The Scratchings of Schrodinger's Cat

---

OK, I wrote this when hideously sleep deprived whichexplains some of the weirdness. To appease the photofiends I've since uploaded selected highlights of thetrip so far (I think!).

Yep it's all gone a bit existential at this end. I was wondering how long I would have to spend alone before I was overwhelmed with introspection and the answer: three and a half weeks. My focus on the incredible bigness of things was brought into perspective at my ger camp in Mongolia when I noticed that the guy leading my horse trek was checking his texts and that the cutlery in the camp came from Ikea. For me'Mongolia' has always been a byword for all things remote but suddenly everything was interconnected and small again. If I ever get to Timbuktu and find their cutlery is from Ikea I shall become inconsolably disillusioned. I enjoyed Ulaanbaatar and managed to go to the theatre and see a live band in one evening (the mid-set powercut being the only reminder of this city's relatively recent modernity) punctuated by cheap pints.

Next day it was off on the train for my last leg into Beijing, sharing a cabin with a sweet French couple. This was the only part of the journey where there were a noticeable number of foreign tourists. We were quickly into the Gobi desert and the whole carriage became listless with the stifling heat and dust. My will broke mid-afternoon and I went to wash my face. It's not often that I'd describe a train toilet as a sanctuary but as the only place with no ventilation it was also the the only place without dust. When I emerged the whole mood had changed. It had begun to rain and everyone on the train was leaning out of the windows having impromptu showers and just laughing. Malaise ended we tripped off to the dining car for a beer before being chased back for the border crossing. Sensibly, the Chinese have a slightly different rail guage to everyone else so once our papers were processed our train was shunted carriage by carriage into a massive shed where we were jacked up and had the wheels changed. Very entertaining although rather laborious.

Waking the next morning we were into China and soon left the plains and were climbing through the mountains towards obscured to a great extent by the mist/chemical smog depending where you want to place yourself on the romanticism/ cynical-realism spectrum. Arriving in Beijing I took a crazy motor rickshaw thing to my rather lovely hostel in a hutong alley. Despite prior assurances about their ability to get me my next train ticket I was told on arrival there was no chance of getting to Xian for the next 10 days. Well, I was born in the year of the tiger and we don't accept that kind of nonsense. Also, I found myself more upset than I'd have expected at the prospect of having to break my overland epic with a flight. Hopped on a bus to Beijing West train station to try my luck and was left literally standing with my mouth open at the sheer size of the place. Some queueing and persuasion later and I'd armed myself with a ticket, hurrah, ominously called a 'hard sleeper', boooo. Returned in triumph and procured some dinner from nearby street stalls. I spent my first full day hiking on the Great Wall at a quieter spot than the big tourist draw. Hard going but an excellent experience and largely quite quiet. I found out afterwards that the weather reports routinely include pollution ratings, with 100+ making strenuous activity inadviseable. That day it had been a 96.

Having spent a few days in China now I find all my descriptions of things involve analogies with animals or elemental forces like: swarms, floods, teeming. The sheer number of people is extraordinary. Greater Beijing alone is the size of Belgium! As a tourist I am at once highly visible and invisible. To some I am an object of curiosity trolling around with my backpack or writing in my journal, to most others I may as well not exist. There are some pretty interesting ideas about personal space here (i.e. that you don't have any) and being ignored and bodily shoved out of the way seems to be normal. It's no wonder the people here are so small, there'd be no room for everyone if there was an obesity epidemic. The style here tends very much towards feminine demureness for the ladies and disturbingly rolled up t-shirts for the guys. The soundtrack to all visits to sights of interest has been the snicking of parasols opening and closing and the rattle and crack of people trying to melt their frozen bottles of water. It's bloody hot here as well as being filthily smoggy (the athletes are going to have fun next year!). My only purchase so far has been a brolly for parasol duty as well as torrential rain. I've been visiting the sights like the Forbidden Cityand Summer Palace. The latter was built as a summer getaway with funds misappropriated from the navy. Now that takes balls. With Olympic fever in full swing here, many things are receiving a face lift or being built from scratch. As a result, a lot of the sights look suspiciously fresh and new which reduces their impact somewhat. They are also coursing with tourists. As in Russia, most of these are home grown. With the tourists come the scams and I've become well attuned to invitations to see student art shows and tea ceremonies. My strategy involves matching their innocent charm and friendliness and extricating myself in a kind of slingshot manouevre where I emerge financially intact and no one loses face. Sweet. I was all up for sampling the supposedly excellent nightlife but feeling a bit constrained by my solo status. However, I managed to invoke the central theme of my trip (i.e. that if I'm not prepared to do it alone then I won't get to do it) and went in search of a night out. Not quite the banging techno event I'd been hoping for but I managed a few beers and even launched myself onto the dancefloor once I'd got the measure of the atmosphere. The young Chinese people were all sweet and friendly and a firm 'non' dealt with some idiot drunken French guys trying it on later. Happy days.

Moving on to Xian I had the joy of a hard sleeper which is basically a triple decker bunk bagsied on a first come first served basis. Inevitably, this resulted in me sleeping in the ceiling next to the light, the aircon and without a view of the outside world. The Terracotta Warriors were impressive but once again I had that slight feeling of being underwhelmed. I'm sure this is because we're exposed to so many amazing images and footage of famous things that it's almost as if you know them already. When you actually get to see them it's like 'Oh look it's the Terracotta Warriors'. I've found myself more excited so far by the things I couldn't have predicted like being in a modern art gallery in Moscow and gasping at what was on show, knowing that within the lifetimes of the older women guarding the exhibits, those works would have been a death sentence to the artist; or realising that the barren looking hills of Siberia and Mongolia are covered in intricate alpine plants so that every step feels like an act of destruction; or mucking about with the youngsters in the incredible fountain display at the Big Wild Goose Pagoda in Xian.

On the subject of introspection I became aware a few days ago of the extent to which I am narrating my trip to myself (don't worry, I'll ring the alarm bells if it goes into the third person!). I guess when people do things together they kind of construct their own collective way of remembering and telling the tales, but as I'm alone I'm obviously doing this for myself. It's led me to think about the censored version which goes down in my journal and the edited version which goes into the blog, and to wonderabout the purpose of blogs at all. Is it simply a means of keeping in touch with interested people, a narcissistic self-indulgence, or a means of insisiting on your continued existence despite your absence? What's curious to me also is that I don't really know who's reading it, who's ignoring it and who hasn't even noticed it's there. Like the hypothetical cat, am I simultaneously alive and dead if I am languishing in scores of junk e-mail boxes? Last night after scoring an upgrade from a tortuous 'hard seat' to a comparatively lux hard sleeper I remembered what this trip's all about: that I am travelling to see my family. In 1981 when we were last all in the same place there were 11 of us. Now there are seven, four of whom are in Sydney. In properly feeling the distance and gradually closing the gap I'm not travelling to find myself or other on the roadcliches, but more to put myself in context perhaps. To be among my family, my blood, the people who share the genes on which my existence depends. Hurrah!

Jude xx

---