How to Get Lost

Total distance travelled:
39,893 km / 24,788 mi

Total distance travelled on land:
14,117 km / 8,772 mi

Total distance travelled by air:
25,776 km / 16,016 mi

Longest train ride by distance:
Yekaterinburg to Krasnoyarsk – 2287 km / 1,421 mi

Longest train ride by time:
Yekaterinburg to Krasnoyarsk – 32:23 for 2287 km

Slowest train ride:
Ulan Ude to Ulan Baatar, 28:25 for 657 km – 23.12 km/hr / 14.37 mi/hr

Fastest train:
Maglev from Shanghai to airport – 431 km/hr / 268 mi/hr

Fastest long-distance train:
Tokyo to Osaka, 2:30 for 556km – 222.56 km/hr / 138.29 mi/hr

Longest flight:
Osaka to San Francisco – 8673 km / 5,389 mi

As we’ve moved along over this journey, I’ve taken pictures of things for posting to the blog. Some of them didn’t make it, for one reason or another. But hating to waste good pictures, I thought I’d throw them into a blog posting for all to experience.

The engine of my plane as I fly down to San Francisco:

Our British Airways 747 to London:

The women who decided to talk us up at the hotel in London (mother and daughter, quite friendly):

Amy and Nick (and me, but I took the picture) sit in a sushi restaurant in St. Petersburg. Russia has surprisingly good sushi for a country that seems to have very few Japanese:

Siberia doesn’t have a lot of features. It generally looks like either of the following two pictures. Usually more the former than the latter:

And periodically, you do see other trains:

The forests often get thicker, too:

Another shot of the Museum of Wooden Buildings. Didn’t post this as I took too many pictures there (was unsure of lighting, etc.):

This is a far, far better shot of the Mongolian Embassy in Ulan Ude, Russia. I think I chose the other one because it did look better … at least at the time:

Me at the lake in Mongolia. Wouldn’t want to go swimming in that, though. Probably not the “cleanest” of places, with all the waterfowl and horses:

Amy catches up on journal- and postcard-writing:

We caught a sunset at Hustai National Park. This was before I nearly froze to death:

A line of rail car bogies sit to one side in the bogie-changing shed in Erlian, China:

Most of you are probably wondering what the toilets in the trains looked like. Here’s an example of the “western” toilets. Never did take one of the squat ones, sadly…

On the road, especially for this length of time, you periodically have to do laundry. Normally, not an issue. But this is what it looks like after washing out all the sand from Mongolia:

We hit a great little restaurant in Beijing for lunch one day, and were served a pot of tea. Make with chrysanthemums. Not exactly normal, but quite tasty:

Don’t ask me what kind of store this is. With a name like that, who really cares, anyway?

This is the view from our hotel in Shanghai. As you can see, it was quite hazy there. The humidity was murder:

It rained a lot in Xian on our first day there. Nice, but wet:

Who doesn’t want to go to a Yummy Restaurant?

We walked around part of Xian’s walls one night. They looked pretty nice:

Our last meal in Xian was at a strange hotpot restaurant, where we had to get someone to translate the freaking menu for us because we couldn’t read it at all. It was pretty tasty, though:

We made a mistake of going to the “Entertainers”, a trio who perform in the lounge of the same name at the Hyatt in Xian. They forever butchered many of my favourite songs…

I meant to post about this. I mean, really, who names their water: “WAHAHA?”

At least you can’t miss the sign to get you to Kowloon (Hong Kong):

Chinglish isn’t escapable, even at the Chinese/Hong Kong SAR border crossing:

One of these is the actual border between China and Hong Kong SAR. I have no idea where the heck it is, as it’s no longer marked:

Rogue vendors are so bad in some areas that private property owners try to keep them out with signs like these:

Ferry traffic!

Our hotel in Kowloon was next to the Avenue of Stars, sort of like the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I found a few names I know:

Jackie Chan apparently heavily sponsors California Fitness. He’s probably an owner.

