Photos

I've finally managed to upload some photos so if you haven't seen any pictures on facebook and you're looking to waste some time then look no further than here http://davelearoyd.shutterfly.com/.

Leeds

Home. Home cooking. Homemade. Homeward Bound. Homework. Homing signal. Home, home on the range. Home furnishings. Homosexual. Homosapian. Homophobic. Homeopathic. Homer Simpson. Home. I’m actually home.

Last week i was in Amsterdam which is the kind of place that you go to with expectations. Canals, cannabis, red lit women and dance floors spin through your mind before you get there and in front of your eyes once you arrive. It’s a city that felt almost anonymous or independent from anywhere else. As if it floats above the rest of the world promising to come back down soon but knowing it never will. Some call it a melting pot. I think it’s more like a blender. But all the human zoo of the red light district and surrounding bars is neatly confined to a few square kilometres near the central train station and the rest of the city is a maze of canals and old, big terraced buildings glinting in winter sunshine or European drizzle depending on your luck.

I met Matijs and Joost, two Dutch guys that i first met when i travelled in Mongolia a few years ago. We met up again and the three of us swapped stories, drank beers in different little bars bulging with people escaping the winter chill.

I left Amsterdam too quickly but i had a seat booked on a bus to Brussels which was driven by a big French man who had crap 1980s music blaring from the radio all the way to the Belgian capital. We glided across the Dutch landscape which is so flat you can almost make out the curvature of Earth as you look out of the window.
Brussels was a really pretty city full of grand old buildings covered in Christmas neon with the smell of chocolate wafting through the streets and the beer flowing not far behind in the cold evening air. The following morning i was zipping towards London on the Eurostar train wondering how and when it became normal to take a train that travels through a tunnel under the ocean linking two different countries.

I spent that night in Oxford where I met two old friends, Stu and Max. I hadn’t been in England for 18 months. Now, i wouldn’t want to add to the reputation that the English are all drunk idiots but you can probably guess what happened next. We played some drinking games in a pub and then I got so drunk that i vomited all over the streets of Oxford, fell asleep in the back of a car and woke up trying to piece together the previous twelve hours of my life without much success. Then we had a fried breakfast at lunchtime. Welcome back. The next evening i was in my home city of Leeds.

Europe has been immense fun but for the past few months i’ve felt like a stone skimming across the surface, seeing place after place, city after city only for the journey to end and being forced to plunge back into something familiar. England. It’s a country where almost 60% of its GDP is national debt. Where a light covering of snow brings the whole nation to a halt. A place where getting drunk or spending money are seen to solve all your problems. Where the politics is centred so firmly on the middle ground, you wonder how politicians are able to sit down properly with all the fence posts stuck up their arses. Where the majority is silent and everybody else seems utterly fixated with Celebrity X-Factor Big Dancing Brother On Ice with Harry Potter in Afghanistan. I wonder how long i’ll last.

As always, i’m already planning the next trip. In the mean time i’m unsure of what to do with the blog. What do i write about now i’m not sleeping in hostels and eating kebabs? As i won’t be travelling for a while would it be true to the title to keep it going? Should i change the title to something more honest such as ShutUpJustTryAndGetAJob or ShutUpJustDrinkUntilYouVomitInTheStreets? Let me know what you think. I’ll leave you with some questions that have, for whatever reason, entered my head over past few months.

1. Why are e-tickets printed on paper?
2. Why are power cuts never during the day?
3. Why are you always oblivious to announcements at train or bus stations until it’s one about your journey, even if the announcement is in a language you don’t understand?
4. Why is it whenever you book a ticket the train is empty but if you don’t book one the train is packed?
5. Why is it when you’re desperate for a shit and you use a public toilet there’s never any toilet paper? Or worse still there are only two sheets left so you try and wipe your arse with toilet paper the size of a bus ticket and get shit on your fingers.
6. Why is it wherever you go in the world you always see a pair of old manky trainers tied together and thrown over a telephone line? Who started this and why did people decide to copy it?
7. Why is it wherever you go in the world you always see a child wearing an English Premier League Football shirt? How the fuck did the Manchester Utd away shirt from the 1996-97 season find its way to rural Uzbekistan?
8. Why do you always see one glove on a fencepost every winter regardless of the country you’re in?
9. Why do people who drive their car with the windows down and the music playing loud always play really shit music? It’s never The Killers or The Kings of Leon is it? It’s always Warren G or DJ Otzi.
10. Why is that six months of your life travelling through different continents and countries taking in mountains, beaches, deserts, cities, villages, friendships and dozens of journeys in cars, boats, buses, trains and planes whilst eating all foods and knocking back strange drinks seem to race by so quickly that at the end of it all you can barely remember what you just did and yet waiting thirty minutes in the cold rain for a bus can seem like a lifetime?

Thanks for reading. Have fun. See you soon.

Amsterdam

I'm almost finished. This trip, and maybe this blog, has less than a week left. Here's another weeks worth of travelling.

I was in Bollnas this time last week and the only reason to be there was to meet up with my mate Alex. It was fair to say that there was nothing for me and Alex to do in the small town of Bollnas apart from what Alex seems to have been doing for the past three years - go ten pin bowling, eat, hit on small-town Swedish girls and drink beer. It got a bit boring quite quickly. We went out to a bar, of which there are two to chose from for the whole town, and it was one of the strangest places i have ever had a drink. It contained three bars, three blackjack tables, two dartboards, a dance floor, shit music, a big screen TV and a load of people who for some reason thought that Bollnas night life rivalled that of London or Hong Kong. Somehow me (an idiot Englishman) and Alex (who's from Ethiopia) got talking to a plumber from Uruguay and a drunk Somalian mental case. In Sweden. In winter. I'm starting to miss normality.

Bollnas was the furthest north i've ever been and the frost one morning was so thick that it tricked you into thinking it had snowed during the night. The sun lazily woke up at about nine thirty, struggled in an upward direction for a few hours and then just gave up, wandered back down to the horizon and disappeared at about three in the afternoon. Me and Alex got a bus back to Stockholm and it wound through an edible scenery of trees and fields that looked as if it were covered in icing sugar.

Stockholm is a very chic place. Coffee shops look like furniture show rooms and restaurants resemble modern art galleries with a few tables thrown in the middle. We were walking around the cobbled streets and old buildings when we saw a small demonstration by Italians about Silvio Berlusconi. One of the demonstrators gave us a leaflet and Alex asked what was going on and why.
"How long has he been in power?" he asked.
"Fifteen years", the demonstrator replied.
Alex shrugged.
"Shoot him," he said blankly and walked off.
I almost died laughing. It seems you can take a man out of Africa but you can't take Africa out of the man.

And Stockholm's expensive. It was over five Euros for a beer but that didn't seem to stop me and Alex drinking Guinness, playing darts and reminiscing about life in Hong Kong. But after a few days in Bollnas you'd probably start reminiscing about time in prison. The next morning i was on a bus again and Alex was back in small town Sweden.

Twenty two hours, two buses, two ferries and a loaf of bread separated Stockholm from Dortmund. Dortmund isn't a great city. It got the arse bombed off it by the British in the Second World War meaning the whole place is filled with functional 1950s architecture and all the heavy industry that was there has recently left for other shores. I'd planned to meet Marco who was working in Seoul when i was and was now back working in Germany again. Marco lives near Dortmund in Hagen and him and his family let me sleep on a sofa in the basement for two nights and feed me at every opportunity.

