Planning for the next adventure

The next adventure will be a Winter excursion to Eastern Europe. Flights are purchased, research is being undertaken, itinerary has been sketched out.

I’ve started looking for iPhone apps. I’ll be giving Tripwolf a trial and I’ve downloaded Rick Steve’s Musee d’Orsay audio guide.

We’ll have a few days in Paris before flying to Budapest. Then will be taking trains and buses to visit Eger, Krakow, Berlin, Prague, Cesky Krumlov, Vienna and Prague.

Update: trip was cancelled. Thinking about rescheduling it with some modifications for 2012. And taking a shorter break midyear.

Books I read on the Eurasia Trip

Books I read during the fabulous Beijing to St. Petersburg trip. This post created from a Google bookshelf. In reverse order of how I recalled the titles. There may have been another that we left along the way – but I can’t remember.

Death of a Red Heroine‎

Qiu Xiaolong – 2006 – Fiction

An Anthony Award Winner An Edgar Award Nominee Contemporary Shanghai comes vividly to life in this new mystery series.

Note: Interesting background for our Chinese visit, although it was set in a city a long way from where we went. Not bad mystery.

Siberian Light‎

Robin White – 1998 – Fiction

Searching for answers to a savage triple murder that may be connected to an American oil company, the mayor of a Siberian village takes up the defense of a female Russian-American scientist he believes is innocent of the crimes

Note: This was OK for some action entertainment and mystery afficionados. And, it was set in Russia.

Buzz Cut‎

James W. Hall – 1997 – Fiction

In an action-packed thriller, Thorn–the hero of Gone Wild–confronts a madman who hijacks a cruise ship and threatens to kill the crew one by one, beginning with Thorn’s best friend.

Note: Rubbish really, but enjoyable. It got so ridiculous in places, I exclaimed out loud.

Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict‎

Laurie Viera Rigler – 2010 – Fiction

While Confessions took twenty-first-century free spirit Courtney Stone into the social confines of Jane Austen’s era, Rude Awakenings tells the parallel story of Jane Mansfield, a gentleman’s daughter from Regency England who inexplicably awakens in the 21st century.

Note: Hmm, not quite as funny as the blurb would have you believe. Mildly amusing. Purchased in a Kusadasi bookshop.

Out of Steppe‎

Daniel Metcalfe – 2010 – Travel

Daniel Metcalfe journeys through the five ‘stans, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and brings to life the brilliant human tapestry they comprise uniquely shaped by the immigrants, deportees and conquerors that have settled there.

Note: Great – and covered a few of the places we visited so it was very relevant.

Sashenka‎

Simon Montefiore – 2010 – Fiction – No preview available

Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and their dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in adangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.

Note: Light reading, but added some context to our visit as it was set in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It was good to identify some of the places described in the novel.

Best and Worst of the Eurasian Trip

On our last evening in Kuala Lumpur we talked over some high and low lights of the trip.

Best Meal

Actually there were three in this category. Funnily enough they were all ‘international’ cuisines in the countries we ate them. In no particular order.

1. Mexican at Tequila Boom in St. Petersburg
2. Vietnamese at VietCafe in Moscow (there are several of these in Moscow). We enjoyed this at the one near the Museum Park
3. Indian in ?? at Le Grand Plaza Hotel in Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Worst Meal

Nothing really stands out as revolting. But the self-catered meals on the long train journeys were very ordinary. Instant noodles featured on several of these trips. We bought nifty travel cutlery in Beijing which included a knife, spoon and screw-together chopsticks.

Best Hotel Breakfast

Sezgin’s Hotel in Kusadasi, Turkey had the yummiest bread with soft cheese baked inside and crusted with sesame seeds. Delicious with honey. Breakfast was served in a courtyard garden – nice atmosphere.

Honourable mention for Angels Home Hotel in Istanbul and Yili Hotel in Urumqi, China.

Worst Hotel Breakfast

Hotel Nukus, Nukus – flies, greasy fried egg, dreadful black coffee

Feliz Pansiyon, Cesme – was boring, but not terrible. Maybe we were just tired of the cucumber, tomato, olives, bread roll thing.

