This is just a little space for me to let friends know what I am up to-- easier than emailing everybody all the time from the internet cafe! This site does not allow "oldest entries first" formatting, so I had to give fake dates to the entries so that it can be read chrnonologically, but that makes the archives in reverse order--when the archive says "June," it is really "May," and vice-verse. Go figure. You can click the pics to get full-size images.

Found the train. . . .Beam Time!

Day One, 5/27:

Well. Long story short, I found the train. Just to make me feel better, virtually everybody else that I talked to had the same confusion. . . including the Korean ambassador to Mongolia, who ended up in the compartment next to me.


So. . . I celebrated, opened the second bottle of Beam, found my way to the restaraunt car, got totally messed with some crazy Russian mom, son, a few cousins, borscht, vodka, and more. Somehow I was so pleased and so out of it then when all was done I paid his bill too! Oh well, that just meant I had to eat more food from the platform or cup noodle sort of stuff, which was OK. We stopped about every six to eight hours, stretched for a bit, bought some sausage or roast chicken or beer or pirogis from the babushkas on the platform, and continued our way. Pint 'o beer (can): $1.75; two litre bottle of beer: $3.00; roast breast of chicken: $5.00; coffee: $1.00.





After all of the scare about tickets all sold out, etc. the train was only about 40% occupied. . . my first-class, two-berth compartment had just the me in it. So it was very comfortable the whole way, just eating and drinking and sleeping and reading (Genghis Khan: The Making of the Modern World), a great read. . . we are all Mongols in the end, and he owned the entire known world. Ah!

Day 2: Just sleeping, a beer at a station stop, back to the bed, read, sleep.

Day 3: Getting it down. . . more of the same. Standing in the corridor and watching scenery roll by. Meeting the usual crowd (besides the Korean ambassador and family and servants) of travelers. . . a couple from Chile out for about six months, twin brothers from Finland about three months, Swedish couple about the same (she is a professional musician and salsa teacher, and after being cooped up for a few days they got out their MP3 player and rocked the platform at one stop). Most folks are doing about the same route as me, Europe to Russia to Mongolia to China, and then variously continuing on down into Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam) and beyond. The folks from Chile are going *overland by bus* from China to India! Gawd, I couldn't imagine doing that again.

Day 4: Unremitting scenery of birch tree stands and flat lands and scrub. . . today is bath day! Cold shower in the little wash area between berths (ah, first class!), so I filled up the hot water pot from the supply at the end of the car and did the old cup-sponge bath thing. It's been a while, but it still works.

and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MAKI! She is in Tokyo and I am somewhere, and it is twenty-eight years of wonderful times, and of course even longer if you count the courting era. The great friends and wonderful times are making me smile. . .

Day 5: Passport Control! OK, I gotta relate this in some detail because it was too serious/comical. . . a five-hour+ stop, the soldiers come on the train and take our passports, all very stern and tough. . . and then dissapear! The train moves about two-hundred yards, we all get out and wander off into the dust-bowl of a nowhere frontier town and drink beer (and salsa dance) for a few hours. Ordered back on the train, we wait. Of course, during stops they lock the bathrooms because they just empty out onto the tracks. . . well, hours of beer drinking and no toilets made for some comical situations that I won't detail. . . they come back. I am ordered out of my compartment. A tough, no-nonsense school-teacher nazi-in-panyhose officer comrade olive drabs (w/ colonel-like epulets and all) with a holstered pistol and some sort of automatic rifle over her shouldr, starts directing a younger soldier on how to search. She was obviuosly in training. . . she made her pull up my Persian carpets, search the drain, and then. . . climb up on my bunk, straddling with one foot on the bunk and the other on the door-knob to the washroom, open the light fixture, take the fan off and search behind it, pull the bedding apart, take the light-switch covers off, and more! Apparantly there is a big smuggling problem with Mongolians bringing stuff into China (not the American taking stuff out), and this soldier was being trained.

