Around the World with Auberon and Alex

The following piece was originally published as a series of blog posts from July to October 2016. I wrote and posted everything from an aging phone using whatever WiFi I could find, and I had no way to upload photos from my camera. I have corrected some typos and added some additional photos in this edition. Nearly all the original photos were kept, except when replaced with a higher-quality version of the same scene.

July 5 – One night to go

Next stop – Seoul!

The visas are in, the hostels are booked, the bags are packed, and the flight leaves tomorrow. Join us for a 3+ month trip that will take us from Ho Chi Minh City to Copenhagen – with the Great Wall and Lake Baikal in between. We’ll update this blog with photos and anecdotes as often as we can on the way. In San Francisco before departure.

July 7 – A pause in a long day

This Korean keyboard is just differently-shaped enough to throw off my typing. I’m here in Seoul, safe and sound and counting down the hours (seven of them) until my departure for Ho Chi Minh City. The flight over was unremarkable, and once we landed any memories of it quickly faded.

We landed in Incheon and, denied a complementary hotel room, took a comfortable express train to Seoul. The city is huge – ten million people. Of course with our limited time we could only see a tiny fraction of it, but it was enough to make us both want more. We spent two hours or so walking around the environs of the train station, and saw the winding alleyways of the Namdaemun night market as it was closing up shop. The airline food was tasty and plentiful, so we stopped only to buy coffee and sample some soju before coming back to the eerily deserted airport. Next stop: Vietnam! Namdaemun.

July 7 – Learning Korean on the way there

I set myself a goal of learning as much Korean as I could – limited to only the plane ride over. I put a couple of phrasebook-type audio courses on my phone, and listened to them all about a dozen times. The in-flight movies all had Korean options, so I saw some scenes of Star Wars, Cars, and Zootopia dubbed excellently.

It wasn’t enough. After coming off the plane I retained only the simplest phrases, and couldn’t really put any words together. Scared to use the language with strangers, I shied away from a lot of interactions. I was also almost entirely illiterate. If I did this again, I’d use the lengthy plane time to follow a much more structured course, because simply listening to and trying to memorize phrases just didn’t work for me. The Korean alphabet is very easy to pick up, too. In the few hours I saw it around me in Seoul, I could begin to piece together the pronunciations of different words. I should have focused on learning to read along with the phrases.

Someday I’ll come back here and give the language the attention it deserves. Till then, though, I’m moving on to languages I feel more prepared for, though only time will tell if I really am.

July 10 – The shower is cold

And that’s fine by me. Here in Hồ Chí Minh, the days are hot and the nights are warm. Despite the heat and humidity, we spend almost all our time walking. Ten, fifteen miles a day, up and down the endless, endless streets of this city.

A lot of the things I see are exactly like what I imagined, which surprises me. Thousands of motorbikes go every which way at intersections (there are posters informing drivers about the new street lights), making crossing the street exactly the adventure described in the guidebooks. The streets are filled with vendors selling hot food and cold drinks out of carts. At the markets, turning any corner means you’ll be greeted with a chorus of offers to help you buy something.

In fact I’m pleased to discover how out of place we really are. People stop and stare and wave with loud hellos, even twenty minutes’ walk from the backpacker areas. Showing up at a food stand (they have plastic tables to sit at) means the workers run and get the one person who knows some English, or they immediately turn to pointing and holding up fingers. Even after a few days, there are generally smiles at the ridiculous foreigners who can’t even complete the most basic of tasks. I love it. The inside of An Đông market in the Chinese district of the city. A middle sized market compared to the others we’ve visited. The author regrets breaking the only fan in the room. July 12 – Saigon and more

We spent most of our time in Ho Chi Minh City simply waking and taking in the sights. But on the last two evenings, Auberon made an excellent discovery. The International Park, just a couple of minutes away from our hostel by foot, filled with social activity in the evening.

We had noticed before that the city parks were unlike others we had seen. My hometown certainly has parks to break up the houses and streets, but the difference lies in the people who come to them. In my experience, people who relax in parks tend to keep to themselves or their friend group. Not so in Saigon. Every day in every park, strangers hung out with one another, sharing games of Chinese chess, cigarettes, aerobics, ballroom dances, conversations, and walks.

What occupied our time the most was long and in-depth conversations with Vietnamese young people who had come to practice their English. Right around sunset, as soon as a foreigner sits down in the park they are approached by students in twos and threes, overcoming shyness and a language barrier to meet other people.

And as soon as a few people gathered around, more would follow. I’m not exaggerating when I say that on both nights we had crowds of at least ten people sitting around and taking turns to talk to us. They were mostly in their early twenties, and there was a wide range of interests, abilities, and personalities. I met language enthusiasts, hospitality students, dressmakers, engineers, and more. The conversations lasted hours.

Auberon enjoyed asking and answering questions about politics and social issues, seeing how people our age thought about the world. These students were all very well informed on current events and had no problem opening up about their values to strangers. I preferred to talk to people who needed more help with their English, since I was impressed with the courage required to approach strangers for help. Of course, I made a bit of progress with my Vietnamese at the same time.

Yesterday we took a break from our usual walking-filled days and took a wonderful train ride north to Nha Trang. We chose the most luxurious train compartment and it certainly paid off. We slept often and soundly, the rocking motion of the train reminding us just how busy we had been in Saigon. Our sole companion in the four-bunk room was an older Vietnamese lady who spent her time sleeping and answering dozens of phone calls with unique ringtones for each one. Outside the window the scenery unfolded into pastoral scenes of rice fields and water buffalo.

This morning I awoke early and went for a swim in the wonderfully warm seas of Nha Trang. Today’s weather is a bit less humid than the days before, and sitting in the air-conditioned indoors does nothing to acclimatize me. But later on I’ll explore more of the city, as the heat dies down and some of my energy returns. Auberon learns chess. Fading sunlight and neon lights.

July 16 – Nha Trang and a change of plans

I left off last time just as our first day in Nha Trang was unfolding. Auberon had some digestive problems because of the train food, so that combined with the heat meant he wasn’t quite up to going exploring early. After my morning swim, I went to the market that was visible from our hotel room.

The outside was surrounded by fruit and vegetable vendors set up on the sidewalk, and a small enclosed building had aisles of clothes and jewelry. A similar building held the eating area, with the same types of street food I had become used to in Saigon. The largest building was structurally little more than a covered set of stone tables, upon which sat scores of stalls mostly selling meat and fish, though there was more fruit to be had inside too. I bought some sweet rice buns and a few bread rolls and brought them back to our hotel for breakfast.

Later that day, Auberon felt good enough to go to the beach. The beach was nearly empty and the water was beautifully warm and calm. We simply drifted, resting and relaxing in the comfort of the sea. Later, I discovered that I had been terribly sunburned, but the memory of the ocean is still pleasant.

We decided to listen to the advice of our Vietnamese university student friends and switch up our itinerary. The old capital of Hue was out, and the historic river city of Hoi An was in. Every time we mentioned where we were going, our friends implored us to forget Hue for Hoi An. We figured that they probably knew a thing or two about their own country (three were studying tourism) so we cancelled our previous booking and found a bed-and-breakfast in Hoi An.

I’m writing this from that same B&B, so you know it worked out, but for now I’m signing off. Soon, off again, this time to Hanoi! Mountains and a river in Nha Trang. View from the Nha Trang hotel balcony.

July 21 – Hoi An to Ha Noi

Confusing names at a glance.

Hoi An, the smaller beach town, was nothing short of beautiful. It was again a new side of Vietnam to see, this time a much more rural and agricultural place that was nevertheless experiencing lots of expansion due to tourism.

Unreachable by train, we took a bouncing bus ride from the Da Nang train station. The bus drivers were clearly paid by the journey, because at every stop the passengers would be literally dragged through the doors by an attendant as the bus kept moving. It was also a courier service, as bags of rice or concrete got thrown on with an exchange of money and shouted instructions to deliver the goods to a waiting party at the bus station. The bus driver had two horns, one mild and one blaring, and both were used in liberal measures during the hour-long journey.

In Hoi An, we stayed at a lovely B&B whose host, Thợ, was more gracious and hospitable than I could have believed possible. He was a classical guitarist who played in restaurants and hotels, and he shared several excellent songs with us. Once he even invited us to sing and play at a folk song night in a cafe. Our music was pretty different from the Vietnamese songs, but I’m told it went over well with the crowd.

The Hoi An that people really come to see is the preserved historic old town, kept in good condition with the high-priced ticket sales. I thought the lights and the street performers and the statues came together really well in a very cool spectacle. It had a polished, touristy vibe, but that didn’t detract from the feeling.

Development is frozen in the historic center, so the hotels and B&Bs are more on the outskirts. Auberon and I walked around and around, from lodging to beach to rice paddy to old town and back, one day reaching a pedometer count of 26 miles.

Our host procured us a private car from his endless list of acquaintances (I think the driver was a friend of his wife’s brother) and we took a drive up to the mountain ruins of Mỹ Sơn. This was the site of temples built centuries ago by the Champa kingdom, which once controlled much of what is now central and southern Vietnam. They practiced Islam and Hinduism, and designed their temple complexes to follow geometric patterns that can still be seen today. The temples made it through the sands of time and some have been very well restored through the work of international conservationists. It was unfortunately very hot and humid in the forest, so we didn’t have too much energy to explore every remaining site.

An afternoon, a night, and a morning spent on the train brought us to Vietnam’s capital city of Hanoi, where we stayed in an apartment thanks to the generosity of a friend of Auberon’s and her housemates. But that’s another post.

July 23 – Hanoi from above and below

We left off, dear reader, at the door of an apartment shared by eight or so Westerners from the US and Europe, who were very kind in letting us stay with them.

I’ve never lived in a big city, so this probably isn’t unique to Hanoi, but I loved walking around the winding alleyways as they meandered away from the main streets. They hardly seemed like planned streets and were barely wide enough to fit a wheelbarrow. Even in these tight spaces, people live and flourish, building houses, riding motorbikes, cutting hair, selling newspapers. It was a great effect at sunset to see the tops of the buildings slowly descending into shadow from below.

We spent a lot of time walking as usual, though we did go out with our hosts to restaurants, bars, and karaoke (my first time). The demand for English teachers meant that they lived comfortably and we were glad to tag along for the treat of pricier Western fare.

I wasn’t able this trip to visit the actual mountain communities that still practice traditions distinct from the Viet people. Instead I spent a while at the Museum of Ethnology, which is a multi-story endeavor whose main attraction is actually the minority houses behind the museum. In a large park, the museum and various conservation groups have erected houses and homesteads in the styles of the different ethnic groups of Vietnam. My favorite was the Bahnar village house, a massive, massive building that was suspended on pillars and had a roof easily thirty feet above the floor. The idea is that the size of the house represents the unified ability of the village that came together to make it.

The “above” part of the title refers to the observation tower we didn’t go to. Visible from most any point in Hanoi is the Lotte hotel/apartment/department store building, far taller than most. We moseyed around the store for a bit, then were disappointed to see that the observation deck charged a hefty entrance fee. We tried to bluff our way into the apartments to get a view from an upstairs lobby (this worked in Saigon) but the receptionist immediately knew what we were up to. The hotel, however, had unrestricted elevators and a fancy restaurant near the top. Even though we were painfully out of place in sweaty T-shirts, the hostess at the restaurant allowed us to wander freely past the wide windows. Pictured is the result.

After leaving Hanoi, we endured many hours of trains and customs lines, complete with a crisis I had to navigate in sleepy Chinese when the guards misplaced my visa. Now, though, we are safe in our Guilin hotel, resting in soft beds before the next adventure.

July 24 – A Vietnam Retrospective

Here’s a few general travel tips I learned that didn’t make it to the other posts:

Take trains between big cities and book tickets at the station. The English language websites cost double compared with buying from the station directly. Everywhere we went had English-speaking staff (and great customer service).

Museums are cheap even by Vietnamese standards. Entrance to each of them averaged 50 cents. Two (Fine Arts in HCMC and Ethnology in Hanoi) had extra attractions and other buildings not visible at all from the street.

