Dante’s Infirmity

Dante’s Infirmity
Boten, Laos
December 25th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I just don’t see the point in tearing apart a perfectly good car.”
Tony P


I HAVE never woken up with a man on Christmas morning and, other than hoping to catch out Santa, I never expected to.
We could only afford four beds at the hotel, and the Mighty Tony P and I drew the short straws. But at least it was a room with clean sheets and a hot shower, not the crab-infested plywood whorehouse.
And Tony is a gentle lover.
Christmas Eve back home is spent down the pub with scores of old friends I haven’t seen for a year.
I spent this Christmas Eve with a gerbily Mexican-Italian-American watching a Japanese slapstick in Chinese in Laos.
I’ll be home for Christmas.
I’d told that to a lot of people, and although I knew months ago that I wouldn’t, it still felt strange. I felt like Dorothy.

Christmas lunch was fried noodles with squid and coffee. There were a few closed shops in Boten, maybe they knew something of this Christian holiday, but otherwise no signs of festive cheer. And though we’d been living in the village for four days, and everyone had noticed us, no one wished us season’s greetings.
I'm not sure what the locals think of the strange white people with their funny cars.
Someone must have been celebrating something because I watched a man cooking a giant hamster with a flamethrower. He was just out on the street with some gloves, a jet of flames and this enormous rodent.
What you up to?
“Just flamethrowering this here hamster.”
Okay.
Round back they had a crazy looking owl and three medium sized bears in cages. They were a few feet tall, with thick dark hair and powerful arms. I asked two of the boys where the bears came from and they gestured towards the surrounding forest. They told me they got them when they were very small, and when they were very big they would eat the paws and heart.
One of the boys was playing slaps with a bear through the cage, trying to palm the back of its paw before getting clawed.

We spent the afternoon successfully repairing Dante, and unsuccessfully working on Ziggy. Everything was tried, every piece taken apart and rebuilt, every component tested. But it wouldn’t start. The starter would whir and whir, and then, when you think the engine is going to catch, a loud ominous clunk, and nothing. It was the same sound as back in Beijing, and four days of tinkering had not fixed it.
By late afternoon OJ was plying Ziggy’s engine apart with a chisel. I think at that point we knew it was the end.
Christmas Day 2007, one-hundred-and-fifty-six days since we set off from Zwickau, Germany, twenty-three-thousand kilometres down the road, in our nineteenth country, we were going to have to dump a Trabant.

The decision to ditch a car was pretty much made for us- one engine didn’t work. But which Trabbi to get rid of? We had two working engines that could go in any of the cars.
The victim would be cannibalised for parts, butchered for spares, and it would take a lot of work, so really it didn’t matter which car went- it didn’t have to be Ziggy.

We decided the time was right to sit around with a beer, discuss it and vote.
But there wasn’t much agreement or discussion, more argument and contradiction. People became sentimental about their Trabbis and didn’t want to see them dumped. They admitted it, Carlos wanted to keep Fez because he loved it, Lovey wanted to keep Ziggy because he loved it, Tony wanted to keep Dante because he loved it.
Only OJ and I remained impartial. I honestly had no problem with losing Fez. I’ve spent a lot of time in the little car, but it is a pile of rubbish. It’s probably had more problems than any other car and runs terribly.
This is not the time for sentiment, I said, lets make a decision which gives us the best possible chance to get to Cambodia.
Everyone agreed. Then continued to let their sentiment cloud their judgement.

We thought about the car’s pluses and minuses:

Fez
Cons: no passenger seat, front right bearing and transaxle dodgy, passenger door doesn’t lock and swings open, brakes dodgy, rear control arm welded, history of problems, exhaust welded to the floor (extra noisy), headlights dim, speakers broken.
Pros: It’s looks good (subjective…), currently works so we could just drive away. In theory three people could squeeze in.

Ziggy
Cons: It’s in pieces all over the floor, broken front leaf spring, rear control arm welded, only Lovey can open the door, parking (hand) brake broken. Shocks are too big on the back (damaging rear tyres).
Pros: The only car that locks, hasn’t had too many problems, seats four people.

Dante
Cons: A giant hole has been cut into the roof (wet, cold, insecure). Passenger window missing, driver window stuck open. Passenger door broken (sealed shut). Trunk door broken (sealed shut). Can only seat two people.
Pros: Currently works so we could just drive away. Big trunk.

