Not content with trying to make out that Yoshitsune moved to Mongolia and became Ghengis Khan, apparently Jesus also moved to Aomori to become a rice farmer. (Cheers Martin!)
+ 0 - 0 | § ¶Goodbye To All That
Finally got back about a week ago now. The trip home, needless to say, was incredible. It really does work - there really are trains and buses and things that go all over the place, and by daisy-chaining them together you can cover some absurd distances. It takes quite a while, of course, and you have plenty of low moments when you're bored out of your mind and thinking "if I had flown, it would have been over in twelve hours. Instead, I decided to take six hundred and seventy-two hours, at least one hundred and sixty-eight of which will be spent in this train compartment." Red pill blue pill. Anyway. A brief report then - brief because having documented the trip in approximately 300 photographs, that would require me writing 300,000 words to do them justice, which you would clearly never read all of anyway. Thus:
China, for all its palatial glories, long history, Emperors, myths, dragons and, indeed, china, is perplexingly drab. I think it's a lot to do with a sort of post-communist malaise, where simplicity and frugality were key and you weren't supposed to enjoy yourself if you could possibly help it. Outside of the historical sites, it is large, grey, square and functional. It seems entirely the done thing, when hot, to roll your t-shirt up around your armpits to cool off, provided you are a) male and b) have a protruding, floppy belly. No-one reads anything - I never saw a single person reading, whether a book, magazine or newspaper. The only time people had newspapers was to sit on, and even then they only had a single sheet. It wasn't horrible by any means - you felt safe on the streets and ate well in the restaurants, but the place seemed without flourish or frivolity, nothing there that wasn't absolutely needed. Tiananmen Square is enormous, but there isn't a single bench to sit on. Things like that.
Mongolia could have barely been more different. Once into the Gobi, there is just an expanse of sand outside the train, which slowly gets a little greener without ever become earthy. It is flat and wide and empty, and it is stunningly beautiful. Even in the centre of Ulan Bataar you can still see the bare green hills around the edge. The country, if placed over europe, would stretch from the west coast of France to the Eastern border of Poland, and yet has a total population of about 2 million people. Outside of the cities (of which there are about three, all tiny) everyone is a nomadic herder. The vast countryside is dotted with flocks of sheep, cows and horses and small, white gers. There are no crops anywhere ("constipating stuff, vegetables"), instead they live entirely off their animals, so their diet is primarily milk, cheese, yoghurt, mutton, and tea (with salt). I've not decided whether it's a testament to them or a damning slight on the military prowess of the rest of the world that, fuelled by this lifestyle, Ghengis Khan managed to create the largest empire in history, stretching from China to eastern Europe. In fairness, there wasn't a lot in much of it.
Which is probably how the Russians managed to carve out such a vast empire too, because they seem, as a country, clinically incapable of organising anything or fixing anything that's broken. You'd think they preferred it that way. One of the phrases in the guidebook that summed it up for me was 'It's hard to understand why Russians put up with this', which referred to just about everything, from useless service to broken phones and computers to endless queues to being barged into in the street to being ignored to having your money snatched when you're trying to pay. There are not many redeeming features in their culture or history either - the famous Hermitage, full of all that lovely art, was built by Peter the Great when the country was starving and then later stuffed full of treasures siezed from the gentry in the Communist revolution.
Which is why it was such a relief to finally cross the border into Estonia, which has gone from former-soviet-bloc to EU-member-state in a very short amount of time. It felt basically like Europe, a castle town with an old centre of tall spires and cobbled streets. From there, across to Sweden, which was lovely in an I'm-bored-of-writing-now sort of way, and then a boat and a train and back. Whew.