Sha To, Sha To" and pointing to him. The locals seemed quite shocked, and the man got up and was trying to leave the bus. I pulled out my camera and snapped the above shot while he was fleeing.

It was interesting to have the attempt made. It will sure make me more careful in future, but the man wouldn't have been too ecstatic even if he was successful, i had only 15 RMB ($2.5 AUS) and an expired drivers license in the wallet. I keep all my valuables in a money belt around my waist while I am travelling, I always thought it kind of dorky, but now I feel vindicated.

It was quite amazing as I didn't feel a thing. I would never be able to put my hand inside someones pocket without them feeling it. If I hadn't have glanced to the side, I would now be sans-wallet.

Go West!

Tomorrow Kelly and I are catching a flight to Xi'an (for a one day stop-over) then to Xinjiang province. Xinjiang is in the very far west of China, where it borders Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Xinjiang is said to be more like a central Asian state than a Chinese territory, and in fact there is a low level Uyghur (pronounced Wee-gyer) uprising in aid of forming the country of East Turkistan. The Chinese military seem to have it under control (at least that is what the state media are saying) so there won't be any danger, but it will be fascinating to travel along the old Silk Road.

We are starting in the capital of Urumqi, the city that is closest to the Continental Pole of Inaccessibility (the furthest place in the world from the sea) then heading to the old city of Kashgar. Kelly can only take 2 weeks off uni, so after that she flies back to Shanghai and I will try to get back overland across china, hopefully checking out Tibet on the way. Well, enough gratuitous wikipedia linkage, Perhaps I will be able to put up a post on the road (although my current reputation in this regard is somewhat poor.)

The search for stout

Okay, so I will cut the oh-sorry-I-was-too-busy/lazy-to-update-my-blog kind of thing and get straight to the beer review.

I do enjoy a good dark beer, preferably a good strong stout. It is hard to have come from Europe and have such limited quality beer available here in Shanghai. Its hard to find a good local beer at all, let alone a good dark beer. I do see dark beers around however, there are usually only 1 or 2 brands available in any supermarket or store, so I have been buying them when I see them to try and find a favorite. Here is a selection I have tried so far.

Haidao 'Black' beer

I bought this beer from Century Mart, it was 4 RMB for 355ml and weighs in at 4.7%.
This beer tasted terrible. Initially bitter with a sweet aftertaste, this tasted like it was a beer flavoured soft drink. It really tasted like it hadn't even been brewed. I could not detect any yeast taste and I would not be surprised if this was made by adding flavours, colours and alcohol to carbonated water. This beer has no head when poured, no mouth feel and there is no reason for me to try it again.


Stout Lodge

This one came from my local Wal-Mart. That's right, Wal-Mart has invaded the east. It has a decent imported goods section, and you can get a reasonably large number of beers at good prices. This beer was in the normal price area for a specialty beer at 4.5RMB for the 500ml can. I say specialty because these beers are made in small numbers and don't seem to popular, which, after tasting I can fully understand why.

This beer was poured and found to have no head and a smell like coffee cola. It taste has a hint of caramel with a slight bitter edge but without any hoppy flavour. It has a mouth feel similar to soft drink and a hint of chocolate in the aftertaste.

This beer had a much more complex flavour than the last one. That said, it wasn't actually a nice flavour.

Reeb Dark

Reeb beer has a pretty bad reputation over here, especially with me. I had a number of bad experiences when I first got to Shanghai with warm Reeb, and that has influenced me against this brand. I have seen at least four types of Reeb beer here, and most of them are terrible. The beer in question this time is the exception. It is smaller than the other beers, at 500ml(compared to the 600ml of the standard long neck style bottle.) It costs 4.9 RMB at a convenience store, or 2.90 RMB each if you buy a case of 12 from Wal-Mart.

It has a head when poured, and while this rapidly disappears it is more than can be said for the other two beers under review. It was quite surprising at first but this is actually quite a nice beer, it tastes similar to the (Australian) Tooheys Old. It is still a touch sweeter than I would have preferred, but has a crisp flavour and an acceptable aftertaste.

Overall, this is the winner. It has been my favourite beer of any style for a few months since my return, and although I am now looking for something new, it is definitely a reliable choice for a decent drink.