It was too tough to call. Not being particularly in on the mechanical side of things, which I felt should be the only consideration, I had no idea how to vote.
But this is how it went:
Tony wanted to ditch Ziggy, it was in pieces. He also loves Dante.
Carlos voted Dante, because there is no roof so it is terminally insecure. And he loves Fez.
Lovey voted Dante for the same reason (and he loves Ziggy), and so did OJ.
So when it came to my turn the decision was already made, Dante by three votes, with the main reason being the giant hole in the roof, which the Americans had cut out just the day before.
I abstained, I really had no idea.

Tony was pissed. That’s an American pissed, which I have learned means angry, not a British pissed, which means drunk. But soon he spanned the linguistic differences by downing a mini bottle of rice wine.
Then he was really pissed.
“I'm not annoyed at anyone for the decision, I just think it was the wrong one. I don’t see the point in tearing apart a perfectly good car, when we could just take the drum and the transaxle from Ziggy and go before it gets dark.”
But the car is insecure.
“So is Fez, the passenger door doesn’t close.”
Personally I didn’t really care about the time it would take to rebuild Ziggy and strip Dante. It would be better to get the job done properly than to rush it. We’re here now, I said, we should just get the job done as best we can.
But Tony was right. It took ages, it got dark, the job got harder and we’d scattered out tools across a mechanic’s forecourt. It was midnight by the time we’d finished testing Dante’s engine in Ziggy, switching the leaf springs over, harvesting the best tyres from Dante, taking the drum, transaxle, speakers, stereo.
When we’d finished gutting Dante it really was a sad sight. Sitting on bricks, shocks hanging loose, roof gaping open. We left it there, by a garage, and told the owner we were going to Vientiane to get parts.
The Americans talked about returning to pick it up once we’ve finished the trek. They want to ship it to the States.
But I think we may have seen it for the last time.

We set off in convoy, if you can call two cars a convoy. Really we were just following each other.
“How far do you think we’re gonna get?” I asked Carlos, who was driving.
“I don’t care, I just want to make it out of this town.”
The battery was dead, but we were on a hill so we roll started down, back towards the Laos border.
The engine kicked in, the loud, raucous vibrations, the exhaust filling the cabin. Carlos clicked it into gear and slipped the clutch. And we went…nowhere.
He turned to me: “There’s no gears.”
We looked at each other in silence. He had that flicker of a grin he grows arounf the corners of his mouth when he knows somethings gone horribly wrong. He shifted the stick around, but nothing.
“Clutch?”
I stepped out the car and looked around. We were still in Boten.
“So on that attempt we actually managed to go backwards?” I said. We’d roll started towards China, not Cambodia.
“Nice work. So we’ve lost one car and scored –50m today.”
We set up the tent for our fourth night in Boten.

Lying in Fez, where I had made a bed, I heard that infuriating sound of a mosquito, buzzing about in the dark, looking for a target. I don’t remember the last time I heard a mosquito. South East Asia, we’re here. Five of us, with two cars. But we’re here.
“Happy Christmas,” I shouted towards the tent, and squashed the midge.

Laos number: +856 (0)20 284 1195

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Big Trouble in Little China

Big Trouble in Little China
Boten, Laos
December 24th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Come to Cambodia he said. We’ll have a good time he said. We’ll be home for Christmas he said.”
A favourite ditty of The Mighty Tony Perez.
WHO’S bored of Christmas already?
Those jingles, that shopping, the decorations. Ever wish to be completely away from it all? Somewhere they think Christmas is a hair product.
Well I think we found it.
Boten on the Laos-China border. A one road strip trapped in a terrible struggle for identity. You see, we’re in Laos. We crossed the border, the little barrier that divides Laos from China is visible from all over the village.
But somehow China has crept over that fragile demarcation, cultural seepage or cultural creepage, I don’t know, but the locals don’t seem to realise where they are. It’s Little China here: All the clocks are set to China time, all the signs are in Chinese, all the prices are in RMB, the Chinese currency.
In fact, we’re having a tough time trying to use our Laos Kip. When I hand it over, the locals stare uncomprehendingly as if I just passed them, well, a foreign note.
“It’s Kip. It’s Laos money.” I say.
A shake of the head. “Renminbi,” they reply.
We are able to exchange, but we are getting royally screwed every time, and we’re running out of cash.
And Christmas. What Christmas?
There isn’t a shred of tinsel in sight, not a whiff of mistletoe or a tinkle of jingle bells. I don’t think they’ve heard of Slade. No Santa hats, roast chestnuts, crackers, stilton or port, and the surrounding forest is spared the shame of being chopped down and dressed up like a kitsch, pantomime drag queen.
A nearby tree bends a branch over and squints a knot at my screen.
“They do what?”
“That’s right my evergreen friend, if you’d had the misfortune to be born anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world you’d have been hacked down, sprinkled with ribbon and glitter, and topped by a winged bimbo with a wand.”
“Frightening. Have your Western trees no dignity?”

