trip reports

From Siberia to Tibet: Beijing, Xi’an and Xining

jpatokal1 Comment

Around 10 PM at night, we trundled across the Mongolia-China border into the dusty town of Erenhot (二连 Erlian).  One of the few pleasures of international train travel is that the border crossings and their inspectors come to you, but China wasn’t having any of it: we all had to disembark with our luggage and go queue up for passport and customs.

And then we waited until 2 AM while our bogies were changed from Russian wide gauge to Chinese standard gauge.  Officially, the sparkly new International Waiting Room had all sorts of amusements including tax-free shopping, a bar and a certified 5-star bathroom; in reality, it lacked all of those as well as air-con, toilet paper and enough seats.  After various conflicting answers and general confusion, I was granted a magic plastic token that let me go outside and check out the jumbled shops and pharmacies, and most importantly, acquire some bananas and the first of many bottles of Yanjing Beer to come.

By the time we woke up next morning, the scenery had changed to rolling green hills, occasional clusters of buildings and factories, and steadily thickening haze.  Viaducts for the Zhangjiakou high-speed rail line, being built for the 2020 Winter Olympics, were often visible and made our clunky train feel rather obsolete.  After arrival at Beijing Station, which seemed to contain more people than all of Mongolia, our host whisked us away for a traditional Chinese welcoming ceremony: foreigner registration at the local Public Security Bureau (公安部 Gong’anbu) cop shop, painstakingly pecked in one finger at a time.  Now we were in China!

Beijing 北京

This was my first visit to the Chinese capital, and I wasn’t expecting much: all you ever see on TV are the inhumanly scaled plazas and buildings around Tian’anmen, designed to make citizens feel like the worthless ants they are compared to the might of emperors old and new.  The shopping district around Wangfujing, all department stores and shopping malls stuffed with name-brand shops, plus the slick modern offices and hotels around Chaoyang, including the dystopian China Central TV aka Big Pants Building (大裤衩 dà kùchǎ), could also have been straight out of Tokyo or Seoul.

But the hutongs around Shizhacai, while now tarted up for tourists and beer-brewing hipsters, remained surprisingly peaceful and lived-in, and the canals and alleyways around Qianhai Lake with weeping willows and pedal boats were green, vibrant and colorful, at least in midsummer.

The Great Wall at Mutianyu (慕田峪), about 1.5 hours north of central Beijing, was a worthwhile excursion, both surprisingly lush and surprisingly smoggy.  Those stairs were a real workout, particularly in the sticky heat of midsummer, and I was glad to take both the ski lift up and the rather ridiculous but still amusing toboggan ride down.  Pro tip: there’s a solitary little snack shop at the top, which will instantly open a frosty bottle of Yanjing for you if you so much as mention the word pijiu (beer) — and attempt to charge you 85 RMB (US$13) for it.  At the bottom of the hill, the same beer will cost you 20, and even that’s pricy by Chinese standards.

Beijing’s other mandatory attraction is the justly reknowned Forbidden City , once the home of the Emperor and now the showcase of China’s Communist mandarins.  There was a queue of several hours to see the pickled corpse of Mao, so when a torrential downpour hit we abandoned that idea and proceeded to the palaces.  The complex is enormous, and despite notional visitor limits (book your tickets online!), it was packed to the gills with local tourists, all armed with pointy umbrellas.   The Outer Court, through which you enter, consists of a series of identical-looking but empty gates and plazas, so there isn’t even much to see.  Mostly to get away from it all, we paid a little extra to visit the Treasure Gallery to the east, and this turned out to be the best move all day: the crowds were thinner and the scale was more reasonable, as this is where the Emperor and his household actually lived.

Xi’an 西安

We ended up in Xi’an through a lucky mishap: the sleeper train we wanted to take from Beijing to Xining was full, and when pondering alternatives, I realized we could take a sleeper to Xi’an, spend a day there, and take an evening bullet train to Xining.  Win!

The thing to do in Xi’an is to visit the Terracotta Warriors, which guard the tomb of Shi Huangdi, the founder of the Qin dynasty and the kind of megalomaniac who makes Mao look modest and reasonable.  In 230 BCE, he unified China for the first time, declared himself emperor, standardized all the things (writing, currency, measures, axles etc) across the vast country, burned all old books and executed those who didn’t comply fast enough, built a necropolis nearly 100 km² in size (the vast majority of which remains unexcavated) and had basically everybody who built it executed.  Unsurprisingly, it’s quite a sight, and enough Chinese agree that it’s now the country’s second-most popular attraction, second only to the Forbidden City.  Don’t expect to have too many moments of peaceful contemplation.

Much further down that list is the Great Mosque of Xi’an, buried in the mazelike depths of the Muslim Quarter (回民街 Huiminjie), and probably the least mosque-like mosque I’ve ever seen.  If somebody swapped the signs, it would substitute quite nicely for, say, a Confucian temple or the Emperor’s former summer residence: for example, the pagoda above is actually a minaret.

Visitors and locals alike do come to the Muslim Quarter in droves, but to satisfy more earthly desires for food and shopping.  Lamb kebabs (烤肉串 kaorou), Chinese hamburgers (肉夹馍 roujiamo), osmanthus cakes topped with dates (桂花糕 guihuagao), crispy meat pies (肉餅 roubing)…  both our quick visit, and this incredible blog post, only scratched the surface.