Shanghai Shanghai

Recently I have been watching workmen at the top of an old apartment building throw desks, chairs and kitchen furnishing off the very top of the building. I was watching them from my kitchen window as I made my morning coffee. They would walk off, come back carrying an item of furnishing, then both heft it off the building. I could only see the first few stories of its fall, however they both would stand looking down as the item plummeted the ground below. They always looked quite content when the inevitable crashing sound echoed up from below. Fair enough, who wouldn't want to see what happens when a sofa is thrown off a ten story building.

The next few days saw someone get another fun job. A big crane type machine with a pincer like jaw at the end of it slowly demolished the building. I couldn't actually see the base of it, what I did see looked like a massive angry metal dinosaur biting and tearing the walls of the building away. It took the machine 2 days to completely demolish the building, I imagine that they had to do it carefully or it would have collapsed onto the base of the dinosaur machine.

For the first few weeks after my return, every day from 7am to 7pm there would be a continuous hammering sound that echoed through the apartment. Someone in our block has gone for a complete apartment re-fit, and apparently that requires an awful lot of noise. I found it hard to believe anyone could hammer continually all day, every day of the week. I suppose they must have had a team of people working in shifts to ensure that no one could hear themselves think all day. The hammering seemed to end a few days ago. This was at first thought to be a good thing, until it was replaced by frequent drilling. This drilling was not regular like the hammer blows, but sporadic, so it is harder to get used to than the banging.

We also have a new CD/DVD store that has opened across the street from us. This wouldn't be of note as there are hundreds of them in the city, however this one is particular. This one has massive speakers outside the store that play crappy music at full volume all day. The first time I heard it, I thought that the music was being played inside our apartment. The crappy music includes a fair complement of crappy Chinese mando-pop, but even worse is the western music they play. They choose some terrible terrible music, and other music that is made terrible by repetition. Even if you are a fan of the Eagles, would you want to hear Hotel California on repeat for an entire weekend?

I have a plan to secretly cut the wire to the speaker. I have done recon for this op, and I think if I wait till there is a gap between songs and bend down to tie my shoelace, I can secretly snip the wire and be far enough away when they realize.

I am in the process of putting photos up on Flickr, check the link to the right.

Red Devil - Alcoenergy

Okay, I have a massive backlog of beverage reviews to get through.

Russia is certainly something else in terms of alcoholic beverages, pretty much anything goes. I do plan to write something the alcohol culture in Russia I observed, however that will come later. Take this as a case study.

This particular product, 'Red Devil' is a combination energy drink premix. This kind of thing was just becoming available in Australia when I left, however to see why this particular drink is exceptional we need to look closer. This 500ml can has 9% alcohol and 200mg caffeine. This means that you have the equivalent of 2 1/2 cans of red bull and 4 1/2 shots of vodka per can. It doesn't taste very good, but you wouldn't be buying it for its thirst quenching capabilities. It cost around 50 roubles for the 500ml can (say $2.50 AUS), there also is a smaller can available however I did not catch the price.

All in all, quite a good pre-party get up and go drink. The locals seem to view it as such, although there is a fair amount of distrust about the quality of the ingredients. There are a couple of other similar brands on the market. I tried another called Jaguar, and it was pretty much the same in terms of punch-packing and terrible taste.

Return to sender

I have come full circle and returned to Shanghai.


I flew back from London, and covered much of the same territory I had done on the train. Skipping most of Europe we flew over Latvia, and up past Moscow and St Petersburg. The flight across Russia was much further north than the route I did on the train, however we turned down and crossed Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. It is amazing to have seen Lake Baikal frozen from ground level, then see it as big as an ocean from the air. We flew down through Mongolia and passed Beijing before landing in Shanghai. My first views of the city were of a landscape covered with thousands of identical apartment buildings, we then flew out over the massive brown expanse of the Yangtze river, dotted with container ships and oil tankers. Back to Shanghai indeed.

I am at this point going through photos and getting other posts ready. Update soon...

Kutna Hora

Kutna Hora is a city in Central Bohemia, Czech republic. While I was staying in Prague I decided to go check it out, as I had heard there were a few interesting attractions. It was around an hour on the train from Prague and turned out to be quite a nice place. Cobbled streets, old churches, quaint town square, all the usual. It also had two other attractions that were the original reason I made the trip.

