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Published: January 12th 2010
Its bloody freezing! India doesn’t have the right to be this cold. Well not Delhi anyway, not in the plains. I mean you expect the rubbish everywhere, the dust, constant cacophony of horns behind your back warning you that some rickshaw, trishaw, tut-tut, motor-bike, car whatever is flying at you from behind and expecting you to jump out of the way or get horrifically injured. You can put up with the dust in your eyes and filling every exposed orifice. Or the constant smell of urine and other less desirable odors. Or the beggars hanging onto you, blocking your way. Heavily kohl eyed women with babies around their waist or raggy urchins that play percentages knowing that if someone catches them wiping snot from their nose then using the same hand to grab your shirt and say “five rupees”, that it won’t be long before some newly arrived tourist will reach for their pocket in desperation only to find themselves immediately surrounded by a whole pack of the same species of snot producing little kiddies. That’s all part of Delhi but the cold, that’s not fair, it’s just not cricket.
Coldest November in three years! It don’t sound like
much but when your hotel room provides you with a stinky old blanket and a hot shower that dribbles when its turned to maximum power then the weather starts to play a part in the way you think.
John is stronger than me, no way about it. I was always the tough guy when it came to travelling. I was able to put up with just about anything. But now I hand-over my tough guy crown to him. He just arrived in the restaurant. We have very different sleep patterns. I sleep early, all night, and wake up early. He sleeps late, badly, and refuses to wake unless the TV is turned up high. I found the ‘God’ channel the most effective way to get his eyes open. They call it ‘God’ channel but it’s a misnomer. There is only one god that gets any airplay. And he is not the one who has devotees from Morocco to Indonesia or the humble fellow who hovers above heads in Thailand and Tibet and claims not to be a god at all. Or for that matter, the ones that freely swaps body parts with animals in India and Bali. “You can
have a monkey body and my blue skinned friend wants eight arms and I will take the elephant head”. Nope, none of them will be seen on the ‘God’ channel. Not even in the add brakes. There is only one god that gets air play, the one who sent his son down to earth to be killed by humankind, the one who has been making humans suffer for it ever since.
I have spared John the ‘God’ channel today. As I was leaving the room he begged for mercy. So I left him alone. He got an Email from his latest girlfriend - Ella I think this one is called - which he wasn’t happy with so he didn’t sleep well last night. Though he will claim the reason he didn’t sleep had something to do with noise outside the room. I envy John. He is the opposite of me. He thinks all women are “gorgeous” and “beautiful” and “sexy” and he manages to fall in love at least once a year. Last year it was, um let me think, Claire, I think. The year before that was Gina. Actually he usually has a few going at the same
time, great. To be in love is great and if you can manage to do it easily what an advantage in life that is.
John is muttering. He mutters in the morning. At night, he is wide awake. People are filtering into the restaurant. It’s on the roof and does not open till 8.30am. I am usually the first here, at 8.15, pushing them to get me a coffee. The new room we moved into has a proper hot shower. That was nice to have this morning. John just asked me if I have worked out my plan of attack for today. He calls me ‘Thunder Man’, and he is ‘Looking Man’, because he goes around checking everything. He has taken over the planning of our trip. He is the one who puts his head into the 1,000 pages of our ‘China Guide’, and the 400 odd pages of our ‘Central Asia Guide’. We still don’t know where the hell we are going. The basic plan is to fly tomorrow to Nepal then pick up an organized Tibet tour leaving on the 1st December. Stay with them for about a week then abscond and make our own way west
into a -Stan. Trouble is getting into a -Stan ain’t that easy. We have got a visa for Tajikistan now thanks to fifty dollars U.S. and a kindly corrupt embassy official but I don’t think we can cross over by land without a special permit. Also the route through Western Tibet might take too long because of bad roads and snowed-off passes. That means we might have to back track on a long train trip east towards Beijing then branch off north to a town called something like ‘Urumqi’. From there John claims the guide book says we can get a Kazakhstan visa and with that we can get long distance trains into Kazakhstan and move quickly through the north. That way we would miss all the Southern Himalayan mountains and snow and freezing passes and rotten roads. That’s a decision we will have to work on later I guess when we need to make it.
