So here we are - dilly dallying in an airport lounge in Delhi of all places....
We had hoped to sneak off into the town but we hit a brick wall so have paid a rather enormous sum to sit here and drink complimentary gin and tonics till 2.00 am
Nine hours of gin and tonics, it could all end in tears. Still we could be stuck in some border village in Belarus without toilets, watching the wheels of the train being changed...
The lounge gradually fills with people who've entered that strange state of waiting, reading magasines about things they've never wanted to know about, eating dried up pastries and drinking complimentary gin and tonics. The non smoking area is rapidly infiltrated by the smoke from the smoking area. The duty free shop informs us that we can't buy alcohol if we're travelling on a BA flight and we've still got 5 hours to go before we're wedged into our seats on the plane.
It seems we've been on the edge of bad weather, avoiding it as we've moved. Now China, India and Nepal are experiencing the worst monsoon floods in years. Meanwhile my Dad is camping out in Cheltenham with a bath full of water surrounded by floods!
Tuesday, 31 July 2007
Monday, 30 July 2007
Off home!
That's it. Our minibus for Kathmandu airport leaves in half an hour. Hope the plane is OK, the monsoon rain has been falling for days and lots of the country is under water. We then have 10 hours in Delhi, not sure if they will give us a temporary visa to go to the city. If so, we plan to chill out in a nice restaurant/cafe.
Carol has promised to add more posts when we get back to UK. I think I'll be up to my ears in work that has remained untouched for five weeks...
Thanks for joining in our trip!
Cheers
Tom
Carol has promised to add more posts when we get back to UK. I think I'll be up to my ears in work that has remained untouched for five weeks...
Thanks for joining in our trip!
Cheers
Tom
Sunday, 29 July 2007
Tom's random thoughts in Nepal - the final destination
Our journey is almost over. We went up to Everest Base Camp along a 70-km long track that went through rivers, deep mud, and ended up near a hostel that Michael Palin describes as one of the most grim places at which it’s possible to stay, at an altitude around 5000 m. But it’s the only hostel from which The Mountain is visible, and it certainly provided a show, popping out of the monsoon clouds as we arrived. We then got a horrid dose of altitude sickness, at the only place on our travels without decent loos… we coped as we could, using the windows (stop right now, Tom!)… The drive then took us along the scariest roads yet, mud-tracks along ravines, for about 300 km to the Nepal border. A spectacular descent from highland desert to lush rainforest. We stayed at the border town and crossed the “Friendship Bridge” on foot. Got a Nepal visa easily and negotiated a ride to Kathmandu in a Tata pickup truck. Nepal is gorgeous. The first thing we noticed is that people wash their clothes, and themselves – nobody does either in Tibet! We were booked into a “country-club” type hotel just outside Kathmandu, found on Google with the search phrase “scenic hotel swimming pool Kathmandu”. It’s gorgeous, and we hardly venture out except once to visit the madness and glory of the city, with its traffic, ancient buildings, shops, and monkeys. We leave tomorrow, flooding permitting, on a flight to Delhi and then London Heathrow.
1. What does it feel like to make such a long journey? The answer depends whether you ask the question while we are travelling, or at the end. While we are travelling the answer is something like “it’s really exciting, interesting, etc”. After the travel is over (we are resting for 4 days in a sort of country club outside Kathmandu) the answer is “blimey, I had no idea that the travel was so exhausting. I want to do nothing for the next 4 days except lounge by the pool”.
2. Some highlights? Leaving Bristol on 27 June; the flat in the old town of Warsaw; gaining access to the Moscow flat; the Siberian moonlight outside the window illuminating the 2-berth cabin on Train 4 to Irkutsk, while we still had the Springbank whisky; everything about Lake Baikal, especially the “banya” which I now want to recreate in my garden; Train 362 from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator, the one that stops every 10 minutes and that I had been dreading; all of Mongolia, but especially seeing the Przewalski horses and sitting in the driving cab of the Mongol T3 locomotive; the food, and cycling, and taking buses, in Beijing; Lhasa, especially the coffee house with free internet and cakes; the clouds parting and revealing Mount Everest; the precipitous drive from Tibet to Nepal, from mountain desert into a tropical rainforest; lazing by the pool at the Nepalese country club while local people played cricket; the madness of Kathmandu, its monkeys, and its traffic; doing this blog; the sufficient supply of Twining’s Tea Bags from England, and the insufficient supply of Springbank 10-year old malt whisky from Argyll; the salami bought in Moscow which was a lifesaver during the Tibetan dietary regime.