Xining 西宁

While Beijing and Xi’an are firmly on the beaten track, it’s safe to say Xining is not.  It may be the capital of Qinghai Province, but by Chinese standards its 2.3 million people barely qualify as a city, at least when compared to Xi’an’s 12m or Beijing’s 21m.  What’s more, while it’s been around for over 2,000 years and was a major staging post on the Silk Road, a massive earthquake in 1927 plus Japanese bombing in 1941 means you’d be hard put to find a historical attraction worthy of the name in the city.  The sole reason we were here was that, at an altitude of 2,600m, this gave us a chance to acclimatize a bit, and the only other city in these parts, the industrial center of Golmud, is by all accounts even more dull.

Given these low expectations, Xining was mostly a pleasant surprise, undoubtedly provincial but largely prosperous and with new infrastructure ranging from bridges and highways to trains sprouting everywhere, virtually all of it built since 2010.  Our Taiwanese cracker conglomerate hotel was golden bling to the max, the shopping malls of Xidajie (西大街) were bustling with real department stores and fake Apple Stores, Mojia St (莫家街) was wall to wall with restaurants.  Only slightly off the beaten track did you remember you weren’t in Beijing anymore, with meat hanging on open-air hooks at the street markets of Shuijing Alley (水井巷) and the green signs and ornate skullcaps of Hui Muslims dominating the local culinary scene even more thoroughly than they did in Xi’an.

Xining’s one major draw is Kumbum Monastery, or Ta’ersi Temple (塔尔寺) to the Chinese, some 40 km outside the city.   One of the largest Tibetan monasteries outside Lhasa, this was the childhood home of the Dalai Lama (you can even find a solitary photo if you look very carefully) and, while much reduced from its pre-Cultural Revolution glory, is still an active temple.  I expected to find some Tibetan pilgrims here and did, but I did not expect tour buses full of Chinese pilgrims, herded about by tour guides and stuffing notes ranging from 0.1 to 100 yuan into every nook and cranny of every statue and altar.  Clearly China’s economic boom has also brought with it a surging market for spiritual fulfillment.

Much more sedate, in fact positively comatose, was the official state-sanctioned Tibetan Culture & Medicine Museum in a faux-Tibetan concrete monolith on the northern outskirts of town.  This showcased Tibetan culture as the Chinese government would like it: colorful, safely encased in static glass displays, no actual Tibetans in sight, and with an overpriced gift shop on the way out.

In the evening, we clambered aboard train Z6811 and started our slow climb to Tibet.

Anorak bonus album: Metros in Beijing, Xi’an and Xining

<<< Ulaanbaatar, Gorkhi-Terelj and the Gobi Desert | Lhasa and Tibet >>>

From Siberia to Tibet: Ulaanbaatar, Gorkhi-Terelj and the Gobi Desert

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I’ve traveled a lot, but I’ve never been to a country like Mongolia.  Scratch that: I’ve never been to a country anything like Mongolia.

The first thing that strikes you is that this country is not really suitable for human life.  The more gentle bits, such as that around capital Ulaanbaatar (“UB”), consist of treeless steppe with temperatures ranging from -40°C in the winter to 35°C in the summer.  The less forgiving parts, like the Gobi Desert and Lake Uvs, dispose of unnecessary vegetation and crank the extremes up to −58°C in winter and 47°C in summer.  Add in the wild temperature fluctuations caused by a continental climate at high elevation that can see UB hit temps below freezing every month of the year, and you can see why agriculture is effectively impossible.

At this point, I should note that I was born in Helsinki, Finland, ranked a respectable #5 on the list of the world’s coldest capitals (#1 is, of course, UB), and many a time I’ve wondered how on earth my ancestors survived in this arctic wasteland without central heating or microwave pizzas.  But at least in Finland, we had timber for housing and heating, fish in the lakes and sea, game in the woods, crops of rye and barley, turnips and rutabagas — whereas the Mongols had, to a first approximation, none of these.

So, when the Mongols were playing Yurtcraft in Hardcore mode around 1000 C.E. and the only resources were sheep and yaks, what did they do?  They built their houses out of wool, namely the felt used for yurts.  In winter they ate only meat, specifically boiled mutton, and in summer they switched to a lighter diet of only dairy products.  And to be clear, when I say “only meat”, I really mean only meat: no vegetables, no grain, no bread, no potatoes, nothing.  Meat.  For dairy, they had a choice of milk, cream, sour milk, yogurt, fresh cheese and dried cheese, but at least they could ferment some into mildly alcoholic airag (mare’s milk) or seriously alcoholic arkhi (yoghurt vodka) and so they could drink away the monotony for a while.

Given this fairly serious handicap, you’d expect the Mongolians to occupy about the same amount of space on the world stage as, say, their fellow pastoralists the Maasai of Kenya, whose colorful costumes and exotic diet regularly feature in the National Geographic but rarely beyond it.  But no: the Mongols gave birth to Genghis Khan, who during his lifetime built an empire twice the size of the Romans at their height, and whose sons and grandsons proceeded to conquer China, Russia, much of the Middle East and knock on the gates of Western Europe.

Alas, the Mongol Empire lasted for only about 100 years until inevitably splitting into warring factions (maybe siring an estimated 8% of Asia’s population wasn’t such a great idea?) and it was all downhill from there for a while.  The Manchu Qing dynasty eventually conquered Mongolia in 1691, and while Mongolia declared independence in 1911, Russian aid quickly turned into Soviet strings and the Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924, complete with local Stalin clone Choibalsan doing his level best to purge the intelligentsia.  This created another overlay of weirdness, with Cyrillic script and hideous Soviet-style architecture still dominating the streets of UB.