For now it’s just another day in Delhi trying to survive the noise and dust and filth long enough to get my shop orders away and buy a ticket out of here. Let’s hope it will be tomorrow. There is a little pussy-cat
here that we watch every morning. It loves to pounce on flies. John looks like the pussy cat at the moment. He has noticed a girl over the other side of the restaurant with her boyfriend. She is crying while her boyfriend tucks into his eggs on toast. She has awoken the predator in John. Will he pounce on the grief stricken women? For the last hour an Israeli girl has carried on a monotone dialogue with a horny looking English guy. She flirts, she tells travel anecdotes and every now and then she wheedles addresses of wholesale jewelry sellers in Rajasthan out of her poor unsuspecting victim. It brings me back to my days selling in Waterlooplein Market when all the Israelis ‘flirted’ with me. I don’t register on the “Israeli information map’ anymore. Anyway, we better get out of here. Places to go, people to see.
26th Nov 2009. We are at the airport now. John and I have decided to be born again travelers - maybe some kind of residual spiritual grime from watching the ‘God’ channel has stuck to our physic - and get to the airport early. We were getting tired from almost missing
every plane we took. Well today we don’t have to worry, the plane is delayed. Already one and a half hours but I wouldn’t bet on it going even then. The same thing happened recently in Java and I ended up flying eight hours late.
The airport is neat modern and clean but way too small. It’s packed with people. There is work going on all over Delhi at the moment to get the place ready for the 2010 Commonwealth Games but it’s hard to believe they can do it. I mean they always say that and they always seem to get finished in time and everyone pats themselves on their backs and congratulates each other on the “most wonderful games ever” but I recon they will be cutting it fine this time. They have ten months to go and one of the main stadiums looks like it’s about ten percent finished. Women in saris with babies hanging around them are digging ditches furiously but that’s about all the contraction you can see.
We are pretty happy to be out of here this time actually. Well presuming we do get out of here. I think from the moment
we arrived we were not feeling in the right frame of mind to be in India. Perhaps if we had done something new it might have given us a better feeling but really all we wanted to do was get the buying over and get out. John suffered badly from the dust. And just the general filth and constant hassle on the streets got to me. But that’s not to say I would not recommend coming to India. I still think it’s the most interesting country in the world to travel in. It can be incredibly rewarding but you have to be tough. And, I guess naturally, the older I get the more of a ‘weakling’ I am becoming. You can adapt to physical hardship, like any kind of deprivation and If we were here for a while the hard side would slowly melt away and dominate less, but it’s not easy when you fly in from somewhere like Bangkok where everything is so soft and luxurious.
I’m getting an up-date from John. He says that a lot of the flights are becoming delayed now. He says that about four planes are flying to Kathmandu at about the same
time. I told him that this is what happened in Java, it’s what usually happens. There is a first delay for an hour of two and then the truth will finally come out. That could be anything from boarding in thirty minutes to a total cancellation and come back another day. Flight delays/cancelations are becoming too common.
Anyway there is not much more to talk about now. Hopefully we will get to Kathmandu today. We still don’t have a hotel address but if we take a taxi downtown into the tourist area we will be able to find one pretty easily.
