The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Xilinhaote, China
November 27th-30th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

TODAY we were meant to leave China.
But seeing as we are in a manic rush to get out of the country, we have travelled just 350km sideways in a week. We are still 4,500km from the border with Laos, a journey it would take a decent car a good few days to cross, but in Trabants….
As a marker, it took us nine days to drive 3,600km through Siberia with one major breakdown. So potentially we’re out of here by the December 10th? 11th? 12th?
I hope Chinese customs is understanding.

Fez is broken. On Wednesday the engine completely seized. Tony took a look and decided we had to change the whole thing out.
It’s not a big job- the engine is only 600cc, a two stroke that you would be more likely to find on a motorbike, it weighs about 40kg. Our guide (more on him later) found a kind man who let us use the back of his workshop for free.
We were told a trained Trabbi mechanic could change an engine in 20 minutes. It took Lovey and TP two hours, a job well done.
We set of for Beijing yesterday with high hopes of reaching the city. Fez started first time using a key. A big moment.
But after getting a fitful 40km in two hours, it was clear something was wrong. We towed all the way back to the workshop in Xilinhaote, where Tony announced that the new engine was broken and we don’t have the spare part.
What happened?
Well, it wasn’t a new engine, there’s no such thing as a new Trabant engine, it was second hand, like all our other spare parts. Maybe there is something seriously wrong with Fez and the little car tore up the new engine.
But there is also a chance that we have carted a broken motor 18,000km across the globe. Through mountains, deserts, swamps and cities we’ve lugged a 40kg dead weight.
This level of ineptitude is well within our collective capability.

So today Fez is being loaded onto a truck bound for Beijing. We hope to collect it tomorrow. From there we will either try and fix the thing, if we can find the parts, or ship it on towards the border and try and have some parts sent out from Hungary. Then we can get out of the country and do repairs in Laos, which doesn’t have such strict rules on foreign cars.

So, for now, we are down from the original four cars, to just two.
This reduces the number of people we can carry- we were toying with the idea of someone having to take public transport through China. But instead we’ve decided to throw all our belongings into Fez so they can be shipped, and the six of us (five trekkers plus our guide) will squeeze into the cars with the bare minimum of stuff.

About Edmund
Watching the slow mental collapse of our guide has been fascinating.
The poor chap, who claims to be called Edmund, although that doesn’t sound especially Chinese, is having his sanity attacked on three fronts. The horrendous car issues are taxing his patience, the looming and impossible exit date is the iceberg on his horizon, and his boss is giving him constant grief because we have yet to stump up the $6,500 we owe for his services (it’s the bank’s fault).
All of this is out of our hands, and we’re dealing with it pretty well (except OJ, whose outbursts of aggression have been getting worse: rock throwing, screaming, kicking out at the cars. He’s a teddy bear really).
But after four months of what OJ politely terms ‘this shit’, we’re used to it. It’s not the same for Eddie.
Old Edmund- 35, married, missing his kid- is a lovely man, who has been an invaluable guide and huge asset: patient and understanding.
But I can see him starting to crumble. The stress is showing although he remains patient and polite.
In the last few days he has taken to regularly consulting the Bible- a faded old St James version he carries around.
Searching for wisdom I imagine- but today I watched him reading from the back. The last bit of the Bible is the Book of Revelation, the fire and brimstone stuff: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the anti-Christ, 666.
I know we’re bad, but I don’t think the end of the world is in sight.

But maybe we are the Four Horsemen? Gunther, Fez, Ziggy, and Dante: Death, War, Famine and Pestilence.
Fez has waged a war against its engine. In Ziggy, OJ has eaten enough to cause minor famines across the globe. When Tony takes his shoes off Dante becomes horribly pestilent. And Gunther is dead.

For Fez at least, it feels like the final reckoning may be looming.

ADDED 21:00: We didn't make it. Try again tomorrow.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

China

China
Erenhot and Xilinhaote
November 23rd- 27th November.
By Dan Murdoch

“China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.”
Charles de Gaulle. Thanks Charlie.

CHINA.
China.
The name has been on our lips for so long. Normally spat out with disdain and preceded by a vehement expletive. The stringent conditions attached to taking cars across the country have made it an expensive hassle: $8,000 to cross and fixed entry and exit dates. It had been a worry for months.
But now we’re here.
Walking through the border was the best feeling I’ve had in weeks.
“We’re in China mate. China!” I said to OJ with a huge smile and we shook hands and hugged.
We were the last vehicle to arrive, screeching up as night fell and the border closed. The guards stayed open late to let us in, though customs was closed so the cars spent the night at the border. We walked into town to get a decent Chinese.
I felt like I floated along that walk into town.
I'm trying to put in perspective what we’ve achieved so far:
We’ve crossed blazing deserts like the Karakoum, freezing deserts like the Gobi, industrial cities in Russia and stunning cultural cities in Europe. We’ve done the Turkish summer and the Siberian winter, the icy Pamir Mountains and the dusty Carpathians. We’ve dealt with crooked cops, despotic regimes, withering bureaucracy, enough breakdowns to break a man and all at a gentle 50mph.
It’s taken four months to cross 18,000km.

Now it’s all south. The long Northern Route is over, things get warmer and cheaper, we’re heading in the right direction for the first time in months, and every day we get closer to our goal. Closer to the beach. That pina colada is gonna be awesome.
Just 6,00km to go.
Chinese roads are great. Chinese food is great, and living is cheap, even if getting into the country wasn’t. And once we crack China we’re in South East Asia- pretty much home.
This isn’t the final straight, but it is the last bend on the track, the third leg. We can do it.

But of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. Our new guide, a prerequisite for travelling with your own car in China, sprung on us the news that we wont be heading south. First we have to go 350km east to get Chinese driving licenses, only issued in the provincial capital of Xilinhaote. Extra mileage we hadn’t reckoned on. And he told us it’s going to get colder.
And our timing wasn’t great. We got in on a Thursday, got the cars through customs the following day. But government offices don’t open at weekends, so we will have to wait till Monday to get our new licenses.
All the time the clock is ticking. Our customs papers for the car expire on November 30th. There isn’t a hope in hell we’ll be out by then. But our guide spoke to a customs official and they predicted a few days leniency.
Maybe five of six days leniency. So in theory we can get to the border on the 6th December.
That gives us 12 days to get 4,500km on good roads. It’s feasible, but we probably wouldn’t see anything of China- a double disappointment considering how much we spent getting in here.
Even so, having just crossed the Gobi on dirt tracks, I felt confident these well-paved Chinese roads would float by.

Then the problems began.
Not the extreme but simple to diagnose problems like the sheered clutch, broken gearbox, the snapped suspension, the seized engine, the car on fire.
But the finikety, hard to diagnose problems.
At high revs Dante began to give up and shut down. At low revs Fez would stall. Neither car will start by itself, both need to be push started. Dante is quite easy to push start, a decent shove from a couple of people. But the brakes on Fez are on too tight, so it’s a bastard to get going, and even then it takes a few tries to make it turn over. It’s exhausting work, and sometimes you get Fez started just in time to see Dante stall. It was like spinning plates- just as you get one going another comes crashing down.
An exhausting nightmare. I haven’t done so much pushing since my rugby days.
I lost count of the amount of times I heard OJ shout: “FUCK. I’ve had it with this shit.”
I told him so and he said: “If I could, I would have quite by now. But I don’t have an option.”
That night he kicked out at Dante, breaking a gash in the panelling. The stress is getting to people.
In Fez roles are reversed. The passenger used to sleep while the driver dealt with all the problems, now the driver has to concentrate on keeping the engine running- he needs to be at the accelerator and choke constantly. So the passenger needs to get out and do all the push starting, refilling, repairing. That means no sleep, so 24 hour driving is out of the question.

The terrain is similar to the Gobi- but now it has long, straight, well lit roads running through it. We can cruise nicely at 70 kph. But I found it a little boring after the random adventure of crossing the desert.

We literally pushed the cars the final furlong to Xilinhaote, the provincial capital, arriving late on Monday night (November 26th).
The city has a little of the communist influence we saw in Russia- grand buildings and sweeping public squares. Slab-like construction.
But a lot of it is sexier, better finished with nicer lighting, more subtle textures, cleaner, neater.
They love the neon lights- plenty of public buildings are outlined in them and the lights change colour, shifting red, blue and yellow. Despite how that sounds it didn’t seem garish.
Food and board is cheap and high quality: $10 for a clean double room with ensuite and a TV (only state channels, no BBC). It’s $4 for a slap up meal with a couple of beers.

The next morning we went to the Chinese version of the DVLA so they could do checks on all our cars and then issue Chinese driving licenses.
The fact that we’re towing Fez to a car inspection is not lost on anyone. The engine is completely seized. Tony had a look and decided we need to replace the entire engine. The theory is that a trained Trabant mechanic can change the engine in 20 minutes. That means we’ll probably get it done in a few days.