In 1990, the Soviet Union and the Mongolian People’s Republic along with it collapsed, and Mongolia acquired a new state ideology: bling.  This gave Ulaanbaatar its latest layer of shiny skyscrapers, modern art exhibitions, traffic jams, microbreweries, hot dog stands, fancy boutiques and even a VIP room at the train station.  It must be said that Mongolia remains a poor country and most of this is far beyond the reach of the common man — but in a country where a taxi ride is $2, a tourist’s dollars go a long way.

This newfound comparative prosperity has also expanded the Mongol diet, with former festival fare like buuz steamed dumplings, khuushuur meat pies and tsuivan fried noodles now served by fast food restaurants.  And when all the mutton starts to get to you — you soon realize that the entire city smells like boiled mutton — check out one of UB’s countless Korean places, serving up all the kimchi and Choco Pies you can handle.

While I found UB to be absolutely fascinating, the scenery in nearby Gorkhi-Terelj National Park was equally so and definitely worth a day trip if not more.  Turtle Rock, Aryaval monastery (which sells pizza, because Mongolia), visiting a local tourist yurt, admiring the owner’s yaks and sampling many yak dairy products, pottering about on stubby Mongolian horses, visiting the yurt owner’s cousin’s distinctly non-tourist yurt and fermented mare’s milk straight out of a blue plastic bucket…  not a day I’ll soon forget.

Early on the morning of our final day, we boarded train #4 to Beijing and set off on a slow trundle across the Gobi Desert.  It’s large, it’s hot, it contains a whole lotta nothing — but the most striking sight was the heat-blasted, godforsaken town of Choir, a former Soviet military base that for some unfathomable reason has not been abandoned by its 8,000 inhabitants yet.  The town consists entirely of commieblocks and fencing, both in severe disrepair, plus an excessively jaunty silver statue of Mongolian cosmonaut Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa with his pants down.

At this point, I’m officially out of words.  It’s about time to cross the border into China.

<<< Life on a Train | Beijing, Xi’an & Xining >>>

From Siberia to Tibet: Irkutsk & Lake Baikal

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As the rest of our group lived in Helsinki, their starting point was set, but for me, setting off from Sydney, this would have added a week or two to an already ambitiously long itinerary.  The eventual solution was that I would skip the initial leg of the trip and fly down to meet them at Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, “only” 15 hours flight time from Sydney.

I landed at sunset into pelting rain at the cavernous and chaotic Beijing Capital Airport, where I waited for an hour for the sole officer to stamp boarding passes at the transit desk and caught a few hours of shut-eye at the stupidly expensive transit hotel.  Shortly after 5 AM, I boarded a lime green S7 (f.k.a Siberia Airlines) Airbus A320 for the two-hour hop to Irkutsk, flying over the same route we would spend the next week crossing by land.  Alas, Mongolia was covered in cloud and I caught only a fleeting glimpse of Lake Baikal as we approached Irkutsk.

Thanks to some optimal bus jockeying, I was literally the first person in line at Russian immigration, where my visa and passport were carefully scrutinized.   Much typing ensured, but a few minutes later they were stamped and handed back, without a single word said during the entire transaction.  Ёлки зелёные, I was in Siberia!

My Russian colleagues had been uniformly horrified at the idea of voluntarily visiting a provincial Siberian town like Irkutsk, which last made headlines in 2016 when 76 people died from drinking methanol-laced bath lotion.  My initial impressions did not do much to dispel this: the dark and gloomy Soviet-era airport lurking inside the baby blue building perched just off Ulitsa Sovetskaya, hailing a Yandex ride in a beat-up car driven by a chain-smoker missing most of his teeth, the early morning drive through deserted roads of rotting wooden houses, Vladimir Ilyich saluting his eponymous street…  it all reminded me too much of the gnarlier bits of Tallinn immediately after liberation in the early 1990s.

Fortunately, we had chosen our digs well in the positively posh 130 Kvartal, a Disneyland-esque wonderland of new timber buildings kitted out with boutiques, restaurants and hotels including our base Marussia, which managed to pull off the unlikely feat of being a pleasant, modern boutique hotel built in what’s essentially a log cabin.

First order of business was to cleanse ourselves of the dusts of Europe and Oceania by performing a triple rite of purification at Polyana:

  1. Searing steam in the banya (Russian sauna), heated by a wood-fired stove behind a brick wall.
  2. Ritual flagellation with a well-soaked venik, or oak broom — the sign prohibits entry into the banya without one!
  3. Baptism in the waters of the Angara River, glacial even in midsummer.

Over the coming days a more rounded picture of Irkutsk fell in to place.  Some parts were booming, some parts were falling apart, some parts were modern, some were straight from 1970, and like everywhere most people were just muddling through.  Some people spoke English, most didn’t but were friendly anyway, and while knowing rudimentary Russian was helpful, particularly for reading Cyrillic, I don’t think we would ever have been in real trouble even without it.   All in all, though, it seemed a city on the mend after some pretty rough years, profiting off the China trade and increasingly popular with Asian tourists.   Well worth a visit.

Food in Irkutsk was a highlight, and Sval in Listvyanka was among the best meals of the whole trip: the famed Baikal omul tasted like an oversized herring to me, but muksun grilled over charcoal was amazing.   In addition to the obligatory Russian rassolnik and pelmeny washed down with vodka, we feasted on Buryat pozy and khuushuur dumplings (a foretaste of both Mongolia and Tibet), shashlik kebabs and lavosh flatbread from the Caucasus, unpronouncable Georgian walnut-paste salads and red wines, and even the odd attempt at modern fusion like a rather delicious concoction of creamy Russian ice cream, berries and cedar nuts (orekhi).  The last of these were ubiquitous and sold by street vendors in packs of up to a kilo.