On Christmas Eve 2007 this isn’t where I expected to wake up.
In a tiny room with plywood walls in a house of ill repute. The cheapest joint in town and thankfully, unlike yesterday, I wasn’t woken by the moans of the single member of staff doing her job. Someone had a happy ending.
We’ve had some progress with the cars. Fez and Dante work. But Ziggy doesn’t, and more worryingly, we’re unable to diagnose the problem. It’s never taken this long to solve a Trabbi riddle before.
So it’s day three on a patch of dust by the side of the road. There is some life here: it’s a free trade zone, so there’s a big new casino just up the road with a $50/night hotel. There are a few little boutiques with some trendy Chinese fashion, all well out of our price range. There’s also the best internet café I have seen in South East Asia, although I haven’t been here for seven years.
There must be 50 PCs, all pretty new, a good connection and gangs of boys and girls- the boys playing World of Warcraft and Counterstrike, the girls on a dancing game and social networking sites. Unlike the West, computers are too expensive for most people, but internet is cheap- 35p an hour. So the interwang, as it is called here, is the place to be. Whenever I walk in the girls just crack up. Occasionally it prickles to have a few dozen teenagers giggling at me, but mostly I just take a deep breath.

Dante now has a skylight stretching over the driver and passenger seats. Which is interesting. Because Dante is now terminally insecure, we have taken the passenger window and put it in Fez to replace the one Carlos broke. But now the passenger door has stopped locking, so you just tug it to pull it open. Not especially secure.
The American’s have tried pretty much everything on Ziggy, with no success. So they have gone to a mechanics up the road to try again, and see if the guys there have any ideas.
If we don’t get it working then we have to ditch it.
“It’s annoying if we have to dump a car just because we don’t know what’s wrong with it,” Lovey told me.
“I agree, it could be something really simple.”
Ziggy has always been the strongest car- it would be a shame to leave it here, when it could be fixed.
I don’t feel like we’re in a rush anymore. We’re not going to make Vang Vien for Christmas, nor Sihanoukville for New Year. So why hurry? I'm resigned to this thing not being over ‘till 2008, why bother rushing through the last few weeks of the trip at a frantic pace, getting stressed out and not enjoying it?
We’ve made South East Asia, it’s warm, it’s cheap, I'm happy to settle into a more gentle rhythm, and if that means we sit here for the whole of Christmas trying to get Ziggy going, then so be it.
I’d only be whinging about Christmas at home anyway. Those jingles, that shopping, the decorations. Ever wish to be completely away from it all?
Try Boten, Laos.

UPDATE 9PM: Ziggy still doesn’t work. The Yanks spent the day taking the car apart and rebuilding the engine, to no avail. No one knows what the problem is, but rather than dump it and move on, the Americans want to try a couple more things tomorrow. If that doesn’t work we either dump it here, or send it ahead to Luang Prabang by truck, and dump it there. That way there would be a chance we could come back for it at a later date. Who knows when?
Dante is broken too. Carlos and Lovey needed a tow back after a 20km trip to the petrol station. But Tony thinks he knows what the problem is.
Another job for Christmas Day.
Fez starts, but we haven’t tried taking it more than a few hundred metres- who knows how far it will run?
So we’re staying here in Boten tonight.
As a group we have $100 left. There’s no ATM here- we waved a credit card at the manager of the hotel/casino and he looked very confused.
They don’t take Visa.
We’re dirty and smelly, having spent the days deep in engine grease and the last two nights alternating between a brothel and a tent. So we want a hot shower and fresh sheets as our Christmas present. We found a hotel that’ll do it, but it’s about $35- a fair chunk of our money. We’re going for it, just so we don’t wake up on Christmas Day in a whorehouse.
But that only leaves us $65 to try and get to Luang Prabang, where there is an ATM.
Hopefully we can fix Ziggy and Dante tomorrow, and get there without breaking down.
That does seem pretty hopeful. Otherwise we’ll try sending Ziggy down by truck, and hope the driver will accept cash on arrival.
There’s a chance we’ll be stuck somewhere in northern Laos with cars that don’t work and no money. This seems just as likely as getting to Luang Prabang.
A teenage girl just walked past wearing a flashing Santa hat. The only hint of Christmas cheer here on the China border.

