Day 281 - Monday Aug 10 - The long long walk

Our day begins at 5:45 am - we get up, make breakfast and organize before meeting our guide, Igor, for our hike.

We originally meet Igor on Day 281 through our guidebook, which gives directions to a nearby hostel that's popular with mountain climbers. We head there looking for trail maps but when we arrive, we discover that all that's left of the hostel are the burnt foundations. There was a fire in December, he tells us, and since then he and his girlfriend and their pets have been living on the grounds of the hostel, alternating between a tent (summer) and a mongolian ger (winter). He's philosophical about the loss of the building: "It's more important that everyone got out all right." Their set up is rustic but cozy and neat. Wildflowers are knee-high. A line of laundry hangs next to the fence that surrounds the property.

Our original plan - to simply pick up a map and find a few trails ourselves - changes drastically when we ask Igor this hypothetical question: "What kind of treks can be done in a day?" Igor traces it on our map: up one mountain to a lake above the tree line, then up and over into the mountain valley before heading back down, past a few waterfalls, to Arshan. He estimates it would take at least 10 hours, depending on the speed we hike.

And so our walk officially begins at 7:15 am. The first part of the trip is fairly gentle and we pass rivers and small waterfalls as we work our way up through the forest. Igor is just as much of a camera fanatic as Pierre is, and when he's not taking pictures he's enjoying the view (as he waits for us). The forest looks a lot like the forests we've seen in western Canada, only it feels bigger, somehow, and it has spiders that bite. Igor walks with a stick held up in front of him as though he's holding a flag in a parade. This, he explains, is to break the spider webs across the trail.

"If you break a web and a spider lands on you, it's better to do this" he says, and mimics picking up a spider gently from his neck, like a delicate berry, "rather than this." He mimics swatting his neck. "If you do that, it will bite you. You won't get sick but you won't feel very comfortable either." We let Igor keep the lead and leave him in charge of spider (re)location.





We keep a steady pace with only a few breaks to drink water and rest our legs, and it's almost noon by the time we finally get up past the tree line and stop for lunch on the shore of the lake.







Igor shares with us some of the local meat that he's brought with him and we share with him some of our dried fruit. During a stop to refill his water bottle in the lake, Pierre slips and soaks his feet. While planned dips in mountain lakes are generally better than unplanned, Pierre takes it pretty well, with only a bit of colorful accompanying language and some wry chuckles as he wrings out his socks and squeezes what water he can out of his shoes. After lunch, we head up to the ridge that leads into the mountain valley.






We stop there for about 30 minutes. Pierre would have stayed all day. The view is absolutely breathtaking. A crystal clear sky shining on a horseshoe shaped valley that opens out onto mountains as far as you can see on the horizon. The mountain meadow's lush green colour is dotted with spots of wildflowers and a few orange tents. A little river runs down one side of it and becomes a waterfall that we will see later on. It's hard to tear yourself away from that kind of splendor, but perhaps the experience is all the more precious for being brief. So we make our way down the lip of the bowl and Igor shows us how to hold our weight on the steep slope by digging our walking sticks into the loose stone and leaning onto them.






In the valley is a Russian yogi and a group of people joining her on her yoga retreat. Igor tells us that the yogi spends July to December of every year in this valley meditating (and doing yoga, I suppose). It's a lovely spot but full of blackflies - their legs and arms are covered with bites. I admire the group for putting up with the bugs. I, in my thoroughly un-zen state, spend the duration of our time in the valley rocking my walking stick back and forth in front of my body to keep the bugs from landing on me. The yogi and her friends don't swat at the bugs once.

A few of the yogi's guests are leaving today and they join us for the walk down. Veronica and Sergei have been in the mountain valley for two weeks.

"What do you eat up here?" I ask Veronica as we start walking down.

"Kasha," she says: buckwheat porridge. "Twice a day." Later on, they're both enthusiastic about a snack of dried fruit, bread and mutton that Pierre, Igor and I pool together during a break.

After a quick side trip to a waterfall (Igor tells us: "exclusive". Apparently not everyone gets to see this one, and we tend to agree as the scramble down the side of the cliff is pretty hairy at times) in a lower part of the valley, Igor finally leads us down the mountain towards town. The route is beautiful and the weather is great, but by about hour 10 of the walk, Pierre and I are pretty tired.

