Sorry!!

Sorry for the slow reply to anyone who's actually reading this. China so far has been an absolute whirlwind trip, much like the country itself. 

Hong Kong was absolutely fantastic.

 It felt like we were in New York, not China, it was that modern and easy to navigate. We were spoiled with English menus and (relatively) easy to navigate metro systems. We felt mighty sure that we had China figured out when we moved on to Shanghai.

Shanghai was our first experience with "real" China. (Hong kong being a half British, half Chinese country of its own; much more western than anywhere else we'll be heading) Suddenly the food was much more "adventurous" and there were no kindly older Chinese fellows with perfect English to help us when we get lost on the metros. For all of its architectural innovation and technology advancements, Shanghai was still very much "real China". 2 days there and we still managed to get on the wrong train to the airport. But a quick correction and seats on a train headed the other direction and we were on our way again. 

Another thing to note is China is strictly anti-Facebook. Of course, smarter minds than I have figured out ways around this, so we're not completely cut off, just more limited than we normally would. Sorry if its taking a while for me to respond to anyone. 

So that brings us up to today. One early morning flight from Shanghai to Beijing and we're in rather cool hostel recommended by a pair of British guys we met in the last hostel. (Thanks to Rusty!) We're a 10 minute walk from the forbidden city and Tiananmen Square, which we'll tackle the day after tomorrow. Tomorrow is reserved for a trek out to the Great Wall. And today is made for wandering the local area, finding food and making new friends! 

Hope all is well back home! 

Mongolia Surprises

Mongolia is just full of surprises!

I was met at my hostel at 5am by my tour guide for the week. We did the half hour ride back to the airport in relative quiet, our silence matching the world outside. 

The Ulaanbaatar airport faintly reminds me of a soviet-era bus station. In fact, most things in Mongolia are faintly Russian-era. The buildings, the language, the food. They share a border with Russia and you can definitely see the influence all around you. 

A quick hour and a half flight south in a tiny propeller plane brought us to Dalanzadgad, (see? Tell me that doesn't sound Russian) the biggest urban area in Gobi province. And I use that term very loosely. The one story squat building had exactly 3 large rooms...pre security, departures area, and a hallway where arrivals came in. Luggage was in a second building consisting of a hole cut in the wall, 3 foot ramp and a flat platform to catch your gear after it was brought from the plane by hand cart. The best thing about it was a dilapidated ping pong table sitting in the luggage room. I seriously thing every airport needs to look into installing one, it made tome spent waiting for luggage a breeze!

When finally our bags came through, we met our driver and we were off!

Now, looking at a map of Mongolia you see the usual...long lines of highway snaking from one town to the next, towns and villages dotted along the way. The road system here couldn't be further than that if it tried! I should have been tipped off when there wasn't even enough money to pave the highway that runs from it's only international airport to the country capital. The "highways" in Mongolia consist of single lane dirt track, rutted and bumpy as hell, cut through the scrubby semi-desert. No gravel, no organized lanes of travel, and definitely no signposts telling you where to turn. I finally asked how the driver knew where he was going when everything looks exactly the same. The only answer I got was "he's Mongolian, he knows". 

Thank god he did know, because we arrived at our first camp after 2 hours of bumping around on the "road". A ger is a traditional Mongolian house, akin to a teepee back home. Only over 50% of Mongolians still lead a nomadic herder lifestyle, so the ger is still very much in regular use.

Approximately 20 feet wide, with a sloping roof and 3 foot tall door, a ger is sturdier than a regular camping tent, and slightly warmer. Regular wooden beds sit inside the circular dome, the roof a series of wooden poles that look like a collapsing wagon wheel, with 2 larger beams at the centre holding everything upright.  Everything wooden is painted very decoratively in a show of great pride.

I hate to cut this short, but it's time for dinner! More later!

 

Day 4

Day 3

Day 2

Day 1

Lessons learned today...

- apparently "domestic departures" in China also includes Mongolia. Knowing that would have saved much confusion. 

- it's probably a bad idea to try jumping in the air for a photo op. while perched on a hoodoo. With a bad ankle. Ouch!