The Taltsy open-air museum, 50 km from Irkutsk, was a worthwhile excursion, with displays ranging from the rather miserable huts and sky coffins of the native Evenki to the mighty ostrog fortresses of Siberia.  It was surprisingly lively too, with shops and costumed performers, and not too many tour buses even on a weekend.

But true to my words to the doubtful Russian visa officer, the main reason I and most other Trans-Siberian travellers came to Irkutsk is to see Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, located a leisurely hydrofoil cruise or hair-raising minibus ride away.   While Irkutsk in July basked in temperatures pushing 30°C, on our first visit the pebbly lakeshore 70 km away was barely 15°C and shrouded in chilly mist, to the point that even Siberian sunbathers hesitated to take their togs off.   It was hard to imagine what it’s like here in the depths of winter, and on our return we got a faint taste of Baikal’s famously fearsome storms (waves 4.5m high are apparently not uncommon) when a sudden squall blew through Irkutsk and left us stranded at the bus station, with trams stalled (“energia nyet”) and half a meter of muddy water sloshing through the streets.

Unsurprisingly, very few people actually live on the shores of the lake.  Port Baikal, the terminus of the Circum-Baikal spur line, is an unattractive rusty boat graveyard, while Listvyanka at the end of the road is a strip of hotels, rental cottages and souvenir shops.  Our second day trip took us by hydrofoil to Bolshiye Koty, where visitors are greeted by a festering pile of trash next to the jetty and entertainment consisted of drinking instant coffee out of plastic cups in a rickety shack while watching the village lunatic speed up and down the dirt road on a clapped-out motorbike.

Yet the amazing thing was that, five minutes from the pier, you were alone in a pine forest with no sound except the incessant chirping of crickets.   Lake Baikal was before us, silent, clear with shades of blue rarely seen outside the tropics, unfathomably deep and majestic.  We walked some distance along the trail, had a picnic of cabbage pie, pickled carrot and warm beer, and remembered what it felt like to be somewhere where there are no obligatory attractions to see or things to do.

Anorak bonus album: Trams in Irkutsk

Next morning, we continued towards Mongolia.

<<< Preamble & Paperwork | Life on a Train >>>

From Siberia to Tibet: Preamble & Paperwork

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For the past 15 years, my father has been talking about traveling “from Hesa [Helsinki] to Lhasa” by train.  This year, we finally did it, and it was enough of an adventure that I’m resurrecting my long-dormant travel blog to tell the tale.  Expect plenty of pictures and less text.

Table of Contents

Paperwork

Pulling off a trip like this requires quite a bit of preparation, since each of Russia, Mongolia, China and Tibet require their own visas or permits, which needs to be applied for in advance…  but not too far in advance, since they have expiry dates!   Most resources about the Trans-Siberian advise people to go via a travel agency to get these, but (excepting Tibet) it’s entirely feasible to do this on your own, so here are some notes for posterity.

Some personal notes, although the details will vary based on your citizenship and where you apply: this is all for an Australian applying in Australia. Also, despite minor differences in the requirements on paper, standard Australian passport photos were fine for all three.

Russia

img_20180517_090142This is the most complicated by a long shot, so get this one first. I applied in person at the Russian consulate in Sydney, using the detailed step-by-step guide here, which was extremely helpful.  The guide, that is; the consulate, on the other hand, felt like a live-action version of Papers Please.   Apply for your visa appointment well in advance, since it may take a few weeks to find a free slot!

On arrival, I was first treated to the sight of an extremely angry businessman chastising a security guard in an ill-fitting green polyester suit on the other side of a locked gate: “You’ve been incredibly rude! I’ll report you to your manager!”  The guard didn’t even roll his eyes, just asked me for my appointment and let me in when I claimed to have one.

At reception, though, another unfortunate soul had made a reservation but had neglected to bring his chit.  Nyet, try again in a few weeks.  The high-tech QR scanner didn’t much like mine either, but it grudgingly accepted the 16-digit code when punched in manually.

The waiting room was plastered with signs strictly forbidding the use of mobile phones, which were roundly ignored by everybody including myself.  When my number came up, I headed to counter 4, whose previous victim was undergoing an interrogation:

– You are attending a conference?
– Yes.
– You cannot use a business visa, you must apply for [inaudible] visa.
– But but…
– Here is form.  Next!

I got to the window.  My friendly greeting was unanswered.  I piled my papers and passport on the counter and careful examination ensued.  Everything was going swimmingly, until…

– Your visa invitation is 1 to 5 July, but your visa application 1 to 8 July.
– Yes, I am traveling out by overnight Trans-Siberian train.
– Why are you going to Irkutsk?
– To see Lake Baikal.
– Hmm.

This was clearly highly suspicious, but the bureaucrat showed grandmotherly kindness and accepted my unworthy application.   Learn from my mistake, use the same dates on your letter of invitation (I used ivisa.ru) and the visa application, and feel free to add plenty of buffer — you’re never asked for an actual hotel reservation.

So now it was time to pay up at counter 6, but the old Chinese lady there was in trouble too.  Neither of her credit cards was accepted, EFTPOS didn’t work either, and rejected receipts were piling up.  The gentleman behind me had prepared the exact amount in cash, which was also unacceptable.  Eventually my turn came and, wonder of wonders, my card worked!  The printer spat out a receipt, Svetlana sliced it in three with a ruler and gave me the smallest piece.

– Come back May 17. No appointment, collect at reception. Next!

I returned as requested, arriving at the consulate when they opened at 9 AM sharp, along with a bunch of other people.  We filed inside, but the “Visa Pick-Up” counter was resolutely closed.  Eventually Feodor arrived, but when somebody had the effrontery to approach the counter, he silently pointed at a small sign saying that Visa Pick-Up is available from 9:30 AM.  So we waited for half an hour under the steely glare of Comrade Putin, and then I finally got my grubby mitts on my shiny new visa.  Victory!