The car park is full of people, and suddenly we’re back at the zoo, the latest prime exhibits wheeled out for the punters.
Welcome to the Trabbi Road Show- Come And Stare.
The locals are swarming. They have no shame- happy to stick heads into cabins and have a good look around.
I get my computer out to write this, and the swarm migrates from the open bonnet, where stumpy China men watch Tony and spit, to the driver’s window so they can stare over my shoulder.
I look to my left now and there is a sea of faces- more people than have been to some of my gigs (www.myspace.com/goldroom J).
I am 99% sure none of them can read English, so I don’t know what they’re looking at.
I throw them a dummy, putting my computer away and watching the crowd disperse then reform at the engine. A few seconds later I get the laptop out and they return, the onlookers. They’re like zombies, no motion flickers across their faces, few words are exchanged, they just stare.
They have definitely seen a computer before- they’re all over the place. Have they seen a Mac? Maybe not. But still, I'm word processing- hardly a riveting display of the power of the Macintosh.
A couple of guys are actually sticking their heads through the window into the cab. It’s amazing. I can’t believe it.

Two days ago, at a two bit town on route to Xilinhaote a guy walked into my room at the guesthouse. He just smiled at me and nodded.
“Hi,” I said.
Then he just walked around looking at our stuff. We had computers, cameras, tapes, hard drives, phones- loads of stuff. It felt like he was scoping it out, made me really uncomfortable. I was in my pants, which also made me a little uncomfortable, so I put my trousers back on.
He pushed open a plastic bag and peered inside at all our tapes. The clincher was him bending down as I put my trousers on. He reached out and started stroking one of my socks. He looked up at me and said something which sounded like approval and smile.
“Good, good, so you like my socks. Great.”
Very strange behaviour.
I put all the valuables in the other room and locked up before going to see the others.

Back here, in the carpark of the car licensing authority in Xilinhaote, the heads in my window have turned and they’re just staring right at me. Their faces are about a foot away and they seem happy checking me out.
If I weren’t so used to it I’d get pissed off. I can’t help but snigger. Carlos just caught wind of it and burst out laughing.
Back at the zoo.
Someone tries to open the passenger door- he tugs on it a few times. He doesn’t realise its broken, he was genuinely going to just open it up while I'm sitting in here. I look at him and he just stares straight back, looking a little desperate, like he’s trying to get to the front of the line at an Ikea sale.
The braver folk, or the jokers, take it turns to come up to my window and shout their best ‘hello’ through it. Then they either retreat laughing, or realise there is no follow up.
I hand a flier out of the window and it is devoured by the pack, who swarm around it like piranhas to a carcass.
There is a ring of men and women around the car with their phones up taking pictures. I suspect this is as close as I will get to being a popstar.
Finally they start to ebb away, and the band disperses. A crowd attracts a crowd, and there’s now just a much more manageable couple of people.


Our guide approaches us.
“There is a problem,” he says, “We have driven here without the proper licenses. We should have got the papers at the border. Now we must pay a fine. 1,000 Yuan per car.”
We’ve paid our tour company a lot to get us though the country, and this is their fuck up, so no one is too bothered by $135 per car. Lovey: “We’ll just knock $405 off the money we pay Wayne (our agent).”
But we go to meet ‘the leader’ and argue the case anyway. He is understanding and agrees to wave the fee.
I'm really getting to like this country.
I got a lift back from the Chinese police. Hopefully that’ll be my only trip in a Chinese police car. I’ve now been in police cars in Azerbaijan (luxurious), Georgia (budget), Kyrgyzstan (a disgrace, I had to pay for the gas), China (average) and good old blighty (very friendly).

The delay means our cars wont get processed today (Tuesday November 27th), and will have to sit at the office as they are still not road legal. So we cannot change out the engine tonight.
Driving at night is a dodgy option- it gets so cold that Dante doesn’t run properly. So we can change the engine after finishing processing tomorrow. That means we are probably here for another day.
Getting out of China by the sixth seems less and less likely.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com

A Note On Genghis Khan

A Note On Genghis Khan
November 25th, 2007.
By Dan Murdoch

WHEN I think of Mongolia I think of Genghis Khan, and it seems right that here on the border with China I give him a mention.
For the great man is at the centre of a dispute over ownership- with the Chinese, who think of Mongolia as their own, venerating Genghis as a great symbol of national unity at the same time that Mongolia is clinging on to him in its quest for post-Soviet identity.
On the Mongol side of the border Genghis appears on beers, taxis, t-shirts, vodka bottles, hotels, bars, restaurants, pretty much anything, and always dressed in full combat gear- the Mongol warrior who forged an empire.
But on the Chinese side he tends to appear wearing simple robes,with a gentle, buddha-like face and neat moustache. Over here he is revered as a spiritual leader, a monk like ascetic who promotes harmony and unity.

I did some research into the all conquering Khan and found an amazing fact- pretty much our entire route thus far would, at one point, have been in Mongol hands (see map).

I had never fully grasped the size of this empire before- when Genghis died it stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific, four times the size of Alexander the Great’s and twice that of the Roman Empire.
By 1300, seventy three years after his death, that had doubled to include all of China, Korea, Tibet, Pakistan, Iran, most of Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, habitable Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and half of Poland.
One fifth of the world’s land area.
From the gates of Vienna in the west, to the jungle of South East Asia and all in between was either controlled by, or a vassal to, the Mongol Emperor. As the Americas were yet undiscovered by Eurasians, and sub-Saharan Africa almost unknown, this must have seemed like pretty much the whole world.
At their peak the Mongols were taking on Egyptian Saracens on one front, Hungarian knights on another and invading the island of Japan on the opposite side of the world.
Mind-boggling, it makes a mockery of Hitler, Napoleon, Catherine, Attila, Victoria and Xerxes.
Not that there is too much else to link them.
Genghis was the son of a minor tribal chief, raised single-handed by his mother after his father’s early death. He showed his ruthlessness before he had reached his teens when he murdered his older brother in cold blood after a dispute over the ownership of a dead fish.
In his teens he was captured by an enemy tribe, but escaped to live in the harsh Mongol steppe. By his 20s he was head of his tribe, by his 30s he had united his nation, and by his 40s he was hell bent on empire, believing himself ordained by heaven to rule the world.
He personally saw and conquered so many of the places on our route: Samarkand, the Oxus, Khiva, Bukhara, the Pamirs, The Fergana Valley, Issyk Kul, Lake Balkash, Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Yellow River, Beijing- the list goes on.
My train journey from Lake Baikal south to Ulaanbaatar took me along much of the route Genghis took his first real army to crush a local tribe.
And our drive through the Gobi followed a path similar to the one many historians believe Genghis funeral cortege would have taken. It was hard not to think of the Khan when I saw Mongol men galloping past at full pelt on their small shaggy horses.

Mongolian logistics across the vast empire were impeccable: the famous Mongol messenger service could carry a note 600km a day by constantly changing mounts and riders along the route, a feat unequalled until the invention of the telegraph. We’re lucky if we cover 600km a day by Trabant on good roads.
Genghis’ philosophy was simple: those that didn’t surrender were crushed ruthlessly, many peoples murdered in their hundreds of thousands: actions bordering on genocide.
But those who ceded to his rule and proved their loyalty were rewarded with high positions; nationality and religion were no bar. He had Chinese administrators, Arab merchants, Turkish architects, artisans and scholars from across his empire, even an English diplomat. Herdsmen became great generals and obscure religious leaders from China were summoned across the globe to meet the Khan.
As a leader believing himself anointed by a godhead even he did not understand, he demanded tolerance of all religions, believing them to be working towards a single unified purpose.
Now he is worshiped as a divinity in parts of China and Mongolia, where a flourishing cult of Genghis has developed from the myths, legends and scattered sources of the last eight hundred years.

Genghis grave is the source of legend and conspiracy.
When he lay dieing from an unknown illness, he made arrangements for his death to be kept a secret so that his enemies would not be motivated by news of his death, and his people not concerned by the upheaval of succession.
His grave was hidden and the obligatory curse placed on anyone who might find it.
Depending on who you believe this is a lost archaeological treasure whose bounties could rival the tomb of Tutankhamen. Or the Mongolian authorities know exactly where the grave is but it is such a closely guarded national secret they refuse to even acknowledge its existence.
I'm sure the truth will out.

The man who ruled over the peak of the Mongol empire was Genghis’ grandson, the legendary Kubilai Khan, who hosted Marco Polo. In fact, Polo’s legendary journey from Italy to China and back would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the safety provided by the Mongol rulers along the whole route.
It is Kubilai that represents a break from the Mongol tradition, and Kubilai that allows the Chinese to claim Genghis as their own. Once Kubilai had completed the conquest of China, he moved his capital to Beijing and his court shifted from nomadic herdsman to city dwellers. He founded the Yuan dynasty in 1279- considered a Chinese dynasty. And if Kubilai was the founder of the great Yuan Dynasty, then surely he was Chinese. And so his grandfather, Genghis must also have been Chinese.
At least that’s what the Chinese say, laying claim to the great warrior as a hero of their own.
But I guess others would say that all Chinese are Mongols.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabantrek.org

Gobi: The End Of The Road

Gobi: The End Of The Road
The Gobi, Mongolia
November 19th- 23rd, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

ABOUT a hundred and fifty kilometres south of Ulaanbaatar the paved road ends.
Like a river petering out in the desert it splits into streams, which divide into rivulets, then trickle out into the sands.
There is no single path from Mongolia to China. Instead there are a million tracks beaten into the desert by a million vehicles, a web of trails crisscrossing the plains for 500km. The better-worn paths may be better travelled, but that doesn’t mean they are quicker or more direct. It is a lottery.
We had all sorts of advice about crossing this maze.
Some of the more vague being: “Just head south,”
Some of the more reasonable being: “Follow the train track.”
But the unifying theme of the advice was simple: “Don’t drive at night.”
So I guess when, deep into the night, we lost the railroad and stopped using the compass, we were bound to get lost.
Lost in the desert after sunset there are no discernable landmarks. We may as well have been at sea. Sorry Lynn, forgot the sextant. By 1.30am we had been doing circles for an hour and things were getting a little desperate. It gets seriously cold out there and no one especially wanted to sit in the cars waiting for the sun, which doesn’t rise to 7.30am.

