PHOTOS UPLOADED

Hey Everyone,

Now that I am back in civilization, I can add pictures to my blog. I have added pictures for all my entries in the last month (except the note on peeing my pants in China). You can load them all up at once by clicking on the March archive on the left, or view each post separately.

Charles

P.S. leave a comment to say you are reading. Otherwise I have no idea who my audience is.

P.P.S. James, I know you are reading.

Oslo

Coming to Oslo was a good idea. It's been the nicest day here this year, a local informed me. The sky was clear, the sun was out and the sidewalks were clear of slush even though there were patches of snow on the ground.

I slept in late, made an omelet, and set out on a day-long trek. I must have walked almost 10 km through the main downtown area. I passed city hall and the king's palace and ducked my head into a bookstore to get a book I needed. They didn't have it, so the clerk at the travel section sent me to a travel bookstore nearby that had exactly what I was looking for.

What I got was the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable (Spring 2006). It gives schedules for EVERY train in Europe, and includes any small town you'd ever want to stop at. I'm glad to have it, because now I can stick to local and inter-city trains where I don't have to reserve (and pay a stupid reservation fee).

After buying my book, I headed to a park on the far side of town. I was hungry, so I sat down at a cafe, ate, and dove into my new purchase. As I mentioned earlier, I'm turning into a rail fanatic. Having the timetable for the entire continent in my hands was like giving bubble wrap to a kid .

I lost track of time, and nearly missed going to the museum next door (the reason why I came). I rushed over and the nice lady at the ticket window let me in for free because it was 10 minutes til closing. I bounced around the room and looked at the persevered Viking longboats that the museum housed. I honestly had no time to read the displays, but I did catch that best preserved one was dug up from a burial mound. They were very beautiful.


I caught a bus back to town and have spent a good part of the evening getting my blog in order. I'm so glad to have it all up to date.

FOG!

I made it on the boat last night a around midnight. It was bigger then I expected.

A huge mechanical gangplank came out from the hull, and I walked into the well lit interior as if entering a UFO from the darkeness of the pier. Instead of humanoid aliens, I was met by a grey haired crewman with a voice like Sean Connery in front of a reception desk. I paid about 130 Canadian dollars for the overnight trip, and headed up to the observation lounge where I slept on a curved couch that was about 10 metres long. It would have been another 30 or 40 dollars for a cabin. Did I mention Norway is expensive?

It would be no exaggeration to say that Norway is the most expensive place I have ever been. I've lived in Japan, been to Tokyo, been to New York and Moscow (all expensive) but Norway tops them all. I spent 30 dollars at a 7-eleven, 16 for kebab and and fries. I had withdrawn 2000 Kroner from an ATM not knowing how much that was exactly, and was shocked to find out how much I was paying for things when I finally looked up the exchange rate. For instance, it's over three dollars for 600 ml of Pepsi, at a 7-11.

Back to my story...

I had a great night's sleep and woke up surrounded by daylight and old people. Most of the chairs near the windows were occupied and all the assembled passengers were staring out into a thick gray fog. Every now and again a dark rocky hump of an island would poke it's head out of the water, but the rocky coast and the mouths of the fjords were invisible to everyone. I rolled over and went back to sleep until sometime after 11.

Sean Connery was back at the reception desk. I asked for the key for the showers unaware that the sauna was open. "Shouna ish better," the Connery sound-a-like informed me. He was right, a good 25 minutes of sweating made me feel great and ready to hit the ground running when we arrive in Bergen.

The sky had not cleared when we docked at the terminal in Bergen. In fact, a light drizzel had started. I found my way to the tourist office to get the weather forecast and was met with the bad news that I'd have to wait three or four days for clear skis. The idea of spending time in a rainy city-- which was very nice mind you-- and paying Norwegian prices was out of the question. I considered going inland to the Fjord town of Flam, but the forecast was no better there. To make a long story short, I am back in Oslo, and had a great train ride up into the mountains and by a beautiful river. Had I thought of it, I could have found a hostel and gone cross country skiing. I think I can handle hanging out in Olso for a day or two before heading south.

Event though I didn't see any beautiful coastal scenery today, I did see a lot of beautiful fjords valleys and mountains yesterday on the train and bus to Alesund.

Scandinavia so far

Actually, the first moment the train pulled across the border I knew that Finland was a much different place than Russia. First of all the infrastructure is modern and European-looking as opposed to the dilapidated soviet road and rail works. Secondly, the customs guy was nice, although still thorough like a border guard should be. Thirdly the architecture was no longer dominated by concrete apartment buildings and small Russian cottages. Any of the houses we passed could have been in rural Canada. In fact, I felt like I was rolling through snow covered fields in New Brunswick or Ontario.

Helsinki also gave me a distinct Canadian feel. It particularly reminded me of Halifax, with careful drivers and short walking times across the city centre. Over the few days I was there, I enjoyed wandering around the streets just soaking up the big city/small town feel that I enjoyed so much when I went to Dalhousie.

