Uncle travelling Gjerulf

Jan 25
As of today, I am officially a youth worker in KICC, Kathmandu’s interdenominational church for expats. The Pastor went on a two month sabbatical last Sunday, and I am living in his house. It is a rather big house, at least for one person. There’s a hall, a big kitchen and living room on the ground floor, my bedroom, a terrace and the pastor and wife’s private quarters on the first floor, and two roof top terraces on the second floor. I have solar heated water, so hot showers are available in the afternoon. The battery backup for electricity is broken, so my daily schedule depends largely on the load shedding schedule. According to the church board members, the house has internet, but I have of yet not found out how to connect. I suspect the router is in the pastor’s locked off study. Some board members have said they’ll email the pastor to find out if there’s a way for me to get online at home and one of the other Norwegians in the congregation has offered to try and fix the electricity backup.

On Tuesday, I met with three of the board members for a job interview, and they seemed impressed. I apparently have quite a lot more education and experience in youth work than they expected. On Wednesday I moved into the pastor’s house, on Thursday I had breakfast with a Norwegian family, before familiarizing myself a little witht the area, getting a visa extension, and doing some necessary shopping. Friday I spent proof reading a field report for the couchsurfer I stayed with last week, in return for which he gave me a ticket for a “mountain flight”, which is a very popular way of seeing the Himalayas from a different angle; from a small airplane! Yesterday I went with some other Norwegians here to do some fabric shopping (I got a good price on linen for two pairs of trousers for warmer weather, which I’ll take to a local tailor)and an English language movie at a café. (Vicky Christina Barcelona, a quintessencial Woody Allen) After the movie, we went to a restaurant, and then over for tea at another Norwegian expat’s flat late in the evening. After church this morning I met some friends of my sister Anne Malene, from the school that’s sent her to Brazil (en hilsen fra Hald-studentene til deg, Anne Malene!) and then I spoke to some of the teenagers about organizing a brainstorm on what they think will be  a good idea for the first step in furthering the youth work, and then there was a pot luck lunch with the church board, where I told them about myself, and what I think I can do to further the youth work in the congregation. The result was that I got the final go ahead, and money back for the 60 day visa extension I bought on Thursday.

I’m quickly getting used to bottling water from the electric filter and refilling the rooftop watertank with the electric pump for a few minutes when there is power, soaking all fruit and vegetables I’m planning to eat raw in iodine-water, wearing a mask to filter away most of the dust when I’m out walking (or from today, bicycling, as I’m now borrowing a mountainbike from the Dutch bursar on the church board) and all the other little peculiarities of Kathmandu life. There are some things, however, that I’m not sure I’ll get used to. Yesterday, as I was standing on the street waiting for the people I was going to see the movie with, a goat was slaughtered right there on the pavement across the street. It was tethered to the little shack that serves as the local meat market, and had it’s head chopped off in one mighty blow with a Khukri, the famous large, curved knife of the Gurkha warriors. Then it was held down by two people, and the blood coming out of the neck was gathered in a bucket. I was picked up before I got to witness the rest of the process, but judging from the carcass that was lying on a sheet next to it, the next parts of the process would be burning off the fur, and cutting off the hoofs. (feet? trotters?)

Incidentally, I walk past the headquarters of the Gurkhas whenever I’m going to the nearest supermarket… The Gurkha warriors are a fierce special force, handpicked from a throng of applicants that go through what are some of the world’s most extreme and rigorous tests. The soldiers are Nepali, but they are part of the British armed forces(!) Popular legend says that the best applicants will finish a footrace even if they break a leg on the way, because a Gurkha is not supposed to be hampered by such minor inconveniences.

So. For the first time on my journey, I have backtracked, and am now back at the hotel rooftop in Kathmandu. My plan was, as you probably know, to be in Royal Chitwan National Park just about now, and head for the border on the 23rd, when my visa runs out. I am back in Kathmandu now, though, because I have a job interview here tomorrow. Kathmandu International Christian Congregation has offered me a two month job as a youth worker. The pastor is out of town for a couple of months, so if I accept, I’ll be living in his appartment. They will also pay for my visa, and give me 20 000 Nepali Rupees (1767 NOK) per month towards insurance and food. My travel insurance costs around 900 NOK per month, and if I eat cheaply the remaining 800 should almost cover food, so I’ll come out losing very little travel time.

Yesterday and the day before, I went trekking in the mountains. I took a bus up to the trailhead, about 1500 meters above sea level, and we then hiked about 11 kilometers up to ca 2300, and back down to 2200, where we stayed the night in a tiny village named Bhanjyang (or something similar.) Up there we got a beautiful sunset, lighting up the mountains in the Himalayan Annapurna range, after a rather hazy day. Yesterday I got up before sunrise, and got some more fantastic views of the majestic giants, coloured bright red by the rising sun. As the sun warmed up the valley, the fog from Fewa Lake down by Pokhara, together with mist from the trees and thatch roofs on the hills, rose up past the mountains, and we got a much clearer descent. Much of the path going there was “paved” in big slabs of stone, making for smooth walking on the few flat stretches, and some mean stairs on the steep hillsides. Much of the paving is paid for by communal guest houses where tourists leave their money, but it is not mainly put there for the tourists’ sake, but for the locals. In the monsoon season, the torrential rains wash away the path where there are no big rocks holding it together, and it becomes almost impassable. This is a big problem for the locals, who have to walk at least half an hour from their homes to find firewood every day, and then haul their heavy loads back. There are plenty of trees, but to avoid deforestation, it is not legal to use healty trees for firewood. I asked why they don’t do like the Tibetans, and gather up dung for the fires, since there are holy cows walking around and dropping it everywhere, but the thought was clearly too disgusting to contemplate…