Things have gone wrong throughout this trip, sometimes it seems as if everything is against us. But occasionally the universe conspires to help. From nowhere, deep in the Gobi, a hotel appeared.
Amazing.
There was nothing around it, just this large, crumbling two-storey building alone in the desert. It appeared derelict, but we could see a light on, so I went in with the Johns and stumbled around in the dark, shouting hello and opening rooms. There was a large billiards table in the lobby and gaping holes in the floorboards. The scene was set for a werewolf encounter, or a room full of gun totting desert bandits to appear.
Instead a kindly woman came out and told us we could stay.
Earlier that evening we had dined at a cafÈ that was 150km from Sainshand, our destination. But the woman said we were now 230km from Sainshand. It doesn’t sound too much, but in those conditions we were going no faster than 40kph, so we had needlessly gone a good few hours out of the way when we were in a race to get to China.
We looked on our incredibly inaccurate guidebook map and saw that the train track we were following splits at Airag- one branch goes south south west to the border, the other doubles back on itself and heads north north east into nothingness.
We’d followed that one.
If ever you come this way, stick to the right hand side of the track.

We all shared a freezing room and grabbed a few hours’ kip.
In the sunlight of the next morning I got to look around the hotel: a very strange place, large, but crumbling- who drags a billiard table out here into the desert? I couldn’t help but wonder at its former glory. The woman who had set up beds for us didn’t seem to want any money, but I gave her some anyway.
Round the back I found a small hamlet, five buildings in a square, all of them falling apart and looking unlived in. But the square was full of statues of curly horned goats on plinths- there must have been half a dozen along with a mysterious sitting camel. And at one end was a broken statue of someone in a veil, I couldn’t work out if it was a man or a woman because part of the face had been sheered off. On the top of a dune opposite I saw a pile of heaped rocks.
Maybe this is some kind of religious site? Certainly I see no reason for a tiny hamlet to have so many statues. And why the hotel? Maybe pilgrims used to come here? In the daylight the isolation of the place was even more vivid. We were nowhere.
As we left I saw a signpost with a name on- the only signpost I saw in the desert. It said DANAH TYPYY, which would be Cyrillic (if there was an N in the Cyrillic alphabet) and translate roughly to Danan Turuu. Or if the N were meant to be the Cyrillic backwards N it would say Daian Turuu.
Maybe it has something to do with the Buddhist cult leader Danzan Ravjaa, who was the Fifth Gobi Lord (what a title) in the early 19th Century. Many think he was a living god and tales of his feats abound in these parts. It needs some looking into…

The Gobi (which means desert in Mongolian) isn’t particularly sandy like the Sahara or Karakoum. It is mostly plains, dirty, gritty, flat plains as far as the eye can wander. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a vast expanse of flatness, except when looking out to sea. Some places it gets grassy, with thick shrubs and a film of yellow. Other places there are patches of treacherous sand, ripe for power slides and wheel spins.
Many of the paths are scored deep into the soil so you have little choice but to follow the heavy grooves. Paved roads are relatively new to Mongolia, but their absence hasn’t stopped people from making their homes far in the wilderness.
We passed a horseman in traditional robes, held together with a bright sash and wearing tall felt boots over padded trousers, a thick skin hat on his head. The horse wore an ornate saddle of tarnished metal and well-worn straps. The combination looked bright and gaudy among the washed out yellows of the surroundings.
Mongolian horses have always been famous, but not for their size or speed, they are actually quite stumpy animals, looking more like overgrown Shetland ponies than world conquering horses and their hair is thick and long and warm and cuddly. What stands the Mongol horse out from the bunch is its endurance; the beast will keep going until it drops dead from exhaustion.

A few hours after leaving, and when the terrain had began to improve and we were making some decent progress, I had the audacity to tell Carlos that I thought there was a chance we could make it to China today.
Then the leaf spring on Ziggy snapped.
The car was undrivable and, after sending a scouting party ahead, we walked it to a small hamlet by the railroad. The place consisted of five large wooden buildings for living in, painted maroon, yellow and blue, and a bunch of small sheds for livestock. The whole thing was ringed by an unimposing, waste high green metal fence.
The hamlet could have been from Sylvanian Families, or Hobiton. In the middle was a basketball court and a stack off timber. A few of the homes had satellite dishes. It was so neat and pristine it felt like a film set.
OJ: “It’s a home for railway workers. There are about 20 guys who live here. Every day they head out on these little carts and check on their stretch of the railway.”
These modern steppe dwellers live in neat tidy homes rather than tents, and spend their days tending their stretch of the railway, rather than their herds.
The path of progress.
There was a camel tethered to its cart near the hamlet and I went to investigate. I’d never liked camels, having spent three uncomfortable days on a one humped monster in the Sahara a few years back. It spat and bit and sneezed, was ugly and grimy to look at, uncomfortable to ride, and needed to be constantly kept in line.
But this one was entirely different. Beautifully groomed with a long beard that turned into a flowing natural scarf down the length of its long elegant neck, it had a flowering Mohican on top of its head and thick, bushy leg hair above its knees that made it look like it was wearing knickerbockers.
This was one of the famous Gobi camels and I guess I had unfairly lumped the two-humped variety in with their one-humped relatives.
I’ve heard they can go a month without water and then drink 250l in one sitting. That would put OJ to shame.

A few of the locals got the leaf spring out of Ziggy and stared at it for a while before deciding they couldn’t repair it.
We decided to split up. Three of us, Tony, Carlos and I, would drive to Sainshand to try and find parts. Three people in two cars, so that if anything happened on the way we could try and fix it (we had Tony) or dump the car (we had a spare).
It was dark and took about three hours to cover the 85km, and we only lost the train tracks once.
Earlier that day, when we had left Ulaanbaatar, it felt like leaving the arctic. It had snowed quite heavily overnight and the fall had settled deep and undisturbed on the endless flats. It looked like pictures of the North Pole rather than East Asia, but the snow slowly dappled out as it got warmer and by the time we reached Sainshand it was a giddy 4c.
It is a strange little town with some impressive administrative buildings and the whiff of desperation in the air. The focal point is a public square outside the government offices. In the square is an empty public swimming pool, which appeared determined to morph into a sandpit and an unpaved, unloved basketball court with both hoops torn form their backboards. I watched a pack of hounds cautiously sniffing out a new member y a pile of rubbish. At night we watched a woman fighting a man in the street and saw the top of a large new apartment building burning down.
The kids are so cute. They look like little Ewoks with their big woolly hats and backpacks that make their arms stick out funny. They speak like the adults: in strange whisperings. The Mongol language sounds like a gruff gentle fluting, it comes from the back of the throat in rasping, airy grasps. Unlike anything I have heard before, it sounds a bit like the murmurs of extras talking among themselves in a film, all hushed tones muttered under the breath.

The next day we got the leaf spring welded and made it back to rescue the others. In the daylight I could see just how much livestock there is in this part of the desert, where it reaches the lusher plains of eastern Mongolia.
Scores of horses roaming in herds, hundreds of cattle chowing absently, we ploughed through the shrubs, scattering tiny birds. There is life in this harsh environment.

We got the whole team back to Sainshand and stayed the night, then rose early to try and push for China.
The welding on the leaf spring didn’t last long, so Ziggy, and therefore the rest of us, were limited to just 30kph.
Shortly after lunchtime the tracks we were following disappeared into a sand dune. Carlos thought he could cross it and pushed on, but only succeeded in getting Fez stuck in the sand, then tearing up the clutch plate trying to get us out.
The plate was destroyed and we were miles form any life, so we did the repairs out there in the desert.
It was dark by the time we finished so we made a fire out of dried dung and tumbleweed, supplemented by a few posts from the railway fence we were following, and set up camp.
I slept in Fez and probably had the coldest night of my life. Whatever position I tried I got an icy draft, my sleeping bag seemed to radiate cold (this one’s really warm my brother Tobi had told me when he handed it over. It’s not.). I woke up in the night to find a chunk of ice had formed on my hat and where my breath condensed on my scarf it was frozen stiff.
My feet turned to numb aching blocks. I hardly slept, but spent most of the night muttering curses. The others, in the tents, didn’t seem much better off.