3. Low points? Not getting the train ticket from Beijing to Lhasa; Sue’s bad back; the squits after drinking fermented mare’s milk in a Mongolian ger; everyone getting horrid colds in Beijing; the Beijing smog; having this blog disabled for a week; Tibetan food; getting altitude sickness and hypothermia after Everest.
4. So what happened to the blog while we were in China? Who knows… First of all, it appeared that all access to the blog was blocked by the “great firewall of China” but we could still post stuff, such as the pic of Carol hanging out of the train window. But when we tried to post more stuff, we got a message from Google which said that an automatic program had found that our site was “suspected of being spam” and was therefore temporarily blocked for new posts. So now we could not see it cos of the firewall, nor post stuff to it cos of this spam nonsense. There was a link to click to try to get the site reinstated, so I clicked on that while in Beijing. In Lhasa I got a reply from Google to say that the site had been checked, was definitely not spam, and we could now use it. But we couldn’t, it still said it was blocked as spam. I suspected that some person or system had reported it as spam (Google has a way of doing this) so I wrote back to Google to ask whether such a system could be used maliciously to disable new posts to selected sites. A week later (there was no internet in rural Tibet) I got a reply from Google to say that it was now definitely OK to post new stuff – and it all works. So I wonder whether the Chinese authorities detected that new posts were going up while we were in China, and used the “spam report” route to close it down? I have heard that Google do not openly admit to the Chinese restrictions – when you try to get at the blog from China you either get a blank screen or a “too much traffic, could not find your site” message from them.
5. Best food: roast duck with apples and horseradish in Warsaw; new potatoes with dill from women on Russian platforms; more roast duck in Beijing; Shezuan-style freshwater fish in chilli soup in rural Tibet (but a Chinese, not Tibetan, restaurant); mutton curry in Nepal.
6. What have I bought? A bar of Russian chocolate; Mongolian cashmere scarves; a deck of Mongolian playing cards; a DVD of Mongolian nomad music; a silk dressing gown from China (a gift from Carol); a painting from Tibet; kitchy lenticular 3-D postcards of Buddhas; Tibetan good-luck pouches. I also have pressed Edelweiss and other wild flowers from Siberia and Tibet that will look good in frames (this was the only use for our “teach yourself Bridge” book). I regret not buying a Dalai Lama fridge magnet earlier today. Everyone else has stacks more stuff, including beautiful antique paintings from Tibet. All the selling touts give up on me long before they give up on the others…
7. What’s Tibet like? Gorgeous countryside, but everything else about it is desperate. People are really depressed about the Chinese occupation but can’t speak about it openly; awful diet, with virtually no fresh produce; very poor living conditions – smoke in tents, poor personal hygiene, diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies; all the Tibetan wealth concentrated in monasteries while the poor appear to be starving; no clear way to coexist with the local Chinese. And yet, everywhere you go, you are met with smiles and courtesy. By contrast, Mongolia seemed better sorted even though its nomads seem equally poor (and they are equally hospitable). The Mongolian gers are of much better design, are not full of smoke, and the diet seems to be a little more varied.
8. Would I do a similar trip again? Yes!
1. What does it feel like to make such a long journey? The answer depends whether you ask the question while we are travelling, or at the end. While we are travelling the answer is something like “it’s really exciting, interesting, etc”. After the travel is over (we are resting for 4 days in a sort of country club outside Kathmandu) the answer is “blimey, I had no idea that the travel was so exhausting. I want to do nothing for the next 4 days except lounge by the pool”.