The trek was a welcome break from the noisy cities I’ve been to, with clean, warm air and the sounds and smells of hight altitude tropical forests surrounding us. My guide Harry, (“Jerry and Harry will have chicken curry, don’t worry” was his first words when we introduced each other) had however brought his Nokia N95 with over 500 western and hindi songs, and a battery powered loudspeaker, so it wasn’t quiet ALL the time… When coming back down, the rocks were wet from the night’s light drizzle, and the steps were treacherously slippery. On the most precarious parts, where the path just hung on for dear life to the green mountainside going straight up on our right and straight down directly to our left, I admit to making doubly and triply sure I had good footing before shifting my weight to that foot… I would’ve loved to take a longer trek, but my legs are glad they’re not moving much today. The ascent was hard on my thighs, but the descent was ten times as rough on my poor knees and calves. I was very happy to find that there was a clear mountain stream at the bottom, where I could cool down my aching feet and legs!

Today I allowed myself the luxury of taking the tourist bus back to Kathmandu, instead of the local bus. The main differences were that the seats were just far enough apart that I could fit my legs between them, there was no stereo blaring Bollywood love songs at 110% volume, we didn’t transport any goats, chickens or other livestock and the trip took about 8 hours instead of 9, as we didn’t stop at every one-horse-town on the way to drop off or try and squeeze in a few more passengers. The price difference, you ask? Up from 300 to 400 Rupees (from 26,50 to 35,40 NOK)

Jan 15

Yesterday I went to Kathmandu, and visited the Swayambhunath temple with Sujan, who’s been with me for three days. He’s studying computer science in Kathmandu, but has a few days off, and is visiting with his uncle, Milan. We got a wonderful view of all of Kathmandu, at least as far as the cloud of fog, dust and smog allowed.  At Milan’s office I got online long enough to upload my last couple of posts, and then we went home to Bhaktapur for the festival feast. The food was phenomenal, with fried chicken, spicy potatoes, something that tasted exactly like grandma’s Norwegian donuts, but were looped into the frying oil so the circles (they call it circle bread) were about 15cm across. There were little balls of sweet seeds, balls of candied, puffed rice, and different kinds of yams. All family members in the valley seemed to be there, and we had a great time.

Before we headed off that morning, however, I got a view into Nepali culture that I hadn’t expected. Milan’s wife had invited some friends over, and the occasion was the first meeting between a prospective bride and groom! I was introduced to both parties, in separate rooms. First there was the girl, and with her were the boy’s parents. In the other room was the eligible bachelor, and the girl’s guardian. They were interviewing the candidates. Milan told me that the next step, after we left, would be the introduction of the candidates. Milan’s wife, as the part who knew both of them, would introduce them by name, what they were doing (the girl was a student, the boy a high level police officer) and so forth. Then the girl and boy would first talk about their families, to find out wether they were related. If they were, marriage would obviously be out of the question. Next, they’d spend some time just chatting informally, and then the meeting would be over. The boy and girl would then decide whether they were interested. If they weren’t, it would’ve just been a nice and exciting occasion, and they’d be introduced to other people later. If they were still interested, the boy would invite the girl and her parents to his parents’ home, and they’d set a date for the wedding!

This morning I got up, had my morning daal bhaat (lentil soup and rice) and Milan followed me to the bus station in Kathmandu. All the time I’ve stayed with him, he’s not allowed me to pay for my own bus fare, or chip in on the food budget, and now he bargained for the bus ticket for me. The driver seemed a bit disappointed when I came from a shop nearby, and turned out to be the one who was paying the locals’ price on the bus… Approx 28 NOK for a seven hour, 206 km bus ride…

I arrived in Pokhara a few hours ago, and I’ve just had a wonderful steak dinner. It was a bit more expensive than I’ve been eating lately, but I decided it was worth it, and it was… I’m sitting in a restaurant on a balcony one floor above the street, and the slight chill in the air, like a Norwegian summer’s night, is dispelled by the fire in the outdoor fireplace (read: a half barrel with a chimney) right behind me. When I ordered the grilled steak, the waiter asked me whether I wanted my steak well done, medium or rare. I replied truthfully that if it was safe, I’d have it rare. The waiter hesitated, looking almost a bit hurt, then proceeded to confirm that I wanted my steak medium…

I had a phone call a couple of hours ago, from one of the Norwegians I met in church on Sunday. She might have a job for me… The job is, as far as I understand, with youth in Kathmandu International Christian Congregation. They don’t have any youth work as it stands today, but they want to start a social scene for Christian youth. She said they’d be having a meeting tonight, and if I was not completely uninterested, she’d discuss the opportunity with the other chair members. It would be voluntary work, but with board and lodging included. I said it’s not out of the question, but I need a few days to decide. I also said that if it becomes a reality, the time I’d have available woulde be up to three-four months. I ask those of you who pray, to pray with me on the matter, and help me find out whether this is God’s will, or just a crazy idea!