I had no huge goals in Helsinki. In fact, I hardly knew what there was to do there before I arrived. The second day, I took a ferry out to a set of islands that make up a sea fortress. I nearly froze my toes off, but it was refreshing walk around and look across the frozen harbour, watching ships pass through the small lanes where the ice was broken. I felt that the ramparts and bridges would make a good setting for a Bond movie as the villains lair.





Life is pretty exciting. I can read again (no more Chinese and Cyrillic alphabet). I know what to buy in the grocery store. I can actually find anything I want in the grocery store.

The hostel I stayed at was very central with only a 5 min walk to the train station and ferry terminals. It was located in an old set of apartments and had original ceramic fireplaces that would have kept the place nice and toasty in the old days. My roommates were a Parisian named Eric and a another French guy that may have also been Algerian named Kamel. Eric was heading north to go skiing and it was hard to say what Kamel was doing. He had left his Russian girlfriend back in Moscow-- I assume his visa ran out-- and was traveling with a suitcase which was half filled with a huge ghetto blaster that he used to play an eclectic mix of pop music, mostly from North Africa. I looked at his huge stereo and he commented "isn't it great?" He lugged the thing to the kitchen when he was spending some time there, and I wouldn't be surprised if he took it into the shower.

We were all getting along quite well in our dorm room until religion came up. It all started with us discussing why Kamel chooses not to live in France. He is turned off by either racism or the secularism France is know for. Kamel then went on to declare how we are all sons of Adam and all must submit to Allah. I wasn't arguing at any point, predicting a fruitless debate, but Eric couldn't hold back. He hinted that religion might be a little bit useless. The fireworks were starting to fly although things remained outwardly civil. I silently escaped to the Kitchen before things got crazy. As I read on the train a few weeks ago, Mohamed believed that all rightly guided religions-- Christianity, Judaism, etc.--worship the same God. As a Christian I was safe. But according to Islam, being atheist is nothing short of being an infidel and I didn't think Eric's points would be well received. Returning a few minutes later, however, the discussion had ended and everyone seemed happy.

As I mentioned earlier, I was happy to find things I could easily use in the Grocery store. I bought cantelope, cereal, pizza, stir fry and goulash ingredients, kiwi juice and a few other wonderful things. At the end of my 2.5 days in Helsinki, I had eaten out once and fed myself completely from 24 Euros worth of groceries.

I went clubbing my last night (Saturday), and met two cool locals, Harri and Jenni. They were arguing over whether my shirt had Hebrew on it or not, which led to Jenni coming over and asking me. She as wrong about the Hebrew as my shirt had some Japanese gibberish on it. I ended up joining them and drinking and dancing the night away. The first question they asked was "why Finland?", which I had no good answer except that it was on my way to Western Europe from Russia. It turned out they they would both rather be in other countries and couldn't imagine someone voluntarily going to Finland (just as I can't imagine why people would backpack in Nova Scotia... but they do it. There's a Lonely Planet for the Maritimes).

Harri and Jenni's story started when they met and become friends a few years before in the local International High School .They both spent almost all their lives living abroad, practically spoke English as their first language and only recently moved to Finland. In effect, they were foreigners in their parents' native country.

Jenni had lived in Thailand, Brazil, the Czech Republic and Israel else while Harri had been born in Thailand and spent his first 12 or 14 years there. He lived there so long that he could have gotten a Thai passport and had dual citizenship.

The night came to a close, and I didn't get to bed until the early morning. I said goodbye to my new friends, jotted down contact info, and headed to the ferry terminal. I had had three choices of what direction to travel in. I could go north and visit Santa Clause, where he lives somewhere around the arctic circle (I'm not joking there is a Santa Clause village and you can meet him year round), I could go to Tallinn in Estonia and then Stockholm Sweden or straight to Stockholm. I chose the last option firstly because my rail pass wouldn't cover the boat to Estonia but would cover the boat to Sweden, but mostly because I am so tired of Winter. I honestly want to get out of Scandinavia as soon as possible. In fact, the last and only thing I want to see up north are the Fjords in Norway.



I made it here today in a small town of Alesund on the west coast of Norway. After the ferry ride from Helsinki, I decided to shotgun through Sweden to Oslo. I almost got stranded in a Swedish town with direct trains to Oslo only on weekends. It seems I didn't read the schedule carefully enough. A little rerouting and I was back on track.

I spent the night in Oslo, did laundry, got up early and headed here. The only problem when I got here was that there is a soccer tournament in town and the only hostel is full. I am now waiting for a midnight ferry to take me south to Bergen. I'll get there tomorrow afternoon and visit about 10 fjordland ports during he daylight hours. I am hoping for good weather and spectacular scenery.