 

Best Hotel

Yili in Urumqi was very good value. Breakfast buffet, lovely interior decoration and we only paid about $40. Dunhuang Hotel (there are two, this one was on Mingshan St) was very welcoming.

Worst Hotel

None were so bad that we wouldn’t stay there again. But some were pretty basic. Actually Nukus Hotel was pretty bad, but then again there are not many choices in town.

Best Train for long Journey

Russian trains were the best looked after. China overnight trains were pretty good too. The Moscow-St. Petersburg train had the cleanest toilet.

Worst Train for long Journey: Nukus (Uzbekistan) to Saratov (Russia) (via Kazakhstan). Crowded and for the first night/day was overloaded with fruit and other produce! including garlic!!! Also the dirtiest toilet. Things improved once we crossed the Russian border.

Fastest Train

The only fast train we went on was in Kuala Lumpur. The KL Ekspres is very clean and takes you from the airport into the city in 28 minutes at high speed. It is possible to check in for some airlines at the station in the city – your bags are already checked straight through onto the plane. Nice.

Slowest Train

Nukus to Saratov. Those middle of the night border crossings did not help.

 

Most Useful Iphone Apps

1. Dropbox – scans of tickets, confirmations, passports, visas, downloads of metro maps for St. Petersburg and Istanbul
2. TripIt – details of flights, rail journeys etc, but an upgrade of the web service mid-trip did cause a few issues which I have been assured will not affect future trips. Limited by no access to wireless internet in some places, notably Uzbekistan and data roaming was too expensive to consider, even using TravelSim
3. Lonely Planet City Guides – Moscow, Beijing, St. Petersburg and Istanbul. Information was good, but slower to use the map than to just use a paper one.
4. Brizzly – allowed access to Twitter in China
5. Moscow Metro Map
6. Converter+ updates currency exchange rates, and if you happen to travel in one of those backward countries that have modernised and still use Imperial units you can convert them too.
7. WN Mandarin – came in handy when we had to order something to eat in Liuyan and Tulufan.

Aegean Coast of Turkey

As we neared the end of this amazing journey it was time for some relaxation and less travelling. Although we had a recommendation to see Datca, it was a bit too far (since we didn’t want to hire a car with no experience of the Turkish roads) and so we settled on Kusadasi for a few days.  

Kusadasi is on the Aegean coast and is a very busy tourist destination with cruise ships pulling in almost every day of the week. It was gloriously sunshiny, and totally packed with tourists, especially in the evening.

We retreated to the nearby National Park about 45 minutes away by dolmus (marshtruka, minibus) for a few hours sitting on a rocky headland and heading down to the rocky beach for a swim to cool off. We did not see any of the native cheetahs or wild pigs that live in the park. We did see car loads of families parked down near the water with picnics. It was a lovely day and location. Kusadasi is near to Ephesus, an historic site in pretty good condition considering its antiquity. We also went there on a dolmus, avoiding a group tour. This allowed us to spend as long as we liked and to choose some less crowded paths. It was busy with tourists, but we found one spot where we could not see or hear any of them and sat in the shade of a tree to rest our feet.

The shopkeepers and waiters worked very hard enticing tourists into their premises – which became quite trying at times. Some restaurants were offering free Anatolian bread with honey as an entree and free fruit salad for every customer. The bread was delicious, as was the honey, but we were too full to eat the fruit salad.

Cesme, was quite a contrast. It too is on the Aegean coast and has quite a few tourists, but nowhere near as many as Kusadasi. We noticed that there were many fewer English-speaking tourists, and that touting was negligible. I actually felt quite comfortable just walking in to some of these shops able to look around without anyone hassling me – bliss. Cesme has a tiny, weeny beach locally, and some much larger beaches nearby. Since it is quite windy there kite surfing is a key activity and depending on the direction, different beaches are recommended. We headed to Altinkum (Golden Sands) Beach and paid 5 lira each for a sun bed with umbrella. Beautiful, clear water, but very shallow and a little bit cool.

