Another advantage is the imposed isolation from our “always connected” communications world. For four days, you cannot check email, get online or be in contact with home, and this can be a liberating experience. Not everyone deals with this in the same way. Seppi mourned the fact that he was missing his old cat; “sometimes the love of an old cat is better than the love of an old woman,” he said. “But an 18-year-old woman on your chest is better than an 18-year-old cat!” Indeed.
Mongolia: My Humvee for your Russian van
The Mongolians could claim to have invented slow travel. The lack of any surfaced road across the vast majority of the country means journeys are inevitably conducted at a sedate pace. Until recently, most of the population relied on horses and camels. Though that is beginning to change, when the roads run out, one is still offered a bewildering choice of rutted dirt tracks that scratch across the landscape like crazy calligraphy.
Mongolian drivers seem to instinctively know their route. GPS merely serves to confuse them, encouraging them to take direct routes from A to B, via inconvenient mountain ranges. We met one German-Mongolian couple driving with the woman’s father, who’d been a truck driver 15 years ago. His chosen route, somewhat archaic, resulted in no less than four punctures in two hours; the rough, unused track was punishing and unforgiving even by Mongolian standards.
To the cruel vagaries of the road surface, add suicidal sheep (we only ran over one, but it was a rather brutal collision) and Mongolian dogs, which try and chew the wheels off the van at speed, and it makes for a challenging journey.
Apart from route knowledge, the van should also be a basic Russian vehicle as opposed to a swank American jeep. This is for the simple reason that Russian vans can be repaired with anything you can find at hand whereas it’s hard to reprogram a faulty engine microchip in the middle of the Gobi desert. This brings to mind the apocryphal story of the multimillion dollar US “Space Pen” research programme to develop a writing device that could work in zero gravity, underwater and in the most extreme conditions. The Russians apparently used pencils.
Travelling in Mongolia requires effort, but is paid back in spades by the wild, wondrous and wholly unspoilt beauty of the countryside. Cool alpine forests, mystical frozen lakes, windswept desert plateaux, rugged rocky mountains and the historical remnants of the biggest continuous land empire the world has ever known make for a compelling travel experience. It is an enormous country with an incredibly low population density and this is its appeal.
China: Culture trip on a train
Like India, China has an extremely extensive and effective railway system. At any given moment in time, so legend has it, there are around 10 million Chinese people on a train. An impressive feat, given that many smaller countries struggle to transport even a small fraction of this figure. Then again, one thing China isn’t short of is passengers.
Booking and buying train tickets can seem a little daunting at first due to the obvious linguistic barriers. But the Chinese are always willing to help and spend time assisting inept tourists. The curiosity and intrigue in laowai (foreigners) from your fellow passengers mean they will happily stare at you for hours, watching your every move with a mixture of horror and fascination.