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| | | | Journey into the great beyond
From the Mail on Sunday
The waitress in the dining car is as fiercely cheerless as a blizzard and just as lovely. She brusquely slaps the menu on the table. Outside, the landscape between our last stop, Vyatka, and our next, Balyezino, is radiant in the summer sunshine; in here, there is a pronounced chill.
'Salad?' I enquire, already suspecting that this may be a rhetorical question. Salad is off, apparently. 'Nyet salad.' Other diners are chomping on tomato and cucumber starters, but I let it pass. There's a long way to go, and it would be a bad idea to offend the caterers this early in the piece.
'How about the fish?' 'Nyet fish.' She is similarly, loftily - indeed, rather magnificently - dismissive of enquiries after beef, chicken or soup. Eventually, she jabs a pencil to indicate that she might, if pushed, be prepared to serve me omelette with sausage. When it arrives, it's as atrocious as might be expected - the thought of what Russians would consider bad food is a truly horrifying one - but my journey now has a purpose.
The train for the first leg of my journey to Beijing left Moscow's Yaroslavski station last night, and has almost three days to go to Irkutsk, its terminus and my first stopover. I have about 70 hours to get a smile out of Ms Nyet-Salad. I thank her profusely and leave an immense tip. She doesn't flinch.
You can fly from Moscow - an ostensibly capitalist city that is still taking to the free market like a goat to roller-blading - to Beijing - a Communist citadel being triumphally reinvented as a neon-spangled consumerist Babylon, the Great Mall of China - in eight or nine hours.
However, the distance between the two deserves better than being ignored from on high. The 4,887 miles of the Trans-Mongolian route contains forests and deserts, factories and farms, cities and villages, Nike super-stores and statues of Lenin, two border crossings involving searches, and hours of mysterious waiting, and one change of wheels (China's rails are narrower than those of Russia and Mongolia: at Erlyan, just inside the People's Republic, the train is jacked up while new bogies are attached).
The passengers are equally diverse - Russian soldiers, Mongolian bootleggers, Chinese diplomats, Uzbek and Kazakh traders, Australian and British backpackers, and platoons of German tourists (who have block-booked the restaurant car).
As the big blue train leaves Moscow, there is only one other person in my four-berth second-class compartment. Valentin is from Omsk, and while his negligible English and my non-existent Russian make conversation impossible, we find common ground with a timetable printed in English and Russian.
As I swap instant coffee for some of his excellent home-made biscuits, we review the name changes the towns ahead of us have undergone: Vyatka, previously named for Stalin-henchman-turned-Stalin-victim Sergei Kirov; Yekaterin-burg, the end of the line for Russia's royal family, for years called Sverdlovsk after Yacob Sverdlov, the Communist official who organised the Romanovs' murder; Perm, once known as Molotov.
The train, unlike almost everything else in Russia, is clean, comfortable, efficient and, Ms Nyet-Salad aside, run by cheerful and friendly people. The smartly uniformed female attendants vacuum and polish the carriage twice daily and perform heroics in keeping the lavatories bearable (sadly, standards slip dramatically when, after Irkutsk, the carriages are crewed by men).
Travel guide: China
Wall-to-wall tourism
From the Daily Mail
Say Tiananmen Square and you conjure up that memory of a lone student standing, vulnerable but defiant, in front of a tank sent to crush the demonstrations in 1989.
It ended in a massacre which left hundreds dead and China in the tourist doghouse.
Now, with the Olympics coming up in 2008, tourism is once again big business, and such brutal images have been airbrushed from history.
The once cold, bleak square has been re-paved to hide the damage caused by churning tank tracks - whatever you do, don't mention the massacre.
Tiananmen has been re-invented as a public park, and tourists are welcome.
Of course, the communist party still rules - and the massive portrait of Chairman Mao which has pride of place on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, leading from the square to the Forbidden City, confirms it.