545 paces to the Hermitage

I've been in St. Petersberg for the last couple of days. The city prides itself in being the most European city in Russia, and it is known by some as "the Venice of the north". I've been staying in the old city centre built when Peter the Great decided a couple hundred years ago new capital would be better than Moscow. Like Venice, St. Petersberg was built on a swamp, which allowed for many canals and rivers to be built into the urban landscape.

St. Petersberg is know for it's arts and culture, so I have found myself visiting museums and going to theatres. Another guy in the hostel and I decided to spend our first day visiting the Kunstkamer, the oldest museum in Russia. It seems that Peter I was interested in promoting anthropological study and sent people all over the world to collect cultural artifacts. The museum had a section for the main cultures from every continent including North America and a small section on Korea which both made me feel at home. The most interesting/disturbing section, however, was the famous one devoted to abnormality.

It seems that collecting "monsters" was a science of it's own in the 1700s. Peter bought a few prominent collections that included stuffed animals with or without birth defects. There were armadillos and crocodiles alongside tropical shells and two-headed calfs (Siamese twins). That isn't all the collection included, however; as most birth defects render a fetus unviable causing miscarriage. In other words, most "abnormalities" never exist in a living human or animal. In response to this obstacle, the scientists simple collected deformed fetuses in jars of formaldehyde. Seeing a human fetus in a jar is disturbing by itself, but there were almost a hundred of them (mostly human) and all of them were somehow abnormal. Some had too many or two few appendages. Some only had one eye or three. Some were Siamese twins. One was an underdeveloped twin. A particular panel display attempted to justify this science as progressive in that it dispelled myths about monsters and devils to common people in the 1700s. I can't help but wonder if that was just an excuse so that a few weird people could collect "freaks," as one of the displays labeled Giants, Midgets and Hunchbacks. I hope it was a bad English translation.

Yesterday, I visited a second museum, the Hermitage. Housed in the former Winter Palace of the Tsars, the Hermitage is an enormous museum. It seems that Catherine the Great was an art lover and bought huge collections from all over Europe during her reign. She had a special "hermitage" attached to the palace specifically to house these works of art. These days the entire palace and a second hermitage are all part of the Museum. Conveniently, my hostel is located an extremely short distance away.




Rather than try to see everything, I decided to pick a few areas to concentrate on and then skim through the rest. I waltzed through a couple of the remaining state rooms with their gilded columns, tapestries, plaster molding and then found my way to the 19th and 20th century French painters. I had just entered the second room, and who did I see sitting on a bench, but Paul who I had traveled with in Mongolia.

Paul is French, and took great pride in sharing the bits of knowledge he had about the painters on display. We saw a room full of Picasso, which confused me because I though Picasso was Spanish. Paul was quick to tell me that Picasso spent most of his time in France and was therefore essentially French.

I always enjoy looking at impressionist works, and was happy to recognize a few famous names I've heard of (Matisse, Monet). My favorite style, and there were only two painted this way, was created by dabbing paint in dots of colour. There were no brush strokes at all.



Paul decided he wanted to come to an evening recital I had bought a ticket for. So l sent him off with my ticket so that he could get a seat adjacent to mine. I headed back inside the Hermitage for the rest of the afternoon.

A great deal of time was spent in the Greek and Roman antiquity areas. I had never seen Roman statues and Greek urns before. I tried to imagine what it would take to turn a slab of solid marble into a naked form with delicate facial features and toned muscles. My favorites were the cupid type figures with wings and a Hercules wrestling a lion that was curiously smaller than him.



I met Paul for the evening concert. It was Mozart's Requiem performed with a poem by Puskin, a famous Russian poet. I had sang the Requiem before as part of a choir, but the added poetry was a new twist. There were two characters, A young guy playing Mozart and an old guy with a deep voice and a severe look. He was Salieri, a renowned composer in Vienna during the time Mozart arrived. As Mozart's music became more and most popular, Salieri drifted into obscurity. It's rumored that Salieri murdered Mozart out of jealousy.

I would love to tell you what the two actors were saying if I knew myself. What I can say about the music was that the orchestra was great, but I had hoped that the choir had been a bit bigger in proportion to the large number of instruments. It may have been a perfect balance had Paul and I been sitting in the centre in the hall. Being situated in the first row meant the choir was singing over us and not at us.

I said goodbye to Paul after a drink at a restaurant that turned out to be German owned. I still have plans to look him up when I am in Paris.

Today, I've been cleaning out my bag and planning the rest of my trip. I'll soon be out of Winter and able to get rid of a lot of things. I still have a lot of books from the train that I have to trade or mail home.

The only thing I did other than eat and plan was go to a Ballet. Just as going to the Circus was essential to Moscow, I felt like I couldn't leave St. Petersberg without seeing Ballet. The programme was Esmeralda by Puni. I can't find any biographical information about Puni, but I can tell you that the ballet was based roughly on Victor Hugo's _Notre-Dame de Paris_. The music was good although not overwhelmingly beautiful or solemn. The dancing, to my undiscerning eyes, was beautiful. I had the cheapest tickets in the theatre which put me in a box on the fifth and top level of seating. The ceiling was beautiful; I could almost touch it.