The next morning, day four in the desert, we drove long and hard to get to the border before six.
We arrived at five thirty, initially they wouldn’t let us pass, but we begged and made it through Mongolian customs at 6pm. On the China side they had closed up, and for a second I thought we would be stuck between countries again, but we met our guide and he negotiated for us to be allowed across while the cars kept in no-man’s-land overnight.
Finally, nearly four weeks after leaving Bishkek, we were in China.
China.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

UB: The World’s Coldest Capital

UB: The world’s coldest capital
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
November 12th-19th, 2007
by Dan Murdoch

NORTH POLE COLLECTION
+DEFEND THE SMELL TO PROCESS
+ DEFEND THE SHRINKAGE TO HANDLE
=HEALTH UNDERWEAR
Slogan on the box of the thermal underwear we bought.

WHEN I got on the train I was in Europe. When I got off I was in Asia.
It’s not true, but that’s how it felt. I’d only really headed south, hardly east at all, but the people looked entirely different.
Asian.
Well Mongolian actually.

The train pulled in around 6:30am, an hour early. Typical that I get the only train to arrive early in the whole of East Asia at the very time I'm in a comatose sleep in a decent bed. The Trek had clearly already hit the city because the assembled touts claimed to know where the guys were.
“They are at our place,” a kind looking lady told me.
I trusted her but didn’t want to be complacent so asked a few questions about the gang. She had all the answers so I went with her.

The hostel the boys found had a TV in the front room. No one was up yet and I hate to wake them, so I flicked on BBC World.
Asian Business Review came on; normally I would have lapped it up. I love the news, it has a meditative affect on me, but this morning I realised I really couldn’t give a toss.
News Anchor: “So the rise in interest rates could have an effect on the equities sector?”
Expert: “I believe so and that means firms like...”
Absolutely no interest.
Dealing so intently with life’s little problems: eating, sleeping, moving, has made the issue of Asian economics seem a little removed.
The Northern Ireland Secretary flashed up on screen. Ian Hayward MP I think. It was the classic shot, standing outside parliament, interviewer out of shot. I hadn’t heard a politician talk for months. Maybe he’s just shit, but it was so depressing. I don’t remember what he was talking about, in fact he wasn’t talking, he was regurgitating some message in slow deliberant dullness, so devoid of charisma he may well have been a government autobot, constructed in the depths of Downing Street from faded manifestos and thoughtless think tanks.

The hostel was great. The UB Guesthouse. Very professional and friendly. Full of other travellers, nice atmosphere, helpful staff, cheap dorms.
But we had heard that a guesthouse down the road had free wifi, and so I went and checked in there. It didn’t work for Macs, only Pcs. We have three macs and two PCs in our touring circus.

Chinese visas were done pretty smoothly. I wrote that I was a journalist on my form and it caused a bit of a stir. They demanded my press card, photocopied it and asked a few extra questions. But I got the visa fine.
I had raced to UB (Ulaanbaatar) from Russia because we planned to leave straight after getting our visas done.
But this is Trabant Trek. Of course we didn’t leave. There was work to be done on the cars. Turned out I could have had a weekend in Irkutsk and then taken the two hour plane, rather than the 35 hour train. But there we go.
This is Trabant Trek.

The neighbourhood we were staying in was full of pretty well-dressed folk. The kids are hip-holy, a little skatery. Then the odd traditional orange sash and gown. There’s a young indie vibe, plenty of independent retailers like the Homestay Hip Hop Shop. They love their hip hop.
Despite the appearance of the locals, who look entirely Mongolian, in many ways this place feels more European than Irkutsk. It could be Eastern Europe. Everything is anglicised, or maybe that should be Americanised, and there are far more English speakers than in Siberia.
We pass King Pizza, California Restaurant, the Detroit Bar (slogan: ‘Shut up and Drink’). Americans don’t even need a visa to get into Mongolia and, like most of the places we’ve visited, English-speaking locals found my English accent more difficult to understand than the American’s accent.

I wondered around Sukhbaatar Square in the centre of the city.
City squares. Across the world people have the same idea. Clear a big space in the middle of the city and whack a great statue or column up there with a national hero on the top, in this case Sukhbaatar, who liberated the country in the 20s. Try and flank the square with a few good buildings, maybe an opera house or a museum and a voila, a centre for civic pride and national identity (and protest: Trafalgar, Tiananmen, Catalunya, Mayo).

My fleeting affair with the Russian language is now over. It’s amazing how much of the world speaks Russian. Before this trip I hadn’t really thought about it, but we’ve been using Russian since early August, when we arrived in Georgia. Three months of it and we’d all picked up a fair amount- OJ’s pretty hot at it, and we can all read the Cyrillic alphabet now.
But Mongolia has it’s own language, and then we’re dealing with Chinese. This will be a problem.

Some nights it dropped to –20c here. There’s no wind chill, but it’s still crazy cold. Exposed fingers ache and burn within minutes, cold feet begin to hurt.
One evening we bought a few beers to keep us warm while we did Fez breaks. But every time we cracked one open it froze before we could finish it. And they were only little 330ml cans.
Frickin cold.
I watched steam rising from an open manhole like effluent ghosts escaping from the sewers. Water bottles left in the car overnight turned to solid blocks of ice.
In the mornings the cars rarely start. On day three we spent ages trying to get Ziggy going, pushing the Trabbi around the circle of the courtyard we were staying in. We gathered quite a crowd of onlookers.
An unhealthy Trabant resonates at a specific frequency that sets off every car alarm it passes, as if the other vehicles are shrieking a warning or crying out in agony. The morning was spent stopping and gasping after another failed attempt at push starting the car, surrounding by flashing lights and ringing alarms in the freezing cold.
Finally Ziggy was going and we thought we’d pull start Dante. But that didn’t work so Tony popped the hood and found some cheeky tykes had nicked the battery. Who nicks a car battery? It cost us $8. They tore the font of the bonnet up to get at it.
Wankers.
We had been warned to park near the guards hut, and we didn’t, so we probably deserved it. Carlos had heeded the advice when parking Fez and had a little game of ‘I told you so’.

Since the 17th Century, when this version of the Mongolian nation was established, its capital has always been a tent city. The highly mobile capital could migrate to seek new grazing and had a variety of uninspiring names like Camp, and Capital Camp. You can see that the Mongols weren’t really city dwellers, and even now large parts of UB is made of tents, albeit with electricity.
Driving to get the cars fixed I saw a bit more of this behind the scenes UB. The outskirts of the city is made of one storey wooden shacks punctuated by the impeccable gers (or yurts, the round tents), their chimney puffs joining in the low atmosphere to create a thick, opaque haze across the city.
The ger is still very much a part of life. The skins are a taught, creamy felt, about 15feet in diameter and tall enough to easily stand in the middle.
Inside the mechanics ger that we visited was warm, spacious and well kept, the central stove heating the place up nicely, the walls decorated with blankets showing horses playing on a baron steppe.
Most front yards seem to have a ger. I asked the owner of the mechanics, Chinzo, who lived in them.
“Families. Sometimes the family of the people in the house, sometimes just another family. It is our way of life.”
Whole suburbs of neat, round felt tents.

I thought we were only staying here for a few hours to get our visas and go. But it turned into a week. And not the ‘lets spend a week in the world’s coldest capital’ sort of a week, but a Trabant Trek week. Every day we would prepare ourselves to leave, and then something new would happen to the cars to force us to stay. Fez’s brakes were the biggest problem. The mechanics and the Mighty Tony P tried a variety of fixes, but it took days. Because we always thought we were about to leave, we didn’t really do much in the city. Sat around using internet and trying to find hamburgers. Progress was painfully slow and we watched as our China visas ticked away.
We finally left on Monday November 19th (about the time Tony thought he would be getting home), and began the journey south into the Gobi desert, and hopefully on to China.
For the hundredth time Zsofi’s parents told her she should head home. They really haven’t been supportive.
“This time I said that I would,” she told us at a meeting by the cars. She’s nearly out of cash, she explained.
She plans to fly home from Beijing.
Then there will be five.

ENDS
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Putin: spies, murders, poisons and hacks.

Putin: spies, murders, poisons and hacks.
Russia
November
By Dan Murdoch
PHOTOBUCKET DOWN SO SORRY, NO PHOTOS


"Society has shown limitless apathy... As the Chekists have become entrenched in power, we have let them see our fear, and thereby have only intensified their urge to treat us like cattle. The KGB respects only the strong. The weak it devours. We of all people ought to know that."
Anna Politkovskaya, Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy.


PUTIN.
The balding Russian president isn’t too popular in the Righteous West right now, and I was keen to see how the former KGB spymaster was perceived on his home turf.
Back home the press echo our leaders concerns over the moves of old Vlad with phrases like ‘limiting democracy’, ‘restricting political opposition’, ‘concentrating power’, ‘returning to a Soviet dictatorship’, and that terrible sin of ‘curtailing press freedom’ (Patriot Act anyone?: http://www.bordc.org/threats/speech.php).

According to Vsevolod Bogdanov, the chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists, 261 Russian journalists have been killed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and only 21 cases have been solved.

