China

Back from western Mongolia

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I just got back to UB after a two-week trekking and camping trip to western Mongolia. I’ll write all about it by tomorrow, but I wanted to drop a quick post to answer the “where the hell are you” emails that have clogged my Inbox during my absence.

It was a last-minute decision to join a trip organized by Mongolia Expeditions, an “adventure travel” company. On August 8 I flew to Olgii, the capital of Bayan-Olgii province in western Mongolia. On August 21 I flew back, having spent exactly one of the intervening nights in something other than a tent.

At the moment I’m rather hung over (lots of farewell vodka last night) and sleeepy. So instead of writing I’m catching up on my photo-uploading (China’s done – now I’m on Mongolia).

Also, BTW, here in UB I happened to run into Karly, one of the Australians I met waaay back in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. She has recruited me to join her on a Gobi tour (finally!) starting Monday. Then we’ll cross back into China and travel together to western China (Urumqi, Kashgar), etc. It’ll be good to have someone to share the difficulties of travel in China. Yay.

OK now I gotta run to take a shower and meet Donna (the Canadian who was also on the western Mongolia trip) and Batbayar (the owner of Mongolia Expeditions) for dinner.

I’m already in a better mood…

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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.

The shortest longest eclipse

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I haven’t really posted much about China. Yeah, I know. Between the Great Firewall, slooooowwww connection in Shanghai, and a lack of a computer, it’s been painful even to check email.

There’s much to say, but I shant say it now. Because I know what you’re wondering: How was the eclipse? So I’ll postpone more general China posts and tell ya.

This eclipse was unlike the other two I’ve seen. Of course, the other two (Hungary in ’99 and Ghana in ’06) were also different from each other. As I told a TV reporter from a local Wuhan news network (!), eclipses are like children (I suppose): You love them all equally, but as individuals.

In the days leading up to July 22, the SEML (solar eclipse mailing list) was manic with worries about a storm (’tis the season) and extraordinarily detailed weather reports from Jay Anderson, the eclipse-chasers’ Al Roker (sans annoying cheeriness and yoyo weight loss).

As it turns out, people’s fears were justified: Shanghai got rained out. As you read before (in my NYT article), I was joining Rick Brown, a native NYer who runs eclipse tours on the side. He had arranged a private viewing area at the Wuhan Bioengineering University. (A big huge THANK YOU to Rick for inviting me to join them. Fun times!)

Though we didn’t get rained out, we did get cloud cover that seemed to thicken right at totality. In other words, we saw the early stages (where the moon slowly moves across the sun) fine, because the sun’s rays were strong enough to pierce the thin clouds. But when the eclipse went total, we couldn’t see my favorite part: the firey black hole in the sky.

However, about a minute before totality ended, the clouds thinned and – gasps, cheers and roar of the crowd – we saw it. I grinned like an idiot and stared. Al Drew, a decorated officer and ex-Special Ops in the US Air Force, ex-test pilot, and current NASA astronaut who flew STS-118 and spent 13 days in space (including 10 on the International Space Station), was flabbergasted. “There it is!” he chirped, like a wide-eyed child who’s meeting a real live astronaut. “That’s it! Is that it?” (He was much more eloquent when interviewed later by the swarms of local media, which was thrilled to have a real live astronaut (and a black man to boot!) in their midst.)

So yes, even if you’ve been in space, and spent your down time on the flight deck of the space shuttle, with all the lights turned off, watching the stars and the earth – even then, a total solar eclipse blows your mind.

I was disappointed, of course. But we still saw all the key moments: the odd underwater light, a 360-degree sunset, the edge of the moon’s shadow hurtling towards us as totality neared its end, the diamond ring, and then the truly remarkable speed at which late dusk returns to mid-day as the moon moves away from the sun.

I do not regret traveling all this way to see it. Neither did Al, who flew from Moscow (actually Star City, where we met via Esther) via Beijing on a 36-hour turnaround for the occasion. It’s funny – any “New York Times writer” fame I might had had with Rick’s crowd was quite easily trumped by “real live NASA astronaut!” So while Al patiently dealt the the swarm of tour-groupees and local media I got to take in the whole scene.

Of course, spending 36 hours with Al was fascinating in its own right. We drank Tsingtao by the Yangtze, discussed everything from US foreign policy to farting in a space suit, and ate a lovely meal at a table for 10 in a local restaurant that was roughly the size of hangar.

