The Trans-Siberian Experience (so far)

It turns out our fears of a Blogger blackout in China were well founded. We couldn't figure out an easy way to get around the government-imposed block, so we just had to save all our stories up until now. But now we're in Ulaan Baatar with a train to catch shortly, so if you want interesting, well written stories and/or pictures, you're just going to have to go somewhere else.

Beijing was awesome. Maybe it's just that we headed there from Delhi, but it seemed like a modern, sparklingly clean metropolis with cheap, delicious food and at least a 75% reduction in scams and hassle. We did all the things that are practically government-mandated for tourists to do in Beijing, including an amazing 10km hike along a totally deserted stretch of the great wall, a trip to the Forbidden City, and a huge, incredibly delicious meal of Peking Duck, or, as it's known there, "duck". I've used that line like 6 times already in emails, sorry if you've seen it before. See above disclaimer re: post quality.

We met up with the other 5 people travelling with us on the Trans-Siberian railway (descriptions and pictures to be posted sometime soon), and then hopped on the train. The first leg was a one-night, 30-hour trip from Beijing to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia. On its own, a 30 hour train ride sounds pretty long, but it's just a warm-up. Later this evening, we get on a 2-night trip from here to Irkutsk, Russia, and after that, we've got a 96 hour monster trip from Irkutsk to Moscow.

We were expecting Mongolia to be pretty cool, and it didn't disappoint at all. While the capital (Ulaan Baatar) is covered in a giant smog-cloud, filled with crumbly concrete block buildings, and apparently packed to the gills with pickpockets, we survived our one day here without incident, and even had a tasty meal at a Mongolian barbeque place nearby.

After that, we headed about two hours into the countryside for a 3-day camping trip, where we stayed in gers (traditional nomadic Mongolian houses), which were way more comfortable than we were expecting. The scenery was jaw-dropping and the weather was pretty mild for Mongolia (5 below during the day, 15 below at night). We went for a few hikes, climbed some hills, and got to visit a nomadic family for a few hours, to get a bit of experience with their way of life. About 25% of Mongolia's 3 million people still live nomadically, which is pretty impressive, given how much foreign influence the country has been exposed to (it was under communist control until 1990, and the Russians destroyed most of the cultural buildings and artifacts in the 1940's). That being said, most nomads now also own solar panels, satellite dishes and TVs, but if I lived in the desert I'd probably want some cable too.

We're off to go do some grocery shopping for the train to Irkutsk, more details and pictures will be forthcoming from Russia. Dosvidanya!

India Wrap-up

We've been inexcusably lax about posting lately, as we've changed our travel style from "slow and lazy" to "regular tourists" for the past few days. We arrived in Delhi on the 9th, and spent the time since then running around frantically getting to the last few cities on our To-Visit list (Chandigarh and Agra), as well as figuring out how best to ship a bunch of stuff home. Small souveniers: 3 hours, no problem. Sitar: 3 days, horrendous nightmare (but more about this in a bit).

DISCLAIMER: This post is really long. Feel free to read it in segments over the next week or so.

To wrap up Jodhpur, overall it felt like a busier, pushier version of Udaipur with no lake. The fort was pretty awesome though, and we finally got a picture of it.



We also got a picture of the turtle that lived at our guest house.


If you're not put off by the text-heavy post, here are summaries of Delhi, Chandigarh and Agra.

Delhi: in some ways, it's very different from the rest of India. It has expensive shopping, mind-blowing restaurants (including one called "Bukhara" that Bill Clinton once said was so delicious it made him wish he had two stomachs), and a shiny new metro that is fast, cheap, and easy to navigate. On the other hand, it also has the worst air quality of any city I have ever visited, just as many scams and pushy touts as anywhere else (if not more), and the most expensive hotels in the country. Overall, it was a mixed experience. Here's a short summary of some of our experiences, in case you find yourself in Delhi sometime in the near future.