Well. Unlike the officer soldier, the searcher soldier, in olive-green fatigues, was a chubby blond about 24 years old, hair in a pony-tail, climbing all over the place while me and stern-woman (hair in bun, the whole mean thing) sat in the doorway watching. I wished I had my camera when she was straddling the bunk and doorknob, bending over, fatigues spread oh-so-tight across her ghetto-booty ass-- about six inches from our faces. Then she turned around to search something else and her crotch was splayed in our face (a "wide-on," as Ed would put it) and her blouse was about to burst! I had to smile (if not cheer), and I think her nazi-mommie boss even wanted to but just couldn't. . . oh, for a picture of that! After my compartment they did a quick search of everything else and left. 90 minutes later the train took off. . . and we all got to take a piss. Ahhhhhhh!

Day 6: The scenery has changed. . . mountains and grasslands. . . pastures, wooden corrals. . . we passed Lake Baikal at midnight Moscow time (the train schedule ran on Moscow time until Mongolia). . . which I suddenly realized would be about 6:00 am Ulaan Baatar time. . . train-time lag is different from jet lag, I suddenly realized. I went to bed.
Well, so that is it in a long nut-shell. I got into the station and had a pleasant surprise when somebody from the university/Center for Mongolian Studies was waiting for me at the station with a driver! That *never* happens, right?

So I have been wandering the city-- a truly bleak, concret-and-garbage-and-dust sort of place. There are ten million bars and "pubs," and Sunday AM I was already accosted by several dodgy drunks! I am told that the Mongolians make the Russians look like beginners.

Japanese and Koreans everywhere (Japanese works better at my hotel than English). . . Mongolia is selling mineral rights like crazy and trying to build, build, build. But more of that later, and hopefully some pics as well.

So I just treated myself to the Japanese bath at my hotel and a massage. . . ahhhhhh, the best massage I have ever had, actually. No trendy new-age music or other mood-crap (the Simpons were even on the TV playing softly for the massage folks while they worked), just low lights, about six massage tables, and the strongest massage I have ever had. Cost for about 90 minutes: $20.

It helped a great deal with "train legs," a new phenomena for me, but a bit like "sea legs:" I still have this odd leaning and rocking sensation when I am sitting still-- after 6 days on the train, perhaps normal?

OK, enough for now. I miss all you guys and hope to hear from you.

Day

Ulaanbaatar Days. . .

Well. I don't have much time to post anything these days, as this seminar keeps me pretty busy. I must say that it is a surprisingly good time, at least intellectually. I have never in my life traveled in a group, and I was a bit worried about that. . . actually, I am most always pretty snobby when I see the foreign group pile off the bus in a herd, complete with guide. I think the only times I have ever even been with a single person (other than family) is with Mike in Panama and Karl in India. However, this is working out well. The group, about ten folks (about half from the University of Missouri, which makes me feel at home from my undergrad days in Missouri), is all a different bunch of folks, and pretty much all but one or two are drinking buddies already (and later on I found the Bourbon drinker in Marian). And the seminar part is amazing-- I am really getting more out of learning the easy way then I ever have in a foreign port. Mostly we have one or two lectures a day and then visit museums, monuments, temples, or whatever at other times, and then go off in small groups for dinner and drinking in the evening. The lectures are incredible-- from the Deputy Director of the Unified Intelligence Agencies giving a briefing on security matters to laughing lamas babbling about Buddhism, it works really well. I am learning tremendously about this place.

BUT Ulaanbaatar (UB, as it is called) is still is right up there with the dustiest, concrete-ugliest, construction-and-butt-ugly city I have ever been in. Broken concrete, pavement heaves, dust and dirt. Like Russia, incredibly hot in the sun but it can drop down to below freezing in the nights, little things have can have huge impacts on the ecology of the place. . . a little less moisture one year, and the grasses don't grow the next, so the herds chomp everything down and what little moisture there is is not retained, and a five-year cycle of brown follows. One lecture said that current global warming predictions are for the Gobi to entirely consume Mongolia within fifty years!
But, there is nonetheless a positively euphoric feeling in the air-- everybody is so excited and pleased with liberation from Russia (1991 or so) and the possibilities. They have lots of minerals to sell (with all sorts of interesting problems, from corruption to too much money) and everybody is way up-beat. So its cool!