29th Nov 2009. I was up early today; 4.30a.m. I watched a documentary from the many I have on my ext-hard drive. It seemed a lot warmer last night. Maybe we are adapting to the cold. We have been in Kathmandu for three days now. We did manage to get onto the plane a short while after I shut off my computer last time talking. We could have missed that also though. The screen kept listing the flight was delayed and it was only because John was alert and heard an announcement for boarding that we got
on the flight in the end. He is increasingly taking over responsibilities. That’s ok with me. He is a very adept organizer anyway. He runs his herb business with about six sellers and vans going for about nine months of the year. He also has an internet web site with mail order. But he likes to sleep in. It’s now almost 10a.m. He actually met up with one of his many girl-friends here. She is an English girl called Claire. She is doing some kind or retreat here. Something like three months in one place. She thinks we are mad to race across West Asia in a month. I guess if I had her head I might think the same, but thankfully we each have our own. Anyway she seems a very nice girl - or must I say lady, or women? I actually find it quite hard to use the word lady. I guess I have read too many old books. Ladies were generally then married to Lords. It’s funny how words change their meaning, or even how differently they are interpreted in the present. I have to use the word filthy to describe new Delhi and that kind
of reflects on the people in most people’s eyes. But I don’t mean it as any disrespect to Indians, dirty just don’t seem to do justice to the level of grime you find in Delhi, or Kathmandu for that matter. The local river that runs through this city has to be the dirtiest spot I have come across in my entire life. We crossed the bridge yesterday going to the famous ‘eye’ temple and I almost threw-up it was so bad. The water is a kind of grey that you cannot even imagine in the most graphic futuristic post-holocaust movie. There were actually even people wading in it looking for usable stuff. We humans can adapt to just about any kind of degradation, it’s just a matter of controlling your mind.
The cold is starting to creep up my legs. I have not ordered breakfast yet, just a pot of coffee because I have been waiting for John and Claire to arrive. Hey here they are. Warm breakfast now! This diary is going to be littered with references to cold.
Back again two hours later. John and Claire are doing a ‘romantic stroll around the shops’ thing. I’ll
wait for them here in my room until they are ready then we will get a taxi to Buktapur. It’s another town close by to Kathmandu. It is a very old city and pretty scenic. I’ve been there before. I keep on going over the same territory. I’m impatient to get to somewhere new.
1st Dec 2009. Well we are on our way, finally. We woke at 5am. I didn’t have a shower, John did then we grabbed up our bags and hit the dark street. I’m not feeling cold because now I have my trekking socks, ‘Australian designed’ high tech long underwear, pull-over and gore-tex lined jacket on.
We had to wait on the street for twenty minutes until our guide turned up then off we marched, picking up a sleepy American on the way, until we made it to the mini bus pick up point and there we met an English women, a German women and a German man. Two young bearded Canadians that were staying on ‘Freak Street’ (wow, nobody stays on Freak Street anymore, I’m impressed) turned up soon after that the mini bus arrived (relatively new Toyota) then away we sped. Speeding lasted
about thirty minutes before we hit a traffic jam. It was one of those ones that can only happen in Asia. Road construction, two lanes turning into one, relatively simple you have a policeman there or at least a guy with a stop and go sign but of course there wasn’t anyone so everyone drove ahead as far as they could jam themselves in and of course there was a grid-lock. But we are through that and now, already, heading into the hills.
This is new territory for me. It feels great not knowing what may be around the corner though I can imagine it will be lots and lots of mountains, eventually snow and many vertical drops. I think we have a tea brake now. The German guy has talked endlessly since we left to the English girl. He is the unofficial leader already. The rest are all pretty sleepy. John is dozing.
We are sitting at the back of the bus. I’m next to the window which is great. That’s where I want to be, even when the vertical drops start turning up. The view will be the big thing of this trip. It should be
fantastic. Let’s wait and see.
We managed to get rid of almost all our rupees which is actually not what we wanted to do. We won’t leave Nepal till this evening or at best late this afternoon so that means a food brake in Nepal and we only have enough money for one small bottle of water. O well a good idea to diet a bit. We have been eating twice a day but they have been large meals and always curry for dinner.
We are still not sure about what will happen when we cross over the border. We have these onward train tickets booked from Lhasa to some place in China on the 8th Dec. It cost us 120 Euros each and is supposed to be soft sleeper. Ok breakfast brake now. Poor us we have to watch everyone eating.
Breakfast turned out to be included so we didn’t starve. We are now ten kilometers over into Tibet. We have to wait till 7pm for the roads to open so we can continue. We met up with the rest of our group which makes us thirteen people now split into groups of four in four-wheel
drives. We crossed the border without too much misshape. The American got in with his Tibet guide - supposedly illegal in China - and the German girl got in with her ‘Free Tibet’ T-shirt. Why the hell she wanted to bring one in the first place is totally beyond me.
