Its been a while since my last blog post and for that I apologise. However, we have been rather busy in China and so that's my excuse. The train from Ulaanbaatar was a long one (28 hours) and fairly uneventful. The only thing of note was that the Chinese had to change the wheels on the carriages and so in true Chinese style did it by lifting up the whole carriage whilst we were on it. Pretty cool. Beijing is an awesome city. As someone once told me, it wonderfully displays 'Chinese superiority'. Everything 'just works'. The tube equivalent makes the London Underground seem ancient and doesn't seem crowded despite Beijing being the capital of a country with over 1 billion people. Now that we have left Serena behind we are in full tourist mode. As such, during our three days in Beijing we saw everything that there was to see - the Forbidden City, the Great Wall and the Summer Palace. Of these, the Great Wall has to take the biscuit. Photos of it look cool but its only once you're up there that you can fully appreciate what they achieved in building it. Also the photos dont quite do the steepness of the wall justice. To get away from everyone else we set off to run part of the wall; given that the wall goes beyond 45 degrees in places, we came back looking like we'd just had a go at a marathon. Evidentially, three months sitting in a car doesn't do your cardiovascular ability much good. Having done the wall, we had heard that the Summer Palace was the place to go. We had seen on a map signs to the 'old summer palace' and so merely assumed that the gentlemen who had designed the map were helpfully pointing out the fact that the summer palace was indeed 'old'. When we got there we were shocked by the lack of crowds and also by the lack of palace. Turns out that the summer palace and the old summer palace are not one and the same and so it was back on the blissfully air-conditioned underground to the actual summer palace which was unsurprisingly quite a lot more touristy. That night was our first Chinese train journey; a 12 hour long overnight train from Beijing to Xi'an. The train was definitely an experience and it is credit to the Chinese that they managed to systematically fit so many people into one carriage. Xi'an is also one really cool city. Famous for the terracotta soldiers but it also has an amazing city wall that you can hire bikes to go around. The terracotta soldiers were cool; it might just be me but I was a little underwhelmed. They are unquestionably one of the greatest finds of all time but they seem to be 'bigged' up so much that reality can't quite meet expectations. As such, the city walls were the unexpected highlight of an incredible city. We now only have a week to go and so its down to Huangshan before spending our final nights of the trip in Shanghai.          

 Once we made it to Ulaanbaatar, a key part of the trip was to visit the Lotus Children's Centre which we had been fundraising for before we set off. However, before we could pay them a visit, we had to do a bit of sorting out the car. Sadly the car can't come with us into China because of a whole host of customs issues and so is having to return to Europe without us. Another slight catch is that we are only allowed to put a very limited number of items in the car when we ship it back and so we set about selling some of the kit we had brought on the trip. Turns out that prices in Ulaanbaatar are only a fraction of those back in the UK and so some of the stuff was proving a little hard to shift. Anyway, a little time later we had managed to sell most of the stuff at a fairly disgusting loss and so set off for the Lotus Children's Centre. I think that often when we are asked to give to a cause we wonder whether our donations are really going to make a direct impact. Well having spent four days at the Lotus Children’s Centre, I can happily say that any donation makes a huge direct impact on the lives of the children. The centre is incredible; it cares for over 50 children and not only helps out in the here and now but also aims to give direction to their futures as well. To say that we were given a warm welcome is an understatement. They were fascinated with the trip and the younger boys then proceeded to ask whether they could wash the car for us! The centre has a basketball court and so it became fairly apparent that pasty white men can’t ‘jump’. We spent hours on the court being humiliated by the skills of boys as young as 10 as they effortlessly made us look like complete amateurs on the court. Ice cream seems to be the currency of the centre and so we decided (along with a few of the other volunteers) to wager our volleyball skills against some of the children with ice creams being bought by the losers. Now it got quite competitive and we ended up winning but definitely didn’t expect an ice cream in reward. As such, it was to our absolute surprise that as we were about to leave we were present with an ice-cream each bought by the children out of their pocket money: I don’t know about you but at the age of 9 I wasn’t going out of my way to pay up my ice cream debts! At the weekends there is no cook and so we had stocked up on pot noodle and so once again we were shocked to find that the children had gone out of their way to cook for us! A big thank you for everyone who donated to the centre (it makes a world of a difference) and for those wanting to donate you can do so through http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=london2beijing/. So now we have dropped the car off and are about to set off on our train down to Beijing. ‘Serena the Subaru’ has been a complete babe on our trip and so it was a heartfelt moment saying goodbye to her in a slightly run-down warehouse on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar. It has truly been an amazing experience visiting Mongolia as a whole but it’s equally exciting to think that the next blog post will be coming from our last country China!       

