Trabant Trek, travelling the world in a plastic car

Trabant Trek: The TV Series

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 12:22:00 +0000

It's been TWO YEARS since the last post.
TWO YEARS.
Is anybody still out there?

Well even if I’m hollering into the void, I thought I should let you fine people know that the The Trabant Trek has been picked up by The Travel Channel. I’m told by credible sources (well…Tony Perez) that a six-part series will be starting in June. That’s right, six-whole-parts, made up of the footage we shot while out there.
Apparently you can get The Travel Channel on Sky channel 251 and 252.

There’s a trailer here: http://vimeo.com/19055068

Cheerio

Trabant Trek the book, available now.

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 15:08:00 +0000

Trabant Trek Book Announced

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:57:00 +0000

Finale

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:15:00 +0000

Finale
Sihanoukville, Cambodia
January 9th and 10th, 2008
By Dan Murdoch

“The riders in a race do not stop when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and say to oneself, 'The work is done.'”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. American Judge and Jurist.

HOW do you finish a trip like this?
Where is the end?
Well, Sihanoukville, that was the finish line, right?
Actually no, it’s when we’ve visited the last charity. That’ll be the end.
But then there’s an interview the following day, so maybe that’s the then?
Actually I still need to write this blog, once I’ve posted it, then we’ll say it’s over, ok?
Well maybe, but I'm hanging around for a few weeks. Maybe once I'm home?
You just don’t want this to end do you?

WE’D hoped to arrive in Sihanoukville early evening, but a series of press interviews delayed our departure from Phnom Penh.
The Americans had replaced a missing screw in Fez, restoring the pressure in a cylinder and solving the car’s power issues, but the brakes were still broken.
OJ, who was my new driving buddy following Carlos’s departure, refused to let me drive after witnessing me collide with a scooter in the city that afternoon. It is the first accident I’ve had in 16,000 miles of driving and it was entirely my fault- I’d attempted a tight u-turn at Hamilton pace on a major road, but we don’t have any wing mirrors and I hadn’t checked my blind spot. As Fez neared a right angle with the flow of traffic, a scooter with three people on board slammed into the driver’s door. Ooops.
Luckily no one came off, nor seemed hurt, but OJ, who has never been comfortable with my roadside manner, was not prepared to take any further risks.
It is only four hours from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville, but the BBC reporter we’d spent much of the afternoon with was adamant driving was a bad idea.
“You really shouldn’t drive at night. The road is terrible. It’ll be pitch black. I wouldn’t do it, seriously, why put yourself in danger?”
But if we’d always followed advice like that we would never have left home. And when you’ve crossed the narrow, winding Anzob Pass at night, flanked by sheer drops and dodging unstoppable lorries, then driving to the beach holds few fears.
We were right to go for it- the road was beautiful, and in Fez we were able to stay close enough behind Ziggy to use the spread from its headlamps to light the way (Fez lights are pitiful).
I was happy to let OJ drive, but disappointed that after six months of driving Fez I wasn’t going to be able to take him over the finish line. Luckily OJ is a kind and noble gentleman, a few miles out of town we stopped to take a last photo of Trabant Trek on the road, and he handed me the keys.
“Do you wanna drive Fez in?”
Hell yeah.
It was strange standing there, the four of us, posing for photos with our arms round each other.
“This is it, the final stretch,” Lovey said.
But it still didn’t feel real.

Shortly before midnight we pulled up to Monkey Republic, the bar-guesthouse where Carlos had booked rooms, to find the Spaniard with a small crowd of fans. Some sort of fireworks were set off, with a banner and lots of cheering. Characteristically we were about four hours late, so everyone was pretty merry, and the excitement in the air was palpable:
“We did it.”
“I can’t believe we actually made it.”
“We’re here.”
What else is there to say?
“How do you feel?” people would ask.
“Very strange.”
I don’t think I ever doubted that we would make it, and pretty much since we reached South East Asia it’s felt like we’re nearly finished.
“I’ll feel like it’s over once we’ve visited the charity,” I told people, and myself.

More hugging was followed by a trip down to a beach bar, for intensive celebrations culminating in Lovey and I having a violent falling out. What a way to finish the trip.
The following afternoon, with sore heads, we headed to our second charity, M’Lop Tapang. The wonderful children there put on a show for us, with traditional Khmer music and dancing complemented by more modern moves, break dancing and theatre.
The kids were great fun, and were obviously having a laugh dancing around on stage. There was plenty of hand holding and waving and jumping on the cars.
I'm not sure what it is about Cambodian children, they are just so smiley and sweet and friendly, it’s so touching. I'm not sure what they thought of us though, giant and pale with these odd cars.
We were given a tour of the school. It’s not as big as Mith Samlanh, but follows the same educational principals, minus the vocational training. Another group of people doing fantastic work for children with few opportunities. A worthy cause if ever there was one.
The last official engagement of Trabant Trek drew to a close, and we headed back to Monkey Republic.
“How do you feel?”
It still didn’t feel over. Maybe it would once I’d said goodbye to Carlos, who was leaving the following day to go to Canada and continue his travels. Nutter.

He drove Fez to the bus station, then handed me the keys, which felt pretty symbolic- that’s definitely the last time my co-driver will hand me the keys.
We hung around to wave him off. Strangely, in giant letters across both sides of his bus were the words “Child Sex Tourists”. I know there is a problem out here, but I think it’s a little more underground than carting bus loads of paedos around the country. There was some writing underneath the slogan but I couldn’t make it out…

I didn’t like saying goodbye to Carlos. I’ve only known the little Catalan for six months, but it was a pretty intensive six months. We spent a lot of it together in a little plastic box- I must have slept with Carlos more than any other man in my life. Despite what could have been a suffocating proximity, we remained good friends throughout, and other than a few weeks following a brief falling out in Ulaanbaatar, I always felt like he had my back.
Full of energy, he is always the first up in the morning, and normally stands by the door, or leaning against the car, looking pissed off and waiting for everyone else to sort themselves out. The length of time it takes to get going used to really wind him up- but by the end he just took the mick out of us all.
“So OJ can we go? Or do you want to take your top off, do some press ups, watch a film then moisturise?”
And the eyes, the ‘Spanish Eyes’ as they were quickly dubbed- the brooding, faux sexual look he pulls for cameras (and women), the dark, angry Latino stare he uses to show displeasure. Makes everyone crack up all the time: “Don’t do the eyes at me. He’s doing the eyes.”
His surname is Gey, which he pronounces ‘Hay’. This could be a little like Mrs Bucket pronouncing her name Mrs Bouquet. Or it may be the correct Catalan manner, who knows? Either way it means he is often simply referred to as The Gay. Or sometimes The Losbian, a cryptic play on Carlos Gey.
He has a passion for terrible puns, which always make Lovey crack up just because of their sheer awfulness, and he likes some terrible Spanish music. Countless times I have woken in Fez to see Carlos driving with his headphones on singing the female lead to a frightening Catalan love ballad at the top of his voice.
A friend once called for him on our China number.
“Can I speak to Carlos please?”
“What’s the passord?” I asked.
Without a pause he just said: “GAY.”
We laughed about that for a long time.
Despite his smaller stature and girl’s hips he walks a lot faster than me, often with his hands clasped firmly behind his back like Inspector Clouseau. I prefer to saunter around new places, slowly breathing it all in. But once Carlos has chosen his destination he is head down and get there.
Sometimes that is exactly what we needed on the trip: “Carlos gets things done,” OJ once said, quite correctly. Though sometimes I think maybe he acts a bit too quickly. He decided to go to Canada a while ago, set a date in his head, and has never wavered from it, despite only getting to spend a few days with us in Sihanoukville. But that’s Carlos, once he’s decided to do something he goes ahead and does it.
His English is good, and he picks up new words, phrases and insults quickly. But he is also good at making it appear that he understands, when really he doesn’t. So a typical conversation in Fez might go like this:
Me (lying in passenger bed): “I’ve checked the tank, we’ve got about four litres left.”
Carlos (returning from stall with sticky rice): “Okay.”
Me: “There’s not much life around here so we should probably stop at the next place we see and fill up.”
Carlos nods. Then a pause. Then he gets out of the car: “I'm just going to see how much gas we have left.”
Me: “No, mate, wait. Carlos…”
But he’s already out of the car, hood popped and checking the tank.
Because when Carlos decides to do something he goes ahead and does it.
I’ll miss that Spaniard.

TO SEE OUR PROGRESS ON VIDEO, PUT TRABANT TREK INTO YOU TUBE.

IF YOU READ AND ENJOYED THIS BLOG, WHY NOT SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION BY MAKING A SMALL DONATION?
www.firstgiving.com/trabanttrek
100% of your donation goes to Cambodian children’s charities.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

Victory Parade

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 10:33:00 +0000

Victory Parade
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
January 7th, 2008
By Dan Murdoch

“I can’t believe we’ve got Trabants in Phnom Penh.”
OJ

THERE have been days on this trip that I would rather forget.
But others I know I will remember forever.
Driving the cars to Mith Samlanh Friends, the Phnom Penh charity that we are raising money for, was one of those days.
I had no idea what to expect.
A cup of tea and a pat on the back? An informal chat with some volunteers?
But pulling up to the gate gave me butterflies, I could here clapping and drums, and see photographers and a cameraman.
The reception was astonishing: a corridor of 400 screaming, clapping kids, led by a band in traditional costume beating drums and dancing.
We stepped out of the cars into a bubble among the throng and just stood there while hundreds of people cheered and waved.
None of us were quite sure what to do. We probably should have jumped on the roofs of the cars and raised our hands like triumphant Grand Prix drivers, lapping up the crowd.
But instead we all got a little emotional, it was lump in the throat stuff seeing all these little kids and what our trip meant to them.
We stumbled about, hugging each other and smiling so broadly we got cramp.

Eventually, after an age of cheering, a head of house appeared with a microphone and a translator and gave a speech basically saying that we were awesome.
Then a representative from the kids spoke and expressed his gratitude, talked about how much the money means to them and how they’ve been following our progress.
It was pretty emotional and I didn’t really want it to end.
“I was welling up,” said OJ, “I was pleased to have the camera so no one could see me.”
“I almost cried,” TP.

The kids all swarmed to the cars, we opened them up so they could sit in and play with the wheel, and we posed for photos. I was literally wading through children, hundreds of these tiny, smiley little kids staring up, waving and holding hands: “helloooo…hellooooooo” they would shout and cling onto me.
I couldn’t stop laughing. We spent an hour with them, so many smiling faces. We were told they were expecting us to arrive in big cars, they thought it was hilarious that we’d crossed two continents in these tiny Trabbis.

After the kids had been called back to class, Mith Samlanh’s communications women, Sophea Suong, took as on a tour of the facilities. It is truly a stunning project. At the city centre base the organisation takes more than 800 disadvantaged kids a day, aged 0-24, and puts them through informal education and vocational training. These are kids who would otherwise be living and working on the streets, doing everything from petty crime and drugs to prostitution.
“About 90% of the children here came to Phnom Penh from the provinces looking for opportunity. But they end up on the street or living in the slums,” said Sophea.
“We get new kids here everyday, so we are always trying to reintegrate them. Getting children back into school is very important, and we reintegrate about 500 children a year.”
There is also a healthcare centre providing free medical care and counselling services. The charity also works to try and reunite children with their parents or close family, and if that fails they help with adoption, but only into Cambodian families. Sophea: “We think it is important that these children live in their own culture.”

As part of the core curriculum, everyone learns numeracy, literacy, English and health education including HIV awareness.
On top of this the centre provides training for aspiring hairdressers, seamstresses, mechanics, welders, beauticians, electricians and cooks.

Tony loved looking around the garage, where students learn theory and do car repairs, and the welding area, where the kids were repairing metal beds from the dormitories.
In a room next door there was a class taking apart TVs and radios and soldering circuit boards. Nearby is a room full of sewing machines where the children were making clothes to sell at the Friends shop. They get paid for their labour, and the charity keeps any profits.
Across the hall we saw a class of barbers watching their teacher give a haircut.
“After training our students are ready to work as hairdressers,” Sophea explained, “many of them go back to their village and start their own company.”
When they have completed their vocational training, the students also do a business class complete with mock interviews to help prepare them for the real world.
I sat down in an English class. On the white board where the words: “Has anyone seen my wire whisk?”
The kid next to me struck up a conversation.
“Hello, what is your name?”
We shook hands.
“How many people are in your family?”
I told him.
“How long will you stay in Cambodia?”
“A few weeks maybe? Your English is very good.”
“Oh thank you,” he looked embarrassed, “this is the first time I ever spoke to a foreigner.”
I felt touched at this: “No? You are the teacher of this class yes?”
“No, no,” everyone laughed, “I am a student.”

There is so much laughter in that place. The kids are ridiculously cute and friendly. Everywhere the children do the hands clasped greeting, like a little prayer- it is such a sweet and respectful hello.
In nursery the toddlers greeted us as ‘father’, and wouldn’t stop waving till we were well out of sight. They made me a little origami car, painted like Fez with the word ‘Trabantterk’ on the side. Tony, our mechanic, was given a paper hammer.
TP: “I’ve been smiling so hard for so long now that my cheeks are hurting. I don’t think I can smile anymore.”

My favourite area was Club Friends, a school hall style building with a basketball court, a stage where kids learn traditional and modern dance, a library corner and an art corner.
A little boy there had painted a Trabant on a brick, it’ll be built into the centre’s wall of friends.

At the end of the day two giant trucks turned up to take all the kids home. About 500 of them live around the city, mostly in the slum areas. A further 300 live in the charity’s two houses, a boy’s house and a girl’s house.
They kept waving and shouting as they boarded the truck.
I wish Carlos had been around to see it. But he went ahead to Sihanoukville a few days ago to meet his mum. I felt bad for him.

After waving goodbye we went to the excellent Friends restaurant just by the school, and treated ourselves to the most expensive meal we’ve had in months.
Tapas and cocktails.
We were all exhausted from a long afternoon, but elated, absolutely on top of the world.
Lovey: “That has to have been the best day of Trabant Trek. I'm not kidding.”
OJ: “That really has made it all seem worthwhile, that was just awesome.”
Everyone agreed.
It felt like the closure we needed. After six months on the road, it was a strange feeling to arrive in Phnom Penh a couple of days ago. I sat down with a beer and sort of thought, well is this it? Is this what we did? It was a bit of an anticlimax.
But the welcome we got from the kids, who made us feel so special, and looking at the work Mith Samlanh does, and how we’ve been able to help, really put it in perspective.
What a day.
I just wish we could have raised more money. But there’s still time.

TO SEE OUR PROGRESS ON VIDEO, PUT TRABANT TREK INTO YOU TUBE.

IF YOU READ AND ENJOYED THIS BLOG, WHY NOT SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION BY MAKING A SMALL DONATION?
www.firstgiving.com/trabanttrek
100% of your donation goes to Cambodian children’s charities.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

The Final Frontier

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 03:03:00 +0000

The Final Frontier
Poipet, Thai-Cambodian Border
January 5th, 2008
By Dan Murdoch

“This could be the last border crossing of Trabant Trek…if you make it in.”
MTP

MY PASSPORT wasn’t valid for entry into Cambodia.
It hadn’t expired, but there were only two months left on it, and to get into Cambodia you need a passport that is valid for six months.
I had already been warned at the Thai border.
And I was worried.