Best food: Bukhara. Expensive even by North American standards, but they served up easily the most tender, delicious leg of lamb that I have ever eaten. The one let-down was their supposedly world-famous dal (lentil dish), which, at $15 for a small bowl, is about ten times as expensive as all other dal dishes in the country, and wasn't THAT much better. Runner-up for best restaurant: Veda. A super-hip North Indian restaurant in the old British city centre of Connaught Place that served extremely delicious fancy Indian food at less than a third the price of Bukhara.

Other food notes: We tried a bunch of fast food places, as towards the end of our time here (and I never thought I would hear myself say this) we were getting a little tired of curry. Most of them were pretty accurate reproductions of their North American counterparts, with one notable exception: no beef, anywhere. Not even McDonald's! Domino's and Pizza Hut both had good chicken and veggie pizzas, and KFC was pretty much identical.

Our hotel: The Pearl Plaza. One of the cheapest rooms in Delhi (at about $30/day) that didn't look like your luggage might be carried off in the middle of the night by an army of roaches. Clean and air conditioned, but with the pushiest service we ran into in the entire country (and that is saying something).

The sights: We went to the Red Fort, but it looked quite a bit like the other 3 or 4 forts we'd seen in the last few weeks, so we didn't go in. Forts are cool, don't get me wrong, but it's like "hey, more cannons". We went to the India Gate, and can confirm that it is indeed a large gate with the word INDIA written on it. Connaught Place is a neat area, with posh colonnaded buildings and fancy shops and stuff. Side note: we're becoming worryingly jaded about historic sights.


The last major thing on our Delhi to-do list was to get my &%*$#ing sitar shipped. The more I looked into it, the more I wished I'd decided on a tin whistle or something instead. The Indian Post refused to ship something so long (it's 5 feet by 2 feet by 15 inches). FedEx wanted like $14,000 to ship it. DHL wouldn't pack it. Luckily, fate swung in and helped get it done. On our train from Jodhpur to Delhi, we had a great conversation with a woman named Aditi, who was traveling with her son. After a few hours, I found out that she (conveniently enough) works for a logistics and shipping company. And she mentioned that before I told her I had something to ship! Otherwise, India being India, it would have been a bit too convenient. I told her my tale of woe and she agreed to help me get it shipped through her company. Not only that, she took the time to make sure I had a ride to her office in Delhi, and met with me a few times to take care of paperwork and stuff. If you find yourself in India with a sitar on your hands, and you have no idea how to get it home, I can highly recommend Interline Global Logistics. Aditi also gives out excellent restaurant recommendations. WARNING: Don't find yourself in India with a sitar on your hands. If you're heading straight home and you can check it as baggage, go for it. They're awesome instruments. But shipping a sitar from India costs several times more than buying the instrument itself. Had I known this a few weeks ago, I might be the proud owner of a nice tin whistle.

Alright, enough about Delhi, here are some quick summaries of the other two cities we visited this week.

Chandigarh: We went here for two reasons. First, it's home to the Nek Chand Rock Garden. Basically, a few decades ago this guy Nek Chand started building this crazy fantasy world in a government-owned but undeveloped plot of land, entirely made out of recycled garbage (old electrical wiring, broken ceramics, small bits of glass jewelry, etc.). He worked at it every day, and by the time the government found his garden, it was HUGE and crazy awesome. Rather than tear it down, they let him keep working on it, and turned it into a public park. It is easily one of the coolest places I have ever been in my life. Picture yourself, as a kid, trying to dream up the coolest park in the world. It would probably have giant stone castles, bridges criscrossing over each other, waterfalls, secret passages, and twisting walkways surrounded by fifty foot high cliffs. That's this place. Except this place also has hundreds of sculptures made out of recycled materials. It's amazing, and a strong runner-up for the best "tourist sight" we saw in India (see Agra for #1). Totally worth the trip to Chandigarh, but pictures don't really do it justice. That being said, here is a cool/kinda creepy army of garbage people.