The Chinese chess that people play in parks and cafes is called cờ tướng. We learned to play it and got a travel set of our own. When we played, it was a source of great amusement to the Vietnamese, who gathered in crowds, shouted advice, and moved our pieces for us.

Both of us really enjoyed our time in Vietnam. We have a lot ahead of us, but I would really like to come back. Each place we saw had its own unique facets, and we really did only scratch the surface. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

July 24 – A Vietnamese Retrospective

Now that I’ve got all that travel writing out of the way, I can talk about my main reason for going anywhere – speaking new languages.

I started learning Vietnamese around October or November 2015, once the trip started to take shape. I found the language to be very difficult, and now that I’m at peak Vietnamese for some time (it will surely fade over the next few months) I still rate it as one of the hardest I’ve studied.

It just takes a long time, really. The expats I met who had been in the country for two months all were less confident in using the language than I was. Even though I couldn’t carry on any kind of complex conversation, I had been practicing the sounds and the rhythm for a while and could pronounce it clearly. That surely came from a combination of my linguistics knowledge and the sheer amount of time I had to practice. With such a long background of study, new vocabulary and usage fell into place rapidly once I got there.

When I came to Vietnam, I knew a few words and phrases, mostly food-related. (Just because I studied for a long time doesn’t mean I studied constantly. I spent most of my time on Russian.) When I left, I could easily carry out tourist tasks like asking the price of things, giving addresses, and asking simple directions. I also learned the words for many more foods and could read some signs and advertisements. My language use was very much of the pidgin point-and-say variety, which I had never expected to work so well. And the locals were always surprised to hear a Westerner say anything in Vietnamese. I was once literally applauded by the staff of a fast-food restaurant after asking for the bathroom.

More emphatic pointing without any Vietnamese might also work well, but outside of tourist areas it’s hard to count on anyone knowing more than a greeting in English. If you’re going to Vietnam, knowing at the very least the numbers and some names of foods will get you far. The language isn’t that hard to pronounce either, especially for single words at a time. Knowing what the different marks on the letters mean in terms of pronunciation will also do wonders for your communication. In fact, while you’re at it, just learn the whole thing… July 30 – How to pack for a trip

You’d think I would know. But despite the fact that I’ve traveled out of a backpack a few times, I still made a few poor decisions.

Things I brought that I shouldn’t have:

• Shaving cream – shampoo works fine.
• A nearly empty floss container – a full one would be better.
• An umbrella – I was promised constant thunderstorms but I have yet to be soaked by anything other than sweat. Fortunately I left it in Saigon.
• A metal water bottle – the locals never drink the tap water and it stays empty as I buy liters of pure water for pocket change.
• A sweater – useful perhaps as a pillow or mask, but it’s a long way from here to anyplace approaching chilly.

There’s not much in the “things I didn’t bring but should have” category, which is encouraging. The real problem I face is leaving my property strewn over the face of the earth – a missing sock here, pair of boxers there, a trail of earplugs near hotel beds – the usual. I still remember the Italian bench where I left some sunglasses in 2012, and a Polish receptionist might still be enjoying the use of my earbuds ever since last summer. I’m acquiring little things here and there (even though I’ve sworn off most souvenirs for their bulk), so it’s really anyone’s guess as to whether I’ll return with more or less than I left with.

August 9 – The First Things in China

The Chinese government doesn’t want you to know about my trip, so they block access to the blog. Interestingly it’s not actually illegal to circumvent the Internet filters, so a good proportion of young people (and even some businesses) have third-party software to access Facebook and Google.

We came to China via train from Hanoi to a city called Nanning, which we were told was not used to foreigners at all. We didn’t explore very much of the city because we quickly found a same-day train to our destination of Guilin. I recall that we were greeted in the train station by a series of helpful cartoons illustrating highly competent Chinese police officers stopping various bad guys who were hacking computers or hijacking buses. Soon we were off to the much more popular southern city of Guilin, home of scenic mountains and river cruises.

Once there we took a taxi to our hotel, and though the driver got briefly lost we were there before too late. The hotel had nice and soft beds and was actually surprisingly swanky on the whole, considering that we had booked it last minute and for a rate in keeping with our bottom-dollar price range. In the morning it was revealed that the hotel complex was right next to several scenic mountains and had a garden of Chinese sculptures.

Ignoring the advice of everyone to take the river cruise, we instead crammed ourselves and our bags into seats on the bus to Yangshuo, where we would meet our hosts. We sat next to a Spanish couple who seemed bothered by the driver’s gentle use of the horn. Clearly they had never been to Vietnam. Auberon described the scenery as reminiscent of some growing communities on the outskirts of San Diego. Every few miles the highway became single-lane due to construction, and there was near-constant building on the sides of the road. Even my Chinese textbook had example dialogues about the fact that the country is growing and changing rapidly, and everyone we talked to was of the same opinion.

Yangshuo is a tourist destination, but with a decidedly rural twist. The majority of the tourists are Chinese, so little English is spoken. Less English is written, which meant I lamented not practicing more Chinese characters. But the town was less interesting than the scenery. The mountains were unbelievable. Auberon was especially enraptured by the sight of the green karst mountains surrounding the rivers and rice fields. The first night, we walked along the river as the heat of the day began to wane and kept bursting into amazed laughter at each new sight. It looked like what you would see on postcards, or stock photos, or sample images for selling picture frames. I have been to many places and seen wonderful things, but the mountains of Yangshuo may be the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in my life. SONY DSC

August 10 – English, Cornered

Though lots of people come to Yangshuo for the mountains, we went there for the free housing and food. Through a volunteer placement service called Workaway, I contacted an English school and arranged that we would exchange English teaching for room and board. Upon arrival I was pleased to find that we were only asked to teach for two hours a day, three days a week. The rest of the time was ours.

Just as I had in Poland a year ago, I found the students intelligent and engaging, and really a joy to talk with. They were mostly around the age of 20, generally university students taking a summer course improve their English. Some, though, were taking a much longer course of eight months at the school, which I found incredible. For young Chinese people, better English pretty much means more money. But the students were forking over huge sums every month, and putting in long hours each day for classes. In addition, the accommodations and food were perhaps less than five-star. Auberon and I both got pretty bad food poisoning, and even the students said it happened to them too.

Kept relatively dorm-ridden thanks to air conditioning and illness, we didn’t stray too much from the school or the section of town we were in. I really enjoyed the nightly English Corner sections I led. While I was infirm, Auberon gave an extremely well-received presentation on places to see in California, from Lake Tahoe to Hollywood. Link here in Chinese and here mirrored with my English translation. On the last school day, we were judges for a speech competition. The students all did great, overcoming nerves and a formidable language barrier to tell stories and give speeches on current events.

I did take time to explore the paths into the hills, past some burial shrines and to a nearby strangely deserted little village. It was the heat of the day, and anybody that had any reason to be inside was taking full advantage of it. The hills were just as beautiful on the other side of the river and it was very pleasant to walk alone on the path. I also took a bike into town from the stock kept by the school. Remembering my lessons in Vietnam, I made liberal use of the bell the whole ride. “Town” meant Yangshuo proper, removed by a few miles from the area with the school. It was naturally much busier and with lots of construction going on, and it was hot enough that I didn’t stay long that afternoon.

But on the last or next-to-last evening, some students invited me out to the touristy West Street, which was very exciting. It reminded me a bit of the tourist area of Hoi An, though most of the tourists there were Chinese instead of foreign. They had some traditional methods of making a kind of dough on display, with muscular men using a huge two-handled pole to pound the flour while chanting. Also of interest were the girls in military costume selling ice cream out of refrigerated ammo boxes, and the your-face-on-a-shirt stall that was evidently providing work for the blind.

The next day two of the same students dedicated essentially their whole day to making sure we could get our train and bus tickets, and the day after that one of them actually accompanied us to Guilin to help us deal with the train station. We’re very thankful to Grace and Heidi for getting us safely to Chengdu.

August 14 – Getting to Chengdu

When we went from Nanning to Guilin, we booked same-day and got the nicest sleeper beds we could. From Guilin to Chengdu, though, the route was more popular and we got the tickets too late. If we wanted to arrive any time in the next few weeks, it was the hard seat for us – for twenty-five hours.

The seats aren’t particularly hard in hard class, just straight backed and tightly arranged. The train was mostly full, and I was denied when I tried to upgrade (bribe?) to a sleeper car. There were a few empty seats, and though Auberon and I hadn’t been seated together we still saw one another.

Among the passengers of the hard seat carriages there is a certain camaraderie. (You, dear reader, are getting these posts on a time delay. After Chengdu I took another hard seat train ride and experienced the same sort of thing.) People talk and play games, children run and make noise, and food is constantly passed around. There were some other foreigners, possibly Italian, but they just greeted us as they passed through our car. Thus we were as usual a novelty, and once the ice was broken people were happy to talk to us.

The clacking of Chinese chess pieces drew us to the other end of the car where we joined in a few games and were soundly beaten. I made a single good move, received polite praise, and then lost. Later, the fruit seller came by and stopped to watch, eventually taking over much of the game for me. “A test for the foreigner,” he said, putting me in a tricky end-game position and walking off.

As night fell I switched seats with somebody who had a window seat in the next carriage so that he could sit by his girlfriend. My new carriage was a bit smokier (the smoking section on these trains is between carriages and under the air circulation vents, defeating the purpose entirely) and a little warm for my taste. I folded myself up in the space between table and wall and had a few hours of surprisingly deep sleep. Auberon, however, reported that his air conditioning in the other carriage was on full blast all night. He described a Donner Party scene of taking down curtains to clothe small children and distributing the contents of his backpack as emergency blankets.

As day began, I went back into the other car and had an extremely pleasant chat with a woman from Beijing. She had a dignified air and a general soothing presence, which I noticed immediately as she calmed down a woman whose boyfriend had missed the train. She was very patient with me and my halting Chinese, which gave me the confidence and stamina to have a long conversation about Chinese and American geography, culture, entertainment, and politics – in simple words of course. She would make an excellent teacher.

After several more hours we arrived and said our goodbyes to the train companions. A quick taxi to the hotel, a small break to collect ourselves, and we were ready to go out and explore.

August 17 – Chengdu and Environs

Twelve days anywhere is a lot to fit into a blog, but I felt like my time in Chengdu was particularly noteworthy. So there will inevitably be things skipped over or left out this format.

We came to Chengdu because of another Workaway, one that was a bit sketchy on the details but again offered free housing in exchange for English speaking. It turned out that some Chinese college students had taken a gap year and opened a café which was essentially a front for an English school. Foreigners would share an apartment with the hosts and draw customers to the café so that they could practice their English. We arrived on the first day of business, though no customers came until the third day after some vigorous hawking by me and Auberon. The hosts weren’t particularly worried about the low turnout, because at the end of August the nearby university would open and the floodgates of students would open. Based on the small but steady stream of people we got during this summer holiday, things ought to speed up soon.

On these slow days in the café, Auberon and I (there were other volunteers but they left soon after we arrived) chatted with the hosts, drew up business ideas, and played chess. I practiced the guitar and tried half-heartedly to tackle reading some books in Chinese. I also tried my hand at art. I’ve always wanted to get good at making those chalk art designs on sandwich boards in front of cafés. Sudden showers got the chalk wet more than once, but I practiced English and Chinese calligraphy and made some pretty designs.

The hosts were the best part (I’ve changed their names here). We mostly hung out with the two girls Lori and JD, since the third girl was gone for most of our time. A guy, Rob, also shared the apartment but kept to himself a bit more. He did take us out to the city one of the first days and put up with our endless wandering, so kudos to him for that. JD had a lot less English than Lori (our main contact through Workaway) but studied Italian and wore high fashion. I poked fun a bit at the care she put into her appearance, but she told me that her parents didn’t allow her to travel. I scrimp and save constantly to take trips, and as a consequence I have few nice things – stained clothes, broken phone, aging camera. She simply puts that time and money into art and fashion.