We got in a pretty nice vehicle with the two Canadians. They are ok guys. They have been travelling for six months from Europe through East Europe and down into Kazakhstan which is the opposite to what we plan on doing. They were shocked to hear we wanted to do it in two weeks. I think they spent two weeks alone in Almaty in Kazakhstan trying to get a Chinese visa which was eventually refused them.
We met the others also when we ate a late lunch. They are a couple of Aussies, another German girl a Rasta haired American and an older Englishman. They all seem a pretty good lot. I’m sure frictions would/will come out at some stage but I’m ok with all of them. The German is the loudest. I like the two English the most. The Canadians are friendly also but very young. But
we will see, time will tell. Already there are differences of opinion. The guide told us that if we leave an hour and a half earlier tomorrow morning and pay thirty RMB more then we can stay in a hotel with a hot shower. That’s ok with me, but some people don’t seem to think a hot shower is so necessary. The German girl said she trekked for eight days without a shower because it was too cold. Yak. John is also is not so bothered but I think his reason is because the Rasta American girl - she is the cutest - also doesn’t think a shower is necessary. I think he will go wherever she does no matter what. Also he had a shower this morning and I didn’t.
We are now at 2,000 meters but we will drive on another hour and a half and sleep at 4,000 meters. I’m taking anti- altitude sickness pills. Hope they work. I can’t imagine if I start getting that debilitating thing again like that time climbing Mount Kenya. Keep my fingers crossed.
2nd Dec 2009. It was a big driving day. We left the hotel - hostel -
at 9.30. John didn’t eat breakfast because he drank a large beer the night before and as usual didn’t sleep well. I slept nine hours even though I had a slight headache from altitude. We drove most of the day stopping at two passes along the way. The first was at 5,200 meters and the second at about 4,000 meters. In the afternoon my altitude sickness got really bad and I felt nauseous and could not eat lunch. I was really starting to worry as I felt worse than anyone else. I took a second anti-altitude sickness pill and a couple of panadol and started drinking lots of water and slowly, as we drove on, it got better. Now it’s ok. I had a good dinner to make up for missing lunch eating with the American guy, Ronny and girl, Emiko. They are both very nice. Actually I like everyone on our tour. It’s great as I had such bad experiences from the last two - I only ever did two - group tours I took. People are very different but everyone is trying to be nice and we have a lot of fun laughing and telling stories. John has
a reputation already.
The English Guy - Paul - has checked into another hotel tonight. The place we are staying in is terrible. It’s actually beyond terrible. It’s horrible. There is absolutely no running water. The toilet is disgusting. We sleep in a dormitory with five people. In our room there is the two Canadians, Christopher and Andrew, Emiko the Japanese American girl, John and I. It’s the last night of dormitory sleeping though, thank god. From tomorrow it will be back to double rooms and hot showers. We had the option to wake an hour and a half earlier and pay three Euros extra and sleep in double rooms with hot showers but only Paul and I were willing to do that. So we have this repulsive place.
The scenery was pretty nice but not super spectacular. We got good views of Mount Everest from the north side and Cho Lu. For the rest it’s all a bit bleak. It looks a bit like Afghanistan actually but less spectacular. But we are up high and it’s very cold.
The Tibetans look very funky. They are also very raggy and dirty. They remind me abit like the
South American Indians. There cloths are filthy and they can’t wash much but you can’t blame them. There is almost no heating except for fires run on dried yak shit and no hot water except what is boiled on the fires.
There are Yaks dotted here and there. Lots of goats also and dogs everywhere and there is almost no vegetation. Ok that’s it for tonight. I want to snuggle up in my bed and get warm.
We are now in KFC (For the coffee!) in a town somewhere in West China. Actually it’s a rather large city called Lanzhou in the province of Gansu, over 5 million people here. We are waiting for our train and appreciating our first coffee in ages. I have had a really bad cold so have only been drinking healthy stuff, like green tea, jasmine tea etc.
We said goodbye to our group the night before last. Had a big dinner together and added five bottles of Chinese wine. It was sad to say goodbye to them all but we also feel it’s time to branch off and do our own thing. The group was a good way to get through
Tibet but it certainly waters down your ability to feel much for where you are. But it was nice, though bloody cold and uncomfortably dirty; A bit like a travelling holiday camp for the masochistically inclined. All the people were great, which I think is pretty incredible when you think how much I generally dislike people at the best of times. But this was a good bunch. No fools that’s for sure.