As does the slogan next to the portrait, which translates as 'Ten thousand years for the People's Republic of China' and the ceremonial raising and lowering of the Red Flag at dawn and dusk each day by immaculate troops from the People's Liberation Army.
But on a crisp spring evening, the square is packed with budding capitalists cheekily peddling their wares to Western visitors.
As well as snacks and the usual maps and postcards, you can buy cheap forgeries of Rolex and other expensive makes.
They also sell copies of Mao's cap and his famous Little Red Book, the one which was waved by millions during the Cultural Revolution.
Today, few Chinese want this volume.
Travel guide: China
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| | | | A samovar for shaving
They serve tea on request, in glasses cradled by silver holders which are relics of a bygone era: the engraving on the side depicts rockets and satellites being launched from a Kremlin perched on top of the world. A samovar at one end of the corridor provides boiling water for coffee, soup, noodles and shaving.
Siberia - the wasteland to which generations of dissident Russians were exiled - is synonymous with desolation. But at this time of year it looks surprisingly benign: the open spaces are never so empty as to be intimidating, the forests never dense enough to be oppressive.
From Moscow to Irkutsk, it's a bit like looking out of a train window at Berkshire for four days (there are doubtless British rail commuters who know the feeling). The train stops every three or four hours, 10 to 15 minutes at a time - long enough to disembark and browse the impromptu super-markets that await at each station.
A minor industry serves long-distance rail passengers with food (dried fish, fresh vegetables, instant noodles, imported confectionery bearing sell-by dates that elapsed in the first Reagan administration), drink (hideous local soft drinks, excellent local beers, vodkas ranging from export-quality nectar to gruesome window-cleaning moonshine) flowers and immense stuffed toys.
These markets are how most local travellers feed themselves, sparing the expense of the dining car and the tender mercies of Ms Nyet-Salad. Our relationship does not improve as we proceed. This becomes a particular concern after the third day when Valentin departs at Omsk.
He is replaced by a trio of middle-aged Russian men who, while affable enough, are around a week the wrong side of an annual bath, and wish to use the compartment as a venue for their card school.
I make myself as presentable as one can in a tiny, moving bathroom, rehearse a couple of pleasantries from my Russian phrasebook, and present myself to Ms Nyet-Salad. She sits me down without a word, reappears 20 minutes later with omelette with sausage, furiously and unfathomably pulls closed the curtain on the window next to me, and storms off. I tip her twice the cost of the meal.
I spend most of the rest of the ride to Irkutsk in the corridor, watching Siberia go by. The outbreaks of civilisation are grotesque industrial ruins of cities looking like they've just been visited by an enemy air force, or quaint and colourful wooden villages which suggest Switzerland rebuilt on a severe budget.
Siberia is a great place to indulge in the voyeurism that is the principal joy of rail travel, those endless blink-long glimpses of places you will never see again, into lives you can only imagine: soot-blackened railway workers who wave on the approach to Krasnoyarsk, sunbathers by a trickling river that curls around a hamlet near Ilanskaya, intriguingly frequent lone voyagers on motorcycle or foot, yomping across formidable tracts of nowhere between human settlements.
As the rails rattle below, I plot my next assault on the ironclad defences of Ms Nyet-Salad. At lunch (omelette with sausage) on the second-to-last day, I perceived a slight softening.
Chairman Mao watch
Even so, there are not enough originals to meet tourist demand, so rip-offs are churned out in unlicensed factories and then made to look dog-eared.
For a dollar (China's currency of choice), I bought my daughter a Chairman Mao watch, a glorious piece of kitsch rather like those old Mickey Mouse watches - the Great Leader's right arm waves endlessly as he beams out over Beijing while a red star revolves round the watch face.
It will make her colleagues in New York green with envy.
To make a joke out of Chairman Mao - and to coin it in, capitalist-style, while doing so - would have been a shooting offence in 1989.
Now the authorities don't give a damn.