The second reason we went there is because the whole city was designed by Le Corbusier, an early-mid 20th century modern architect. I'm not really a huge fan (read: he's more or less my least favourite architect in the world), but we went because we were curious to see how a modernist super-planned city would look in India. It was much more clean and spacious than the other cities we've seen, but the buildings were definitely designed by Le Corbusier, proving that North America doesn't have a monopoly on totally soulless architecture.


Also, all the neighbourhoods are called "sectors", which makes you feel like you're in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie anytime you need to get somewhere. "I'd like an autorickshaw to Sector 17, please."

Agra: We came here for the same reason millions of other tourists come here every year: The Taj Mahal. To be honest, there aren't a lot of other good reasons to visit Agra. It's dirty, and restaurants/taxis/shops are all WAY more expensive here than just about anywhere else in the country. All that makes the Taj Mahal stick out even more by comparison. It is amazing. A lot of famous tourist sights wind up being a bit of a letdown when you get there, for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don't look as cool in person, maybe they've been poorly maintained, maybe they're interesting in a "hmm, cool history" sense. The Taj Mahal, on the other hand, is just flat out one of the most impressive structures I've ever seen. It's so perfectly designed, so perfectly proportioned, that you feel it as much as you see it. There is no such thing as a bad angle to view it from. It just sits there, radiating epic-ness.


A must-see on a global scale. All this is even more surprising, since everyone has seen 100 postcard-perfect pictures of the Taj, so you'd think it would be a little bit spoiled. Nope. Walking through a dark archway and seeing it looming in the distance is one of those moments that brushes away all the bad experiences and challenges of traveling and replaces them in your mind with the cognitive equivalent of "wow". Just don't stick around in Agra too long.

Side note: we paid a rickshaw driver to take us around Agra a bit while we waited for the air to clear in the morning (it's super smoggy until well after noon there, and we didn't want our one trip to the Taj Mahal to be smoggy). On the way, we got an idea of the kind of nonchalance you would develop living in the shadow of one of the world's most famous monuments. An excerpt from his tour: "On your right, you can see some traditional farms growing eggplants, cauliflower, potatoes... over there is the Taj Mahal. On your left is some spinach!"

Final India Summary: Equal parts amazing, unique cities, incredibly friendly people, foul-smelling streets, non-stop tourist hassle, wealth, poverty, dancing, delicious food, constant fear of food poisoning, scams, questionable sanitation, tea, music, spices, and cows. It's like nowhere else on earth (in our limited experience), but we're excited to be moving on to something new.


Alright, we're taking off for Beijing tonight. At one point, I think the Chinese government had blocked access to Blogger from within the country, so it could be a while before we post another update, but we'll do our best! Failing that, we'll be in Mongolia in about a week or so, and we'll try and post from there.

Notes from Rajasthan

We're down to our last week (and a bit) in India, but we're going to try to cram three cities in between now and the 16th. We're heading to Delhi on a night train tomorrow evening, and then we're going to attempt day trips to Chandigarh and Agra from there. I say "attempt", because the train system here is usually on time to within a tolerance of plus or minus four hours. We're hoping for the best.

Udaipur was one of the more enjoyable cities we've been to so far, probably because we spent most of our time relaxing and taking music and art lessons instead of frantically sightseeing. The sights in India have been interesting, but they're usually packed to the gills and pretty expensive. Well, expensive by India standards, anyways. Like 4 or 5 dollars. Going to India early in our trip probably wasn't the best idea; we're now going to spend the rest of the trip in a state of outrage every time dinner costs more than $0.75. What do you mean you can't get a palatial hotel room made of hand-carved sandstone for $10 in Moscow? Unacceptable!

Anyways, the art and music lessons were awesome. I spent 6 days learning the sitar with Bablu, who ran a music shop down the street from our hotel. The sitar is one of the coolest sounding instruments ever, but playing it is like running your fingers along razor wire for an hour. I had some monster blisters for the first few days, and now I have a callous so thick I've lost all tactile feedback from the tip of my left index finger. But most importantly, I learned that riff from Norwegian Wood. Here's me and Bablu with some tablas (I also bought some tablas and took one quick lesson on them... I suck at tablas).


