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Published: September 13th 2006
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From "Hip Hop" to "Punk Rock", a shift in graffiti as we crossed over to Russia marked a change in landscape, peole, and attitude... with one common theme - they all got bigger. The plains of the steppe were exchanged for hills and mountains, stocky asian nomads were replaced with improbably tall, skinny caucasians, and friendly individual style gave way to harsh greetings and conforming leather jackets & military fatigues.
It's been 2 or 3 weeks since my last blog, but when i look back it seems like months ago! So much has happende, I don't know where to start, i'm writing this with my finger in a splint and stitches in my leg - but they're a relatively recent addition.
We spent 10 days in and around Ulaan Baatar after thetour, most people headed off after a day in UB, and no-one stayed more than a few days. We had a strange transition period where for the first time we faced the prospect of not really knowing anyone (the hostel was a little antisocial) & not really having a plan to work toward. As it panned out, we spent a lot of time at "Dave's Place" - the
local ex-pat pub, and doing the museum circuit while waiting for some takers to reply to fliers we put around the hostels.
My birthday fell in this time and Dave managed to fish and chips with fish from NZ waters! Even turning 28 as disappeared into the blur.. not that it matters, no-one will believe me. H and I play a game with people we meet when they ask how old we are, we either get them to guess who is older and guess an age - or tell them one of us is 24 and the other is 28 and watch the confusion on their faces.. I'm always younger 😊
I met a mongolian girl, Meg, who'se favourite food is fish and chips, and loves to dance.. we got on ok 😊 We ended up seeing some of the more "real" parts of UB together.
Street kids are quite a problem for mongolia.. Not much money, a warrior histor, and the ubiquitous vodka doesn't provide the most welcoming home for many kids. Often they just choose to leave and chance their luck on the street. Some kiwi friends working for World vision told us there were maybe
300-500 kids on the street waiting for a -40deg winter!
This all sounds really "sensitive touristy" & there's not much i can really do (apart from maybe join the mining race and earn a ludicrous salary - 250k for a kiwi geol "logging RQD in the Gobi" who started varsity at the same time I did). We made friends with a kid who had only just "moved" to the street & lucky for him had decided to live nex to dave's place (doris, you may remember swinging him accross Sukhbaatar Square?). He told us he was 10 but looked 6, just wanted to play and never asked for anything - he started calling Meg "sister", and when we shared hot chips told me off for not using the skewers on the plate to pick up the chips.. Anyway, smart kid, real positive & fun but future completely up in the air :/ another girl we met on the way home one night had lost her first daughter months ago and just couldn't find her. She wasn't happy, but resigned to sit and eat her iceblock with her son on the kerb at 5am.
I'm sure it happens everywhere,
but it's not easy to leave friends to deal with life like that.
H & I took 3 days to go hiking in Terelj National Park which is about 1h out of UB. The park's really beautiful, but spoilt. So close to UB, it catches all the tourists.. and regimented "ger camps" and concrete carparks dominate the road in. We went hiking in the hills slightly out the back where locals reportedly don't like tourists camping as it doesn't bring them any money. we were warned we may get a hard time from drunk gangs at night.. no troubles, but it took some of the gloss off the trip.
when it finally did come time to leave UB it was really hard, it doesn't take long to get familiar with a place. People started introducing me as a "tourist" partly to get under my skin - which was really frustrating as it was true - but after 5 weeks I really felt more like i belonged 😊
We got the train out on the evening of the 6th and watched the biggest full moon i've ever seen rise over the fields as they slid by. Our train cost just
$35USD, took 33h, stopped for a minute every 10-20min, and spent 14h sitting on the Russian-Mongolian border. despite this it was awesome, really beautiful & never boring. Over the length of our last week in Ub the temperature dropped like a slone and by lunchtime on the second day of out train dry powdery snow was falling all around us!
The graffiti really did change, from a wall outside our hostel to a fence on the Russian side of the border. The contrast between the countries is amazing. To see mongolians working on one side of the fence and Russians on the other without a 3h plane ride in between was a big eye-opener to a kiwi.
We've been in and around Irkutsk for almost a week now, but I've got a train to catch this afternoon & plenty of time to write on that.. so you'll just have to wait a few days for the story of my visit to a Russian hospital!
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Shane
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Happy Late Birthday
Yo, sounds like Russia is living up to the rep. These injuries weren't obtained from a mad dash out of a ger when the husband came home were they?