The most beautiful mountains I have ever seen…

So – after almost 2 months in China (I still can’t believe I crossed the whole bloody country east to west!) - I find myself in Kyrgyzstan. These are some words I’ve never thought I’d say… Funnily enough, crossing from China into “Kyrgy-land” (as we’re affectionately calling it) felt a bit like homecoming: from the land of eating rice with chopsticks and of absolutely no way of communicating with the locals unless one speaks Mandarin Chinese to the land of post-soviet architecture in the cities and the familiar diet of bread, meat and potatoes (all of which I grew up with). Plus I can actually talk to the locals as I remember surprisingly much of my primary school Russian!

But the absolute unexpected highlight of Kyrgyzstan is the landscape outside the cities. 92% of this country is covered with mountains and pretty spectacular mountains at that. Everywhere you look you see glaciers, snow-covered mountain peaks, lakes, streams perfect for white-water rafting, herds of horses and sheep, yurts, and abundance of hiking trails. I have been told that Kyrgyzstan is one of the most beautiful countries in the world but still nothing quite prepared me for how beautiful exactly it is. It is virtually impossible to take a bad picture of its mountains and sunsets (which I hope the new pictures on my Snapfish website prove).

Some of the highlights of my last few weeks in Kyrgyzstan include:

Zety Uguz: extremely picturesque mountaineering camp where we camped for couple nights in below 0 Celsius temperatures, almost continuous rain and – inevitably – heaps and heaps of mud. It was by far the coldest temperatures I’ve ever camped in. Most of us slept in several layers of clothing, in our all-season sleeping bags and under several blankets. And my nose was still freezing cold and red when I woke up. To keep ourselves from freezing to death we resorted to entertainment such as drinking insane amounts of Kyrgyz vodka and singing Russian revolutionary songs by the campfire (don’t ask me why but it does help with the cold weather). Oh, and let’s not forget a whole lamb roasted on the fire that some local guys cooked for us… Amazing…

Altyn Arasan (which means Golden Spa): another absolutely breathtaking spot in the Kyrgyz mountains where we camped for few nights. It serves as a mountaineering camp and has an added benefit (which we happily indulged in) of hot baths with steaming hot water from the underground springs. Nothing better after a freezing cold night and a day of hiking than jumping in your bikini (or without) into the hot spring with an obligatory glass of vodka.  

Lake Ysyk-kol: we spent few days driving around the entire lake, camping along the way. It was such an amazing change from the rain, mud and snow of the high-altitude mountains: we camped directly at the lake waterfront, swimming and sunbathing all day in the glorious hot weather. Swimming in this lake was a very memorable experience with its crystal blue water and snow-capped mountain peaks at both sides of the lake. Water temperature was similar to that in the Baltic Sea in summertime, which means that most of us Europeans jumped right in but most Australians wouldn’t dare. We spent the evenings by the campfire (those Russian revolutionary songs again!) eating the fish that our local guide caught in the lake. I even learned how to cook vegetarian goulash and raspberry tart! This was a perfect example of what Donna  - our lovely crew member – said: “when you wake up in the morning on these overlanding trips you’re never entirely sure what and where you’ll be doing in the evening”. So true: in the morning I woke up in the freezing cold mountain and jumped into the hot springs at 6 am. By 5 pm on the same day I was swimming and sunbathing in summer weather by Ysyk-kol lake. Life is amazing!

Next stop: Kazachstan!

More of my favourite quotes about travel and life

“Travel of not just the seeing of the sights. It’s the change that goes on – temporary or permanent – in the ideas of living”

“Traveller sees what he sees. Tourist sees what he came to see”

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware”

“The true mistery of the world is the visible, not the invisible” (Oscar Wilde)

“As you walk, eat and travel be aware of who you are, otherwise you’ll miss most of your life” (Buddha)

“I soon realized that no journey carries us far unless – as it extends into the world around us – it goes an equal distance into the world within” (Lillian Smith)

“Life is too important to be taken seriously” (Oscar Wilde)

“The criterion is how you treat the weak. The measure of civilized behaviour is compassion” (Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari)

“Safari in Swahili means “journey”. It has nothing to do with animals. Someone on safari is just away and unobtainable and out of touch” (Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari)

“Home became a routine. I was a sitting duck in my predictable routine: people knew when to call me, they knew when I would be at my desk. I was in such regular touch it was like having a job – a mode of life I hated. Being available at any time in the totally accessible world seemed to be a pure horror”  (Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari)

“My typical travelling mood: hoping for the picturesque, expecting misery, braced for the appalling. Happiness was unthinkable for although happiness is desirable it’s a banal subject for travel” (Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari)

“Why did this man’s zealotry make me so uneasy? He seemed a nice fellow. He said he accepted everyone. But he didn’t listen. He was a true believer. His zealotry worried me because it was zealotry. Zealots never listen” (Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari)

Who knew that desert life is so beautiful

We spent the last few days crossing the Taklamakan desert. 