The first was the Sedlec Ossuary



In the 15th century when plague and war was causing serious life-span issues in Europe, the monks of this church found themselves with a serious oversupply of bones, and not enough cemetery to house them all. The solution was found in a somewhat surprising field, that of interior decoration. The bones of 40,000 people are housed in this Ossuary and arranged into massive self supporting pyramids. In 1870 all of the bones were bleached and re-arranged by a Czech woodcarver named Rint.



Here we have the coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family, in the background there is one of the four massive piles of bones in the ossuary. If you look closely at the lower right hand corner of the shield you will see a bone bird picking the eye from a skull. Reading the information sheet picked up from the front of the church, I learnt that this arrangement of bones was supposed to remind us all of the temporal nature of our earthly lives, and the fact that all people living or dead will face the final judgment. It did not mention anything about the apparent insanity of the people who thought to construct this place. Bones were cut in half and sawed into shapes for aesthetic reasons, and Master Rint even signed his name in bones at the entrance to the Ossuary.



Hanging from the roof in the centre of the ossury is a bone chandelier, seen in the centre of this picture. It contains at least one of every bone in the human body. I was interested to know if it also had the hammer and anvil bones of the ear, however I could not seem to locate them at the time.

The other reason I went to Kutna Hora was that it has a medieval silver mine, and I had heard that you get down with some urbex 13th century style.

The first time I was in Kutna Hora it was too late in the afternoon and the silver mine was closed. Luckily for me I managed to score a ride with some Americans (with a car) from Prague to Cesky Krumlov a couple of days later. They wanted to check out the bone church so we went through Kuta Hora and the silver mine was open. After a rundown on the mine and medievel mining technology we donned old school miners outfits, with hats and lamps and descended (with a tour guide) into the mine. The mine was active from the 13th to the 18th centuries, and the guide quoted me a rather large amount of silver that had been removed over the years, however I can't remember what it was. The mine was great, we walked a few hundred meters of tunnels that twisted and bent to follow the vein of silver. The guide mentioned there were hundreds of kilometers of tunnels under town, I wished I had time to find a way into some of them.



Another interesting thing about the town was that the houses are three stories above and three levels of cellars below the ground. The old miner who was our tour guide told me that this produced the most optimum beer temprature.

At the moment I am in Berlin, however tomorrow morning I fly to London where I will stay a number of weeks before flying back to Shanghai. When I return to Shanghai I will finally have time and computing power to regale you all with tales, anecdotes and photographs.

Rocking in Wroclaw

I was wondering through Wroclaw the other afternoon and I stumbled on the annual 'Thanks Jimi' guitar festival in the main square. It was really quite good, there were many polish acid-rockers making their axes sing.

This guy was quite into it. In fact he looked as if he had either put the acid in the acid-rock, or that he was drunk and crazy. He was entertaining hundreds of people with his very expansive dance moves. The move he was doing now was the showing-off-the-magic-orb move. It was quite similar, but not exactly the same as the carefully-holding-the-beautiful-butterfly-before-release move that he did earlier.

I left Wroclaw the day after, and at the train station I was amused to see this sticker everywhere. Its an official sticker of some kind, I imagine its a warning of sorts although what action exactly its supposed to stimulate I can't say. Is it just indicating that yes, an exploding pram is terrorism? Perhaps this kind of warning would put people off the age old exploding pram prank, as they could see how seriously the authorities really take it. The kids will have to find a new gag for muck up day.

Plokštinė missle base

I had read that there was an accessible ex-soviet underground missile silo located around 50km north east of Klapedia. It was going to be impossible to get there via public transport, so me and a few people I had met in Lithuania decided to hire a car for the day and drive out there.

The Plokštinė missile base is located near lake Plateliai, in the centre of a national park. It was built in 1962 and housed R-12U intermediate range ballistic missiles, tipped with 2 megaton thermonuclear warheads pointed deep into the heart of Europe.

The national park it was built in was quite beautiful. We had lunch by the lake. Birds were singing and flowers were blooming, and just a few hundred meters away was the base, hidden in a forest clearing.

The base was closed in 1978 as the Americans had learnt of the location of the base through satellite photography and the place was looted and vandalised by the local population. After the collapse of the USSR the base was turned over to the national park administration who have made it an 'Exposition of Militarism' and run guided tours on request. I tried to get into the site, however it was locked up tight. The blast doors are designed to handle 300PSI overpressure, so there was no way I could force my way in. We dropped by the national park office and picked up a nice ranger who gave us a tour for around $10 AUS.