Lori was a language person like myself, majoring in Indonesian at university. She had traveled to Korea and Japan solo and had had wonderful experiences there that inspired her to start the café project. Since I was getting free housing, I thought I’d give her her money’s worth and so when she asked me to help with English I jumped at the chance. My linguistics area of interest is phonetics, so we worked on advanced pronunciation techniques to get her closer to that eternal goal of natural native-sounding speech.

My Mandarin got quite a boost too. Lori and company (most everyone in Chengdu, actually) spoke Sichuan dialect to one another, which at first is incomprehensible to a speaker of standard Mandarin. But everyone was more than willing to use Mandarin with me when I wanted to practice, and I bought a small notebook to write down new things. Having had little luck finding resources for Sichuanese before I arrived, I was over the moon when Lori and Rob agreed to record a set of phrases in both Sichuanese and Mandarin. Through careful listening to these and the speech around me, by the end of the Chengdu leg I could understand a surprising amount of Sichuanese conversation, and my Mandarin speaking was a lot more confident. Perhaps most importantly, Auberon and I learned a colorful range of Sichuan curse words. As much as I love the idea of speaking colloquial street Chinese, I think the best strategy is to learn the standard register first. I’ll try and publish the Sichuan recordings in some way, but for me just learning to understand a little is enough for now.

I practiced one particular Mandarin sentence many times: “We came to Sichuan because he loves spicy food” – punctuated with significant pointing at Auberon. He has an immense tolerance for spicy food, well beyond my own limit. We’ve asked for spicy food before, and they always take it easy on us. In Chengdu we found lots of food, generally oil-based, that had generous amounts of spicy sauce or powder added. Auberon only met his match once, though, in a hot pot restaurant where the diners were cook spicy food in boiling spicy oil, then cool it down by dipping it into room-temperature spicy oil. It was delicious.

All the food in Chengdu was wonderful and very affordable. My heart lies, though, with the pork bun place right next to the apartment complex. The owner was always glad to see me even though he never quite grasped that my use of Chinese to order and pay was more than playacting. I’d order, he would prepare the food, then he’d double check by silently mouthing the order details (in Chinese) and making elaborate hand gestures. I’d confirm and say goodbye in Chinese, he’d smile and wave, and the process would begin again the next morning.

In the last few days we took a reasonably perilous car ride to Lori’s hometown, a great place with excellent river views. We stayed there a night, enjoying her mother’s fine cooking, then the next day went to a more touristy old town not far away. In both places we were the only Westerners, but surprisingly we weren’t really pointed and laughed at the way we were in Vietnam. The old town reminded us both strongly of Hoi An, with the type of old storefronts you’d find someone being thrown against in a kung fu movie. Since it was very hot, these streets were peaceful and slow moving compared to the city bustle. So far it’s the only place we’ve yet seen insects (dead and alive) for sale like nuts or fruit.

When back in Chengdu, we said our goodbyes and left for our overnight train to Xi’an. It was really an excellent city, and I’m very glad I got to see it through the lens of the young people who live there. I’ll miss them. A view of the inside of the world’s largest building by floor space, a wonderfully strange complex of a mall, theater, water park, apartments, abandoned rooms and busy startups. Us with Lori (JD barely visible in the back) at one those sushi restaurants with the conveyor belt. Trying and failing to bring Mexican quesadillas to China, land of little cheese and no salsa.

August 21 – Around and around Xi’An

From Chengdu we had a pretty average hard-seat overnight trip to Xi’an. Once the silence around me was broken, I chatted to the people around me a bit and ate some of the great fruit offered to me by a man across the aisle. Lots of Chinese people take bags of nuts or small fruits on trains, and I don’t know if they’re snacks or for the home or what. Auberon was accosted by a few very persistent women who stormed through the language barrier to ask repeatedly for his nonexistent Chinese social media info.

We arrived very late at night and realized that we had come to the south train station, a good distance from the actual city. Some French tourists (also coming from Vietnam in a roundabout way) suggested that we share a taxi, so we walked to the end of the taxi hawkers and got into one that quoted us 50 yuan lower than everybody else. He immediately got lost on his way out of the station street, and the Frenchmen left once he had us all get out to hop a curb. This distressed him greatly, but I understood little of his shouting. Once on the lonely country road he flagged down another taxi and got out to talk with the other driver.

This distressed me greatly, and I unbuckled my seat belt and told him to give us our bags, and we’d walk to Xi’an if we had to. He became much more apologetic, and started the car once more. A short while passed in frosty silence until I started to understand his situation. Half his customers up and left after an embarrassing mistake, and the remaining two were either incomprehensive or bitter. He was just trying to do his job. So I told him that the weather was much nicer in Xi’an than Chengdu, which started the wheels turning a bit. As we got into town he recommended tourist attractions, and offered to call our hotel to make sure he had the right address. We left on friendlier terms.

The next day Auberon and I were seized by a desire to walk really far. His phone has a step counter which gives us a daily goal of 10,000 steps a day, and we generally reach this goal very quickly. Our high water mark was one day in Hoi An where we got to 43,000 since, as he put it, left to our own devices we just wander all day. Since then one or both of us has been laid ill or we’ve had company not as willing to put in the mileage. With both of us healthy and rested, the day promised to be one for the books.

Our meandering took us in a general southerly direction past the tall banks and malls of the city center. We came to a museum by and by, which my research had said was boring but we found perfectly nice. We continued our habit of presenting various cards from our wallets and claiming that they’re foreign student IDs, which so far has a 2/3 success rate. I do have my actual student ID, but the picture on it wore off years ago leaving only a smudge. In the museum, I was particularly taken with the colored jade sculptures. In the shape of soldiers and animals, these used some combination of the natural color of the jade and a glaze to give a three color effect to the pieces. Usually I just breeze past glass cases with sculptures, but these really did catch my eye. Noodles and dumplings galore.

We also found a nice tangle of alleyways in a style I had always imagined to exist in Chinese cities: steam rising from street vendors’ pots, clamoring crowds, and signs poking out overhead. The signs are probably the interesting point for me, since at first glance I can’t read a thing. Little by little more emerges as I keep looking: noodles, beef, pork buns, fried rice. Auberon and I were close to the same level of being able to read food words in Chinese when we began the trip, so by now we’ve both picked up a lot of the common characters.

Xi’an has famous city walls, and they pair with a moat to encircle the old town. We walked halfway around the seven-mile loop and admired the effect the sunset had on the lanterns and watchtowers. It was very pretty and quite a draw for the Chinese tourists, many of whom mounted bicycles or small carts to go around. The walls walked, we cut through the huge shopping complex in the center to end up with a step count of 53000, or just over 30 miles. I’m not itching to break that record anytime soon.

The next day we went to see the biggest draw of Xi’an, the terracotta warriors. It was sadly extremely hot, so our visit wasn’t quite as leisurely as the place may have deserved. I was advised to see the excavated pits in reverse order, since pit one is the grandest one that all the pictures show. They recently started showing the excavation and restoration process right there in the viewing areas, which would have been nice if anyone had been there working that day. It was still neat to see the tools and equipment, including some process of shrink-wrapping the soldiers, possibly for moving elsewhere.

After bussing back to the city we kept up our walking by finding several big malls in the city center and seeing what they had to offer each time. Beginning with the Vietnamese markets and malls, each of these big Western style shopping centers has offered us a slightly different experience. Sometimes we get gawked at, other times not, sometimes the brands or slogans are hilarious, other times familiar. In this plaza we found little strangeness, but there’s something relaxing about the constant stream of placid music and bright storefronts.

The next day we left our bags in the hotel and set out once more. It was a sweltering day, seemingly taunting me for praising the weather in the taxi. We walked a good distance around the moat surrounding the old city. The authorities put some big fences and gates up to deter people from getting too close to the river (which was a brilliant green). Nevertheless there was a second path that was relatively shady and we spent lots of time on it. The path had a very dead riverfront bar and café complex and the usual assortment of Asian bodyweight exercise machines.

Once tired out from the heat and exercise, we found a tea house where we could sit and play chess. It turned out that it was far pricier than anywhere else we had been in recent days, so we ordered the cheapest tea and played for hours. It was a very long game ending in stalemate, and both of us had shaky hands at the end from dozens of cups of tea.

In the evening we collected our bags, hailed a taxi to the train station, and rode off into the night, to the plains and deserts of the north. Tea and chess. A nostalgic Sichuanese meal. Clay guys.

August 21 – Warmly welcomed in Hohhot

We left Xi’an in the evening but planned to arrive in Hohhot at a leisurely late morning hour. The railway had different plans, and we ended up stopped instead for five hours on some lonely desert tracks.

Eventually it was revealed that passengers would receive a tiny refund and would be on their own for additional transport. Fortunately a woman nearby translated the squawking loudspeaker announcements into more audible Mandarin for me, and accompanied us in a taxi to the city bus station. There we greatly annoyed a woman asking for donations by not giving her money – making perhaps our only enemy in China. But she got off the bus and we got on the road to Hohhot, arriving slightly before sundown. Accustomed to walking, it was a wonderful surprise to see that we were about a minute from our hotel, itself right across the street from the train station.

The next morning we wrote down some cool-looking sights nearby and asked the front desk about how to get there. In an interesting twist on a common theme, the porter decided I probably couldn’t understand his spoken directions and so instead presented them to me in handwritten Chinese characters. This was in fact much harder than understanding him directly, but I determined that there was no bus to the meadow, the ancient fortress was six hours away, and bus 2 went directly to the mountain. We went to the mountain.

Eventually. 大青山 (Da Qing Shan) turned out to be the name of both the mountain and a safari park, the latter of which was the destination for bus 2. We didn’t realize it was a zoo until we had already entered, and just after entering we had look-at-the-westerner selfies taken with three or four families. So we decided to just go with it. I talked to a young Chinese couple who turned out to also be looking for the mountain, and thus we felt a bit less foolish for wandering into a zoo. Actually, it was my second time this trip wandering into a zoo, the first being in Hanoi on a long walk looking for noodles.

The park was nearly deserted, at least as close as any tourist attraction can be in China. The weather was very pleasant after the hot days of Xi’an, with some warm sun occasionally peeking past the clouds. So we spent an hour or so strolling from monkey house to bird cages to yak enclosure. I’m afraid I don’t have any tales of wacky Chinese zoo antics, just animals and people doing their thing.

We met up on the other side of the yaks with the other potential mountaineers, and they had new information directing us to another area about half a mile down the road. There we found another large park with some sort of traditional Mongolian building at the far end. Auberon and I made a beeline to it and saw that there was some sort of car show set up. We had seen dozens of rally cars already, with maps and city names on the rear windows. Could this be a race?

As usual we walked straight up to the staff booth to find out. Unusually, we heard a voice call out to us in perfect English, “Hey guys, what are you doing?” One of the staff came up to us and let us know that the area was off limits to guests. But she was interested in our story, and as more details emerged about who we were, where we had come from, and where were going, she became more and more excited. She offered to drive us to the mountain personally (for we were still far away) as an excuse to get away from work and to hear more about us. It turned out that she, at 21, was running a media company and coordinating the models for this upcoming Audi exhibition. She had studied in Canada for six years and had only recently returned, shocking us at just how fast she was growing this business. We arrived at the mountain in twenty minutes or so and were told to call for a pickup later. Shaking our heads at our good fortune, we started up the ascent.

I’m going with the local use of the word ‘mountain’ but it really wasn’t that big. More of a peak. The locals had thoughtfully built wooden steps into the side to help us along, and in no time at all we arrived at the summit. It was gorgeous and much cooler than the walk had been. From the top the buildings of Hohhot were clearly visible, as were some smaller settlements receding into the distant green hills. We took many pictures and then turned back down again, using a second path that took us past some pagodas and cairns adorned with prayer flags.

