Loco

Emily and Verity have now made it all the way to Beijing, and it appears that this blog is censored there. It must be all the anti-communist propaganda I suppose. Anyway, the upshot is that the girls can’t post themselves, and so they’ve asked me (Jamie) to post the next installment of their adventure for them…

Right, we were going to write separate blogs about the same themes to show our different perspectives of overland journeying, but some slightly more important strategic things have happened in the mean time, so we thought it might be better to tell you about those first.

At the moment we are a bit stuck. Stuck in Beijing, though, which is alright – there could be worse places. However, we have had to spend the first few days of our stay here trying to sort out a way to get to Lhasa, which means that we haven’t even seen the Great Wall yet. We’ve been sent round in circles from embassy, to hotel, to travel company, to train station and have sent many panicky emails to hostels all over China, attempting to find out what a Tibetan Travel Permit really is, whether you have to have one, or whether it exits at all.

On top of this, we are running to a deadline because we are here at the beginning of the Spring Break (Chinese New Year), a two-week national holiday when the transport industry is stretched beyond its means to accommodate the thousands of workers going home to see their families. We felt that even had we managed to get tickets, we would have been depriving someone of the only chance they have this year to be at home (in other words, stealing Christmas). We saw an example of this chaos the other night, when we tried to meet up with a fellow traveller at Beijing Railway Station, of all places. It was so crowded that you had to have a train ticket to even get inside the building and every ticket booth – of which there were about fifty – had its own ridiculously long queue.

Anyway, the Trans-Siberian railway was the most incredible experience. We would highly recommend it to anyone, especially in winter – we’re so glad we braved the cold. On top of avoiding the summer tourists, you also get the chance to experience some of these:

Five things that happen when it’s really, REALLY cold:

• It becomes a standard form of transport to skate along the pavements. (Maybe we should have tried to get to India like this?)
• Your snot freezes when you breathe in through your nose and it tingles, making you feel like you’re turning into an ice sculpture from the inside out.
• It becomes ‘necessary’ to have coffee breaks every half hour, just to warm up.
• Hot air condenses and freezes instantly outside, making strange furry icicles in cow sheds and next to air vents.
• Your ears go hard.

We’re actually missing life on the trains quite a lot, and we’re trying to think about why. For one thing, we met some lovely, genuine people (locals and foreigners), and had the time to have decent conversations with them. We enjoyed the peacefulness of not feeling we HAD to do anything, the result being that everything we did was a bonus. Here in Beijing we feel like we are missing out on the city if we stay in to read a book. (Having said that, being in a city where everyone is on holiday is a nice feeling.) On the trains you would glance up from your book and sometimes be greeted by a startling sunset, spot an enormous vulture-like bird, or see the same (comforting?) telegraph poles, trees, and snow that had been on a loop since Moscow.

Today we did manage to hire some bicycles and climbed to the top of a big hill (made from the earth dug up for the moat of the Forbidden City) to see a spectacular panoramic view of Beijing.

(Jamie) As I said to the girls when they emailed this latest entry to me, they are certainly having an adventure. Best of luck to them finding their way to Tibet…

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One response to “Brussels to Delhi: how dare they censor us!”

1. stan says:
   February 1st, 2008 at 11:49 am

   that sounds totally amazing….! Really interesting post- thanks so much. Good luck with the Tibetan permits!!