The Chinese have always loved lights and colour, and some inspired spin doctor has ordered the oppressive Great Hall of the People and the other public buildings round the square to be outlined in coloured neon lights.
The trees are bedecked with fairy lights. OK, it is garish, but it is fun and stunningly beautiful.
No wonder young lovers take their evening stroll here, while youngsters zip around on Rollerblades and parents watch their precious only children fly gaudy kites.
And you can never feel quite the same about the feared police headquarters, just off Tiananmen, when you have watched teenagers skate-boarding on the plaza outside, to the polite applause of the gun-toting, white-gloved security guards.
Before dusk, I wandered through the Gate of Heavenly Peace and into the Forbidden City, the seat of power before the communist takeover.
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| | | | Fried eggs with rice
Upon a particularly raucous guffaw from the Germans I rolled my eyes in mock despair and caught, on the glacially lovely face of Ms Nyet-Salad, what looked like an answering smirk.
My hopes for my last supper are, therefore, high, but they do not maintain altitude long. Tonight, even omelette with sausage is nyet; I dine on two mercilessly fried eggs draped over a glutinous heap of rice, and Ms Nyet-Salad's demeanour makes it clear that whatever might have transpired between us at lunch was an indiscretion of which she has no wish to be reminded. It's over.
My last brilliant idea, of turning up for breakfast on the final day and presenting her with a huge bouquet of flowers and an enormous toy elephant, is abandoned when the platform traders at Zima, the last longish stop before bedtime, have nothing for sale but radishes, chicken and a ferocious vodka which eases by the final hours in an agreeable stupor.
After a couple of days idling in Listvyanka, a village on the shores of Lake Baykal, I return to Irkutsk for the train to Ulan Bator. It has come from Moscow and is largely populated by Mongolians going home with what looks like Russia's annual output of portable tat.
Every compartment is piled with beach balls, costume jewellery, hairspray, deodorant, shoes, watches and Teletubbies bought cheap in Russia, to be sold in Mongolia or en route.
When the train stops at Slyudyanka and Ulan Ude, bidding for polyester dresses hung out of the windows is spirited to the point of occasional scuffles. For most of the 12 or so hours it takes for the train to roll to the Russian border post at Naushki, the corridors thunder with Mongolians swapping merchandise.
A gross of chocolate bars goes for ten cartons of eggs, a crate of beer for a box of shampoos - so that when the inspectors board, none is exceeding the personal limit permitted for one item.
I don't catch the name of the middle-aged woman sharing my compartment - Mongolian sounds like several violin strings snapping at once - but I can tell she's worried. Having failed to offload enough of her enormous shipment of cigarettes, she sets about maximising the storage possibilities of the compartment, unbolting a ceiling panel, prising open heating vents, cramming all available space with her cargo. Clearly she's done this before.
At Naushki, Russian customs officials make their way down the carriage. In a train full of dedicated smugglers, the Russian customs guards search me. My second stopover is in Mongolia's pretty but dishevelled capital, Ulan Bator, notable for its friendly people, cheap shopping and murderous traffic.
Deep-fried sparrows
Imagine a walled enclosure containing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, the Palace of Westminster, the Abbey, the Tower of London and Downing Street, grouped round beautifully proportioned courtyards.
No wonder common folk were kept out.
Today, they pose in giggling groups for happy snaps in front of the palaces, temples and ceremonial halls where emperors and their concubines once cavorted.
Feeling peckish, I finished my visit with a treat for those with strong stomachs.
The Dong Hua Men night market opened just a stroll from the square in 1984 when a few brave souls started to sell home-cooked goodies from makeshift stalls.
They could have been arrested, but eventually the authorities decided this was a welcome example of individual initiative and not a counter-revolutionary threat.
The locals come to buy deep-fried sparrows, crispy fried crickets, cooked scorpions, baby snakes and skewers of larvae and grubs, and stroll along nibbling them.
I forced down one crunchy cricket and then switched to dim sum, those nice little dumplings, fried or boiled, which are filled with minced pork, shrimp or other delicacies.