Grace, our new friend, returned soon and took us into the city. Continuing our stroke of luck, it happened to be her mom’s birthday and we were invited to a hot pot dinner. This was different from the hot pot we’d had in Chengdu, with more peanuts and less spicy oil. It was still excellent and with Grace as interpreter we talked about China, America, and the world until we were all full. Afterward we saw the very closed Buddhist temple complex and took part in one of the constant Chinese choreographed dances organized by women in parks. It was a wonderful day made possible only by the lovely hospitality of Grace and her family.

Since our train left at 10 the next night, we left our bags with the endlessly patient receptionist and set out again. Grace mentioned the city’s famous mosques (there is a large Muslim community with many restaurants sporting the halal sign) and our general goal was to find some of these. Find them we did, in and around a street market with a wonderfully different feel than ones we’d seen before. There was a service going on, so we didn’t enter or stay very long. The architecture of the area combined the mosaics I associate with Iran and the now-familiar flared and tiled Chinese roofs. Also of note was the way the Arabic script was fit into the Chinese design, broken up like characters and stacked vertically. I got some fried things at the market that were essentially donut holes, and we ate them as we continued on.

We then came to a shopping center and found a bookstore after winding through the first few stories. It was surprisingly expansive and we found a few Chinese editions of familiar children’s books. I got a Tintin story to give myself something to carry and a reminder to keep up my Chinese after leaving the country. Soon we found some small snack shop and sat, a bit wiped out from the days of wandering.

But there was another surprise in store. We picked a building at random and, as we often do, headed for the panoramic views at the top. In the elevator there was a short-haired young woman who clearly had places to be, as evidenced by the effort she expended in pressing the Door Close button after every passenger got in. Once on the top floor we looked for a window but wandered accidentally into a section of the floor that was being remodeled. A worker looked up, decided for some reason that we probably belonged, and led us to an office door where he knocked and left us. Forging ahead, I asked if we could take a picture out the window. To our delight, the managers were perfectly willing to let us in the office (also being remodeled) and happily posed with us and the other employees that had begun to file in. Soon we were drinking fancy tea, chatting about our trip, and looking out over the city, marveling once more at our good fortune while traveling.

The managers recommended a nice Mongolian restaurant, visible from the window. It turned out to be a bit too popular for its own good – they were fresh out of lamb, perhaps the staple dish of Inner Mongolian cuisine. We had camel instead, served in a pita-like arrangement that in Outer Mongolia is called khooshoor. For dessert, an excellent cheese pastry upon which we actually melted more cheese, reveling in the return to food for people who are not lactose intolerant.

The evening was drawing to a close. On our way back to the hotel we heard nearby fireworks, and though we rushed to see them we caught only a glimpse behind some buildings. Auberon waxed poetic on the theme: on our first night in Yangshuo some students had set off fireworks that burst directly next to our balcony. Those marked the beginning of our trip to China, a huge explosion of new experiences. Now the fireworks were further away as we left China, showing that there is always more to see, and that traveling the way we do means that there will always be things we can’t fit in.

Our bags collected, we walked to the station and settled into our bunks for the overnight ride to the border, where we’d go through customs and carry on into Mongolia. The summit of Da Qing Shan. The mosque complex. View from the manager’s office.

August 24 – The land and language of many

My China travel posts were more in-depth than my Vietnam ones, so I don’t think a full China retrospective is very necessary. Suffice it to say that Auberon and I both really enjoyed our time there. We both had expectations about what “China” would be like (he had visited 9 years ago on a very organized tour bus trip) and some were true and some were not.

For one, it’s a lot cleaner and more orderly than I thought it would be. I think Westerners have a tendency to stereotype mainland China outside the powerhouse cities as poor and dirty, and perhaps the people as rude or uneducated. Nothing could be further from our experience. Everywhere we were greeted with gleaming streets and amazing hospitality, and I’ve already written about the excellent people we met. Americans can easily apply for and obtain a ten year multiple-entry visa now, and I’m glad I have mine.

Now for the language. People say that Chinese is very hard. It is. But it’s not impossible. I started my self study of the language in January 2015, and then a year later started classes at the intermediate level in college. The classes were immensely helpful and I worked hard to catch up to my classmates, focusing hard on pronunciation. When I finished classes I didn’t really self study much during the short break before travel, instead cranking up the study of Russian and Vietnamese.

Arriving in China, I initially felt way out of my depth. I could communicate much easier than in Vietnam, but my knowledge of the written language was limited to the most common characters in the textbook dialogues. But there’s an interesting thing I’ve learned about immersion in country. Dear reader, if you’ve ever studied a foreign language, try to think of a few words: Wet floor, to pull, caution, garage, repair, exit, center. A strange list, but these are the type of words that you see every day, a dozen times or more, when walking around a city. They’re not really what the beginner learns in a phrasebook or classes, but instead what is so common to the native speaker that it blends into the background. Thus as a language-minded tourist, I noticed this repetition and then noticed myself acquiring the words without ever studying them.

Of course I studied too. I got the excellent Chinese learner’s dictionary app called Pleco, and filled several pages in my tiny notebook with characters and pronunciations. Forcing myself to try and read Chinese around me day after day got me used to it, and (though it took me longer than I expected) I eventually became relatively literate in terms of signs and menus.

Speaking was interesting. Once I came to Chengdu I really started using a lot more Mandarin* throughout the day, and it came more naturally by and by. Every day I used Mandarin to buy food, ask directions, use public transport, and chat. I rarely asked whether someone could speak English, and in any case the answer was usually no. The locals loved it, praising me for using the simplest of words and always being generally patient while I spoke.

I’m still not fully satisfied with my conversation performance, because I quickly grind to a halt when I’m not sure of a word or I mishear something. I was also surprised that I got frustrated and disheartened (and tired!) when I couldn’t keep up, I guess because I felt a certain pressure to be able to say more than the basics.

But the constant practice did have an effect. At the end of my last Chinese class in college we made a video, and I showed it to my Chengdu hosts for a laugh. Laugh they did, but they also said that my Chinese had improved since the video – even after the classes stopped and I hardly thought about Chinese until I arrived. Language learning takes time, and skills like speaking and listening settle into muscle memory in a process that can’t really be rushed. Consistent, regular practice is the best path to good results.

*I use the words Chinese and Mandarin interchangeably here, though some people make a distinction. Mandarin refers to the standard spoken language of China, based on the Beijing and northeast accent, used on TV and in school and understood by everyone. The written language is Mandarin save for some special usages too detailed to write about here, though I could fill hours on the subject. I, like all university students outside of special programs, studied Mandarin.

Though there is a common language, there are also innumerable dialects and local varieties. They all fall under the broad banner of Chinese, though most of them are mutually unintelligible. Therefore on the train from Chengdu to Xi’an, I sat next to a woman from Beijing who told me in Mandarin that she couldn’t understand the man across from us at all when he was speaking Chengdu dialect to his friends. He overheard and began to speak with us in Mandarin.

Or a specific example: on a Hohhot bus, a woman was asked a question and replied meidei, which I had learned was Sichuan dialect for I don’t have any. Her questioner was confused until she repeated the answer in Mandarin: meiyou.

The concept of so many different local languages is fascinating to me, especially how different ones get used in different social contexts. Most Chinese people can speak two or three varieties of Chinese, and more if they’ve spent time living in different cities. You can see why this country would appeal to me. A sign in Xi’an advertising milk of all things.

August 27 – A snippet of Mongolia, part 1

I had done only the most cursory research about the border crossing from China to Mongolia. I knew that thanks to a strange immigration law, it was mandatory to cross in a vehicle, and a train crossing didn’t work with our timetable. So we decided to go with one of the locals making a killing renting themselves out as drivers for quick border hops. Because we had arrived remarkably early, we were ready to go well before the border opened and thus well before any touts were awake.

Erlian (also Erlianhaote or Erenhot or Ereen depending on how you feel) is a small city but with a bit more life than we expected. At five-thirty in the morning people were setting up vegetable stalls, opening shops, dancing in the park, cracking whips in the park (for very loud exercise, I imagine), and erecting a huge sound system and stage for a music festival.

We harangued the earliest tout until he took us to be the first people of the day to cross into Mongolia, then at the border we were given free passage to the nearby town of Zamyn Uud. There we changed money and became aware that there was no cheap bus to the capital and that it was about twelve hours until the train left. This information was provided by a crowd of thirty or forty drivers all begging us to part with a large pile of bills in order to hire them. One highly multilingual woman (surely hired by the drivers) came over and told us in fine English about all the advantages of the car over other modes of transport – we could drink beer, stop for selfies, and listen to the radio. We bargained down to $10 more than the train and got in. As it happened, there was no beer, very few selfies, and the radio was a Mongolian call-in talk station.

If asked to guess the most popular car in the harsh climate of Mongolia, the Toyota Prius might never even enter your mind. But this was the vehicle whose middle seat I occupied for six hours to Ulaanbaatar, and the vehicle which filled the streets once we got there. Due to certain import regulations and pricing schemes, it is actually preposterously cheap to import unsold older Priuses from Japan to Mongolia. Although the average salary is very low, workers abroad can send back enough remittances to buy the car outright in a few months.

Another interesting thing about this is that they’re all right-hand drive. About a third of the non-Prius cars are also right-hand drive. Thus, on the drive-on-the-right roads of Mongolia, our driver tried out both lanes until he found one he liked best or other traffic forced him to change his mind. But on the whole we found Mongolian drivers incredibly polite and willing to give way, especially in light of six weeks in China and Vietnam.

Our guesthouse was easy enough to find and surprisingly close to the central square. The rest of the people living there seemed to be in various yet constant states of arrival and departure, filling the hall with luggage more often than not. The majority of budget accommodations in the city also offer tours, since practically every tourist wants to go to a park or desert at some point. Our host seemed impossibly busy at all times yet managed to be our guide for a day trip a few days into our stay, which I will detail soon.

The city of Ulaanbaatar gave us kind of a shock. It has much more of a Western feel to it, visible in architecture and advertisement and cars and food and everything – at every turn we were reminded that we were not in China. There was also not very much going on, at least not that we discovered at first. Outside the main avenues, restaurants were empty all day and streets were essentially silent. Tourists stuck out everywhere, perhaps more than we’d ever seen in one place. Even with the low turnout, prices were more expensive than I expected. These things kind of made us pine for the more familiar cities of China.

But then we took a day trip to one of the nearby national parks, and everything was better. I am a miserly person, and on this trip we’ve been especially tight-fisted, very often sacrificing our comfort for a few extra dollars. So when our host told us the price of the day trip he’d planned, we discussed it at length before agreeing. I’m very glad we went through with it, since he was a wonderful guide and filled the day with things to see and do.

We first went to a museum built under an enormous statue of Genghis Khan (who else), with sparse yet pretty exhibits about the Mongols and those who came before. You could climb out onto the statue a ways, but it was foggy and we couldn’t see much. Near the base was a small collection of life size metal cavalry warriors. Our host said that the museum plans to eventually have ten thousand of them, which would just be hilariously over-sized and cost a fortune. Apparently there are plans to charge people to put their own likeness on the soldier to help fund it – any takers?

Then we drove into the Gorkhi-Terelj park itself. Gorkhi means “wellspring” in Mongolian, and I suppose the Terelj river has its origin somewhere in the park. The first stop was on a stunning meadow with grazing yaks, shaded by mountains as the sun peeked through the mist. It was phenomenal. I ran from place to place taking photos under the amused looks of the farmers who had undoubtedly seen the same excitement hundreds of times.

Our next stop was Turtle Rock. Months ago as this trip was being planned, Auberon and I read about and saw pictures of this rock in the park that looked like a turtle. It stuck in our minds as the secret true goal of the trip – to travel thousands of miles over months to see a big rock. It was silliness of course but as the big moment drew near the excitement was real. The best thing was that this rock really did look like a turtle, and it was far larger than we thought. Many selfies were taken and we were thoroughly satisfied Right next to the rock was a tiny camp where we gladly parted with $5 to be led around on camelback for a few minutes. Then it was lunchtime, and after that we continued on into the park.