I had a day Düsseldorf which sits next to the Rhine River and was once the financial capital of Germany until all the banks moved to Frankfurt for reasons that nobody seems to know. Düsseldorf is also home to one of the largest Japanese populations outside of Japan. Again, nobody seems to know why but it adds to the city which is a decent place to waste a day and drink a beer. I also went to a small city called Munster which was like Oxford but German. And then i got on another bus.

Koln is spelt Cologne in English (again, nobody really knows why) and i stayed with Stefan who i met in Uzbekistan. He and a load of German students were doing research in Tajikistan and were seeing Uzbekistan while they were there. In Koln, we swapped more central Asian stories and by coincidence i was there the night that they were doing a big presentation at the university about Tajikistan which joined the dots between Samarkand and Koln quiet neatly. I had a few drinks last night in Koln where i ordered a wheat beer which for some reason came mixed with banana juice. Apparently the good people of Koln enjoy fucking up the already wonderful German brews for reasons that, guess what, nobody seems to know. I'm starting to think that Germans aren't as we all thought they were. All the precision engineering and efficiency and beer brewing is just a ruse and they are all, in fact, clueless about everything and secretly hate beer so much that they choose to mix it with fruit juice.

I've been racing too fast through Europe which isn't ideal but better than flying over it and so today i was on another bus to Amsterdam where i arrived a few hours ago. After here it's Brussels, Oxford and then the finish line in Leeds.

Thanks for reading. Have fun.

Bollnas

It's a little bit freezing cold outside. I'm in the middle of Sweden in December. Who's idea was this anyway?

Berlin somehow got better the more i was there. I spent most of the time in the eastern side of the city and in Kreuzberg which is an area adorned in graffiti (even the fire station had some) second hand shops, small record stores, street art and lots of bakeries and Turkish restaurants. There was an area called Mitte where i saw a photo exhibition and art galleries, Christmas markets, the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag and bus loads of other tourists clicking cameras in the winter sun and the cold rain.

And then there was the beer. I found a delicious little microbrewery serving some of the best beer i have ever tasted which came with a side salad of relaxed bar staff, football on a big TV, tiled walls, furniture that looked as if it had been nicked from somebody's house and a big dog that sat in everybody's way as it licked its bollocks. And everything rattled slightly as trams rumbled pass outside and the rain hammered down. Somehow, it felt like home.

I met up with Anja who i met in Georgia a month or two ago. She took me on a cycle tour for the day showing me the Berlin Wall, Checkpoint Charlie, more fantastic exhibitions, Currywurst (Bratwurst in curry sauce), gluhein and whizzed around on a bicycle as i followed straining to hear her barking directions and information over her shoulder at me as we dodged traffic or waited at lights in the never ending cycle lanes.

I said goodbye to Berlin and Anja and got on a bus to Copenhagen. I figured the bus would travel over land and bridges but a few hours into the journey we came to a ferry port at Rostok. Now, i have a very black and white relationship with the sea. Sometimes my stomach is like a brick for the whole journey on a boat and other times i vomit so much i almost break a rib. There's no in between and there's no telling which it will be until about five minutes into the sea journey. Fortunately my stomach stayed inside my body this time and two hours later we were in Denmark and not long after i was on a train leaving Copenhagen for a small city called Horsens in the dark and damp of a Danish winter.

I met up with Jamie, an old mate that i went to high school with but hadn't seen for ten years. It's strange how sometimes when you meet friends or family that you haven't seen for years you're somehow able to just carry on the conversation from where it left off years previously and so it was with Jamie. I stayed with him and his girlfriend, Jeanette, and we mainly spent our time drinking, eating, watching TV, playing on an X-Box and avoiding the rain. We also went to a Christmas tree farm and played tenpin bowling where we saw dozens of Danish people on Christmas parties who got shitfaced drunk, ate a load of food and were entertained by the worse band in history called The Bacons.

Horsens was a quiet place that seemed comfy and an easy place to live but also very quiet and set in a flat green agricultural landscape. Jamie described as "retired persons dream" which pretty much says it all. The train back to Copenhagen revealed more flat green farmland and more retired towns and not much else.

Copenhagen seemed like a very cool place to spend some time but i only stayed there one night and hopped on another bus to Stockholm taking in another ferry journey on the way and then an endless landscape of green trees interrupted only by the occasional farm and three kids at the back of the bus who seemed to cry and scream for no reason. In Stockholm i met Alex who i lived with when i was teaching in Hong Kong a few years ago. He's from Ethiopia and has been working in Sweden for three years and we chatted and caught up with each others lives on a bus for three hours until we arrived in Bollnas which is like Horsens only smaller and less interesting. And fucking freezing. I've just read that description back to myself and it sounds like the start of a bad joke, "There was an English man and an Ethiopian man on the back of a bus in Sweden in winter and..."

So that's my life at the moment - taking mammoth day long bus journeys into the cold arse end of Europe and freeloading my way onto long lost friends sofas and into spare rooms. I'll be doing the same for the next two weeks all the way back to Leeds. Feel free to leave some abuse below.

Berlin

I'm in Germany. I'm back in western Europe. It's cold and damp and grey and multicultural and drunk and sarcastic and cynical. I love it.

I left Istanbul after only scratching the surface and promised myself to return one day and dig deeper. I was on an overnight bus to Sofia in Bulgaria and we spent an hour on the border as our bus got x-rayed and all our bags were searched by Turkish customs official. I don't know why they were searching everything when we were leaving the country. I think they were just bored on the night shift and wanted to use some new gadgets. The bus was almost empty and i copied what some other people were doing and slept by stretching my body across four seats. My head at one side of the bus, my feet at the other with my legs suspended, crossing the aisle.

I arrived in Sofia at 5.30 in the morning and got on a tram to take me to a hostel. There was nowhere to buy a ticket and nobody checked if i had one. Free transport. I only stayed in Sofia for one night but had a decent time seeing the old neglected buildings next to the new European money and the cobbled, compact, dinky sized city centre still seemed to be partly trapped in a communist time warp, dragging itself towards the rest of the West.

The bus from Sofia to Budapest took all day. The drive out of the city centre revealed damp dank apartment blocks and gypsy squatter camps covered in mud and dirt. Rural Bulgaria didn't look much better as grey dark fields and dead grass greeted the road to the border with Serbia. I now have a Serbia stamp in my passport but i only got out of the bus and actually walked on the country twice and that was to have a piss and buy a Bounty. Serbia looked happy and Mediterranean compared to hardened Bulgaria with white and cream farmhouses and green fields and mountains. We crossed the Serbia-Hungary border at nightfall and arrived in the capital late at night.

I did my usual "walk, get lost, get drunk" routine which i seem to have done with alarming regularity on this trip and Budapest is a great place for those things as the city is packed full of streets that go nowhere, streets that go somewhere, old gothic buildings and plenty of bars. Like Sofia, it also has a great old communist era clanking grumbling tram system where nobody ever checks that you have a ticket and half the ticket machines are broken anyway. I love old knackered trams. I think every city would benefit from a clunking Russian built tram grinding around town full of fare dodgers and drunks. And drunk people love Budapest. I thought it may have been compulsory for people to have drink in their hand as every other person seemed to be drinking, buying or carrying some kind of alcohol. Other signs that i was firmly back in Europe were the large amount of homeless people, buskers playing violins and graffiti.