It’s that huge empty patch of yellow on your maps of China in the western part of the country, going almost up to the border with Kyrgystan (which we’ll be crossing in few days). 


I absolutely fell in love with the Taklamakan. It’s huge, empty, totally inhospitable, sand dunes every direction you 
look, the only vehicles on the only crossing road are huge cargo trucks. Its name means “go in and you won’t come out”. Well I proved them wrong! We camped each night in the middle of the sand, cooked dinner, made a campfire, looked at stars from the roof of the truck. Gusty winds in the sandy dunes mean one thing: sand gets absolutely everywhere. In each piece of your clothing, in each opening of your body, in your food, tent, teeth and toothpaste. You learn to like crunchy meat and beer for dinner. 
And it’s still so amazingly beautiful out there. Just before sunset the wind picks up and the loose sand does its pretty dance on the top of the dunes. And Taklamakan even has its very own oasis town of Turpan – green (they invented their own ancient clever irrigation system), bloody hot as it is after all one of the hottest places on earth (temperatures here can get up to 70 Celsius). I loved it there…

Life doesn’t end at 50.

Admit it, you’re probably secretly thinking that the exciting things in life happen to you until you’re about 40 years old, maybe bit older if you’re lucky, but anything after that is all about serious  boring office work, tending to your garden, looking after children and soon after grandchildren and trying to age as gracefully as possible. Well, one of the absolutely amazing benefits of my Big Trip is finding evidently everywhere I look that it’s absolutely not the case. There are several 60-plus year olds in my team (among them my favourite Australian couple I have written about before) who are having an absolute blast on this trip and are more excited about overlanding life than the folks half their age on the truck. I love talking to them about the travels they have done in their 50s and 60s, and still are planning to do. Some of them have travelled more of the globe in a more adventurous rough ways that most people I know. I find their life stories very inspiring.

Another example that life doesn’t have to end at 50 or 60 years old was a German couple we met on the road (to be specific, in a nasty smelly toilet on a Chinese petrol station in the middle of nowhere). This German couple, easily in their 60s, was driving in their 4 wheel drive with a sleeping cabin across China, central Asia, Nepal and then planning to head to Thailand, Cambodia and rest of South East Asia. And this was only a small part of their Round the World itinerary: they were planning to spend the next 5 years travelling like this. Every year they were planning to spend June, July and August back in Germany with their family and friends, and the rest of the year on the road. Can you believe it? They are grey hair grandparents driving around the world and changing their own 150 kg tires on their monster truck! How many grandparents do you know back home having the guts to do anything like that??? Inspiring...

Have any of you ever slept on the Great Wall of China? Ha ha, I have!

I got this amazing and once in a lifetime opportunity on the Jiayugnan western section of the Wall. It is a small but absolutely amazing and completely non-touristy section of the Wall. It has been renovated by a couple of locals with their private money over the last couple of decades. They charge a small fee to camp in the area and to climb the Wall. We bush camped at the base of the Wall, washed in a cold wild stream nearby, cooked and ate a simple camp dinner by the camp fire and then several of us climbed the Wall (steep and sweaty) in the dark with our sleeping bags, wine and “fire water” (local and very strong spirit). It was an amazing night. Lots of laughter and telling ghost stories and taking amazing night pictures of the Wall and the mountains. About 6:30 am it was time for an amazing sunrise on the Great Wall of China. Truly an unforgettable experience...

Speaking of ghost stories, I feel obliged to share with you a little night-time scary story that bunch of Australians on my truck have been trying to frighten me with. They have told me about a very scary animal called drop bear that lives in Australia and kills quite a few people every year. These creatures (that I’ve never heard of before despite having visited Australia twice) look like Koala bears and are vicious man-eaters. When you’re walking in the forest, they drop down from the tree when you least expect it, land on your shoulders and start chewing off parts of your body. Evidently they’re deadly, everyone is scared of them and the safest way to protect yourself is to stay away from the forest. Well, as ashamed as I am to admit it, it was a while before I found out that the whole story about drop bears is complete fiction and my evil Australian friends made it up just to scare me

Curiosities of everyday life in inland China:

[pictures still to come]

Over the past month or so I have carefully and with (sometimes morbid) fascination observed the curiosities of day-to-day life in inner China and especially the “interesting” challenges that await a non-Chinese speaking foreigner in the provinces and villages where the locals possibly have never seen a foreigner before. Here are some examples, which I hope you find amusing because I certainly did:

Trying to get an Iranian visa photo done in China: Iran is one of the many countries I’m planning to visit in the next several months (although, in the case of Iran, “hoping to visit” is a more appropriate wording as evidently they refuse entry visa applications randomly and without explanation, so I actually have no idea if I’ll be able to enter the country). For my entry visa into Iran I need a number of different invitation letters and documents, among which is a visa photo of me wearing a black head scarf. I didn’t get this done in UK (no idea why, it would have been easy enough) so I needed to get it done on route. In one of the cities we were visiting I found a photo store, which appeared to do passport photos. Now all I needed to do is somehow explain to the store clerk (who of course spoke not a single word of English) that I need a visa photo for Iran (not passport photo because they are a different size), with black headscarf (not any other colour because my visa application will then be refused), with white background (not any other colour for the same reason as above) and absolutely no hair showing and no smile. Hmmm, let’s just say that it was quite an adventure and an exhausting exercise of body language to explain to the store clerk what exactly I was after. But, after about 2 hours in the store I got my photos: 2 visa and 2 passport because till the end the clerk wasn’t 100% sure which one I needed. I also had to endure bunch of local people in the shop pointing at and loudly commenting on my eyes, which, against black scarf and tanned face, appeared freakishly blue in the picture. Now I have my Iran visa pictures safely stored in my wallet and all that remains is to keep our fingers crossed that the lovely Iranian authorities will let me into their lovely country. I’ll keep you all posted on that one...

Trying to buy white wine in China: in the spirit of the preparations for going camping (i.e. buying lots of booze) we went to a supermarket with an ambitious objective of buying some wine (as the girls were getting sick and tired of drinking cheep Chinese beer). Red wine was easy enough: there were bottles of it stacked on the shelf so all we needed to do is choose one. White wine was bit more tricky. There was none of it on the shelves so we needed to ask the store clerk if they even had any. Of course, as in 99% of the cases, the locals didn’t speak any English. After many, many failed attempts to explain what we’re after, we did what we thought was a simple charade: we pointed at the bottle of red wine and then we pointed at a white shirt of a Chinese customer in the store. The store clerk’s eyes lit up and she said a relieved “aaaaaahhhhh!!!”. We thought “yes, she got it, we’ll be drinking white wine in no time”. Well, not so quickly. The store clerk went to the storage room for a minute and emerged with a box of.... laundry powder with whitener in it J We gave up our hopes of drinking white wine that night...

Trying to buy tampons in China: hmmm, that is a continuous experience, still going on in every city supermarket I get my hands on and still prving to be an unsuccessful mission. I am coming to a conclusion that they don’t sell tampons in  this country. Miles and miles of fully stocked shelves with pads and panty liners of every imaginable brand, size and colour. Tampons – not a single one in sight. And asking a store staff girl if they have tampons was an adventure in itself. I was using every bit of every language known to man to explain to the poor and more (embarrassed by the minute) girl that I don’t want that thing that you put in your underwear at certain time of the month (i.e. a pad) but instead I want that thing that you put inside of you at certain time of the monh (i.e. a tampon). No luck. By now the entire female store staff have gathered and nobody had any clue was I was on about

Trying to ask where the toilet is in a restaurant in China: toilets in restaurants in China can be tricky to find. The more remote the city / village, the more obscure the location of the restaurant toilet: in back storage rooms, on the rooftop, in the restaurant owner’s private apartment, in the neighbour’s apartment etc. We were at  a restaurant in a small town and, after couple of beers, I was desperate to go to the toilet. All my attempts to ask the waitresses where the toilet was failed. Finally, getting desperate, I crouched on the floor (as all toilets in China are crouching style) and made a peeing sound “psssss, psssss”. The waitress burst out in a mad attack of laughter and started waiving over the other waitresses to take a look at the crazy foreigner pretend-peeing on the floor in the middle of the restaurant. But my mission was accomplished: they did show me where the bloody toilet was and it was one of the best toilet stops I’ve ever had

Trying to buy 5 kilos of lamb meat on a local market in China: the rules of the overlanding life say that when we’re camping, we cook our own meals. There’s all the basic cooking equipment on the truck, gas stove and cook book with plenty of simple recipes. We have 4 cook teams of 4 and we take turns planning meals, shopping for them and cooking them. Few days ago my cook team was up. We wanted to make lamb stew. We went to a local meat market in a small town. No butcher had 5 kilos of fresh good meat that we wanted, just small leftover scraps. One butcher was extra nice – he signalled for us to wait 10 minutes and watch over his store while he’s gone. He jumped on his old little motorbike and disappeared. So we sat there minding his meat stand with the locals quickly gathering to stare at the strange white people behind the meat counter at their local market. After about 10 minutes the butcher came back – with a whole animal on the back seat of his motorbike, just killed and skinned! He emptied the blood and removed the main bones right in front of us with the biggest knife I’ve ever seen. I have blood spatter on my shoes to prove it!