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A Sad Humiliation on Entering Laos

A Sad Humiliation on Entering Laos
Laos
December 23rd, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I love Gabor. He didn’t send us what we asked for. But he did send us what we need.”
Tony, on the package of parts we received from Hungary.

A MORE ignominious entrance to a country would be difficult to imagine.
Our three Trabbis, pride of our lives, towed across the border in convoy by a single tuk tuk.
Shameful.
One little motorbike tugging along all our cars and worldly possessions.
Passers-by pointed and laughed, officials stared, motorists gawped and swerved. Trabant Trek hits Laos.

We’d hoped to cross from China on Wednesday (December 19th), but the cars took a few extra days to reach the border. So we relaxed in a town about 50km away, Meng La.
We needed a few hundred quid to pay the shipping company, and, although Carlos had sorted out the European money, none of the ATMs in town would accept the American’s cards. They had to take a four-hour bus ride to the nearest city to withdraw the cash.
OJ broke a pen in protest.

That afternoon I went to check out a basketball court I had seen the following evening. There were a couple of guys playing and a load of seven or eight-year-old girls in school uniform. It was about 4pm so I guessed they were on their way back from school, and I joined in. I was getting a lot of funny looks, which I expected, being a pasty, sweaty white man, but after ten minutes a woman came out.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Well, I'm on my way to Laos.”
“But what are you doing here?”
“Just passing through, I’ve driven here from Germany actually, we’re trying to get to Cambodia.”
“No, no. What are you doing here? This is a school. This is a PE lesson.”
I’d inadvertently wandered into a playground and started shooting hoops during a class. Oops. The lady was the school’s English teacher who had been summoned to sort me out.
I wonder what would have happened if a pot-bellied Chinaman had turned up at an English girls school and joined a basketball lesson.
He would probably be arrested.
But they were okay about it and I ended up playing a proper, hour long game of full court with the PE teachers, complete with scoreboard, ref’, floodlights and refreshment table. Exhausting.

The next day (Friday) the Americans returned from their ATM mission and Edmund, our guide, text to say the last car was at the border.
We headed down to Mo Hoa but they couldn’t get Fez off the truck before the crossing closed, so we were stuck another day.
We paid Edmund, our guide, who has been pretty awesome throughout our stay in China, sorting out all the paperwork, officialdom and shipping.
We are so late that the poor chap wont make it home (a five day bus and train journey) to be with his family for Christmas. He’s a devout Christian, and we all feel terrible about it.
Carlos found out about his distinctly un-Chinese name though. Apparently he’d once worked at a hotel, and the manager told him he could pick his uniform. Each one had a name stitched on and he chose one with Edmund.
I think all people deserve a similar opportunity at birth- take the parents out of the equation.

Saturday, December 22nd, we finally made it out. More than three weeks after the expiry of the Trabbi’s customs papers, just a day before the end of our own visas, six weeks behind the original schedule, and three weeks behind the revised Bishkek timetable.
Three days till Christmas.
And none of the cars work.
We’ve crossed mountains and deserts in these little cars. We’ve come so far, more than 20,000km through 19 countries, and the cars are badly damaged. But much is superficial or cosmetic- the doors don’t close properly, none of them lock, and when they do you can’t open them. The paintwork is a horrible mess, and there are various battle scars from collisions. Yesterday Carlos smashed Fez’s passenger window, which is ok, because before that it wouldn’t open- fine in freezing Siberia, but a problem in sunny Laos. None of the cars have seatbelts- all of them have been removed to use as tow cables at some point. Ziggy can only indicate left, and doesn’t have brake lights. Fez doesn’t even have a passenger seat.
All these things we can, and have, been dealing with. The cars are rubbish, we know that, they’ve been lived in for five months, they’re trashed.
But what’s going on under the bonnet, I have less idea about. None of them work, that’s clear enough, and we are relying on the parts that Gabor, our Hungarian mechanic sent, being able to sort the problem.

In a rare moment of group co-ordination, Lovey, who had gone to Bangkok to collect the parts, managed to meet us at the Laos border with the package. Our tuk tuk had dropped us off just before the crossing, but luckily it was downhill into Laos, so we released the handbrakes and freewheeled into the country, stopping outside a restaurant to compare notes.
What an arrival.