- spending almost an hour slowly spinning in circles staring at the unbelievable explosion of stars in the desert sky completely takes your breath away, in all the right ways. 

Awesome travel moment:

- playing an actual game of pingpong while waiting for my luggage to arrive. 

Just a note...

I'm just waiting for my guide to pick me up, I should be out of contact for about 5 days while I'm in the Gobi desert (unless camels now have wifi) Will drop a line when I'm back!

So far so good!

After 14 hours spent flying, 10 hours in 4 different airports and countless hours awake, I'm finally safe in Mongolia. 

Other than a brief moment of panic when I thought I lost my phone on the plane (no laughing!) the flights were uneventful. 

The drive from the airport into downtown Ulaanbaatar on the other hand was pretty eye opening! Turning left out of the airport parking lot, we were suddenly on a completely washed out single lane dirt track road. No street lights. Certainly no pavement in a long, long time. We crawled slowly through vast empty land, frequently ducking into oncoming traffic to avoid the biggest of potholes. To an outsider it was completely lawless, Mongolians are by far the scariest drivers I've seen (though, they seem to share a love of rainbow flashing LED lights on their cars...even the police van was sporting a pair on the license plate) Despite all that, I still manage to drift off for a minute or two; a testament to just how exhausted I actually am. 

On that note, I'll say goodnight! 

Important travel lesson....

At least I'm still alive?

That was officially the trip home from hell.

I think it's karma...I had a fantastic trip that went with hardly a hitch the whole time. I was bound to be using up all my good luck and due for some bad.  But really?

- Lost my cell.
- Missed my flight in San Francisco.
- Checked my bag on the already-departed flight.
- Had to wait 8 hours for the next flight to Calgary.
- Make that 9 hours.  They lost our plane. No joke.
- Nearly missed THAT flight when they made a sudden gate change clear across the airport while I was having a (very much deserved) drink next to the "correct" gate. Ended up sprinting 10 min across the airport, making it just as they were closing the doors.
- Luggage still MIA.

So anyone who's text me and had no response, sorry, I'm not ignoring you. I'm going later to try and get a new phone asap.

It WAS kind of nice to be in my own bed last night though.


*******************
Currently in: Calgary
Best thing about today: Not dying?  The rest sucked donkey balls.
Listening to: Blalock's February playlist of new indie music. Nothing too outstanding so far?
Where to next: Sleep.  I've been up all night with jet lag. Work is going to SUUUUCK in a few days if I'm still like this.
*******************

Last One

And so suddenly it's my last real day on vacation. How did it come so fast?

Rather than get all sad and philosophical, I'm going to make it count. I'm enjoying a lovely coffee on my balcony overlooking tropical jungles. A bit of shopping and a massage are in order today too, but I think I'm just going to enjoy the moment for now.

**********
Current Location: Alam Puri villas, between Ubud and Denpassar, Bali
Listening to: Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance (oh so fitting, Love this song. Especially since I've been singing the hockey monkey song in my sleep all night!)
Tomorrow: (shudder) the start of 27 hours of flying. And back to reality (double shudder)
***************

I'm going to miss this place

I leave Candidasa tomorrow and head inland, just outside of Ubud.

It's been absolutely pouring rain all afternoon and evening. (so much for it being the "end" of rainy season) the rain has turned into this amazing electrical storm.

So here I sit, in the dark outdoor dining hall, watching lightening over the Indian ocean.

Just amazing.

************
Current Location: Sitting in the dark.
Listening to: waves and thunder (though, I just managed to get "fishing in the dark" stuck in my head too. Awesome)
Craving: Not a damn thing!
************

Should I be weirded out...

That every staff member at this hotel knows my every move? Everyone, from the waitress to the desk clerk to the masseuse has known when I have a dive class, what my plans are for tomorrow, even what time I woke up at. (I slept in today till 1130, missing breakfast. I've been asked 3 times now whether I'm feeling ok, if there was a problem with my sleep, etc.)