The chances of getting busted and not being able negotiate my way out of trouble weren’t high. But the penalty for getting busted was- I would have to go back to Bangkok, if they would even let me into Thailand, get a new passport, and try again. So I would almost certainly miss the end of Trabant Trek.
I didn’t like the thought of coming so far over the last six months and falling at the final border crossing.

The signs on arrival weren’t promising. OJ was filming quite blatantly, and the Thai border guards weren’t happy.
One guy was a real prick and seemed determined to give us shit. A shouty little man in an immaculate uniform that looked like it’d been picked up in an illegal French SS memorabilia eBay auction. Maybe the kit had rubbed off on him, he kept shouting: “Papers. Show papers.”
He looked through my passport, but I managed to divert his attention when he was on the expiration details. And for some reason he made me unpack a fold up chair in front of his cronies, but didn’t ask to look in the boot.
They spent half an hour questioning us, photocopying passports and poking around in the cars.

The only non-uniformed personnel who seemed to have the freedom to roam the border were the kids, ragged little urchins who tap on the car windows and ask for money. They looked sweet, but you wouldn’t want to leave your car unattended. Little tykes.

We attracted a lot of stares, large crowds pointing and laughing.
Watching is a big hobby around here.
Since we left Europe the rules on staring engagement have shifted more and more. It is now open stare warfare, with laser-guided looks constantly locking onto us.
I noticed the cultural differences when we parked the Trabbis on Khao San. The Westerners sidled up to the car, often adopting a blasé approach to conceal their interest. They’d fake a look at a nearby stall, then swivel and cast a glance at the car. You have to greet them to show it’s ok to come and have a look.
“How’s it going?” I’d break the ice.
“Oh, oh,” mock embarrassment, he wasn’t really looking at my car, “yes good thanks.”
“You recognise the car?”
And there we go, now they are free to explore.
But with your typical countryside East Asian there is no such façade. He will see the car from his perch in the shade, walk straight up to it, tap the hood, peer in through the window, push on the spare wheels, pluck at the wipers, then stare me up and down, sometimes laughing, sometimes looking troubled.
Maybe it’s because a lot of the places we visit are pretty light on entertainment- less computer games, cinemas, theatres, clubs, TVs, radios, music. So people take advantage of any form of fun they can get, and watching Westerners drag a brightly coloured plastic car down their High Street is about as good as the scheduling gets that week.
I’ve often wondered how much conversation we’ve caused on dinner tables across the world. Not that they use dinner tables in a lot of the places we’ve been.
At all those little villages we passed and caused a stir I'm sure people were talking about it afterwards.
“Hey did you see those stupid white people earlier? What was that all about?”
We’re probably victims of all sorts of speculation and gossip. The proud father boasting that he knew the name of the car, the grandfather claiming we were Russians, the old woman thinking Tony was from Pakistan.

After the Nazi was satisfied, and we’d got out stamps, the Thais waved us through and we drove down to the Cambodian side of the border.
The Thai’s and Cambodian’s have made full use of the 150m stretch of no-man’s-land between them. In the last few years this untaxed zone has become a haven for duty free trading, with people selling everything from clothes to blocks of ice, and a plush casino cashing in on the tax break- The Tropicana Resort.

Thankfully the Cambodian border guards were more friendly and less organised than their Thai counterparts.
We filled out our forms, paid our dues, got in line and….da da da…i got my stamp.
Elation.
But we didn’t have permission from Phnom Penh to bring cars into the country, so there was a small altercation at customs.
Luckily the official was easy going and let us in: “As long as I don’t get in trouble.”

The Cambodian border town of Poi Pet is not a pretty place. Its stinks of the decomposing rubbish that litters the streets, a treasure hunt for wild kids and wild dogs questing for morsels of food and money. The architecture is grubby and crumbling, the streets are unpaved, pot holed and dusty, and the 50km stretch of road out of the town is the worst we have driven since Mongolia.
But we’re in Cambodia.
Cambodia. Our 21st and last country. The final frontier. Six months and one day since I flew out of London, eight time-zones and 15,000 miles later, we are nearly there.

TO SEE OUR PROGRESS ON VIDEO, PUT TRABANT TREK INTO YOU TUBE.

IF YOU READ AND ENJOYED THIS BLOG, WHY NOT SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION BY MAKING A SMALL DONATION?
www.firstgiving.com/trabanttrek
100% of your donation goes to Cambodian children’s charities.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

One Night In Bangkok

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:32:00 +0000

One Night In Bangkok
Bangkok, Thailand
January 3rd-4th, 2008
By Dan Murdoch

“Very Bond right?”
Tony, on tricking our way into Thailand

DIVERTING to Bangkok was a controversial decision.
It meant a longer route, but on better roads, and it would add another country to our hit list and let us pull the cars into the travellers Mecca of Khao San Road. But I had no particular desire to go and I was worried about driving into and out of that sprawling, congested city, and concerned that we could easily lose a few days.
But Lovey pretty much forced the decision by leaving his bags there when he went to collect the box of spare parts a few weeks ago.
We made the drive from Vang Vien in Laos to the Thai capital in one hit, stopping off in Vientiane to eat and collect a parcel of car sticker’s we’d been sent from the States.
The journey took about 26 hours. Carlos did most of the work on day one, driving from 10am till 3am, then I got to take over for the last six hours of highway and three hours of traffic. I hate that early morning shift, from dark through sunrise into the blazing noon, and I still felt ropey from New Years, so it really took it out of me.

The drive was pretty straight forward, except we weren’t sure how we would get on at Laos customs. We’d brought three cars into the country but, having dumped Dante on Christmas Day, we were only leaving with two. In many countries this would result in a fine of thousands of dollars, but we didn’t know how organised the Lao were.
We arrived at the border, the Friendship Bridge that links Lao with Thailand across the Mekong River, and began the process. But it soon became clear that the Americans had lost the car papers for Ziggy, and the guards weren’t going to let the car across without them. We stalled and stalled, but OJ couldn’t find them. Although we no longer had Dante, we did have Dante’s old papers and Dante’s old plates.
So, right at the border, in full view of guards, police, military and passers-by, the Ziggy crew began switching the plates.
“Very Bond right?” Tony asked.
I couldn’t help but laugh. Kind of Bond. It took 20 excruciating minutes. I'm sure in films it’s over in a flash.
Now the car plates matched the papers, although the model, year, and engine numbers didn’t, but luckily the guards didn’t check.
We made it across and entered Thailand, our 20th country.
But the long drive took its toll on Fez, which broke down three times in the Bangkok traffic: brakes seized, spark plug popped, cylinder head smashed up.

Petrol stations can tell you a lot about a country. They weren’t bad in Laos, were they mostly had pumps, unlike Uzbekistan where we bought our gasoline in old coke bottles. Thai petrol stations are a wonder of cellophane-wrapped indestructible snacks that are so pumped with e-numbers and preservatives that only they and cockroaches survive the WW3. Hot dogs, microwave burgers, instant noodles, frozen meals and dried out pastries compete with the chocolate, crisps, coffee, tea and every soft drink under the sun thankfully kept chilled to a Siberian cool.
If these things had been available along our whole journey the trip would have been considerably more comfortable.

The big camera that we’ve been using to film this whole debacle broke at some point in Vang Vien, so we found a Sony repair shop in Bangkok. It would take about a week to fix, so we decided to leave it behind and OJ would collect it when he flew out of Bangkok later in the year. We still had the mini cam so, although it was a disappointment, it wasn’t show-threatening, we could still film the end of the Trek.

As expected, Bangkok traffic really is shocking- worse than Beijing, worse even than Budapest. The only way to avoid it is to pay a hefty fee to join the elite on the toll roads that exist high above the mayhem- a rollercoaster circuit of swerving overpasses built over the maelstrom.
Unfortunately Carlos and I managed to get thoroughly lost on this racing circuit (Carlos: “I know the way.” He didn’t.), paying repeated tolls, losing the Americans and having to return to the underworld to get to our destination anyway.
We parked the car at one end of Khao San to wait for Ziggy. We got quite a lot of attention, handing out fliers and telling our story, and everyone was pretty impressed with what we’d done.
It felt good to sit there with our battle-scarred cars after all we’ve taken them through- though the police didn’t seem to think so, but we’re good with police now. In fact it was a joy to be pulled over for the first time in months. I’ve lost my driving license, but we managed to wing it.
We had the usual offers from tuk tuk drivers: “You want see ping pong girls? You want see show?”
Carlos was asked: “You want girl? Very beautiful, just 15 years.”
So the guy basically had Carlos pegged as a paedo straight away. Something about the glasses maybe?
Khao San may have gone a little upmarket since I was last there, almost seven years ago.
The bars look a little trendier, a little better decked out. There’s more premiership football, more internet at the pubs and a bit of wifi floating about. It’s not so filthy and there are more ATMs as well as a McDonalds and a Burger King. Still selling pad thai and fried grasshoppers though and there are still pirate CDs, but now pirate computer games too and even Mac programmes.

There was some discussion over what the Spaniard would do next. His mum arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to meet him on January 1st. It was now the third and we were still a few days drive away.
So Carlos was planning to fly out from Bangkok to the Cambodian capital ASAP, then we’d catch up by Trabbi in a few days. But when we crossed into Thailand we had registered Carlos as the driver on Fez’s car documents. So we weren’t sure if he would be allowed to fly out without the car, or if we could get the car out of the country without him.
In the end we decided it wasn’t worth the risk and he would drive with us to Cambodia, if we had serious delays across the border he could always get a bus to meet his mum.

I almost wasn’t allowed into Thailand at all. My passport expires in three months and it is Thai policy that your passport must be valid for six months. The border guard eventually stamped it, but gave me a telling off and warned that I wouldn’t be allowed into Thailand like this again, adding that Cambodia wouldn’t let me in either.
I got in touch with the UK embassy, who said it was impossible to extend my passport, I would have to apply for a new one, which would take a week.
No one was willing to wait in Bangkok that long, so I had a couple of options. I could try to get a new passport, then fly out to meet the others. But that would put me behind by a week and mean I would probably miss the end of the trip.
I could go to the Cambodian embassy first thing and beg for permission to enter the country. But what if they refused and made a note of my passport number, guaranteeing I wouldn’t make it into Cambodia?
There was a chance the border guards wouldn’t notice and I’d sail in. Then I could apply for a new passport in Phnom Penh at the end of the trip.
But there was also a chance I could be refused entry into Cambodia. By that point I would already have been stamped out of Thailand and unable to return. So I’d be caught in no-mans-land with a valid but expiring passport and no country that would take me in.
This wouldn’t be ideal.
In the end I decided to go for it, we’d blagged plenty of borders up till now- just one crossing left.
We planned to leave at 5am to give Carlos the best chance of meeting his mum. I was still feeling pretty terrible so I got an early night, as did Carlos, but the Americans stayed out drinking till the early hours and didn’t enjoy getting woken up at 4.30am.
“I'm still drunk. There’s no way I can drive,” Tony told me when he made it down. I felt rubbish too, whatever I had was more than a New Year’s hangover, it cant last four days, so I just lay down in Fez hoping I wouldn’t wake up again until the border.
But we’d only been driving for twenty minutes when Ziggy pulled over. The Yanks shouted out the window at us: “Have you seen the mini cam?”
Shit.
We raced back to the hotel, but it had gone and no one there knew anything about it. Tony thinks he may have left it on the floor of the hotel when we drove off.

So now we were in a race against time to find a video camera and cross the border. We phoned the Sony centre, but the one we dropped off wasn’t repaired yet. We looked at buying a minicam, but it was expensive. So Lovey phoned a contact at the Foreign Correspondents Club and they put us in touch with a company that loans professional quality cameras. For $500 a week we could borrow one identical to the awesome Sony that was being repaired.
It seemed the only option so we went to grab it, but by the time we’d waded through the thick Bangkok traffic, collected the camera and got out of the city, there was no way we were going to make the border before it closed. Sorry Carlos’s mum.
We drove to Aranyapratet, six kilometres from the border, found a hotel and slept.
It felt strange being so close to our goal. If all went well, the Trek could be over in just a few days.
But first I had to make it across the Cambodian border with an invalid passport.

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New Year’s Eve Laos Style

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 16:37:00 +0000

New Year’s Eve Laos Style
Vang Vien, Laos.
December 30th-January 2nd, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Just sit in this, spark that, and float down there.”
Some overheard tubing advice.

I DON’T know if the sport of tubing would be allowed in England.
Mixing one of the world’s great rivers with a bunch of piss-heads screams health and safety. And we don’t really have the climate.
But I can’t really think of a better way to spend New Year.
First though, January 30th: another drive of epic beauty from Luang Prabang to the little river town of Vang Vien. We’d been told it was a haven for Westerners and we had hoped to spend Christmas there. We’re running well behind schedule on our 78th revised Trabant Trek plan, but at least we made it to a party town for the New Year- I may have snapped spending another holiday on the roadside.
The drive through the mountains continued where the rest of northern Laos had left off- awe inspiring scenery dotted with wattle and daub villages and bathed in sunshine. Every corner we turned there was another spectacular view, with plenty of ‘wow’ and ‘look at that’ between the Spaniard and I.
Fez did his best to ruin things, struggling up the hills and eventually breaking down about five kilometres out of town. Carlos and I were so desperate to reach Vang Vien we pushed the car up a hill, hoping to freewheel the rest of the way. It didn’t work, but we got a tow from some laughing Japanese tourists and, in typical Trek style, announced ourselves at our new home by taking apart and rebuilding one of the cars on the main drag.

Fez had chewed up another cylinder, but the warmth in the air, the elation at reaching the town, and the constant attention of tourists added to a party atmosphere around our impromptu workshop.
We heard there was a party at a beach a few kilometres away so headed down. It was more of a campfire affair, a mix of nationalities sitting round and sharing a gourd of moonshine, but it was cool to chat with other Westerners, relax and loosen my tongue ahead of the big day, which Carlos had insisted we would spend tubing.

The essence of tubing is this: you pay an entrepreneurial local to lend you a giant, over-inflated lorry tyre. Then they drive you five kilometres upstream and lob you into South East Asia’s biggest river, the Mekong. You spend the day lapping up rays and drifting through the idyllic riverside, flanked by jungle and overlooked by palm-peaked mountains.
All very tranquil and relaxing.
However, the serenity has been compromised by the building of dozens of bamboo bars along the route. These roar out ear-splitting tunes, which are mostly shite, and provide regular pit stops for refreshments, which are mostly cheap.

As you float along, a boy with a long stick will catch hold of your tube and pull you onto his bar’s bamboo decking, which is built over the river and on the banks. It’s obligatory to down at least a shot of Laos Laos, the local moonshine, before heading to the well-stocked bar for Beer Laos and the lethal Buckets- a combination of vast quantities of rum mixed with the deadly Asian Red Bull and a dash of coke. Depending on the bartender, some of these are knee wobblingly strong, and according to popular myth the Red Bull contains amphetamine. The whole concoction is served with ice and straws in a children’s beach bucket. What a drink.
To add to the pandemonium caused by large doses of sun and booze, many of the bars have built giant rope swings, zip lines and tall jumping platforms. These ensure an acrobatic spectacle is provided for drinkers by pissed up Westerners throwing themselves into the water from great heights. What more could you ask for?