I was up for having the cars towed all the way south to Vang Vien, a traveller’s town where we hoped to spend Christmas. That way we could relax for a few days, fix the cars and enjoy the festivities with some other Westerners. I was very afraid that we might get the cars going and begin the drive, only to break down in the middle of nowhere and spend Christmas by the side of the road.
But the others were confident we could fix the cars here, so, on the side of the road, 100m from the border with China, we removed all three engines, and began rebuilding them. It turned out we hadn’t requested the correct parts for the job. But luckily Gabor had sent us them.
TP: “I love Gabor. He didn’t send us what we asked for. But he did send us what we need.”
Everyone got burned in the blistering heat, but loved it after the cold of the last few months.
By nightfall we had Fez and Ziggy back together, but all the cars had flat batteries. We tried to push start them, to no effect. I managed to find someone with leads to give us a jump start, but Fez only ran for a few minutes, making a terrible racket and sounding distinctly unwell, before the engine just died.
Tired and getting ratty, we turned in at what may have been a house of ill repute.

So this morning we plan to get the cars going and begin the drive south. Luang Prabang is about 300km away, Vang Vien another hundred. The chance of making it to Vang Vien for Christmas seems pretty slim from here- we don’t even know what the problem is with Fez or Ziggy. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.
Luang Prabang is a possibility, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and pretty dull.
But it’d be better then the side of the road.

UPDATE, 3.30PM: This morning I found a garage to charge all the batteries. We are doing them in shifts. Just brought the first one back and stuck it in Fez. The little car works. We asked Tony to try it first and he raced away. He then kindly asked Lovey to have a drive of our baby Trabbi. Neither Carlos or I have been allowed a go yet, but I'm sure it’ll be smashing.
I'm resting my sunburn in a shady restaurant, and watching the Americans removing the roof from Dante. I can’t see exactly what’s going on, but when I returned from the mechanics they were drinking Beer Laos and excitedly told me they are going to make Dante into a convertible. Now they are on the roof with various tools.
It doesn’t rain in Laos does it?

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China's Century

China’s Century
China
December 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.
In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”Confucius

DID you know that China is where it’s at?
For the next century this is the best seat in the house. Sorry Old Europe with your entrenched socialism, stifling history and petty prejudice. Bollocks to America and the military industrial. Russia? You’re so 1900s.
This is China’s Century.
In the last 20 years the country has transformed from communist to consumerist. From Mao tunic to Prada miniskirt. From global pariah to global power.
And the next 20?
Watch the country rocket to world leader. See our rulers scream in terror as the juggernaut overtakes, listen to the scare stories, the rhetoric, the flood of cheap goods, the outsourcing, the military build up, oooh the pain of the West as it loses its crown.
This is China’s century and we’re all in it.

China gets such a rough ride in the press. It is seen as a threat, an economic threat, a political threat- evil communists, repressive regime, no freedom of speech, it’s a one party system. The US must be twice as good; it has a two party system.
In my three weeks here I have only visited cities: Xilinhaote, Beijing, Xi’an and Kunming. I have no idea about the countryside, I have little idea of the political situation. But from what I have seen at street level, whoever is in charge has gripped modernity by the wallet.
The cities are exploding, booming, bursting at the seams with development. You can taste the progress in the air: it’s the smell of car exhausts, coffee, and perfume. It’s touch screen mobile phones and wireless internet, skyscrapers and shopping malls, dancing cranes hovering around new buildings that grow a storey a second, every second, day and night. Armani vies with Apple for attention; do I want a rain mac or an Apple Mac? David Beckham, Kate Moss and their fragile ilk pout down from the billboards to help me decide.

I don’t know how many people can afford this stuff. How many have been left out by the new China. When a slap up meal costs a dollar, how many people can spend $30 on a shirt?
Those who can- the new commercial class of the new China- are well-dressed city-dwellers, funky, fashionable, mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, little leather handbags, big leather wallets.

The web is big. All the guesthouses we stayed in had free wifi, as did plenty of restaurants, cafes and bars. It is censored- no BBC and even my own blogspot site is banned. But you can easily get around it with a proxy server (www.anonymouse.org).
And with the explosion in web use has come a surge in free speech and criticism, which in many ways has helped facilitate the new China.
The government still runs the Great Firewall of China, a wonder of the modern world, and even Google has kowtowed, censoring its own search engine.
But in an increasingly net savvy society, how long can this last?
And with freedom of speech comes criticism of the government, and political change.
China doesn’t do change quickly. It doesn’t share the West’s obsession with youth (Michael Howard too old to lead the Tories at 66), and its rulers are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Political change is slower and more deliberate.
But it is happening.
Be prepared. This is where it’s at.
This is China’s Century.

