The next time you see a lost tourist – help them.

After the last few days I have now made a vow that I will make sure I help any tourist I came across that look lost and in need of help. We have been helped by so many people just over the last few days, and I am sure that if we had not had their help we would have been stuck stuck stuck.

This one lady at Xian station first approached us with a usual tour card and the promise of a great deal on visiting the sights. A great deal it was not, but a very nice lady she sure was! We gave her a bit of an abrupt ‘no thanks’ went on to try and find the ticket office. Clearly in the mass of people we stood out like 2 sore thumbs and she saw that we were getting lost – going to the wrong place for the ticket office, so she came up again and before I could tell her where to go with her tour offer, she directed us again! Finally when we go to the right place, she wrote all the details of what we wanted in Chinese and directed to the best queue. Without this assistance I was really worried that would struggle with getting our ticket. Her help sure made it really much easier.

When we arrived in Xining we were due to pick up our tickets for Lhasa from the local agent. We could not find the office, so we went to a small hotel where the guy at the travel desk helped us by calling the agent and getting him to meet us at this hotel, this really helped as the office was miles away!!

Once we had our tickets and the infamous Tibet permits in our hand we went off to the station, we were really early but this was a god send as the copy of the permit was not correct. You have to present your permit to the police at the station before they will allow you to wait for the train, anyway to cut a long story short, this really nice police officer again called our agent explained that the permit copy was not good and that he would need to get the guys in Lhasa to send it again, she gave them a fax number and when we went back to the station after a few hours she had our correct copies with her. That was a close shave!!

We went off to the station, we were really early but this was a god send as the copy of the permit was not correct. You have to present your permit to the police at the station before they will allow you to wait for the train, anyway to cut a long story short, this really nice police officer again called our agent explained that the permit copy was not good and that he would need to get the guys in Lhasa to send it again, she gave them a fax number and when we went back to the station after a few hours she had our correct copies with her. That was a close shave!!

Have you ever wondered why you see so many Chinese tours everywhere around the world?

Maybe you haven’t, but I certainly have! Everywhere you go, you are sure to bump into a group of Chinese tourists, all wearing the same funny coloured baseball cap and all clicking pictures like the world would collapse if they didn’t! I have started to call them goods trains, because if you get stuck behind a group of Chinese tourists, you will be stuck with them for a while! We found out that in order to control the numbers of people who go out of the country (and presumably get a flavour of what the rest of the ‘free’ world is like) the Chinese government make people pay a huge deposit before they can leave the country independently. Therefore the only way to go out and see the world is through one of the billions of organised and maybe mildly censored tours that are in the main organised by the CITS (Chinese International Tourist Service). I found this so interesting as it explained one of the great mysteries of the world!! Why do you only see Chinese tourists in tour groups!

Our own Taj Tour!

Some of you may be aware of the famous Taj tours that run out of India - where they will show you 15 countries in 3 weeks, and they go with slogans like breakfast in Berlin, Lunch in London and Dinner in Denmark...

Well we did our own mini Taj Tour across China. Between the 22nd May to the 29th May we travelled to Datong – Beijing – Pingyao – Xian – Xining and got on the Train for Lhasa. That’s 5 stops in 8 days, including 3 days in Beijing!! I will cover Beijing in a separate post so this is about the rest.









The first thing to say was that it was tiring and maybe not the ideal way to see a country like China, but with the 30day visa deadline approaching and the major block of time in china being spent in Tibet we had to follow a bit of a hectic schedule. I know this was not Urvi’s choice, but I guess that with the 15 days in Tibet coming up there was not much else we could do.

The trip was tiring and I don’t think we did full justice to any place, but only got a bit of a flavour. What was in interesting was how far away any of the main sights were from the actual cities that we went to. Landing up at the station we would get into a habit of storing our bags and then getting out to see the place, however as we would be going to 1 or 2 of the main sights we would then miss the main towns. In some cases this was not a big deal such as Xining, but in others the towns are interesting and we missed it – Xian for example, which has one of the largest Muslim populations in China.