Cost A$135, processing time two weeks plus wait for appointment.

China

img_20180517_095124By comparison, getting the Chinese visa at the fully-outsourced Visa Center in Sydney was a miracle of socialist efficiency with Chinese characteristics.  Appointments are required, but are usually available next day and apparently you could get one on the spot too.  I arrived two minutes before my appointment at 10:00, and my number was called at 10:01.

You will need to fill out your tediously long application online and print it; it’s not an online application!  You will also likely be asked for proof of how you will enter and depart China, so bring along train/flight tickets or reservations.  I also had an itinerary from a tour agency in China, which is not strictly necessary, but it was sufficient to cover all other documentation needs.

Cost A$109.50, processing time four business days.

One catch if you’re also planning to visit Tibet: China won’t grant visas to people who want to go to Tibet unless they already have Tibet Travel Permits (TTP), but you can’t apply for a TTP unless you already have a visa.  The only way around the Catch-22 is to make up an innocuous itinerary that involves panda-watching in Chengdu or something for visa purposes, and then apply for the TTP afterwards.

Mongolia

img_20180524_172646There is no Mongolian consulate in Sydney, so I applied via post at the Mongolian Embassy in Canberra. The documentation and travellers’ reports are not clear on whether you need to include train tickets for a tourist visa, but I called them up and was told that a “tourist agency itinerary” was enough. I sent along my ticket reservation receipts (not an actual ticket) and that was good enough. Also, Russia & China take credit cards but Mongolia insists on a bank cheque, so order that at least a week in advance.  It’s also highly advisable to register your mail both ways, meaning you need to prepare a self-addressed envelope and get the post office to register it before you send off your application.

Cost A$230 (!), processing time 4 days.

Note that transit visas are cheaper (A$150) but have tighter documentation requirements (“Detailed travel program provided by the Tour agency”), so I played it safe.  In retrospect, though, Mongolians don’t seem to be the same kind of sticklers for paperwork as the Russians and the Chinese, so this would probably have been fine.

Tibet

dsc_6014Unless you’re a PRC citizen (including HK/Macau), the only way to visit Tibet is to join an organized tour.  This is expensive, particularly if you do what we did and opt for a custom/private tour, but it’s a pretty routine process and the tour agency handles all the paperwork.  That said, there is a certain element of nail-biting involved, since the permit can only be applied for 20 days before arrival, takes around 8 days to grant, and can be denied for no reason if there’s anything happening in Tibet that China would prefer the rest of the world didn’t hear about…

Before 2008, there were occasional stories of people hitching into Tibet and sneaking around without permits.  As of 2018, I feel confident in saying that you won’t get very far these days: your permit is checked constantly, on average 2-3 times a day, and in places including train stations, airports, road checkpoints, hotels and major tourist attractions like the Potala Palace.

Elapsed time

I started my paperwork on April 21st and received my final visa on May 31st, so around 40 days end to end.  (The Tibet permit can only be applied for 20 days before entry into Tibet, but this is handled by the travel agency anyway.)

If I had been in a hurry, I could have shaved a week off this by booking my Russian visa appt earlier, another week by paying for express processing for Russia & China (not available for Mongolia), and a few days by paying for express mail to/from the Mongolian Embassy.

The journey begins here: Irkutsk & Lake Baikal >>>

 

Serpent Across the Mekong: Days Of The OK Family Here We Go! Let’s Enjoy Shopping For Your Exciting Life

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Bangkok

With a little planned buffer time to kill, I headed down to the Magic Food Court down in Suvarnabhumi’s basement and had a perfectly acceptable (if hardly magical) meal of rice with pork leg stew — one of those ubiquitous Thai dishes that no tourist restaurant ever stocks, because the economics require a huge pot and dedication to serving this one dish alone. It’s fatty, it’s greasy, it melts in your mouth and it’s aroy maak maak. (And you don’t have to order the pig skin and intestines unless you want to.)

A good half hour ahead of time Z, having unintentionally abused her freshly minted Star Gold to go through Fast Track immigration, appeared fresh off her flight from Tokyo and we headed to the taxi queue. Our cabbie, smiling a little too toothily for comfort as we chattered away in the back seat, figured he could pull a fast one on us and he turned right (that is, to the east, towards Pattaya) at the junction from the airport to the Bang Na-Trat highway and then did a great big loop around the airport that padded the bill by a good 100 baht and added 30 min to our travel time. Not being too sure of the geography, I thought he was heading for some alternate route to the south (I usually stay around Sukhumvit, but this time we’d opted for the Hilton in Thonburi), but the penny dropped once the loop ended and we reached precisely the same highway — and he didn’t even drive onto it, just under.

On arrival at the hotel, the meter was showing ~450 and he cheekily told us it would be 600 with the surcharge and tolls (which in reality totaled 95 baht). I called him on the right turn after the airport, to which he tittered and made up some lame excuse about avoiding an accident… and then snatched the 500 baht we grudgingly gave him and skittered off. Welcome back to the big city!

But we didn’t have much time to mope, as we’d booked two nights at the Millennium Hilton. Back when I first lived in Thailand around 2003, the building was still a skeleton left rotting after the 1999 financial crisis (remember that one?), and it was a real pleasure to find out what they’d done to it. I’m not much of a Hilton man, and I was staying here primarily to dispose of some points I’d had sitting around, but this is one excellent hotel — even without any elite status at Hilton. Our room (and, as I understand it, all rooms) had great river views and the pool area downstairs had a little fake beach (less fun than you’d think) and recliners placed inside the pool itself (more fun than you’d think). Add in a large local market right next door, with an excellent array of Thai eats especially at dinnertime, and who needs executive lounges anyway?