2. Some highlights? Leaving Bristol on 27 June; the flat in the old town of Warsaw; gaining access to the Moscow flat; the Siberian moonlight outside the window illuminating the 2-berth cabin on Train 4 to Irkutsk, while we still had the Springbank whisky; everything about Lake Baikal, especially the “banya” which I now want to recreate in my garden; Train 362 from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator, the one that stops every 10 minutes and that I had been dreading; all of Mongolia, but especially seeing the Przewalski horses and sitting in the driving cab of the Mongol T3 locomotive; the food, and cycling, and taking buses, in Beijing; Lhasa, especially the coffee house with free internet and cakes; the clouds parting and revealing Mount Everest; the precipitous drive from Tibet to Nepal, from mountain desert into a tropical rainforest; lazing by the pool at the Nepalese country club while local people played cricket; the madness of Kathmandu, its monkeys, and its traffic; doing this blog; the sufficient supply of Twining’s Tea Bags from England, and the insufficient supply of Springbank 10-year old malt whisky from Argyll; the salami bought in Moscow which was a lifesaver during the Tibetan dietary regime.
3. Low points? Not getting the train ticket from Beijing to Lhasa; Sue’s bad back; the squits after drinking fermented mare’s milk in a Mongolian ger; everyone getting horrid colds in Beijing; the Beijing smog; having this blog disabled for a week; Tibetan food; getting altitude sickness and hypothermia after Everest.
4. So what happened to the blog while we were in China? Who knows… First of all, it appeared that all access to the blog was blocked by the “great firewall of China” but we could still post stuff, such as the pic of Carol hanging out of the train window. But when we tried to post more stuff, we got a message from Google which said that an automatic program had found that our site was “suspected of being spam” and was therefore temporarily blocked for new posts. So now we could not see it cos of the firewall, nor post stuff to it cos of this spam nonsense. There was a link to click to try to get the site reinstated, so I clicked on that while in Beijing. In Lhasa I got a reply from Google to say that the site had been checked, was definitely not spam, and we could now use it. But we couldn’t, it still said it was blocked as spam. I suspected that some person or system had reported it as spam (Google has a way of doing this) so I wrote back to Google to ask whether such a system could be used maliciously to disable new posts to selected sites. A week later (there was no internet in rural Tibet) I got a reply from Google to say that it was now definitely OK to post new stuff – and it all works. So I wonder whether the Chinese authorities detected that new posts were going up while we were in China, and used the “spam report” route to close it down? I have heard that Google do not openly admit to the Chinese restrictions – when you try to get at the blog from China you either get a blank screen or a “too much traffic, could not find your site” message from them.
5. Best food: roast duck with apples and horseradish in Warsaw; new potatoes with dill from women on Russian platforms; more roast duck in Beijing; Shezuan-style freshwater fish in chilli soup in rural Tibet (but a Chinese, not Tibetan, restaurant); mutton curry in Nepal.
6. What have I bought? A bar of Russian chocolate; Mongolian cashmere scarves; a deck of Mongolian playing cards; a DVD of Mongolian nomad music; a silk dressing gown from China (a gift from Carol); a painting from Tibet; kitchy lenticular 3-D postcards of Buddhas; Tibetan good-luck pouches. I also have pressed Edelweiss and other wild flowers from Siberia and Tibet that will look good in frames (this was the only use for our “teach yourself Bridge” book). I regret not buying a Dalai Lama fridge magnet earlier today. Everyone else has stacks more stuff, including beautiful antique paintings from Tibet. All the selling touts give up on me long before they give up on the others…
7. What’s Tibet like? Gorgeous countryside, but everything else about it is desperate. People are really depressed about the Chinese occupation but can’t speak about it openly; awful diet, with virtually no fresh produce; very poor living conditions – smoke in tents, poor personal hygiene, diseases caused by nutritional deficiencies; all the Tibetan wealth concentrated in monasteries while the poor appear to be starving; no clear way to coexist with the local Chinese. And yet, everywhere you go, you are met with smiles and courtesy. By contrast, Mongolia seemed better sorted even though its nomads seem equally poor (and they are equally hospitable). The Mongolian gers are of much better design, are not full of smoke, and the diet seems to be a little more varied.
8. Would I do a similar trip again? Yes!
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