In England, where you’re not allowed to operate a pond without a qualified lifeguard, I'm sure this whole event would be banned. But here in Laos, which according to one guide book has less than 100 written laws, plying tourists with dangerous levels of homemade alcohol and launching them down a major river is a minor industry.
It’s awesome fun, a giant adult water park in the most beautiful of settings, literally hundreds of people laughing, dancing, splashing and playing like kids. And it being New Year’s Eve, all the revelry was attacked to the power of ten.
My favourite bar had multiple decks, an enormous rope swing, two stratospheric diving platforms and a couple of volleyball courts, where I picked up a few minor sprains and some serious grazes (not that I noticed at the time).
Of course I spent far too long at the bars socialising, and not enough time actually floating downstream. So a long way from home night fell, the blazing sun gave way to a brisk chill, and I was lying in a three foot rubber hoop with my arse in the Mekong.
Luckily this is a pretty typical fate and taxis patrol the road near the riverfront to pick up hypothermic tubers and drop them back into town (for a small fee, like I said, this is an industry).

I didn’t get back to the hotel till gone ten, happily drunk, and found the others sleeping off their excesses.
I woke them, showered, and headed down to a large island in the river that hosts most of the late night parties. There we did all the things you’d expect on New Year’s Eve.

But the partying took a terrible toll. This is the longest hangover of my life, I haven’t drunk alcohol since, and don’t feel at all inclined to.
Maybe it’s time for a New Year’s resolution?

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Parasols and Elephants

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:15:00 +0000

Parasols and Elephants
Northern Laos
December 26th-30th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“WELCOME to Laos: straw roofs, mud houses, kids on the street…and Beer Laos…lots of Beer Laos.”
Carlos.

CULTURE shock.
The way we’ve meandered slowly across the world we’ve completely avoided it. It’s all very well flying in from cold, stoney London to sticky, clingy Bangkok- that’s culture shock territory. But driving so slowly you get overtaken by cyclists is a different prospect. The changes are slower, more gradual, so you see a hint of China in southern Mongolia, a whisper of Turkey in east Bulgaria.
But driving into Laos proper for the first time, I felt stunned by the surroundings.
The little villages that exist in the northern mountains could not be more different from the Chinese mega cities we came from. It’s a different dimension, an old way of life.
No concrete, glass and steel here, this is town planning eau naturale: bamboo houses on wooden stilts with woven wicker walls, thick thatched roofs topping sun shelters, where locals sit around cooking sticky rice in bamboo canes over open fires.
Pretty, idyllic, backwards. Mesmerising homes in this remote wonderland.
This was unmistakably Laos, not that strange China-mirroring border town of Boten, and it is unlike anywhere else we have visited, from Slovakia to Mongolia, from Romania to Russia- nowhere else looks like this.

Before this I would probably have put Tajikistan as my favourite drive- the five days trying to get to the foot of the Pamir Mountains, when we hugged the rugged Afghan border.
But these mountains could not be more different. Tajikistan is all bare cliff faces and sharp, jagged outcrops reaching up straight and spiky, with a few shrubs and grasses. Northern Laos is all curves and lumps, soft lines clothed in thick jungle and blooming, exploding colours from all manner of tropical wonder.
The mountains roll up, in a swell, steep but rounded like camel’s humps, and where The Pamir’s are thick and slab like, these mountains seem to spurt up like little nipples leaving ample room between peaks for rangy, eye-watering views.

I watched a tiny little girl, she couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, walking around with a baby strapped to her hip in a papoose. She cuddled and nurtured the infant while the families elder females beat rice into a paste with heavy sticks of bamboo. We tasted the congealed pulpy grain, which the locals chewed from leaves. It had the texture of rubber and was declared ‘completely flavourless’ by OJ.

Because all the houses here are made of wood, with rush roofs and wicker walls, everything feels so natural, so bountiful, so unlike any other country we have visited. The heat, the sun, the flowers, the forest- it feels like a natural utopia.
But there are dangers here. Just a few years ago the government rounded up hundreds of bandits who had terrorised traffic along Route 13, the same road we were travelling, and the north is rich in opium. On separate occasions I saw three or four men walking the road with an AK47 strapped to his side. One of the men was in khaki green and could feasibly have been military. But the others I saw were in faded T-shirts and grubby trousers looking every inch the jungle mercenary.

As we moved further south it felt like we were heading west. More and more signs of tourism- a couple of Spanish motorcyclists shared lunch and offered us a smoke, a whole car full of Germans were delighted to see Trabants so far from home, we passed a lone English cyclist and a fleet of Thai Volkswagen enthusiasts. There were more Chinese and Japanese tourists than I remembered too.

We spent two nights trying to get south to Luang Prabang, the first camped on the side of the road, the second in a two-bit transfer hub after a Fez breakdown. Fez kept playing up and people began getting a little frustrated with it, especially since we had just decided to ditch Dante instead.

We weren’t in Luang Prabang for long, but here too we were greeted by a new sight. Hordes of westerners, mostly couples mid-30s to late-60s. I hadn’t seen so many white people since Europe and it was a little off putting. The whole town is based around tourism, it’s a world heritage sight, and the sort of place retired French couples visit.
It was strange, like coming to an all inclusive resort after months in places that couldn’t attract a traveller with all day happy hour and free internet.
Carlos and I spent a relaxed day working on Fez, drinking, smoking and lapping up the sun.

ENDS
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Laos number: +856 (0)20 284 1195
Thai number: +66 83 985 1615.

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Dante’s Infirmity

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:19:00 +0000

Dante’s Infirmity
Boten, Laos
December 25th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I just don’t see the point in tearing apart a perfectly good car.”
Tony P

I HAVE never woken up with a man on Christmas morning and, other than hoping to catch out Santa, I never expected to.
We could only afford four beds at the hotel, and the Mighty Tony P and I drew the short straws. But at least it was a room with clean sheets and a hot shower, not the crab-infested plywood whorehouse.
And Tony is a gentle lover.
Christmas Eve back home is spent down the pub with scores of old friends I haven’t seen for a year.
I spent this Christmas Eve with a gerbily Mexican-Italian-American watching a Japanese slapstick in Chinese in Laos.
I’ll be home for Christmas.
I’d told that to a lot of people, and although I knew months ago that I wouldn’t, it still felt strange. I felt like Dorothy.

Christmas lunch was fried noodles with squid and coffee. There were a few closed shops in Boten, maybe they knew something of this Christian holiday, but otherwise no signs of festive cheer. And though we’d been living in the village for four days, and everyone had noticed us, no one wished us season’s greetings.
I'm not sure what the locals think of the strange white people with their funny cars.
Someone must have been celebrating something because I watched a man cooking a giant hamster with a flamethrower. He was just out on the street with some gloves, a jet of flames and this enormous rodent.
What you up to?
“Just flamethrowering this here hamster.”
Okay.
Round back they had a crazy looking owl and three medium sized bears in cages. They were a few feet tall, with thick dark hair and powerful arms. I asked two of the boys where the bears came from and they gestured towards the surrounding forest. They told me they got them when they were very small, and when they were very big they would eat the paws and heart.
One of the boys was playing slaps with a bear through the cage, trying to palm the back of its paw before getting clawed.

We spent the afternoon successfully repairing Dante, and unsuccessfully working on Ziggy. Everything was tried, every piece taken apart and rebuilt, every component tested. But it wouldn’t start. The starter would whir and whir, and then, when you think the engine is going to catch, a loud ominous clunk, and nothing. It was the same sound as back in Beijing, and four days of tinkering had not fixed it.
By late afternoon OJ was plying Ziggy’s engine apart with a chisel. I think at that point we knew it was the end.
Christmas Day 2007, one-hundred-and-fifty-six days since we set off from Zwickau, Germany, twenty-three-thousand kilometres down the road, in our nineteenth country, we were going to have to dump a Trabant.

The decision to ditch a car was pretty much made for us- one engine didn’t work. But which Trabbi to get rid of? We had two working engines that could go in any of the cars.
The victim would be cannibalised for parts, butchered for spares, and it would take a lot of work, so really it didn’t matter which car went- it didn’t have to be Ziggy.

We decided the time was right to sit around with a beer, discuss it and vote.
But there wasn’t much agreement or discussion, more argument and contradiction. People became sentimental about their Trabbis and didn’t want to see them dumped. They admitted it, Carlos wanted to keep Fez because he loved it, Lovey wanted to keep Ziggy because he loved it, Tony wanted to keep Dante because he loved it.
Only OJ and I remained impartial. I honestly had no problem with losing Fez. I’ve spent a lot of time in the little car, but it is a pile of rubbish. It’s probably had more problems than any other car and runs terribly.
This is not the time for sentiment, I said, lets make a decision which gives us the best possible chance to get to Cambodia.
Everyone agreed. Then continued to let their sentiment cloud their judgement.

We thought about the car’s pluses and minuses:

Fez
Cons: no passenger seat, front right bearing and transaxle dodgy, passenger door doesn’t lock and swings open, brakes dodgy, rear control arm welded, history of problems, exhaust welded to the floor (extra noisy), headlights dim, speakers broken.
Pros: It’s looks good (subjective…), currently works so we could just drive away. In theory three people could squeeze in.

Ziggy
Cons: It’s in pieces all over the floor, broken front leaf spring, rear control arm welded, only Lovey can open the door, parking (hand) brake broken. Shocks are too big on the back (damaging rear tyres).
Pros: The only car that locks, hasn’t had too many problems, seats four people.

Dante
Cons: A giant hole has been cut into the roof (wet, cold, insecure). Passenger window missing, driver window stuck open. Passenger door broken (sealed shut). Trunk door broken (sealed shut). Can only seat two people.
Pros: Currently works so we could just drive away. Big trunk.

It was too tough to call. Not being particularly in on the mechanical side of things, which I felt should be the only consideration, I had no idea how to vote.
But this is how it went:
Tony wanted to ditch Ziggy, it was in pieces. He also loves Dante.
Carlos voted Dante, because there is no roof so it is terminally insecure. And he loves Fez.
Lovey voted Dante for the same reason (and he loves Ziggy), and so did OJ.
So when it came to my turn the decision was already made, Dante by three votes, with the main reason being the giant hole in the roof, which the Americans had cut out just the day before.
I abstained, I really had no idea.

Tony was pissed. That’s an American pissed, which I have learned means angry, not a British pissed, which means drunk. But soon he spanned the linguistic differences by downing a mini bottle of rice wine.
Then he was really pissed.
“I'm not annoyed at anyone for the decision, I just think it was the wrong one. I don’t see the point in tearing apart a perfectly good car, when we could just take the drum and the transaxle from Ziggy and go before it gets dark.”
But the car is insecure.
“So is Fez, the passenger door doesn’t close.”
Personally I didn’t really care about the time it would take to rebuild Ziggy and strip Dante. It would be better to get the job done properly than to rush it. We’re here now, I said, we should just get the job done as best we can.
But Tony was right. It took ages, it got dark, the job got harder and we’d scattered out tools across a mechanic’s forecourt. It was midnight by the time we’d finished testing Dante’s engine in Ziggy, switching the leaf springs over, harvesting the best tyres from Dante, taking the drum, transaxle, speakers, stereo.
When we’d finished gutting Dante it really was a sad sight. Sitting on bricks, shocks hanging loose, roof gaping open. We left it there, by a garage, and told the owner we were going to Vientiane to get parts.
The Americans talked about returning to pick it up once we’ve finished the trek. They want to ship it to the States.
But I think we may have seen it for the last time.

We set off in convoy, if you can call two cars a convoy. Really we were just following each other.
“How far do you think we’re gonna get?” I asked Carlos, who was driving.
“I don’t care, I just want to make it out of this town.”
The battery was dead, but we were on a hill so we roll started down, back towards the Laos border.
The engine kicked in, the loud, raucous vibrations, the exhaust filling the cabin. Carlos clicked it into gear and slipped the clutch. And we went…nowhere.
He turned to me: “There’s no gears.”
We looked at each other in silence. He had that flicker of a grin he grows arounf the corners of his mouth when he knows somethings gone horribly wrong. He shifted the stick around, but nothing.
“Clutch?”
I stepped out the car and looked around. We were still in Boten.
“So on that attempt we actually managed to go backwards?” I said. We’d roll started towards China, not Cambodia.
“Nice work. So we’ve lost one car and scored –50m today.”
We set up the tent for our fourth night in Boten.

Lying in Fez, where I had made a bed, I heard that infuriating sound of a mosquito, buzzing about in the dark, looking for a target. I don’t remember the last time I heard a mosquito. South East Asia, we’re here. Five of us, with two cars. But we’re here.
“Happy Christmas,” I shouted towards the tent, and squashed the midge.

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Big Trouble in Little China

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:34:00 +0000

Big Trouble in Little China
Boten, Laos
December 24th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Come to Cambodia he said. We’ll have a good time he said. We’ll be home for Christmas he said.”
A favourite ditty of The Mighty Tony Perez.
WHO’S bored of Christmas already?
Those jingles, that shopping, the decorations. Ever wish to be completely away from it all? Somewhere they think Christmas is a hair product.
Well I think we found it.
Boten on the Laos-China border. A one road strip trapped in a terrible struggle for identity. You see, we’re in Laos. We crossed the border, the little barrier that divides Laos from China is visible from all over the village.
But somehow China has crept over that fragile demarcation, cultural seepage or cultural creepage, I don’t know, but the locals don’t seem to realise where they are. It’s Little China here: All the clocks are set to China time, all the signs are in Chinese, all the prices are in RMB, the Chinese currency.
In fact, we’re having a tough time trying to use our Laos Kip. When I hand it over, the locals stare uncomprehendingly as if I just passed them, well, a foreign note.
“It’s Kip. It’s Laos money.” I say.
A shake of the head. “Renminbi,” they reply.
We are able to exchange, but we are getting royally screwed every time, and we’re running out of cash.
And Christmas. What Christmas?
There isn’t a shred of tinsel in sight, not a whiff of mistletoe or a tinkle of jingle bells. I don’t think they’ve heard of Slade. No Santa hats, roast chestnuts, crackers, stilton or port, and the surrounding forest is spared the shame of being chopped down and dressed up like a kitsch, pantomime drag queen.
A nearby tree bends a branch over and squints a knot at my screen.
“They do what?”
“That’s right my evergreen friend, if you’d had the misfortune to be born anywhere in the Anglo-Saxon world you’d have been hacked down, sprinkled with ribbon and glitter, and topped by a winged bimbo with a wand.”
“Frightening. Have your Western trees no dignity?”

On Christmas Eve 2007 this isn’t where I expected to wake up.
In a tiny room with plywood walls in a house of ill repute. The cheapest joint in town and thankfully, unlike yesterday, I wasn’t woken by the moans of the single member of staff doing her job. Someone had a happy ending.
We’ve had some progress with the cars. Fez and Dante work. But Ziggy doesn’t, and more worryingly, we’re unable to diagnose the problem. It’s never taken this long to solve a Trabbi riddle before.
So it’s day three on a patch of dust by the side of the road. There is some life here: it’s a free trade zone, so there’s a big new casino just up the road with a $50/night hotel. There are a few little boutiques with some trendy Chinese fashion, all well out of our price range. There’s also the best internet café I have seen in South East Asia, although I haven’t been here for seven years.
There must be 50 PCs, all pretty new, a good connection and gangs of boys and girls- the boys playing World of Warcraft and Counterstrike, the girls on a dancing game and social networking sites. Unlike the West, computers are too expensive for most people, but internet is cheap- 35p an hour. So the interwang, as it is called here, is the place to be. Whenever I walk in the girls just crack up. Occasionally it prickles to have a few dozen teenagers giggling at me, but mostly I just take a deep breath.