Speaking of markets, though, Z had been converted to the religion of Chatuchak on her last visit to the Big Mango and the next morning I was somewhat reluctantly dragged along. Fortuitously, the March morning dawned unseasonally cool, and coupled with kinda-sorta-early morning start spending 3 hours poking around (me) and buying tons of stuff (her) at the Weekend Market was far less painful than usual. To counterbalance this surfeit of capitalism, we popped into the recently opened Bangkok Art and Culture Center just across from MBK, which even had a free coat check service where we could deposit our Chatuchak loot. If arriving by Skytrain, visitors are first greeted by Wit Pimkanchanapong’s brilliant If There Is No Corruption — unfortunately, it was pretty much downhill from there, with a mishmash of generic (read: largely incomprehensible) modern art that could have been from anywhere. Bah humbug, but points for trying anyway. (And it was, after all, free.)

The next morning, we decided to do something even more touristy, and visit the Grand Palace. We’d both been here once before, but ages ago, and I figured on getting a few new snaps since the last round didn’t turn out too good. What I didn’t figure on, though, was the crowd and (this time) the all too seasonal heat: the place was jampacked, with tourist buses disgorging their loads non-stop and slowly shuffling queues to get into the shrine of the Emerald Buddha. We took a breather by the Ramakiet murals, another in the blissful air-conditioned comfort of the Royal Regalia pavilion (top pick: the three clothing sets of the Buddha), and then escaped back to our hotel pool.

With that, the Serpent Across the Mekong has swallowed its own tail and come full circle in Bangkok, and our story has come to an end.

Serpent Across the Mekong: Day of the No Killing Zone

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Chiang Rai

Like most Thai provincial towns, Chiang Rai doesn’t look like much at first sight, but once I’d ventured out of the night bazaar and my Wangcomely confines to the local restaurants and markets I’d started to appreciate it a little more. With my flight at midday, I had a few hours to kill in the morning, so I decided to skip the execrable hotel buffet and head out on a walking tour.

First stop was Po Sai, apparently one of Chiang Rai’s best-known khao soi noodle joints and conveniently located right next to the Wang Come. A dish rarely seen outside northern Thailand, khao soi consists of noodles in thin chicken curry, topped with lime, shallots and pickled cabbage — and while this may not sound like a recipe for culinary nirvana, when done right it’s absolutely fantastic, and Po Sai’s is the best I’ve tried yet.

And then I set off on my temple tour. Wat Klang Wiang is your standard-issue northern Thai temple, deserted early in the morning, with some gorgeous statuary and a handy “No Killing Area” sign. Wat Ming Meuang impressed with a squat but stately wiharn and an intricately carved sign written in the ancient (and long-dead) Lanna script. But Chiang Rai’s top attraction is Wat Phra Singha (“Temple of the Holy Lion”). According to legend, this was just a fairly ordinary temple until one day in 1434, a bolt of lighting struck one of the chedis (stupas), splitting it open and revealing the Emerald Buddha, said by legend to date back to 43 BC in India (although archaeologists note that it looks suspiciously like 15th-century Lanna style). Adventures worthy of a comic book followed, with the statue moving to Lampang, Chiang Mai, captured by a Lao prince and taken to Luang Prabang and then Vientiane. Vientiane was sacked by the Thais in 1779, who brought it back. King Rama I finally built Bangkok’s famous Temple of the Emerald Buddha in 1784, and that’s where it’s stayed ever since.

Today’s Wat Phra Singha is royally supported and thus well funded temple overflowing with well-tended greenery and an excellent if compact two-story airconditioned museum, where a bored but amiable old monk likes to quiz visitors about Thailand. The museum contains a near-exact replica of the Emerald Buddha, although it was intentionally made 0.1 cm shorter than the real thing! The once-cracked (but long since repaired) chedi is in the middle and tucked away towards the back is the hall where real Emerald Buddha was once kept.

Serpent Across the Mekong: Day of the Yellow Surprise (A Special Brand Of Siamese Drinking Water) Exploited at Mae Sai by Tuptimkuna Ice Factory

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Mae Sai-Golden Triangle-Chiang Saen

I had toyed with the idea of dropping across the border into Tachileik for the day, but somehow the appeal of passing through four more convoluted immigration arrivals and exits had decreased in appeal after doing just that between Thailand and Laos, and anyway, did I really want to get my first taste of Myanmar by visiting what is, by all accounts, a dusty border town with little to see? So I contented myself with attempting to peek across the border from Mae Sai, where the Thais have tactfully erected a series of monuments commemorating King Naresuan, who beat back several Burmese invasions and personally dispatched their crown prince in a sword duel. The most memorable of these monuments is a giant scorpion, angrily brandishing its huge claws in the general direction of any Maew hordes who might dare come this way. The peek didn’t amount to much (darn haze again), but hey, this was along the way anyway for my main destination of the day — the Hall of Opium. I grabbed a bottle of Yellow Surprise (A SPECIAL BRAND OF SIAMESE DRINKING WATER EXPLOITED AT MAE SAI) and hopped aboard a tuk-tuk to the Golden Triangle.

My hopes were not very high, since every museum I’ve been to in Thailand — and, for that matter, every museum I’ve been to in any South-East Asian country outside Singapore — has sucked. But once I hopped off the songthaew and strolled through the landscaped grounds of the Hall, it became clear that this was no ordinary municipal dust-collector, and I bit the 500 baht bullet for an entry ticket and ventured inside.