The most high profile example occurred in October last year, when Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a vocal critic of Putin’s administration, was gunned down in her apartment building.
The 48-year-old had accused Putin of ‘state sponsored terrorism’, and revealed a host of atrocities and rampant corruption in Chechnya, where Putin launched a grim war against insurgents.
Working in a country few journalists dare to cover, Politkovskaya reported on the Russian-backed military engaging in torture, abduction and murder, and claimed huge sums of war cash were being embezzled.
She made plenty of enemies in Chechnya, including the Chechen Prime Minister, who she called a ‘coward armed to the teeth’.

"We are hurtling back into a Soviet abyss, into an information vacuum that spells death from our own ignorance. All we have left is the internet, where information is still freely available. For the rest, if you want to go on working as a journalist, it's total servility to Putin. Otherwise, it can be death, the bullet, poison, or trial - whatever our special services, Putin's guard dogs, see fit."
Anna Politkovskaya, Poisoned by Putin, Guardian Unlimited, September 9, 2004

In 2001 she was detained by the military in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. In 2004, on a flight to the Beslan school siege, where she was to help with the hostage negotiations, she became violently sick and lost consciousness after drinking a cup off tea. She claimed to have been poisoned. Yet she kept working. She received death threats as a matter of routine, but continued with a determination bordering on fanaticism. Probably a feisty sort.

She won a plethora of international awards, but her influence as a journalist was limited. She was banished from state-controlled public television and wrote for the small Novaya Gazeta, a bi-weekly with a readership of 100,000 people.
I think it would be fair to say that, sadly, her death had a greater impact on the world than her life.
The murderer has not been found.

"We'll follow terrorists everywhere. We will corner the bandits in the toilet and beat the hell out of them." Putin on Chechen extremists.

A few days after the murder Putin was in Dresden for the annual Russsian-German meeting known as the Petersburg Dialogue. Around ten thousand protestors gathered to call Putin a murderer, and I find his response quite revealing. He told reporters: "This journalist was indeed a fierce critic of the current authorities in Russia and Chechnya.... (but) her impact on Russian political life was only very slight. She was well known in the media community, in human rights circles and in the West, but her influence on political life within Russia was very minimal.”
Later he added: "In my opinion murdering such a person certainly does much greater damage from the authorities’ point of view, authorities that she strongly criticized, than her publications ever did. Moreover, we have reliable, consistent information that many people who are hiding from Russian justice have been harbouring the idea that they will use somebody as a victim to create a wave of anti-Russian sentiment in the world."

So what did he have to gain from her murder? He has a point.

The person ‘hiding from Russian justice’ was widely interpreted in the Russian media to be Boris Berezovsky, a man who had met Politkovskaya more than once. The billionaire, who once held the high government post of Secretary of the Security Council, now lives in London, from where he has announced he is campaigning to overthrow the Russian government. Is this a man ruthless enough to murder his allies to spite his enemies?
I saw him on Question Time once. He shouted and waved his arms around a lot in the Russian style.

Putin’s point could also be raised when considering 2006’s ridiculously Bond-esque Alexander Litvinenko poisoning- a story you really couldn’t make up. Who poisons someone in this day and age? And what fool would use a substance almost only employed by the KGB, that’s so radioactive it left a trace across London, and takes a few weeks to do away with its victim, allowing him to scream giddy accusations till he snuffs it.
Very dodgy.
In the 90s Litvinenko worked as a bodyguard for Berezovsky, but then flipped out and openly accused his FSB (the new name for the KGB) bosses of ordering the oligarchs execution. He was arrested, then released and fled to London where he was granted asylum and again got chatting with his old friend Berezovsky.
While in London he wrote a book claiming that the FSB organised the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, which killed 300, and helped organise the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. Both events helped Putin gain greater support and funding for his war in Chechnya. He also accused them of murdering Politkovskaya, who he knew, and said Putin had been involved in organised crime.
When the book was published, Russian authorities confiscated 4,000 copies on route to Moscow.
So far so feasible, but he also went on record claiming Putin was a paedophile, and that Italian PM Romano Prodi was a KGB agent.
Sounding a little more like a cranky conspiracy theorist now Alex.
The simple conclusion to the Litvinenko case is that the FSB did it (see picture of FSB agents using his photo for target practise). But in my mind his death lends more credence to Putin’s suggestion that his enemies are trying to ruin Russia’s reputation. What did Vlad have to gain from the murder of one slightly bonkers dissident.
Though Vlad didn’t help himself by refusing to let British police interview their prime suspect, the former-FSB agent Andrei Lugovoi.

While working on the cars one night I raised this with an off-duty policeman: “So Andrei Lugovoi can fly to London, leave a trace of Polonium 210 across the capital, meet Litvinenko in the restaurant where he was poisoned, then fly back to Russia, and British investigators aren’t allowed to interview him. Is that fair?”
“Hahaaaa,” he slapped me on the back, “this is Russia, whatever Putin says is fair.”
“Do people think it was Lugovoi?”
“No people don’t care, Litvinenko was crazy, he had many enemies. The Kremlin says Berezovsky did it. And why not? This way he harms Russia yes?”

If you think about who benefited from both the Litvinenko and the Politkovskaya murders, it wasn’t Putin. In fact both damaged Russia in the eyes of the West- had you heard of either before their deaths?
And if his enemies are willing to murder their own champions in order to get at Putin, he has every right to be a touch paranoid.

In 2004 there was another poisoning, this time Viktor Yushchenko, the West-leaning Ukrainian opposition leader. He almost died after being struck down at the height of the county’s presidential election. He won the fight for his life, and then the election, but has been left horribly scarred.
In September this year Yushchenko told The Times newspaper that Russia had blocked investigations into the poisoning: “Three laboratories in the world were producing dioxin of this formula (the poison). It is very easy to determine the origin of the substance; there is nothing magical about it.
“Two laboratories provided samples but not the Russian side. This of course limits the possibilities of the investigation process.”
He added that Russia had refused to let Ukrainian prosecutors interview their three prime suspects.
(It should be noted that Yushchenko said this three years after the event, and just before the Ukrainian elections. Not that I'm suggesting that campaigning politicians make cynical attempts to win favour and slur their opponents.)

An Irkutsk taxi driver in his 50s: “Even if Putin is using his KGB ways, why should I care. Russia is getting strong again, the world will notice us. Who was this Politkovskaya? Wasn’t she the mad woman? People get shot in Russia, especially mad people who write mad things.”

Even if we discount the Litvinenko, Politkovskaya and Yushchenko affairs as conspiracy theories, there are plenty of other things Putin does to get up the West’s nose.

He supports Iran in its tug-of-war with the UN over the country’s nuclear ambitions, cemented by his recent trip to Tehran- the first visit to Iran by a Russian leader since WW2, and a deal to provide the country with enriched uranium for its civilian reactors.

He has stoked up the rhetoric against the US, accusing Bush of making the world a less safe place by throwing his weight around.
He, in my opinion completely fairly, opposes US plans to build a nuclear shield over the West by stationing interceptor missiles along the Russian border (this is a little inflammatory). The Yanks claim the shield is to protect them from North Korea and Iran. Putin cleverly suggested they use an old Soviet missile base in Azerbaijan, and others in Turkey and Iraq, much better placed to protect against Iran but in no way neutralising the Russian armoury.
Bush has yet to get back to him on that one.

“There are no such missiles – Iran does not have missiles with the range. The defence system would be] installed for the protection from something that does not exist. Is it not sort of funny? It would be funny if it were not so sad.
“We have brought all our heavy weapons beyond the Urals and reduced our military forces by 300,000. But what do we have in return? We see that Eastern Europe is being filled with new equipment, two positions in Bulgaria and Romania, as well as radar in the Czech Republic, and missile systems in Poland. What is happening? Unilateral disarmament of Russia is happening.” Putin.

Putin claims the US military actions and spending are forcing Russia into a new arms race, and just last month, on his annual, three-hour, live television phone-in, said that Russia would continue development of a new generation of nuclear weapons. He said Russia was upgrading its nuclear arsenal, including intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines and strategic bombers. It was also developing "completely new strategic [nuclear] complexes”.
"Our plans are not simply considerable, but huge. At the same time they are absolutely realistic. I have no doubts we will accomplish them," he said.
A little disconcerting, but understandable if seen as a reaction to US military spending.

He has also made a recent grab for a large chunk of the resource rich Arctic by claiming it is actually a part of Russia’s continental shelf. That one will take a while to resolve.