I saw lots of Budapest including some great markets and the modern art gallery but the cold damp weather meant that i spent my last day there in a bar with and couple from New Zealand watching football and rugby. Then i got the 14 hour overnight bus that passed through Slovakia and pulled into Prague in the early morning. We ploughed through thick fog and crossed the Czech-German border at sunrise which revealed a landscape of green rolling hills, farms and massive wind turbines. After brief stops in Dresden and Leipzig the journey eventually ended in the capital yesterday lunchtime.

I've only been here for one day but i already love Berlin. I have never experienced a city that has so much personality and immediacy. Graffiti is on every building. That's not an exaggeration. Every building has a signature of some kind. Half the population seem to ride bicycles. It oozes attitude. This is where the country's leader is a woman and the Mayor is a gay man. This a place that has the highest per capita cocaine and ecstasy users in Europe. This is where the past collides with the future. This is where you would not be surprised if a revolution was around the corner. This is where anything can start and nothing seems to stop. This is more a social experiment than a city. This is Berlin.

But nothing lasts forever so i'll be leaving on Friday for Denmark but i don't know what i'll be doing between now and then. But this is Berlin. You're not really supposed to know what you're doing between now and then.

Istanbul

It's official. I'm in Europe. Somehow and for some reason i've made it across Turkey in a week and ready to move further west and north.

I was in Diyarbakir which was a Kurdish city in Turkey where people would happily try and teach you some Kurdish words and has been home to many demonstrations and problems in the past between Kurdish movements and Turkish law enforcement. There were armed police in the streets and at the bus station making their presence felt but everybody seemed happy enough. The back streets of Diyarbakir old town were a knot of alleyways with kids playing on cold stone cobbles amongst the litter and women barking down to the children below from balconies as the sun crept between buildings and the call to prayer rang out from the mosques. Nobody paid me any attention at all as i sauntered around taking pictures.

I stayed in what i thought was a cheap hotel and i guess it was but it was also a kind of brothel. Three fat ugly women would loll around on a sofa in the cramped corridor waiting, smoking cigarettes and sipping tea all day until an old man would come in and they'd disappear to a room for while. Thankfully they never bothered me but the whole place had no windows and was painted bright green and pink in a way that gave you a headache if you stayed inside too long.

There were always two sides to Diyarbakir. The main streets were modern and clean full of shops and restaurants, the back streets were cramped messy and noisy. The old city was encased in walls and buildings that were centuries old as the new city sprawled outwards in dull apartment blocks. But then i've realised that most of Turkey seems this way - always pulling in different directions. Black Sea versus Mediterranean. Street side kebabs versus upmarket restaurants. Mosques cry out with the call to prayer five times a day versus bars and nightclubs pumping out beer and beats all weekend. Western cities versus Middle Eastern villages. Five star hotels versus green and pink brothels. Europe versus Asia. Summer beaches versus winter skiing. Sand deserts versus green farms. Ancient history versus an uncertain future. Every country has it's contrasts but Turkey seems to take it to another level. And then there's Istanbul.

Guess what? There are two sides to Istanbul. On one side sits Asian Istanbul and the other side of the river sits European Istanbul. The bus from Diyarbakir (a 22 hour over-night bum numbing journey) crossed from the blue skies of Asia over a large suspension bridge. A few hundred metres into European Istanbul and the skies darkened, the clouds thickened and it started hammering down with rain. "Europe in November," i thought, "It's been a while. I remember this."

Istanbul is one of those cities that draws you in with its physical size, depth of history and breadth of potential and quickly breaks down every preconception you had about the place and then rebuilds that image just as fast and spits you out the other side knowing that you won't look at things in quite the same way again. It is head spinning. Istanbul, along with the rest of Turkey, is way more European than i thought it would be, both the people, the buildings and the culture. The history of the place shouts at you through the massive mosques and the Grand Bazzar but the future burns bright as well with women matching Adidas with head scarves and the trams, boats and metro buzzing people through the chaotic traffic. I could stay here for a long time and it would still feel fresh and new. If you get bored in Istanbul you're probably dead.

I really wanted to experience two main things from Turkey; a football game (ticked that one in Trabzon) and a bath. I went to a Turkish bath with Zaka, a German guy who, by coincidence, lives not far from where i grew up in my home city in Leeds, and Ali, the owner of the guesthouse i'm staying in. The Turkish bath was a round marble room with a large slab in the middle, sinks and taps on the walls and steam drifting everywhere. The full Turkish bath experience, so Ali told me, consisted of sitting in a sauna and sweating for as long as you can and then a large hairy man about the sıze of a telephone box scrubs you with a rough cloth. I was embarrassed by the amount of dead skin that came off me. I can only guess at how much crap came of my back after carrying my life on it for a few months. Then i laid down on the huge marbel slab in the middle of the place and was "massaged" by the same guy. He kneaded my aching muscles in a way that made me yelp in a similar way to that of a small girl finding a spider. At one point i was laying on my back and the telephone box man was squeezing my arm as if he were trying to strangle a snake. "Me...Muhammed," he said and then he gestured at me.
"Erm...Dave."
"Italia?" He took both my arms crossed them over my chest and put all his weight on my elbows, slowly pushing my arms in opposite directions.
"No, Englaahhhhhnd!"
"Football?"
"Leeds United. You?" He took my left arm, tried to pull the hand off my wrist and then proceeded to try and pull each finger from my hand. His eyes grew wider for a second and he drew his head a little closer to mine and with a big grin said,
"GA-LA-TA-SA-RY."
"Hmmm."
Once the massage/kneading was finished Muhammed was kind enough to wash my body and head, rinse me and send me back to the sauna after which he wrapped me in three towels and then served me tea on some sofas. My body felt elastic and the cleanest and squeakiest it has ever been.

Unfortunately i won't be going back because i'm leaving on a bus tomorrow night to Bulgaria and then onto Hungary. I'm city-hopping and friend-meeting almost all my way back to England. It's almost finished. Only one more month.

Diyarbakir

I'm in Turkey, in a city that classes itself as Kurdish after sleeping in a bus station and eating kebabs and soup. Turkey is different.

I was in Tbilisi which was nowhere near as good the second time mainly due to the fact that it was raining the whole time i was there. The previously sunny dusty streets were full of grime, shit and beggars. It was unreal just how much the weather had changed the place. I stayed in a guesthouse with a Polish guy who insisted that he didn't use toilet paper, a Canadian guy who looked liked Iggy Pop and acted accordingly, a middle aged American guy who'd been living and working in Georgia for over a year and complained about it non-stop and there was an old Georgian man who was in the military and wore a naval suit to work every morning making him look a little bit like Captain Birdseye. I got drunk.

And then i went to Batumi. Batumi lies on the Black Sea coast, west of Tbilisi by a few hours. The journey there was a classic Georgian travel experience. The minivan was mainly packed with bottles of Coca-Cola and the windscreen had the obligatory cracks caused by peoples heads or luggage hitting the windscreen from the inside or stones from the road kicking up and hitting the outside. The rearview mirror was almost completely obstructed by a small picture of Mary with baby Jesus. The driver drove so recklessly that i occasionally feared for my life. Perhaps i should thank Jesus that i still have it. We sped through Georgian villages weighed down by apples and fruits and populated by old men drinking tea and various sorts of animals (cows, ducks, pigs, dogs) invaded the road lined with derelict buildings or large farmhouses.