The two Canadians, Christopher and Andrew, were finishing off a trip that took them in the opposite direction we were going; from Europe to Kazakhstan. Emiko was headed to Hong Kong to take a cargo ship to Peru. Then there was the Aussie couple, Grant and Kirsten, who had already been over most of the world and were next going to India and then the Maldives before returning to live in Sydney for the first time in seven years. Paul had his own travel business and moved around the world a lot. Then there was Jo, a German living in Berlin, who was a travel writer and had written a book about travelling overland right around the world in three years three weeks and three days by
train and cargo ships. The others, Ronny from the US, Melanie from England and the two German women Rebecca and Beatrice had also done a lot of travelling so between us we had been just about everywhere. So it was almost like an alternative travel group. It was lots of fun, lots of discussing and lots of laughing.
From when I last wrote we spent a couple more nights in hotels and driving through the day time at a leisurely pace stopping off here and there to take photos of mountains or lakes or walk through some of Tibet’s most famous monasteries. We ended up spending three nights in Lhasa and saw the Potato (Potala) Palace and three more monasteries. By that time most of us would be happy never to see a monastery again but I think John could have kept going on forever. He was like the teacher’s pet. Always trotting next to the guide and always ready with a selection of weird and wonderful questions. Quote, “Why are yaks brown?” He was a big hit though, like he is everywhere we go.
So at 8am yesterday morning we climbed aboard our train from Lhasa to
Lanzhou. We travelled soft sleeper class like usual and it was an absolute joy after the hardship and dirtiness we had lived through since leaving Bangkok. We were on the highest train track in the world passing through the Tibetan mountains dotted with yaks, sheep, deer, eagles, donkeys and the occasional human. As an extra we even passed by the partially frozen lake Nam-tso which is supposedly the highest lake in the world. We had the cabin to ourselves like usually happens with soft sleeper travelling in luxury on the ‘roof of the world’ then we got a rude shock latter in the evening when a drunken guy was thrown in with us. He was as shocked as we were by being subjected to a nights intimate relations with a couple of white barbarians so he immediately took off to the dining car and arrived back loaded with cans of beer and Red Bull. John joined him slurp for slurp for a while until even his immense patience was wearing thin. Eventually all of us managed to convince the ticket women that it was in the best interest of everyone if he moved out to another cabin so after that
we managed to have a good night sleep, eventually to wake up into the ugly industrial waist-land of Mid-Western China.
This part of China is a shit-hole that’s all there is to say about it. We spent six hours walking around this city and didn’t see anything worthwhile. This part of China is the opposite of Eastern China. This is the poor industrial side of the country. It’s worth seeing just for perspective. We have not seen enslaved children yet though. I will keep looking though as I know how important it is in western minds to believe that China is some kind of evil empire that needs to be stopped by any means possible. I gotta run now. Next trains a’commin. Another twenty two hours of soft sleeper. Bring it on!
God I would kill for a cup of coffee now. It’s 9.48am and we are chugging long through an endless landscape of flat dead land. In the distance are rugged mountains. If the area around Lanzhou was a lot like the brown rural ugliness of Central Yugoslavia in winter then this place has to be a lot like the barren moonscape of Tibet, or perhaps the
Hindu Kush except not nearly as spectacular.
John is starting to wake. I don’t know how he manages to sleep so late. But credit to him, when we need to wake early he is always up for it. He just asked for a cup of water in a croaky voice. I don’t think he is catching my cold I think it’s just his early morning voice.
We should get into Urumqi about 2pm if the train takes twenty two hours like it’s supposed to. Then we have to make decisions. I want to try and catch trains through Kazakhstan but John wants to fly down to Tajikistan and try and get overland through Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Either way its not going to be easy. The biggest problem will be getting visas, especially for Turkmenistan. But infrequent transport will also be a problem. Today is the 10th December so we really only have two weeks to get home. It’s turning into a bit of a Finnius Fogg (‘Around the World In Eighty Days’) conundrum. John just clambered down from the top bunk and grunted that the scenery looks very familiar. Apart from the snowcapped Himalayas is been barren land
with craggy mountains in the distance since we left Kathmandu.