In all this frenzied travelling the real high point was the day in Pingyao. This is a tiny town that has not moved on from the 1700s, it is a really characterful Chinese picture postcard town. We arrived in the rain and therefore did not spend loads of time ‘touring’ but we found an amazing Youth Hostel - Yamen Hostel where we basically set up shop, it was awesome. Free internet so we could make final arrangements for Tibet and Japan, and also lovely coffee and Chips!!! Hurray! The day we spend there was just lovely and really helped to distress from the hectic train to train travel we were doing

Highlights for this portion of the trip were the Hanging Monastery at Datong, The whole of Pingyao, the terracotta warriors (just an amazing sight and wonderfully persevered and shown off)

We now get ready to get on the train to Lhasa, on the Quinghai (pronounced Ching Hai) railway. The highest railway in the world that also contains the longest land bridge in the world.

Beijing – this place is awesome and the hostel was even better!!!

Ok so imagine getting off the overnight train at 5am, being faced a mammoth Beijing West train station, finding your bus, getting on with a million others and fighting with the ratty conductor who is shouting at you in Chinese, and you are shouting back in Kutchi – no it’s not a funny sight!!! (Well it was actually) but then you get off the hot bus to a hot Beijing (20c at 6am!) and then we go searching of our Hostel. It is in the middle of a Hutong (which is basically a cram of small streets, and common courtyards, off which people’s houses are to be found. This is a very traditional way to live in China, and was really interesting to experience but a killer to navigate. It was lucky our Hostel is soooo popular that even the locals know where you are going when they see to back packers plodding aimlessly along the streets, looking at the road signs as if they were written in Chinese!!

So the picture I am trying to paint is that we are a bit haggard and tired, we enter the hostel and suddenly cool, calm, relaxed, everything is just lovely and we sink into the easy chairs in the semi open courtyard/common area. The hostel – ‘Sitting on the city walls hostel’ was soooo nice and the perfect remedy for our condition. The guys who run it were really nice and very experienced at making sure the guest get the best out of Beijing. On arrival they gave us a cheat sheet for the city, so that we could avoid the inevitable rogue tour guides that would take us to the great wall in a 10th of the price of the official rates, and then proceed to take us to 101 shops and other things that would sap our money!
Anyway back to the city itself and our take on it.

We loved Beijing, it is a humming place, that may well have been different before the Olympics but from what I recall about how my parents found it, I think they like it too. Beijing is huge, and there is a lot to experience and take in, it was really hot when we were there which made seeing the place kind of tough, but the city is so nicely planned in terms of public transport you can make it anywhere fairly easily. We became pretty good at navigating the metro (which is totally world class) and the busses too, and at 10p per trip it is a bargain.

The biggest thoughts I had on Beijing was that it was a young city, both in itself and in the residents. The city clearly has been majorly developed and even after the Olympics it moves on with further development. Maybe at the expense of the old traditional city, but that is the case in so many places around the world. And too be honest apart from some major sights and places of national value I don’t think the regime in china is too bothered. The people are also really young, everywhere you go it is young people, maybe cos we were there over a weekend we got more of that, but I don’t think so.

The major sights are all amazing, the Great Wall, Forbidden City and Summer Palace is where we concentrated our time, and we loved them. However I was not taken by Tiananmen Square. One may ask what is there to be taken by a square. Albeit the largest public square in the world. However it felt really stale to me. On the other hand Beijing’s Snack Street was a real fun busy place, basically I saw it as a little china town within a Chinese town!! There were small eateries and stalls, and shops and all sorts sprinkled with loads and loads of people all enjoying an evening, it was really fun, eating the fried Dofu (Tofu) the huge plates of Noodles, and then trying to explaining to the guy that we wanna pack it as a take away!! Trying to avoid the mass of sellers, telling us to ‘hello... come a look a look, I give you goood price!’ for the ‘antique’ chess board that she has stacked in a high pile.