Tomorrow mornining I've got an early morning train to catch and I'll be on my way to Finland.

A weekend in Moscow

Wow I'm tired, I spent all day at my new hostel in St Petersberg. After I got in this morning from the overnight train I immediately checked in, slept, read and surfed the net, went to the supermarket, cooked and ate. A nice guy in the hostel shared his beer with me too.

My two and a half days in Moscow were extremely busy. My brain was still set to an east Asian time zone (don't ask which one), so I was going to bed at 9 and waking up at the crack of dawn. On Saturday morning, I was up so early that I went to an Internet cafe before it closed for the night at 7 am. I had breakfast at McD's and then headed back to my hostel and waited for the free breakfast to start at 8. I felt really keen being up so early.

At the subway station, I was greeted with the sketchiest escalator I've ever used. The stair treads were covered with hard brown plastic, the moving railings were low and the thing ran faster than any moving sidewalk or escalator I've ever had the pleasure of using. It's hard to describe, but the way the steps separated wasn't sudden like in western escalators; it was gradual over a curve so that I thought I was being thrown over the over the edge casing me to swipe at and miss the low guard rail and making me feel the immanence of plunging 100 metres to my death. I made it to the bottom and got on a train that was driven with the same craziness as the cars on the street. The train passed the platform at a barely slowing, after which the doors opened and closed abruptly with no apparent concern for safety.




Safely on the train, I was feeling the drowsiness of having eaten two breakfasts. I made it downtown, but I had to drag myself out the station into the cold morning air. I trudged through the grey streets of Moscow soupy from a spring thaw and into the red square. The red square turned out to look exactly like is does on TV and in pictures. It's a large open area bordered by the red walls of the Kremlin on one side and a glitzy department store on the other. St. Basil's Cathedral, like the Taj Mahal, could never be done justice with a picture. The multicouloured onion domes were so vivid against the blue morning sky that I felt like I could pluck them out of air by reaching out.

I spent the majority of the day in the Kremlin museums looking at the old clothes, silverware, and other property of the Tsars and the orthodox Church. I also saw a few of the Churches on premises where the early Tsars were buried and the one where all coronations were held.







In the late afternoon, I decided to find a banya (Russian bath house), get circus tickets and find the service times for a church to go to the next morning. I had no luck getting circus tickets or going to the bathhouse, but I managed to collect enough information to plan the craziest Sunday in Moscow possible.

Sunday morning came and my body instinctively woke me up at the crack of dawn. I ate my breakfast and hopped on the metro to go to the Church of Christ the Saviour. The church itself is a bit of history. For whatever reason, Stalin decided to blow it up in 1930 and replace it with a swimming pool. A populist Moscow mayor rebuilt it around ten years ago.

The new Church is like the original, but the frescoes are brand new and the gold and brass is completely untarnished. I know I will probably see a million churches in Europe, but this one is the most beautiful church I have ever seen. The building exterior is made of white marble topped with a great golden dome bordered by four smaller domes at the building's corners. An Anglican or Catholic church often has a nave or central isle that runs the length of the church with a transept that crosses the nave to form a cross-shaped place of worship. This western design results in a roughly rectangular building. What was neat about this church was that it was a perfect square and all the crosses in and on it were as wide as they were long. I've since noticed other Russian churches to be square as well. I wonder if that's characteristic of all Eastern Churches.



I entered the sanctuary at 9:30 am and immediately noticed a few things that an Episcopalian blogger had mentioned about her first visit to an orthodox church. Firstly, there are no chairs. Secondly, everyone has their own small rituals. The church is full of icons-- pictures or symbols representing saints. Many of the congregated worshipers spent time going to the icons kissing them and bowing. A Third thing that the Episcopalian blogger mentioned was the way that Orthodox Christians form the cross over the chest. They start the same as western churches forehead to chest but then push their hand from the right shoulder to the left as opposed to pulling from left to right like Catholics.

The service was preceded by altar boys chanting scripture. I couldn't believe how fast they were reading. Eventually the clock stuck 10 and the priests came out. Everyone entered thought the two side doors and on occasion, the big golden doors in the centre opened to reveal the altar and a beautiful depiction of the last supper on the back wall. Periodically, a priest would purify the room with intense, but what was most impressive was the almost constant chanting and singing. Their was a baritone priest who led most of the singing and and a choir at the back did most of the responding. There was one piece during a prayer that was especially great. The deep voices of the second basses produced the sound that I expected from a Russian choir. Time crept on, and after an hour or two, some of the congregation took communion which was bread MIXED in the cup of wine and then served to them by the clergy with golden spoons. At this point my back had been killing me for about 40 minutes. I had to step out into the outer corridor to stretch for a minute. It's not often that you stand in one spot without moving for a long time.