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The Cusp of South East Asia

The Cusp of South East Asia
Kunming to the Laos border
December 14th- 21st, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”Confucius

KUNMING was beautiful, I felt very much at home.
Busy, warm, vibrant, large university population, very much a modern city, but with a distinctly Chinese twist- huge government buildings that could have come from the New York skyline, except they had subtly curved roofs, a little nod to a pagoda.
Walking back from watching the United-Liverpool game, at 2am on a Sunday night, the streets were still busy.
A little oasis of stalls around a street lamp, filled with fruits and foods I didn’t recognise. Dozens of people sitting out in the night, eating and chatting.
A patrol of policemen passed, about half a dozen all swinging long clubs as they sauntered by. The back two cops were arm-in-arm, laughing.

The cars were meant to arrive here and be shipped out to the border on Friday (December 14th). But the delivery company must have been infected by Trabbi Time, as the last car, Fez, didn’t arrive ‘till Wednesday and didn’t get shipped ‘till Thursday (December 20th)- another week long delay.
Carlos and I went down to the shipping company to pay them and check on the cars.
Ziggy was surrounded by a swarm of men. They had the windows down, the doors open. They were rifling the inside playing with walkie talkies, three men had the boot open and were going through the stuff inside, waving our 8mm camera about.
We approached by stealth and I shouted a loud English greeting in an attempt to scare them. But they just looked up, shameless, and waved our stuff at us.
I gave them a tour of the engine, to much laughter.

We got a night bus south to a town nearer the border to wait for the cars. There were three rows of double beds on the bus, which was nice, except Carlos, TP and I were in a five-person bed at the back, sandwiched between two Chinamen.
A sweaty and frustrating night. Sleeping with five men was everything I’d imagined it to be.


It is a shame not to have driven the length of China. It would have been some road trip alone, and a real missed opportunity, especially considering how much we paid to do it. Instead all our efforts were limited to the dull northern desert. It would have been interesting to watch that dry, dirty, grey landscape develop into the humid, lush, greenery that we’ve seen in the south.

Looking outside the window on our long journey south (65 hours of trains and buses) I had seen the usual ebb and flow of city to countryside. Rural wooden shacks and chocolate cake hills drifting to suburbs, mixing old thatched homes with light industrial, low-rise factories, then the neck craning city centres, thirty and forty story apartment blocks and offices, filthy decrepit estates near shining new glass and metal skyscrapers. The image would rebound as we left the centre, returned through the fading development and arrived back at hillsides carved into terraces, sweeping like grand colonial staircases down to sun-kissed green fields and heavy streams topped with a head of floating mist.

It is sad we couldn’t drive, but driving Trabbis is a two edged sword.
On the one hand, you never know when you are going to stop (i.e. breakdown). So the little cars take you to places you would never have normally visited, places that don’t make the guidebook, that aren’t even on the map, that few westerners have visited.
This is awesome: no guesthouses, no internet, not even any restaurants- you have to rely on the hospitality of locals, and they always come through.
On the other hand, you never know when you are going to stop. So the little cars take you to places you would never have normally visited, places that you don’t want to visit.
So you end up staying five days on the Turkmen-Uzbek border, instead of getting to know Ashgabat. You live a week in tiny Tajik villages, instead of exploring the Pamirs.
Here in China we spent a week in Xilinhaote, it’s a big city but not worth a visit, we could have used the time doing anything- Three Gorges Dam? Shanghai?
So we have seen China in a completely different manner to all the other countries we have visited. We have been on the tourist trial. Refreshing in some ways, but still, a missed opportunity.

Hopefully tomorrow, Friday December 21st, Fez will arrive and we will cross into Laos.
Of course, none of the cars work. We will be pushing all three of them across the border. Truly stumbling out of China. I don’t know how much no-man’s-land there is. On the Tajik-Kyrgyz crossing there was 22km of mountainous tracks between the countries.
Let’s hope China and Laos enjoy a closer relationship.
Either way, we will be limping in, struggling over the last few miles to the home straight, South East Asia.
I can already smell it in the food, see it in the foliage and feel it I the air- sticky and humid.
Six weeks late, but we’re nearly there.