Then there’s his pursuit of the oligarchs.
The oligarchs are the men who made billions when the Soviet Union broke up and state owned assets, particularly in the energy sector, were sold off at a fraction of their true worth. It turned middle managers like Chelsea-owner Roman Abramovich and Berezovsky into some of the richest men in the world. Many of these men then bought into the media to add political power to their financial clout.
But Putin has waged a war against them, many have faced charges of corruption forcing them to flee or been sent to prison. One example is Mikhail Khordorkovsky, the former president of Yukos Oil. He bought the company when it was privatised in the 90s for £55million. In 2004 it was worth £15billion.
Even with shrewd management that’s some growth, and there is little doubt the company was hugely undervalued when Khordorkovsky bought it.
A couple of years ago Khordorkovsky was jailed for corruption and fraud. Yukos has been forcibly taken back into state control. The liberal West saw it as a political move because Khordorkovsky was funding Putin’s opponents. But Putin claimed Khordorkovsky was involved in organised crime and corrupting Russia’s parliament, the Duma.
In the West this often appears to be a communist style campaign against the wealthy. But there is a stink about some of these oligarchs: Berezovsky is currently being investigated in Brazil for alleged money laundering involving football clubs. Khordorkovsky faced constant accusations of links to crime.
But because of the West’s mistrust of Putin’s motives, it is hard to separate the truth from the propaganda.
I asked George, a 22-year-old student from Novosibirsk, what he thought: “These men stole the wealth of Russia. The stole the natural resources from the people and made themselves very rich. Now it is right that we take this money back.”
What about Yukos?
“It is right that the people get the benefit of the country’s resources, not just a handful of men. Why should some people have billions of roubles from Russia’s oil and the rest of us have nothing?”

The clampdown on political opposition has become even more incendiary and blatant in the run up to next month’s presidential elections.
In May several opposition leaders, including western journalists and former world chess champion Gary Kasparov, were arrested and detained on their way to an EU-Russia summit. Kasparov was planning to lead a rally by Other Russia, a group opposing the Kremlin.
As he was being surrounded by police, Kasparov shouted at reporters: "It is an authoritarian regime. Putin is not a democrat. Europe's leaders need to address this issue. It is ridiculous when a Russian citizen with a good biography is not allowed to travel."
He added that Russia was obliged, under international law, to allow freedom of assembly. "We have no access to TV or parliament. The only way for the opposition to protest is through non-violent demonstration.”

Putin has now served two four-year terms as President, the maximum allowed, and according to the constitution, must stand down at the elections.
But there is nothing in the constitution banning him from becoming prime minister, and it seems that is his plan. He will ensure a weak president is elected, who relies on Putin’s power base and will probably be little more than a puppet. Then, at the next presidential elections in four years time, perhaps he will stand again?

This move would of course attract huge amounts of criticism from the West. But Russia is a fledgling democracy, absolute monarchy was only dropped in 1917, then followed 64-years of Soviet dictatorships. Democracy has only been around for 16 years: it needs time to settle. In the US women only got the vote in the 20s and blacks in the 60s, even now it can hardly be considered a perfect democracy (2000 elections?). In Britain we have a mostly hereditary second chamber, complimented by political appointments (cash for peerages?): not quite the rule of the people.
So although Western criticisms are justified, some sense of perspective is needed.

“Russia will not soon become, if it ever becomes, a second copy of the United States or England - where liberal value have deep historic roots.” Vlad Putin.


I asked people across Siberian Russia what they thought of their judo-throwing leader, and, pretty much universally they showed their support. Always I heard that he is ‘a strong leader’.
Asya, a 21-year-old student: “He is a good man, a very strong leader. We love him here because Russia needs a strong leader at the top. Not like Yeltsin. Yeltsin was weak. After that the whole country needed someone to take us forwards.”
Would you be happy for Putin to remain as president?
“Yes. Who else is there? The opposition are jokers. There is no one else as good as Putin so why not keep him?”

A sentiment I'm sure Vlad would love to hear.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Gentrifying the badlands

Gentrifying the badlands
Irkutsk, Russia
November 8th-10th
By Dan Murdoch

"It's not the giant trees, nor the deathly stillness that constitutes its power and enchantment, rather, it's in that only the migrating birds know where it ends. You don't pay attention to it on the first day of travel; on the second and third, you are surprised; the fourth and fifth day give you a feeling that you'll never get out of that monster of the Earth."
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian playwright, on Siberia.


I AM alone.
The only trekker without a valid Mongolian visa (the embassy put the wrong date on mine) and I have stayed behind in Irkutsk to get a new one, while the trek races ahead to try for Mongolia before the border closes on Friday. I hope to follow by airplane, if I can find one.

I would have thought people would stop staring now I'm not driving a brightly coloured lunchbox. But they can’t get enough of it, they don’t let up for a moment. Waiting to cross the road, the driver of the car at the lights stopped to gawp for so long that motorists behind him began hooting. People are transfixed.
I haven’t seen many other tourists, it is the low season, but I didn’t expect Russians to be too interested in a lone backpacker.
That is all I am now. Squinting under a streetlamp at the map I tore out of our guidebook, carrying all my belongings on my shoulders. Longhaired and stubbly, wearing a dirty green Russian military jacket, faded blue flat cap and chocolate scarf. The girls in Novosibirsk had said I looked like a bumsh, which is the Russian word for a bum. So maybe people think I am a touring hobo? Saved up enough from begging to head out east on my hols. I guess that would be worth staring at.

After a few weeks of constant driving, and months staying in tents, yurts and cars, I was looking forward to a hotel room. It was horribly overpriced, but I found one with a bathtub and enjoyed laying in hot water properly for the first time in months.
The place, Hotel Irkutsk, was an international affair, not a young person in sight, and cost three days budget a night.
I'm here now, I thought, I should probably make the most of it. Wake up call at 8.30, head down to breakfast, on the way, skip past reception and book a flight to Ulaanbaatar, along with a cab to the Mongolian Embassy, hand my laundry in for collection on my return. Act like I am just another one of the businessman tugging cigars at the bar.
The embassy went smoothly, but there was no flight the following day, not one till Monday. So I began resigning myself to a weekend in Irkutsk.

I had expected a Siberian city to be rugged and basic- based around necessity and survival. But Irkutsk couldn’t bee further from that. Dubbed the Paris of Siberia by Chekhov when he visited at the turn of the last century, the pretty, treelined avenues are flanked by ornate and impressive mansions and museums.
Irkutsk was the supply hub for Russia’s expansion east, an expansion driven by those exiled to Siberia and forced to work the mines or the railways.
The city was a base for these labourers, who provided a useful source of free labour for Tsarist Russia, and had sometimes committed trifling crimes like fortune telling or begging.
As such it was a harsh criminal outpost in the freezing steppe, bordering the majestic Lake Baikal, whose icy depths are home to the globe’s largest concentration of fresh water.
This changed in 1826 when the city received 120 new exiles- former army officers who had been involved in a failed uprising in December of the previous year.
Many of these Decembrists had spent years fighting Napoleon, sending him all the way back to Paris, and they returned imbued with the spirit of Western Europe’s Enlightenment.
Unconvinced by Russia’s backwards autocracy, they revolted against the appointment of the conservative new Tsar, Nicholas I, who only received the title after his elder brother Constantine relinquished his right to succession.
The revolt in St Petersburg was rubbish, and easily crushed, but the Tsar’s decision to send large numbers of the plotters to Siberia had unexpected consequences.
These men arrived, with their families and entourages, and brought a chunk of Enlightenment thinking with them along with an interest in the arts, architecture, civility and the finer things in life. Into the badlands of wild Siberia the Decembrists took concerts, plays, poetry, recitals, dances and balls. They built schools and churches and introduced the wealthy local traders, rich from trading fur to China for silk, to cultural pursuits.

In fairness it was the women who did most of this. The men spent most of their days in the mines. But through pressure from the wives, conditions at the labour camps slowly improved so their husbands managed to live through the ordeal.
In 1856 the Decembrists were pardoned, but many of them chose to stay on in Irkutsk and continue the cities cultural development.

Despite the grand 19th Century town houses, and the more modern slab like hotels, the city’s rural past still peers out from back alleys and bathroom windows. Wooden houses, something Siberia is famous for, still standing, shack like and rotting in the shadows of their successors, but still you can make out their beauty: intricately carved coving, doorway and windows. Well joined walls and arches in pastel green and sands.
Some of them have sunk into the street, or the street has been raised around them. I saw one that was all off kilter, half of it had collapsed on its foundations or slowly slipped deeper into the earth so all the windows and doors were sloping away.

In a square by the junction of Lenin Street and Karl Mark Street there is the seemingly compulsory Lenin statue, arm pointing the way forward. I’ve lost count of how many Lenins I have seen since we entered the Russian-speaking world, and it really is a world- a huge swathe of the map.
Has any man of the modern age made more of an impact on the globe? From the Caucasus to eastern Siberia we have seen his statues, dominating central squares, his mantras adorning factory walls and his vision, idealised in freezes and paintings across the whole of eastern Europe and northern Asia.
Hitler? Certainly made an impact- though not too many statues left. Stalin? Piggy backed on Lenin. Genghis Khan? Maybe in his heyday.
I guess the only people with a comparable modern influence are Jesus and Mohammed, though I doubt Lenin’s influence will last a fraction as long. Already in cities like Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan, Lenin has been relegated from his central position in the main square and replaced with a local hero- part of the long process of nation building. Lenin now lives round the back, tucked among the evergreens.
Further down Lenin Street I was surprised to find a Stalin bust in a small, modest square. He wasn’t named and there was no plaque, but I'm pretty sure it was him, the glowering eyes and thick moustache. The first Stalin I had seen.