It was amazing to be in a site that would have featured prominantly in the end of the world. Most of the equipment had been removed by looters, however our guide had talked to several ex-soviet generals and gave us a full run down of the day to day operation of the base. Reportedly there were only 2 times this base became fully active with warheads loaded and rockets fueled, during the Cuban missile crisis, and when Czechoslovakia tried to move away from the USSR's doctrinal line in communism.

There are four silos, each covered with a retractable blast door (as seen above). When the missiles were armed and the blast door withdrawn they could be fueled and launched in half an hour.

This tunnel goes to the fuel storage tanks. There were massive tanks of Kerosene and Nitric acid that would send the missiles to England, Germany, Turkey and the other NATO targets in Western Europe. OPACNO means 'DANGER' in Russian, it was sprayed onto the wall after a Lithuanian man crawled into a fuel tank to scrape the Aluminum from the tank and was overcome by the fumes and died.

The silos themselves were around 28 meters deep, and 6m across. The missile inside would have been much narrower, however there was room needed for technicians and fueling equipment. The rockets on launch would have become so hot that they had cut a tunnel from the lake to flood the silos as the launch occurred to cool them.

All in all a very cool urbex location. Oh, I am also now in Poland. Krakow is very nice. Anyway, Till next time.

Spring

When I arrived in China it was the height of winter and all the trees had lost their leaves. Mongolia was much the same, the grass was dead and brown and the trees were bare. The further north I travelled the more snow replaced dead grass as the ground cover.

On the Mongolian steppe and on Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal I did give some thought to how the place would look in summer with greenery, however I did get used to a palette of brown and black for dead grass and winter trees, white for clouds and snow and the blue of a clear sky.

I noticed the snow was melting first. White streets of snow turned brown with mud. Every car drove around with a brown mud coating, and my boots came back dirty each day.
The ice was melting also. I saw the Angara river twice in a week, before and after travelling to Lake Baikal. The first time it had a layer of ice covering it, and people sitting in groups fishing through holes in the ice. The second time the ice was only near the shore, and the river was flowing very rapidly indeed, with chunks of ice breaking of and being carried down stream.

Seasonal awareness has only come recently to me, I was walking through a park in Riga and was surprised to notice all the trees had small green orbs attached to their branches, naturally I did know what was going on, however I had never given it much notice in Australia, many trees are green all year round. When most of the trees stay green, the deciduous ones budding in spring don't have the same impact. When everything loses its colour and signs of life, the first leaves budding seem quite special. Over the last week I have watched the changes in the flora avidly.

In Australia colour usually signalled spring for me, however it was the colour of the flowers that bloom at this time. I haven't seen many flowers yet this spring however I am more than sure that spring is on its way. As I left Russia I saw from the bus fields of dead grass being burnt. Now as I travel from Latvia to Lithuania the fields are green with small shoots and the trees are thinly covered with the beginnings of leaves.

There are of course some evergreen trees in this part of the world, I saw many in Siberia, however my impression of them was an image of deep winter. I caught a train from Irkutsk to Tomsk leaving late in the night. The area around Irkutsk was quite open, and most of the snow for the season had melted. When I awoke in the morning on the train to Tomsk, we were travelling through a thick Fir forest and it was snowing heavily. There was snow drifts banked up around the tree line, and every branch was white on top with snow and a dark green below.

I am leaving Villinus tonight to take a train across Lithuania to a town called Klapedia on the Baltic sea. Enjoy the change in season.

St Petersberg to the Baltics

This will be another one of those I-promise-to-give-a-proper-update-later posts, as my time is limited and this computer is so slow it is infuriating.

After Moscow I took a night train to St Petersberg. I didn't get much sleep, as I was in the middle of a carriage with a year 10 school excursion. It was quite amusing as I was on the aisle and could watch the teacher walk up and down the carriage checking on the kids. They were all drinking beer on the sly and hiding it when the teacher came past.
St Petersberg is a fantastic city. Canals and gilded church domes are set amongst beautiful 18th century buildings. There are so many amazing things in St Petersberg that I would love to write about now, however this computer is so slow I can't open or edit any of my photos.

I arrived in Latvia 3 days ago, and have spent my time walking around the world heritage listed city of Riga. Medieval cobbled streets and old buildings topped with spires and castellation make this the city feel the oldest of all I have been in. The city recently celebrated its 800th anniversary, so this feeling does have some basis.