There are Soviet-like statues everywhere in town-- Lenin of course, and their own revolutionary heroes as well. Stalin, who offed almost 10% of the population back in the later '30's, was removed and now is the centerpiece of a disco right down the street! LOL!

Tomorrow we leave for a four day jeep trek through the steppes, hot on the trail of Chingis Khan. Chingis Khan (Ghengis Khan) is a god over here. If you don't know, he went from being an orphaned herder/hunter kid in a tribe that nobody really ever heard of (the Mongols) to having perhaps the world's largest empire within about 25 years. As they say, his horses drank the waters from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, from the Vietnam shorelines to the Siberian, from Moscow to Korea. He has become an incredibly potent foil to the Western cultural/political incursions, and most all Asians take great pride in their Chingis. . . but here in Mongolia, he is a cult fetish item. Everything is Chingis, from the beer to the vodka to the candy bars to the images in the Buddhist temples to the pics on the cash. So, following the ancient "Secret History of the Mongols," we have a number of jeeps and are going out to the steppes to retrace his early life. . . feels a bit like a pilgrimage! We have ger camps for the evenings as we make about a 1,300 km journey: http://www.mongoliacenter.org/IFDS2008



OK, gotta run. More later.

The Chingis Khan Pilgrimage

OK-- This is a mess, the computer is puking, I am pissed at dumb computers (among other things) and outa this computer cafe!! Maybe another day. . .



Well, we rolled out of UB in our three-van caravan early Friday, ready to start tracing some of the Great Khan's life stories-- visiting where he was born, captured the thieves who stole his eight horses, perhaps died, was crowned Great Khan, and the like. Two Russian vans and one Mitsubishi-- tho the Japanese van looks nicer, it will turn out that the Russkie vans are sturdier in the vast, vast steppes that we will traverse.

All are four-wheel drive, but the Russian vans seem to have better suspension and handle the fact of virtually no roads at all better than the Mistsubishi, which likes paved roads. . . unfortunately there are none.

Along the way, we stopped for lunch at a sort of "town". . . and in my wanderings I wandered into a snooker room-- I have never played, but with the encouragement of the guys and a few shots of the ever-present vodka, I took a few shots and missed every time! Oh well-- the vodka was good, I only held the crew up for a few minutes and was able to snooze a bit through the grinding ride.





As I said, Chingis Khan is huge over here (about 120 feet huge, in this case):





Well, I gotta see a man about a horse. . . .this was the line that we all used when we made a pit stop. . . in the beginning, we would all politely wander off in different directions, hopefully discrete, the girls in particular preferring to crouch and pee behind a hill or whatever. . . by the end of day one, however, we would pile out of the van and if somebody made it as far as around to the back of the van that was considered rather polite of them. . . we are slowly getting weirder. . .

More of the steppe



Well, let's see if this works better today.

So, after an easy start, we headed off-road, sometimes on various ruts but often just lurching across the grasslands, fording rivers, and making our own way. We had an anthropoligist in the lead van who had spent most of his life secretly studying Chingis Khan-- the subject was taboo during the Soviet era, a possible nationalist rallying point that was forbidden. He navigated sort of like sailors of old-- just knowing the mountains and terrain, sometimes a familiar ger. Horsies, sheep, goats, cows, and the now-and-then camel everywhere, with the occasional herder boy attending the flock but mostly just grazing. Whenever you hear a population count for a "province" (soum) they also always give the livestock headcount!

The vans too had a life of there own: Chingis, the lead van; Jamuga, the life-long friend turned traitor (who now and then tried to pass the lead van), and then the Von Khan Van, ruled by the German prof, who saw to it that nobody pilfered from the provisions, kept in her van (I was happy to be in her van, just in case the group thing went weird). Sometimes it seemed like we were racing around like the horses, just going here and there as we liked, playing games.