Unfortunately, we still have several more hours of walking to go before we can stop. By hour 11, I confuse being tired of walking with being tired of the mountain. By hour 12, I resent the mountain. There is swearing, mostly in my head.

The entire descent form the valley and at least 80% of our route is along rocky river banks which require a lot of clambering and balancing. As Pierre learned earlier, his shoes don't do well on wet rocky terrain and so he treads carefully. In combination with the fatigue, we're slower than we should be. We pass more waterfalls, stop for tea at a tent site with a friend of Igor's, do a few river crossings over some slippery logs and makeshift bridges and then pass more waterfalls. By the time we arrive back in town at around 8:30 pm, Pierre and I are both worn out. In total, we've walked some 24 kilometers. The sky is still light thanks to the long northern summer days - we visit with Igor for awhile in his yard, then head to a snack shop for a late dinner of borsch and meatballs and stumble home to bed.






The verdict: a beautiful, beautiful hike that I have no desire to repeat for a long, long time.

Photo credits: A big thanks to Igor for sending us the pictures that he took that day!

Day 280 - Sun Aug 9 - Ulan Ude to Arshan

From the previous day's research, we know that there are mini-vans that run daily from the Ulan Ude train station to the village of Arshan, our next destination. These mini-vans leave every hour between 8:00 am and 10:00 pm, and only depart once every seat is filled. It's an eight hour ride, about 12$ per person, and seats are on a first-come-first-served basis.

Originally, we plan to catch the 8:00 am, but when we reach the city bus stop near our hotel it seems the buses run rarely on weekend mornings. Our backpacks, etc, very clearly mark us out as tourists, and a Buryat men waiting at the bus stop strikes up a conversation with us. He and his friends are local boys, from villages in the area, living in town and working on construction sites. They like the town and enjoy having the area's famous Tibetan Buddhist temple (datsan) nearby where they can go on their more spiritual days.

Today is their day off and they're up early, hoping to continue the party from the night before. "We're not drunks," he explains, "we're just having a good time." He just wants to clarify that they're in a different category from the full-time drinkers so common in town - those with the leathery skin, bleary eyes, staggering pace and sharp odour of chronic drinkers. "If you have hands and feet you should work," he says, and does not think very highly of those who ask for change for their drinks rather than working for it.

Pierre and I wait for our bus and talk with our new friend awhile until we finally realize we realize the bus we want may not come in time. We negotiate with a taxi driver and say goodbye to our worker friend. As we put our bags away, he continues to chat away, and I miss most of it but catch the gist at the end: "Is there anyway you could spot us 100 rubles?"

I see the logic in this: Pierre and I have enough money to spend on a 100 ruble taxi ride to the train station, so perhaps we've got an extra 100 (4$) lying around taking up space. I think up a way to say no that won't sound to him as though I'm turning down a panhandler. "Sorry," I say. "We only have enough for the taxi and bus."

He smiles his goodnatured smile - oh well, worth a shot - says good luck and wanders back to his friends at the bus stop.

At the station, there's no sign of the mini-van yet, so Pierre waits in the station out of the drizzle with our bags while I hover around the parking space where the 9:00 am Arshan bus should arrive sometime before the hour. A small crowd of passengers eventually gathers.

When the mini-van finally arrives, there's a scramble for seats. As expected, there's shoving and I get a few elbow jabs, but in the end the fight for seats is pretty tame as far as transportation scrums go. I wiggle my way far enough into the side door to throw my back pack and one grocery bag into a pair of seats. Voila, we have a reservation. Pierre staggers over with our remaining bags - we tuck one next to the driver, another under the back seat, wedge our small backpacks and grocery bags aound our calves and rest Pierre's guitar on his lap. Crowded, but fairly cosy. The ride goes smoothly for the first 7 hours of the trip.

Though the sign in the minivan window says "ARSHAN" our bus driver doesn't plan on going all the way there. Instead of taking the turn to Arshan, the driver tells a group of us to get out. This kind of change of plan is pretty familiar to us by this point in the trip - getting from A to B is always less straightforward than we expect. Still, I'm not clear on why we need to get out.