We have made it. We've driven over 13,000 miles across Europe and Asia to finally arrive in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. The Russia we experienced wasn't the Russia we imagined. First of all, the tarmac was amazing. None of the pothole rubbish that we had in Kazakhstan but rather kilometre after kilometre of wonderfully smooth tarmac. I get that part of the trip was about driving on awful roads but after the Pamirs and Kazakhstan, none of us were complaining. Say what you want about Putin but he certainly knows how to build a road. Secondly, the scenery in Russia blew us away. The Altai region was up there with the Pamir Highway for the most incredible views of our trip. It echoes the Alps in many regards yet the beer is reasonably priced and petrol is dirt cheap. The campsites were amazing and it was only the alarmingly high horsefly population that did Russia a discredit. Given that Russian tarmac was amazing, the car now only had to do 1600km on bad roads through Mongolia and so with this mission in mind we approached the Russian/Mongolian border. We weren't expecting this border to be too much of a hardship and it went fairly well for about the first 3 minutes as they let us into the border zone. From then on in, the Russian side at least was a bit of a struggle.  They asked us for our Russian customs form which stumped us a bit because we weren't given a Russian customs form; we thought that the whole system was electronic. ​​At this point I showed him all the forms I had and for some reason it was only when he saw the Kyrgyzstan customs form that he was satisfied. Not sure what that was all about. They then let us through the gates into the 28km of no-mans land between the two countries. At 14km you leave the Russian side and so also leave the gloriously smooth tarmac. The Mongolian's appear not to have bothered to tarmac a bit of land that they don't actually own - fair enough. Mongolian customs was fairly easy once we had paid our $1 disinfectant fee and so we set off into the middle of nowhere on characteristically bad Mongolian roads, or so we thought. After about 30km the corrugation ended and there lay the most amazingly smooth road that had 'made in China' all over it. Given that it was Mongolia there was no one on it and so slightly surprisingly our recorded top speed (which I won't disclose for fear of a bollocking from my parents) was recorded in Mongolia. However, sadly the roads didn't last and for much of the next 5 days we were driving alongside the half built road, not on it. Mongolia is a seriously cool place. I don't fancy that there are many other places in the world that give off such a atmosphere of nothingness. You can drive for hours along what is the main road in Mongolia and yet only see a couple of yurts and a few packs of wild horses. The people are unbelievably hospitable as well and we managed to get ourselves invited into a traditional Mongolian wedding. It was quite clear that at such an occasion there were clearly do's and don'ts and we definitely made a few balls ups. The biggest was properly when we downed our shots of Mongolian vodka only to see to our horror that the chap next to us took a gentle sip. Not good. However, their hospitality continued and whenever we pitched camp, someone would come out of nowhere to greet us and welcome us to their country. The roads got steadily worse to the point where it was no more than farmers tracks with the result that about 7 tracks to chose from, each as bad as the next. The Subaru didn't particularly appreciate this but 6 days later she pulled into the parking spot outside Burger King in Ulaanbaatar. It still is hard for us to believe that we have driven all this way and we will be certainly sad to see the Subaru shipped home. Its now a week working with the Lotus Children's Centre here before we take the train down into Beijing!

Kazakhstan, the home of Borat and our last ‘stan’ on the way to Russia. From the border, we immediately hit Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. The western influence was immediate; shopping centres, good roads and most importantly, a McDonalds. We spent a couple of days there during which the car went to get a clean bill of health whilst we hit the ring of fast-food chains at the local shopping centre. Then it was the mammoth drive across Kazakhstan. It didn’t start particularly well; after about an hour we got pulled over by the notoriously corrupt Kazakhstan police. Understandably he asked me for my driving license and insurance. Then he tried to explain that without a translation in Russian on my driving license I was breaking the law. By this stage it was quite clear that he was after a little bribe. However, I had my international driving licence which has a translation into Russia so no go for him there. With this, the policeman tries a different tact – did you have a beer in Almaty? Oh so now he was going for the ‘drink driving tact.’ I had but I wasn’t going to tell him this – ‘no’ I reply. ‘How about two days ago?’ By this point I wasn’t going to admit to having drunk a beer all year. ‘No’ was the answer yet again. He then tried for 3 days but got the same answer. Finally he gave up his attempts at earning a little extra cash and waved us on. For the next 3 days we ate up the miles through Kazakhstan, paying particular attention to the speed limits lest the police would have an excuse to slap another ‘fine’ on us. On our second night we camped at a lake and the track around the lake provided an opportunity for a little bit of light exercise in the form of a run. I don’t know about the other two but my body told me within about 30 seconds that sitting in a car for two months have done no wonders for my cardiovascular ability. The lake was absolutely stunning and a bit of wind meant no mosquitoes – a welcome break from the DEET.   Whilst Kazakhstan has been interesting, we are all very much looking forward to Russia and Mongolia, even if the car isn’t given the state of Mongolian roads. I’m not sure when the next blog post will be given the state of communication in Russia and Mongolia but its amazing to think the next post might come from Ulaanbaatar! KBO.
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