We went to the Olympic stadium and trust me on the outside it was amazing for its architecture, presence and technology, but from the inside it was amazing for the sheer numbers of people who came to see it as a temple to the Chinese plan to dominate the world. I could not work out if people are almost told that they must visit the ‘birds nest’ or whether they truly feel the pride it is meant to symbolise, either way there were thousands of people all coming to see it. Admittedly it is not even a year since the closing ceremony took place, and Boris Johnson came along on his big red bus. So maybe the crowds will die, but the authorities have kept it exactly like the stadium was during the games, including all the hoardings etc.

The most notable thing about the Olympic stadium visit for me was the totally open way the stadium had been opened for people. You basically pay to enter, the stands are open and then the whole ‘pitch/track’ area is open. People were relaxing as if in the park, taking food, playing with their kids, playing badminton etc etc, it was lovely dare I say it almost not Chinese – in that there was no tour, nothing very regimented, relaxed. Maybe I have read the Chinese wrong, but I noticed that they were all very relaxed in this space.

I have always wanted to see the great stadia of the world – Lords, the MCG, Wembley, Old Trafford, Neu Camp, the Birds Nest, the Maracana etc etc, not totally for the sports connection but because these places represent 2 really strong traits that I think are so powerful, the idea of achievement – that comes through sports at the highest level, and an amazing sense of human togetherness. People come to stadia to watch and experience in unity. And these temples of sport are just so good at pulling people into the action, the history and the uniqueness of the sporting spectacle.

Overall we loved Beijing, the hostel really helped to set up the city for us, but it is clear that Beijing has something about; a something that we felt was missing from Moscow. The people were helpful, interesting and really seem to know where they are going. We were not there to assess the levels of control asserted by the communist regime, but even if we were, on the surface there was not a lot of suppression that people seemed to feel. The young were expressing themselves as much as anywhere in the world, however I am mightily angry at the fact my blog was blocked here!!

We are finally in China! But with a special pit stop

The border crossing was really interesting not for the visa processing, not for the rush to the duty free shop at the border not for the masses of people trying to swap Togrigs to Yuan etc etc.the interesting and really impressive thing was the physical changing of the WHOLE trains wheel sets! Russia and China run on different gauges so when the international trains come over the over board there are 2 options, either empty the whole train into alternative Chinese train or change the wheels!! It sounds crazy but actually it is not as stupid as it sounds. Moving everyone and everything from one train to another across a border would a logistical nightmare, so better just change the wheels.

We were shunted into a special yard where all of the wheel sets were unlocked from the carriages. Then each of the carriages were uncoupled and lifted on massive jacks, once clear the wheels were all pulled away. As we were on special tracks which could then change gauge and once this had happened the new wheels were pushed into place. Finally the carriages were lowered and the journey continued.





It took about 30 minutes for the whole train, which isn’t exactly formula 1 pit stop speed, but i reckon that’s far quicker than the changing the train. It was a good example of the Chinese efficiency they are trying to show the world. The passport were just as delayed as in Russia, but to be fair with the pit stop we had other stuff to keep our minds occupied.

It is soo amazing to have everyone’s thoughts and best wishes

I have been trying to catch up on the emails that we missed since being on the Trans Siberian, and then Mongolia and it is so amazing that there are so many people who are wishing us well and who are interested in the trip. Without getting too emotional it is really an amazing feeling.

I really feel quite amazed – thanks to everyone!!!! We already feel so privileged to be doing this trip and then to have so many thoughts and wishes makes it even more special...

Mongolia road trip deep into the country

When I first thought of Mongolia, I thought ‘outer’ Mongolia – being in the middle of nowhere and desperately barren and empty. In many ways this is exactly what it is, but along with that, Mongolia is a beautiful country with even more beautiful people. There are only about 3 million people in a country that is 3 times the size of France. Urvi really liked the capital Ulaan Bator, I didn’t think there was much to it but we both agreed that the countryside was stunning and the trip we took out for 3 days to the rural areas proved to be a real hit.