The first section of the Hall of Opium is also the strangest: a dimly lit and weirdly colored twisty tunnel, with (you realize with a start) outlines of wraithlike, tortured figures embedded in the walls amid admonitions to pay attention and learn what opium does to you. After a brief breather in a large open-air hall complete with a little field of poppy, opium latex oozing out a few sliced-open pods (was it for real?), you’re escorted in to watch a brief movie about the history of opium in the area and endless benevolence of their Majesties in putting a stop to it… and then the museum starts. And this was, perhaps, the most amazing part: hall after hall of pictures, objects and explanations, with life-size replicas, videos, headphones where appropriate. For most part, it was remarkably true to the facts even when those facts were inconvenient, with eg. thorough coverage of the Thai kingdom’s former opium excise tax system, the political motivations behind the original ban and the CIA’s dope-dealing through Air America. Only the very last sections on the unrequired evils of all drugs started to go a little overboard.

Somewhat dazed but quite thoroughly satisfied, I munched on some tasty poppy seed cookies at the gift shop and trekked the three km down to the Golden Triangle itself. This term has now been appropriated to describe the point when Myanmar, Laos and Thailand intersect, and since this isn’t really very much to look at, the Thais have gone out of their way to dress it up into an absolutely ridiculous tourist trap. The once modest temple has sprouted a giant sitting Buddha perched upon an even more giant ship-shaped buildings and there are elephant statues topped with palanquins where you can clamber and have your photo taken (in exchange for a donation, of course). Every inch of the riverside is taken up with hawkers pushing cruises on the Mekong and every inch of the roadside opposite is taken up with souvenir stalls pushing junk.

I shoveled down some rather tasty fried kuey teow phat siiu noodles and made my escape, first snagging the songthaew down to Chiang Saen. This is the place where I was originally supposed to stay, and which turned out to be low-key but fairly nice, with some intriguing, half-overgrown ruins along the road out — it was a shame that I had no time to explore. Another hour and a half by rattletrap local bus to Chiang Rai, and I was back in Wangcomeland.

Serpent Across the Mekong: Morning of the Special Transport For You My Friend

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Luang Namtha to Chiang Rai via Huay Xai/Chiang Khong

Next morning, the daily haze was augmented with mist so dense you could barely see across the road, and even with a jacket on I shivered while shoveling down my breakfast of eggs and toast, regretting not going for the little noodle shop two doors down. I’d booked a seat on a public bus through a little travel agency, but I was in luck: a plush Japanese-made 8-seater minivan was on its way to Huay Xai, and since they had seats to spare I was promoted on board.

Until fairly recently, this crossing would have involved a full day of bumping about potholed dirt roads in the back of a Soviet-made truck with a few Kalashnikov-toting guards keeping an eye out for bandits, but with Chinese money the entire highway is now paved and is now one of the best roads in Laos, two lanes and paved all the way. The van sliced through the mist and down the highway, twisting and turning its way up and down valleys, neatly bisecting little villages along the way. I’d been hoping to reach Thailand before the border closed at sunset, but we made it to Huay Xai in just over three hours, meaning it was still high noon when the van dropped me off at the Mekong pier over to Thailand. I celebrated with a plate of Thai-Hainenese chicken rice and my last Beerlao, then made my way to the Lao exit immigration hut and got my passport stamped. Au revoir, Lao!

Longtail boats were waiting by the riverside and I clambered on board, followed by a Thai guy from the van who was continuing all the way to Bangkok by overnight bus and a random bunch of vegetable-toting locals. After a journey of all of 5 minutes (you could probably swim it if you’re not in a hurry), we docked in Chiang Khong.

This is where things became complicated. I’d planned to hear over to the ancient walled city of Chiang Saen, some 30 km to the north of Chiang Khong, but to my surprise there was apparently no regular public transport there. Unless I wanted to take my chances on waiting for an indeterminate time for a songthaew that may or may not exist to appear, my only choice was to head to provincial capital Chiang Rai, a good 2.5 hrs away, and then backtrack from there to Chiang Saen, which would take another 2 hours. Neither option sounded very promising, so I improvised Plan C: forget about Chiang Saen and make Chiang Rai my base.

An hour later, I was aboard a rattletrap 3rd-class Baw Kaw Saw (“The Transport Company, Ltd”) non-aircon bus, poking its way towards Chiang Rai the long way at approximately 30 km/h through minor rural roads that were in considerably poorer shape than the morning’s Laotian highway. Unlike Laos, the terrain on this side of the Mekong was mostly flat, which proved a blessing as the bus had serious trouble grinding its way up the solitary (and not very impressive) hill we did encounter. Instead, the dominant scene was one which I was to see repeated again and again in the next few days: a vista of flourescent green rice irrigated paddies, framed by dried trees and scorched, sometimes still-smoldering vegetation, fading off to the hazy horizon in gradations of brownish gray.

Around 5 PM, we finally pulled into Chiang Rai’s bus station, which fortuitously (and quite unlike most Thai cities) is located smack dab in the city center, and it was time to make a decision. I could stomp about the city center in the lingering late afternoon heat (which seemed so much worse now after the brief respite of Laotian highlands), looking for a place to stay for two nights before I checked into the fancy hotel I’d booked for Thursday night… or I could head to the fancy hotel right away and try to cut a deal there.