The streets are filled with Japanese cars, Opels, Toyotas and Nissans, shipped over to Vladivostok and driven west along what we were told were terrible roads.
“So it is possible to drive those roads. We could make it?” I asked a group of Russian petrol heads.
In unison they leaped at me with hands raised and crossed at the forearms: “No, no, no,” they all shouted.

The decision to leave Irkutsk came suddenly.
I woke up late on Friday having spent the day catching up on sleep, ate, then wondered around looking for a bar. There was a place called Liverpool, tucked down a side alley. I had to have a look. Inside it was coved in Beatles memorabilia, live music was playing in one room, and a Roy Orbison gig was on the TV. There was Beatles Russian dolls on the mantelpiece.
With the help of a Russian acting as interpreter I tried to quiz the waitress on how the pub got its name.
Is the owner English?
“No. Russian.”
Does he just like Liverpool or The Beatles.
“No.”
So why the name?
“Because it is the only pub in Irkutsk.”
She refused to expand.
I heard a northern voice, and found a couple of lads from Leeds sitting at the bar. They were taking the trans-Siberian railway across the country, but seemed to be having a completely different trip from me.
“The Russians are great aren’t they?” I said.
“Well, they’re alright once you get beneath the icy exterior. But most of them are moody bastards.”
I was surprised. “Well there are a lot of lovely ladies about.”
“They’re alright. Nice bodies. Don’t make much of their faces though.”
We were surely on a different trip. The Russians had been great to us, and we boys had constantly been turning our heads at another well-dressed, good-looking lady.
Maybe the Trabants are our golden ticket. The source of our powers.
We kept drinking and chatting, they were pleased to talk to a Brit after going three weeks pretty much only speaking to each other due to their lack of Russian and the lack of tourists in low season Siberia.
It turns out that one of them lived in Chertsey for a couple of years. Small world.

We had been chatting for a few hours and it was early in the morning, but I knew I had the luxury of a hotel room to lay in tomorrow.
But then disaster.
I idly flicked through their guidebook and saw that there was a train to Ulaanbaatar leaving at 6am the next morning- in about three and a half hours. Fantastic news, I could actually get to UB in time to get my China visa with the rest of the gang. But terrible news, I was in no state to take on an hours sleep followed by a 36 hours train ride. But what choice did I have?
I drank up, returned to the hotel, packed my bags, had an hour’s kip, and headed to the train station. No one spoke English and I got sent around the houses, but finally determined there was no early train, the next one was at 8.30pm: what a waste of perfectly good hotel room and a decent nights sleep. I cursed the guidebook and headed into town to find a café to sit, write and await my fate.

Standing outside the café, waiting for it to open, I counted how much money was left in my wallet- about $12. A man in his 30s came up to me and asked for money. I said no, but accidentally dropped a 100-rouble bill, about $4.
He stepped on it.
I asked him to move, and he stepped back, very deliberately and obviously scraping the note with him under his foot. I laughed and bent down to pick it up, but he wouldn’t get off it. Then he dragged it away a bit and grabbed the note. I grabbed the other half and we engaged in a tug of war based around the four-inch long strip of paper.
I was shouting at him to let go, our faces inches apart. He didn’t look tough, he was vaguely handsome, and well kept, but when he gritted his teeth I could see they were in a terrible state- the classic sign of the desperate (and the English according to my American friends). This impasse went on for a stupidly long time. Long enough for me to consider what to do.
I thought about head butting him. But once you’ve had time to think about these things the moment tends to pass. And anyway what then? What if he head butted me back? I didn’t fancy an early morning head butting competition with a desperate Russian mugger.
He eventually wrestled control of the note, jumped in the air and ran off, looking behind once to see if I was following. I just stood and stared. What a pathetic mugging, on both our parts. Him too cowardly to mug me properly, me too cowardly to defend myself.

I caught the train, and it had a bed. That’s all you need to know.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
for more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Entering Russia

Entering Russia
Siberia
October 31st
By Dan Murdoch

“For the love of God have you learned nothing from the mistakes of Napoleon and Hitler? Granted they were deranged megalomaniacs and you’re a local journalist, but still. Siberian Winter??”
Goolistan Cooper

DRIVING through Siberia was exactly how I imagined.
Thick forests of skinny, densely packed, skeletal trees, topped with a dusting of snow, and rooted in a bed of ice. For thousands of miles the road ploughs through the bright white landscape.
We camped our first night deep in a scary looking forest, but the next day the surroundings developed into rolling golden plains, the afternoon sun picking out a yellow haze across the horizon. We went through one strange looking wood, where only the very tops of the tall trees bore leaves, the trunks, hidden in perpetual shade, hadn’t bothered with foliage, the forest looked like it had a crew cut.

It was cold, cold enough to freeze our windscreens and leave icicles on our wing mirrors, but nothing like the dire predictions we had been given. It touched –5c at night, very manageable with all our bedding. Everywhere we went locals told us it was unusually warm for this time of year. Some good luck at last. It snowed a few times, but nothing heavy enough to slow us down.

I had an image in my mind of the stereotypical Russian. Gruff, shouty, impatient and quick to anger. But this has been thoroughly dispelled by the people we met during our first few days in Siberia. At the very first café we entered, a man enquired about our route, told us there was a quicker way, and insisted on leading us to the road. Once there he reached into the back of his car and pulled out six beers for us. A few hours later a bunch of lads led us around a town to find an ATM, then 20km up the road to a petrol station. The police pulled us over, but only to take our picture.

When we arrived at our first big city, Novosibirsk, I immediately hated it. A sprawling, industrial traffic jam covered in mud and ice existing beneath a dirty grey sky. Fez’s clutch plate chose to give up outside the city’s library. The night shift, Tony, Lovey and I, stayed up to fix it, while the day shift got some sleep in the cars.
Throughout the night a bunch of local lads, including two off-duty policemen, stayed with us and brought us beer. They said they had to go to bed at about 3am, but returned 20 minutes later with hot sandwiches and coffees. The Russians were winning me over.
The next day OJ got chatting to a couple of girls and one of them insisted we go back to her grandparents apartment to wash, do laundry and stay the night.
How could we refuse?

Kataya looked a little Chinese, but Asia (that’s how her name sounded, but probably isn’t spelled) was thoroughly European, a buxom blonde.
Kataya’s grandparents properly took us in, and gave Zsofi a whole load of clothes, and Carlos a very fetching stripy sweater.
The next day random strangers from the housing estate worked on the cars and a wonderful family nearby fed Carlos and I a huge lunch and dinner, then lashings of vodka and gave me a scarf. It was hard to refuse an invitation to Kataya’s friend’s 21st birthday party, and despite reservations about our schedule, we decided to go.
I presented the birthday girl with a bottle of red wine: “We’re Russian girls, we drink vodka,” she replied, to the cheers of her friends. They were a fun bunch, dancing to terrible RnB and cheesy pop, it could have been a 21st birthday party anywhere in Europe.
I was tasked with getting up at 8am to go to the car market and find a new bearing for Fez, so I resisted drunken antics. I did have a clear the air chat with Lovey though.
Back in Bishkek he read a blog on my computer about him threatening to go home a few months ago when we were in Armenia (Lovey Throws His Toys Out Of the Pram).
He said he hadn’t meant to bring it up the way he did (at a dinner with a load of old friends) but he’d been backed into a corner. He admitted that he got defensive, leaving a tacit acceptance that he hadn’t put over his point very clearly that night.
In the blog I wrote that he had gone down in my estimation, something he said he hoped wasn’t for good, but I left him hanging on that one.

The next day we got back on the 24-hour driving thing. The road quality deteriorated, making it hard for the drivers to drive and hard for the sleepers to sleep, slowing the whole process down.

On the long road to Irkutsk, Fez was kind enough to break down near a mechanics and, although it was closed, when they saw us jacking up the car in the cold and the snow, they invited us in to use their lifting equipment.
It made the job ten times easier and again we were left praising Russians. We currently have a strange set of mix and match tyres of varying sizes and styles, so we bought a few new ones off them.
While we were there some friends of the mechanic turned up with some weed. I hadn’t smoked since Budapest and I was keen to see what they had. The bifta was rolled strangely, a backflip with a long, wide roach that must have been half the joint. It was soap and it was pleasant.
Later they embarrassed me when, undoing a bolt under the Trabbi and surrounded by the Americans, one of them came up to the car and bent down:
“Hey Daniel, come.” he waved the joint towards me. I looked at the Yanks I know they’re not into it but I don’t know how much they disapprove.
“You want,” the stoner waved the doobie at the Americans.
“No, no, no, no,” they all shook their heads and looked at the ground.
Well bollox to them, I thought, I'm not getting peer pressured into NOT smoking a joint.
I shuffled towards him, awkwardly squatting under the raised car, and then he insisted on giving me a blowback. For those who never had a smoke when they were 15, that is where he reverses the spliff in his mouth, puckers his lips and pouts them close to mine, as if we are about to kiss, then blows smoke into my gob. A sensual manoeuvre when performed with an attractive, new female acquaintance at a party- but wholly inappropriate when attempted with a gold-toothed, slack-jawed Russian man in front of disapproving colleagues under a broken Trabant.
Of course immediately after the incident I spent five minutes loosening a bolt I should have been tightening (I was coming at it from reverse, honest guv). Embarrassing.