So yes, I’d say that the eclipse was a success.
——-
Now I’m back in Beijing and leaving for Mongolia early Monday morning, having cut short this leg of my China time. I’m still getting too frustrated here to have a good time on my own. I’m hoping that a month of cheering up in Mongolia will provide me with a good reset with China. I’ll try again when it’s cooler and when I haven’t been ripped off as I cross the border. Reset my Chinese karma, if you will.

I need a computer!

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I’m sitting here at the Internet-connected computers at my hostel – the Qianmen Hostel in Beijing. I’m by the door out to the noisy, hot street. The air conditioner next to me is leaking, so one of the staff is mopping around me. Behind me, other guests are coming and going through the door, sometimes bumping me with their backpacks as they pass.

This is no way to write anything interesting and/or thoughtful!

So I’ll stick to banalities for the moment.

Despite the leaking air conditioner, this place is really lovely – an old wooden building with rooms set around a cool inner courtyard. The staff is friendly and cheerful. They serve a huge, cheap breakfast with good coffee. Good stuff.

While here I met a gaggle of Brits – 5 just-graduated women and one early-30’s man – who invited me out with them last night. We went to a lake district north of the Forbidden City, where a huge number of loungey bars have opened up. The setting was nice, the bars were basically interchangeable, and the “we’ll just go out for a drink or two” turned into a sleepy 3 am cab ride back to the hostel. Good times.

Today I leave for Shanghai but overnight bus. If my miming and the bus-ticket vendor’s broken English have the same meaning, then it’s a sleeper bus – meaning I’ll have a bed (short and narrow, but still a bed). If not, it’ll be 15 hours being crammed into an Asian-sized seat, with Asian leg room. But heck, the ticket was cheap – 266 yuan (about $47) vs the 655 yuan it would have cost for the train.

Ugh, this is boring, right? Yeah. I’m going to end this torture now, and hope that my HP Moscow/NASA connection comes through in a few days.

Ha HA. Welcome to China (version II)

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Greetings! Surprised, some of you? Well, DrC, my dear and clever friend, sent me his proxy info to help me (as he put it) get around the “Great Firewall of China.”

To catch everyone up, a few days ago I sent this note to a few friends and family:

———–
So, I’m spamming all 33 of you because, as readers of my blog and/or followers of my Facebook, I thought you’d be interested to know that yes, I’m in #&$*(%ing China, and no, neither Facebook (expected) nor my blog (unexpected) are available. So expect silence for a few weeks.

In case you’re wondering, I am not amused with China so far. I have gotten ripped off every 3 hours or so, on average, since I arrived on Saturday afternoon. The first thing that happened: my bus left me at the border. It just took off without waiting for me, leaving me in the middle of laughing cabbies – they were all in on the scam – to insist that I pay 100 yuan (about $18) for a 5-minute cab ride into the actual town. And that’s just the beginning. Ooh, what a story – from Saturday morning at 7 am until Monday very-early at 3 am I’ve been fighting with Chinese bullshit, scam artists, shoddy transportation, and jerks. Grumble.

Happily, I finally made it to Beijing (last night at 3 am) and am staying at a lovely hostel within spitting distance of Tianamen Square. Also, the French daughter/father travelers I met in Vladivostok are here until tomorrow night, so we went out for cheap and delicious Peking Duck this evening. But really, that’s the only pleasant thing I have to say so far.

Anyway, I don’t want to complain too much. But I wanted to let you know that I am safe, but I won’t be posting for a while.

The rough plan is to stay here until Thursday, then to Shanghai (Ollie plz put me in touch with your cousin!) for the weekend, and then to Wuhan on Monday for the eclipse on Tuesday the 22nd. Then up to Xian, I think, then I go to Mongolia soon after (still hazy on details). I will try again to post, from a different internet cafe – maybe one that can get around the filtering (though I doubt it).

OK I’m off to sleep, in a bed, for the whole night, for the first time since Friday. Yay!
———–

Things have, in fact, turned around since that first frustrated missive from here. I haven’t gotten ripped off since (!), and a few things have gone well: I visited the Forbidden City and the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which were both very interesting (if hot and crowded, to paraphrase Tom Friedman). I’ve gotten used to China – the culture shock coming over a land border from Russia, I think, was greater than it would have been had I come from the US on a plane.