Footnote: the Mongolian name for Turtle Rock actually translates to Frog Rock, but everyone agrees that this is ridiculous. Ulaanbaatar from an apartment building roof. Camel riders. SONY DSC

August 28 – A snippet of Mongolia, part 2

Also inside the park was a Buddhist temple complex. We paid an inflated foreigner price ($2 instead of $1) and started our climb up the mountain. It should really go without saying that the temple was on a mountain. The path was clear and easy, and marked by scores of Buddhist teachings on signs along the way. Roughly halfway up there were prayer wheels and then additional signs started, 150 thoughts on the nature of enlightenment and how to reach it. This path led to a stairway with 8 black steps and 108 white steps (the symbolism of which I’ve forgotten) leading up to the temple doors. This number was convenient for me as it was the exact number of times that a nearby sign told me to repeat a mantra. At the top I marveled at the view and meditated in the temple while a monk was teaching a group of children, easily ignoring the tourists. After the pensive walk it was very easy to meditate, and I found the whole experience very fulfilling.

Our guide took us to a river for our next stop, the Terelj where the park takes its name. It reminded me strongly of scenery in northern California, with a wide, cold river cutting through stony banks and forests. There weren’t too many tourists around -hardly any people at all, actually- and so Auberon and I walked around as our guide kept up behind us. One thing that sadly stuck out was the trash. Heaps and heaps of it, some clearly measuring years’ worth and others hinting at a picnic recently concluded. It didn’t seem like anyone was coming by to straighten up anytime soon. On the bright side, the water remained very clear and the trash seemed confined to the banks, several yards away from the river’s edge. We took pictures and soon walked off.

On the way back we stopped at a large gravel mound with a sort of pole erected on top, draped with scraps of blue cloth. This was a traditional Mongolian shrine, predating Buddhism in the country. It was used by shamans to communicate with the heavens, and in their absence, ordinary people could make contributions. The taller the rock pile the better, so we found some spare stones along the road and walked slowly around the shrine three times in order to bring good fortune on our travels. As we left we heard another car honk three times – the symbol of respect for people too busy to contribute to the shrine.

Back in the city we found a Korean restaurant and reflected on the day after Auberon managed to select a dish that the restaurant wasn’t out of. We had little else to see in the city, having discovered through vigorous wandering that it was actually quite small. I wanted to find some more socks, so we resolved to make the next day a shopping day.

Actually it was another wandering day, but we did chance upon a magnificent street market. This was apparently where all the people were. It was a densely packed market the likes of which we hadn’t seen even in Vietnam, for it sprawled out on all sides of a dedicated covered area and had hundreds of stalls selling most everything you could imagine. I say most everything because Mongolia was sadly devoid of the easy access to street food that we’d gotten used to over the last month. Only one little kebab stand offered hot food, and nobody was eager to try it. But the market perfectly satisfied that desire for a bit more chaos and unpredictability. I overpaid handsomely for some beads and got a pair of Mongolian socks (they say “Mongol” in traditional script) for a song. I got some red and yellow Chinese socks in China and I have a vague goal to get socks representing each country as I continue. Other than that I’m really not one for souvenirs, though I’ve been carrying around a wonderful calligraphy scroll I was gifted in Vietnam.

Our train would depart late the following evening, and we were unable to store our bags in the hostel. So we resolved not to walk overmuch the next day, and set out for the national library. After brief confusion about whether we were allowed in, we passed some enormous and beautiful calligraphy and sat down in a silent reading room. Auberon switched between his Kindle and a book on ethics, and I updated my journal and nearly finished a book on Uzbekistan. It was very peaceful and the students took no mind of the out-of-place tourists. After a few hours we found another empty yet tasty restaurant, then after we had overstayed our welcome by some time we again set off in the direction of the train station. There I read every single issue present of the English-language government magazine, and increased my general knowledge of Mongolia by about a thousandfold. Did you know that there are 25,000 Mongolians living in the United States, and slightly more than that in South Korea? How about the fact that the Indonesian government recently removed visa restrictions for Mongolians in order to boost tourism? Or that child labor laws are cracking down on the tradition of using children as jockeys during the Naadam festival races?

When the train arrived I was essentially an expert. We collected our bags, hoped that it was the right train, and climbed on for our ride to the north. Two things most people would not expect in Ulaanbaatar.

August 31 – The Trans-Mongolian Line

As we boarded the train to Irkutsk, we realized that nearly everyone else in the carriage was an English-speaking tourist. The majority of the compartments were occupied by an Australian-based tour group, evidently all retirees going from Beijing to Moscow. Our roommates (for we were four to a room) were a newly engaged couple in the middle of a year’s journey from southeast Asia to Italy. They were kind and pleasant people, and they talked with us for a long time over the next 36 hours, sharing tales about their journey and their lives in Hawaii before traveling.

A bed makes a world of difference. The hours really did fly by, and it seemed like we reached the border in minutes. Rick from our compartment performed a bit of a song and dance for the border guard, as he had changed significantly since his picture was taken. “Tilt your head. No, to the left. Open your eyes more. Hmm…”

But we were eventually let through and we watched with amusement as some minor smuggling ring was broken and about a dozen bottles of vodka were confiscated. The customs agents had been extremely thorough, shining flashlights into air vents and pulling back rugs, even though they didn’t open any of our bags. I found out later that it was actually the railway workers that had tried to sell it, and all they had to do was pay a small fine. The forests of northern Mongolia became the (very similar) forests of Siberia, and we continued into our third country of the trip.

When you’re on a long sleeper train ride, you get to know the others in your carriage, first by voice, then by sight. I first spoke to some of the others when I caused a minor incident by unplugging somebody’s charging iPad so I could snag one of the precious electrical outlets on the train. But of course it was fine, and now that the silence was broken we said hello when we passed in the hall. I talked to one couple and shared my same story about where I had come from and where I was going, finding it a bit new and different to deliver this speech in English to other native speakers. They were very unsatisfied with their trip so far, which told me immediately that they were used to the kind of travel pampering rarely experienced by young people like me.

Later, though, I chanced upon a woman, Allison, staring out the window in a kind of rapture. She was in Siberia and amazed by this fact. In talking to her it became clear that she was quite different from the other couple I talked to. She looked perfectly ordinary, like someone you’d see in a grocery store, and so as she revealed how much of a lifetime adventurer she was I was amazed. She told me about selling cigarettes on the black market in Burma in the 1980s, and then another woman who had done the same thing joined in with her own stories. Allison’s husband walked by and was dragged in with the introduction “Pete got stabbed in Indonesia,” which was about the point that I realized my own adventures were terribly boring. I stood and listened for half an hour to tales from the 1970s and 80s about bribing border guards in Pakistan, motorcycling to Iran, meeting Thai drug kingpins, refusing to smuggle hashish in Morocco, and more. I had started the train ride thinking of myself as the Paul Theroux figure next to the more ordinary travelers (this is a feature of his books), but as it happened I was very small potatoes indeed.

The hours kept flying by, and in no time at all it was early morning in Irkutsk. We shook hands, said goodbye, chose a direction, and walked off again.

September 1 – Middle Siberia

Outside the station we grew a little nervous at the presence of the guys hanging out in the parking lot – they bore a strong resemblance to the bad guys from every eighties action movie. But of course they paid us no mind, even after I set off a car alarm, and eventually we found a big bridge and decided to cross it. Both of us were in fine spirits and ready for more walking after our longest train ride to date.

We did some circuits around the parks and squares of Irkutsk, without much of an idea of where we were or where we were headed. The city instantly reminded me of my time in Poland last summer, and so I was struck with excitement to wander the streets as I had done back then. At that time of day, though, the streets were almost entirely empty. It was very strange to both of us that it was about seven in the morning and that nobody was beginning the bustle of the day. We had been used to waking up later, sure, but in the morning in China and Vietnam people were up and starting the day early. After about an hour of this confusion we had grown tireder and hungrier and paid a taxi too much to bring us to our very nearby hostel.

This was actually our first time in that backpacker mainstay, the hostel. We had shared rooms before when volunteering, but when buying accommodation it was well within budget to just get private rooms. Things were a bit tighter in Russia, so for all of Russia we booked hostels in an effort to force us into being social.

At this point actually, we were a bit cynical at the prospect of repeating The Script for the thousandth time: I’m from California, I’ll be staying in your country this long, funny story actually we came from Vietnam, haha yes it’s a long way to Denmark, Alex, Auberon, Au-be-ron, yes it’s a hard name for Americans too… We’d started saying these things in Ho Chi Minh City and hadn’t really stopped. In China it was especially frequent because of all the English teaching. Auberon declared that if he met a girl that went off script he’d have to marry her. He’s still single.

After such cynicism you’ll be happy to hear that we met a cool Mongolian guy named Timin and went around with him for most of the day. He was there on business, coordinating international shipments of construction materials between Russia and Mongolia. He matched us in walking enthusiasm and his Russian blew mine out of the water. We wandered to a nice restaurant and then to the parks on the south side of the city, then back to the center where he departed for a bus ride out of town.

The next day we found passage to the nearby town of Listvianka, a popular and easy to access day trip. Jumping on the chance to collect another method of transportation, we traveled by speedboat. It was very fast and didn’t offer too many opportunities for photography since the decks were crowded with Russians at all times. I find it very easy to fall asleep at the beginning of car or bus rides, and the boat was no different. In no time we had arrived at Lake Baikal.

Lake Baikal is huge, and the destination for throngs of Russian and international tourists. We were really there because we’d seen big cities for a long time and needed a good hike in the woods. We found a nice path leading away from the souvenir shops and started off. In seconds we were alone on the path. Apart from some women gathering mushrooms we had the woods to ourselves. They were wonderfully European woods, broad and dense and filled with roots and birches and ivy. Bright red mushrooms peeked out of the leaves here and there, and though the path was clear it was far from the paved trails of China.

After a solid climb we reached one rocky summit and were immediately covered in flies. Not biting or stinging, just aggravating and persistent. Even though the temperature is dropping in Siberia it’s still bug season. After a minute or so of selfies we reluctantly pushed on. It turned out there wasn’t much of a view from the actual summit, but at least we had a lively scramble down the very steep mountainside to the town.

Back in Irkutsk we felt pretty complete with our time. There wasn’t a ton more to see and our train left very late at night, so we had just one more goal for the day: vandalism. Irkutsk is a territory in the board game Risk, and months ago over a game with some friends we decided that we would take one of the little Red Guard game pieces and secure our control over the area by supergluing him to the city. We did. If you find him and send me a picture, I will personally mail you a card of congratulations and all of the remaining Russian coins I have in my possession – a sizable stack by now. A boat on Baikal. A very large church.

September 7 – The long train

In Irkutsk we got on the train and didn’t get off for three days.

It was a lovely journey, really. I believe I’ve mentioned before that I find it very relaxing to lie down on a sleeper bed and watch the world pass by. We were served a single free meal at the very beginning, some very acceptable crepes with jam. Unlike the last journey, we had no English speakers in our carriage and so spent much of the time in silence or talking to each other. My Russian never got particularly conversational, so I didn’t want to go through the stress of almost understanding social interactions over and over. But that seemed to suit the Russians fine.

It’s easy and enjoyable to slip in and out of sleep on the rails, and we all wrecked any kind of 24-hour sleep cycle we might have had. The beds were very comfortable, especially coming off of six weeks in Asia. Four to a compartment, with space for baggage above and below. You’re provided with sheets and small towel and left totally unbothered by the staff for the duration.

The restaurant car, present for the first time now that we were properly on the Siberian route, served the expected fare. Thanks to a strong dollar we ate there more than we expected. They frowned upon too much loitering at first, but after the hours slid by we were allowed to sit and play Chinese chess for some time. I think Auberon won almost every game, even though we’re pretty well matched. Like I said, the train puts me in a nice stupor.

I’d gotten to see great rivers and lakes on the first train leg. This time it was almost entirely forest, punctuated with villages and open fields. Slowly the architecture changed from the hardier log cabins of the eastern regions to tin-roofed buildings and small farms, sometimes with a church spire poking out above. At night, since we were constantly traveling west, the sunset stretched out into twilights almost eerie in their length. Perhaps my favorite view was seeing a copse of birch trees, denuded somehow, nearly the same color as the fading sky and with a small campfire adding a splash of orange in between them.