He is eating our second last apple now. I’m going for the last one before it also gets devoured. Breakfast is not something to look forward to. Chinese train food is great generally but last night we were served chicken chopped up with peppers. And when I say chicken chopped up I mean the whole chicken. Head, feet, and whatever else you can imagine. I just had a bowl of rice.
We arrived at Urumqi train station and walked out into freezing weather. There is frozen snow all over the ground with people frantically slipping and sliding onto their next destination. There is not a single word we can see in Roman letters. It’s all Chinese and Arabic. We try to get information about the trains to Kashgar in the south or Almaty in Kazakhstan but nobody speaks English and the lines are too long. I feel like giving up and laying down to die, but this is when ‘Looking Man’ (John) comes to the fore. He blasts some confident energy into the whole atmosphere and next thing we are in a taxi and on our way to
the ‘Happy Inn’ hotel. That’s our Hotel chain from the old days in Shanghai and Xiamen. It costs 159 RMB standard price all over China. The taxi driver actually knows where it is so we are there in twenty minutes. None of the staff speaks English so I do sign language to get us a room. It’s warm and clean. TV hot shower, just as we expect. But unfortunately there is no Wi-Fi internet here. And anyway you can’t open ‘Face book’ in Western China or Tibet because the Chinese authorities are worried about descent in the Western ‘autonomous’ states.
It’s permanently below zero here. - 2 (if you’re lucky) to - 8. We hit the street and freeze again. We manage to blunder our way to a travel agency and get information on a flight to Tajikistan. It is over two hundred Euros and only flies every Saturday. It looks like our only option though tomorrow we will look into getting a fast visa into Kazakhstan. It’s now the 11th so we are running out of time.
Went to a bar last night and I drank a Kriek - Belgian beer. John had a Boddingtons. We both
went for the comforts of home. There were no women of any particular beauty in the place so we went home early and watched ‘Truman Story’ on TV and went to sleep before midnight. That’s the latest I have been up since Bangkok thanks to two coffees in KFC. It’s another big day tomorrow. We will have to make some decisions.
We are at the Dushanbe airport departure lounge sharing local ‘horror’ stories with our fellow travelers who are, this time, either NGO’s or embassy staff. Coming through immigration was a bit of a nightmare. You never know who is going to demand money from you. I got through ok but they tried to touch up John. “Give me money”, “No” says John. He got through finally.
Three days in Tajikistan was enough. The people are very nice but the corruption is rampant. It’s like nowhere I have ever been. They make Indonesian bureaucrats seem saintly. This is a funny country. The Tajiks are nice friendly people but pretty ‘hunter gatherer’. Then ‘ruling over them’ are the Russians who control things like the way the Chinese control the Uyger people in Urumqi or for that matter the way
Australians control New Guinea. The Uygers seemed unhappier though, whether it was because of the Chinese - they seemed a miserable lot in West China also - or in spite of them it’s hard to say. The Tajiks are happier people, at least here in the capital.
There is a pretty major divide though between here and Urumqi. This has a very old world soviet feel about it. And even though Dushanbe it is cleaner and more comfortable than Urumqi you feel that Urumqi is the place that is going forwards while this place is going backwards. There is no denying that all of China is accelerating at a pretty incredible speed.
Anyway we are out of here never to return. The whole -Stan trip was a bit of a fiasco actually. We only got into one of them and didn’t even get out of the capital. We could have got visas for another three, perhaps, but we would have needed a letter of introduction to get into Turkmenistan. The trip was badly organized. In most of the world you can just bowl along and get visas and arrange travel along the way but to do that here
you would need months and to organize all the visas beforehand would cost an extra 600 Euro. Too much money! We did try a few embassies. We went to the Kazakhstan embassy in Urumqi but they expected us to wait outside the gate in the snow along with twenty or so other unfortunates. I just flagged down a taxi and sped off giving them the finger, much to John’s amusement. ‘The finger’ is now called the ‘Kazakhstan salute’ between us. We also tried the Uzbekistan embassy in Dushanbe and that was even worse. The guy there gave me the “I only speak Russian”, piggy faced stuff that I had injured so much in Moscow so I actually told him to ‘Fuck off” and walked out. That was the end of our chances for an Uzbek visa.