Mongolia is poor, and historically has been caught between Russia and China, both physically but also politically and commercially. There is fair amount of Russia money there, but it is not so apparent anymore.



The biggest asset I think the country has is its people. They are a tough and hard working bunch that are always ready to smile. Most people outside of the capital live an almost Bedouin existence, where they travel around the plains with their sheep or horses. They live in traditional Ger tents (low round constructs that withstand the fierce winds, snow and heat that Mongolia experiences through the year. ‘homestays’ are common and even the locals will share their Ger with local travellers.



It was really interesting to be in such a large country with so few people, you would maybe see 10 or 20 people in the whole day??!! It was spooky! When you do meet some of the locals they were so warm and welcoming. Of course language was a problem but people can communicate so much with their expressions and they were always warm. We went out on a 3 day Ger trek, visiting the ancient capital at Kharkorin, stayed with some local families in Gers and took in some of the stunning natural beauty. The families with whom we stayed were the highlights. I know that we paid (under GBP2 per person for dinner bed and breakfast) to stay with them, but we got a real sense that the appreciated us, as we got so much from them.



There is a real simplicity to peoples life, they do things to survive, and spend time coping with the weather, and not much else. This lack of complication rubbed off on us, and we spent the evenings when we go to the camps talking, looking at the amazing star scapes and playing cards, no TV, no internet – it was amazing! I think we have cluttered our lives a lot with things that may not really matter, with complications that we think are important, just these 3 days with families in Mongolia showed me that our lives are not stressful in themselves - we create stress. Maybe we need to think about it, and maybe if we were to restrict our life to a simple matter of what you need to do to survive and restrict your possessions to what you can fit into a Ger tent, we would be happier? Maybe it is not that easy, but i think i have seen that simplicity is invaluable.

Getting across the Mongolian Border

The last 2 sections of the train journey involved 2 border crossings one between Russia and Mongolia and one between Mongolia and China. Of course we cross borders all the time, when we fly, but the experience on this train was somewhat different from the generally slick airport experience. Exiting Russia involved stopping at the border station, handing over your passport and sitting around for over 4 hours hoping that you get it back! Oh yeah, then there is the cabin checking and also the various health forms that you need to complete. The final output of all this is a small exit stamp on the returned passport! What was funny is that everyone on the train was as apprehensive and worried that they would never get their passport back, or worse still get stung for some customs fine or something. In reality although it takes time, the process was pretty good, considering the fact that they have to process the whole train before it can move on.

Needless to say we were all fine and we have made it out of Russia, after an amazing taste of the largest country on the planet.

Final leg of Trans-Sib Russia concluding thoughts

We are on the final leg of the journey through Russia and out into Mongolia. So it’s time for some concluding thoughts on the Russian Republic. The most obvious thing to say is that Russia is huge and we have simply just scratched the surface of a tiny bit of it. It comes across as a hard country to live in and a hard country to ‘make it in’. St Petersburg was a real European city and is full of history and culture but as it is a really difficult to travel, it is not a big draw for the city break market. If it was any easier then I am sure that it would have been swamped. Moscow is a big brash city which has an attitude. In the past it was thought of as crime ridden and not welcoming, but we found it ok to be in now. It is really clear to see how people are straining to change in Russia following the fall of communism, and due to the different pace people are travelling at, there seem to be many separations. There are financial divides and major cultural divides, with the youth generation doing everything to be like the US and the older generations who have been brought up in communism resenting this and pushing up against it.



Russia is a country that is difficult to categorise, it was naturally beautiful and has a massive amount of culture, history and complication. I am glad that we have travelled through this great country; it is not true that people are unwelcoming and it is not true that the cities are depressing grey sprawls. The Trans Siberian was one of the main reasons that we launched our world trip from Russia and this experience has not disappointed. We have met many wonderful people along the way, and seen that we are not alone in travelling such a great distances and for such a long time. I think this has been a great start to our trip and we now look forward with verve to the next stage – See you in Mongolia!!!!