In what seemed like nothing near 53 hours, we had arrived at Yekaterinburg. Yekaterinburg in the morning light. The author several days after last seeing a shower.

September 8 – A few days in Yekaterinburg

Arriving as usual in the early morning, we continued the theme of heading roughly toward the city center. We were told by the hostel not to check in until noon. Given that we had no idea where it was, it was mutually decided that we should wander for a while to kill time and then maybe take a taxi once we were tired.

Again we saw the night turn into early sunrise, and again we were mystified that absolutely nothing was open around six in the morning. No 24-hour cafes, diners, grocery stores, anything. It certainly seemed that this city was much richer than Irkutsk, with a small collection of actual skyscrapers creating a skyline over the river.

Eventually we found a little pastry shop that had just opened. Quite hungry by now, we became early and valuable customers, staying and resting perhaps a bit more than necessary. I was excited by the presence of a particular Georgian cheese pastry known as khachapuri. I went to a wonderful Georgian restaurant last summer in Budapest, and I’ve wanted to visit the country for years. Sadly the pastries in the shop were too cold and too salty to remind me of the ones I’d had before.

Our hostel was a bit hard to find, but once there we got into our shared 12-person dorm and dropped our luggage next to the very creaky bunk beds. There was a woman in the staircase later who was very skillfully painting someone’s portrait. Seeing our interest, her friends told her спроси! спроси! – ask! ask! She hesitantly posed the question: would we like to sit for oil portraits so she could practice for art school? Would we! We made plans to meet the next morning.

I didn’t realize how hard it was to be a model. I got pretty chilly in the shade and regretted choosing an awkward, twisting three-quarter angle. We talked about art and artists, and how the low rent in Yekaterinburg made it easier than other Russian cities to live and paint in. She enjoyed portraits and had even hitched around Russia with a friend to do portraits of strangers in other places. Soon she switched to Auberon’s painting and I was happy to stretch my legs, wander and explore.

The city was, as expected, much larger than Irkutsk. It had a younger energy too, with lots of young students seen walking around or working in cafes. Many sculptures in a sort of caricature style, mostly unlabeled, dotted the streets. There was a big pedestrian walkway near a super-sized mall and shopping center, where street performers pounded acoustic guitars to Russian pop melodies.

Breaking with our tradition of wandering through malls and buying nothing, I got myself some new shoes and a lovely shirt. My shoes were new around April, but walking hundreds of miles over the previous two months had taken its toll and they were now toast. In Asia I saw many great shirts capitalizing on the popularity of English, with no regard at all paid to the actual content of the words. Nonsense was common, and near-nonsense veered into hilarity. In Russia these were less common but I think the shirt I got fits the theme well: “University & National Sport Team.”

I used to be much more into photography, especially older film processes. Back home I have twenty or so old cameras and a small library of photography books. I was thus glad to find a little museum of photography with art gallery on the second floor. I always get a little bit more inspired when I see works by other artists. The main exhibit seemed to be about Central Asian villages in the Soviet Union, though the captions were all in Russian. Auberon identified with a note written in Spanish in the visitor’s book: “Nice pictures. I don’t understand any Russian at all. It’s very hard to get by.”

In my solo wanderings I found a great library. They gave me a Russian ID card, which I will certainly use to pretend to be a foreign student in the future, and let me loose in the languages section. Auberon and I had been contemplating the physics of a central fountain in a square, and as he put it, that conversation scratched an intellectual itch but only made it worse. So we bought notebooks and went back to the library together, where I read about languages and teaching theories and he read about physics and computer science. It was a great library and we both shared with the other what we’d learned after it closed.

Then we went to Moscow. Inside of the library. Me in my new shirt next to plastic-wrapped shopping carts.

September 13 – The capital of Russia

The train to Moscow was very comfortable, though I caught a bit of a sore throat. We had our compartment mostly to ourselves and the journey was just a bit more than overnight. In keeping with the general theme of our Russia travels we arrived around sunrise and braced ourselves.

I had studied Russian language and culture for a while, and something I had seen over and over was that Moscow was not a fun place. From the man at the embassy to our hostel mate in Yekaterinburg, I had been told I would have no fun. But Moscow was just beginning to shine in the morning sunlight. As a capital city it was enormous, and just getting to the hostel brought us past three or four incredibly large buildings. Architecture ranged from 1940s New York to big wide Soviet glass and concrete blocks.

Our hostel was right next to Red Square and even closer to the Lenin Library. But the staff seemed not to be feeling the communal spirit and wouldn’t let us occupy our room until later. This didn’t change the general plan much, so we dropped off our bags and walked. Adding on to our head start from sunrise, we walked another 30 miles or so that day from corner to corner of the city and back. What we saw was far from the dismal description I had been given, rather, the city was clean, full of art installations, and vibrant. There was even a whole section of skyscrapers, cordoned off on their own little island of high-powered business deals. Unfortunately the Russians were less welcoming than the Chinese and we weren’t allowed to the tops of any of them.

During the day of walking we went back to the train station and bought a ticket to Riga, Latvia – for the wrong day. Upon discovering this in the evening we decided to kick our habit of wandering around and throw regular tourism into high gear. That night we made a list of museums and attractions that would please even my dad, noted trip-planning enthusiast.

We aimed for Red Square first. It was easy enough to find, and then by joining a group of Chinese tourists we got in line for something unknown. Within a minute or so it became clear: we were accidentally visiting Lenin’s mausoleum. The Chinese tourists bowed to the body three times out of respect, but I was more transfixed with how small he looked. The line was kept moving constantly and soon we were out in the sunlight again, laughing after noticing the big sign we had been standing under that read “to the mausoleum.”

Next was the museum of Soviet arcade machines, which was just what it sounds like. All the machines were in working order, though that didn’t mean it was easy to win. The clumsy yet ingenious analog controls combined with a general habit of older games being difficult meant every game was diabolically hard. I enjoyed the two-player games: strange foosball variations of basketball and hockey. There was a little library on the second floor with dusty Soviet magazines, a sort of parallel to old Analog issues.

We kept going on the pedestrian street Arbat until a small bookstore caught my eye. Inside I browsed art books until sufficiently rested and inspired, then crossed the street to a small gallery. The receptionist noticed that we cheapskates were wrestling with the idea of paying any admission at all, so with a wink she let us in for free. It was a wide and open space whose main exhibit was a series on typography and logo design. Much of it reminded me of things I had seen back at school, in the library or in the school’s gallery. SONY DSC

We set out for Gorky Park, and once there played a brief bit of outdoor chess (Western this time instead of Chinese) on the type of jumbo board for which I have always had a weakness. Then we went to the Garage, a new and trendy modern art museum that would not look out of place in Amsterdam or San Francisco. The number of exhibits was pretty low but they had a lot of critique and interpretation about each piece, as well as all relevant text in Russian Sign Language on a monitor. Auberon chatted to one of the docents as I lost myself in huge and expensive coffee-table books on photography.

Since the train to Riga didn’t leave until the evening and we had accidentally booked a day extra at the hostel, the following day was another excellent one where we didn’t have to carry our bags. It rained on and off, and I went off on my own as Auberon explored with his new friend from the museum. I popped into the very large gold-domed church (I’ve got to start remembering these names) and then to an excellent little photography gallery. By way of return I went to the Lenin library, which I wholly misunderstood. It seemed to be entirely reading rooms and no actual books, though it was enormous. Plus the entrance was under construction, so I had to do a lap around the block to find it. But in the end I got another cool ID card.

I met back with Auberon and we headed off to the train station, hoping that I had correctly used the ticket machine and our expensive new tickets were for the right place. Moscow sunrise. “Business Lunch” brunch. A famous church whose name I never learned. Chess in the park.

September 15 – Big and small cities in an unfamiliar place

After a fairly nightmarish train ride (bunks smaller than we were and enthusiastic snorers) we arrived in Riga, the capital city of Latvia. I knew little to nothing about either. In a nice turn of events we had arrived well into the morning, and from the looks of the market outside the train station things were already in full swing. I had been getting intermittent blisters from walking eight hours a day in new shoes, so we decided not to explore and just walk straight to the hotel.

We had booked just two days in our hotel, which we figured would give us the same ability to combine wandering and targeted tourism. Sure enough, we saw a few museums and also got in a great deal of exploration of the old and new towns. The Occupation Museum was rated poorly by every Russian on TripAdvisor, which brought me back to the War Remnants Museum in Vietnam. It told the moving story of Latvia’s struggle for independence against the Germans and later the Russians. A short video clip showed what I felt to be too little of the amazing nonviolent protests of 1989, when millions of people joined hands to create an unbroken line from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius.

The state history museum deserves a mention too, since for a miniscule entrance fee we had four floors of exhibits to ourselves. It was much more of a traditional arrowheads-under-glass museum, and most of it was in Latvian, but I liked the atmosphere. They had several life size dioramas of typical rooms at different points in history, and the silence of the museum lent these exhibits an eerie edge.

There was definitely a beauty to Riga, but we reached a certain point quickly where we felt like moving on. In the train station I impulsively suggested that we take the next train to the coast, and after discovering the incredibly low price of the Latvian intercity rail, we did. We ended up in Vecaki, which was mostly a road leading to the beach with a few lucky restaurants on either side. Vecaki seemed like a fairly popular destination even in this off season, and we followed other tourists to the water’s edge.

It was gorgeous, especially so because of the flat shore and flat surf, surely the most gentle I’ve seen. The sun was slowly setting to the west, though the ocean horizon stretched out northward. We had come from the Pacific coast in Nha Trang across desert, forest, grassland, and more to make it to the shore of the Baltic Sea halfway around the world.

The next day we took another train to Sigulda, a smaller town at the edge of a national park. Our guesthouse was on the outskirts, a huge log house that had a dining hall for fifty people or more. But in this in-between season (past summer and not yet to snowfall) it was not only cheap but ours entirely. We walked for a while in both directions of the road, raising the attention of a neighbor’s friendly dog who accompanied us into some small woods. The other dogs were less pleased to see us, but there was no trouble. I wonder if they can tell how far we’ve come. On the road to Turaida.

Sigulda is a few hours’ hike from another town, Turaida, known chiefly for its castle. We walked through some very nice forest, past a malfunctioning cable car, and over a few flights of nice new wooden stairs to get to this castle, stopping at a lovely little café for nourishment. The castle was red, clearly a bit different from the classic Western European stone towers. Inside there were a few guides in period costume and some brief descriptions of the restoration efforts. Only the main tower was accessible to the public, but the view over the forested countryside was very fine. Back in the courtyard I surprised all present by paying a euro and scoring a bullseye with my first shot from a bow and arrow. This feat earned me another free shot, where it was revealed that the first was entirely luck and I had no idea how to handle a bow.

We took a bus back to Sigulda after seeing a small sculpture park next to the castle (known as Folk Song Park but with hills that remained silent). By then some other guests had moved into the house, though we hardly saw any of them. The next morning we went off to Riga again, headed for the bus station and a route south to Lithuania. Auberon out to sea. Riga from a rooftop. Turaida Castle.

September 15 – The Russian tongue

I had studied Russian in fits and starts before this year, but once I knew I was going to the country I put in more effort. Every time I study a new language I go about it in a different way, drawing from experience and new techniques that I constantly come across. With Russian I hoped that I could ignore the notoriously complicated grammar and focus on acquiring it more or less naturally. I studied it for six months, doing at least ten minutes a day but generally closer to half an hour on average. Say 90-100 hours in total.

Because of my love of phonetics I focused a lot on the sounds and the flow of the language. This paid off in a way, since people rarely switched to English on me and some guessed that I had Russian heritage. Someone that had spoken Russian with a grandparent once a week, maybe. Just a student, I said, though sometimes I mentioned that my grandmother was Polish.