Batumi was crap. Don't ever go. Most of its pavements and roads were in the process of being dug up leaving piles of sand or rubble everywhere and random holes here and there. The only places to eat were cafes where fat women with as much facial hair as me would serve soup and bread and then look annoyed that they'd had to. For some reason there were more slot machines than Las Vegas, there were lots of beggars, it rained the whole time and there was a large power cut one night. Apparently in summer the beach is nice. I hope i never find out.

Leaving Batumi was equally annoying. I bought a bus ticket to Trabzon in Turkey that said we'd leave at ten thirty, the driver said eleven and we rolled out of town at midday. Not long after, we passed through the sketchy border post to Turkey (it seemed totally designed for trucks and not humans) and bombed down the sunny Black Sea coast on roads that Georgia dreams of to Trabzon.

Trabzon had a busy bustle and a lot of new money and people were enjoying spending it. Fashion shops hugged the pedestrian streets, there were cheap decent restaurants everywhere and people seemed happy and friendly. For some reason i wasn't expecting any of that. I was expecting anger, mayhem, dirt and a hint of danger but i have no idea why. I liked Trabzon.

I spent a morning at Sumela Monastery which clings impossibly to a shear cliff outside the city. It was mainly populated by Turkish students who were amazed at seeing two Korean girls. They all wanted their pictures taken with the two Asian people in a way that reminded me of Chinese people in China wanting their picture taken with Europeans or North Americans.

That night i had a ticket to a game of football between hometown Tranzonspor and Besiktas. I got to my seat behind the goal not far from the corner flag in one of the cheap seats and watched the crowd enter the large stadium covered on only one side. All the fans were men in Trabzonspors colours of dark purple and light blue. Seats were not used for sitting on but for standing on to get a better view. Fists clenched. Fingers pointing. Chants shouting. Warm angry breath. Cold evening air. It was a great atmosphere where fans in different parts of the ground, especially in the cheap seats behind the goals, would trade chants with each other from opposite sides of the large stadium. Some fans seemed less bothered about the football and more bothered about shouting and coordinatıng chants. It was a shame that Trabzonspor weren't very good. They were great at passing it about but as soon as it came to actually attacking and scoring they had few ideas. 0-0 at half time quickly became 1-0 to Besiktas with a screamer. A goal that sailed into the top corner. The chants went quiet. The voives angrier and more desperate and so too was Trabzonspors play. Besiktas scored another near the end to seal it and the fans wanted the blood of their underperforming players. It was a good job that high security fences and nets were in place or blood would have been duly sought and gained. Still, it could be worse; they could be fans of Ankaraspor who so far this season have a played eleven, lost eleven, scored none and conceded thirty three. Though i had neither the language skills nor the balls to communicate this to the exiting fans.

I got a night bus to Diyarbakir after i was told that it would reach Diyarbakir between 4am and 5am. The bus pulled into the station this morning at 2.30am. The station sits 14km outside the centre of town. I looked around the nearly empty station. Some people were waiting for late night buses, a shop was open, men chatted quietly, a woman sat typing on her laptop. Was this really Turkey? It all seemed so safe and clean and efficient. I figured i may as well save some cash and huddled onto a bench and slept for a few hours before getting a taxi into town this morning and finding a small crap hotel that's painted green and purple and then ate soup and a kebab.

I'll be here for a few days and then head west in search of more kebabs, carpets and, hopefully, the mild Turkish mayhem that i had imagined existed before i came here.

Tbilisi again

One week in Armenia has provided plenty to talk about.

I left Tbilisi in a mini-van packed with fifteen people, countless bags and a satelite dish. We bounced along to the border and then snaked through rocky sandy villages and over scraggy hills in the sun. Small post-Soviet industrial towns sprang up here and there showing huge long forgotton factories that looked like they'd fallen from the sky forty years before and done nothing since. The rest of the landscape to Yereven was serene rolling hills and sunny, dusty villages.

I arrived in Yereven at a bus station to be confronted by a few taxi drivers who seemed intent to getting as much cash out if me as possible. An old woman who was on the same minibus as me tugged at my elbow as i haggled with the men. I followed her and her friend to the other side of the road. She spoke a little English, told me that all taxi drivers are cheats, phoned my guesthouse on her mobile, showed me to the minibus that runs to the centre of town, told me where to get off, insisted on paying and acted like doing all of those things was a regular everyday occurance. In Yereven it probably is.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that everyday in Yereven is a Sunday afternoon. Armenia's capital is continually hitting the snooze button, rolling over and having an extra hour. The place is filled with tight narrow streets where cars zoom along but the people loll about for as long as possible in coffee shops and cafes doing what ever they please. I planned on staying three days. I stayed for six.

On Sunday morning i went to church. I was staying in a guesthouse that wasn't really a guesthouse - it was a retired woman's apartment and she had a few empty rooms and made some cash from it. Also staying there was George from Georgia and his Belarussian wife. George had studied in Cardiff for a few years so his accent was somewhere between Welsh, Georgian and Russian. They were going to a place called Mayr Tachar which is Armenia's vatican. It was a small chruch with no seats and hundreds of people on a Sunday morning. The place was swarming with tourists, daytrippers and cameras which replaced any sense of religion quite quickly. I left for the flea market back in Yereven.

Yereven flea market sells everything. It was all just laid out on the floor of a park. Everything. The old men and women would come and lay out books, bathroom taps, chess sets, guitars, electrical wire, CDs, nails, swords, bird cages, arc welders, irons and more random crap in a small park every weekend. After the market i hunted for a bar that showed the Liverpool Manchester United game but all i found was a Irish bar that was shut and a British pub owned by a friendly man born in Jordan. I got chatting to the owner and as it was late afternoon i decided to stay for one beer. Just one. At eleven o'clock that evening i was playing fuseball with three girls, buying cocktails and partaking in behaviour that some people may describe as "debauchery".

The rest of my time in Yereven was spent visiting musuems and art galleries, getting drunk and nursing hangovers. For some reason Yereven has a lot more art galleries and museums than it should have so i saw an old library full of Bibles and Gospels from the 12th century (i can't really remember why i went there, it was as boring as it sounds), i went to the National Modern Art Gallery that was obviously saving on electric bills as an old woman had to switch all the lights on so i could see the paintings and then and old man followed me around turning the lights off in different sections that i'd finished looking at. There were other great little art galleries as well but none of them were the highlight of the week which was, of course, Armenia's Darts Championship.

In the British pub where i got a bit tipsy last Sunday, they told me they were hosting Armenia's Darts Championships. I went down on the Tuesday and sat at the end of the small bar watching people arrive, register and start playing. It was strange. The national darts championship of Armenia was taking place in a pub and it seemed anybody could signed up. I didn't but after seeing the first game i should have. The first player threw darts like a cowbody throws a lasso and his opponent was the Armenian Darts Federation President's daughter. She was wearing so much leopard print clothes that in certain countries she would have been protected under conservation laws. The President himself held a cigar in one hand and with the other threw darts like a builder throws bricks into a skip. They were playing a very easy version of the game (301 single check-out if you know about darts) and there was an Armenian TV news camerman recording a piece for the next days sports bulletin. I may have been on it as he filmed me as i sat snugly between two old chainsmoking men, all three of us looking a little confused. And drunk. Unfortunately i didn't hang around long enough in Yereven to attend the semi finals and final so i don't know who won. It could have been anybody.