And for afters, I had skewers of strawberries soaked in toffee - just like our toffee apples - and nice they were, too.
You can stuff yourself silly here for a couple of pounds.
But be warned. Don't buy bottled water from the street vendors. The wily hustlers collect empty bottles, refill them with tap water - and leave you with an upset tummy.
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| | | | Abba impersonators
In the evening, I play it safe, sitting on my hotel balcony and watching a German troupe of Abba impersonators play to a crowd of 50 in the park opposite. When the train for the final leg of my journey rolls out of town, it is apparent that Ulan Bator marks the point at which the luxuriant green emptiness of Mongolia's north begins to give way to the harsh yellow emptiness of Mongolia's south.
The Gobi Desert's visual repertoire of sand strewn with camel carcasses and occasional encampment of the circular tents, or gers, of Mongolia's nomads, is interrupted by rugged breeze-block towns - Choyr, Ayrag, Saynshand - that look like they were built by people who don't expect many visitors.
Nevertheless, the platforms fill with hopeful traders as the train pulls in. My first view of China is as crowded and busy as my last of Mongolia was lifeless and quiet. Between the industrial cities of Datong and Zhangjiakou, there isn't a flat surface that isn't being farmed.
Even where the Great Wall crests the forested hills around Badaling and Qinglongqiao, there is scarcely a vista not filled by someone repairing, building, cleaning or on their way somewhere in a hurry.
After ten days indulging in one of the world's best arguments for taking the scenic route, I'm almost feeling guilty by the time we arrive, dead on time, in Beijing. Almost.
Travel facts: Regent Holidays (0117 921 1711) offers an 11-day itinerary on the Trans-Mongolian railway.
The Great Wall
It is not just Tiananmen and its surrounding areas which has been given the public relations once-over.
Having decided that the Great Wall is a marketable asset, the authorities have designated the area at Badaling for tourists.
You are rushed from Beijing in a convoy of coaches, 43 miles up a toll highway to this heavily restored section of wall.
It is surrounded by new hotels, guesthouses and a makeshift market selling fleece jackets (mine cost a mere £3 after hard bargaining) bearing the naff slogan: 'I climbed the Great Wall.'
In fact, there is not much climbing: more a slow shuffle along the top of the wall for a few hundred yards as part of a dense crowd of visitors.
There is not much romance about such a trip, but the sight of the wall undulating dramatically over the mountainous landscape into the misty distance is worth the hassle.
The other site in which the tourist authorities have invested in an equally calculated manner is 18 miles outside the imperial city of Xian, where 8,000 life-sized terracotta warriors were discovered in 1974 by farmer Yang Jun Pen, who was digging for water.
The warriors, which had been lost for 2,174 years, were buried in a pit to provide an army for the emperor Qin Shi Huang in the afterlife.
Today, painstakingly restored shard by shard, they stand in eight columns under a protective aircraft hanger roof.
I have never seen anything with quite this wow factor. No wonder the Chinese call it the eighth wonder of the world and Unesco has designated it a world heritage site.
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| | | | Take one home
As well as the heritage stuff, this huge site is sheer fun.
The authorities have spent a fortune building a museum, cinema-in-the-round, classy restaurants and a shopping centre where you can pose for pictures in front of reproductions of assorted terracotta warriors.
And if that doesn't grab you, how about buying one to take home?
They cost several thousand pounds each and will be delivered to your door for no extra charge.
But in all the glitz and hype, old farmer Yang Jun Pen has not been forgotten.
He has been allotted a corner of the bookshop where he signs guidebooks at a dollar a time.
I waited for 10 minutes before he signed my copy.
In that time, he had earned £14 - not bad when the average monthly wage in the countryside is said to be the equivalent of £10.
TRAVEL DETAILS:
Voyages Jules Verne (http://www.vjv.co.uk tel: 020 7616 1000)
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