I turn to another woman exiting the minivan - she also looks a little confused. "Do we continue by foot?" I ask her. She and her friend laugh like I've just made a witty joke. Apparently, no, we won't continue on foot.

We wait at the road side "bus stop" with our mini-van driver for about 10 minutes until a bus passes by. The minivan driver talks to the bus driver, and they seem to negotiate a passenger swap. This allows the mini-van driver to continue to the next and final town without making the detour to Arshan, and the bus driver only has to go to Arshan without continuing on to the next town. We lug all of our things onto the bus for the 20 minute ride to Arshan.

The stops off at a little bus hut near a park and we pile off again with our many bags. I take a few moments to load myself up and when I look up I notice Pierre looking at a loss. An elderly man is lying on the ground on the curb next to the bus. From the way his wife calmly sits down her bag and lies down on the ground next to him to talk , I assume that he's on the ground by choice. She is sober, he is not. From his tone of voice I assume he's refusing to go anywhere after the bus ride. We offer to give a hand and Pierre manages to help the man and his wife as far as the grass a few feet away before the man gets cranky again and doesn't want any help. His wife laughs.

"We'll sit on the grass awhile," she says to us. "Where are you from?" I tell her. She lowers her husband onto the grass. "We have lots of drunks here in Buryatia," she says and laughs again.

"In Canada, too," I say. No one around us seems to be taking much notice of the public-fall-down-drunkenness at 4:00 pm. It reminds me of Ulan Ude. I ask her for direction to the Arshan Spa, where we think we might find accommodations, and she poins us down the street.

As we walk down the street, we pass fences and houses, most of which have little signs that say "zhilyo" (жилье). This means more or less "lodgings available." The guidebook mentions these and says they are quite a good deal, but we continue onto the Arshan Spa. It's not quite what we expected, in terms of price or appearance, and the lady at the front desk is a mix of multiple front desk cliches from Hollywood movies: bulldog expression, bleached blonde bun high on her head. She grudgingly gives us the price information and a registration form. Pierre and I debate the price and the type of room we're likely to get. In the end, we decide to check out a zhilyo before committing to a room here. Not an extensive search - just one or two.

The first place I check out isn't willing to take two people for just two or three days, so I check out lodgings at the house next door. The building and yard are unassuming by Russian standards, but neat - wood fence, wood house, woodpile in the yard. I wander in the front gate and the owner, Danil, comes out to give me a quick tour of the rooms he has for offer.

The first room is simple and dark, with cots and a hotplate, but the second is much more charming. The place feels like a cottage - the front door leads into a small bright kitchen area with a sink, hotplate, fridge and table; a second door leads into the sleeping area. There I find four cots and a couch, a TV and a whitewashed woodstove.

I love the place but with all the hiking we're hoping to do, I know we're both looking for a place where we can take a shower from time to time. I have no problem with using the nearby outhouse, but I have no desire to take cold water sink showers for the next few days.

"Do you have a shower?" I ask.

"Well, we have a banya," he says. I recognize the word, but I have never had a chance to use a banya myself, the Russian sauna/washing room that is such a part of Russian culture.

"Are we allowed to use it?" I ask, just to clarify.

He gives me a funny "of course" look. "Just tell me an hour before you need it and I'll start the stove."

Danil takes me across the yard and shows me the two by two metre wooden shack with a white water tank above a woodstove. He shows me the lightswitch and where the door locks for privacy, explains how to pull hot water from the heated tank and how to mix it with the cold mountain water from the tap on the wall. There are basins and metal scoops for collecting the water and pouring it out again.

I go to collect Pierre and our bags and we walk back to Danil's place, past the cows that as always are loose in town, trimming the grass that lines the roadside and near the parks.

Pierre's impressed with our little cottage and thrilled about the banya. Since there are so many cots and couches in our place we expect that we might get roommates at some point, but it turns out that the place is all ours for only 24$CAN per night. We like our little home the nearby mountains so much that we decide to skip visiting Lake Baikal and instead stay in Arshan until Day 286 when we catch our train to Tomsk.