For food we did the traditional thing: drop in unannounced at whatever ger (yurt) happened to be nearby-- in such a sparsley populated land unexpected callers both needed to taken care of and provided a bit of entertainment. Of course, with such a large crew we would usually ask at one ger where a ger might be that could feed us, and then wander off in search of it. Here is my favorite. As the grandma and grand-daughter were getting tea and food for us, gramps road back in on his horse, slilghtly bemused to see this gaggle of foreigners poaching his food. . . and then out came the home-made yogurt vodka-- damn, it had a punch. The fella kinda reminds me of Captain Bob from our marina. . .



They live far away from everything-- no cars, electric, nada. Some gers have vehicles, solar panels and satellite dishes, but most have none.

Capture The Flags! Unite The Nations!

Well, the Chingis Khan spirit has taken over-- or perhaps it was the vodka. In any case, I decided that my little-guy Napolean comples could only be assuaged by uniting all of the "people of the felt tents" into one tribe, and beginning my conquest of the universe. So a midnight run around the ger camp. . . one flag, two flags, ALL THE FLAGS! All mine!















And since all the girls (given the large number of folks from U. of Missouri on this trip, I have reverted to Midwestern language) are now my chattel, I gave Nicole to the "dreamy" Marine that she fawns over. . .











UB never looked so good!

Well, our 1300 kilometer voyage came to a dusty end-- only one vehicle mishap (fortunately we were packing two spare distributers), and one forty-minute sandstorm that we just straight on through, buffeted by the blasts of sand and generally unable to see anything at all in any direction. I must say we were all quite happy to get back to the rubble and dust of the city. The Japanese bath in my hotel is probably clogged from all the dirt I washed off.

And so the seminar ended with a farewell party at a local brewery.

And now I am off on my own, doing some of the meeting and planning that I actually came to do, in advance os several Mongolia/Buddhism projects for next year at Smith. And, of course, I ended up shit-faced drunk at a political fundraiser-- the future PM, most of the Democrat party parliment members important lamas, artists, and movie stars. I didn't really have the right duds, but . . .



Glenn Mullin, an old colleague going back as far as 1974 in Dharamsala, escorted me around and all I can say is that it was one of those things that could only happen on the road. . . and I am glad I wasn't driving!


And that's it! Tomorrow morning I am back on the train-- the Trans Mongolian Railway for two days to Beijing! I look forward to being the practice-object for all of the Chinese who have been ordered to be super tourist-friendly for the Olympics.

See ya!

Last night in Ulaanbaatar, First Day in Beijing

Onwards to Beijing

Well, this will be short-- they don't seem to have much concern for fast and everywhere Web access here in Beijing-- perhaps info-control? In any case, I have yet to find an internet cafe, and my hotel is charging nearly $20/hour (up from 80 cents/hour in Ulaanbaatar), and the connection sucks.

In any case.

I had one more great night and evening with Glenn Mullin (billion-seller Buddhist author ex-pat Canadian), talking about our future symposium at Smith on the rebirth of Buddhism in Mondolia. We were also joined by a another schemer on the project, Lhagvademchig, and then the evening (and vodka) wore on and artists, film makers (one working with National Geo and one with NHK), academics and a few others joined us. . . I called it an early night 'cause of my 8:05 am train, and perhaps best that I did so as the night looked to continue on.

The train was a joy to get on-- after six days on the first part from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar, it almost felt like home. . . and lo and behold, I even had the same conductor!! And, again, tho the train had more passengers than before, I had a first-class two-berth to myself. Two days felt like too short a time for sleeping and catching up, but what can you do?

The diner car was incredible! Carved wood everything in Mongolian motif (pics later), great staff, and good cold beer. Alas, when I got up in the morning the car had changed and I now had a fairly sterile Chinese car with old-school surly Chinese staff. Sneered at my Mongolian money--bad blood 'tween these peoples, for good reason on both sides. . . nothing in Beijing even mentions the fact that it was Khubalai Khan that founded the city with its broad avenues (mostly for the galloping Mongol horses), and nothing in the massively massive Forbidden City (now the Palace Museum, site of the former Imperial Palace) mentions that it was Khubalai who originally built the "Forbidden City" as a Mongolian refuge in the middle of the newly built capital, where only Mongols could enter and they lived nomad-like in their beloved gers/yurts. . .