I dropped back to the hostel to pick up my camera and bag and then headed to destination number two, the circus. I haven't been to the circus for a long time and it seemed like the best time and place to go to one. There were acrobat, jugglers, clowns, horses and dogs. Everyone was dressed in baroque french fashion (powdered wigs and the like). The tightrope walking and all that was fun to watch, but the clear highlight for me was seeing a parrot riding a tricycle.

After a cheap and entertaining day, I headed to the banya that took me so long to find the day before. The Russian bath felt like a gentleman's club. There were big leather benches where you deposited your belongings before heading to the sauna. The idea is that you sweat for a while, beat yourself with some birch leaves, sweat some more, jump in cold water and repeat the process. I noticed that the other guys' birch leaves were wet and mine were still dry and new. I took this to mean I needed to break mien in a bit more, so I just beat myself harder. The sensation on my whole body was like the inside of your mouth after a breath mint. I only noticed on my way out to the showers that newcomers were soaking their branches in hot water before entering he sauna. I must have looked funny beating myself with dry branches (they did get a bit wet from the steam and my perspiration).

After forcing myself to stay awake later than I had since arriving in Moscow, I boarded a midnight train and slept like a baby until I arrived this morning in St Petersberg. I've already told you about my lazy day, but what I didn't mention is the strange behaviour I saw on my way to the Internet cafe. First there were three girls, trotting by on horseback with beers in their hands. Then, there were a group of middle aged tourists who passed me on a foot bridge, but instead of crossing, they doubled back at the other side and I noticed from a distance, that the group of ten or so happy people was not leaving the narrow footbridge, but doing a circuit from one side of the bridge to the other. The last strange thing were two half clothed Russian girls (it was cold out). they started pleading with me about something in Russian, and when I said that I didn't speak Russian, they barely managed to communicate that they needed 10 roubles. I normally don't give money to strangers, but their request was so out of the blue and 10 roubles is only about 30 cents. I really wonder what was up with that.

Other then visiting the Hermitage, I have have no clear plans for St. Petersberg. I'll probably write about my time spent there this weekend.

77 hours later...

I finally made it to Moscow. Four days and three nights on the train was relaxing to say the least. I put on sweatpants after the first few hours and took them off a few hours before arrival. Showering was a bit of challenge. My guidebook mentioned something about using a bit of hose attached to the bathroom sink tap (which I didn't have). I settled for dumping mugfulls of hot water over myself which drained through a hole in the floor. I suppose the whole train thing sounds kind of spartan; I was actually impressed by how clean the train was and how clean the provodnitsas (attendants) kept it.

I felt a special bond with the provodnitsas who constantly chided me in Russian. I They forced the optional bed sheets on me (I had my own in my pack, but I miraculously didn't have to pay for the ones they forced on me) and they always managed to lock the bathrooms for station breaks just when I had to go.

I shared a cabin with a mom and daughter on their way to St. Petersberg from Irkutsk. We had one or two "conversations" using sign language doodling on paper and the odd German, Russian or English word that we all happened to know. I found out that the mom, Marina, was a doctor or physiotherapist, although what she did exactly was a bit confusing to understand. Tanya, the daughter, was 12, so it was easy to understand that she was a student and went to a "schule" (Maria knew some German). They spent the majority of time playing cards, doing crosswords and playing battleship on paper. I considered trying to join Battleship with Russian coordinates, but my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet is limited and I didn't get around to learning numbers (After starting in Korea and moving through Chinese and Mongolian speaking areas, you get lazy. Finnish is next!!!)



The provodnitsa who was always chiding me in Russian up to this point brought to my attention to Craig, the other English speaker on the carriage. He was only going to Yekaterinburg, 27 hours short of Moscow. In talking to him, I found his overland trip to be significantly cooler than mine. He was off to Eastern Europe after St Petersberg from where he would skirt through the fertile crescent and then travel down the length of Africa on its west coast to his native South Africa. we spent a lot of time talking about various things. It seems we had both taught Kindergarten (He in Taipei, I in Seoul), but he quit his job when the real estate market in South Africa went crazy and he could sell a house he had owned there for a nice profit. He did a little market research and started up a breakfast shop which specialized in a Tea that only grows in South Africa and a Sausage made there. It was met with mixed success and in the end he chose to cut his losses and spent the rest on his trip home.

When I was alone or in my compartment, I read more of the Roald Dahl short stories got through a lot of "A History of God" which has been testing my patience with the number of theologians, political figures and philosophers it mentions. I traded the Roth book for the Kipling's Jungle Book from Craig. Now that I'm off the train, it might be a while until I have a chance to read them.



One last thing I should mention... I made it to Europe! Exactly 1777 km from Moscow, in the Ural Mountains, there is a an obelisk that marks the division between Asia and Europe south of the tracks. I was looking out the window for the thing and knew the exact moment I had moved to a new continent. I've turned into such a trainspotter. I'm kind of excited about taking the train across Canada sometime.