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The Train to Spring

The Train to Spring
Kunming, China
December 13th-17th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I’ve been clean for two weeks now.”
Tony P, team mechanic, on the joys of travelling without Trabants.

THE thing about long train journeys is the smell.
As is the way with odour, it builds up around you, slow, subtle and unnoticed, like carbon monoxide poisoning, senile dementia and Jack Johnson.
But you step off the train to fight over a satsuma with a bunch of passengers suffering cabin fever, return to your cot, and then it hits you.
Piss, eggs, wine, fart, sweat, rice, coke, beer, perfume, shit, bleach, noodles, effluent, chicken, hair, feet, feet, feet, feet and more feet- a heady brew of satanic spices concocted in a cauldron previously used as a dustpan when Beelzebub swept out hell’s charnel house.
Overpowering, stomach-turning revoltingness on a chemical weapon scale- expect pre-emptive action by a US-led multinational force acting under the auspices of the UN with a brief to destroy WMD and anyone affected.
There were no windows. I imagine we couldn’t be trusted to regulate our own temperature to aroma ratio, and the only draft came when someone opened the toilet door, wafting a port-a-loo breeze of acrid disinfectant and sewage through our carriage.
We didn’t have a cabin, just three stories of bunk beds arranged along an open and busy corridor. Every half hour a man with a trolley would dash through shouting in Chinese, but disappear before we could see what he was wheeling.
Thirty-five hours in these conditions was always likely to be testy.

There were a few other inconveniences.
The freak show fame attached to being Westerners in the east: aren’t we funny, aren’t we strange, come and have a look. Fair’s fair- we’re only here because they’re funny and strange and we wanted a look.
But we don’t watch them crapping.
The Chinese have a penchant for the art of throat clearing. Never have I seen a nation attack the issue of phlegm with such vehemence. True connoisseurs of the clearance- huge, racketing, barking, choking hocks that are enough to make innocent bystanders gag and dogs howl at the moon. I sometimes expect cranium chunks or nasal cavity to come roaring out with the gob: oh look, that’s his frontal lobe, that was a good spit.
And it isn’t just the men, communism is non-discriminatory, a truly equal form of suppression, so woman too can hurl vile slime balls down as they adjust their make-up. Nor is the practice restricted to the outdoors, our train was something of a haven for spitters, the beat to our journey the rhythmic expulsion of snot.
What could make this paradise of sight and smell complete?
Throw in the tantruming youngster. A perfect wake up call for day two on the Nifkin Express. She must have been nine or ten, not the screaming baby who knows no other way to express her wants, but a young girl with command of language taking out a vehement yet unknown grievance on a train full of folk who were not her tormentors.
Little brat. Hours of it, lung-bursting, head in hands shrieks- not even crying, just wailing. And her guardian, in what I imagine was an attempt to discipline the little bitch, sat stony, silent and impassive.
Just give her what she wants, I thought, we shouldn’t all have to be involved in this terrible lesson. But on it went, ‘till she seemed to forget what she was screaming about.
Time decided to relax and spread out, the only punctuation to its mindless passing the decision to have a pot of instant noodles. A little treat for having coped with another six hours, and a rare chance to do something gratifying and rewarding.
I got hot water. I made noodles.
The red wine we brought as our valium went too quickly and the night was restless, sleep hindered by the jagged progress of our driver, who had a sixth sense for passengers nodding off and gleefully hit the breaks to put a stop to such weakness. Isn’t sleep deprivation a form of torture? Can I call the Red Cross? No? So it’s true what they say: China is a country piled high with repressive jobsworths bent on punishment and suppression.
I hope that sentence never comes back to haunt me.

In the morning everyone was ratty, but the mood lifted when we pealed back the curtains.
Outside all was green and yellow.
True, vibrant, healthy, vegetable green dowsed in a wash of eastern yellow from a heavenly body long lost to us, but now reintroduced.
The Sun.
Rolling fields bathed in sunshine.
We cast our collective minds back for the last time we’d seen such simple glory. Tajikistan? Mountains. Turkmenistan? Desert.
We placed it in Azerbaijan, the long drive to Baku, August 25th. Nearly four months ago.
I greedily absorbed the view, and tried to snatch a look at what the farmers where wearing as they flew past my little screen. Is it sandal weather? Shorts?