Cesme has a small and delightful ‘castle’ near the waterfront. For only 3 lira each we entered at opening time and almost had the place to ourselves. The small museum held a surprise for us. We had no plans to go to Cesme until we were in Kusadasi, although a Facebook friend had mentioned it was a lovely  spot to visit. So it was a coincidence that we had recently been to St. Petersburg and then found ourselves in Cesme reading about the battle between Russia and Turkey for the small port, and the strong connection with St. Petersburg where Catherine the Great had resided and several items from Cesme were now residing in the Hermitage Museum. It just seemed right that we should have turned up in Cesme.

Gelibolu Peninsular and the Sardine Trip

We booked a couple of tours including 1 night accommodation, a bus transfer and accommodation in Kusadasi, while we were in Istanbul.

The first tour included a pick up from our hotel and travel down to the Gelibolu Peninsular otherwise known to Australians as Gallipoli. We were surprised to be picked up in a private car, but expected to be put onto a bus shortly. This didn’t happen. The driver proceeded over to Sirkeci and picked up a New Zealand woman and the three of us ‘enjoyed’ a fast drive in the car down to Eceabat through cloudy, rainy weather. The weather too, was unexpected at this time of year. We then checked in to the hotel, and met others in the tour group for lunch at a nearby restaurant.

Fortunately the rain had mostly cleared by the afternoon for the tour of the Anzac sites. It was an informative tour covering all the major points of interest. Seeing the memorial site which is inundated by Aussies and Kiwis in late April it was amazing to think that up to 15,000 could fit there, let alone all the transport logistics on the windy narrow roads.

Back in Eceabat (the nearest town, not Gelibolu which is some distance away) we sat on the balcony of our hotel room and spent some time watching the traffic in the Dardanelles, including the car ferries that were loading right across the road from us. The seaside restauranteurs were funny to watch as they stood in the middle of the road trying to direct traffic to park in front of their restaurant so they would dine there!

The next morning, breakfast was served on the top floor of the hotel. We met up with two other young Australian women who were doing the Troy Tour with us and the NZ woman from the day before. We then headed downstairs with our luggage (ready for the bus transfer after the Troy tour) to find that five of us were expected to squeeze into the car – not a bus. “How far will we be travelling like this?” – “30km” we were told. Not entirely happy, but supposing we could put up with that just to get to Troy we got in.

The tour of Troy was OK. A bit rushed – but then there is not much left to see there. Back in the car and we were not happy to find that we were back in the car for a much longer journey to Pergamum – where two of the group would be doing a tour and then on to Kusadasi. Yes it turned out we spent a long time in the car with four women like sardines in the back – naughty of you TJ.

The bus might have taken longer – maybe not arrived until 8  or 9 at night – but at least we would have each had a seat. Fortunately they were all good-natured companions.

Istanbul

Arriving in Istanbul very late is not the best plan. The Metro has finished up for the evening and you must pick your way through the shuttle bus operators and taxi drivers.

We chose a shuttle bus (mini bus), which left the airport after it had filled up all its seats (and squeezed three extras – young boys) who sat on the floor. First stop was our hotel in Sultanahmet which is a maze of windy, hilly streets packed wall to wall with hotels. However, there were still a few people out and about and someone was able to provide the driver with directions to the right location. We checked in, showered and fell asleep in short order.

Next day we started on the list of sights with the Blue Mosque (blue inside with tiles, grey outside. A ‘free’ guide showed us around and did provide an informative narrative of the mosque and its surrounds, but ended up by leaving us at a carpet showroom – we did actually see that coming. We were offered the standard apple tea (like hot apple juice pretty much) and then sat through the spiel and eventually departed without buying a carpet to continue our explorations.

Restaurant touts are mildly annoying in Sultanahmet and on the Galata Bridge but are usually good-natured about it even in the face of complete disregard. It is just not possible to respond to every ‘hello, look my menu’ and ‘where are you from?’.

On other days in this enormous city we visited Aya Sofiya, cruised up the Bosphorus (a bit of a lifestyles of the rich and famous voyeurism passing the riverside houses and hotels), ferried to Eyup and bussed back to Eminonu to catch the excellent tramway back to Sultanahmet, visited with friends who live in the city, and of course the Topkapi Palace. Some of the treasures from this museum were in the Kremlin when we were in Moscow, and were much easier to view there than in the palace. Topkapi palace is worth a visit, but it was so packed with visitors (maybe because Aya Sofiya was closed that day.