Skating on Lake Baikal

The train from Mongolia to Irkutsk the main city of Siberia was a 36 hour adventure. I'm sure that it can be done in a day, but i chose to save money by taking the daily train from Ulaan Baatar to Irkutsk, rather than getting off at the Irkutsk stop from the bi-weekly train that goes all the way to Moscow.

The daily train actually consisted of one carriage that started attached to the back of a local Mongolian train. The local train terminated at the border sometime in the middle of the night, and left our singular carriage sitting alone at the end of the platform. I had difficulty sleeping due to the drafty window that I swear was lightly sprinkling me with snow. After a bit of tossing and turning, wearing my hat to bed seemed like the acceptable solution.



I shared a compartment with a Russian student named Sema and Mogolian woman named Buja with her 8 year old son Tsengel. Tsengel didn't sit still the whole trip and swung around the bunk beds like a monkey most of the time. Buja and I had a conversation using a lot of gestures broken English and even some Korean thrown in there. I think Her sister married an American and was living in the US, but I could have misunderstood her. Sema, on the ther hand, was noticeably sad. He had left a whole group of friends at the Station at Ulaan Baatar who ran with the train to the end of the platform as we pulled away from the station. One guy actually jumped off the end of the platform and ran beside the tracks for a bit. It seems Sema wouldn't be seeing these guys for a long time.



The next Morning, I was awoken by a knock at the door. For all I knew, it was Mongolian customs getting an early start. I opened the door, filling the cabin with light and thus waking up Buja only to find an old lady trying to exchange Mongolian money for Russian. Oops.

Sometime mid-morning, the customs agents did actually come to see us. I got yelled at for not having a customs declaration from my entry into the country. The agent at the Chinese border had told us to wait, but never came back with the forms. Fortunately, the agent here just looked a little annoyed and went away.No fine, phew!

A train engine pulled us 10 or so kilometers with about 10 or 20 Mongolian soldiers on board. The Mongolian soldiers hopped off just before we got to the Russian side. Our carriage was put "under border control" for an hour or two during which our passports were taken and the carriage was searched top to bottom by women in green jumpsuits. We got out passports back and were free to leave the train. Things didn't start moving again until 3 or 4 in the afternoon when we were attached to a local Russian train and made our way toward Irkutsk stopping at every town village hamlet and platform in the middle of nowhere along the way. The scenery was much more lush that what I had seen in Mongolia. Grass existed in more than few tufts and there were lakes indicating a more wet climate than what I had seen.




To make a long story short, I arrived in Irkutsk the next morning and was shuttled off to Lake Baikal after getting picked up at the station by the tour operator I booked through. We picked up two German tourists along the way and then dropped off our passports at a hotel to get our visas registered. I learned on the way that the place we picked up the German tourists was where I was going to be staying the next night. It was there that I was supposed to pick up my passport and train tickets. I wasn't comfortable leaving my passport (no worries, I got it last night), but I didn't argue.

We drove an hour on the nicest stretch of highway in Siberia. Called the Eisenhower road locally, The Soviets built it in the late 50s for an expected visit of the American resident. While arrangements were being made, however, the Russians shot down an American spy plane which Washington never admitted to sending over Russian and for which they never apologised. I'm not an expert in Cold War history, but I would hazard a guess that this is when it started.

I was happy to be driving on such a nice road that cut through the forest and past a few small villages. The woods were a mix of evergreen and birch, and with a blanket of snow on the forest floor, was nice to look at.

We knew the hour drive was over when the scenery opened up to a huge frozen lake. Lake Baikal is a natural wonder that has to be seen to be believed. It is 45 km wide at its narrowest nut long and shaped like a kidney bean. The lake is bordered by mountains and sits in some kind of geological crevice (fault line?) that been filled with fresh water for 15 million years. I was reading that ALL other lakes in the world are 15,000 to 20,000 years old at most. High School science and geology teachers always like to boast that Canada has 9% of the world's fresh water. Well, Lake Baikal contains 20% of the worlds fresh water all by itself. That's over double the fresh water of Canada in one lake!

The town that I stayed in was quaint but very used to tourists. I arrived on Sunday morning and you could clearly see that Siberians far and wide had made the Sunday drive to the lake and were buying up the smoked fish and knickknacks like there was a shortage. Once settled in my home stay, I set out on a 6 hour epic journey. I first walked straight out in the middle of the lake for about 20 or 30 minutes. I had asked about safety before doing this and it seems that the ice is 60 cm at its thinnest and 2 m at its thickest.

The mountainous edge of the lake was a faint blue and white colour across the horizon. The ice was dark black where it wasn't covered by a thin lake of hard snow. you could see that the some of the cracks extended 60 cm down to the bottom of the ice, while others only partway down reveling cracked sheets of ice laying one layer across the top of another the appeared like natural crystal when looked at from different angles. I look a million pictures of everything I saw.