Walking around with a giant sitar case (which I've yet to figure out how to get back to Canada, incidentally) garners a lot of attention from people, including the receptionist at our hotel, who insisted that I unpack it so he could get a picture of himself looking all badass and playing the sitar like a guitar to use on Orkut, which is like Facebook, but popular here.


Our art lessons were pretty cool too. We sat on tiny chairs and painted elephants covered in jewelry, which was really cool, except when my legs fell completely and painfully asleep.


We also went to the City Palace in Udaipur (our one token bit of sightseeing there), which was a cool building with some neat artifacts in it. The one bit that was kind of mystifying was the portrait gallery, featuring paintings with all the refined technique and quality you would expect from a class of grade school art students who spent most of their painting time thinking of which games they were going to play at recess.


Also at the City Palace: a whole bunch of people who stopped to look at a monitor showing pictures of various parts of the palace, and taking pictures of the pictures. You are IN THE PALACE. You can take pictures of the ACTUAL THINGS. Maybe it was a really nice monitor or something, I didn't look. And yes, I'm aware that I took a picture of a guy taking a picture of a picture, to make fun of taking pictures of pictures.


One night we went out to grab a bottle of Indian wine (proposed slogan: "It's drinkable!"), and found this gem, which is just about my favourite liquor brand of all time.



Now we're in Jodhpur, which is dominated by a HUGE 500 year old fort right smack dab in the middle of the city. We've been here for 5 days, and even hiked up to the fort and wandered around it for a few hours yesterday, but somehow we've managed to completely forget to take any pictures of it. We did take some pictures of Jodhpur from the fort though. It's a neat looking city from above. Most of the houses in the old part of town (within the crumbling city walls) are painted blue, and the streets are about 18 inches wide and laid out like someone threw a bowl of spaghetti at a map, which makes navigation interesting.


That's all for now. We'll post our final India wrap-up and some impressions on Delhi and the Taj Mahal sometime between now and our flight to Beijing on the 16th.

Diwali in Udaipur

After finally saying goodbye to Calcutta (for real this time), we hopped on a plane to Jaipur, then pretty much immediately got on a train for Udaipur. It's a smallish city in the middle of Rajasthan, famous for having several giant palaces, a lake, a palace on the lake, rolling hills and, perhaps most impressively, for being the site of half of the 1983 James Bond classic "Octopussy". It's hard to forget any of these things while you're here, since there's almost always a fort or temple or lake within sight, and since every single restaurant in the city shows Octopussy at least once per day.


We got here one day before October 28th, which happens to be Diwali (one of the biggest Hindu festivals of the year). It's called the "festival of lights" (not to be confused with the OTHER festival of lights, Hannukah, which falls on a different day and is also Jewish), and thousands of small oil lamps and Christmas lights (or rather, Diwali lights) are traditionally lit in celebration.



Modern pyrotechnic merchandise has made things a little more exciting, and from sundown until 3:00 in the morning the whole city was in a constant state of explosion. It was really neat to see a city-wide, hours-long fireworks display, though after seeing some questionable lighting techniques and a few flaming projectiles landing in restaurants, I cringe to think of the Udaipur emergency room situation on October 29th.

There's a big family component to Diwali, and most people gather with their extended families to eat colossal quantities of sweets (and set off fireworks). Everyone seems to warm up, and the constant low-level tourist hassle (which has sort of blended into the background of India for us by now) turned into genuine friendliness for the whole night. The family who lives beside our hotel even invited us in to share in their celebrations (and, more importantly, their epic dessert mountain), so we joined them in their living room for conversation (and macaroons). Mallory thought to get a picture of me and some of the family members, but forgot to get in one herself, possibly because our brains were coated with a thick layer of fudge by that point. Seriously, so much food.