Also we made our way along the major shopping street to Taksim Square from Galata Tower and managed to find a heap of music shops. With a drummer in the family we were interested to look for shops where we might buy a cymbal. Istanbul is famous for hand-beaten cymbals.

Russian Reminders

I am so far behind on writing up this trip that I’m going to condense a few days in Moscow and St. Petersburg into a single post.

I like Russia. We have be en very lucky with the weather, I’m supposing we could have had some quite cool days that far north, even in Summer, but it continued fine and warm. Indeed, the day we arrived in Moscow, the city was in the grip of a heat wave and we wandered around Red Square, Kitay Gorod and Alexandrovsky Sad amongst sweating tourists consuming icecream and some even jumping in the fountains fully clothed to cool off. It was reportedly 35 degrees C.

In contrast St. Petersburg was also warm (up to 30 degrees), but had lovely cool mornings. But it seems I have carried a pair of jeans on this trip for no good reason. I doubt I will wear them until I get back to Winter in Queensland.

The Kremlin was a wonder to visit, and we went there twice. The first visit was all churches and the general layout, the second visit we focused on the Armory. There was a special exhibition of treasures from the Topkapi Palace (Istanbul) at the Kremlin so that gave us a taste for the upcoming visit to Turkey.

Moscow is huge, and is full of big things. The amazing Moscow State University building is incredible although photographs do not clearly show the scale of it. There are also enormous concrete blocks containing apartments and other skyscrapers reminiscent of wedding cakes, with tapering, layered, decorative tops.

St Petersburg is grand in a different sense. Not very much in the way of highrise buildings, but it abounds with old-fashioned buildings along its waterways and has a wealth of palaces. You can visualise historical characters going about their business.

In both cities we took river cruises. In Moscow, the passengers included a small group of young adults (maybe school leavers) celebrating something – dressed up, drinking champagne and primping and posing for photographs. As we passed under each bridge they yelled out loudly, the echo perhaps surprising pedestrians above. In St. Petersburg it was all tourists – and we cruised quite sedately along the Neva a little way before negotiating through the canals, and under the bridges. It was so warm, it was hard to imagine that these waterways freeze over in Winter. Indeed – it was so hot in Moscow that it is incredible that last Winter it reached –35 degrees C.

In St. Petersburg we stayed at the Azimut Hotel – a simply enormous hotel that looks quite out of place in the old part of the city. We were in the low-rise section on the fourth floor, but the newer section rises 18 floors, towering above the rest of the city. Needless to say the ‘sky bar’ has a marvellous view across the city, and at this time of the year (white nights – so far north that the sun only dips below the horizon for a few short hours) with the sky never getting dark the bar is open all night. Below our hotel room was a park, and family groups stayed out late enjoying the twilight. The sun set at about 11:30pm and was always up high in the sky before I woke each morning.

We took an excursion (hydrofoil out from St. P, suburban train return) to Peterhof. The gardens were beautiful and the wooden parquet floors in the palace were fabulous – we had to wear sock/slippers over our shoes to protect them. While we were there a thunderstorm rolled over. We took shelter early in a pavilion by a fountain early. Within 10 minutes the lightning, hail and rain arrived and the pavilion filled up with tourists – latecomers dripping wet. It passed quite quickly heading off in the direction of St. Petersburg and we made our way out of the grounds and hiked to the train station. It was much further than the 20 minutes advised in the guide book – did we head to the wrong one?

Later that afternoon another storm rolled over St. Petersburg while we were in our hotel room. I’ve never heard thunder like it – it echoed sharply – an effect of the hard surfaces and waterways perhaps, and maybe our position on the 4th floor with window open made a difference.

The metros in both Moscow and St Petersburg are decorative – Moscow the more so – although after visiting Tashkent and seeing its Soviet era metro, the wow factor was not so great. Unlike Tashkent’s metro they did not smell of ammonia.