My adventure led me 5 km down the shore to the far end of the Village. There were plenty of wooden cottages painted different colours along the way. I was amused by the great number of touristy activities set up for the Russian tourists. There were sleds; There was a motorized hang glider; There were snowmobiles; and there was even a hovercraft. I preferred waking to all of these and didn't let my amusement in them spoil the natural wonder in front of me.

On my way to the far end of the lake, I stopped by a recommended restaurant and had an endemic fish called Omul prepared "the old Russian way" as the menu claimed. The old Russian way turned out to taste really good. the fish layer at the bottom of a tinfoil bowl topped with a mixture or potato mushrooms and cheese. Yum.

At the end of the village I popped into the local museum which highlighted the diversity of species (especially endemic ones) of the Baikal area. There was no English signage, but the diagrams, stuffed animals and fish and pickles specimens spoke for themselves. There were even seal fetuses in bottles of formaldehyde.

The highlight of my adventure was skating on the lake. I rented hockey skates from the tree start hotel near the museum. The looked at me like I was crazy when I said I wanted to go on the lake, but they let me do it. As I mentioned earlier, there were patches of snow on the ice. I should have said it the other way around there were patches of clear ice among the snow. This pattern mean that skiting in a straight line was almost impossible. I found some nice Australian tourists to take my picture. They had clearly never walked on ice before, and were closer to the edge of the ice where the river starts than I would have like (I'm still alive, so no harm done.)

I liked the photo they took, but wanted some action shots of me skating on the biggest piece of freshwater ice in the world. I found a few good spots and set my camera on my bag on the snow with a 10 second delay. I cut off body parts and missed the frame completely a few times but ended up with a few decent shots, with my whole body in the picture.



About a kilometer from shore, I crossed a fissure in the ice and found what I had been looking for, a large area of open Ice. it seems the fissure created a wind break that allowed for this open ice. I estimated the length of the area by measuring my stride and skating the length. 77 strides at 2.5 m per strides was 192.5 , long (hockey rinks are no more than 60 m long) with a width ranging from 5 to 25 m. You couldn't play pond hockey there, but it was fun to skate on.

I sprinted back to the shore, jumping from patch of clear ice to patch of clear ice. In some areas, I had to travel in an es shape to get where I wanted to go. I dropped my skis off, walked 5 km back to my homestay and fell asleep almost immediately.

The next day (yesterday), I slept in, ate breakfast and caught a minibus to a ski resort on the way back to Irkutsk. I rented cross country skis for two hours, and was directed to a slope of muddy snow covered in snowmobile tracks. It didn't look promising. I had never been that good at going downhill on cross country skis. I had brief lessons in grade seven and have been winging it ever since. I should have walked down this initial slope, but mistakenly decided to give it a try. My skis went out of control underneath me. Halfway down the slope they spread apart and I belly-flopped saving my chin only by arching my back and snapping my neck up. I was covered with muddy snow, and managed to fall once more before making it to the bottom alive. The belly flop, although getting me really dirty had a strange chiropractic effect that seems to have gotten rid of a chronic pain I've had in my lower neck for a long time.

Wow, it look like it's time for summary.... I caught a but back to Irkutsk went through a huge ordeal trying to find my homestay that included three friendly hotel staff who led me around the neighbourhood where I thought it was knocking on doors and asking. I
has to call Moscow and after 5 hours of searching and waiting, someone picked me up and brought me to my homestay where my tickets and passport were waiting.

This morning, I ate breakfast served by my homestay landlady, Galina. She speaks German and Russian. Little help to me, but we made do. There were some meat pastries with tea and hard boiled eggs. I tried to ask if I should put some kind of sauce in the pastry, but couldn't get a clear answer from Galina. She simply directed me to the fact that there was meat inside, which thinking about it now may have indicated that I shouldn't add sauce. I wast thinking along the lines of samosas and chutney in Indian cuisine. I guess I'll never know.

Anyhow, I've got a few more hours in Irkutsk, the pearl of Siberia (which looks quite dirty to me) before I board a three day train to Moscow. After all the running around, I'm looking forward to a little rest.

Mongolia: sand, snow and horses

I was met at the Beijing train station by the owner of my Mongolian Guesthouse. Standing by my carriage Kim, the owner, asked "are you Charles Freeman?" as I walked by. I was impressed by his accuracy, but later found out that he had asked every other White guy he saw the same question. Kim is a South Korean guy who married a Mongolia woman he met in London. He happened to be in Beijing meeting with other
hostel and guesthouse owners trying to set up cross promotions.




The train ride through Mongolia was a lot of fun. I shared a compartment with a British couple named Micheal and Lauralee. We chatted a lot about their time in the Solomon Islands as consultants to the islands' waste disposal programme and about our travels in Asia/Oceania. I was fortunate to be able to trade books with Michael;
my Grisham for "The Plot Against America" by Phillip Roth. I've since read the book, which is a historical novel based on the author's speculation of what would happen if Charles Lindbergh-- the first man to fly across the Atlantic non-stop and prominent American isolationist during the second world war-- were American president
instead of FDR when WWII broke out. I like speculative fiction, but I especially enjoyed this one because it was based on historical figures.