Inside our favourite dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong:

We had this at a sushi restaurant in Chiba. We thought it was some weird pickled eel. It was eggplant:

Today was errand day. Today, we decided to get our train tickets sorted out, and make plans for an excursion to the Great Wall. Inadvertantly, some things happened along the way…

First off, we hopped the subway down to Qianmen station (which is Tiananmen Square, but we weren’t headed there) to search through the hutong neighbourhoods. After a little dive in, we were diverted due to biological reasons (namely self-preservation having not to use the toilets in the back alleys). Out back on the main street, the decision was made to skip ahead to the Grand Hyatt Hotel for two reasons: exchange traveller’s cheques and see if they can handle tour bookings a little more easily.

(Just as a side note: if you’re travelling to parts distant, such as Russia, England, China, Hong Kong, Japan, and so forth, don’t bother with travellers cheques. Yes, they’re safe. Yes, they can be replaced. But they are not accepted everywhere. It’s (pardon ma francais) f$!@*ing annoying. Everywhere we’ve been, it’s been “sorry, we don’t accept those”. I’ve exchanged them successfully once. If you’re going, just bring a bank card and a VISA card. That’s all you need. Trust me on this. Even in Mongolia, you can use them — they have no ATMs, but banks will do the withdrawal for you.)

We scooted up the sidewalk on the east side of the road of Tiananmen Square, in the hopes of an expedient passage. We were almost immediately hit with the Art Exhibit people.

The Art Exhibit people, in case you’re wondering, is a bit of a scam. The idea is to entice tourists (generally English-speaking, as they don’t seem to speak other languages) to see an “art exhibit” that will close “in five minutes”, and encourage you to purchase something. It’s all quite nice, starting with “hello”, then going to “where are you from” to “is this your first or second time”, to the shpeal about the art exhibition. We’d been warned about this not only from Lonely Planet (thanks, guys!) but also by others who’ve been here before. In the span of about seven minutes we were hit four times. The last time, we resorted to speaking French to throw them off.

About 10 seconds after that, we ran into Noah and Justin, two brothers originally from Montreal who were touring China. We immediately hit it off with them, recounting our mutual experiences with trying to shake the sharks after the tourists. (Noah has a particularly novel way of getting rid of them. He looks them in the face, and tells them “I don’t speak English” as clearly as if he were telling you his phone number. Noah seems to follow the philosophy that visiting China is almost a game. We like these guys.)

The four of us pretty much hit it off (partly because Amy and I have been dying for some home-grown company, and both of them had great senses of humour), and hung out for most of the afternoon. We all headed down to the Grand Hyatt where I failed (yet again) to change all my damned travellers cheques for renminbi. (I’m so never taking these things again!) Then we tried to book a tour to the Great Wall.

We’ve been told that going to the Great Wall might not be fun. It all depends. For starters, you don’t go to Badaling if you’re actually looking for the Wall. Badaling is a restored section of the Great Wall, done in the grand ol’ Disney style. We’re thinking of Simitai, which is a little more authentic (at least according to Lonely Planet). But getting there is a bit more difficult. The conceirge at the Grand Hyatt (exceedingly nice, and outstanding English) suggested a taxi, which should cost about 800 renminbi (a little over $120, divided amongst four people) — considerably cheaper than any of the tour prices.

Justin and Noah then went to purchase tickets for their trip back to Shanghai (they’re flying in and out of there through Air Canada, and have yet to take the train here), and Amy finally found replacement books (she’s been suffering through Dostoyevsky for weeks). A trip through the rather nice mall nearby followed.

One thing about Beijing that all of us noticed. They’ve got the whole communist thing sorted out (mostly, aside from the odd overzealous crackdown, anyway). The mall was better than almost any that I’ve seen in North America. There were even BMW, Audi, and Volkswagon dealerships! And a store that sold a whack of Star Wars and Astroboy shirts.

Our ultimate destination, though, was Silk Street. This is the ultimate in (potential) bargains. It’s a massive four-floor store where you can find all sorts of brand-name clothing (whether or not it’s real depends on how good you are at mind-reading), and all of it for sale at a price you can attempt to get, if you’re good. This is where the good haggler comes into effect. So far, this isn’t me. You don’t get to browse here. You need to know what you’re looking for. You need to know what it is you want, and you need to be ready to wheel and deal. I figured this out after casually looking at a North Face jacket and deciding that it wasn’t anything I was interested in. I could have picked it up for about $10. Amy went after a Gap shirt (definitely fake) and a pair of zip-off pants. We’re thinking of going back to see if we can get some other bargoons.