Dante now has a skylight stretching over the driver and passenger seats. Which is interesting. Because Dante is now terminally insecure, we have taken the passenger window and put it in Fez to replace the one Carlos broke. But now the passenger door has stopped locking, so you just tug it to pull it open. Not especially secure.
The American’s have tried pretty much everything on Ziggy, with no success. So they have gone to a mechanics up the road to try again, and see if the guys there have any ideas.
If we don’t get it working then we have to ditch it.
“It’s annoying if we have to dump a car just because we don’t know what’s wrong with it,” Lovey told me.
“I agree, it could be something really simple.”
Ziggy has always been the strongest car- it would be a shame to leave it here, when it could be fixed.
I don’t feel like we’re in a rush anymore. We’re not going to make Vang Vien for Christmas, nor Sihanoukville for New Year. So why hurry? I'm resigned to this thing not being over ‘till 2008, why bother rushing through the last few weeks of the trip at a frantic pace, getting stressed out and not enjoying it?
We’ve made South East Asia, it’s warm, it’s cheap, I'm happy to settle into a more gentle rhythm, and if that means we sit here for the whole of Christmas trying to get Ziggy going, then so be it.
I’d only be whinging about Christmas at home anyway. Those jingles, that shopping, the decorations. Ever wish to be completely away from it all?
Try Boten, Laos.

UPDATE 9PM: Ziggy still doesn’t work. The Yanks spent the day taking the car apart and rebuilding the engine, to no avail. No one knows what the problem is, but rather than dump it and move on, the Americans want to try a couple more things tomorrow. If that doesn’t work we either dump it here, or send it ahead to Luang Prabang by truck, and dump it there. That way there would be a chance we could come back for it at a later date. Who knows when?
Dante is broken too. Carlos and Lovey needed a tow back after a 20km trip to the petrol station. But Tony thinks he knows what the problem is.
Another job for Christmas Day.
Fez starts, but we haven’t tried taking it more than a few hundred metres- who knows how far it will run?
So we’re staying here in Boten tonight.
As a group we have $100 left. There’s no ATM here- we waved a credit card at the manager of the hotel/casino and he looked very confused.
They don’t take Visa.
We’re dirty and smelly, having spent the days deep in engine grease and the last two nights alternating between a brothel and a tent. So we want a hot shower and fresh sheets as our Christmas present. We found a hotel that’ll do it, but it’s about $35- a fair chunk of our money. We’re going for it, just so we don’t wake up on Christmas Day in a whorehouse.
But that only leaves us $65 to try and get to Luang Prabang, where there is an ATM.
Hopefully we can fix Ziggy and Dante tomorrow, and get there without breaking down.
That does seem pretty hopeful. Otherwise we’ll try sending Ziggy down by truck, and hope the driver will accept cash on arrival.
There’s a chance we’ll be stuck somewhere in northern Laos with cars that don’t work and no money. This seems just as likely as getting to Luang Prabang.
A teenage girl just walked past wearing a flashing Santa hat. The only hint of Christmas cheer here on the China border.

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A Sad Humiliation on Entering Laos

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 08:52:00 +0000

A Sad Humiliation on Entering Laos
Laos
December 23rd, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I love Gabor. He didn’t send us what we asked for. But he did send us what we need.”
Tony, on the package of parts we received from Hungary.

A MORE ignominious entrance to a country would be difficult to imagine.
Our three Trabbis, pride of our lives, towed across the border in convoy by a single tuk tuk.
Shameful.
One little motorbike tugging along all our cars and worldly possessions.
Passers-by pointed and laughed, officials stared, motorists gawped and swerved. Trabant Trek hits Laos.

We’d hoped to cross from China on Wednesday (December 19th), but the cars took a few extra days to reach the border. So we relaxed in a town about 50km away, Meng La.
We needed a few hundred quid to pay the shipping company, and, although Carlos had sorted out the European money, none of the ATMs in town would accept the American’s cards. They had to take a four-hour bus ride to the nearest city to withdraw the cash.
OJ broke a pen in protest.

That afternoon I went to check out a basketball court I had seen the following evening. There were a couple of guys playing and a load of seven or eight-year-old girls in school uniform. It was about 4pm so I guessed they were on their way back from school, and I joined in. I was getting a lot of funny looks, which I expected, being a pasty, sweaty white man, but after ten minutes a woman came out.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Well, I'm on my way to Laos.”
“But what are you doing here?”
“Just passing through, I’ve driven here from Germany actually, we’re trying to get to Cambodia.”
“No, no. What are you doing here? This is a school. This is a PE lesson.”
I’d inadvertently wandered into a playground and started shooting hoops during a class. Oops. The lady was the school’s English teacher who had been summoned to sort me out.
I wonder what would have happened if a pot-bellied Chinaman had turned up at an English girls school and joined a basketball lesson.
He would probably be arrested.
But they were okay about it and I ended up playing a proper, hour long game of full court with the PE teachers, complete with scoreboard, ref’, floodlights and refreshment table. Exhausting.

The next day (Friday) the Americans returned from their ATM mission and Edmund, our guide, text to say the last car was at the border.
We headed down to Mo Hoa but they couldn’t get Fez off the truck before the crossing closed, so we were stuck another day.
We paid Edmund, our guide, who has been pretty awesome throughout our stay in China, sorting out all the paperwork, officialdom and shipping.
We are so late that the poor chap wont make it home (a five day bus and train journey) to be with his family for Christmas. He’s a devout Christian, and we all feel terrible about it.
Carlos found out about his distinctly un-Chinese name though. Apparently he’d once worked at a hotel, and the manager told him he could pick his uniform. Each one had a name stitched on and he chose one with Edmund.
I think all people deserve a similar opportunity at birth- take the parents out of the equation.

Saturday, December 22nd, we finally made it out. More than three weeks after the expiry of the Trabbi’s customs papers, just a day before the end of our own visas, six weeks behind the original schedule, and three weeks behind the revised Bishkek timetable.
Three days till Christmas.
And none of the cars work.
We’ve crossed mountains and deserts in these little cars. We’ve come so far, more than 20,000km through 19 countries, and the cars are badly damaged. But much is superficial or cosmetic- the doors don’t close properly, none of them lock, and when they do you can’t open them. The paintwork is a horrible mess, and there are various battle scars from collisions. Yesterday Carlos smashed Fez’s passenger window, which is ok, because before that it wouldn’t open- fine in freezing Siberia, but a problem in sunny Laos. None of the cars have seatbelts- all of them have been removed to use as tow cables at some point. Ziggy can only indicate left, and doesn’t have brake lights. Fez doesn’t even have a passenger seat.
All these things we can, and have, been dealing with. The cars are rubbish, we know that, they’ve been lived in for five months, they’re trashed.
But what’s going on under the bonnet, I have less idea about. None of them work, that’s clear enough, and we are relying on the parts that Gabor, our Hungarian mechanic sent, being able to sort the problem.

In a rare moment of group co-ordination, Lovey, who had gone to Bangkok to collect the parts, managed to meet us at the Laos border with the package. Our tuk tuk had dropped us off just before the crossing, but luckily it was downhill into Laos, so we released the handbrakes and freewheeled into the country, stopping outside a restaurant to compare notes.
What an arrival.

I was up for having the cars towed all the way south to Vang Vien, a traveller’s town where we hoped to spend Christmas. That way we could relax for a few days, fix the cars and enjoy the festivities with some other Westerners. I was very afraid that we might get the cars going and begin the drive, only to break down in the middle of nowhere and spend Christmas by the side of the road.
But the others were confident we could fix the cars here, so, on the side of the road, 100m from the border with China, we removed all three engines, and began rebuilding them. It turned out we hadn’t requested the correct parts for the job. But luckily Gabor had sent us them.
TP: “I love Gabor. He didn’t send us what we asked for. But he did send us what we need.”
Everyone got burned in the blistering heat, but loved it after the cold of the last few months.
By nightfall we had Fez and Ziggy back together, but all the cars had flat batteries. We tried to push start them, to no effect. I managed to find someone with leads to give us a jump start, but Fez only ran for a few minutes, making a terrible racket and sounding distinctly unwell, before the engine just died.
Tired and getting ratty, we turned in at what may have been a house of ill repute.

So this morning we plan to get the cars going and begin the drive south. Luang Prabang is about 300km away, Vang Vien another hundred. The chance of making it to Vang Vien for Christmas seems pretty slim from here- we don’t even know what the problem is with Fez or Ziggy. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.
Luang Prabang is a possibility, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and pretty dull.
But it’d be better then the side of the road.

UPDATE, 3.30PM: This morning I found a garage to charge all the batteries. We are doing them in shifts. Just brought the first one back and stuck it in Fez. The little car works. We asked Tony to try it first and he raced away. He then kindly asked Lovey to have a drive of our baby Trabbi. Neither Carlos or I have been allowed a go yet, but I'm sure it’ll be smashing.
I'm resting my sunburn in a shady restaurant, and watching the Americans removing the roof from Dante. I can’t see exactly what’s going on, but when I returned from the mechanics they were drinking Beer Laos and excitedly told me they are going to make Dante into a convertible. Now they are on the roof with various tools.
It doesn’t rain in Laos does it?

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China's Century

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:36:00 +0000

China’s Century
China
December 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.
In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.”Confucius

DID you know that China is where it’s at?
For the next century this is the best seat in the house. Sorry Old Europe with your entrenched socialism, stifling history and petty prejudice. Bollocks to America and the military industrial. Russia? You’re so 1900s.
This is China’s Century.
In the last 20 years the country has transformed from communist to consumerist. From Mao tunic to Prada miniskirt. From global pariah to global power.
And the next 20?
Watch the country rocket to world leader. See our rulers scream in terror as the juggernaut overtakes, listen to the scare stories, the rhetoric, the flood of cheap goods, the outsourcing, the military build up, oooh the pain of the West as it loses its crown.
This is China’s century and we’re all in it.

China gets such a rough ride in the press. It is seen as a threat, an economic threat, a political threat- evil communists, repressive regime, no freedom of speech, it’s a one party system. The US must be twice as good; it has a two party system.
In my three weeks here I have only visited cities: Xilinhaote, Beijing, Xi’an and Kunming. I have no idea about the countryside, I have little idea of the political situation. But from what I have seen at street level, whoever is in charge has gripped modernity by the wallet.
The cities are exploding, booming, bursting at the seams with development. You can taste the progress in the air: it’s the smell of car exhausts, coffee, and perfume. It’s touch screen mobile phones and wireless internet, skyscrapers and shopping malls, dancing cranes hovering around new buildings that grow a storey a second, every second, day and night. Armani vies with Apple for attention; do I want a rain mac or an Apple Mac? David Beckham, Kate Moss and their fragile ilk pout down from the billboards to help me decide.

I don’t know how many people can afford this stuff. How many have been left out by the new China. When a slap up meal costs a dollar, how many people can spend $30 on a shirt?
Those who can- the new commercial class of the new China- are well-dressed city-dwellers, funky, fashionable, mobile phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, little leather handbags, big leather wallets.

The web is big. All the guesthouses we stayed in had free wifi, as did plenty of restaurants, cafes and bars. It is censored- no BBC and even my own blogspot site is banned. But you can easily get around it with a proxy server (www.anonymouse.org).
And with the explosion in web use has come a surge in free speech and criticism, which in many ways has helped facilitate the new China.
The government still runs the Great Firewall of China, a wonder of the modern world, and even Google has kowtowed, censoring its own search engine.
But in an increasingly net savvy society, how long can this last?
And with freedom of speech comes criticism of the government, and political change.
China doesn’t do change quickly. It doesn’t share the West’s obsession with youth (Michael Howard too old to lead the Tories at 66), and its rulers are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Political change is slower and more deliberate.
But it is happening.
Be prepared. This is where it’s at.
This is China’s Century.

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The Cusp of South East Asia

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:23:00 +0000

The Cusp of South East Asia
Kunming to the Laos border
December 14th- 21st, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”Confucius

KUNMING was beautiful, I felt very much at home.
Busy, warm, vibrant, large university population, very much a modern city, but with a distinctly Chinese twist- huge government buildings that could have come from the New York skyline, except they had subtly curved roofs, a little nod to a pagoda.
Walking back from watching the United-Liverpool game, at 2am on a Sunday night, the streets were still busy.
A little oasis of stalls around a street lamp, filled with fruits and foods I didn’t recognise. Dozens of people sitting out in the night, eating and chatting.
A patrol of policemen passed, about half a dozen all swinging long clubs as they sauntered by. The back two cops were arm-in-arm, laughing.

The cars were meant to arrive here and be shipped out to the border on Friday (December 14th). But the delivery company must have been infected by Trabbi Time, as the last car, Fez, didn’t arrive ‘till Wednesday and didn’t get shipped ‘till Thursday (December 20th)- another week long delay.
Carlos and I went down to the shipping company to pay them and check on the cars.
Ziggy was surrounded by a swarm of men. They had the windows down, the doors open. They were rifling the inside playing with walkie talkies, three men had the boot open and were going through the stuff inside, waving our 8mm camera about.
We approached by stealth and I shouted a loud English greeting in an attempt to scare them. But they just looked up, shameless, and waved our stuff at us.
I gave them a tour of the engine, to much laughter.

We got a night bus south to a town nearer the border to wait for the cars. There were three rows of double beds on the bus, which was nice, except Carlos, TP and I were in a five-person bed at the back, sandwiched between two Chinamen.
A sweaty and frustrating night. Sleeping with five men was everything I’d imagined it to be.

It is a shame not to have driven the length of China. It would have been some road trip alone, and a real missed opportunity, especially considering how much we paid to do it. Instead all our efforts were limited to the dull northern desert. It would have been interesting to watch that dry, dirty, grey landscape develop into the humid, lush, greenery that we’ve seen in the south.

Looking outside the window on our long journey south (65 hours of trains and buses) I had seen the usual ebb and flow of city to countryside. Rural wooden shacks and chocolate cake hills drifting to suburbs, mixing old thatched homes with light industrial, low-rise factories, then the neck craning city centres, thirty and forty story apartment blocks and offices, filthy decrepit estates near shining new glass and metal skyscrapers. The image would rebound as we left the centre, returned through the fading development and arrived back at hillsides carved into terraces, sweeping like grand colonial staircases down to sun-kissed green fields and heavy streams topped with a head of floating mist.