We celebrate our first night with a trip to the banya and a bowl of borscht from a local snack shop. We meet with a local guide to set up a long day hike on Day 281 before heading home to sleep.

Days 278 to 279 - Fri Aug 7 to Sat Aug 9 - Ulan Ude

The train pulls into our station around 7:30 am, and we step off the train with our four backpacks, a guitar, a scooter and the remaining grocery bag of food. The signs in the train station are in cyrillic, the same as in Mongolia, but this time the words make sense to me. Toilets. Magazines. Left Luggage Room. Exit to City.

We have no plan for our first few hours in Russia and no place to stay, so we leave our bags at the left luggage office and wander downtown. As always, the area around the train station is pretty grim - warehouses, overhead wires, rundown brick buildings, and not much of a pedestrian area. It doesn't feel dangerous at this time of day, merely neglected, and after a 15 minute walk we reach the town's more scenic main square, which is actually a rectangle. At one side is Ulan Ude's former pride: the world's largest Lenin's head. We stop to get a photo.

"I think they're pretty safe with that record now," says Pierre: not too many new Lenin heads going up anymore. Ulan Ude's version is slightly cross-eyed and is big enough to dwarf an adult. The locals who pass by us on the sidewalk barely notice it.

The hotels in town are busy today, though we don't see many tourists around, and the prices are generally 50 to 70% higher than the guidebook suggests. We hope this isn't a hint of what we're to expect price-wise in the rest of Russia. In the end, we settle on a fairly central, fairly cheap hotel in the southwest part of town, near an outdoor market. The room is on a half-renovated floor. When we walk to the communal toilet (not yet renovated) at the end of the hall, we pass by the older rooms, airing out after their cleanings. The white walls are chipped and graying. In contrast, our room is neat and freshly painted with a sink in one corner. From our window, we can see down towards the market, and down onto the streetside kiosks that sell cigarettes, beer and hot snacks. The pay showers (thankfully, renovated) are down the hall and for 2.50$ CAN per person you get all the hot water you can stand once the water finally works its way from the basement up to the third floor.

The key to the shower is held by the floor monitor/concierge that the Russians call a dezhurnaya/дежурная (from the French term de jour?). She is also our main source for boiled water and new towels. By the front door there is a guard reading a paper who registers us in his guest log the first time we head out into the city.

The center of Ulan Ude is small and a bit run down, but still beautiful and very different from what we've seen in the rest of Asia. Many of the older residential buildings are made of dark stained wood planks with carved wooden lattices framing the windows. The foundations of most buildings are no longer level, with many buildings either tipping down into the dirt on one end or warping in the middle near the sidewalks. We wander around for a few hours before deciding to find something to eat.

We decide to head into a "zakusuchnaya" (закусочная). The word is on signs almost every few houses in our part of the city - the word doesn't ring a bell from my first trip but I know it translates into something like "snack shop." We head into one one of them - a small gate in the fence leads to a short mud path that leads into what looks like someone's private kitchen. At first I'm not sure if we're in the right place.

We poke our heads in and I ask a passing woman "Can we?"

She nods. "Of course, of course," and waves us through to the dining room. The room is painted robin's egg blue from ceiling to floor, with plastic blue table cloths over mismatched tables. Some tables have benches, others have wooden chairs. A fly strip hangs in the middle of the room. From a menu taped to the table by the cash I order us two bowls of beef noodle soup. When we take a seat we discover that each meal also comes with all the fresh baked bread you can handle.

We wander out again. At one point, while Pierre is (re)taking a photo, I go into a grocery store to kill time. When I meet up with him again I show him our travel buddy for the day: a round loaf of bread that works out to about 40 cents. It's roughly the size of a cantaloupe. We have a bite and instantly realize that it's been 10 months since our last real loaf of bread. Fresh whole wheat bread. Pierre is glowing.

Later on the same street, while Pierre is taking a photo, a man pops his head out of a window - he's heard us speaking English and is curious. "Where are you from?" We tell him and he leans onto the window sill and makes himself comfortable. His name is Victor, he looks to be in about his 50s or 60s, and used to work as a school teacher. The building he leaning out of at the moment is under renovation - we're not quite clear on what he's doing there or if he's one of the workers. He talks a bit about his background (Buryat), the building's history (someone famous lived in it once) and Princess Diana (because of my name). Another worker passes by and says something to him - it seems to be his signal to go back to work. He says goodbye and disappears back into the building. Later on we pass him again on the street and chat again for a few minutes.

