PaddyandSage

Just thought I'd give a quick update. Riga was pretty, but again rainy and cold and infested with English stag parties. Patrick thought he'd never get to experience a real Riga stag party, but we were sitting eating our dinner in a bar near a private room one night when all the lads turned up for the party, so he invited himself in! We hung around until I found it all a bit offensive (which didn't take very long), and then we left. It was a relief for us to reach Riga after Russia, the people were friendly, spoke English and smiled. We can highly recommend the Old Town Hostel and Backpackers Inn and the Eat Riga Walking Tour, which takes you to the more interesting areas of the town. From Riga to Germany, and then ... read more

I have been meaning to update these more regularly as there is free internet at most of the hostels in Russia, and we have had a fair bit if time hanging aroud waiting for trains, but it just hasn't worked out for me. We are leaving Russia tonight, so I'm condensing the train, Moscow and St Petersburg into one. We boarded Irkustsk ready for our 77 hour train trip on the evening of the 19th, which would get us to Moscow on the 22nd. Due to our late booking, we had had to purchase a ticket which included food. It was a little more expensive, but it saved us having to carry food four three days as well as our packs, jackets, water etc to the train. The train trip was I think one of (if ... read more

Sooo. After we had realised our timing error we examined our options. They were limited. If we tried to catch a minibus down, we risked missing the train and we weren't entirely confident that we would in fact find a place to sleep the night at Angaskolkya. We headed back to the guesthouse, to check the internet and once again check the train times so we could be sure/or not sure of making the circum-baikail.....low and behold their were two Irishmen that had just arrived and that was the end of us for the day. Paddy had been deprived of serious drinking buddies for long enough so there was no leaving Irkutsk for the moment. We skulked back over to Galina, and begged for our room back, even though she had stripped our bed, and decided ... read more

We left Mongolia on the 15th and boarded the train headed to Irkutsk which was to be our first stop in Russia. Once again we had a compartment to ourselves, and the Provodnitsa (carriage attendant) was a jolly, gay German who would surreptiously wink and blow kisses to me on his way past. The trains between Mongolia and Russia are full of Mongolian traders, smuggling their wares across the border. We had been warned to check the shelves and under the seat compartments in our carriage, so that there was nothing stored there that did not belong to us. What we were not warned about was the endless procession of these traders up and down the carriages in the no-mans-land between the two countries, looking for somewhere to spread their loot. A woman came and innocently ... read more

We had very inauspicious start to our visit to Mongolia. After alighting from the train, we were met with the usual touts for hostels, and because we had to find an ATM, chose to jump in a taxi instead. A taxi driver came running toward us, and after assuring us that his was indeed a metered taxi, packed our bags into the back of his vehicle. First he drove us to a money exchange, even though we had specifically said ATM, and then we drove around, and around the city looking for an ATM that accepted Mastercard. As we were driving and stopping, the meter seemed to be going up astromonomically.....at one point it had reached 30, 000T, which is roughly $30 US. Maybe we were reading it incorrectly, and there was an extra zero? We ... read more

Nearly a month no blog....we are now in Mongolia, but I need to update on the rest of our China tour. Last blog we were killing time in Suzhou, waiting for our overnight train to Xi'an. We arrived, left our bags at the hotel, breakfasted on dumplings, and then grabbed a tandem to cycle round the city walls (13km in all, and Patrick will tell you he did most of the work). We then grabbed a cab and headed to the Big Goose Pagoda, the monastery ofTripitaka (you know, Great Sage equal of Heaven), where we spent a couple of hours looking for some sign of the Monkey King, but all we could find were some crappy figurines, so we left. That night we dined in the Muslim Quarter and then headed to a nightclub. I ... read more

China, where do I start? We are doing an organised tour through China with Intrepid, mainly because at the time we wanted to get our visa the whole Olympics hoopla was making getting visas difficult, in the end we probably didn't need to, but we are looking at it as a bit of a holiday from our holiday in that we don't really have to think, we have someone doing it for us. China is big, everything is big and there are so so many people, many of whom seem to be on holidays, visiting the same attractions as our little group complete with mega-phone wielding tour guides who shriek in what is probably Mandarin, but who knows.... It feels as if we have moved further, faster in the last 2 weeks than we have in ... read more

It's been a long time between blogs.....we are now in China, and internet is not so easy, but I thought I should just go back a month ago to Northern Thailand and give a brief run down before moving onto the China files. We flew to Chiang Mai on the 9th of August and were met at the airport by Jono and BB. You have no idea how nice it was to be met at a destination after all this time......also they had a car, so it meant no haggling with tuk-tuk and taxi drivers, no local buses, and no walking the streets for hours looking for accomodation, it was like a holiday! The next two weeks we spent touring round Nothern Thailand, from Chiang Mai, we drove to Pai, where Jono and Patrick did some ... read more

Ok. So Patrick tells me that I write too much for you busy people that actually have to work to read.....so we'll try a new format, with some highlights, and then some detail below for those of you that have the time. Since I last updated the blog we have: * Secured both our Chinese and Russian visas....there is a lot more to this story, it took us nearly a week in Vientiane and many trips back and forth from the embassies, but in the end the beard won out (it is now 100 days and we are debating the big shave!) * Booked a 28 day tour through China with Intrepid (thanks Yvette) starting on the 24th of August in Hong Kong * Caught up with our mates Dru and Tim who were on their ... read more