Tomorrow I’m planning to look around Pokhara and relax after a tiresome bus journey today, and then I’ll head up into the mountains the next day. I’d like to have taken a longer trek, but this is what my visa allows me. (or so I keep telling myself, to avoid the fact that I’ve  grown lazy) When I come back, I’ll stay one more night before heading to Chitwan, and a tropic climate.

As I am writing this, I still haven’t had the opportunity to  upload my last post, so I guess both will be posted simultaneously.

On Saturday I googled churches in Kathmandu, and I got several hits. I chose KICC, Kathmandu International Christian Congregation, and found out where they have their Sunday service. After breakfast on Sunday, I checked out of my hotel room, and took a taxi to the church. It was a very friendly crowd, and lots of people came up to me, asked if I had been in town long, and whether it was my first time there. In the beginning of the service, people who were there for the first time were asked to stand up, and the microphone was passed around so everyone could introduce themselves!

The songs sung during the service were all English hymns that I didn’t know, but it was very nice. Nepal has a serious problem with electricity, and power comes and goes on a set schedule, a “load shedding schedule” in order to keep the grid from breaking down. The “children’s talk” was early on in the  service, and the guy leading the service was talking about how God has no “load shedding schedule”, his power is working everywhere, all the time! After the children’s talk, the children left, and went to Sunday school, and the pastor gave a sermon where he was talking about the situation in Gaza, and how to react to the Isreali attacks. His conclusion was that the history of God’s chosen people in the Old Testament shows that the Jews have a special position with God, but they are still held accountable for their acts, and that this is how he  figured we should look at the current situation.

After the service, some Norwegians came up to me, and it turned out I had found the place where the people from both the Norwegian Tibet Mission and Normisjon use to come on Sundays! I got to film some of them, and got a greeting from one of the Norwegian teenagers there to the teenagers in the congregation of Vardeneset back home. I was invited to join some of the younger people there for lunch at a café, and afterwards I went home with a couple of the Norwegians. I got to borrow a Nepali sim card from them, and the Lonely Planet guides to Nepal and to India! I then called up my CouchSurfing host Milan, who lives in Bhaktapur, 15 km from Kathmandu, and I went to meet him. The 15 kilometers here take about an hour by bus, because of traffic and horrible road quality. I have lived with his family for the last couple of nights.

His nephew Sujan showed me around Bhaktapur yesterday, and we went to a couple of temples in Kathmandu today. The hindu temple area of Pashupatinath was quite special, as there were pyres along the river there, where they were cremating people. before the cremations, they took the corpse to the river and washed the feet, poured some of the water down the throat of the corpse, and then covered it in an orange shroud, flower petals and some red powder. After the pyre was burned down, they flushed the ashes into the river, where street kids were rummaging through it to search for coins. A little downstream, people were washing their hair, themselves, and their clothes! There were holy cows walking around the temple grounds, and lots and lots of monkeys were playing and chasing each other on the streets, walls and rooftops. If anyone took out any food, the monkeys would follow them around until the food was gone, hoping for some scraps. There were people selling fruit, that was given out in small, black plastic bags, and the monkeys would also follow any black plastic bag around, knowing it might contain a snack coming their way!

The second temple we went to was Bodhnath, which is a Tibetan buddhist temple, the only one in the world where Tibetan buddhism is practiced freely, without oppression. The biggest change was that there were pictures of the CURRENT Dalai Lama in the shrines, and it was free of the throngs of military that dominated the monasteries and temples in Tibet… It also has the worlds largest stupa (chörten in Tibetan). There I could pass on some of the things I learned in Tibet to my “guide”, Sujan! The chörten is surrounded by prayer wheels, like everywhere in Tibet, all of them inscribed with the holy words “om mani padme hom.” For the first time, I saw white, western buddhists walking around in the red monks’ robes, or prostrating themselves in front of the chörten alongside the Tibetans!

Tomorrow will be a small festival, and Milan has invited me to stay and experience it. It is the first day of a new Nepali month (lunar calendar) and it apparently marks mid winter. It involves a bath, supposed to be taken in cold water, because in a legend, a monkey fell from a tree into the water, had a bath, and came a long way towards enlightenment as a result (or so I gather.) None of the people here will be taking a bath, however, because it is too cold, and Milan and his family has no running hot water. The water they do have is pumped from a well into a tank on the roof, whenever there happens to be electricity for the pump… It will, however, involve a feast with lots of special traditional Nepali food!

Tomorrow I should also book a place to trek from in Pokhara, and go to Kathmandu and give back the books and sim card. From Kathmandu, I’ve gathered that I should go west to Pokhara, for a two or three day hike in the mountains, and then head south to Royal Chitwan National park, where it is much warmer, and I can ride elephants on safari around the park, and see Bengal tigers, rhinos, monkeys, fresh water dolphins, crocodiles and Gharials. (The latter is described as a prehistoric slender beast of an animal, with a long snout full of bad teeth, living on a diet of river fish) From Chitwan I go to the border, and head into India, before my visa runs out on the 23rd. I’m considering taking a round trip of India before I head east, and if so my first stop there might be Agra, but I haven’t quite made up my mind yet.