Today I went to a shooting range in an old soviet bunker. I shot a Glock 9mm, an AK-47 and a pump action shotgun. Firing the Glock was interesting, it was so small a thing for the noise and recoil it made. This of course was nothing compared to the noise and recoil of the AK. I was firing it in single shot mode, as if it had been on a burst there is no way I would have got anywhere near the target, as it kicked a good 5 degrees up with the recoil. My first shot was quite a shock, it does indeed sound like something has exploded next to your head (for good reason). There must be some serious OH&S issues for guerrilla fighters, as they would go deaf pretty damn fast. I was wearing hearing protection and it was still damn loud.
The shotgun was probably the most fun to fire, and half of that was the pumping action. It was also very loud, but had more of a booming sound and less of the crack of the AK.

Tomorrow I am heading out of leaving Riga, Latvia and heading to Vilnius, Lithuania.

flip it...

Moscow

At the moment I am in Moscow.

I went and paid my respects to Lenin the other day. After queueing up for half an hour or so, and undergoing the security screening, I descended into his tomb. The security was quite intense, you couldn't bring anything at all into the tomb, they only allowed mobiles if it didn't have a camera. You had to keep your hands out of your pockets and in view the entire time you were 'in the presence'. The soldiers on guard must be paid extra to keep the same stern expression on their face all day, and you would think after years of hanging out with a dead body you would have a slightly warped sense of humor, but none of them looked in the slightest bit amused when I waved to Lenin.

The man himself was lying in a glass coffin, and illuminated brightly in a dark room. Many people have said he looks like a wax model, and that may be true as he did have a slightly waxy look about him. There are no spots or blemishes on him at all, and his facial hair is impeccably groomed. He looks as if he is peacefully sleeping.

I will be staying in Moscow for two more days, then heading to St Petersberg. I have put a number of photos from the last few weeks up on Flickr, at the time of this post they are not organised but they will be eventually.

High and low in Ulan-Ude

Before I left Australia, A friend was telling me about her experiences in Russia. She said she found it a place of emotional extremes, and that she found herself laughing one moment and cursing the fact she came the next. My experience in Ulan-Ude quickly showed me what she meant by this.

My easy going work-it-out-when-you-get-there attitude seem to work for me in most instances, however I have noticed that it has severely failed me on several occasions where planning has been necessary. My arrival into Russia was one of these instances. As I mentioned earlier, I have been on the move pretty much constantly since leaving Beijing. Within 12 hours of arriving in Mongolia I was out on a jeep trek in the Mongolian steppe, however before leaving the capital I booked my train ticket from Mongolia to Russia. I booked it to Ulan-Ude as I had read some nice things about the place. When I got back to the capital of Mongolia I had to get straight back on the train to Russia. While on the train I realised that the train arrived in Ulan-Ude at 10:30pm, I hadn't booked any accommodation and I hadn't had a chance to change any money into roubles. I had a feeling this might be a problem, and it was.

Leaving the station immediatly felt quite obviously like a foreigner, as I had a massive backpack and was walking around hesitantly with a map. I did a number of laps of the СBD before finding an ATM that would accept my card and give me roubles. I did find one but I didn't feel all that safe knowing I was now carrying 5000 roubles in cash, it was midnight and that I still had to find a hotel. There were large numbers of drunk russians hanging around the city and while several of them had approached me in an unfriendly manner, while I was walking to a hotel a group did come up and give me a beer to drink. While I was drinking this another man that I had noticed following me earlier approached us and told the Russian guys to leave. He did it in a way that was as if he was doing me a favour, and then offered to show me to the hotel I was looking for. We were conversing in Russian, so I was not sure exactly what he was saying. I started to get a bit of a bad vibe about him and told him no, and that I was leaving. He stopped me and asked me a question in Russian that I didn't understand, but it ended in 'chelovek', a word for man. I then realised what was going on. He was asking me if I liked men, and was trying to pick me up.

Naturally I beat a hasty retreat, turning around and walking down another street. This street was quite poorly lit at the start, and degenerated to near darkness by the middle. One thing I have noticed about manholes in Russia is that they very rarely are covered. You can obviously see where I am going with this. Luckily for me there was a piece of metal about a foot from the surface that my foot landed on, so I didn't fall down the hole, but it was enough to send me sprawling onto the road cutting my hands. Of course the first thing I did was look around to see if anyone saw me. Luckily the people drinking in the park opposite hadn't noticed.