Great things about Russia:

• Hotel Ibis loaned me an electrical adapter
• ATMs and credit cards work
• Buying train tickets in Saratov – excellent experience despite language challenge
• Kremlin & Red Square
• Hermitage Museum & the Commandants House Museum at Saints Peter and Paul Fortress
• Sparrow Hills, Vorobyovy Gory – beautiful to walk through the park

Not so great things:

• Azimut Hotel charged us to leave our bags there – even though we were staying for 4 nights. They were happy to provide free wifi – but charge to leave bags!!
• No jug/tea making in hotel rooms
• Burying train tickets in Moscow – why don’t they accept credit cards like Saratov? – why do they give tourists the run around deliberately
• Queuing for the Hermitage Museum

Out of Uzbekistan

Nukus (Uzbekistan – in the Karalpakstan Republic) is a sad-looking town. This place is not far from the Aral Sea disaster and looks so neglected. We only stayed overnight allowing us to see the Savitsky Museum and to meet the train that would deliver us into Russia after crossing Kazakhstan once again.

The Savitsky Museum is a gem in the middle of nowhere. It has a huge collection which includes Central Asian art and avant garde Russian art of the middle 20th century which were being banished and/or destroyed by the Soviet authorities of the time.

We stayed at the Nukus Hotel which was rather expensive considering the state of it. The plumbing was interesting – no basin, just a bath tub with a very long spout/shower arrangement. Water pooled at the bottom of the bath tub revealing the source rust-tinge that stained the bottom.

Our train was not due to leave Nukus until after 4pm the following day so it was quite a long day with little to do. Fortunately the bazaar was quite large and afforded us some entertainment as we shopped for some provisions for the upcoming 2 night train journey and found a restaurant of sorts overlooking the covered part of the market.

At last we boarded the train which had originated in Tashkent, and found our companions were some truck drivers from Urgench on their way to Volgograd for work. With no English on their side and no Russki or Uzbek on ours we managed a communication of sorts using a notepad for sketching and miming. At first they thought we were from Austria, until we drew a kangaroo and koala. And we couldn’t figure out one mime, until later they produced a clove of garlic.

Strangely, the shelf above the compartment contained boxes of fruit and there was a definite fruity tang along with the stench of dried fish that wafted along with the vendors. Sales of drinks, fish, and other snacks kept going all the way to the Uzbek border where the sellers had to get off.

We had two border crossings on this trip – from Uzbekistan into Kazakhstan and then from Kazakhstan into Russia – both of them took a long time.

Somewhere in Kazakhstan our truck drivers disembarked, and at the same station huge quantities of fresh produce were unloaded. At this point it became clear that this was no ordinary passenger train – every compartment must have contained several boxes of fruit.

At the Russian frontier there was a great inspection of compartments and wall tapping – were they looking for illegal fruit importers or stowaways? The scenery began to change and it was with some wonder that we gazed upon the blue of the Volga River as we neared Saratov.

Originally we planned to take a train from Nukus to Volgograd, but an agent was unable to secure tickets for us. So while in Tashkent we had organised alternative tickets and rescheduled within the limits of our visa – Saratov was an option that would work – but it meant we were two days behind and could not stay there without giving up a night of accommodation in Moscow.

So after getting off the train we lined up at the ticket office with fingers crossed that we could get a train that afternoon that would get us to Moscow the next day. We liked Saratov – things went right – there were a heap of ATMs and they accepted Maestro Cirrus and MasterCard, and the ticket office accepted Mastercard too and lo and behold there was room for us on board.

To while away some time we went for a stroll around the nearby square and bazaar, bought an icecream and looked for an electrical adapter (with no success). The afternoon wore on and the temperature climbed to 39 degrees C  – it was hotter inside the compartment as we loaded our bags and we were very glad when it finally started moving.

PS. I am way behind in typing up posts due to the fact I am having a busy time enjoying the journey and that for much of it I have been relying on borrowing an adapter from hotels. Could not find one in St. Petersburg until we got to the airport – so maybe I’ll start catching up.