Before i came to Armenia i never knew that it was the victim of a genocide and I spent an afternoon at the Genocide Museum learning about it. Armenia was the victim of a mass murder perpetrated by Turkey. For reasons best known to Turkey 1.5M Armenia's were killed between 1915 and 1922. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were forced to march across the deserts to Syria. Few made it. Those that did were killed. Hundreds of thousands fled the country. The Turks also destroyed cultural relics and attempted to wipe Armenia and Armenians from the map. Turkey has always denied that it gave any orders to do so even in the face of photographs and first-hand accounts. It's meant that there are Armenians living all over the world. Second and third generation Armenians are returning to Armenia after being born and living all their lives in countries like Jordan or Iran, Australia, the US or Europe. It's meant that Yereven has a very cosmopolitan feel where people are still today angry that Turkey hasn't even acknowledged what it did, let alone apologise.

I left Yereven for a town to the north called Dillijan. I stayed in a friendly guesthouse that served me a mountain of food but the main house seemed to be built without any right angles as every wall and floor seemed to slope in different directions. Dillijan is billed as the "The Switzerland of Armenia" and if that's the case then Switzerland must be shit. I wanted to do some hiking but it wasn't really worth it as it had been raining for a few days so all the villages that looked bright and dusty in the sun look grey and muddy in the damp and Dillijan was just that.

Today i got a minivan from Dillijan back to the border in the drizzle and after i'd been stamped back into Georgia i managed to find a shared taxi to bring me through the drizzle and the autumn greens and browns to Tbilisi. We drove away from the border and after about 500m we promptly run out of petrol. Fortunately we were going downhill so the driver just slapped it in nuetral and we let gravity do the driving all the way to the next village where we filed up and eventually arrived back in grey, damp, Tbilisi. It almost looks like England.

And i'll be back there soon. I've got six weeks left of this trip and there are mountains, Turkey and Europe between me and home.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

Tblisi

I'm in Georgia and it is one fine country. Very fine.

Sheki was nice but i left it and Azerbaijan behind and travelled with an Australian diplomat in a couple of minivans to a border town where we hopped into a taxi and drove to the border. The Azerbaijan immigration was sketchy at best as everybody had to hand their passports over to a man with a gun who quickly disappeared but everything sorted itself out and me and Axel, the Aussie, walked over the border to be greeted by Georgian immigration officer who said happily, "Welcome to Georgia!" before i even gave him my passport. Two taxis, one minivan and a few hours later i was in Sighnaghi.

Sighnaghi is a red tiled hillside town complete with pastel coloured houses, balconies and lazy cobbled streets. It's in a region of Georgia famous for grape growing and wine making which was a fame that my guesthouse seemed only too pleased to extend further. The large woman called Manana who owned the place kept asking me to sit down at their big dinner table and then say "David! Eat!". This was usually followed by her small husband, Gori, who seemed to appear from nowhere, his face dominated by large glasses and a bald head and would say "David! Drink!" and pour me some wine or cha cha. Cha cha is a Georgian fire water made by fermenting grape skins and grape seeds to an average alcohol level of at least 50%. Apparently. I don't really remember the finer details.

The next morning i was sat in the front seat of Gori's car with three Israelis on the back seat who were also staying at the guesthouse. Gori was giving us a tour of the area and we saw a winery, a old fort, a monastery and his sisters house where she and her husband brew their own wine and cha cha which, of, course, had to be sampled. It was ten o'clock in the morning. And that's how i found myself being piloted through the landscapes of Georgia dripping with autumn leaves with three Israelis while Gori threw an arm out of a window and said things like, "Church! You go?" and me with a few glasses of cha cha flowing quite freely through my head.

I stayed another day in Sighnaghi (or it may have been two, ask cha cha) and then got another minivan to Tblisi. The Georgian capital is a dishevelled city that oozes charm and bursts with old architecture, happy faces, churches and speeding cars all of which seem to inhabit every tree lined street. I stayed in a family run guesthouse on a Saturday night and met lots of Polish people who seemed to want to drink a large supply of Cognac and then dance (Pole dancers, if you will) which made for a memorable experience.

I left Tblisi in another minivan (it's the only public transport in the Caucasus) and three hours later i was in the mountains near the Russian border and the village of Kazbegi. I stepped off the minivan to be greeted by a nice smiling woman who simply said, "Hello. I am Nazi." Thankfully Nazi has a guesthouse and her name is pronounced Nah-see but for some reason best known to her parents it's spelt with a "z". Unlucky. Nazi and her husband were fantastic hosts always entertaining and cooking huge amounts of food for me and the other guests staying there.

Kazbegi is famous in Georgia for the church that sits on a small mountain above the town. It is perched at a place where no church (or any building) should be but it's there looking out below to the village and the valley, across to the mountains and up to Mt Kazbeg, a snow covered peak towering over everything. Like most things i've seen so far in Georgia, Kazbegi is utterly wonderful. I walked up the dirt tack to Tsmida Sameba, the famous church, and hiked higher up the lower slopes of the dizzying mountain behind it. The next day me and Anya, a German photographer also staying with Nazi, got a taxi to a tiny village called Juta and spent the day hiking in heart-stopping camera-battery-sapping scenery into the brown green Chaukhi valley and up to the base camp of the brilliant white topped Mt Chaukhi. We sat and ate food, looked around and decided that Georgia is less a country and more a work of art. This place is great.

I'm back in Tblisi where i'll be for a few days and then i'm heading south to a different country. Who knows when i'll next be in this part of the world so i thought, "Let's go to Armenia." And it's not everyday that you can have that particular thought. I should be there for a week and then head back north to Georgia as there's no border between Armenia and Turkey. And Georgia deserves more time anyway.

Thanks for reading. Have fun.

Sheki

I've failed. I wanted to get from Japan to England without getting on a plane but on Friday last week i did exactly that and flew from Tashkent to Baku. But now i'm in Azerbaijan which makes me sound exotic and adventurous even though Azerbaijan is neither.

I left Samarkand and the friendly guesthouse and grabbed a train that sped through the familiar mixture of desert and cotton fields back to Tashkent where i stayed in a guesthouse with the three most Bravian looking men i've ever seen and a French guy who seemed to have an affliction to wearing clothes whilst staying in the dorm we were sharing. He also wanted to walk to Mongolia. I met some interesting people in Uzbekistan. It was a fun country though. I wasn't expecting much from deserts and mosques but i was amazed and entertained almost everyday in a country where the average age is 15 and everybody seemed obsessed with either making money or escaping to another country.

I did leave for another country. I managed to get through immigration at Tashkent airport which was bursting full of (guess who?) loads of old French tourists and waited to board my flight to Baku.

Disclaimer: If you are my father then you should probably not read the next two paragraphs. As far as you're concerned nothing out of the ordinary happened on the flight and flying is ace. Just ace.

Thanks to an airport worker and a bus, i and a dozen very Russian looking men found ourselves on the tarmac queuing to get on a plane that looked suspiciously small for an international flight. I've slept in bigger hotel rooms. I noticed a red dotted line around two of the windows and in red letters it said simply "cut here in emergency". The plane was already full of Pakistani men who'd transferred from a flight from Lahore. It seemed that there wasn't enough time or space for all of their luggage to be stowed away properly so the guy next to me spent the whole flight with his suitcase wedged between his legs. Other nondescript boxes that had been shrink-wrapped jutted out into the aisle. Now, i'm an open minded liberal thinking guy but when you get on any aeroplane there are certain things you don't really expect to see and one of those is a lot of Muslim men holding onto boxes whilst on a flight to Europe. It brings out the Fox News in you and that's never a good thing.