It is sad we couldn’t drive, but driving Trabbis is a two edged sword.
On the one hand, you never know when you are going to stop (i.e. breakdown). So the little cars take you to places you would never have normally visited, places that don’t make the guidebook, that aren’t even on the map, that few westerners have visited.
This is awesome: no guesthouses, no internet, not even any restaurants- you have to rely on the hospitality of locals, and they always come through.
On the other hand, you never know when you are going to stop. So the little cars take you to places you would never have normally visited, places that you don’t want to visit.
So you end up staying five days on the Turkmen-Uzbek border, instead of getting to know Ashgabat. You live a week in tiny Tajik villages, instead of exploring the Pamirs.
Here in China we spent a week in Xilinhaote, it’s a big city but not worth a visit, we could have used the time doing anything- Three Gorges Dam? Shanghai?
So we have seen China in a completely different manner to all the other countries we have visited. We have been on the tourist trial. Refreshing in some ways, but still, a missed opportunity.

Hopefully tomorrow, Friday December 21st, Fez will arrive and we will cross into Laos.
Of course, none of the cars work. We will be pushing all three of them across the border. Truly stumbling out of China. I don’t know how much no-man’s-land there is. On the Tajik-Kyrgyz crossing there was 22km of mountainous tracks between the countries.
Let’s hope China and Laos enjoy a closer relationship.
Either way, we will be limping in, struggling over the last few miles to the home straight, South East Asia.
I can already smell it in the food, see it in the foliage and feel it I the air- sticky and humid.
Six weeks late, but we’re nearly there.

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The Train to Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 06:52:00 +0000

The Train to Spring
Kunming, China
December 13th-17th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“I’ve been clean for two weeks now.”
Tony P, team mechanic, on the joys of travelling without Trabants.

THE thing about long train journeys is the smell.
As is the way with odour, it builds up around you, slow, subtle and unnoticed, like carbon monoxide poisoning, senile dementia and Jack Johnson.
But you step off the train to fight over a satsuma with a bunch of passengers suffering cabin fever, return to your cot, and then it hits you.
Piss, eggs, wine, fart, sweat, rice, coke, beer, perfume, shit, bleach, noodles, effluent, chicken, hair, feet, feet, feet, feet and more feet- a heady brew of satanic spices concocted in a cauldron previously used as a dustpan when Beelzebub swept out hell’s charnel house.
Overpowering, stomach-turning revoltingness on a chemical weapon scale- expect pre-emptive action by a US-led multinational force acting under the auspices of the UN with a brief to destroy WMD and anyone affected.
There were no windows. I imagine we couldn’t be trusted to regulate our own temperature to aroma ratio, and the only draft came when someone opened the toilet door, wafting a port-a-loo breeze of acrid disinfectant and sewage through our carriage.
We didn’t have a cabin, just three stories of bunk beds arranged along an open and busy corridor. Every half hour a man with a trolley would dash through shouting in Chinese, but disappear before we could see what he was wheeling.
Thirty-five hours in these conditions was always likely to be testy.

There were a few other inconveniences.
The freak show fame attached to being Westerners in the east: aren’t we funny, aren’t we strange, come and have a look. Fair’s fair- we’re only here because they’re funny and strange and we wanted a look.
But we don’t watch them crapping.
The Chinese have a penchant for the art of throat clearing. Never have I seen a nation attack the issue of phlegm with such vehemence. True connoisseurs of the clearance- huge, racketing, barking, choking hocks that are enough to make innocent bystanders gag and dogs howl at the moon. I sometimes expect cranium chunks or nasal cavity to come roaring out with the gob: oh look, that’s his frontal lobe, that was a good spit.
And it isn’t just the men, communism is non-discriminatory, a truly equal form of suppression, so woman too can hurl vile slime balls down as they adjust their make-up. Nor is the practice restricted to the outdoors, our train was something of a haven for spitters, the beat to our journey the rhythmic expulsion of snot.
What could make this paradise of sight and smell complete?
Throw in the tantruming youngster. A perfect wake up call for day two on the Nifkin Express. She must have been nine or ten, not the screaming baby who knows no other way to express her wants, but a young girl with command of language taking out a vehement yet unknown grievance on a train full of folk who were not her tormentors.
Little brat. Hours of it, lung-bursting, head in hands shrieks- not even crying, just wailing. And her guardian, in what I imagine was an attempt to discipline the little bitch, sat stony, silent and impassive.
Just give her what she wants, I thought, we shouldn’t all have to be involved in this terrible lesson. But on it went, ‘till she seemed to forget what she was screaming about.
Time decided to relax and spread out, the only punctuation to its mindless passing the decision to have a pot of instant noodles. A little treat for having coped with another six hours, and a rare chance to do something gratifying and rewarding.
I got hot water. I made noodles.
The red wine we brought as our valium went too quickly and the night was restless, sleep hindered by the jagged progress of our driver, who had a sixth sense for passengers nodding off and gleefully hit the breaks to put a stop to such weakness. Isn’t sleep deprivation a form of torture? Can I call the Red Cross? No? So it’s true what they say: China is a country piled high with repressive jobsworths bent on punishment and suppression.
I hope that sentence never comes back to haunt me.

In the morning everyone was ratty, but the mood lifted when we pealed back the curtains.
Outside all was green and yellow.
True, vibrant, healthy, vegetable green dowsed in a wash of eastern yellow from a heavenly body long lost to us, but now reintroduced.
The Sun.
Rolling fields bathed in sunshine.
We cast our collective minds back for the last time we’d seen such simple glory. Tajikistan? Mountains. Turkmenistan? Desert.
We placed it in Azerbaijan, the long drive to Baku, August 25th. Nearly four months ago.
I greedily absorbed the view, and tried to snatch a look at what the farmers where wearing as they flew past my little screen. Is it sandal weather? Shorts?

Kunming means the City of Eternal Spring, and we stepped off the train into a beautiful spring day.
T-shirt weather.
It seems strange to hark on about the weather. I am English, and in a country with such an unpredictable climate commenting on the clouds is an understandable national pastime.
But for us it’s more than that.
Back in Bishkek we had to make the choice between going south to Bangkok (quick, warm, easy) or heading north through Siberia (long, cold, difficult).
We plumped for north and the six and a half weeks it has taken us to escape sub zero temperatures have been the most testing yet.
Even in west Tajikistan, where we broke down relentlessly, it felt like a bit of a holiday because you could always relax in the sun.
But when you have to slide under the car at night time in two feet of snow it really doesn’t feel like a vacation. When two of the cars need to be push started every time, and it is so cold that even touching the back windows with gloved hands freezes your fingers so they hurt.
Seven weeks of wearing thermal underwear, three pairs of socks, huge jackets, scarves, gloves, layer after layer giving me a Jo Brand physique. Having to take everything off when you get in somewhere, and putting literally everything on in the evening to spend another night in a Tupperware box with no heating and doors that don’t close so that the outside is very much inside.
Our lowest ebb must have been in the Gobi when we (Carlos) burned out Fez’s clutch plate. All our water was frozen so we had to make a fire out of dried camel shit and fence posts that we sawed down from along the railway line. The coldest experience of my life.
It has been a real test of endurance.
And now its over.
We made it. We did the northern route. We beat the Kazakh steppe, the Siberian winter, the Gobi Fucking Desert, and now we’re safe. Whatever happens, the threat of exposure and frostbite is over.

Our hostel has a terrace, no, a SUN terrace. From it I can see palm trees.
South East Asia here we come.

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The Great Mosque of Xi'an

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:50:00 +0000

The Great Mosque of Xi'an
Xi’an, China
December 12th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

FOR a while in Xi’an it felt like I’d been transported back to Central Asia.
We’d stumbled into the Muslim Quarter, a strange and ancient place that owes its existence to the Silk Road, the famous trade route between China, the Middle East and Europe. The road, which was actually more of a network of different and often competing paths, was a conduit for all sorts of luxuries like firs, dyes, gems, spices, and of course silk. Xi’an was the first big Chinese city western merchants would get to, and plenty of Arab traders decided to settle here to make their fortune.

It is an interesting walk, although most of the people look Chinese, I could see the odd Arabian among the stalls. People wore little Arabic touches: men wearing fez, women with headdresses.
Little birds sang from cages that lined the main road, like street lamps. A girl with clubbed feet crawled around after us, clattering along a paint tin with a few bills in. Every now and again we would stop long enough for her to catch up and she’d start banging her tin. She could only have been 11 or 12. She wore gloves on her hands like shoes as she dragged her lame, bare feet behind.
A man sang traditional songs at the top of his nasal voice as he sliced up a great rice cake, a huge yellow thing the size of a bedside table. He skewered thick, moist pieces and barbecued them.
Next to him whole carcasses hung from butchers hooks, dripping puddles of blood into congealing pools.
We stopped for something to eat and the menu was straight out of Central Asia, shashlik, manti, naan bread, even pismaniye, which is a sort of candy floss like sweet we had in Izmit in Turkey almost four months ago and haven’t seen since.

Buried among the narrow alleys is The Great Mosque of Xi’an, the largest in China,
We’ve seen some very impressive mosques on this trip- none more so that the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, Turkey. But the Great Mosque of Xian really looks nothing like a mosque, not as I know it anyway.
The mosques we’ve seen normally have great domes, often a cloistered brick courtyard surrounded by minarets. But this was more like a large garden separated into sections by ornate Chinese gateways, pavilions and pagodas, the same sort of layout as a Chinese temple.
In the buildings were intricate carved furniture, glazed vases, wooden shutters and paper screens.
And it was full of contradictions:
There were Chinese symbols like dragons and turtles everywhere- but in Islam depicting a living creature is banned so you don’t expect to find these images in mosques.
There were quotes from the Koran up, but they are in Chinese, and, translating the Koran is considered blasphemy so is banned.

It was strange, fascinating and beautiful. Such a tranquil atmosphere- the Chinese use small trees and bushes cleverly to create an impression of privacy in open spaces. The air felt light and calm, a little oasis in this noisy city. If it wasn’t for the sign at the door I wouldn’t have guessed it was a mosque. Only the large prayer hall at the very end, closed to infidels, gave a solid clue.
I was surprised to see that work on the place started in 742AD, only 150 years after Mohammed was born, yet here, thousands of miles away, is this magnificent structure.
Testament to the power of Islam as a faith, and the power of the Silk Road as a highway for ideas.

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Terracotta Warriors

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 07:06:00 +0000

Terracotta Warriors
Xi’an, China
December 11th and 12th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

THE city of Xi’an exists in a cloud.
At least it did when I was there, a thick fog obscuring the sky and the tops of buildings. Smog or moisture or maybe both, our two days were spent walking in a damp, 100m wide bubble so it was impossible to grasp the scale of the place.
We passed a McDonalds and smart looking Starbucks to get to our hostel- the more time I spend in these Chinese cities, the less different they appear from their Western counterparts. It could have been one of those strange, misty London mornings where the city’s grey stone sits camouflaged and disorienting in the opaque. Only Chinese faces stared back at me, could still be home, but then, from the gloom, like a Polaroid developing, emerges a pagoda or temple unlike much outside Soho or the tower at Kew Gardens.

By the end of my week in Beijing I had grown too familiar, too comfortable in my little niche, to notice the city.
I woke up every day in the same place, in the same part of town. Began eating at the same joint, choosing my favourite thing off the menu, drinking the same beer and generally feeling comfortable. Familiarity didn’t breed contempt- I loved Beijing- but the excitement of the first few days dwindled into apathy, and the ink stopped flowing as the bizarre became the usual.
First impressions are best. When you don’t yet understand your surroundings and wander intrigued by the little differences. After five months of moving these changes are so quickly assimilated that Beijing’s early romance and novelty were too quickly taken for granted
So I was pleased to get out and try something new.
We grabbed the overnight train, Beijing to Xian, 12 hours. The air con went off in the night and for the first time in months I remembered what it is like to be too hot to sleep. The stiflingly close atmosphere on my top bunk (thee bunks high), freaking me out, and when we arrived I caught up on some sleep for an hour while OJ researched the city.

The Eighth Wonder of the World? According to some, the Terracotta Warriors here in Xi’an warrant a place with the Pyramids, the Oracle, and the rest on that controversial list.
We went to find out.

On another hot day in 1974, among bone-dry fields on the outskirts of Xi’an, and beneath the rolling stare of the legendary Lishan Mountain, a group of local farmers, suffering from the annual draught, began digging a well.
Hours into their work, and about ten feet down, Yang Xi Man struck something solid. Initially thinking it was a rock, he called for help, but when he and his friends dug further they found it wasn’t stone, but clay.
Clay that had been fired.
Working at the object more carefully now, in the darkness of the pit, the men slowly uncovered a round fragment, and dusting it off revealed the clay head of a warrior, staring back at them from a tangle of bamboo matting.
The men had unwittingly stumbled upon a chamber in the burial grounds of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the infamous 3rd Century BC Chinese ruler. In fantasy style they had made one of the great finds of the 20th Century, uncovering a vault that had remained undisturbed and unknown for two millennia.

Emperor Qin has a mixed legacy. He is probably most famous for being the first man to unite the competing Chinese dynasties, quite a feat. He also began work on the first Great Wall, but possibly more importantly, he was responsible for standardising Chinese script, codifying his new nation’s code of laws, and regulating weights and measures for trading. All these changes, completed in the 15 years of his reign, served as the foundations for the next 2,000 years of Chinese development.
So far so good, but there were bad sides. He sparked the first Chinese peasant revolts by raising tax to 30%- the sheer cheek of it. Those peasants didn’t know how good they had it, 30%? We’d be singing in the streets with that kind of let off now.
He had a large mausoleum built which, according to legend has pearls imbedded in the ceiling to represents stars, and rivers of liquid mercury flowing around it, though no one has yet opened the 76m high mound. It is this grave that the Terracotta Warriors guard, standing about a mile to the west, and to ensure its secrecy Qin ordered the 700,000 labourers and artisans who worked on the tomb to be killed and buried with him.
At the time China had about 20 million souls, so roughly three or four per cent of them got the chop, and an even bigger percentage of skilled workers, were put to death.
Frightening.
He had a reputation for wanton cruelty, gouging out the eyes of courtiers who disagreed with him, summary executions, proclaiming himself a deity, questing for eternal life- typical emperor vices. What is it with these chaps? Everywhere we go we hear tales of the extreme cruelty of rulers. Maybe the kind ones get forgotten by history?
Oh yes and then there was Emperor Jin He Do, he liked chess and soft fabrics.
Doesn’t really work does it? History has no time for constants, it craves uproar and chaos so the story of mankind sounds like a constant affliction of despair: nasty brutish and short. Actually things were very nice during the 4th Century thank you very much, just not too much to write about.

So back to the strange pit. Inside archaeologists found a huge, but mostly collapsed, subterranean cavern filled with an army of life-size warriors, finely detailed to the point of individually painted faces, all made of terracotta.
Not just a clever name.
There are spearmen, archers, swordsmen, skirmishers, cavalry and chariots, arranged in a battle formation ready to take on all comers- about 6,000 men in that pit alone.
The men form the army Emperor Qin took with him to the grave, guarding his nearby mausoleum and providing arms for him in the afterlife.
Thirty years after its discovery the pit is a major tourist attraction, covered in a grand marble and granite building, a modern reflection of the power of the state exercised beneath.
Strolling in, the scale of the pit took my breath away- the excavation is covered by a roof like an aircraft hanger- more than 200m long and over 70m wide. Underneath are 11 corridors, filled with warriors, standing four or five abreast, with the fronts and sides of the formation lined with men facing outwards to cover the rear and flanks.
The size is stupendous, and although only the front few dozen rows have so far been restored you can only guess at the completed picture when the last of the workers looked at the extent of their achievement before closing over the roof of the corridors with thick wooden beams, laying mats on the top then piling the ground with soil- the last men to glimpse the army in its full glory, more than two millennia ago.
Three more pits have been found since the first- there’s four in total, though pits three and four are only a fraction of the size of pits one and two.
Because we are generally turning out to be guided by a kind of supernatural luck and uncanny ability to be in the right place at all times, the best of these, pit two, was closed for refurbishment ahead of the Olympics next year.