Conversation was difficult. As nice as it is to speak with a good accent, it doesn’t mean much without the words themselves. My method was to practice whole sentences at a time, thus internalizing some grammatical constructions easily while remaining fully ignorant of ones I hadn’t come across. So I fumbled a lot, especially in the beginning, making sure adjectives matched nouns and pronouns were in the right case.

It was a bit stressful, as I mentioned previously. When you practice with a teacher or a Skype partner you don’t quite feel the pressure that’s palpable in a restaurant or a ticket line. To hear and understand my mp3s on my phone was great, to hear a string of jumbled syllables from my conversation partner was dismal.

Reading was nice. After a week or so the Cyrillic came back easily (having not looked at it since departing for Korea) and I generally knew what signs said. I still need a lot of practice to read books, but it’s just something that will take time. It wasn’t until years into studying German that it was truly easy to read average articles or books.

I grudgingly admit that Russian is a useful language and I should really put more effort into it. It really comes in handy in some places where German or English don’t reach. I spoke it first on this trip in Vietnam and twice just today. I can function with it, and I can tell that with a few hundred more hours of studying it’ll get to that wonderful point of being accessible at a moment’s notice.

September 20 – Klaipeda and Kaunas

At this point in the trip we were playing fast and loose with plans. We knew that we wanted to spend time in Latvia and Lithuania, but since we could hardly tell them apart before visiting there wasn’t much that we were looking for specifically. After much debate and checking of transit routes we settled on going to the coastal town of Klaipeda in western Lithuania (eastern coastline being fairly hard to come by).

We had initially scheduled just two days, but soon realized that it was worth much more. Our guesthouse was relatively near the old town, but we covered it in an afternoon. For tight-pursed backpackers, old towns filled with jewelry or amber shops don’t offer much excitement. If you’re into amber, though, Klaipeda is the place to go. Apparently they find it on the beaches in huge chunks and then make elaborate ornaments out of it.

Instead we took the ferry to the Curonian Spit, a long and thin landmass that goes from Poland through Kaliningrad and up to the ferry terminal at Smiltyne where we got off. Sightly disappointed that it was more than a day’s journey to get to the Russian border (not that our visas were valid anyway) we contented ourselves with the spit itself.

Auberon loved the beach and decided to spend much of his time there, while I walked through the forests. I was quickly and completely bewitched by their incredible beauty. The air was perfectly crisp, the grass was astonishingly green, and when I stopped walking I could just hear trees and wind. The main path branched off into smaller paths, and I saw dozens of huge orb weavers in their webs, evidence that the larger part of the tourists had stopped tramping about for the season. I saw very few people except when near the beaches, and surely only a fraction of those who come at the height of summer.

The next day we planned to go out again. Auberon would continue to enjoy the beach with a picnic lunch, and I would rent a bike and see the forests at a higher speed. Alas, I discovered that the bike rental shops were closed in the off season, and I only found this out after an hour or so of walking around town. But I had a map, and I was already on the north end of town, and so I decided to keep going north.

I found forests soon enough, as well as a huge and sprawling adventure park which looked far too fun to ever be constructed in the United States. There were ziplines, balance beams, tightropes, swings, and more dangerous playthings all suspended twenty feet or more off the ground. There was a ticket office with ropes and helmets but I knew that if I was a student at the nearby university, that park is the first place to go after a night of drinking in the dorms.

I reached a tiny beach suburb after an hour or so of walking around the port and railway depot. There was not much to see besides some strange and old concrete bunkers half-buried in the sand and clearly still used by enthusiastic drinkers and urinators. I popped into the tiny town library and had a halting Russian conversation with the kindly librarian, explaining that I had worked in a library and that I liked to see what libraries around the world looked like during my travels (many people speak Russian in Latvia and Lithuania, and the guesthouse owner was the only person to tell me – in German – that I should have learned some Lithuanian).

Returning to home, Auberon and I had a pizza dinner and planned for the next day’s trip to Kaunas. Auberon had been told that Kaunas was worth three hours at most, but like Moscow we found it a very agreeable place. We stayed right in the old town, in a hostel connected to a church. Our room came with a crucifix and a shrink-wrapped picture of a saint plus literature inviting us to retrace the pilgrimage of John Paul II around Lithuania.

Apart from a small fort near the church, there was a long pedestrian street that formed the main attraction of the city, starting in the old town and leading far further into a wider shopping area. I walked a good distance by myself the first night owing to Auberon’s now-tattered shoes making it uncomfortable for him to keep up the hard miles. I saw some people square dancing in a park to a drummer and accordionist, forming a beautiful and wholesome scene.

The next day we walked more in a different direction and wound up at a large art museum, where we were some of the only patrons present. It had a large selection of more classical European art in the upper floors, with seascapes and wildlife sketches next to fine silverware and furniture. Auberon noticed a couple of pictures by the same artist who had taken a few liberties with proportions, such that when you looked closely Mary’s eyes were the size of teacups and her legs were folded in knots around the Christ child.

From Kaunas we found an evening bus to Augustow, and the rolling plains out the window soon gave way to the forests of Poland. The fairy tale forests of Klaipeda. Concrete on the beach. The Kaunas old town.

September 29 – Small town Poland

We arrived after two hours or so in Augustow, a lakeside town I had booked way at the beginning of the trip. I didn’t realize that the place we were actually staying (a guest house/cabin/resort sort of thing) was well removed from the town, shopping, transit, restaurants, and everything else. We had a quick dinner downtown near the bus station and called a cab to bring us to our lodgings.

The next day we walked for an hour or so to get into town and find something to eat, and resolved to buy groceries in the evening. We got some food at a place selling pierogi, then headed to a shoe store where Auberon sorrowfully parted with his beloved yet disintegrating sneakers in exchange for more substantial trail shoes.

Augustow is a very small place that is mostly suburb. A park and square forms the center near the bus station, and then a little further north is the lake and many places that will sell you boat tours in the high season. There were certainly people around, perhaps it was even one of the most bustling tiny cities we’d seen. But soon we’d seen what we needed to and took a cab back to the hotel.

There we set out for the woods, and quite some woods they were. We hiked through trails and paths all around the general area, meeting as I expected nobody else. The trails were clearly marked and I imagine that in the high season it’s common to see other hikers enjoying the thick birch groves.

The next day saw an incredibly slow start as we stayed in the room well past noon. The initial goal was to buy some train tickets at the station, but once we got ourselves over there it was clear that the station itself had been closed for years, and passengers were expected to buy the tickets on the train. Later in Poland we saw more boarded-up stations, replaced entirely by mobile ticket machines carried by the conductors. We walked around the other side of the outskirts, soon chancing upon an abandoned factory.

I’ve seen a lot of great pictures of abandoned Soviet industry, and last time I was in Poland I saw some enticing buildings from a distance. It wasn’t until one of the last buildings we went into that we discovered a huge forge and crane-like apparatus, which was extremely interesting to look at and climb around in. It looked like it had been partially disassembled a while ago, as there were strange holes in the floor and inaccessible catwalks near the ceiling. Nobody came in or disturbed us for the duration of our visit.

The partying Lithuanians next door did their best to prevent it, but we did in fact get some sleep before our very early train. A few hours and a few transfers later, and we found ourselves in Krakow. SONY DSC Abandoned factory selfie.

October 2 – Big city Poland

In Krakow we were immediately taken with our biggest city since Moscow. As we left the train station buses and trams whizzed by and advertisements flashed over the heads of the shoppers in the crowd. It was very much like those montages of people from the countryside coming to the big city for the first time ever.

We had rented a room in an apartment, and the landlady came to meet us with her young son. I played peekaboo with him as she filled out our rental forms (by hand in duplicate using the same information I provided on the booking website) and told us not to have too much fun. Then we got the keys and went off into the night.

We had become accustomed to seeing the cities we visited close up shops and restaurants around 8 PM. Thus we practically stopped in our tracks when the quiet and looming apartment buildings gave way suddenly to a wide square that was lit up beautifully and filled with people. In the center was a market hall selling furs and jewels, and surrounding it were fancy restaurants with outdoor seating, flaming heaters fighting the September cold. We walked down one of the side streets and soon saw the old city wall, which unlike the one in Xi’an was closed to tourists at that time.

The next day we planned to see what the city could show us. We went back to the main square a few times as well as toward the outer areas, breaking in Auberon’s shoes some more and working our way to the big commercial shopping centers.

I had left my sweater in Augustow and so had to layer three or four shirts to keep out the chilly autumn winds. Auberon, too, lacked a good fall layer. We went through a few stores with typical indecisiveness and stinginess, but eventually picked up a pretty heavy sweater for me and a thinner turtleneck for Auberon, with some made-in-Poland socks thrown in at the end.

Auberon wanted dearly to take the bus to the town of Zakopane, about an hour and a half south toward the Slovak border and famous for its mountain hiking. The next morning I accompanied him (he used the words “grumpy” and “dour” but I simply felt I had seen quite a few rocks and trees already) to a small diner in Zakopane where we waited out the rain and discovered that our hiking map was uselessly out of scale. We picked a mountainous direction and forged ahead, crossing little streams and seeing the town quickly disappear into forest. A gate and entrance fee indicated that we were on the right track. The rain had stopped completely and we surged ahead at the initial climb, finding ourselves in half an hour or so above a very picturesque valley. Here I learned that Auberon likes to see nature at speed, so we continued on for a good deal longer on another trail.

We had the park almost wholly to ourselves, and on the one occasion that some rain appeared we happened to be near a shelter anyway. We filled the time with academic discussions, talking about the machine learning and artificial intelligence work that Auberon is interested in as an engineer. In an hour or so we ended up underneath some impressive switchbacks, and once these were crested we found ourselves at an even better summit than before. On the one side, the red roofs of towns and cities on the plains. On the other, hills becoming craggy rocks stretching into the clouds. As the clouds shifted we saw a glimpse of snow on the highest peak – so far had we come from the hot days in Vietnam.

But a sun low in the sky told us that we’d better turn back, and we began to retrace our steps. The whole way back was almost more beautiful than before, as the golden sunset pierced the clouds and shone through patches of rain. We reached the bottom just as darkness fell, and put off dinner in favor of getting the first bus back to Krakow.

Two packed days thus behind us, we arrived at the station early next morning for our train to Berlin. The Krakow main square. Hiking in Zakopane. The mountain view.

October 4 – Poor but sexy

The first time I went to Berlin, last year, I was admonished on the train for planning to spend only one day there. But that’s what we did, thanks to lodging prices that were mysteriously three or four times higher than I had expected. So we planned to spend two nights in Berlin and then a week in a Workaway near Hamburg, giving me (I minored in German in college) lots of time in Germany at a fraction of the usual cost.

Our train arrived late in the day. The rail passes gave us unlimited travel on the wonderful Berlin transit system, so after dropping off our bags we went directly to Alexanderplatz, home of the TV tower. From there we walked haphazardly toward the Brandenburg Gate, illuminated at night and obscured somewhat by some odd fences. I love that in big touristy cities you can find the famous sights in a matter of minutes, all practically right next to one another.

In the morning we went off in a new direction and found a bakery for breakfast. For a reason I cannot understand, in several German bakeries I’ve been to there are wasps crawling over the pastries. Nobody seems to mind and in fact I question sometimes if I’m the only one who can see them. Then they fly around you as you eat and try to fall into your drink. This trip, so late in the year, we saw them only in Germany. I should have studied French instead.

In a little while we began to get some answers to the mysteries described earlier. Police erected more barricades in an intersection as we watched, and crews used rubber strips to cover up the tram rails. A crowd began to form, and almost immediately applause began as some men in Lycra roller-bladed toward us at high speed. We had arrived in time for the world-famous Berlin Marathon – which apparently has a skating component the day before. First dozens, then hundreds of skaters went by, ranging from individual to team with custom jerseys. I’d never seen anything like it.

I was very excited to show Auberon the fact that there are some streets and neighborhoods in Berlin where you can walk for an hour and see a constant stream of shops on either side of the road. The same distance in other big cities we visited might have put us into suburbs or outside the city entirely. I got to see new parts of the city I’d never been to, and although the weather was a bit warm we had fine energy all day. We spent a while at the Berlin wall memorials, something I hadn’t seen as much of before. They’re huge and sobering, and I was able to draw for once on my history knowledge rather than my linguistic knowledge in conversation.