In China it seems that most things are described as “The [X] of [Y]“,  so you don’t really have to be a genius to understand how Tibet came to be called “The rooftop of the world.” We’re 3700 meters above sea level, and the train that got me here went along the highest altitude railroad in the world, at 5072 meters at the highest point. It didn’t really seem that high, though, as we were rolling along on a vast plateau, with much higher mountains on both sides.

I spent New Year’s Eve on the train, and it was rather uneventful. It was just another Wednesday night in China, seeing as new year here isn’t until January 26. The lights in my carriage went out at 9:30, and the restaurant car closed at 10… Anyway, I wish all of you a wonderful 2009!

When I arrived in Lhasa, I was picked up by my tour operator Lee Jack and my driver(!), and presented with a traditional white scarf for good luck. When we arrived at the hostel, I was warned that in order to avoid altitude sickness, I shouldn’t shower in the first 24 hours, nor smoke, drink alcohol, eat meat, fat or spicy food, get winded for any reason, and in general just relax as much as possible. High altitude sickness, or Acute Mountain Sickness as they call it, presents with headaches, fatigue, sleeplessness, nausea, or if you will: The Worst Hangover Ever. If symptoms are ignored it may be fatal, so I decided to be safe rather than sorry…

The first night here, I just wandered (slowly) into the quaint Tibetan back alleys, found a food market, and the muslim quarter. I ate a vegetarian supper in a hole-in-the-wall restaurant, where the cook/serving woman looked terror stricken at the prospect of having to communicate with a Foreigner… The food was amazing, though, when I finally managed to communicate that I couldn’t eat meat, fat and spice, as it was my first night on the plateau. The dormitory where I stay in the hostel has 12 beds (6 bunk beds) but is only occupied by me, a Chinese guy, and four Chinese girls. It set me back the staggering sum of 15 NOK per night…

I had the best night’s sleep in over a week (the Chinese medicine did the trick for my stomach!) and the next morning I went out to a place called Jokhang, where I had breakfast in a traditional Tibetan restaurant. I had yak dumplings, fried barley flour (Tsampa) and salty tea with yak butter… The place was pretty full, so I shared a table with a family of Tibetan pilgrims who, as a matter of course, shared what they ordered with me, and I shared my food with them!

I got into the Jokhang Temple in the busiest period of the day, when lots and lots of pilgrims were paying their dues to the buddhas in the temple, so I was basically standing in a long line, going through all the little chapels in the temple.

Actually, the way I found the temple in the first place, was when I came out from a small side street, onto a wider pedestrian where everybody were moving the same direction… Most were dressed in traditional style, with amazing hairdoes, involving braided hair, sometimes intertwined with colourful threads. That went for both men and women, although some of the men were wearing ornate swords at their sides! Quite a few were prostrating themselves, laying all the way down on their stomach, forehead to the ground, every three steps! When I reached the front of the temple, there was a roped-off area, where dozens of people were laying down, getting up and laying back down over and over again!

When I’d done the whole circuit of the temple with the crowd of pilgrims, I went up to the roof, which was pretty awesome! The temple was built 1300 years ago, and although it has been partly destroyed and rebuilt several times over the past millennium, it still had that ancient feel of strong spirituality. From the roof it was clearly visible that the whole thing was built much like a maze, I assume in order to let light down into the lower interior rooms of the structure. I wandered aimlessly around on the roof, and stumbled upon a guy making (or maybe repairing) buddha statues, and in another place a couple of carpenters apparently preparing beams and posts that would replace crumbling ones around the massive structure. I also wound up on a stretch of roof that had a distinct off-limits feel to it, seeing as I was the only one there, and there were the occasional monk washing his cape, making tea and generally going about their business.

In the evening, 24 hours after my own arrival, the couple I’ll be travelling with in Tibet in order to share the cost of the obligatory car, driver and guide, arrived. Gabrielle and Christoffer are in their mid forties, and have been (in their own words) semi-nomadic for the past 16 years. In spring and fall they work as teachers back home in the US, to make money for further travelling! Today we went toghether to Potala palace, which is the most famous structure in Tibet. It is pretty easy to locate, it is the one that “touches the sky!” The massive red and white building is (according to a plaque at the entrance) 115,703 meters high, and was the seat of the 6th to the 13th Dalai Lama, from the 17th century till 1959, when the current (14th) Dalai Lama had to flee from the Chinese liberators/invaders. Most people here put on a wide grin when they find out I’m Norwegian, and say something along  the lines of “Oslo! Dalai Lama! Nobel Peace Price!”