In the museum you can see the detail on the figures up close- it is pretty incredible, the curves of the chain mail armour, the folds of their robes, the detail of the faces and fingernails.
Back in the day each one was painted brightly. But after the unpopular Qin died his son and successor was assassinated. Mobs descended on the site of Qin’s tomb and managed to get into the vaults housing the terracotta army, which they burned then resealed.
So the archaeologists have to contend with fire damage along with the ravages of two millennia in collapsing subterranean cavities, but you can still see some of the paint on a few figures.
Every warrior was armed, the Chinese produced around 40,000 bronze weapons for the force- spears, halberds, swords, battle axes, hooks, bows, crossbows, arrows and the Chinese weapons the Pi, Shu and Ge. It is one of the world’s earliest surviving examples of mass production of weapons, and a showcase for early metallurgy.
When the archaeologists got at them, they found some of the weapons were still sharp.
In total, experts guess there are more than 10,000 warriors, but most are still buried under the gathered muck of 2,000 years. The archaeologists have spent thirty years digging them up and painstakingly piecing the breaks back together from millions of fragments, restoring the army to its formation. An epic, mind numbing work- and they want to complete the whole thing. Probably not in my lifetime.
In Pit 3, which is tiny in comparison to Pit 1, many of the blokes are headless, strange, eerie figures- like a London Dungeon diorama of the reign of James I. The ones with noggins seem to be smiling a little, but I guess I’d be laughing too if I’d spent 2,000 years watching my mates heads drop off. In a lot of places you can see the rubble that archaeologists have to deal with, a mass of jumbled hollow pieces, like a pile of leftover Easter eggs that have spent time in the sun.

By closing time our visit descended into the usual farce of people being more keen to gawp and have their photos taken with us than the majestic sight before them. We smiled patiently.
Lucky the Trabbis weren’t here, it could have been a terrible distraction, and I wouldn’t want to invoke the ire of the proud clay warriors.

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From Six to Four

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 12:26:00 +0000

From Six to Four
Beijing, China
December 6th- 10th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
Confucius

AN EVENTFUL few days has seen our sixsome temporarily reduced to four.
Lovey has flown down to Bangkok in Thailand, definitely to collect the spare parts, ostensibly to arrange press contacts, and possibly to meet women.
He flew out on Sunday (9th December) and his separation is temporary. We plan to meet up just over the Laos border next week to fix the cars and continue south.
But on Friday (7th) Zsofi left for good. Flew home to Budapest, Hungary, to a land of exams and studenting.
It seems like she’s been saying she will have to go home for months now, so it was no great palaver. We’d already said goodbye once, back when we were stuck in Xilinhaote and she went ahead to Beijing alone. We ended up meeting and spending another last few days together.
But this time we new it was final as walked her to her cab and waved her off.
It was pretty sad. I guess it will affect the Mighty Tony P the most, they have been driving Dante together for five months, so it’ll surely be strange for him. But I’ll leave that for him to explain.

Before she left I chatted with her about the trip. We talked about how hard it had been for her to come, with her friends telling her she was mad, and her family actively trying to dissuade her. She had to bunk off a semester of university and get horribly in debt to her parents. She hadn’t travelled for more than a few weeks before, and at 21, was the youngest on the trip, and one of just a couple of girls. So it was a pretty brave decision.
Her highlight was Central Asia, her lowlight was being unwell in Siberia. Her best friend was Tony, but she got on with everyone.
Yes, she’s disappointed not finish the trip, but she feels she done as much as she could- she has to go home now for exams.

When we got back to the hostel, I looked around and, for pretty much the first time, it was just the boys. Just the elite who plan to go all the way. In a way that felt good- the final team assembled for the final push.

The next day Carlos, TP, OJ and I headed to a strange temple. The Dongyue Temple.
I don’t think I really got it, but it was full of little rooms with strange mannequins in: devils, gods, men and women, people being tortured or executed in quite disturbing ways.
These rooms had names like The Department of Suppressing Schemes, The Department for Implementing 15 Types of Violent Death, The Department of Controlling Cheating, The Department of Signing Documents, The Department of Retribution and Reward, The Department of Wind Gods, The Department of Giving Birth to Insects, of Opposing Obscene Acts, of Individual Destiny, Reducing Longevity, Accumulating Justifiable Wealth.
Chinese really doesn’t translate to English very well.
There was a donation box in front of each room and I guess if you are affected by whatever the department deals with you’re meant to chuck some cash in there.
I don’t know too many people who have been affected by insect birth, and surely once affected by the 15 types of terrible death it’s a bit late to start bribing the gods. But like I said, I don’t think I got it.
I’ve whacked a few of the pictures up anyway.

On the way back we ate scorpion. As you do.

Later that night the whole of Trabant Trek was accused of being boring by an English woman called V.
“I'm getting a picture of you lot,” she announced in the lounge of our hostel picking off a snap, “this is how I will remember you- sitting on your laptops working. That’s all you do.”
The hostel had free wifi and it’s true we had hardly socialised, instead geeking out on the internet.
But being called boring after giving up our jobs to drive the world’s worst car across half the planet doesn’t strike me as dull.
“Come and play kings, put your laptops down,” she added mockingly.
Well how could we turn down such a challenge? Boring? Not up for drinking? An affront to my Englishness. I can urinate in streets and break garden furniture with the best of them.
We accept.
Kings is a messy and raucous drinking game with absolutely no skill and plenty of downing whatever’s to hand. We all got pretty wasted and loud and ended up blowing off some steam.
Carlos and I continued the merriment, heading out with a couple of Irish lads, an English chap and V herself, to party Beijing style. I hadn’t expected to find a large Nigerian community out here, relaxing with Jack and Jill. They were fun and we carried on clubbing and partying until about 11am the next morning, when Carlos retired and I headed off for the best version of a Bloody Mary Beijing can offer.
It was rubbish.

The next day we hopped on a 12-hour, overnight train south to Xi’an.

The shenanigans completely wiped out the next day, and I still felt crap on Monday. I also lost my wallet in a drunken stupor: sim card for my phone, bankcard, driving license and press cards- all Missing In Action, but that sort of night always involves collateral damage.
I’ve promised Carlos not to put up a video of him trying to re-enter the hostel around brunch time on Sunday. Messy. (If you want to see I can email it you.)
We haven’t been out like that since Bishkek, though the Americans weren’t with us.
When I staggered back to the hostel, around 1pm, clutching the remains of a Bloody Mary, wearing a troubled grin and a squint, I found Lovey all packed ready to fly out to Bangkok.
Not sure what he thought of me, but I didn’t really have too much to say for myself.

Just four of us, with no cars- down from the nine who headed out with four cars nearly five months ago. A sorry state of affairs, but if all goes to plan we will be reunited with the Trabbis later in the week, then smuggle them to the border to rendezvous with Lovey.
It should only take a couple of days.
Of course that’s the plan. It’ll probably take a week.

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Forbidden

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 12:44:00 +0000

Forbidden
Beijing, China
December 6th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

"A single act of carelessness leads to the eternal loss of beauty."
Sign in The Forbidden City

THE queue was herded from Tiananmen Square across a narrow bridge, flanked on either side by lines of military, each guard demonstratively staring everyone up and down.
Looking for bandits?
I struggled to see what threat could be posed by this sheepish group of sightseers, gawping behind cameras and holding maps upside down.

We passed under the giant portrait of Mao, through thick ochre walls, and into The Forbidden City.
What a title. So named because only the emperor and his court could enter. No commoners allowed please. Well now they queue up en masse to take a look, and not just commoners- but communist commoners, the people excluded by the very title of the place have risen up, overthrown millennia of imperial rule, cast off the feudal yoke, and now form their own chattering parade through the courtyards of power.

At the beginning of the 15th Century the Chinese capital was moved to Beijing, and work on a central complex, the Forbidden City, began in 1406. It took a million workers about 14 years to finish and was home to as many as 9,000 people at a time.
Development continued for the next 500 years while the place hosted 24 emperors, who all provided their own flourishes, whims and fancies. The result is the world’s largest palace complex- more than 800 buildings covering 74 hectares (740,000square metres), palaces, temples, audience chambers, gardens, administrative buildings, shrines, processional avenues and giant courtyards, all enclosed by imposing city walls, overlooked by giant watchtowers and ringed with a deep moat.

In 1947, when the commies got in they toyed with trashing the place- what better symbol of the end of the emperor than to smash the seat of power?
But sense prevailed, and instead they have spent a fair wad keeping the palace renovated and open to the legions of tourists.

I’d arrived alone, but stumbled into Zsofi, OJ and a Swedish girl called Robin at the ticket office. We paid our 40RMB, about $5, only to find the main attraction, The Hall of Supreme Harmony, was being renovated.
This is typical of our trip- of course they’re renovating it now, this is the low point of the low season, no one visits now, everything is cold, and grey and miserable, why would tourists come here now? Anyway the Beijing Olympics begin in nine months, they’ve got to get everything tarted up for the big event.
So what’s the lesson? Don’t travel the world in the off-season. If only we were on schedule…

Despite that disappointment, we were surrounded by grand, stunning buildings. All curved eaves and neatly painted roofs, with shining glazed tiles and marble pillars.
Beautiful, no doubt about it, stunning, historical, steeped in imagery, religion and tradition.
But by the fourth courtyard I got a little restless.
A majestic gateway opening into….another courtyard. It’s a concrete jungle in here, a prophecy of cities to come- giant paved areas, surrounded by buildings.
Maybe the architect ran out of ideas because I got a real sense of déjà vu in each new courtyard. I suspect I am too ignorant to perceive the subtle differences that mark out the various period’s architecture, and too ill-read to grasp the symbolism behind the umpteenth ceremonial gateway.
There are some nice terraces, with some impressive stonework. The Hall of Complete Harmony, nice, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, also nice. But this harmony thing is getting a little thin now.
No wonder the emperor rarely left the city, it’s a right bastard to get out. All those gates and entrances, all those steps, those long courtyards. And the paving is terrible, no good for skateboarding or playing basketball. How’s an emperor to entertain himself?
The last emperor got it right, he had bicycle lanes installed through the complex. Now that’s a thinking emperor.

There are plenty of signs up explaining what the vaguely impressive rooms were used for. My favourite was in the Hall of Preserving Harmony, the Bao He Dia.
As the sign said, Bao He means: “maintaining harmony between all things on earth to have a long period of peace and stability.”
So really it’s the Hall Of Maintaining Harmony Between All Things On Earth To Have A Long Period Of Peace And Stability.
Catchy.
One gateway opened up to show a complex of yellow tinted roofs stretching and sloping elegantly across the eyeline, in the distance a tall hill, thick with green trees is topped by a beautiful looking temple. It is an idyllic setting, a beautiful place. But I found it hard to imagine it in Imperial times, bustling with courtiers not tourists.

At the Hall of Union and Peace the favourite saying of the Emperor Kangxi was written in bold letters on a board hanging at the back.
And the words of wisdom that old Kangxi felt so important they should be memorialised in board form for millions of tourists to glimpse over centuries?
“Doing Nothing.”
These emperors. What a life.
Did I mention The Large Stone Carving?
It’s a large stone carving. The largest in the complex.
These Chinese have a knack for naming things.

At last, at the end of the procession of halls, gateway and courtyards we reached something different. The Imperial Garden, where emperors would relax, entertain and choose girls for their harem.
In spring when the flowers are blooming it must be stunning, but even in dark winter the spidery trees and knotted bows are a majestic playground fit for…well an emperor.
Chinese catalpas, pines, cypresses and wisteria dance across abstract rock formations that hide stairways, towers, chambers and temples.
It was beautiful, one of the most exciting gardens I’ve been to (exciting gardens? Sorry about that). Here I could finally imagine the imperial court: lecherous old emperors with long fading beards making grubby advances on the prettiest youths of Beijing.
Lovely.

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DHL: Don’t Help Little Kids

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 10:15:00 +0000

DHL: Don’t Help Little Kids
Beijing, China
December 7th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

Hey Friends,

As you may know (see previous post) the cars are broken and we urgently need a small box of parts to be sent from Hungary before we can do repairs. Unfortunately DHL want $1,000 to send the box. We politely asked for a small discount, seeing as this is a charitable venture, and they politely gave us a stream of spurious nonsense about why they couldn’t help (see email trail below).

If anyone fancies firing off a quick email imploring them to help (come on it’s a Friday, you’re not really working), and maybe calling them tight-fisted corporate ball bags, then the kind lady in charge is:
Cessalie Bruce
Corporate Citizenship
Cessalie.Bruce@dhl.com
Her US number is: 954-626-2678

If you could link this to any other blog sites that would be smashing.

Here’s the story so far:

When our great friend and supporter Michael Moore originally asked DHL for help, and outlined our trip, this is what he received from Mrs Bruce.

Dear Mr. Moore,
Thank you for making DHL aware of the Trabant Trek. Unfortunately, this is not an activity which we are able to support at this time. Please understand the decision in no way reflects the quality or caliber of the event. It is based solely on our available resources.
We do, however, appreciate your interest in DHL and extend our best wishes for your success.
Regards,

Cessalie Bruce
Corporate Citizenship
Cessalie L Bruce (DHL US) Cessalie.Bruce@dhl.com

So Mike sent this:

From: Michael Moore
Date: Dec 6, 2007 2:16 PM
Subject: Re: Need Help from DHL to Complete Round World Charity Rally
To: "Cessalie L Bruce (DHL US)"

All we are asking is to get about 60 lbs. of spare part from Hungary to China or bangkok.. All 3 cars are now out of commission... Please, we need help.. even if it is a discount on the freight.