A single day only lasts so long, and we had split it about 60-40 between simply walking and goal-oriented sightseeing. At night we visited the Holocaust memorial – even more powerful and haunting in the dark – and turned in late to the hostel. Then it was back to the train station the next morning, to our destination of Hoisdorf in the countryside outside Hamburg. Skaters at speed. My new business venture. A total of one bike remains.

October 7 – Retreat to Paradise

We realized fairly quickly that the new Workaway we had signed up for was squarely in the boonies. But that was part of the charm – it was billed as a meditation retreat and seminar center. Our work was simple. Auberon was to repair and expand the booking website, and I was to shoot and edit a series of short promotional videos.

The house was enormous. Auberon and I both tried and failed to name houses of friends or family that even approached it in size, plus it had a backyard orchard. When we arrived there was one long-term guest (a German medical student), one solo volunteer (a Lithuanian wanderer), and one volunteering couple (German/Bulgarian off-grid hippies).

After a few days we realized that we had actually had plenty of relaxation recently, and the tiny town seemed closed-in. So we took advantage of the ample free time offered us to go to Hamburg and Lübeck on separate day trips, plus regular long walks around the countryside. I use the word “countryside” because our host did, but in reality the little towns were all close together in car terms, and simply a longer walk by foot. There were great bike paths thanks to the dismantling of local train service half a century ago (a dilemma for me – train or bike?) and they led through wonderful tall forests.

Each day we cooked something, either with the other guests or alone. Our meals when living together in college were often somewhat bachelor chic, that is to say, unimaginative. Here, I did my best to stay vegetarian (all bets were off outside the home) and experimented with cooking all kinds of rice and vegetable dishes from scratch. It turns out rice is a lot easier and more versatile than I ever gave it credit for in college.

In Hamburg we saw the huge park and made fun of the street art for a while. It reminded me of both Frankfurt and Berlin, which isn’t saying much as that’s the rest of my big city Germany experience. Several of the attractions we walked by were closed, and the cutting wind made us walk past things faster. At night I sought out the Reeperbahn, years after reading a description of it by Bill Bryson. It was going downhill in his day, and from what I could gather the same was happening 26 years later. The red light district lure isn’t enough to keep businesses running, and many of them are becoming ordinary bars or dance clubs to attract young people.

Lübeck was entirely different – a very old town that had the architecture history advantage of not being blown up in the war. For the first hour or so we walked in entirely the opposite direction from the central old town, seeing only suburbs and wondering what all the fuss was about. Once back on track, the majesty of the old town was wonderful and it was beautiful to see the ancient buildings and streets as the sun set. In the Yugoslavian restaurant where we stopped for dinner, we ordered an enormous and delicious plate of assorted meats and potatoes, which arrived on fire and inspired its order by at least two other tables.

Somewhat surprised by the closeness of the date to Auberon’s departure, we finished up our work at the retreat and took the last train of the journey – to Copenhagen.

Pictured: one of my culinary creations, view of Germany from the ferry, and a scene that I found hilarious but that sadly doesn’t come through in the photo: the foreground and background signs say you’re entering and leaving the same town on a single empty stretch of road. One of my culinary creations. Germany from the ferry to Denmark. Now leaving Ahrensburg – only to arrive in Ahrensburg again a hundred meters down the road.

October 10 – End of an Era

On this trip we had been keeping track of the various modes of transportation that we used. Every few days, or when we remembered, we’d think of all the metros, cabs, trains, and so on that we had ridden recently and put it all on a list in Auberon’s notebook.

We were, however, initially at a loss as to how we should record the journey to Denmark – as the train itself chugged onto a massive ferry and we were thus brought to Copenhagen by two methods of transportation at once. (It ended up in the logbook as three entries, train-ferry-train, due to the technicality that we were not allowed to remain on the train once it was off dry land.)

In Copenhagen we learned that our accommodations were Poland-style: far away. It was a long but pretty march to the fairly sterile business area where our hostel was located, across marshes and flatlands dotted with modern Nordic Design concrete ponds and benches. It was late when we arrived and the prospect of going all the way to the city and back for dinner wasn’t great, so we ended up eating at an Indian place. I had fortunately not internalized the conversion rate for krøner to dollars, which consequently resulted in our most expensive dinner all trip.

Such is life in Denmark. We saw very high prices absolutely everywhere, the unfortunate opposite of the under-budget first weeks of the trip. But, we reasoned, we would still come in well under our estimates thanks to the Workaways and general miserliness throughout.

The next day we had a few boxes to tick. Auberon had seen the outline of a star fort on the map, which was conveniently next to my own goal of seeing the Little Mermaid statue in the harbor. The fort reminded us both strongly of colonial American architecture, though it dates to the late seventeenth century. We were unable to go into any of the buildings but it was very pleasant to walk around the grounds and along the ramparts. The weather was gorgeous. The suffocating heat of the first several weeks stayed with us in memory, so we didn’t mind the chilly winds as much. And despite the grim warnings of a man on the train that we came at a bad time, the sun shone and the sky was clear.

On the way to the statue Auberon happened to glance into the harbor and notice that there were hundreds and hundreds of tiny jellyfish present among the boats. We sat and watched for a long time, picking out subtle color differences and particularly large ones, wondering aloud about the life of a jellyfish and how it perceives the world. Then to the statue, which we saw only briefly as dozens of other tourists were clamoring for their turn. I can only imagine the scene in the high season. As much as I talk about the wandering we do, I still have a soft spot for famous destinations like the mermaid statue, the terracotta warriors, and Red Square.

We next found the Design Museum, which impressed us first with its lenient admission rates (free) and then with its collections. There was a fantastic section on Japanese art and Danish artists who had been inspired by it, and I was enchanted with some of the Japanese paintings – a school of art I’d never given much thought to. A lot more of the museum was devoted to examples of Scandinavian design in furniture, architecture, and so on. It was a great museum, one of the best on the trip. The only problem was that I kept wanting to sit on the chairs.

That evening we saw the pedestrian street Strøget, a very long shopping plaza that, while pretty, didn’t offer us anything we hadn’t seen in other countries’ versions. We had a Chinese buffet for dinner (far from the culinary high-water mark of Chengdu), a bowl of what claimed to be Sichuan noodles at another shop (ditto) and then headed for the metro home.

At the station we noticed a family of tourists rush to get on and then leave two members of the party behind. This they fortunately found hilarious, and as they spoke together about it I was glad to hear Vietnamese again for the first time in months. It happened that they were on the wrong train line anyway, and we were able to set them straight. More bookends: we had started the trip quite confused in Vietnam, now in Denmark we were able to help some Vietnamese people on their own trip. I was hoping to hear them say something about their plans for traveling overland, from Denmark to Vietnam via Russia…

The day of departure soon arrived. Auberon had refused to pay Scandinavian prices for a meal on the plane, so we stocked him up with muffins and fruit at a grocery store. Then with plenty of time to spare we got to the airport. One last selfie, some parting words, and then Auberon was off.

As for me, I stayed in Denmark for a few more days, traveling around to some more very nice cities and setting fire to my remaining money. I’m writing this from Germany now, where I have another week planned. Then I’m off to China, where I’ll return to my friends in Chengdu and do some more teaching, eventually getting to California in early December.

This blog is really about the trip before that: Auberon and Alex went Around the World. So I won’t turn it into a personal diary, but I won’t abandon it either. We collected a lot of information as we traveled, and some of it is useful but all of it should be relatively interesting. Data like steps walked per day, number of taxis taken, total trip mileage – these might interest a few readers, especially if you know us well or are my dad. There are thousands of photos on my camera that I fully intend to edit and share with the world, and those will make it on here some time after I get back to California. And I also collected a lot of knowledge that might be useful to tourists of the ten countries and 30+ cities we visited, like what transportation is like and how not to get scammed at ticket offices. Stay tuned.

Until then, dear reader – thanks for coming along!

Postscript: Transport here and there

The trip was fundamentally train based. However, the data shows that we took 180 total journeys from July 6 to October 5. Taxi rides actually had the highest tally, beating out train and metro for the top spot. Runners-up included buses and hired cars that didn’t belong to a taxi service. Out of the 180 legs of the journey, fully 150 were taken by both of us at the same time. I took slightly more solo journeys than Auberon did, and he does claim to have done more walking than me.

So what was the transit like in all those corners of the world? Here’s a quick breakdown by country and region:

Vietnam: Sleeper trains are affordable and very comfortable. We read enough horror stories about nightmarish long-haul bus rides to put us off from any long bus trips there. Taxi prices varied quite a bit in the cities, and the motorbike drivers charged a similar range of prices.

China: Sleeper trains are not great, as the beds are open to the corridor. The tickets also sell out fast. But life in a hard seat carriage can be an adventure on its own, with incredibly sociable people all around. Just don’t expect any personal space. City metros vary in quality but are up-and-coming in many cities, and the one in Chengdu was particularly easy to navigate. Taxis are very cheap and easy to come by, especially in larger cities. Very few drivers speak any English. Most Chinese people use a ride sharing app called Didi, so you might be able to save some money and frustration by having someone order a car for you. Buses are also very cheap, though maybe the least user-friendly. Even with some Chinese knowledge, the schedules are convoluted and hard to understand. The city buses are also usually quite crowded.

Mongolia: We took very few taxi rides in Ulaanbaatar. There is an informal ride-sharing economy there, and many drivers are willing to take you to your destination for a fee. The train infrastructure is not very expansive in Mongolia, so to get to the national parks a hired car is an expensive yet comfortable option.

Russia: The intercity trains on the Trans-Siberian Railway were excellent. I’ve written before about the wonderful train experience to be found in Russia. In the cities we visited, taxis and metros covered all that we needed. The Moscow Metro doesn’t have the polish of newer metro systems, but it takes you to every part of the city.

Eastern and Central Europe(Latvia, Lithuania, Poland): Latvia’s train infrastructure is sublime. It’s all very new, it all runs on time, and it’s all very cheap. Because of the places we visited, we actually didn’t board a single train in Lithuania. The intercity buses in that area of Europe are all cheap, but the booking websites lure you with outrageous deals and then never deliver. In general, booking at the bus station itself is the best strategy if possible. Train stations in smaller Polish cities have been made redundant by machines operated by the conductor, so don’t despair if you arrive in a city by bus and find the station boarded up.

Western Europe (Germany, Denmark): Transit in general in these countries is far more expensive than anywhere else we visited. The German train network is extremely dense and it is possible to get to almost any large town by train. Special thanks to the Berlin metro map as a masterpiece of metro maps. The smaller town where we stayed near Hamburg did require a bus, but the bus was comfortable and the schedule easy to follow. In Copenhagen the metro was also painless to use and went way out to the outskirts where our hostel was located. In my solo travel around Denmark I took a few intercity trains and found them to be just as nice as the ones in Germany: fast, quiet, and comfortable.

We purchased the Germany/Poland Eurail pass, and that decision involved a great deal of calculating and estimating to make sure we were getting a good deal. German trains are very expensive compared to other places, so if you’re planning a German trip with a lot of stops then you may wish to check out a rail pass. But for a comparatively short trip like we had, the savings were fairly small – maybe 50-100 euros in total. I first used a Eurail pass in 2012, and on that trip the conductors were pretty lax about checking the pass for validity. That had completely changed by this trip – there was no possibility of sneaking an extra day on the schedule.

For those travelers who prefer to speak English when traveling instead of dedicating months and months to learning the local language, you will find transit in big cities doable and transit in small cities a little frustrating. The workers at the Vietnamese and Mongolian train stations all spoke English, while in China and Russia there was usually a single line for English assistance. Poland was the only other country after that without ubiquitous English, and even then it was readily available. Even in China, the most monolingual country on the trip, there was still English signage in the train stations.

I hope this information can be useful for anyone considering an overland trip, wherever in Eurasia it may be!