It is pretty obvious that Tibet is occupied territory. At every street corner there are four Chinese military guards, two with riot shields, and two with what I suspect are tear gas launchers. They also patrol all large open spaces in fours, sit on rooftops with their launchers, march around in large groups, or hang around the temples in their “civilian” dark blue no-brand track suits. Today I was stopped by one of the latter, had to show him all the pictures on my camera, and delete any pic that had any sign of military presence in it! Because the button that scrolls through pictures on my camera sometimes takes two or event three pictures at a time I managed to keep one; a picture of guards on a rooftop next to the Jokhang Temple… If the government finds this, they’ll probably ban gjerulf.com from all net users in China, and possibly deport me if they find out where I am…

The Chinese name themselves the liberators of the Tibetan people, which to some extent is true, as Tibet was a feudal serfdom before the Chinese arrived, and most people lived basically as slaves, in extremely poor conditions. Whether exchanging one oppressive regime with another one can be considered liberation is a different story. The undebatable truth is that Tibet is a much richer and more developed country today than it was before the Chinese arrived. Another truth is that the Chinese culture is on the verge of overwhelming the local Tibetan culture, which would be a great loss. In the future people might have to go to museums to see the pilgrims, full of grime and with bloody foreheads from hundreds of kilometers of prostrating every three steps, see the colourful clothes and headdresses, the men with the swords and all the things that make Lhasa unforgettable…

I don’t know how internet access will be the coming week, travelling through the inner parts of Tibet, so my next entry might be posted from Kathmandu, Nepal. I’m considering going to the Nepalese embassy tomorrow to get my visa, since it’s supposed to be cheaper here than on the border. I am looking forward to visiting Mount Everest Base Camp, which looks to be accessible even though it’s bloody freezing up there. Can’t get as bad as Mongolia, though. Or can it? Will those be my famous last words?

The past couple of days I’ve spent in my hostel. Eating western food in the hostel restaurant is the likely culprit… I should’ve known better, I guess, but I just needed a change from rice and noodles. At least I didn’t get the tourist runs, but I’ll tell you; gas pains are almost as bad! I had lots of green tea today, to make it go away, and I’ve been eating fried rice to get my system something to work with again, after two days of eating next to nothing… Anyway, enough about my digestive troubles.

Today, I was sitting in the common room of the hostel, googling churches in Xian, because it is Sunday and I wanted to go to mass. I was unable to find an address, so I’d just about given up, when a guy came up, introduced himself as Collins, and asked if I wanted to play a game of pool. When we’d played a couple of games, he asked me if I wanted to go to church with him!

Turns out he’s a catholic from Ghana, who’s been teaching English here for three months. I went with him to one of the four churches in Xian.  The church was a 300 year old cathedral (which means it is the church where the Bishop resides) called Cathedral of Saint Franciscus,  and the mass was in English. They’d had two masses in Chinese earlier in the day, and the one I went to was mainly for foreigners. The priest was Chinese, but there was also a Mexican Father visiting today, and he held the sermon. They were a very friendly bunch, and I got a few greetings on tape, and a nice little clip of the Chinese priest playing football with the kids outside  after mass.

The apartment hotel where I stayed with Thorbjørn in Beijing was a bit of a  step up from where I’ve stayed earlier. I had my own bedroom with a queen size bed, and my own bathroom. In the basement there was a gym, a swimming pool, a steam bath and a sauna, and also a spa that offered massage and aromatherapy at a discount for guests at the hotel. One night I figured I’d go check it out. I spent an hour in the pool/sauna/steam bath, before I had a 90 minute aromatherapeutic massage… I didn’t know an hour and a half could pass that quickly! I actually think I fell asleep there for a while…
The remaining days I stayed there, I went to the pool and sauna every night. It is most definitely the best way of winding down after a long day of walking around in one of the world’s most polluted cities!

On Saturday night I got on the train to Xian. In 11 hours, I went 1200 kilometers headed southeast into central China. Xian is quite different from Beijing. For one, it’s much smaller, only around 5 million inhabitants. If Beijing can be compared to New York, then Xian is probably more like Rome. True, Beijing has a lot of historic sites, but when you’re moving around town, you don’t really notice them, because they’re all walled in. Xian on the other hand, has the historic buildings right here in the centre for all to see. I am in a youth hostel right on the central square, and out the window I can see the old Bell tower and Drum tower. They used to ring the bell at dawn, and bang the drum at dusk. Up to about the 10th century, Xian was the most important city in what is now China. It is the beginning and end of the Silk Road, and as such has had a lot of contact with the rest of the world. One of the museums here has a tablet with a Christian (Nestorian) inscription, dated 781 AD. The muslim community is thriving, and today I visited the Hui (Chinese Muslim) quarter in the city. For about a hundred meters down one of the narrow streets, every single shop that wasn’t a muslim restaurant was a Halal butcher! The Great Mosque was also fascinating. All outward appearances are that of a Buddhist temple, down to the Spirit Wall at the entrance, that is meant to keep out the evil influences. The Minaret looked like a Pagoda, it had the typical Chinese arches and architecture, and there were Chinese symbols on big tablets over the arches, just like in a Buddhist temple. The first hint that it wasn’t Buddhist, however, lies in the fact that it didn’t point North<->South, instead it pointed west, towards Mecca. Also there were inscriptions in Arabic mixed in with the Chinese. In the main Prayer hall were the familiar rows of muslim prayer carpets, but the dead give away, however, were the bearded men walking around with their little round hats, sitting in side rooms reading Quran, and kneeling in prayer on some of the mats. They weren’t Arabic, however, so their beards weren’t the full, shiny beards of Arabs, but the thin, stringy beards of the Chinese!:D