Most cheeringly, thanks to Esther I might get a replacement for my hopelessly broken HP laptop (it would have cost more to fix than I paid for it). Esther, being Esther, is arranging with (ahem) the managing director of HP in Russia to find me one and send it to China with one of her NASA astronaut friends, who I met in Star City in May and who’s coming to see the eclipse with me next week. As Coline, the French woman I befriended in Vladivostok, said, “It’s nice to have connections.” Indeed!

OK, I’m going to wander Tienanmen Square for late-afternoon light. More later (yay).

[Thanks DrC, and Esther, and the rest of you who sent me words of encouragement after my China email. I have the greatest friends in the world! ]

For Henry

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This morning (yesterday evening, your time!) I was chatting on IM with my friend Henry. The gist of the conversation was, “Where are you? What have you been doing? When the hell are you going to post again, you no-account layabout?”

The short answer is: I’m still in Vladivostok, waiting for my Chinese visa, which should be ready tomorrow morning. That means if all gos as planned, I’ll leave for China Saturday morning and arrive in Beijing Sunday evening local time.

[The trainspotting types among you might be wondering why it takes 36 hours to get to Beijing. “There’s a direct train, isn’t there?” you must be wondering. In theory, there is. Only it takes a gobsmacking 40 hours just to get to Harbin, the transport hub of northeast China. I could get halfway through Siberia in that time! The reason for the time delay is shrouded in mystery. Evidently on this route the Russian and Chinese officials each take about 8 hours to do their border thing (that’s 16 hours on a train, without a toilet). Plus the wheels of the train must be switched out (or something?) because Chinese tracks are a different size. So what should take about 20 hours, takes 40. No one can explain why trains on the Trans-Manchurian line, which enters China further west, don’t suffer the same delays. Either no one knows or they don’t feel like telling me. Personally, I blame the North Koreans.

Instead, I will take a ridiculously complicated bus/train route and save myself about a day: I’ll go northwest from Vladivostok to Ussuriysk by bus – 2 hours. Then west from Ussuriysk (RUS)/Suifenhe (CN), the Chinese border town, by another bus (3ish hours, depending on the border process). Then I have to hang around Suifenhe for about 5 hours waiting for the overnight train to Harbin (8 hours). Finally, if I make the tight connection, I can take a fast day train from Harbin/Beijing (8 hours), arriving around 5:30 pm Sunday. Crazy!]

So, what of Vladivostok? My initial good feeling about the place is still there. It’s a pleasant, surprisingly green city on gentle slopes that jut at odd angles into various bays of the Pacific. The city center is especially nice, featuring pre-revolution architecture, some of which has been restored.

But the weather! I can barely see anything, the fog is so thick. I only know I’m by the ocean thanks to the unmistakable scent of salt water and sight of statues splattered with seagull shit. It’s damp and cool. Sometimes the fog becomes rain, ending any attempt at wandering. Then suddenly the fog lifts, and for a few hours I can scurry around in the bright sunshine, taking photos and climbing to viewpoints. And then, just as suddenly, the fog sweeps in and all is grey once again.

Since I’ve been here I’ve spent quite a bit of time with Eugene, the just-graduated Russian student I met on the train from Ulan-Ude. His mother grew up here and he spent his first 10 or so years here. When his mother lost her job the family – parents and two boys – was forced to live in a one-room flat. After a few months of that, they decided to move to Tomsk, where they had family, though the father didn’t want to go. Now Eugene, his brother and his mom are here putting the papers together so they can sell their old one-room flat.

There’s a lot that’s interesting about Eugene. He’s remarkably focused, for a 22-year-old. At the moment he works for Gazprom, the Russian oil & gas company, doing some sort of logistical project management. But he wants to work for a foreign company, because they have a clear career path laid out. At Gazprom, I guess, your promotions are left to the mercy of the moods and popularity of your direct boss. But Eugene is going places, and wants to see exactly where his job will take him, and how long it will take to get there.