Travelling is hard work – on the mind, body and spirit

But isn’t that the point? Talking to people about their travels and thinking about our trip it is becoming more and more clear to me that travelling in the way we are doing it is not easy, and sometimes it is not fun, however it has benefits that you just can’t describe. The people you meet, the gems you see of the world and the places that are just so far away from your own comfort zones and reference point that it blows your mind. There are over 190 countries in the world and a million different cultures and ways of life, nobody has a right to say their way of life is the best or better than any others, but until you experience the different cultures you can’t even begin to describe the differences.

The mind - I think I would classify our trip as backpacking tourists; we are away for a long long time, and this means it is not the same as 2 weeks of a vacation somewhere, the trip requires planning, persistence and a greater degree of mental strength than I initially thought. Take money for example, sometimes we feel like doing things that we financial can’t do, and then other times we think that we have spent too much! I am sure will settle on a middle ground sometime, but right now it is like my scuba diving - very up and down!! I am worried because in an attempt to budget and plan we should not lose sight of the scenery and sounds and flavours around us. Also you have to constantly think and plan ahead, what is going to happen when you arrive in the next place, what do you need to do, where to go what to experience. You have to show flexibility and react to situations, and doing this day in day out can be wearing. Once again I revert back to the fact that we WANTED to do this trip, we are FORTUNATE to be doing it and I am sure that when we are back in the comfort zone we will recall the ‘tales’ for this trip and smile fondly.

Physically – this is it the least of my worries. Travelling this way will be sometimes tiring, uncomfortable and smelly, but I know that we will work our way through this. Our fitness is already starting to improving, and one of the big things I want to learn from this trip is tolerance, including for being uncomfortable on occasions, having to walk long distances, and eating at random times. A lack of order in one’s life is probably a really liberating thing!

The spirit – at points on the trip I am already feeling so many things about the world. Sometimes that there are so many things the same between all our cultures, sometimes that we live in pockets of isolation, that don’t know or care what is happening next door. Sometimes one sees things that questions faith and that question human goodness. I have no right to draw any conclusions yet, but the spirit is tested and challenged all the time on a trip like this, and that has to be a good thing!

Scuba Diving Lake Baikal – a cold but amazing experience!

So one of the things that I would like to do as we travel is develop and improve my diving experience and also dive some of the nicest dive spots in the world. This started in a very frosty way by diving the 2°c waters of Lake Baikal. I will be honest this was a dive I was not prepared for and therefore was very daunting.



Diving is all about preparation and experience. I don’t think for this dive I had either! The biggest thing was that to dive in water this cold you need a dry suit and you need insulation. If I told you I had 3 insulated woollen trousers, and 3 woollen jumpers tops on when I went diving you would think I was mad! But that is exactly what I wore, plus a dry suit, and full head cover, gloves and boots. This all made it pretty unmanageable out of the water. Also without the technicalities using a dry suit is not all that easy, as it fills with air, so you have to control the amount of air in the suit, to avoid yourself blowing up like a balloon when you rise to the surface!!!

This was the first time I had dived in these conditions and the basic point I am making is that it was a challenge!!! My dive buddy was pretty patient to be honest, despite only having met me a few hours before we dived.




The dive itself was ok, it was tough to see lots because I was concentration too much on the diving technicalities but I am glad I did it. I have now dived the deepest lake in the world, although I only went to 15metres! I also got to try out the underwater housing for the camera that we bought in readiness for the Great Barrier Reef – which will be much nicer diving and much warmer!!!! The shots are of me as my dive buddy was snapping away.

The lake is very clear, but at this dive site fairly unspectacular. Again the achievement for me was to dive in this deepest lake, and also to dive in this cold cold water. It makes me want to do more diving soon!!!