Day 279 is rainy, so we make a few trips to the store for supplies and explore another corner of our neighbourhood. Nearby is a Russian Orthodox church where we are treated to the first onion domes of our trip.

The rain falls sporadically and the streets are still flooded with last night's rainfall. We make running jumps over puddles to make it dry to the other side. One of Pierre's jumps meets a slippery end, so we make a pit stop to patch up his scraped hand with disinfectant and bandaids. We head to a nearby pharmacy to replenish our supply of portable swabs of rubbing alcohol.

At the pharmacy we enter into a situation which is common of the next weeks of our trip: myself and my dictionary acting the role of interpreter/communicator for our little group of two. To Pierre, it is as though the Russian version of Shakespeare is flowing from my lips. In reality, it's often more like this:

"Hello. Please help us. I do not know the name of the thing we seek. It is small and square and when you have a hurt, you can open and do this [mime wiping wound] to clean. Do you know this thing? Do you have them?"

Functional, yes - it's gets us the swabs we need - but not much finesse.

Days 276 to 278 - Wed Aug 5 to Fri Aug 7 - The Trans-Mangolian Railway: Beijing to Ulan Ude

We arrive at the train station at around 6:45 am for train K3 from Beijing to Ulan Ude via Mongolia.


Our cabin is small and cozy with 4 beds, a fan and a table. There's enough room in the cabin to stand up, turn around, play the guitar and stretch. The first day, we receive two meal vouchers each. When we arrive at the restaurant wagon to use our lunch vouchers, we are served a a simple lunch of rice, fried celery and mystery-meatballs. We try to identify the meat.

"Canned flakes of ham?" says Pierre.

We share a table with a young couple from Luxembourg who are part of a larger party of Luxembourgers on their way to Ulan Battar for a colleagues' wedding. We run into the couple again several times, once at dinner ("Mystery meatballs again") and once again at the China-Mongolia border crossing at around 8:30 pm. Everyone is ushered off the train while it's taken into the shop to undergo a few adjustments to be compatible with Russian and Mongolian train tracks. The Luxembourgers and the rest of the wedding attendees invite us over to their part of the platform to take part in their trainside vodka party. Pierre plays a bit of guitar while we visit and wait to be let back on the train. We're let back on around 1:30 am.


Pierre and I sleep soundly and have a breakfast of instant oatmeal and fruit in our cabin (no meal vouchers for the Mongolian leg of the journey). The countryside has changed drastically since the previous night, and we are already past the Gobi desert and into the wide, green, rolling Mongolian steppes. The train rolls through small towns and settlements, past groups of children and adults riding across the plain on horseback or motorcycle, past muddy fenced yards that surround either simple wood houses or the white circular shapes of low, cloth-covered traditional gers.


At every stop of the train, Pierre and I wait for another passenger to come and occupy the upper bunks of our cabin, but eventually we realize that we may have the cabin to ourselves for our whole trip. It's a comfortable way to travel, and though I've never travelled much on trains, the experience feels nostalgic. It reminds me of travelling in the back of an old camper while driving across Canada.

We close our cabin door and fix most of our meals in the cabin - simple snacks of fruit, cups of soup and peanut butter sandwiches. At the end of Day 227 we break down and head to the food cart. We are surprised that the run-down comfort of the Chinese restaurant wagon has been swapped for a gorgeous Mongolia restaurant wagon. The walls, tables and doors are all carved from a warm, golden wood and there are traditional weapons (bow and arrow), saddles and clothing hanging on the walls. We have a quick meal of Mongolian noodle soup, fried roast beef and fries, and then disappear back into our cabin to enjoy the sunset.

Crossing the Mongolian-Russian border is a long tedious process that starts just after sunset at around 8:30 pm, with border guards collecting our passports and visas. This is followed by customs forms (filled out in duplicate), more passport checks and several hours of waiting. When we finally get our passports back at 2:00 am, we're finally allowed off the train to use the bathroom. (The train bathrooms are locked during any stop.) We brush our teeth, wash our faces, go back to the wagon to sleep and barely notice when the train finally starts moving again a few hours later.