I was shocked when I met his mother, who looks Buriyat (ethnically similar to Mongol). He must, I thought, take after his father 100% – this very tall, very blue-eyed, very white Russian betrays no Asian blood. In fact, his mom is only half-Buriyat: her father was Buriyat and her mother, believe it or not, was Jewish. So this little Asian woman is a Russian Jew, and only recently told her sons that they, too, are Jewish. It’s as outlandish as some Irish guy from the Bronx named, say, Patrick Canavan, being Jewish. Oh wait…

For his part, Eugene seems proud and excited and curious about his Jewish heritage, and is planning a visit to Israel. He wants to get his Israeli passport.  I could be wrong – I’m neither Jewish nor Russian – but I have a feeling he hasn’t quite grasped the discrimination that I fear is coming his way. I hope I’m wrong.

So I came all the way to Vladivostok expecting Russian sailors, concrete ugliness, and lots of Chinese & Korean immigrants (and illegals). Instead I found American sailors, European architecture and Russian Jews. That’s Russia!

OK, I must run out and get some fresh air and groceries. I promise to post again today, at least once. I’ve had various things running around in my foggy head, only some of which are at all interesting. I’ll try to pick only the interesting bits to write about.

In a fog

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I’ve been in foggy Vladivostok for 5 days, with great wifi internet access, but for some reason I haven’t posted. There’s so much to say about my train ride here, about this beautiful city full of American sailors (!), about the people I’ve met here.

But I’m afflicted with fog of my own – unable to write, to concentrate. It’s hard to be “always on” – to be constantly figuring out where to go and how, meeting new people from different countries, becoming acquainted with a new city, planning future itineraries…and writing, too. Every once in a while I’ll need a break.

So for the past few days I’ve been laaazy. Yeah, I applied for my Chinese visa (ready on Friday!). Yeah, I met American navy guys who are here for a week on a sort of friendship-exchange mission. Yeah, I met up with my new friend Eugene, who I met on the train, where he played interference between me and various vodka-fueled Russian army recruits. Yeah, I stayed out late drinking beer with a couple I met here in the hostel while they waited for their 3 am train. And I’ve wandered around a good bit of Vladivostok as well.

I might write about these people and experiences in a later post. In the meantime, though, I’m going to read about Steve McNair’s sad end and Sarah Palin’s ineloquent Nixon impression and other trash.

Sleepless in Irkutsk

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Providing a neat book-end to my time in western Baikal, I am again awake at 6:30 am, sitting at the kitchen table of Baikaler hostel. In two hours I’ll be on a train to Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia and the biggest city on the east side of Lake Baikal.

This time, instead of my sinuses keeping me awake it’s my brain. Last night I visited with Anton, my hiking guide and (I hope) new friend. We talked about many things, including the birth of his truly adorable 3-month-old named Polly. But the thing that’s kept me awake most of the night is sustainable tourism and Russia (I’m trying to put together a story proposal), and his very convincing pitch for me to go to Severobaikalsk (on the north shore of Baikal, and difficult to get to from Ulan-Ude) and to come back for an ice trek across the lake for my birthday in March.

All of a sudden I’m seriously considering skipping Mongolia entirely and just doing it next year, after coming back to Baikal. Because I need to be in Wuhan for the eclipse July 22, I’ll need to go straight from Vladivostok to southern China, then back up to Mongolia, then back down through China to Vietnam, Malaysia, etc. Pain in the ass. If instead I just do Russia/China/Vietnam/Malaysia for the diving season/back to Russia in March/Mongolia….hmmm. But that means Mongolia in April/May time, which isn’t ideal weather.

The other option is to skip Vladivostok this time and head straight to Mongolia after UU/Severobaikalsk, stay in Mongolia for just two weeks and then hightail it down to Wuhan. Then I can hit Vladivostok when I come back next March. This has the benefit in Mongolia of being the right season for and overlapping my time there with Nikkie, Nikki and Russell. But then only 2 weeks (instead of a month) in Mongolia. And…I *have* to make sure I go to Vladivostok, which (rather oddly) has been on My List since I was a little girl.

Someone, please tell me what to do!

Also, after all my ambivalence about Russia, I trust everyone is making note of the irony of me planning a return visit so soon?

As I said, Anton is very convincing. But also…I’ve realized that Baikal has me hooked. It’s beautiful and difficult and rugged and complex and intriguing and always-changing and grumpy and breathtaking and boasts a list of superlatives: biggest freshwater lake, biggest unfrozen fresh water source, deepest lake, oldest lake, home to a number of endemic flora and fauna, and so on. You can swim in it, dive in in (in theory), search for sunken treasure, drive, walk or bike across it, rock- or ice- climb along it, etc.