Tomorrow I’m planning to go see the sight that this city is definitely most famous for; the terracotta warriors! The first unifier of China, Emperor Qin Shi Huang, is buried with thousands of life size terracotta footsoldiers, officers and even horses! Some claim he was afraid of the spirits of his vanquished enemies, waiting for him in death, but most archaeologists agree
that he simply expected his rule to continue in the afterlife, and he wanted to have as great an army there as he’d had in this life… Like real soldiers, they are lined up in ALMOST (but not quite) the the same position, and like real soldiers, not two have the same facial features! Their weapons were real, and therefore are mostly gone after 2000 years, and some of the horses had real chariots, which have also all but rotted away. More on that later.

I’ve unearthed a couple of American CS’ers that want to do the same tour as me, at the same time, in Tibet. They’d found out that the rule against travellers of different nationalities travelling in a group together is no longer in effect, so maybe we can split the cost of car and guide, so the trip won’t cost an arm and a leg, only a few fingers and toes from each of us…

The past few days I’ve explored UB at a rather leisurely pace. I reunited with Michiel and Rick from Holland. We met in a CS meeting in Irkutsk, and had a day trip to Lake Baikal together the next day. When I left for UB, they stayed on for another day in Irkutsk, and then went to Ulan Ude before they too continued on to UB. Michiel is a Buddhist, and is  staying in Mongolia for a month, to do volunteer work. He’s working at a soup kitchen, helping set up a play with local orphans and street kids, and making a short promotional video for the buddhist centre he works at.

In UB, I’ve been to the National Museum of Mongolian history, and the Mongolian Museum of Natural History, which among other things has a quite good collection of dinosaur bones. An old man I met at a restaurant took me to an art workshop funded by the state, where many of the great artists of Mongolia do their work. His son is an artist there, and he showed me how he worked, and I got to look in an album with pictures of his work. I assume he must be rather well known, because I recognized quite a few of his pieces from various places around Ulan Bator!
I’ve also been to the Monastery Museum of Choijin Lama, the Winter palace of Bogd Khan, and to the Zaisan Memorial, a Soviet phallus of a monument in honour of unnamed soldiers in various wars. On Sunday I got up early, and went to Gandan Khiid, and witnessed the morning ceremonies of the Buddhist monks there. It was a pretty fascinationg affair, with the monks chanting different texts at different pitches, and all of it mixing together into a cacaphony which was sometimes emphasized by frantic blowing in horns, ringing of bells and banging on drums. Some of the layity also took part in the ceremonies, by holding some of the religious objects used in various rituals.

On Sunday afternoon, I met with a Norwegian couple and their three kids. The couple have lived in UB since 1994, and the kids grew up there. They work for a Norwegian mission, with local economic development. A few weeks ago, the Norwegian Crown Prince Haakon was on an official visit to Mongolia, and he also paid a visit to one of their projects. We had a burger at the State Department Store, and then we went to worship service at the international interdenominational fellowship in UB. There were Christians from all 5 continents, and I got to talk to quite a few of the people there. Not all of them were foreigners, though; quite a few were Christian Mongolians who were interested in improving their English. For those who didn’t understand something from the sermon, or just wanted to talk about it, there was a small gathering after the service, where people could ask questions about everything from “what does that word mean” to deeper religious questions. It was nice to be part of a fellowship off Christians, where I even understood all that went on!

My host after I came back from the Ger camp, an outspoken and kind satanist-neo-nazi-metal-head (!) who calls himself Degi, spoke very little English, and frequently used what little he knew to proclaim things like “I hate jews,” “I hate all black people,” “kill all the Christians and burn all their churches” and similar outrageous statements. It was difficult to understand where all the hatred came from, and we had trouble connecting. One night, however, he told me about his mother, who died from stomach cancer last year. He told me that he always sided with evil, because it made him feel brave, and not fear death. He didn’t know, or couldn’t explain why, but he said that Satan lives in his heart, and makes him do it…
Last night was my last night in UB, and we were talking about everything and nothing. Suddenly he tells me that he wants to be rid of Satan’s power because he can feel him destroying him on the inside, but he was worried that Satan would retaliate if he denounced him! We talked about it for a while, and it turned out that he’d been given a new testament at the Christian hospits where his mother had spent the last of her life. She was there, because nobody else would take in a dying woman. He’d read the whole thing twice, and wanted to know whether Jesus could protect him from Satan, if he stopped being Satan’s servant. I told him that the battle was already won, that Jesus defeated the power of Satan when he rose from the dead. He was still apprehensive, but he wants to talk to someone who can help him understand more about what he’s facing. He was very sceptical of Mongolian Christians, because he’d met with a lot of judgmentalism and greed, but I promised to put him in contact with the pastor of the church I went to on Sunday. When I said that I’d pray for him if he wanted me to, he thanked me, and then didn’t want to talk about it anymore, because he thought he might start crying… To those of my readers who believe, I ask that you pray for Degi and what he’s going through.