Thanks

Mike Moore

And she replied:

On Dec 6, 2007 2:42 PM, Cessalie L Bruce (DHL US) wrote:

Mr. Moore,
We are still unable to offer you a discount. If a discount were offered through our office, we would have to absorb some of those costs. Regrettably, we are not able to do so.
Regards,
Cessalie Bruce
Corporate Citizenship
954-626-2678

So I did a little research into her excuses, then I sent her this:

Dear Mrs Bruce,
Thank you for taking the time to reply to our requests, and offering you best wishes for our success. Unfortunately your best wishes won’t help our little box of bits get to Bangkok, wont help our little cars get to Cambodia, and wont help the little children there who are relying on us.
All we are asking for is a little discount on getting our parcel of spare parts out here, so we can fix the cars and complete our charitable mission. At the moment you kind folk are asking for $1,000 to send a 60 lbs box from Hungary. We’re terribly over budget, and these costs are threatening our project: we have a budget for living expenses of about $7 per day.
We here on the Trek (and most of the people in our Beijing hostel) find your reasons for rejecting our plea a little flimsy.
I did a bit of research to see if I could support your claim that DHL would be ‘unable to absorb some of those costs (of a discount)’.
Well 2006 was a pretty good year for your German parent company, Deutsche Post World Net. According to the 2006 Annual Report (the latest one available) revenue was up 35% to EURO 60,545,000,000 (count the zeros). That’s $88.4 billion. (http://financialreports.dpwn.com/2006/ar/thegroup/ataglance.html)
Of course, the profit from operating activities (EBIT) was just $5.6 billion. And these are last year’s figures, so I suppose this could have been a terrible year for the logistics industry.
But surely the cost of knocking a few hundred bucks off a small shipment in the name of charity could be absorbed? Sorry Mrs Bruce, don’t buy that one.
Oh but you ‘don’t have the available resources’?
6,500 offices, 420 aircraft, 76,200 vehicles, 1.5million shipments a year to 120,000 locations in more than 220 countries and territories. (www.dhl.com/publish/g0/en/about/network.low.html)
That’s a lot of resources.
You employ more than 285,000 people across the planet, not you personally Mrs Bruce, you are responsible for ‘corporate citizenship’.
Being unfamiliar with this important sounding title I looked up ‘corporate citizenship’: “The role of a company in considering its responsible involvement within the wider community”. (www.ccd.net/resources/guide/glosary/glossary1.html).
Well as a company with a global reach, I think in this case the wider community certainly stretches to the needy kids in Cambodia. And maybe your responsibility is to look a little further than the profit when you can help out a worthy cause.
And if it is vital to have the ambitions of DHL furthered by this charitable gesture, we would happily put your logo on our cars, on our website, on our t-shirts, on a documentary, on our webisodes, and on our blogs, which are read by thousands, and have appeared in newspapers across the world from the Washington Post to the Mongol Messenger.

I’ve put a copy of our correspondence on our websites (www.trabanttrek.org, www.myspace.com/trabanttrek, http://danmurdoch.blogspot.com) so that the tens of thousands of people supporting us can see how DHL have helped.

We do appreciate your interest in Trabant Trek and extend our best wishes for your success.

Regards,

Dan Murdoch
Trabant Trek
+86 150 471 87602

If you fancy bombarding the good lady with emails, and linking this terrible slight to other sites, that would be beautiful.

Ends
Mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org

The Cars are Broken: Episode 382

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:40:00 +0000

The Cars are Broken: Episode 382
Beijing, China
December 7th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

"Only when the tunnel is in the most absolute dark can you see the light again."
According to Carlos a Chinese Proverb, translated into Spanish, then English.

THE cars are broken.
All three of them- kaput. Fez gave up in Xilinhaote, Dante gave up just outside Beijing, and a few days ago Ziggy refused to start.
Engine problems all round.
It’s frustrating. We have crossed blazing deserts, the icy steppe, some of the world’s highest roads, some of the world’s worst roads, we’ve chugged through traffic in stunning cities, and bombed along deserted highways, dealt with a Siberian winter, a Turkish summer, and always, always managed to scrape the cars forward.
But now we hit China, and what fucks it all up?
A couple of tanks of dodgy petrol.
Can’t believe it. It wrecked the engines in Fez and Dante, chewed up the spare engine we put in Fez, and now something’s wrong with Ziggy.
We don’t have enough spare parts left, over the last four and a half months we’ve gone through or ditched so much stuff, we’re down to the bare minimum.
And we have already overstayed the cars’ Chinese customs papers, which expired a week ago, so we have no choice but to try and get out of the country as soon as possible, rather than attempt any repairs here.

All three of the cars have been boxed up and loaded onto trucks bound for Kunming, about 3,000km south of here. It should take a week for them to get there, then we have to try and get them trucked the last 900km to the border. Personally I don’t think we’ll get them out of the country for another ten days, maybe December 17th?
Seventeen days late. It’ll be interesting to see what customs have to say about that one.
Probably a lot of arguing and some fines. But so far the Chinese officials have been great, so there is hope.

In the mean time the gang is separating again.
The plan, which is always liable to change, is to get the parts we need shipped to Bangkok (See DHL blog). Lovey is hoping to fly there to collect them in the next few days, then he will head back through Laos to meet us at the China border. Tony will soon fly to Laos to scout out a workshop and try to arrange something to tow us there from the border. The remaining three of us, OJ, Carlos and I, will head down to Kunming and find a way of getting the cars from there to the Laos border.
Hopefully we will all reconvene at the border, us with the cars, Lovey with the parts, and Tony with a tow truck.
Mental isn’t it?

So once again the stage is set for separation. The last time this happened, in Khorog, Tajikistan, we didn’t see each other again for three weeks.
This time?
There’s plenty to go wrong. We could struggle to get the cars from Kunming to the border- I'm not sure how much traffic there is on that route.
But I think the most likely delays will be at Lovey’s end. We’re relying on an unreliable Hungarian mechanic to source and ship the parts to us. Then we’re relying on Lovey getting them from Bangkok to the China-Laos border ASAP.
Bangkok is a big city full of distractions, it’s easy to get sidetracked for a few days. And once he’s on the move, he will need to get a few buses, which could take three maybe four days.
So there’s a high chance we’ll be stranded in some two-bit town in the underdeveloped northern part of Laos. But it’s a beautiful country, with great people. And it should be warm.

China. It’s all south from here right? The final leg yes? Easy now ok?
Not a bit of it. The cars are broken, this could be should be our lowest ebb. But strangely, morale is high. We’re in an amazing city, we’re staying at a great place, and surrounded by travellers who think what we’ve done is awesome.
The cars are broken, but not our spirits.

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Hitting The Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 14:06:00 +0000

Hitting The Wall
Beijing
December 2nd-5th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

WHAT a stupid place to put a wall.
Skirting the steep, pyramid hills north of Beijing, the crumbling, turreted Great Wall of China rises and dips across the horizon as our noisy, angry convoy, stop starts down the motorway.
What a stupid place to put a wall.
If I’d bothered leading an army up those vertiginous slopes I wouldn’t get to the top and go: “Oh bollocks, someone’s only gone and built a wall up here. Right that’s it. Turn back lads, we’re not invading. Lets go home.”
Surely those hills are enough of a natural barrier and don’t warrant being topped by a shaky looking heap of ancient bricks.
And it’s not a continuous wall. It’s a bunch of small strips, a half formed defence, as if the labourers had stopped work during a pay dispute.
What kind of barrier is that?
Don’t worry we’ve sort of walled off China.
Rubbish.
It’s an ill-conceived plan anyway: the ‘barbarians’ that came from the north were mostly the mounted nomadic horseman types. You don’t take horses up mountains, but you do take them on long road trips around ridiculously porous defences.
Really the wall was little more than the emperor’s cock extension. A way for him to show the people he was in charge and define his territory, for tax purposes as much as anything. I read that the Great Wall never stopped a single invasion.
Quite a few people were heading out on day trips to get a closer look, but I really don’t see the attraction.
“What you don’t have walls in your country?” I asked. Flippant wanker.
“I’ll settle for Hadrian’s.”
But the Great Wall did stop one invasion.
Dante didn’t make it. The little Trabbi gave up within sight of the thing, maybe scared by this epic wonder. Three of us hitched a lift from a passing people carrier. Ziggy towed Dante into Beijing.
Just two cars left, one being towed. An ignominious arrival in the Chinese capital.

The drive from Xilinhaote to Beijing was mostly downhill, and as we descended the steppe, the long ridge stretching across northern Eurasia, the temperature rose rapidly from a bone chilling –15c to a pleasant 5c.

For the past six weeks we have been fighting running battles with condensation in the cars, which freezes almost as soon as it appears, so you constantly have to use an ice scraper on the inside of the windows.
But at one point on our trip south OJ turned to me: “Watch this.”
He breathed a deep, heavy lungful of warm air onto the windscreen, and instead of sticking and icing over, it melted the film of ice from the glass.
We cheered that one for a long time.

We found a hostel in a grubby area of town alive with a vibrant assault on the senses. This was the China we had come to see. Narrow streets, unwelcoming for cars, filled with a giddying stream of hawkers, floggers, taxis and shoppers.
Men cooking stir-fry in giant woks line the street, women deep fat frying odd shaped spring rolls. Buddhist candles, fighter pilot’s helmets, digital cameras, wood carved Buddhas, friendship bracelets, straw hats and memory sticks competing for attention.

The forward party agreed to meet the towers in Tiananmen Square, under the big Mao picture. We went to McDonalds, then Pizza Hut. Incredibly expensive Western food, sometimes you just have to do it.

At the bar of our Guesthouse, the sensationally friendly Leo Hostel, I got chatting to a Dutch author and journalist who has been covering the region for 25 years.
My Dutch friend was anxious. He had just published a book about Tibet, the Himalayan country that has been occupied by the Chinese sine the 50s. In it he revealed interviews with a lot of unhappy Tibetans and portrayed the Chinese involvement as an occupation.
Although the book wasn’t to be printed in Chinese, he was worried that someone working at the Dutch Embassy would read it and report him to the authorities. He had a flight out of the country in three days, the book came out five days before, and he was worriedly sitting out the time.
“If they don’t like what I wrote, maybe they wont let me leave.”
I’ll leave his name out of this.
I asked him to describe the Beijing he first saw in 1982.
“The whole city was mostly Hutongs.”
Hutong: area of low-rise buildings with narrow lanes and alleys.
“Which is great, lots of character. But every 50m you have a communal shit house. So it stank. And people used communal kitchens or cooked on the streets, so everywhere there is this smell of cooking and shit.
“There weren’t many proper roads, and the streets were full of bicycles, there were almost no cars- just a few trucks. Everyone was riding bicycles.
“Tiananmen Square was full of young lovers. They would set their bikes up with blankets and do what young lovers do. Not like now: it is all police now.
“Everyone looked the same, because everyone dressed the same. They had the Mao tunic, and the short trimmed hair. I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls. I remember coming back in 1988, when things had moved on a bit, and thinking ‘wow, where did all these tits come from?’”
As the night wore on he got more drunk, and our conversation slowly morphed into him telling a series of rambling stories which I lost interest in.

The next day I wondered around the city and tried to compare it to the Beijing Old Dutchy had portrayed.
There’s certainly cars now- driving around the city is as much of a nightmare as any other- it’s a bustling, heaving metropolis- but there are plenty of proper roads, controlled by solar powered traffic lights.
We are staying in a hutong, but much of the city shows signs of recent redevelopment: sky scrapers, sprawling malls and shopping districts, neat, glassy office blocks and flashing neon. They love their neon, obsessively ringing public buildings in bright lights- an epileptic nightmare of these flashing colours and shapes.
And the people certainly aren’t sexless. This is a fashion conscious society, particularly the younger generation: teenagers in skatery, bright stockings and denim mini skirts with furry boots. Guys in hip-hop leather jackets with baggy pants and baseball caps.
“Shopping is not a sin” one advert gleefully shouts out in bright English. So much for the communist mantras. Our cultural leaders- David, Jodie, Kate- pout down on us from billboards rivalling even Mao’s.

Mao. His portrait hangs, not smiling, but still benevolent, at one end of Tiananmen Square, the square made famous by the violent quashing of a student demonstration in 1989: the iconic photo of the student standing in front of a tank.
On emerging from an underpass I was greeted by a line of five cops, four grunts standing stock-still and a senior, eyeing the passing crowd.
A little over the top I thought, but not too sinister.
I wondered around it and felt the little Dutchman had been a little harsh, it was busy, filled with tourists and guides, hawkers selling Chinese kites and Mao watches. The centre of the Square has the obligatory monument, though this one has no statue on top, and at one end is some impressive statues depicting idealised China men rising up in the revolution of the 50s.
A pleasant nationalistic scene, just like Trafalgar Square.
Mao must have liked his parades. The square is vast, and at one end are huge viewing platforms. The forces parading past would make an epic sight.
But as the square opened up before me, and I could see the subtle scale of the military presence, it dawned on me: the place was under lockdown.
Guards in sharp cut uniforms stood at attention every 50m, remaining so still they faded into the background, almost invisible, but omni present. They are everywhere, but you would only notice if you looked.
It was the same at the zebra crossings, eagle-eyed officials staring warily at visitors as they file through a narrow gap in the perimeter fence.
CCTV cameras ring most of the lampposts, there were scores of them, and must have been hundreds of military and police.
I even felt wary walking around with a notebook out, staring at uniforms and cameras and scribbling.
I can’t imagine there will be too many protests here.

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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:22:00 +0000

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Xilinhaote, China
November 27th-30th, 2007
By Dan Murdoch

TODAY we were meant to leave China.
But seeing as we are in a manic rush to get out of the country, we have travelled just 350km sideways in a week. We are still 4,500km from the border with Laos, a journey it would take a decent car a good few days to cross, but in Trabants….
As a marker, it took us nine days to drive 3,600km through Siberia with one major breakdown. So potentially we’re out of here by the December 10th? 11th? 12th?
I hope Chinese customs is understanding.

Fez is broken. On Wednesday the engine completely seized. Tony took a look and decided we had to change the whole thing out.
It’s not a big job- the engine is only 600cc, a two stroke that you would be more likely to find on a motorbike, it weighs about 40kg. Our guide (more on him later) found a kind man who let us use the back of his workshop for free.
We were told a trained Trabbi mechanic could change an engine in 20 minutes. It took Lovey and TP two hours, a job well done.
We set of for Beijing yesterday with high hopes of reaching the city. Fez started first time using a key. A big moment.
But after getting a fitful 40km in two hours, it was clear something was wrong. We towed all the way back to the workshop in Xilinhaote, where Tony announced that the new engine was broken and we don’t have the spare part.
What happened?
Well, it wasn’t a new engine, there’s no such thing as a new Trabant engine, it was second hand, like all our other spare parts. Maybe there is something seriously wrong with Fez and the little car tore up the new engine.
But there is also a chance that we have carted a broken motor 18,000km across the globe. Through mountains, deserts, swamps and cities we’ve lugged a 40kg dead weight.
This level of ineptitude is well within our collective capability.

So today Fez is being loaded onto a truck bound for Beijing. We hope to collect it tomorrow. From there we will either try and fix the thing, if we can find the parts, or ship it on towards the border and try and have some parts sent out from Hungary. Then we can get out of the country and do repairs in Laos, which doesn’t have such strict rules on foreign cars.

So, for now, we are down from the original four cars, to just two.
This reduces the number of people we can carry- we were toying with the idea of someone having to take public transport through China. But instead we’ve decided to throw all our belongings into Fez so they can be shipped, and the six of us (five trekkers plus our guide) will squeeze into the cars with the bare minimum of stuff.

About Edmund
Watching the slow mental collapse of our guide has been fascinating.
The poor chap, who claims to be called Edmund, although that doesn’t sound especially Chinese, is having his sanity attacked on three fronts. The horrendous car issues are taxing his patience, the looming and impossible exit date is the iceberg on his horizon, and his boss is giving him constant grief because we have yet to stump up the $6,500 we owe for his services (it’s the bank’s fault).
All of this is out of our hands, and we’re dealing with it pretty well (except OJ, whose outbursts of aggression have been getting worse: rock throwing, screaming, kicking out at the cars. He’s a teddy bear really).
But after four months of what OJ politely terms ‘this shit’, we’re used to it. It’s not the same for Eddie.
Old Edmund- 35, married, missing his kid- is a lovely man, who has been an invaluable guide and huge asset: patient and understanding.
But I can see him starting to crumble. The stress is showing although he remains patient and polite.
In the last few days he has taken to regularly consulting the Bible- a faded old St James version he carries around.
Searching for wisdom I imagine- but today I watched him reading from the back. The last bit of the Bible is the Book of Revelation, the fire and brimstone stuff: Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Armageddon, the anti-Christ, 666.
I know we’re bad, but I don’t think the end of the world is in sight.