And most people have never heard of it.

From Russia, with frustration

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I’m back in Irkutsk after three days of not diving Lake Baikal. The dry suit was too big, the weather too poor, the dive shop too disorganized. Thwarted by Russia once again!

Since my delightful detour into Tuva, which felt like I left Russia for a week, it seems my ambivalence about Russia has not changed. I escaped the shaman in Abakan (I can’t stop saying that – it’s too funny), only to I find myself back in plain old dour Russia. I think I’ve found a big reason for my ambivalence, however: Russians are also ambivalent about themselves, about their country.

Over my 8 weeks here I have spoken with businessmen (as opposed to Russian biznesmen, who are closer to mafiosos than entrepreneurs), administrators at nonprofit organizations, educators, university and high school students, tour operators, lawyers, retirees, and dozens of others. They come from all over Russia – Moscow, Kazan, Yekaterinburg, northern Siberia, eastern Siberia, Tuva. As you’d expect from such an enormous country, I’ve gotten dozens of different impressions about the state of Russia, and what it needs. The one unifying thread is that things are not going well, that the people are struggling to find a good way – a Russian way – to live; the whole country is searching for a Russian identity. Dilyara Sharikova, the head of a private business school Kazan, was eloquent and remarkably blunt: “I am not optimistic about Russia. It needs a very long time – not even money – to find our own way of living. Now we are living half in the Soviet system, half in the US/European way. We need to find a synthesis. We have American, Asian, Soviet, Communist concepts. We need our own, new concepts. This will take a long time – 100 years. Our mentality is very conservative. Too conservative.”

For 70 years Russians were told that they are a world superpower. When the Soviet Union disintegrated, they were suddenly left staring at the shriveled old man behind the curtain instead of the Great and Powerful Oz. While they rubbed their eyes in bewilderment, oligarchs stole much of the country’s riches and deposited the profits in offshore accounts while the same old politicians donned masks of democracy yet continued to rule as before. And most people I’ve spoken with don’t really believe in democracy, or don’t understand or feel the power it may give them. They view voting as a joke – they already know who will win an election before it happens.

The people I’ve spoken with are angry and frustrated at the loss of the only positive aspects of the Soviet times – full employment, free health care, good education. They’ve been left with no safety net, and no rules or examples for how to make a life. Most Russians I’ve met live in the shade on either side of the fence between legal and illegal. Honest entrepreneurs from Moscow to Irkutsk make daily choices between doing business legally – standing in absurdly long lines for a rubber stamp on an absurdly long form, paying exorbitant random fees for basic banking transactions, and so on – and spending time actually running a profitable business. Parents “bribe” their kids’ teachers for good grades or a passing mark on an entrance exam; they have to, because there are limited spots and teachers have no choice but to supplement their meager incomes to survive.

In the meantime, Moscow spends the Federation’s money on show projects – Olympic facilities in Socchi; a bridge to nowhere in Vladivostok, in advance of the Asean Summit to be held there; Special Economic Zones, where in the name of innovation and entrepreneurship a few hand-picked companies get huge tax breaks and other benefits in closed office park-like facilities.

It’s all quite depressing. As I write this, it occurs to me that I haven’t met a single happy, contented or optimistic Russian. It’s a country running scared, covering up their emotions with stoicism, maliciousness or heavy drinking.
————————

I write all this with a giant caveat: I’ve only been here 8 weeks, for god’s sake. Anton the hike guide was right when he said my fellow tourists and I would never understand Russia. This is true of any country I visit, but I think it’s even more true here. First of all, as I said Russians themselves don’t know what they are. But also there are at least two Russias, and probably more: European Russia and then Asian Russia, what most people incorrectly lump into Siberia.

In my travels I keep thinking that Lonely Planet needs to make many different guides for Russia – there is too much to see, too much convoluted history, too little tourist information in every oblast or independent federation or other section of Russia to fit into one 800-page guidebook.

As I travel east I find people’s perceptions about themselves as Russians are as complex and varied as each section of Russia. I wonder what it’ll be like in China – another huge country split into a rich, powerful section (the east coast) and a poorer, neglected section (the west).