On Monday, we've got bus tickets to Jodhpur for 6 days. Once we're there and settled, we'll post about our recent souvenier-buying binge; I apparently have no innate ability to resist buying musical instruments, and Mal reverts to kid-in-a-candy-store mode when she's sat down in front of a big box of gems and minerals.

Darjeeling Wrap-up

We'll summarize our 11-ish days in Darjeeling, but first things first:

WE GOT OUR RUSSIAN VISAS!!!

It took a total of 5 weeks (3 weeks for processing, plus 2 weeks spent waiting for letters of invitation to be shipped from Siberia to Kolkata), and several trips to the Russian Consulate, but we are finally allowed to go to Russia. This is insanely good news since we already booked and paid for our trip from Beijing to St. Petersburg. Here's Mallory outside the consulate, looking suitably excited.


Now, back to the rest of our time in Darjeeling.

We spent one very early morning catching a jeep to Tiger Hill, the highest point near Darjeeling, to see the sun rise over the Himalayas. We got really lucky with our choice of day and not only did we get to see the closest stretch of mountains, we even got to see Everest (way off in the distance, but still, it was cool). The pictures make it look like a really serene, peaceful sunrise, but that's only because you can't see the 200 Kolkatan tourists standing directly behind us (we got there early to get a good spot). The best part of the whole thing, aside from the view, was when hundreds of other people started cheering wildly when the sun finally broke over the horizon. Yeah, go sun! Sunrise is number one! In your face, night time!!


We used another morning to take a "joy ride" on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway toy train, a steam-powered, super-narrow-gauge train that follows tracks through a bunch of mountain villages between Darjeeling and the plains to the south. The tracks themselves are only about 2 feet wide, and don't look like the kind of thing that a sane person would try to run a train on. The ride was cool, full of equal parts "wow, great scenery" and "we are about to get hit by a truck" moments, since the rail line runs beside, and occasionally in the middle of, the main road through the hills.


Being the dorky engineer (and fan of crazy old-school technology) that I am, I was almost more fascinated by the train itself. It dates from the 1890's, and takes three people to run: one conductor, one guy manning the steam whistle, and one guy shoveling coal. Coal!


We also went to the zoo, visited the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute (which has Tenzing Norgay's boots from the first summit of Everest!), took a tour of a tea plantation, and ate lots and lots of momos (Tibetan steamed vegetable dumplings). Fun fact: The Darjeeling Zoo has the most profane parrot in India! I will spare you the details, but suffice it to say that someone with a good grasp of English obscenities taught this parrot exactly how to express its displeasure at passing tourists (ok, I can't be sure it's the MOST profane parrot in India, but I'm going to go with that until proven otherwise).

Mallory also got to celebrate her birthday in Darjeeling! Woohoo! We celebrated with a night out on the town (read: at one of Darjeeling's two pubs), followed by two days/nights at a posh resort on top of a hill just outside of Darjeeling (our room had TWO fireplaces!). We also went to see a Bollywood movie called Karzzzzz. The extra z's symbolize reincarnation, I think. It was in Hindi, and there were no subtitles. Still, we managed to follow along pretty well. Also, the poster has a dude playing a flaming guitar. Yes.


Here is Mallory with her birthday cake and ice cream.


Here's a quick round-up of recommendations in case you find yourself in Darjeeling in the near future.

Best restaurants:
-Kunga's: cheap and tasty Tibetan food, including momos and bhagthuk, a garlicky and delicious noodle soup.
-Hasty Tasty: best Indian food in town, for less than $2/meal.
-La Casse Croute (a.k.a. Hot Pizza Place): Surprisingly delicious pizza in an area not usually renowned for its accurate or tasty Italian dishes.

Best entertainment:
-Karzzzzz: it had dancing, reincarnation, revenge, a bald guy with a robot arm, and a sudden kung fu fight scene at the very end, for some reason.
-Joey's Pub: one of two bars in Darjeeling, it's a great place to meet other travellers. Just don't plan on partying too hard, last call is at 9:30pm.