Days 269 to 275 - Wed July 29 to Tue Aug 4 - Beijing

Most of the trip, we haven't had a real schedule, but since we want to get a full 2 months in Russia, we actually have deadlines this month. On day 269 we close up shop in Huizhou, say a sad goodbye to Dre and Amelie and settle into Car 8, Top Bunks 9 & 10. We're a few days behind schedule - we should have arrived last Sunday but I caught a cold and refused to travel. We re-booked and had to sacrifice a few days from both Beijing and Russia to make it work - the only reason the timing is complicated is because a) there's paperwork to do for the Mongolian visa that takes a few working days to process and b) the Trans-Mongolian only leaves twice a week. We don't want to take any chances so we're trying to leave ourselves a bit of elbow room in our schedule.

We arrive in Beijing late on day 270 and book ourselves into the lovely and affordable Hai Inn in the Hu Tong alleys near the Lama Temple in the north east part of the center. Our wanderings let us stumble across a great place on our first night that serves Beijing Duck, and we go back almost every night afterward for dinner. On one of those evenings, Pierre gets inspired by a dab of plum sauce on his plate and with the help of a toothpick, paints it into a lovely likeness of a cow. If it becomes art, is it still "playing with your food"? The restaurant makes a lot of money off of us that week - when we aren't splurging there on the lovely duck, we're enjoying our last tastes of mutton soup, pickled garlic heads and chicken pockets at the Xi'An-style restaurant at the end of our street. We already miss Chinese food and we haven't even left yet.

We take care of paperwork - pick up our Trans-Siberian tickets and set up our Mongolian visas. Day 272 finds us on a small group tour to the Great Wall - we don't want to take a chance on waiting and possibly running out of time or good weather. The weather is not on our side - we end up with a foggy overcast day.

Actually, correction: the weather is not on Pierre's side. He wants to take pictures and the weather's cramping his style. I, on the other hand, love the fog and love not having the sun beat down on me as we make the 10 km trek from Jinshanling to Simatai. The wall is not too crowded but it is being fixed, so there are workers periodically, and the sections of wall that used to be more treacherous are a lot more tourist friendly. Pierre has been on this trek before: in a nutshell, what the route has gained in safety and health of the wall it has lost in terms of remoteness and atmosphere. A couple of vendors walk half of the wall with us, point out where the Mongolians (that the wall was meant to keep out) would have lived, tell us about their own village and their children, and stop with us when we have a short fruit and water break. At the halfway point they have to turn back, and the hard sell begins - they work on us awhile to buy some of the books or t-shirts they're carrying. We buy some postcards and continue on. The bus ride is an hour shorter on the way home than it was on the way there (3 hours, as opposed to 4). We go for duck when we get home.

On day 273 we visit the Lama Temple nearby, which Pierre has seen before. It's a short visit - we're getting a little templed out. However, it is beautiful. It's the second biggest Tibetan Buddhist temple in the country, and the largest outside of Tibet itself. It also boasts a massive Buddha sculpture carved out of a single trunk of sandalwood. Tourists aren't allowed to take pictures of the sculpture, but you can find them online and can get them from postcards. At 26 m in height, it is quite impressive. At one of the little market stalls there is also an award-winning carver of "chops", traditional stone signature stamps. We decide to get one as one of the few souvenirs we will bring them home from China.

Beijing is staggeringly polluted - this is the only clear day we have in the city, due to the downpour of the previous night; one day of storm clears up the air for a day and you can see blue sky, but by the end of the second day after the storm the smog and dust visibly slowly lower from the sky until everything further than a street or two away is hazy and blurry from the knees up.

Our second visit of the day is to the Temple of Heaven and its surrounding park. The primary pavilion is famous for its elaborate woodwork and architecture and a little further down the main Causeway is the whispering wall where you can whisper on one side of a curved sandstone wall and have a listener understand you on its other end, 180° across from you. Unfortunately, most likely due to obnoxious amounts of tourists all trying this at the same time, the wall is sort of fenced off and you're not really supposed to approach it too closely, thus thwarting attempts to actually prove the theorem. We spend a bit more time walking around the park and head off to try and catch the sunset on the Forbidden City from the top of the hill of the Jin Shan park directly north of it. Pierre is hoping to catch the light of the only sunset we get to see in the city, but the smog is already settling back in and the light is good but not great. Still, several pictures are gotten, a nice time is had and the view is enjoyed.