But i finally realised on this flight that traveling by plane is crap. You have to be there three hours early, everybody gets treat like a terrorist, the food is shit, you watch movies you don't like or you've already seen and unless you've got a window seat or are lucky enough to suffer from mild narcolepsy you spend most of your time counting the pieces of dandruff on the persons hair in front of you or guessing how many layers of make-up the stewardesses put on their faces that day (Why do they always cake themselves in it? There are certain people who have to wear too much make up to work - clowns and figure skaters. That's it.). The announcements fascinate me as well. "In the event of an emergency...." What kind of an emergency? I'm in a chair in the fucking sky. If the name of this emergency is anything other than We've Run Out Biscuits then we're all mince. Or when you're late leaving and the captain says, "Sorry about the delay. Hopefully we'll be able to make up some time during the flight." How? What the hell are you going to do? Take a short cut? Fly faster? The sooner we invent trains that travel quicker or some kind of Star Trek teleportation device the better it will be for for everybody.

After spending the GDP of Malawi on a visa at Baku airport (robbing bastards) i got a taxi to the centre of the city. My taxi driver was a friendly man and through my miniscule handle of Russian and the taxi drivers broken English here are some things we managed to establish.
I'm rich because England is rich.
My name is similar to a famous motorbike and for the rest of the journey i will be refered to as "Davidson" but it will always be said in a Mr Miagi style "Danielson" kind of way.
I'm 27.
He's 33.
He has two kids.
I have no kids.
I'm weird because i'm not married and i have no kids.
I should hurry up and get married and have kids because my dick will go limp before i'm thirty three.
His dick went limp before he was thirty three.

My expectations for Baku were amazingly low. Everybody i'd met who's been there hated it and as a result i didn't think it was too bad. It's going through another oil boom (in 1905 it produced 50% of the world's oil - economic freedom has led to another) and as a result there's a huge amount of money pouring into the place and the classical European looking buildings are being refurbished or just rebuilt. There's construction and building everywhere, BMWs race Ladas and taxis, hot looking women are crawling all over the place and the old town is smack in the middle keeping all its history and alleyways intact.

I left Baku and came to Sheki by bus which took an age as the road was under construction. Azerbaijan is a nice enough place but it'll be much better when it's finished. Sheki is an old town in the cool hills in the north west of the country. There's not a great deal to see here but it's a really friendly little town and the old men sitting around in the central park playing checkers and sipping tea watched over by the old buildings is a nice contrast to the money and pace of Baku.

Tomorrow i'll cross the border to Georgia which everybody seems to to like as it's full of wine, food, mountains and hospitality. Let's hope everybody is right.

Samarkand

I only have two more days in Uzbekistan and then i'll be on a plane. Here's where i've been, what i've seen and who i've met this week. Aren't you getting bored of all this yet?

Bukhara is an old city chock full of awesome medrasses, mosques and minarets. Most have been restored as they've been crushed and rebuilt plenty of times between the Mongols and Russians. One mosque, Maghoki-Attar Mosque, has been the subject of excavations and digs and summed up the history of the place nicely. First it was the site of a Buddhist temple, then Zoroastrianism (don't ask, i don't know) then a Mosque and finally Jews used it as a synagogue but it's now hawking carpets and hats to tourists. I'm not sure who made the decision to turn all the remarkable Islamic architecture into glorified tourist shops but i wish they hadn't. The best place i visited was Abdullah Khan Medrassa as it wasn't restored to its original form but had been left to decay. I paid an old guy to unlock the place and let me wander around taking pictures of rooms where students used to live and study that were now covered with thick layers of dust, debris or pigeon shit but to me it just added to the charm of the place.

I stayed in a guesthouse in Bukhara owned by fat man and a small child who promised me football on TV and beers in the fridge. I got neither but i did get a strange breakfast every morning. One day it was sausage and mash with grapes on the side.

I got ripped off by a friendly man in Bukhara. He approached me on the street and told me i could have lunch with him and his family and then before the food was served (which was crap) he tried to sell me some blankets and cushion covers embroidered with silk (i must look like the kind of guy interested in soft furnishings). He got so desperate to sell something other than lunch (which cost more than we'd agreed) that he asked me if i liked watches. I shrugged. He disappeared to the kitchen and produced a cheap Soviet wind-up watch that he said would make a good souvenir. I gave him a disdainful look that was only surpassed by his daughter. There are lots of tour buses passing through Bukhara and it seems to have made people there think that a foreign face is some kind of coin-shitting machine that likes to walk the streets buying crap they don't need for no reason at all.

I jumped on a speedy train to Samarkand in the early morning sunshine and we sped past miles of cotton fields sprinkled with people harvesting in the autumn heat who stopped to wave at the train as we then trundled on through dusty deserts and villages. Three hours later i was in Samarkand, one of the most famous cities on the ancient Silk Road and home to the amazing Registan which is a collection of enormous mosques and meddrasses and is a seriously beautiful building. Unfortunately most of Samarkand has ben turned into yet more tourist traps and manicured roads that the Uzbek authorities would love to call "boulevards" which split the dusty old town charm from the soulless buildings and keep the tour buses on the clean streets. It's a shame but it's a big business. Samarkand, Khiva and Bukhara is where the money is but i'll probably have my best memories from the other places in Uzbekistan.

And there are amazing numbers of French people on holiday in Uzbekistan. They're everywhere. Most of them on tour buses and most of them old and slightly bewildered but definitely everywhere. I was sat in an internet cafe in Bukhara and an Uzbek man came in to chat with the owner. He then walked over to me, tapped me on the shoulder and said, "France?"
"No," i replied, "England."
"London?" he offered.
"Erm, no, Leeds."
"Manchester?" he attempted, ignoring the answer i'd just given him.
"No...Leeds." He shrugged, looked almost insulted and walked out.

I stayed in a great guesthouse in Samarkand. There were a load of cyclists staying there all on huge trips across Asia and Europe that made me feel as if i should be trying harder to be traveling as well as Japanese people on a mission to take pictures and get drunk as quickly as possible. It was great to sit around and do nothing but swap stories drink beers and share emails before planning the next legs of our respective journeys.

I'll be in Tashkent for one night and then on Friday i'll be in Europe. Or Asia. I'm not sure. Which continent is Azerbaijan on? I'm looking forward to finding out.

Bukhara

Uzbekistan is the country that just keeps on giving. Just in the past week i've seen ships in deserts, mosquitos on hotel bath towels, ruined cars on roads and museums in mosques.

I took a 22 hour train to Nukus which is in the west of the country in an autonomous region called The Republic of Karakalpakstan (what a name!) and befriended a few people on the train. Two old women kept feeding me tea and plov (a national rice dish) and two men were enthralled with both my Russian phrasebook and my ipod which they wanted to buy from me - until i told them the price. I also have a small travel book full of useful pictures that serves as a kind of international phrasebook. It has pictures of all the essentials for traveling (food, stuff in hotels, beer, condoms) and the two guys who were arguing over my ipod spent ages looking at a page full of seafood. Uzbekistan is double land-locked. A land-locked country surrounded by other countries that are also landlocked. Pictures of squid, crab and lobster looked alien to the men of Karakalpakstan. And i was reliably informed that The Pouges are better than The Killers who are better than The Beatles. Who knew?