Kunming means the City of Eternal Spring, and we stepped off the train into a beautiful spring day.
T-shirt weather.
It seems strange to hark on about the weather. I am English, and in a country with such an unpredictable climate commenting on the clouds is an understandable national pastime.
But for us it’s more than that.
Back in Bishkek we had to make the choice between going south to Bangkok (quick, warm, easy) or heading north through Siberia (long, cold, difficult).
We plumped for north and the six and a half weeks it has taken us to escape sub zero temperatures have been the most testing yet.
Even in west Tajikistan, where we broke down relentlessly, it felt like a bit of a holiday because you could always relax in the sun.
But when you have to slide under the car at night time in two feet of snow it really doesn’t feel like a vacation. When two of the cars need to be push started every time, and it is so cold that even touching the back windows with gloved hands freezes your fingers so they hurt.
Seven weeks of wearing thermal underwear, three pairs of socks, huge jackets, scarves, gloves, layer after layer giving me a Jo Brand physique. Having to take everything off when you get in somewhere, and putting literally everything on in the evening to spend another night in a Tupperware box with no heating and doors that don’t close so that the outside is very much inside.
Our lowest ebb must have been in the Gobi when we (Carlos) burned out Fez’s clutch plate. All our water was frozen so we had to make a fire out of dried camel shit and fence posts that we sawed down from along the railway line. The coldest experience of my life.
It has been a real test of endurance.
And now its over.
We made it. We did the northern route. We beat the Kazakh steppe, the Siberian winter, the Gobi Fucking Desert, and now we’re safe. Whatever happens, the threat of exposure and frostbite is over.

Our hostel has a terrace, no, a SUN terrace. From it I can see palm trees.
South East Asia here we come.



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The Great Mosque of Xi'an

The Great Mosque of Xi'an
Xi’an, China
December 12th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

FOR a while in Xi’an it felt like I’d been transported back to Central Asia.
We’d stumbled into the Muslim Quarter, a strange and ancient place that owes its existence to the Silk Road, the famous trade route between China, the Middle East and Europe. The road, which was actually more of a network of different and often competing paths, was a conduit for all sorts of luxuries like firs, dyes, gems, spices, and of course silk. Xi’an was the first big Chinese city western merchants would get to, and plenty of Arab traders decided to settle here to make their fortune.

It is an interesting walk, although most of the people look Chinese, I could see the odd Arabian among the stalls. People wore little Arabic touches: men wearing fez, women with headdresses.
Little birds sang from cages that lined the main road, like street lamps. A girl with clubbed feet crawled around after us, clattering along a paint tin with a few bills in. Every now and again we would stop long enough for her to catch up and she’d start banging her tin. She could only have been 11 or 12. She wore gloves on her hands like shoes as she dragged her lame, bare feet behind.
A man sang traditional songs at the top of his nasal voice as he sliced up a great rice cake, a huge yellow thing the size of a bedside table. He skewered thick, moist pieces and barbecued them.
Next to him whole carcasses hung from butchers hooks, dripping puddles of blood into congealing pools.
We stopped for something to eat and the menu was straight out of Central Asia, shashlik, manti, naan bread, even pismaniye, which is a sort of candy floss like sweet we had in Izmit in Turkey almost four months ago and haven’t seen since.

Buried among the narrow alleys is The Great Mosque of Xi’an, the largest in China,
We’ve seen some very impressive mosques on this trip- none more so that the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. But the Great Mosque of Xian really looks nothing like a mosque, not as I know it anyway.
The mosques we’ve seen normally have great domes, often a cloistered brick courtyard surrounded by minarets. But this was more like a large garden separated into sections by ornate Chinese gateways, pavilions and pagodas, the same sort of layout as a Chinese temple.
In the buildings were intricate carved furniture, glazed vases, wooden shutters and paper screens.
And it was full of contradictions:
There were Chinese symbols like dragons and turtles everywhere- but in Islam depicting a living creature is banned so you don’t expect to find these images in mosques.
There were quotes from the Koran up, but they are in Chinese, and, translating the Koran is considered blasphemy so is banned.

It was strange, fascinating and beautiful. Such a tranquil atmosphere- the Chinese use small trees and bushes cleverly to create an impression of privacy in open spaces. The air felt light and calm, a little oasis in this noisy city. If it wasn’t for the sign at the door I wouldn’t have guessed it was a mosque. Only the large prayer hall at the very end, closed to infidels, gave a solid clue.
I was surprised to see that work on the place started in 742AD, only 150 years after Mohammed was born, yet here, thousands of miles away, is this magnificent structure.
Testament to the power of Islam as a faith, and the power of the Silk Road as a highway for ideas.

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