The following day, We make it to the Forbidden City and walk around the grounds. Another superlative, The Forbidden City is the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden buildings in the world. Typical of the grandeur and excess of royalty, the place is stuffed wall-to-wall with awe-inspiring scale and relentless, lavish detail. You wouldn't want the Emperor to have boring roofing tile, now would you? It is beautiful, however, and no visit to Beijing is complete without seeing it. Even if you've seen it before, you probably didn't see it all and there is always going to be something that catches your eye again and makes you appreciate all the effort that went into creating this place. As a hilariously offensive T-shirt once put it: "Slavery, it gets [things] done." We walk through Tian An Men square, directly south of the Palace. This is the largest public square in the world (about 440,000 m²), as the PRC would have it no other way. To the south is the Qianmen (Chi-Ahn-Men) gate which used to be part of the old city walls, torn down in the heyday of the communist era in a frenzy of modernization. Somewhere around the middle is the mausoleum of Chairman Mao where you can queue in a line that usually spans I'd guess at least a kilometer (and three or four people wide) by snaking to and fro along the area of the square in order to get a glimpse of the embalmed chairman himself. Seeing as - 1) Pierre has done this once before, 2) it's a really hot day, 3) it's one of our priorities to go see another communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, in Moscow - we decide to skip this attraction this time around.

In other parts of Beijing, we do a bit of shopping and walking around, discover that the cool-sounding tour of the underground tunnels has been closed permanently, and that the national museum is closed on Mondays (but we catch it on Tuesday). We eat whatever treats we can find (street food is always the way to go), and walk through the narrow streets of the Hu Tongs around the Forbidden Palace (who knew we'd find delicious fish and chips tucked away down here). On day 275, we wrap things up, pack and get some final supplies for our train trip the next day.

Update: still backpacking

We're still on the road working our way across Russia, but we're getting near the end of our backpacking phase and we should be settled in St. Petersburg in the next week. We didn't make a lot of stops across the country - it can get a bit too hectic packing up and leaving every 24/48 hours and distances are quite large in Russia. Instead, we narrowed things down to a few key places:

Ulan-Ude
Arshan
Tomsk
Vladimir/Suzdal
Moscow

Lots of onion domes, lots of icons. In a week or so we'll start putting up a few posts with photos.

Days 253 to 269 – Monday July 13 to Tue July 28

The rest of July is mostly a mix of hanging out and getting ready to leave Huizhou.  Conrad and Yen come to Huizhou for a visit a week after our trip to Xi Chong, and we get to say our final goodbyes, at least until we see them again in Canada.

Our original travel plan is to head out on Day 266 (Saturday July 25) - we've got our tickets booked and our hostel set and everything - but I catch a miserable cold and decide that a 28 hour train ride to Beijing just isn't in the stars that day.  We postpone our trip a bit longer than expected - the train is booked for the next few days and so we get tickets to catch the train on Wednesday July 29.

Our short-term intinerary is as follows (most of the dates in Russia are guesses):

Thursday July 30 to Tuesday August 4 : Beijing

Wednesday August 5 to Friday August 7 : Trans-Siberian Train (via Mongolia) to Russia.  First stop is Ulan Ude in Siberia.  

Saturday August 8 to Tuesday August 25 : random travels along the Trans-Siberian (including Lake Baikal) towards the west 

Wednesday August 26 to Monday August 31 : Moscow and the surrounding area

Tuesday September 1 to Wednesday September 30 : St. Petersburg

Thursday October 1 : flight home to Canada (with stopovers in Zurich and Geneva)

We hope to keep updating the blog as much as possible, but if necessary, we'll just do updates and post most of our pictures and stories once we're settled in St. Petersburg. (There will be free internet access at the Institute where I'll be taking a few lessons.  And no anti-Blogger firewall!)