The scenery we passed was epic to say the least. It took an hour or so to make it out of Beijing, but we knew we had finally escaped its borders once we saw the great wall stretching outward on the hilltops and we plunged into the darkness of a 2 km tunnel underneath it. The northern part of china was dominated by industry. We made our way through the some of the most industrial and polluted parts of China.
This included the city of Da Tong which produces more coal than any other city in the country.

At the Chinese border our compartment was visited by three different agents. One to checked and stamp our passport. One to take out departure card. and then one to take our customs declaration form. We were mystified as to what was happening or how long it would take, but in the end we were confronted with no hassles.

Because Mongolia uses wider Soviet tracks, all of the sets of wheels and suspension (called bogies) were removed and replaced. Many travelers got off to hang out in the station, but Lauralee, Michael and I chose to stay on and see the world standard bogies exchanged for Soviet ones.

The train was backed into a huge workshop in sections where hydraulic jacks lifted the carriages up off the Chinese bogies. The workers then pushed all of these bogies out from under the carriages. For a few minutes we were suspended wheel-less high in the air. You could see the how the double set of tracks underneath could support either guage. Eventually the wider Soviet bogies were wheeled into place and
we were set down on our new undercarriages. The process took about an hour and made putting trains together look like building with Lego.





After picking up the passengers who got off, the train travelled a few more kilometres to the Mongolian side. One agent stamped our passports, but the next agent couldn't collect out customs forms because the train attendant had given us none. He motioned to wait a minute. We were exhausted from being on the train for 16 hours and fell asleep. The for whatever reason, customs agent didn't come back.
and we woke up the next morning rolling through Mongolia.

The ride to Ulaan Baatar, the Capital located in northern Mongolia, took us through the edge of the Gobi dessert. There was nothing save sand, dust and the road running parallel to the tracks. We stopped in an outpost town halfway from he border to the Capital. It was dominated by soviet era apartments and little used streets of dust.



The rest of train ride was marked by similar scenery, although more grass appeared was we headed north, and we saw occasional horses and sheep grazing. Some highlights of the ride were a game of scrabble and the Mongolian dining car we picked up at the border. The car was full of carved wood and the food was much better than in the plain Chinese dining car.



Ulaan Baatar, like the outpost town in the Gobi, was dominated by soviet era apartments. The main difference was the abundances of gers in he suburbs. A ger is a round tent used by traditionally nomadic Mongolians. I think it's insulted with first and blankets. I wouldn't be surprised if the modern ones are mostly synthetic. As an aside, Mongolians don't really have much (or any?) agriculture. They raise
sheep, cattle and horses and mainly live off things harvested without tilling the land. Traditionally, it is bad luck to eat anything from under the ground.

Once in Ulaan Baatar (UB to expats), Kim and his team whisked myself and a few other travellers away to his guesthouse. I didn't have a chance to say bye to Micheal and Lauralee but I chanced meeting them later in central UB, when I got to say farewell.

I spent most of my time with a British pair of travellers, Jeremy and Micheal, and a French traveller names Paul. The Mongolian food we had consisted of steamed mutton dumplings and some Kind of mutton chopsuey (hard to describe). The beer ("Chingis" after Chingis Khan) was apparently quite strong although I didn't drink any.

The next day, Paul, Jeremy, Michael and I rented a jeep and headed to Terelji National Park some 60 km away. Although we had arrived to spring weather conditions, a low pressure system had brought cold and snow so that it seemed like a different place.

The park was marked with hills topped with neat granite outcropping surrounding a series of snowy plains. We got to visit a touristy ger that at which the owner provided a lunch of goulash. We walked around a bit and I took a lot of pictures of the beautiful landscapes. Paul had brought along a deck of cards, so as we warmed up in the ger we played a round of cheat and then some rounds of asshole. Paul knew a
set of rules different to mine so we came up with a hybrid set of rules that was a lot of fun.



After cards, the site owner got he horses ready and we want for a gentle two hour ride through the hills. I was wearing sneakers sot hat my toes almost froze off, but the owner lent me a Russian fur hat that apart from looking cool kept my ears perfectly warm. The ride gave us a chance to see more of the local landscape and didn't leave any of us all that sore. I found out that the horses knew the route well, when my horse stopped dead in its tracks when I tried to continue on a road
past where we were supposed to turn.



Today and back in UB, I've been preparing for the next leg of my journey. I will be on the train for 2 nights to Irkutsk in Siberia where I will stay for 3 days. After Irkutsk it's 3 more days on the train to Moscow. Unless there is Internet in Irkutsk (doubtful) my next post will not be until March 17 or 18.