Like most Flyertalkers, I’m quite particular about my hotels, but instead of worrying about brand affiliation, elite levels or even price, I pick mine based on the establishment’s most prominent feature: its name. With my attention already piqued by the Porn Ping Hotel of Chiang Mai, followed by Korean-style action in the Dong Bang Hotel of Jinju, it was time to complete the Holy Trinity, a climax for the journey if you will, and stay at the Wang Come Hotel, the finest place of lodging in all Chiang Rai (when it was first built at some time in the 1970s, that is). After all, there are plenty of massage parlours in Thailand that offer their clients the “Wang Come” experience, but this is the only hotel named for it, and they’ve got not one, but two mottos to describe how good it feels: you can pick from “Wang Come Hotel — The Centre of the Action”, or “Wang Come Hotel: The Ultimate Pleasure of Staying”.

After a little negotiation at the front desk, I got the price for two extra nights down to a tolerable range and settled into my overly air-conditioned but surprisingly plush room: the “Wanker”, as I’d already lovingly dubbed the place, has evidently gotten a nice interior renovation sometime in the last few years. The location within easy walking distance of everything was also convenient, but all things considered, that’s about the last positive I can give for the place. The depressing pool is surrounded by concrete on all sides and in the shade throughout the day, while the breakfast buffet was terrible in that special way that only bad hotel buffets can be — everything tasteless, overcooked, slimy or otherwise ersatz.

More ersatz, tasteless, overcooked and slimy surprises awaited at the Chiang Rai Night Bazaar, whose outdoor food garden looks quite inviting at first glance, but on closer inspection consists mostly of stalls hawking reheated deep-fried crap. Experimenting with the limited other options, I had the worst pad thai (fried noodles) I’ve tried in Thailand yet, some distinctly mediocre som tum (papaya salad), ultra-fatty muu yang (grilled pork) and rice that was more mushy than sticky. Gah: time to go to bed.

Serpent Across the Mekong: Morning of the Suppression of Terrorist Bands In Mountain Areas and Villagers and School Children Shouting In Delight

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Bright if not so early the next morning I set off towards the village of Mae Salong, about 50 klicks northwest of Chiang Rai near the Burmese border. This pipsqueak of a village has a more interesting story than most: after the Commies under Mao established their rule over China in the 1950s, one fragment of the losing Nationalist (Kuomintang/KMT) army made its way over to exile in Thailand. There the KMT trained its army for the day of return that was one day to come, and financed itself by growing opium and dealing in heroin, with notorious warlord Khun Sa living just around the corner.

The Thais weren’t entirely happy about this state of affairs, and the KMT head honchos started to have their own doubts about the probability of imminent return, so the two struck a deal: the battle-hardened KMT would help the Thais squelch their own Communist insurgency, and they’d get Thai citizenship and help for crop substitution. Somewhat surprisingly, the plan worked — the Reds got squished, the renegade Chinese became upstanding Thai citizens, and instead of opium fields, it’s now tea plantations growing Taiwanese High Mountain Oolong that dot the hills of Mae Salong.

And that’s where I found myself standing on a broiling hot April noon. It soon became clear that this was well off-season: the peak here is the winter, when the plums and cherries blossom and visitors come not just from Thailand but KMT’s main territory of Taiwan as well. My only consolation was that April is tea harvest time, so leaves were drying out next to tea factories and the smell of roasting tea filled the air.

Guidebooks try to paint Mae Salong as a little Yunnanese Shangri-La, where KMT cadres with wispy Ho Chi Minh beards smoke suspiciously opium-y long pipes, but no, appearancewise it’s pretty much a Thai town these days, complete with the obligatory Seven-Eleven in the little town square. I trekked up to the hilltop to see the Thai stupa and temple, detoured via the Mae Salong Resort (formerly a KMT training camp and still looking about as comfy as an army barracks), had a bowl of not very noteworthy noodles at the Yunnanist Noodle Shop and tried my hand at Chinese tea ceremony with an obliging if English-challenged tea shop hostess. And with the heat and the haze beating down, I felt I’d seen enough and took my leave. Maybe again someday in winter…

Serpent Across the Mekong: Morning of the Laminated Fixed Price Menu Courtesy of the Vientiane Tuk-Tuk Drivers’ Association

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Vientiane

It was Monsieur M’s first time in town, so we made the obligatory pilgrimage to Wat That Luang, the missile silo-cum-temple that is considered Laos’ national symbol. Another sign of fierce independence awaited at the ticket gate: Yankee imperialist dollars were no longer accepted, the gatekeeper demanding instead kip or baht. We scrounged up around 75% of the demanded sum, and he waved us past without giving us tickets in exchange. Look like the Laotians have mastered not just capitalism, but corruption as well…

And indeed, for a country where nothing supposedly ever happens, Vientiane is growing up at astonishing speed. Beaten-up bamboo shacks by the Mekong that a few years ago served only Beerlao and mosquitoes now have DJs and cocktail menus, hip cafes serving up quiche and organic muffins proliferate, the crusty old Morning Market has been torn down to make way for a shopping mall and shiny new Toyota Land Cruisers sit in every other backyard. Even the tuk-tuks have learned to maximize their earning power through collusion: any enquiring falang are promptly treated to a laminated menu of “fixed” (and, by Lao standards, outrageous) prices for trips in and around town.

Lest that sound too negative, there has been a lot of positive development as well: Vientiane’s once lethal sidewalks are now paved over through the city center, considerably decreasing the odds of tippling over into an open sewer, and street signs, previously rare as hen’s teeth, now decorate most road corners. Traffic remains far less murderous than in Thailand or Vietnam and even the few modern few green glass-plated temples of consumption that have sprouted up here and there are, by and large, far less hideous than the Communist-era concrete egg cartons they’re replacing. All in all, Vientiane right now strikes a pretty good balance between modern amenities and preserving the past — I’d like to hope they can maintain it, but alas, it’s unlikely they will.