Blogs from Mongolia, Asia - page 6

Day 1 On the Train at last Last night's Hotel (arranged by the Sundowners travel company was a little ho hum after the comfortable facilities of the Holiday Inn. Luckily it was only for one night. We found a nice restaurant for dinner last night only a short walk from the hotel. We had a couple of beautiful curries two beers and a vegetable dish, plus desert of ice-cream and tiramisu cake. Yesterday afternoon we discovered (along with 100,000 Chinese) the Beijing Lake. It is a beautiful lake in the middle of Beijing running alongside the Forbidden city and then on towards the North Gate of the old city. It was full of paddle boats and even some people swimming in the lake which reminded us of the bold and the beautiful swimmers from Manly (but ... read more

Je suis déjà à Pékin depuis hier, mais voila encore quelques mots et photos pour cloturer les chapitres Mongolie et transsibérien. J'ai passé 2 jours à OB avant de prendre le train pr Pékin. Ce que j'en retiens : c'est assez surprenant, il n'y a pas trop de cohérence entre les différents bâtiments dans un quartier. Les routes et trottoirs sont en mauvais état, et la circulation un peu étouffante en centre-ville. Cependant, il y a une atmosphère assez agréable, et les gens sont plutôt sympas. D'autre part, j'ai terminé le trajet du transsibérien (check) ! Le dernier tronçon du train (Oulan-Bator - Pékin donc) était clairement le meilleur en termes de paysages, surtout les dernières heures avant la banlieue de la ville. J'étais tellement absorbé par le décor que je n'en ai pas pris de ... read more

We now leave the Tran-Siberian route, and board the Trans Mongolian train, a much more modern train than our last train that brought us to Irkutsk. The train slipped away from away from the platform just as the sun was beginning to rise. A hundred years ago the train would have continued to Port Baikal then driven onto a British built ice breaker then travelled across the lake onto its destination. However, the stormy sea and thick ice made the journey unreliable so the alternative was to build a railway through the mountains at the south end of the lake. This was to our advantage, the train thread its way through, rising, then dropping, twisting, through some tight curves, in something akin to the Polar Express film, then finally skirting the frozen Lake Baikal for more ... read more

Goodday all, I just made a video a few days ago about my first two years abroad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jzkfo_Rdo4 From Tokyo I flew with MIAT, Mongolian Airlines, to Ulaanbaatar. Originally I thought about going to Mongolia in April but decided to go in May because of the climate. It gets very cold in Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital in the world. With an area of more than 1.5 million square km, Mongolia is the 19th largest country in the world but has just over 3 million inhabitants. It's sparsely populated and almost the half of the total population lives in the capital. The Mongolian Empire started to grow rapidly after it was founded by Chinggis (Genghis) Khan and possessed more than half of present Asia at the end of the 13th century. Due to its ... read more

Zamin-uud le 06.07 jour 132 Yo, Petit debriefing sur ma première experience de wwoofing? Pas la peine de vous faire un pavé, les photos sont plus éloquentes, je précise qu'elles ne sont pas toutes de moi. 3 semaines sans galères, un repas tout prêt 3 fois par jour, un lit douillet chaque nuit et une yourte pour chambre. Ça fait du bien de se poser de pas courir partout de voir les mêmes visages chaque matin. Donc primo un grand merci a Kat et Bat pour leur acceuil ! L'objectif: si le wwoofing c'est habituellement plus du travail dans une ferme éco, la on construisait un camp de touriste (écolo), une serre... Reste que, bon timing, je suis arrivé au tout début du projet; en gros l'essentiel de mon boulot c'était creuser, passionnant non? Ma journée ... read more