I feel gritty – oh so gritty

We had agreed with an English tourist at our hotel that we might share a taxi from Khiva to Urgench, a distance of only 35km and headed out relatively early to the North Gate of the old city where taxis generally milled around on the lookout for gullible tourists. They lucked out with us, as the possibility of a marshrutka (even with our travel bags on knees) did not deter us, and there right at the gate was the Khiva-Urgench minibus. We hopped in and arrived somewhere in Urgench. Our fellow traveller was only going to Urgench to take a look around and enquire about flights to Tashkent – we were just on the first leg of the more onerous trip to Nukus.

The marshrutka driver was queried about buses to Nukus and he flagged down a very mini-bus and waved at us to get in – which we did. We waved goodbye and the mini-bus took off – we weren’t sure exactly where – surely this tiny thing was not going to Nukus about 130km. A few minutes later, after squeezing in the tightest spaces between cars, it pulled up near some taxis and there was a bit of calling out about Nukus – G firmly advised “No Taxi – Aftoboos (autobus)” – and then we turned around and pulled in to a bus station of sorts.

These were no tourist buses. The Nukus bus was derelict. It was also loaded up with planks of wood in the aisle, bags of various sorts and a hand on the seat raised a cloud of dust. There was no room for our bags in the lockers underneath so the bus attendant squeezed our big bags into the overhead racks – I thought mine was an impossibility, but the racks have been treated roughly over the years and knew better than to argue. It was already hot at 10am when we got into the bus, and it got steadily worse as we sat there waiting for the 10:30 departure. Meanwhile other passengers got on and off and back on again, hawkers climbed over the planks in the aisle selling water, bread and pastries. A vodka drinker settled in a few rows back was at this stage the only one relaxed enough to enquire as to whether we were tourists.

Eventually we got going, only to stop 5 minutes away at a ‘secret’ petrol supply. The bus had to negotiate a couple of tiny lanes to pull up at a mechanics ‘shed’ where ‘benzene’ was poured into the tank via a funnel. Petrol/Gas stations were generally choked with cars lined up down the road waiting for fuel – there is a fuel shortage in Urgench and Samarkand, but for some reason not in Bukhara! Off we went again only to stop about 20 minutes later at another mechanics spot – no idea why – and then we got going properly.

This bus was slow (did I mention it was derelict?) and we expected that it would be at least 2 hours to cover the distance as we were fully warned that buses are slow, but we had all day and we knew there was not a lot to see in Nukus.

The road to Nukus starts off in some fertile countryside with orchards and other vegetation and makes a river crossing. The bridge is not just a bridge. The bus stopped and we all got off to cross the bridge on foot. We walked across steel plates kind of patchworked together across timber supports that appeared to be sitting on top of old barges. The levels were all over the place and there were gaps where we could see the water rushing underneath.

On the other side, the men all fanned out into the vegetation for a comfort stop and then walked along the road a little way. The women on the bus crossed the river after the men, and by the time they got to the other side it was clear for them/us to find a discreet spot in the bushes too.

After the women came the bus and pulled up along the road a little way next to the refreshment stands. Our vodka drinking passenger stocked up again while black clouds poured out of the back of the bus. Dubiously we climbed back on board and the bus tried valiantly to get going again but less than a kilometre on it coasted to a stop and the driver and his assistant got out the tools and set to work on the engine. This was not good. Most of the men and a few women got out of the bus and squatted in the shade of some small trees or meandered along the road a little way.

With nothing better to distract them, the ice was finally broken, curiosity broke out and with much miming, and few common words we were queried about our nationality, where we were going and various other topics – most of which we had no idea of. There were also requests for us to take photos of some of them with us and then much gold-toothed smiling and nodding of heads instead of sideways glances. With much miming and repetition we managed to ask how far we still had to go until Nukus. 20km.

The windows of the bus are open to catch a bit of breeze and cool us down, and sandblast us as well.

So, four hours after leaving Khiva, the bus – coerced back into action – pulled up in Nukus and we were put off in the city.

–Having problems uploading photos – will have to add them later.

The less said

The desert crossing in a shared taxi from Bukhara to Urgench/Khiva is not to be recommended. At least, not with a fat man, his wife and baby sharing the back seat with you in 40+ degree heat, no air conditioning.

Even the buses going the other way looked more comfortable, even if they do take longer than the 6 hours it took us.