This morning (Thursday Dec 11) I got up at 6, and I went with Degi to the restaurant where he works, in the Narantuul Hotel. There he made me a big English breakfast before I had to head to the train station.
As I write this, I am sitting in the restaurant car of the train, watching the sun set over the Gobi desert. There is so much I’ve left out from the last days, like the joint Dutch/Norwegian vegetarian cooking experiment, the night in a seedy Mongolian karaoke pub, the drunk secretary of the president’s press corps who tried his darndest to get me wasted and gave me an autographed copy of his recently published collection of nomad poetry, meeting with Tsolmon, Leonid (the hitchhiker)’s web-friend, my first real blunder when it comes to crashing cultures, but if I keep writing, I guess nobody will have the stamina to read it, so this’ll have to be it for now. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be in Beijing, where I’ll try to get this posted.

Thanks for your comments! To those still wondering how to post a comment, just press the number at the top left, under the date of the entry.

Do you know what forty degrees below freezing feels like? It means your lips freeze together when you close your mouth, your eyes and nose start watering, which again means you have ice forming in your nostrils and the corners of your eyes before you know it. In other words: you don’t go outside in -40 degrees unless you really have to!

I arrived in the ger / yurt some 70 kilometers outside of Ulan Bator the day before yesterday, a little after noon. We spent some time looking for the place, but when we found a lonely rider we asked him, and he pointed the way for us. The taxi had to leave the road, and head out onto the steppe itself for the last kilometer or so. As we were driving a rather normal Hyundai, and not an all-terrain-vehicle, that meant
taking it REAL easy, but I think the driver was used to it, so it was OK.

When we entered, the taxi driver, my friend Degi and I were seated on the three only chairs in the yurt, and served hot tea with milk before anyone introduced themselves. When we finished our tea, I gave my gifts, a bottle of vodka for the man of the house, and a big bag of caramels for the women and children, and THEN we introduced ourselves. After a glass of vodka, I could also introduce myself to the lady of the house. The yurt was the home of a couple in their early sixties, with two of their sons, a ten year old nephew, their sons’ wives, and two babies. The youngest one was only a month old, and named Amgaa after my host in Ulan Bator!

The man of the house, Pimba, kept serving me vodka. A lot of vodka. My friend Degi said that refusing a drink on the first night of a friendship would be a very bad thing, but that he would make sure I was OK. I kept as low a pace as I could. The end of that night, I cannot remember. I woke up the next morning, in my sleeping bag, crammed in among all the others on the floor. There were two beds in the yurt, in which slept the young mothers with their babies.  I felt rather bad in the early hours of the morning, to my hosts’ great amusement… They were very understanding, however, and after a couple of hours on one of the beds, I was back to my old self. The temperature however, had dropped drastically during the night, unusually cold for this time of year, apparently. I didn’t see a thermometer anywhere, but they said somewhere around forty degrees below zero…

Degi was supposed to be going back in the taxi that morning, while I was staying another day, and then hitchhiking back. The taxi wouldn’t start, however, and the driver and the men of the family were trying all day to warm it up, heat the battery, recharge with the help of a solar panel, but nothing worked. It was almost getting dark again by the time the taxi finally started. I had spent the day mostly inside, because as I described earlier, forty below is just too cold… I did however ride around a bit on the family’s horse, and took some pictures. By the end of the day, I was having trouble keeping warm, though, and with the temperature that low, getting a ride to town the next day was going to be difficult. I therefore ended up saying goodbye that night, instead of waiting till the next morning. Pimba insisted that he and his wife (whose name I can’t even vaguely pronounce, much less spell) were my new Mongolian parents, and there was a farewell with lots of hugs.

I had a great time, and only regret I had to give in to the cold. My only excuse is that there is a limited amount of clothes one can bring when travelling, and one of Pimba’s coats were bigger and heavier than all of my luggage together, made of the skins of several whole sheep…

Back here in UB, I’ve stayed the night at Degi’s, and we’re going to a death metal concert tonight. Degi is a self proclaimed satanist neo-nazi pagan death metaller who speaks very poor English. We’re still trying to get along, even though he doesn’t speak enough English to understand what I’m talking about when I try to ask him how he gets those things to fit together…

I met my Dutch friends, and we went to Listvyanka village by lake Baikal, about an hour from Irkutsk. It was definately a huge lake, and I took some cool pictures (that I still can’t upload, as the computers in this internet cafe don’t have accessible USB). My first priority was to find a dive centre, and lo and behold, even on our way into the village, we saw people in scuba outfit on the shore just next to the road! After a nice lakeside lunch, we trotted over to the dive centre.

I contacted a dive centre in Irkutsk a while back, www.baikalex.com, through the contact box they have on their page, and via email. They never answered, but I called them when I got to Irkutsk. They said they were fully booked, and that I should have contacted them via their web page… They suggested I just go out and have a looksee at Listvyanka village, so there I was. For a while, I actually thought I was going to get to dive! It then turned out that there HADindeed been a free spot in their previous dive, a couple of hours earlier, but the next free spot was in the middle of next week… (just about when I’m posting this)

Instead of diving, we went for a hike in the pribaikalsk national park, which turned out to be an, if not equal then at least decent, substitute. We went up one of the valleys from the lakeside, between quaint old wooden houses, on frozen creeks, through snow that was about ankle deep, and up steep hills. We were originally planning to head over to the next valley, and then go back to the village from there, but we instead decided to get up to the top of the hill, and thus followed the ridge when we got to the highest point of the pass. The two Dutch guys were beside themselves, which is maybe not so surprising, seeing as they both live four meters BELOW sea level… The view from the top was gorgeous, and at least lessened my disappointment at not having gotten in that dive.