I’m spending the rest of my somani on biscuits as there is only expensive on-flight food on the 5 hour flight to Riga. I don’t even know if I will get into Riga without a visa. I thought it would be no problem then I looked at a silly American visa web-site on the net and it said that Australians needed a visa.
It sounds ridiculous to me but then again I might be crying that I didn’t take it serious in another six hours. I do have my Dutch/European residency though, for what that’s worth.
I think they are starting to board now. Everyone is massing in line. Like usual John and I will wait till the panic has receded then calmly board the plane in last position. “Goodbye Tajikistan and see you never again”. I will have to add you to my list of countries never to return to. It’s quite a long list. Russia is at the top but Tajikistan is not far below that.
The date today is the 16th. We have booked our flight all the way to Amsterdam on the 23rd - John to London - with a one week stopover in Latvia but we hope to see Lithuania and Estonia if we have time. John wants to try and get over to Helsinki by ferry which is fine with me. I really had to work on him to get him not to fly by himself to Istanbul. Poor John, he is a good soldier. He is sick of the cold. I can’t blame him,
he has another four of five months of winter to look forward to in Britain while all I have to injure is about three weeks and then I will be back in the tropics. We are already talking about the next trip. At the moment it is Vietnam and perhaps that large island in the south of China, Hunan I think it’s called. Anyway the next trip will most definitely not feature snow, or even cold weather for that matter, though Northern Vietnam can get a bit chilly in December.
We must be, perhaps, somewhere over Hungary now. The ground below looks frozen. I think its minimum minus thirteen Celsius in Riga now. Let’s hope we can find a warm hotel and a nice little bar to celebrate in tonight. And what will we celebrate? Returning to Europe or perhaps to Civilization? No I don’t think so. It will be more likely to the end of our recent hardship and a trip that has been difficult but without doubt inspiring and enjoyable. Wow that snow is looking thick on the ground below. Riga bring on your worst, we are ready for you.
I’m always writing at airports! I’m
waiting in the departure lounge of the Riga airport now. Any moment we will be boarding. I said goodbye to John half an hour ago. He is flying to London thirty minutes before me. This is the end of our five week trip. Most of it was hard, well let me see, that’s not correct, all of it was hard, except for the first three days in Bangkok. It could have been a miserable trip but it’s hard to be miserable with John. He is eternally optimistic. He is nothing like me at all. I’m all gloom and doom. He will make some lucky girl a great house-husband if he eventually finds a smart enough women. I think the trouble with John is that the ones he chooses just don’t seem to be that smart. Ho ho. People are starting to board now so I better continue this in the plane.
Ok, up in the air now. The plane is bumping around like a toy in a washing machine. Outside the plane it’s like a white wall of mist. Nothing can be seen. The weather finally broke this morning. We woke to zero degrees and a ground covered in
increasingly sloppy melted snow. It’s the first time it has not been below zero since we arrived in Riga one week ago. Since then it has oscillated between minus two and minus sixteen. The last few days it began to snow quite heavily and the ground was covered in a beautiful white powder. Now is a good time to leave. While before I could walk the entire day with dry feet, this morning my feet got soaked through in half an hour. John thinks I need new heavy boots. He might be right about needing new shoes but not boots. From here on it will be no more sloshing through snow for Jeremy. It’s going to be three weeks in a nice warm shop and then five months in tropical Asia. Yippee. Goodbye bloody cold weather, goodbye and good riddance. I have no desire to be in temperature below PLUS twenty degrees for years to come.
