Greetings from Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia. HooRAY. Arrived early yesterday afternoon from Beijing, and I already feel the difference. China and I were just not on the same wavelength. We’ll see what happens when I go back in a month or so.

One piece of exciting news is that I’ve published another story – this one about last year’s trek in Burma/Myanmar. It’s in an online travel mag called The Expeditioner. It’s not the NYT (and doesn’t pay as well), but I think it’s more my style. Plus Matt Sabile, the man behind the website, edited very lightly – this story is in my own voice, whereas the NYT piece was in NYTspeak.

And speaking of exciting treks, I’ve been on one and will leave for another tomorrow. On Sunday I visited the Great Wall, hiking the 8 km section from Jinshanling (about a 3-hour drive from Beijing) to Simatai instead of the Disney-fied section at Badaling. The way was very steep and mostly unrenovated – I sweated bucketloads. At every watch tower (the only place to rest in the shade) extremely annoying women shoved bottles of “ice watah!” in our faces and generally harassed us to buy stuff…no matter how many times we said “no, no thank you, please go away, please get out of my face” etc. Other women would hike along with you, telling you about “short cuts” and, at the steepest bits when you had to concentrate on where your foot would go, they’d step directly in your path and offer their hand, to “help.”

But despite this nonsense, the hike was beautiful.

Tomorrow I leave for a 14-day trip to the Gobi Desert and central Mongolia. The tour is organized via the Golden Gobi guest house here in UB. I’ll be with 5 other adults: two French dudes, a Swedish woman, and a French couple, plus their 10-year-old son.

I’m pretty sure there’s no WiFi in the Gobi, so you won’t hear from me again until at least August 12 (though I’ll probably post again before I leave).

OK, I need to go make some preparations for the trip.