I'd normally be creeped out, or at least nervous from a safety standpoint about people knowing my day, but I'm trying to relax. Today's massage helped that :)

***************
Listening to: Gaslight Anthem on my iPod, with the water from the stream that runs through the hotel running in the background. I'm going to miss afternoon tea on the patio, it'll be months before I can do this at home.
*************

Swim with the Fishes

Ok ok, sorry, I've been lazy. I've been in Bali 5 days now on my own, "relaxing". How is it that I've only been able to sleep in 1 day in the whole time I've been away?

I won't bother going back and giving details about Siem Reap, or Angkor Wat, you can see the photos. The drive back to Bangkok was a long one, and the day was made even longer by deciding to stay out partying with the group till 230 in the morning in the streets of Bangkok, then heading for the airport at 3, for a 6 am flight to Bali. Altogether I was awake something around 33 hours. But that brings you to where I am now!

Bali has been absolutely fantastic! It's hot and unbelievably humid, I got yet another unexpected sunburn and I come home every day absolutely exhausted, but it's been awesome!

The hotel is absolutely top notch! There's only 13 or so rooms, each it's own bungalow complete with king sized 4 poster bed and outdoor washroom. The shower is a treat, about 5 feet long (I took a bubble bath my first day...it's the first tub I've been able to fully stretch my legs in!) and made of marble tiles. If I could find a way to bring it as a souvenir, I would.

My last 3 days have been filled and busy ones! Deciding I was tougher than my fear of water, I signed up for a course teaching open water diving. It's more than the standard intro course some resorts offer. Before the first class I was given a 300 page manual and told to study. It was a lot to take in! Early the next morning I met with the dive instructor and 1 other student and studied more. The standard course is 2 full days of class training, 1 day pool diving and 1 day out in open water. But classroom is boring, so we we agreed to study hard, do half a day in the pool and go for 2 ocean dives instead. It was fantastic! I wish I would have had a real deep water camera, it's so surreal under the water, especially exploring around a sunken US naval supply ship. What a fantastic experience!

I'm babbling. One side effect of being up all night studying, then working so hard on the diving, I'm absolutely exhausted by dinner time. Luckily I arranged for another spa day tomorrow, so hopefully I'll be feeling more human and less mermaid again soon enough.

**************
Current Location: Candidasa, Bali, Indonesia
Listening to: I completely deny any claims that I may have been singing "Under the sea" at any point today. Nope, certainly not me!
Craving: snack food! I've been so good for almost this whole trip. The time or opportunity to snack hasn't been there almost the entire trip. But what I wouldn't do for a handful of Pringles right now!
*******************

This is why I travel...

Angkor Wat at Sunrise

Temple Dancers

My philosophy on life....

Heavy day in Cambodia

Today was definitely a highlight of the trip, but also probably the heaviest and darkest day of the trip. Today we went to S21 and the killing fields, home to millions of Cambodian deaths in only 3 years.

S21 is a former high school converted into a prison and torture centre. Much of the building hasn't been touched...right down to the blood stains still visible on the floors and the piles of sculls left on the site as a warning to other prisoners. Out of the tens of thousands of people imprisoned there in the 3 years it was operational, only 7 survives remained when it was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1978.

40 minutes out of town is the other half of the story Home to over 20 thousand deaths, part of the overall 2-3 million deaths that took place in the span of 3 years, the killing fields are exactly what they say they are. After the guards had extracted all they could from the prisoners, they were loaded into trucks in the middle of the night and taken to mass graves in the countryside to be exterminated. They warned us it would be graphic, but much of the graves have only been partially excavated, leaving bones and teeth and bits of clothing to come out of the soil over time. It's a completely eerie sensation of having to watch where you step to keep from stepping on people's bones. The centre of the grounds features a huge tower maybe 3-4 stories high, with level upon level of human sculls that they've excavated. It was definitely a lot to take in.

We were eager to get away from all that death. After a fantastic lunch at the foreign correspondents club (where all the rich English journalists hang out) we went to the royal palace (lots of photos there) and finally took a tuktuk back to the hotel.

Now it's time for a quick shower, then a nap before a nice dinner at the best restaurant in town! You're finally caught up!