No border laughter like last time. . . tho, because the rails are different guage in China and Russia/Mongolia, they actually spent about three hours lifting our cars up on jacks and *changing* the wheels! That was impressive. The customs folks freaked a bit when they found my Russian book on the Mongolian temple in St. Petersburg w/ a picture of a Tibetan monk on the cover. . . assumed that I must be covert for the Dalia-clique, likely trying to snuff the Olympic torch. So they questioned me and searched all printed material fairly carefully (they missed the 2 kilos of coke, fourteen illegal Mexicans, and four brothels that I had stowed under the bunk), and in the end let me go.

Beijing is wonderful-- a complete change from the rubble and concrete and dust of Mongolia. All new and wonderful and fancy w/ "Olympic face" everywhere. Nonetheless, there is a stark difference 'tween the completely modern and forward-looking folk of Ulaanbaatar and the urbanites of Beijing, who still feel a bit like they are in a fifties movie. Even in fashion, the long-legged hotties of Russia are no more, and the tight-jeaned Britany-belly girls of Mongolia are also sorely missed. Everybody is very sincere, sort of like earnest university students bent on furthering self and nation, sort of nerdy-sweet old fashioned looking. And as far as I can tell, Beijing shuts down around 10:30. I am sure that there is a lot I don't know yet, but so far the long arm of Mao is still lurching about. . .

And the joint is hoppin' for the Olympics! Everything is spruced up or on its way, the TV regularly has public-service spots showing how to help old people across the street, prohibiting spitting in public places, exhorting smiling, and the like. Otherwise it is news spots on the progress of the torch. . . and let's not forget the omnipresent mascots:
Beibei is the Fish, Jingjing is the Panda, Huanhuan is the Olympic Flame, Yingying is the Tibetan Antelope and Nini is the Swallow. When you put their names together -- Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni -- they say "Welcome to Beijing." They will close me down for this copyright infringement, as they are trying really hard to show the world that they can respect that sort of thing. . . yeah, sure. . . I bought my Olympic crap off the street for a buck or two. In the stores they have everything from T-shirts and keychains to $5,000 commemorative coins, five-foot tall cloisone Olympic vases, stuffed mascots, and more.

Of course the earthquake also gets a lot of press. . . I hate to be an ass, but between the Olympics and a national tragedy the media is working it for all its worth in terms of national image. I wanna be a big fat panda!

Things are a bit cheaper here, so that is good. . . I swore off buying more crap that I don't need, but I am now filling up on it. . . Olympic rip-off hats, Olympic glow-in-the-dark electro spin tops, Mao-this and Mao-that. . .

And finally, the greatest thing of all! My hotel, for $93/night, turns out to be a really great and even luxerious joint! Nearly five-star, I would say. Huge king-sized bed, amenities up the wazoo, about ten huge restaraunts, free gym (I am so Panda-fat from all the beer I can hardly move) and sauna, and just about everything one could want, including central location about ten minutes walk from Tienanmen, Forbidden Palace, the shopping districts, and all that. The only downside is that in the hotel everything is way, way overpriced (to make up for the cheapo internet rate)? The beer that in the store costs about fifty cents, about a buck or so in most restaraunts, costs $7 in the hotel, and I can't afford the restaraunts. Which, of course, is just fine because I am slowly getting used to the city (figured out the subway today) and have taken to getting lost in small weird neighborhoods stolling, eating and drinking. . . today got invited into a majhong game (which I don't understand) by some totally earthy kind of sweaty guys and swillin' mamas. . . they forced me to smoke foul cigarettes and drink skanky Chinese bootleg something. . . probably full of lead. Oh well.

OK, enough. This will cost me two days of drinking budget!!

I'll be back in a few days-- look forward to seeing you all!!!

PS-- I am about too old for this solo travel. . . after a lifetime of it, from now on I am dragging Maki, even if she wants to go to Europe more than Asia!!