I found the hotel I was looking for, and it was of very dubious quality. There was a casino style thing on the ground floor and shifty looking people in the lobby. I managed to make myself understood and get a room. The door of the room didn't lock and there didn't seem to be a toilet nor shower on the entire level. Not that I looked around that much, I wedged a chair under the door handle and went to sleep.

The next day I booked a ticket to Irkutsk that left on the evening train, left my luggage at the station and went to explore the town. First of all I checked out the worlds largest head of Lenin, and it was definitely very large. It was kind of bizarre seeing people going about their daily business with such a monolith mere meters away. There were some beautiful wood lace houses, and as I was walking around the backstreets checking them out I was approached by an interesting looking character. He was wearing skin tight leather pants, a leather jacket, and had black slicked back hair. He could speak a little English and I could speak a little Russian, however the combined conversation was still quite stunted. His name was as 'Slava', however his friends (and he himself) called him 'Crazy Slava'. Turns out he was quite into rock and roll, and I imagine he saw me as a fellow 80's hair rocker. We went to a bar, bought some beers and had a conversation about rock which went along these lines "You know Jimmy Hendrix?", "Yes", "Good or Bad?", "Good" , "Yeah!" Slava makes air guitar sounds and motions", "You know Axle Rose?" etc...

After a while at the bar, we went and picked up his Mongolian mate named Balor. We went to Slava's place, drank Armenian Cognac and watched an old VHS tape of a guns and roses concert. After much air guitar and Cognac Slava passed out and Balor and I went to meet a friend of his. I forget Balor's friends name, but both of them were very helpful and interesting. They made it their mission to help me accomplish all of the errands in needed to do before getting on the train, they showed me to an Internet cafe, tried to track down a payphone that was working and wrote me a list of Russian words they thought I needed to know (including cure, hospital, husband, kitchen, police and skin head. I don't exactly know why these words made it on to the list). We bought some beers and they took me to the train station and saw me off. Nice guys.

Phantasms

In the theme of the title of this blog, I will be occasionally relating random images and events I have jotted down in a notebook.

~~~~~

Boarding the train in Beijing early in the morning, the station smelt of coal and axel grease, as it should.

~~~~~

Visibility is low leaving Beijing. Stark winter trees are but black outlines against the smog grey world.

~~~~~

We passed a small cemetery. A score of mounds in an overgrown field, each with a grey stone obelisk indicating ownership. The trees surrounding the graveyard are bare and the ground is barren.

~~~~~

In a jeep in the middle of the Mongolian steppe. It is dead flat in every direction. There is not a road, person nor structure in sight. Suddenly there is the familiar sound of a Nokia ringtone, somehow our driver has mobile reception.

~~~~~

Our jeep driver Gamba was a captain in the Mongolian army. He is as cool as ice in his black beret. He says he doesn't speak English and I have had limited success communicating with him in Russian. I suspect he understands much more than he lets on, as he occasionally laughs at jokes told in English.

~~~~~

The toilet on the train opens straight onto the tracks. An blast of ice and snow rushes up and in as the sleepers fly past below.

~~~~~

Arrived in Ulaan-Baatar. Quite cold. Too cold for pen. Should have brought pencil. (Written in patchy ink)

~~~~~

Siberia is full of wood and snow.

~~~~~

Old wooden houses with brightly painted blue and white windows.

~~~~~

Another cemetery. Another rubbish dump. Rows of silos. A woman with dyed red hair and striking blue eyes. Log trucks lining up at level crossing. A man and child pick their way through the mud and snow.

~~~~~

Many bridges in Siberia have guard posts with barbed wire and dogs at either end.

Frozen

Hello from Irkutsk, Siberia.

I have been going non-stop since I left Beijing, and have just returned from 4 days on Olkhon Island, situated on Lake Baikal. I don't have much time to describe everything that has been happening, I need to go get another train soon. Lake Baikal was fantastic, it is hundreds of kilometers long, and holds 20% of the worlds fresh water. It was also frozen, so we drove out to Olkhon Island in a 1960's Russian army van that supposedly was designed to remove bodies from battlefields. The place I stayed had a sled, so later on we hitched that behind the van and drove around on the ice.
I am off to Tomsk tomorrow, and from there will be making Moscow on the 2nd of April. I will be staying with a friend for a while in Moscow and should have time to write a bit more about what has been happening.