When I got back to Irkutsk, I had to take a taxi to my host’s place in the suburbs, pack my stuff, and then back to town to catch the train. Anastasia saw me off, and offered to help me getting supplies and everything before I got on the train.

The train from Irkutsk to Ulan Baatar was the most expensive so far, because they didn’t have third class, which is what I’ve used so far. The only carriage that was crossing the Russian/Mongolian border was second class. In third, the “compartments” aren’t really compartments, because they don’t have doors or walls. Second class was a whole different deal. The third class carriages look like they’re from the early seventies, but the carriage I was in from Irkutsk was brand spankin’ new! Each compartment had a tv and you could get either the onboard radio or the tv sound from minijack outlets above the beds. Each bed had a reading light, the windows were clean so you could see out, you could open them to get fresh air, the provodnitsa spoke English, the toilets smelled of soap instead of piss, all in all it was a whole different world! Still, the biggest change was being able to have proper conversations with the other travellers. I shared my four berth compartment with a couple from New Zealand, two compartments over was a father and daughter from Holland, who both were fluent in English, and a few of the other passengers also spoke English!

The train was a really slow one, however, and apparently I missed some of the most impressive scenery in Russia, going through tunnels and across bridges along the southern bank of Lake Baikal, since we passed it in the night.

We got to the border about 1pm the next day, and then found out that passport control wouldn’t come till 4pm. We went out and looked around a little, but it was a tiny village, so there wasn’t much to do. I spent my last few rubles buying some more credit for my Russian sim card, and used it to send some messages to my friends in Irkutsk. Then we waited. Around three thirty we got some customs forms to fill out in duplicates. At five to four a guy came into our compartment, looked at our passports, took the customs forms, stamped them, gave one back, and left again. A while later, another guy came in, got our passports, and trotted off with them. After more waiting, first one, then two more people searched our compartment. I couldn’t say what they were looking for, because they didn’t even touch our luggage… About seven hours after we first came to the border, we started moving again… Ten minutes later we were at the ACTUAL border, and twenty minutes after that, we got to the first Mongolian station. There, we had to write immigration documents and more customs documents, and of course the Mongolians had to take our passports. I don’t really know how long the whole border crossing ordeal took, but it must have been over ten hours…

The next morning, we were woken up at 5:30am, about forty minutes outside of Ulan Baatar. The plan was to borrow a phone and write my host in UB an sms with my arrival details as soon as we entered Mongolia, but I fell asleep before I thought of asking anyone, so I obviously wasn’t met at the station. There were several hostels that had pick-up-service however, so I hitched a ride to a hostel, had breakfast, borrowed a phone, and sent an sms. Fifteen minutes later my host picked me up from the hostel, and we went to his place. He went to work, and I spent the day relaxing, catching up on international news on BBC World, and fell asleep in the middle of an airplane disaster show on Discovery. It was unspeakably nice to get a proper shower and a shave, which I hadn’t had since Ekaterinburg. (I had shaved, but my host in Irkutsk didn’t have a shower, only a communal washroom)

Today I’ve been walking around UB. It just might be the ugliest capital in the world… There are, however, some pearls buried in the massive concrete soviet heritage pig sty. My host runs a restaurant a few minutes walk from the city centre, and on my way from the restaurant to the Sukhbaatar Square, I found a small, run-down buddhist monastery, that wasn’t even among the few sights listed in my Lonely Planet guide! It was quite cool, with it’s prayer wheels,  huge communal Gers and locals going around offering their prayers! There is a bigger, more beautiful monastery in UB too, which I’ll visit later. I finally feel like I have time to do what I want, with two weeks here!

I also went to a large park that was marked on my map, but it turned out to be more like the ghost of a park… I don’t think it was supposed to be open to the public, because all the entrances were welded closed, except the one I reached first, and even that one was deserted. I was the only person in there, which was both nice and really eerie at the same time… There was a broken fountain with no water, a big, empty, dusty bowl where a pond was marked on my map, lined with broken statues of exotic aquatic animals. Further over were the skeleton of an old rollercoaster and a rusty ferris wheel that looked ready to collapse. The walk paths had almost no paving left on them, and dry, brown undergrowth was sticking up through the snow everywhere. I was really far from the place I’d gotten in, and all the other entrances were welded shut, so I ended up squeezing through a hole in the fence, in order to get out of the park on the right side…

My cs host has friends that are nomads, and live in a yurt out in the countryside. He’s arranged for me to go there tomorrow! I will be staying and working with the family there until Friday. Then I head back to UB, because I’ve been invited to a concert with Mongolia’s first (and only) death metal band! Can you say clash of cultures, anyone?