Noah and Justin tried to get $25 Armani suits. They didn’t succeed … this time.

Walking through the place is hard. Not because it’s crowded, but because some of the vendors are fairly aggressive. (Noah swears that a couple of other places, such as Hong Kong, are worse.) You hear greetings shouted out often starting with “Mister” and “Lady”. One tried to tell my that my beloved Critical Mass sling pack is dirty. (A mark of pride, thank you very much!) Trying to leave the place through the somewhat-unmentionables area, we were treated to “Hellol, underwear!” and “Hello, socks!”. Very surreal.

Dinner was an interesting experience, with Amy and I (we’ll hook up with Justin and Noah for the Great Wall on Monday) walking into a restaurant near our hotel. I love the Chinese way of naming foods. It’s like trying to decipher the title of a Led Zeppelin tune to figure what it’s about. Such items included:

• The asparagus fries the shelled shrimp (shrimp with asparagus)
• The exquisite article livings purely (beer)
• The thou is more the dragon mountain
• Wrap the male fish (fish with vegetables, near as we can figure
• The parsley mixs the hair belly (I don’t think I wanna know)

And my personal favourite, although we didn’t order it:

• An article steams the big cabbage

The food, however, was pretty darn good, even if the start of one section read:

That was for the seafood section. Go fig.

Attention Lonely Planet! You might want to update your information for the next run of your Trans Siberian Railway book, ‘cuz a few things have changed.

According to Lonely Planet, the crossing from Mongolia to China takes about seven hours, during which time you can get off, change money, eat at the restaurant, and so on. However, they seem to be only covering the case that you’re crossing the border during the day. If you take train #24 from Ulaan Baatar to Beijing, things are a little different…

So you’ve survived the journey across the Gobi desert. It’s desolate. It’s not exactly the most interesting thing to see. Even three days of birch trees was better. You arrive at Zamin Uud, the border city in Mongolia. You’re about two hours late due to various delays along the line getting there. (Unlike Russia, Mongolia has only a single track through most of its area, and exceedingly few sidings with which to stagger train movements.) Due to late arrival, the exit process runs a bit quicker than the book suggests.

Although there is still the mandatory banging around of cars as the train is arranged for shuttling to Erlian, the Chinese border city. By the time you finally cross the invisible line, it’s dark. You can’t even see it. Arriving in Erlian, things happen pretty quickly, again. You’re still a bit behind schedule, but the shortened process in Mongolia has made up for a large portion of that time. The immigration officers come in, do their thing (one form in triplicate, two others are one-offs), and you’re tickety-boo.

Almost.

One problem remains (here’s where the train stuff comes in): the train you’re on can’t run in China. Russia, for some odd reason, has a wider track gauge than pretty much everyone else (not counting narrow-gauge railways, that is) — including China. However, someone planned for this, and the process to adapt the train is fairly simple, if esoteric.

Instead of letting everyone off the train (which is what is supposed to happen — note to Lonely Planet), the entire train is backed up to a large building about a half kilometre from the station house. The building is itself about 400 metres long and at least 10 metres high (there’s a large overhead crane in there, though it wasn’t in use). The cars are divided and set next to tough-looking yellow devices firmly implanted in the thick concrete floor, four per car, one at each corner (about a metre in, actually).

The car bodies are then jacked up off of the bogies that connect them to the track. (If you’re not sure what a bogie is, look at a rail car — the bogie is the part with the wheels and the bracket that holds them in place.) The wide bogies are then pushed out in favour of narrower ones. The car bodies are then lowered back down, and you’re good to go. The process took about an hour and a half, all told, for the 10 or so cars that had to go through the process.

According to Lonely Planet, you’re supposed to be allowed to get off and watch. We had to setting to view through dirty windows. Only when the train was reformed and brought back to the station were people finally let off — 100 yard dashers don’t run that fast.

Without question the coolest thing, albeit weirdest thing, I’ve seen done to trains yet.