Eventually Riga was getting like a European version of ‘Ground Hog Day’. I woke every morning early, waited as long as I could in the dark - I don’t have much patience for that - and then turned on my computer. John would
already be awake by then, he wakes when I turn over in bed. He is hot on hyperbole and says that I toss and turn but in reality I’m just turning over. He would wake from a mouse squeaking. Thank God I am not thus burdened. Anyway from when I wake up and do stuff on the computer - we had Wi-Fi in the room which is getting pretty standard in hotels these days - till ‘breaky’ at about 8am John flits in and out of a kind of somnolent muttering delirium to being wide awake and sharp then back to delirium all within a matter of seconds. Then we both have a shower - yes I know the whole thing sounds very gay, that’s sharing rooms with men - throw on half our cloths - the inner layers - then hit the dining room.
That went on for seven straight days. Coffee, orange juice, muesli and yogurt, toast, boiled eggs, cheese and pancakes with maple syrup. I don’t think I could stand the site of another pancake right now. Seven days was enough. After breakfast we would pile on all the extra cloths, coat, hat, gloves, facemask and
plastic trousers. The facemask was probably the best thing I bought on the entire trip. It’s just like the hospital ones that people who are afraid of flu wear except it’s a bit thicker. It only cost about 20 euro cents in Tibet and kept my face warm all the way from there until last night. They are very popular in Nepal and Tibet and China but they don’t wear them in Europe. But I guess, unless your outside a lot, you don’t really need it.
The reason why we ended up staying in Riga was because of John’s decision that he had had enough of dragging bags around through freezing weather. I sort of agreed with him though Riga got thoroughly boring for me in the end. We did break it up though. We had a day trip to Vilnius and then the next day I went alone to Tallinn. John started getting more into a kind of go out looking for bars and girls kind of mode as time passed also. Something to do with the end of the trip I guess. I can’t blame him at all. It was a kind of drinking and staying out
till 2am or latter stuff. I did it with him on Saturday night but I found the night life in Riga was pretty dull. Worse even than Amsterdam and I would not be bothered going out there so I couldn’t see the point in doing it in Riga. But over the last few years I have got pretty tired of the whole going out thing. John is still right into it. We also heard lots of stories about bars scamming people for hundreds of Euros. I already mentioned that. It was more to do with sleazy bars and victims that buy drinks without being sure of the price yet, so it should not be a problem for us. We would always ask the price beforehand if we had gone into a sleazy bar! Ha ha.
Latvia and Estonia have a large percentage of Russians who were moved in in the same kind of way Chinese are being moved into the Western parts of what is now Chinese territory. It’s a really evil policy. The end result of that is that over generations the emigrants have no other home except the one they have moved to but on the other
hand they will never be excepted by the original indigenous people. There is resentment because the enforcement is backed by political power and physical might. It’s simply a policy of imperialism which the English became so good at when you look at what they did in Australia, North America and Northern Ireland. But they are not alone. The French, Spanish and Portuguese did it, then the Russians, then the Chinese , the Indonesians in Irina Jaya and of course the Israelis presently are doing exactly the same thing in Palestine. Though I will always support open immigration policies and porous borders, enforced population movements should be condemned with equally everywhere. We should not be just focusing our condemnation on countries that are not our ‘allies’ but on all countries regardless. Evil is evil, whether committed by your friends or enemies does not change that.
Perhaps about 30% of the Latvian and Estonian population is Russian. They will have a hard time in the future. Many might move further west into Europe to get away from the stigma of their countries past behavior there. The Baltic States were pretty much bashed around by either Russia or German for the last
few hundreds of years. I think the most wonderful thing about the European Union is that, through federalism and a central concept of mutual government it allows a large amount of freedom to the smaller member countries. That was exactly what they originally talked about and it really is happening now. With free access to any country for all its citizens there is no reason for any country to want to gobble up land. If you are German and you want to go and live in Riga, or Madrid, you can just pack up and do it. Great! Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if we could convince all of the timid that it could work on a global scale. An Australian could just pack up and live in India and an Indian could do the same in Australia. Anyway I am digressing. This diary is supposed to be a travel diary. I need John to keep me on the straight and narrow. But anyway the travel diary ends here. Amsterdam is around the corner. Until the next little jaunt across the world starts, adieu.
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Paying a bribe.
http://www.travelblog.org/Forum/Threads/22402-1.html