We made it out of the garage at about two AM; got something to eat, then found an ATM, which promptly ate OJ’s card. The big Slav cracked in a terrible way, I would have hated to be the plastic bin in the bank-o-mat booth. I actually had to walk away, I thought he might lash out at me (for I had led them to the machine).
In moments like these my reaction is normally the complete opposite- calm, rational: “How do we sort this one out then?” sort of thing. When I was a teenager my grandmother gave me Letters From A Stoic by Seneca, and I agree with a lot of it. It helped my crisis management.
But it wasn’t really the time to explain Seneca to OJ, who kept repeating the same mantra: “I'm gonna smash that fucking machine up.”

After getting a local to phone the number in the booth we decided to camp outside the bank until it opened, He got his card back the next morning and we finally arrived in Irkutsk on Wednesday night. We’d made an abysmal 1,100km in 72 hours.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Chapter Two: The Northern Route

Chapter Two: The Northern Route
Kazakhstan
October 29th-31st.
By Dan Murdoch

THERE was a little trouble trying to get out of Kyrgyzstan. We had forgotten to collect customs papers for the cars when we entered the country. No one at the border had said we needed any, and there was no obvious place to get them, but apparently we should have asked for them and of course they were needed on exit.
The problem was far from trivial- the first solution a friendly but initially unyielding official suggested was returning to our point of entry to get the papers. Back across Kyrgyzstan? Across the mountains?
Out of the question.
After some negotiations we found we could get new papers in Bishkek, but would have to pay a fine based on engine size.
Seeing as we are driving 600cc lawn mowers across the world, this wouldn’t be a big financial penalty. But it would cost us another few days.
Finally we played our charity card, explained our mission and showed them some photos of us with kids at a Kyrgyz NGO. A local, who was acting as translator, was won over by the cause and negotiated our release.
At the Kazakh border we remembered to ask for customs papers.

It was great to be back behind the wheel of Fez. It felt like a new beginning:
Chapter Two- the drive north through Kazakhstan, across Siberia and into Mongolia, before the long road south, through China and South East Asia, all the way to the Gulf of Thailand.
Carlos is my new driving buddy, replacing Megan, who left a few weeks ago.
The Spaniard is also known as Les (his Catalan name is Carles), AKA The Lesbian, or Los (his Spanish name is Carlos) AKA The Losbian, or The Gay (his surname is Gey), or sometimes Spanish or Pedro.
We drove together for a few weeks at the beginning of the trip, then he spent quite a lot of time driving with OJ. As the two male members of Team Europe, we spent most of last month exploring Bishkek, and get on well, have shared stories and jokes and I have ignited a passion for The Mighty Boosh in the Spaniard.

Despite the backwards portrayal of Sacha Baron Cohen’s pseudo-Kazakh, Borat, Kazakhstan is actually the largest, richest, and most developed of the Central Asian countries.
Abundant oil and gas deposits mean there is plenty of money floating about in the cities, although there is also some pretty extreme poverty, particularly in the countryside.
Under the Soviets the vast, empty country was something of a dumping ground. It was used for nuclear testing (huge swathes of land are now uninhabitable), home to gulags and forced labour camps. Dissidents, such as the author Dostoevsky, were banished here, and Stalin sent whole races of people out here to work.
The nation’s president has been in charge since the Soviet collapse in 1991, when Kazakhstan suddenly gained independence and a nuclear arsenal, and the progressive, reformist leader probably wont voluntarily relinquish control. Democracy is practised in name with regular elections, although none have been deemed free or fair by international watchdogs. But the president has overseen the overhaul and expansion of the country’s economy and built a new capital, Astana, to mark his nation’s emergence as a regional economic power.
Although we wouldn’t be visiting any of the cities to see any of these changes, it was nice to be back in a country where the petrol stations sell drinks and chocolate. It’s not a big detail, but it makes a difference to life on the road.

In a cloudless blue sky the distance is slowly filled by a low gathering of pinkish cotton candy. It rests low on the horizon, as if we are high in the mountains, flirting with the clouds, not driving through the low in plains. When we get close enough I realise the thick smog is coming from an industrial city with multiple chimneys spewing a tower of smoke high into the air that then cools and settles over the area like a toxic halo. As the sun dips low behind us, its rays slow in our atmosphere and the reds of the solar spectrum pick out the cloud in a frightening pink. I think the city was called Balkhash.
As we left we followed a line of enormous piles of burning rubbish, dumped in the fields and set alight.

Over dinner at a roadside café, we decided that it would be best to rush through Kazakhstan as quickly as possible. Time wasn’t on our side and we hadn’t heard too many great things about the cities on our route. So we resolved to try and drive in shifts, non-stop.
That plan was messed up when, shortly after 4am, Dante’s front left wheel inexplicably shot off. I was asleep at the time so I asked Carlos what had happened.
“It was a cold and dark night and the moon was shining,” he told me, I think he knew I was taking notes, “you could hear the whisper of the cold telling you you were going to die.” He paused for dramatic affect, and stifled a laugh.
“Suddenly I saw all these sparks coming from Dante. They pulled over and I saw the wheel was missing. So I pulled up to them, Tony just looked at me out the window, he didn’t say anything, it was priceless.”
We drove around a bit looking for the renegade wheel, but it was too dark in the cratered steppe. Tony said he had seen it roll off into the night: “It went that way,” he pointed in a vague arc.
“How fast were you going?” I asked.
“About 70.”
“So the wheel went that way,” I swept my arm over the dark horizon, “at 70kph?”
“Yeah.”
We decided to camp for the night and have another look in the morning.

At night Carlos and I turn our little Trabbi into The Fez Hilton. There is no passenger seat and the driver’s seat is removable, so with a little rearrangement we have two fully reclined beds. Everyone has heaps of warm weather gear now, and the blankets, duvets, sleeping bags and cushions aid the most comfortable car sleep I have had.

My sleeping pattern was all screwed up by the malaise of Bishkek, so it made sense for me to do the late driving shift. I regret it because it meant that I really saw little of Kazakhstan other than the dimly lit arc of Fez’s headlights on tarmac, and the rear end of Ziggy.
We didn’t find the wheel that morning, but I got my only really decent look at the famous Kazakh steppe- the huge, arid plain that dominates this latitude of Asia. The soil is sandy, but punctuated by hardy shrubs and gorse. It stretches out for hundreds of miles, undulating but not rolling, with little that could be called a hill, and no trees. The soil wont take agriculture, so settling is not really an option, and there is little for cattle to eat. It is no wonder the plains have been home to the world’s great horseman over the years- the nomads had little choice but to wander around on their mounts looking for a meal. Out of this barren flatness successive mounted hordes have emerged to rape and pillage Europe’s eastern frontier, Scythians, Huns, Mongols, but they left no major marks on this huge, hostile territory.

We raced through Kazakhstan. I did a shift from 5pm to 5am, pretty terrible driving hours. But my sleeping pattern is truly abysmal and I had slept all day so fatigue wasn’t a problem.
For a few hours the steppe was swathed in a thick mist. Doing 80kph in darkness on these bumpy roads in a rattling, vibrating Trabbi feels like driving a rocket. In the fog it felt like flying a MIG through a turbulent cloud, we could have been doing 200mph, not 50.
We crossed Central Asia’s largest country, the ninth biggest in the world, in 44 hours. More than 1,500km. At 80kph. A Trabant Trek record. Very proud of that one.
On the 31st, after 30 hours of straight driving, we left the country, and the ‘stans, behind.

Central Asia was bad for us.
We lost a car, two people, two roof racks, thousands of dollars, vast quantities of spare parts and roughly a month. We gained an intricate knowledge of the region’s visa system, particularly the American’s, who now have two sets of Turkmen, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Russian visas. I could take you a tour of Bishkek’s bars and eateries. I now have the street equivalent of a PhD in Traffic Cop Psychology.

It is hard now, just a few days after leaving, to sum up my thoughts on the region. We had such varied experiences: A month in urban, Russified Bishkek versus a fortnight stuck in the remote Tajik mountains; staying in renovated, historic Khiva versus camping on the dusty Turkmen-Uzbek border; the long straight roads of Kazakhstan versus the rock strewn mud track of the Anzob Pass.
It is hard to weigh it all up. In Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan the police interference was regular, we were stopped constantly and unnecessarily although we were rarely bribed. In Bishkek I wish there were more police, I didn’t feel safe at night.
There is no doubt it was the most difficult part of the trek so far. A combination of the poor roads causing breakdowns and delays, and the bureaucracy involved in getting new visas made it a testing time. But once we dumped the Merc the roads were less of a problem, and the visa problems followed on from the breakdowns.
I would go back. I would like to see more of Uzbekistan’s Silk Road cities. I would recommend the Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan to anyone, and Tajikistan’s Pamir Mountains were probably the most stunning drive yet.
But I'm not sure I would take a Trabant.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org