Best hotels:
-Dekeling Hotel: alright, this is the only hotel we tried in town, but it was clean, well-maintained, comfortable, and cheap, at $20/night for a double room with "side mountain view" (note: side mountain view indicates that a mountain can kind-of, sort-of be seen from your window if you hang out of it on a rope or something).

Tomorrow we catch a flight to Rajasthan, in the hopes of seeing some desert palaces, and maybe taking some music lessons.

Darjeeling Mail

We've been lazily making our way around Darjeeling for the last week, and it's been great, for the most part. We're still really enjoying the fact that you can walk down the street without acquiring an orbiting cloud of touts and salesmen. For the most part, it's a great low-stress place to spend a few days.

And then there's the post office.

We picked up a bunch of souveniers on our second day here, and decided to mail them home before we had to lug them around between cities, so we headed down to ship them off. We'd heard it's important to leave lots of time to ship things, but "How hard could it really be?" we thought to ourselves. Little did we know... Here is a visualization of the process of mailing a parcel through the Indian mail system:


The first sign that it might be an ordeal was when we walked in the door and saw that the sign marking the "Speed Post" queue was covered in cobwebs. Seriously, you can't make this stuff up. Not a good sign. Then we had to line up to have our parcels, uh... tailored. The Indian post office requires that all international parcels be sewn in linen.

To make this possible, there's a guy who sits in the corner of the post office at a tiny wood table, with a needle, some thread, and a big pile of linen cloth. For a fee of about a dollar per package, he will unpack all your things, rearrange them and wrap them in twine, and then provide a fine bespoke suit for your souveniers.



After it's been all sewn up, and you think you're ready to finally start actually mailing your package, he busts out the sealing wax.

Wax?


Yep, wax. Your package is then subjected to no fewer than two dozen wax seals along the sewn edges of its fine linen suit. At this point, I was pretty sure our parcels would make their way to Canada on the back of a camel, or in the hold of a galleon, or something.

Here's Mallory clutching her package after about an hour and a half of sewing and sealing.



Finally, once your package is completely sealed to the satisfaction of the Post Master, you get to actually line up and send it. Unfortunately, there's only one guy in the post office who does this, and he takes frequent half-hour breaks, without notice. When he does return, he moves with all the blazing speed of a glacier, even pausing to laboriously roll up his sleeves before getting down to the rough and dirty business of affixing labels and taking money. Mal sat in line for the better part of an hour before finally sending hers off.

Total time spent to ship two packages and 3 books: 3.5 hours.

This goes some distance towards explaining why we're spending so much time in India. You can't do anything spontaneously here. Shipping parcels is basically an entire day's worth of activities. Ditto buying train tickets. The whole country operates on its own logic and unhurried rhythm which, for the most part, is cool. Just not when it comes to mailing a package.

Darjeeling

We made the 15 hour trip from Kolkata to Darjeeling without any major problems, except for the last 3 hours which we spent squished in the back of a jeep with a very carsick lady from Kolkata who had some pretty severe stomach control issues.

Darjeeling is in the same state as Kolkata, but it's almost like being in a different country. Most of the residents here are of Tibetan or Nepalese origin, it's about 15 degrees cooler, it doesn't have anywhere near the same level of poverty as Kolkata, and the salespeople are perfectly content to let people browse without bombarding you with constant hyper-agressive sales pitches. Also, the city's surrounded by Himalayan mountains, so that's cool.

Here are some pictures from our last few days in Kolkata.

The street in front of our hotel.


A guy carrying a ton of plastic bottles. In general, people here seem to be really good at carrying very awkward loads.


One of the hundreds of statues of Durga, created to celebrate the 5-day long Durga Puja holiday. This was taken on Thursday.


On Friday afternoon, all of the statues were taken down to the river in big trucks filled with people and drums and dancing.


Then, they were paraded around at sunset.


Then, they were thrown in the river.



Our plans for the next few days involve steam-powered mountain trains, hiking up a few hills to check out the Himalayan views, and maybe a zoo (they have tigers!). We'll keep you posted.