The Republic of Karakalpakstan (sorry, it's addictive to say it) is completely linked with deperation and destitution. Nukus is a perfect example of a central Asian hole full of people who look as if they know they're living in the arse end of nowhere. I stayed in a hotel that had three bed dorms and shared a room with a small, stocky, bald middle aged man from Tashkent. He spoke no English but thanks to a combination of my Russian phrasebook, the hotel bar and his mobile phone we got on really well. His name was Islam and he phoned his English teacher daughter to translate some things for me that weren't in the phrasebook. Apparently Islam's son was in prison in Nukus and he was in the region to try and secure his release. We drank quite a lot.

That night we both got murdered by mosquitos. The next night we decided we should kill as many insects as possible before sleeping. Which is why i was stood on a bed swatting the air with a guide book whilst a man called Islam, wearing only trousers and vest, slapped another wall with a bath towel in a vain attempt to kill mosquitos in a hotel room in The Republic of Karakalpakstan.

But Karakalpakstan is home to two much more famous and interesting stories. One inspiring, the other depressing. Nukus houses The Savitsky Karakalpakstan Art Museum which was set up thanks to Igor Savitsky. He was an Uzbek artist at the start of the 20th century. Soviet Russia decreed that artists had to stop painting pictures that were abstract or depicted images that didn't conform to the new fantastical Stalinst ideals of the USSR. Any artist who didn't follow the new rules found themselves in Siberia or a gulag. Igor Savitsky collected and smuggled the art from Russia to his home and kept the forbidden paitings and drawings hidden in Uzbekistan for decades as a kind of Schindler for Russian modern art. Now there's a museum in Nukus with 30,000 pieces of art from the 1920s and 1930s that the world was never supposed to see. Of course, only a fraction of them are on display at any time but the story is as wonderful as the art is amazing and a few hours gazing at Russian art from the 1920s almost made Nukus a bearable place. Almost.

The other story linked with Karakalpakstan is The Aral Sea. The Aral Sea is a perfect text book example of humans fucking the world up for the sake of money. I went north from Nukus in a taxi and then a minivan to Moynaq. Moynaq was a fishing town in the 1950s and 1960s and sat on the shore of the worlds fourth largest lake, The Aral Sea. Now, the Aral is over a hundred kilometres away to the north. It gets smaller every year. Eventually it will disappear all together. This isn't an accident. This isn't a natural occurrence.

Russia wanted to increase cotton production within the USSR in the 1960s and decided the rivers that ran into the Aral Sea were a perfect freshwater supply, damned up the rivers and dug diversion channels into fields to irrigate the land. The result was that lots of cotton was produced (Uzbekistan is still the worlds second biggest producer of it) but the Aral Sea was left to wither away. Between the 1960s and 90s the water fell by a height of 16m. In those thirty years some shore lines saw the water recede by 80km. I stood on what was once the Aral Sea next to fishing boats that had been left to rust and decay and tried to do the maths. 80km in 30 years. About two and half or three kilometres a year. About 7m a day. You could probably stand in Nukus forty years ago and be able to see the water receding from the shore before your eyes. Worse was to come. After the fishing industry collapsed the reduction of the water meant less rain and more dust. This killed plant and animal life and caused huge health problems for the people. The weather changed to extremes causing summers to be desert hot and the winters Arctic cold. The whole area is depressing. Everybody who lives in Moynaq wants to leave and i didn't feel particularly comfortable wandering around taking pictures of stuff.

But i did wander around. I saw the old fishing boats that have been parked together conveniently for tourists. I met Ahmet, a nineteen year old who said he enjoyed walking among the old boats so he could meet foreigners and practice his English. He said he'd never seen the sea and that his parents would speak about it as if it was a mythical place or a dream. I walked back to the bus stop along the dusty streets being part harassed by a school kid who simply kept shouting the word "dollar" at me. At the bus stop i was surprised to meet some happy people. Three men were swigging beer and laughing, joking and calling for me to join them while i waited 30 minutes for the bus to leave. They chatted and giggled about money, women, football and Guinness. It wasn't until the 30 minutes passed that i realised why they were so happy. One of them was the bus driver, the two others worked on the large bus collecting fares. They were leaving Moynaq. Why wouldn't they be happy?

After Nukus i got a shared taxi to Khiva which is an old small walled city that has been rebuilt and destroyed a few times and was once home to a slave market on the Silk Road. It's now home to hot sunshine, sand coloured buildings, mud brick homes, old wrinkly people saying "Salam" and skipping kids shouting "Hello". And French people. Middle aged or just plain old French people on tour groups are everywhere in Khiva gawping at the massive mosques, medrasses and minarets that have have been turned into museums and furnished with market stalls hawking crap.

Cars in Uzbekistan are different. They're either Daewoos (the crazy Koreans built a factory in Tashkent) or Ladas (they just don't die) and all of them have some kind of defect. Normally it's nothing too serious - a crack across a windscreen that looks like somebody threw a stone at it, gear fitted the wrong way, steering wheels that aren't aligned correctly with the steering of the car, speedometers that have a needle that just jumps around as if trying to guess the speed to the vehicle.

The car i was in today between Urgench and Bukhara sped through the desert landscape at a hair raising speed but i have no idea exactly how fast as nothing on the dashboard worked apart from the radio. As far as the car was concerned we didn't have any fuel and our speed remained constant at 0km/h. I was on the back seat sandwiched between the sizable frames of Jalal and his friend who only communicated through the power of grunt. Jalal was a friendly guy though. He kept offering me cigarettes, asking me how much a prostitute costs in England (he didn't quite understand how i didn't know) and falling asleep on my shoulder. At one point he called the driver to pull over in the middle of the scrub shrubby desert. We got out and walked over to a spot where a small commemorative stone had been placed with words and dates inscribed on it. There were mangled bits of car strewn around and you could make out bits of body work or engine. I looked at the date on the engraved stone - 10 September 2009. One of Jalal's friends had died in a car crash. We all jumped back in the car and drove at an unknown but stupidly excessive speed through bumpy rough desert roads in car with only one seat belt which the driver only used when we went through a check point. Uzbeks are instinctively friendly and linguistic chameleons (Uzbek, Kazakh, Russian, English, Karakalpak, Turkish, no problem) but from now on i'm getting the train.

Bukhara is the holiest city in central Asia and keeps a steady population of French tour groups but i've only really just got here and i've probably written too much. Then again, Uzbekistan is probably giving me too much. Thanks for reading.

Tashkent

I'm in Uzbekistan. New country, new cities, new people, new language, new money. I feel like i'm starting all over again.

I was still in Kyrgyzstan the last time i wrote on here. Osh was a dusty city with a massive market, lots of restaurants and a large hill in the middle of town called Soloman's Throne where Prophet Mohammed apparently once prayed. I got drunk for the first time in a long time gulping down vodka and beer in varying amounts with other tourists and travellers from my guesthouse. Kyrgyzstan vodka is not recommended. Even by the Kyrgyzstan vodka manufacturers. It's vile.