But maybe we are the Four Horsemen? Gunther, Fez, Ziggy, and Dante: Death, War, Famine and Pestilence.
Fez has waged a war against its engine. In Ziggy, OJ has eaten enough to cause minor famines across the globe. When Tony takes his shoes off Dante becomes horribly pestilent. And Gunther is dead.

For Fez at least, it feels like the final reckoning may be looming.

ADDED 21:00: We didn't make it. Try again tomorrow.

Ends
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China

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:56:00 +0000

China
Erenhot and Xilinhaote
November 23rd- 27th November.
By Dan Murdoch

“China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese.”
Charles de Gaulle. Thanks Charlie.

CHINA.
China.
The name has been on our lips for so long. Normally spat out with disdain and preceded by a vehement expletive. The stringent conditions attached to taking cars across the country have made it an expensive hassle: $8,000 to cross and fixed entry and exit dates. It had been a worry for months.
But now we’re here.
Walking through the border was the best feeling I’ve had in weeks.
“We’re in China mate. China!” I said to OJ with a huge smile and we shook hands and hugged.
We were the last vehicle to arrive, screeching up as night fell and the border closed. The guards stayed open late to let us in, though customs was closed so the cars spent the night at the border. We walked into town to get a decent Chinese.
I felt like I floated along that walk into town.
I'm trying to put in perspective what we’ve achieved so far:
We’ve crossed blazing deserts like the Karakoum, freezing deserts like the Gobi, industrial cities in Russia and stunning cultural cities in Europe. We’ve done the Turkish summer and the Siberian winter, the icy Pamir Mountains and the dusty Carpathians. We’ve dealt with crooked cops, despotic regimes, withering bureaucracy, enough breakdowns to break a man and all at a gentle 50mph.
It’s taken four months to cross 18,000km.

Now it’s all south. The long Northern Route is over, things get warmer and cheaper, we’re heading in the right direction for the first time in months, and every day we get closer to our goal. Closer to the beach. That pina colada is gonna be awesome.
Just 6,00km to go.
Chinese roads are great. Chinese food is great, and living is cheap, even if getting into the country wasn’t. And once we crack China we’re in South East Asia- pretty much home.
This isn’t the final straight, but it is the last bend on the track, the third leg. We can do it.

But of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. Our new guide, a prerequisite for travelling with your own car in China, sprung on us the news that we wont be heading south. First we have to go 350km east to get Chinese driving licenses, only issued in the provincial capital of Xilinhaote. Extra mileage we hadn’t reckoned on. And he told us it’s going to get colder.
And our timing wasn’t great. We got in on a Thursday, got the cars through customs the following day. But government offices don’t open at weekends, so we will have to wait till Monday to get our new licenses.
All the time the clock is ticking. Our customs papers for the car expire on November 30th. There isn’t a hope in hell we’ll be out by then. But our guide spoke to a customs official and they predicted a few days leniency.
Maybe five of six days leniency. So in theory we can get to the border on the 6th December.
That gives us 12 days to get 4,500km on good roads. It’s feasible, but we probably wouldn’t see anything of China- a double disappointment considering how much we spent getting in here.
Even so, having just crossed the Gobi on dirt tracks, I felt confident these well-paved Chinese roads would float by.

Then the problems began.
Not the extreme but simple to diagnose problems like the sheered clutch, broken gearbox, the snapped suspension, the seized engine, the car on fire.
But the finikety, hard to diagnose problems.
At high revs Dante began to give up and shut down. At low revs Fez would stall. Neither car will start by itself, both need to be push started. Dante is quite easy to push start, a decent shove from a couple of people. But the brakes on Fez are on too tight, so it’s a bastard to get going, and even then it takes a few tries to make it turn over. It’s exhausting work, and sometimes you get Fez started just in time to see Dante stall. It was like spinning plates- just as you get one going another comes crashing down.
An exhausting nightmare. I haven’t done so much pushing since my rugby days.
I lost count of the amount of times I heard OJ shout: “FUCK. I’ve had it with this shit.”
I told him so and he said: “If I could, I would have quite by now. But I don’t have an option.”
That night he kicked out at Dante, breaking a gash in the panelling. The stress is getting to people.
In Fez roles are reversed. The passenger used to sleep while the driver dealt with all the problems, now the driver has to concentrate on keeping the engine running- he needs to be at the accelerator and choke constantly. So the passenger needs to get out and do all the push starting, refilling, repairing. That means no sleep, so 24 hour driving is out of the question.

The terrain is similar to the Gobi- but now it has long, straight, well lit roads running through it. We can cruise nicely at 70 kph. But I found it a little boring after the random adventure of crossing the desert.

We literally pushed the cars the final furlong to Xilinhaote, the provincial capital, arriving late on Monday night (November 26th).
The city has a little of the communist influence we saw in Russia- grand buildings and sweeping public squares. Slab-like construction.
But a lot of it is sexier, better finished with nicer lighting, more subtle textures, cleaner, neater.
They love the neon lights- plenty of public buildings are outlined in them and the lights change colour, shifting red, blue and yellow. Despite how that sounds it didn’t seem garish.
Food and board is cheap and high quality: $10 for a clean double room with ensuite and a TV (only state channels, no BBC). It’s $4 for a slap up meal with a couple of beers.

The next morning we went to the Chinese version of the DVLA so they could do checks on all our cars and then issue Chinese driving licenses.
The fact that we’re towing Fez to a car inspection is not lost on anyone. The engine is completely seized. Tony had a look and decided we need to replace the entire engine. The theory is that a trained Trabant mechanic can change the engine in 20 minutes. That means we’ll probably get it done in a few days.

The car park is full of people, and suddenly we’re back at the zoo, the latest prime exhibits wheeled out for the punters.
Welcome to the Trabbi Road Show- Come And Stare.
The locals are swarming. They have no shame- happy to stick heads into cabins and have a good look around.
I get my computer out to write this, and the swarm migrates from the open bonnet, where stumpy China men watch Tony and spit, to the driver’s window so they can stare over my shoulder.
I look to my left now and there is a sea of faces- more people than have been to some of my gigs (www.myspace.com/goldroom J).
I am 99% sure none of them can read English, so I don’t know what they’re looking at.
I throw them a dummy, putting my computer away and watching the crowd disperse then reform at the engine. A few seconds later I get the laptop out and they return, the onlookers. They’re like zombies, no motion flickers across their faces, few words are exchanged, they just stare.
They have definitely seen a computer before- they’re all over the place. Have they seen a Mac? Maybe not. But still, I'm word processing- hardly a riveting display of the power of the Macintosh.
A couple of guys are actually sticking their heads through the window into the cab. It’s amazing. I can’t believe it.

Two days ago, at a two bit town on route to Xilinhaote a guy walked into my room at the guesthouse. He just smiled at me and nodded.
“Hi,” I said.
Then he just walked around looking at our stuff. We had computers, cameras, tapes, hard drives, phones- loads of stuff. It felt like he was scoping it out, made me really uncomfortable. I was in my pants, which also made me a little uncomfortable, so I put my trousers back on.
He pushed open a plastic bag and peered inside at all our tapes. The clincher was him bending down as I put my trousers on. He reached out and started stroking one of my socks. He looked up at me and said something which sounded like approval and smile.
“Good, good, so you like my socks. Great.”
Very strange behaviour.
I put all the valuables in the other room and locked up before going to see the others.

Back here, in the carpark of the car licensing authority in Xilinhaote, the heads in my window have turned and they’re just staring right at me. Their faces are about a foot away and they seem happy checking me out.
If I weren’t so used to it I’d get pissed off. I can’t help but snigger. Carlos just caught wind of it and burst out laughing.
Back at the zoo.
Someone tries to open the passenger door- he tugs on it a few times. He doesn’t realise its broken, he was genuinely going to just open it up while I'm sitting in here. I look at him and he just stares straight back, looking a little desperate, like he’s trying to get to the front of the line at an Ikea sale.
The braver folk, or the jokers, take it turns to come up to my window and shout their best ‘hello’ through it. Then they either retreat laughing, or realise there is no follow up.
I hand a flier out of the window and it is devoured by the pack, who swarm around it like piranhas to a carcass.
There is a ring of men and women around the car with their phones up taking pictures. I suspect this is as close as I will get to being a popstar.
Finally they start to ebb away, and the band disperses. A crowd attracts a crowd, and there’s now just a much more manageable couple of people.

Our guide approaches us.
“There is a problem,” he says, “We have driven here without the proper licenses. We should have got the papers at the border. Now we must pay a fine. 1,000 Yuan per car.”
We’ve paid our tour company a lot to get us though the country, and this is their fuck up, so no one is too bothered by $135 per car. Lovey: “We’ll just knock $405 off the money we pay Wayne (our agent).”
But we go to meet ‘the leader’ and argue the case anyway. He is understanding and agrees to wave the fee.
I'm really getting to like this country.
I got a lift back from the Chinese police. Hopefully that’ll be my only trip in a Chinese police car. I’ve now been in police cars in Azerbaijan (luxurious), Georgia (budget), Kyrgyzstan (a disgrace, I had to pay for the gas), China (average) and good old blighty (very friendly).

The delay means our cars wont get processed today (Tuesday November 27th), and will have to sit at the office as they are still not road legal. So we cannot change out the engine tonight.
Driving at night is a dodgy option- it gets so cold that Dante doesn’t run properly. So we can change the engine after finishing processing tomorrow. That means we are probably here for another day.
Getting out of China by the sixth seems less and less likely.

Ends
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A Note On Genghis Khan

noreply@blogger.com (Dan Murdoch) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 16:54:00 +0000

A Note On Genghis Khan
November 25th, 2007.
By Dan Murdoch

WHEN I think of Mongolia I think of Genghis Khan, and it seems right that here on the border with China I give him a mention.
For the great man is at the centre of a dispute over ownership- with the Chinese, who think of Mongolia as their own, venerating Genghis as a great symbol of national unity at the same time that Mongolia is clinging on to him in its quest for post-Soviet identity.
On the Mongol side of the border Genghis appears on beers, taxis, t-shirts, vodka bottles, hotels, bars, restaurants, pretty much anything, and always dressed in full combat gear- the Mongol warrior who forged an empire.
But on the Chinese side he tends to appear wearing simple robes,with a gentle, buddha-like face and neat moustache. Over here he is revered as a spiritual leader, a monk like ascetic who promotes harmony and unity.

I did some research into the all conquering Khan and found an amazing fact- pretty much our entire route thus far would, at one point, have been in Mongol hands (see map).

I had never fully grasped the size of this empire before- when Genghis died it stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific, four times the size of Alexander the Great’s and twice that of the Roman Empire.
By 1300, seventy three years after his death, that had doubled to include all of China, Korea, Tibet, Pakistan, Iran, most of Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, habitable Russia, Ukraine, Hungary and half of Poland.
One fifth of the world’s land area.
From the gates of Vienna in the west, to the jungle of South East Asia and all in between was either controlled by, or a vassal to, the Mongol Emperor. As the Americas were yet undiscovered by Eurasians, and sub-Saharan Africa almost unknown, this must have seemed like pretty much the whole world.
At their peak the Mongols were taking on Egyptian Saracens on one front, Hungarian knights on another and invading the island of Japan on the opposite side of the world.
Mind-boggling, it makes a mockery of Hitler, Napoleon, Catherine, Attila, Victoria and Xerxes.
Not that there is too much else to link them.
Genghis was the son of a minor tribal chief, raised single-handed by his mother after his father’s early death. He showed his ruthlessness before he had reached his teens when he murdered his older brother in cold blood after a dispute over the ownership of a dead fish.
In his teens he was captured by an enemy tribe, but escaped to live in the harsh Mongol steppe. By his 20s he was head of his tribe, by his 30s he had united his nation, and by his 40s he was hell bent on empire, believing himself ordained by heaven to rule the world.
He personally saw and conquered so many of the places on our route: Samarkand, the Oxus, Khiva, Bukhara, the Pamirs, The Fergana Valley, Issyk Kul, Lake Balkash, Siberia, Lake Baikal, the Yellow River, Beijing- the list goes on.
My train journey from Lake Baikal south to Ulaanbaatar took me along much of the route Genghis took his first real army to crush a local tribe.
And our drive through the Gobi followed a path similar to the one many historians believe Genghis funeral cortege would have taken. It was hard not to think of the Khan when I saw Mongol men galloping past at full pelt on their small shaggy horses.

Mongolian logistics across the vast empire were impeccable: the famous Mongol messenger service could carry a note 600km a day by constantly changing mounts and riders along the route, a feat unequalled until the invention of the telegraph. We’re lucky if we cover 600km a day by Trabant on good roads.
Genghis’ philosophy was simple: those that didn’t surrender were crushed ruthlessly, many peoples murdered in their hundreds of thousands: actions bordering on genocide.
But those who ceded to his rule and proved their loyalty were rewarded with high positions; nationality and religion were no bar. He had Chinese administrators, Arab merchants, Turkish architects, artisans and scholars from across his empire, even an English diplomat. Herdsmen became great generals and obscure religious leaders from China were summoned across the globe to meet the Khan.
As a leader believing himself anointed by a godhead even he did not understand, he demanded tolerance of all religions, believing them to be working towards a single unified purpose.
Now he is worshiped as a divinity in parts of China and Mongolia, where a flourishing cult of Genghis has developed from the myths, legends and scattered sources of the last eight hundred years.

Genghis grave is the source of legend and conspiracy.
When he lay dieing from an unknown illness, he made arrangements for his death to be kept a secret so that his enemies would not be motivated by news of his death, and his people not concerned by the upheaval of succession.
His grave was hidden and the obligatory curse placed on anyone who might find it.
Depending on who you believe this is a lost archaeological treasure whose bounties could rival the tomb of Tutankhamen. Or the Mongolian authorities know exactly where the grave is but it is such a closely guarded national secret they refuse to even acknowledge its existence.
I'm sure the truth will out.

The man who ruled over the peak of the Mongol empire was Genghis’ grandson, the legendary Kubilai Khan, who hosted Marco Polo. In fact, Polo’s legendary journey from Italy to China and back would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the safety provided by the Mongol rulers along the whole route.
It is Kubilai that represents a break from the Mongol tradition, and Kubilai that allows the Chinese to claim Genghis as their own. Once Kubilai had completed the conquest of China, he moved his capital to Beijing and his court shifted from nomadic herdsman to city dwellers. He founded the Yuan dynasty in 1279- considered a Chinese dynasty. And if Kubilai was the founder of the great Yuan Dynasty, then surely he was Chinese. And so his grandfather, Genghis must also have been Chinese.
At least that’s what the Chinese say, laying claim to the great warrior as a hero of their own.
But I guess others would say that all Chinese are Mongols.

Ends
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