I met a Korean guy in my guesthouse who was also traveling to Uzbekistan and we got the wrong minibus and ended up at the airport but eventually found the way to the border and on to the city of Andijon further west. It was very obvious entering Uzbekistan that we'd entered a police state. There were checkpoints on the road where drivers were ordered to stop and show some ID. Police are an obvious part of life here. No free media exists and elections are always won by president Islam Karimov who has a firm hold on the leadership.

Andijon is famous for markets and massacres. The Jahon Bazzar on Sunday mornings makes every other shopping experience i've had seem like a closed convenience store. It sells everything from boxing gloves to bullets, swords to salads, chairs to chimps. Everything. And it's huge. Unfortunately few tourists venture to Andijon to see the market or the friendly funny people as it's seen as a dangerous part of Central Asia after what happened on May 13 2005. President Karimov used the War on Terror to keep his grip on power by locking up (or just killing) any of his opponents or critics by labelling them Islamic fundamentalists or terrorists. Twenty local businessmen in Andijon were locked up in 2005 on such charges but their supporters demonstrated outside the prison and in Barbur Square in the centre on town. The police and army opened fire and killed between 200 and 1000 people - the exact figure is unknown.

But for all the police and the horror stories the people are huge hearted and always smiling, the streets are safe and the taxi drivers as manic as ever. Andijon was home to thousands of minivans that whizzed people to all parts of the city in cramped, hot and fast conditions. As we were there at the weekend the banks were closed so we had to change money on the black market. The current exchange rate is about 1850 Uzbek Sum to 1 US dollar but the highest bank note in Uzbekistan is 1000 Sum which makes changing 100 dollars a unique experience. Especially when the money changers stand on the street corner holding carrier bags full of cash. It took me ten minutes to count my money.

After a shared taxi ride i arrived in Fergana with it's large parks, dusty streets and another massive market. I stayed in an old Soviet hotel complete with peeling wallpaper and a lift that sounded like a tank. Fergana is a cosmopolitan little place with plenty of Russians and lots of ethnic Koreans who, for some reason, were brought here by the Japanese when Korea was a Japanese colony. It also has an open air disco nightclub thing right outside the hotel which pumped music for hours into the night.

Getting from Fergana to Tashkent at the end of Ramadan was a bad idea but eventually i found my way into the front seat of a shared taxi and we buzzed through the traffic and checkpoints to the capital city along roads that Kyrgyzstan can only dream of. I stayed in a guesthouse owned by a man called Ali who was always drunk on vodka or in the process of getting drunk on vodka whilst telling all the guests to join him and get drunk on vodka. Uzbek vodka is worse than the Kyrgyz variety. I slept in a dorm room with a Russian guy who walked around wearing his boxer shorts, way too much aftershave and not much else and played crap music as loud as possible on his laptop. I also met two monosyllabic Polish guys, a funny German, a Canadian know-it-all and a Pakistani who once visited Germany and had "twenty two girlfriends in twenty two days". Funny place.

Tashkent is an old gritty city with some new shiny buildings thrown into it. The metro doubles as a nuclear shelter and the trains rattle through the tunnels with their lights blinking making you feel like a spy in Bond movie from the seventies. There are also lots of signs around that say Tashkent 2200. I can only hope that it's not a two hundred year plan to modernise the city. It's a bit disheartening if you live here. As if the government is saying, "Yes, it's a bit of a shit tip now, but just wait two centuries. It'll be great."

I leave tonight on a train to the far west. Apparently there's plenty to see in Uzbekistan besides policemen and markets and checkpoints and vodka and dusty towns. At least i hope so.

Osh again

It's been a fun week.

I left Karakol behind in a minivan that, for once, wasn't jammed with people along the south side of the huge Lake Issyk Kol and then onto a drab town and into a Lada that bumped over roads and into a small town called Kochkor. Kochkor was a happy smiling place and the people seemed content and friendly enough but unfortunately they couldn't disguise the fact that their town was in fact a shithole with quite a few drunk men who insisted on stopping me and speaking Russian. The first thing i did was make plans to leave the next day. The next thing i did was find a tiny old hotel that was owned by a hairdresser and she proudly showed me a cold bare room, an outside pit toilet and a sink in the car park that used water from a old oil drum.

I'd arranged to leave to Lake Song Kol the next day with a jeep and a driver. The driver was huge Kyrgyz man and the jeep was a Korean 4x4 which had to be push started by two taxi drivers who were stood around doing nothing which seemed to be the main source of employment for the men of Kochkor. The 4x4 rumbled over dirt roads and mountain passes covered in snow until we arrived at the edge of the lake where i stayed with a family in a yurt for a few days. We arrived to find half the family packed and ready to leave the lake shore for the winter and head back to the warmer valley so there was a farewell family feast laid out in the large white felt yurt. Nobody even blinked when they saw me. It was as if i was a member of the family and they looked and talked to me as if they were saying, "Sit down, we've been waiting for you, have a cup of tea, here's a plate, munch on some goat meat and potato, wash it down with some vodka, do you speak Russian, don't worry, here's some fermented mares milk, it's tangy and it'll make your stomach bubble for a night, have some more vodka, have you got a camera..."

I was humbled and amazed at the landscape at Song Kol and the people. There wasn't a tree or a sign of human life for as far as you could see apart from a few yurts and a dirt road. The family had no electric, gas or running water and slept on snug warm blankets on the floor of the yurt being kept warm by a stove fuelled by dried cow shit. I was kept entertained by watching an old man and his grandson patch the holes in a boat, the mother milk the cows and a little ten year old ride around on a donkey herding cattle. I spent the next day wandering and hiking by the lake, taking too many pictures, eating great food, getting my nose sun burnt and seeing an amazing sky full of stars.

The next day i headed south to a town called Naryn with the help of a manic taxi driver who drove like he'd just robbed a bank and kept stopping at rivers and streams to refill some water bottles and would then pour them into the engine to stop it from overheating. Naryn was a town that made you want to instantly leave. I stayed in a hotel that was either half built or half destroyed, it was difficult to tell which. It made Jack Nicholson's place in The Shining look like a theme park. The surly ugly woman in the office at the entrance showed me to a room and i gestured that the large window wouldn't close but would just gently swing open. She just walked out into the dank corridor and called the handy man who was scraping stuff from the floor. After a brief conversation the handy man walked into the room, took out two nails and a hammer and nailed the window shut. He looked at me as if to say, "Happy now?" and walked out.

Thankfully i found a B&B and a Spanish couple, Jaoquin and Issabella, who also wanted to leave Naryn quickly. The following day we spent 12 hours traveling to the wonderful town of Arslanbob through some ridiculously awesome mountain scenery. We started in a Japanese jeep driven by a friendly tour guide and then after lunch managed to find an old 1980s Audi (of which there are thousands in Kyrgyzstan - they all got sold to central Asia by Germans after the fall of the Berlin Wall) which took us over some grizzly mountain passes on hobbled, cobbled and battered dirt roads. The driver only stopped twice during the whole journey. The first time because we got flagged down by some old men who were hunkered down by the side of their Audi. I thought they'd broken down. After a brief conversation the driver rummaged around in the glove box and found what the old guys needed. A shot glass. He handed it to them and we flew off again. The second time we stopped was because the axal, transmission and steering suddenly and quite abruptly decided to separate itself from the front right wheel which caused a bit of a noise and a slight panic as we were zooming along at about 120km/h at the time. Thankfully the wheel managed to stay attached to the brakes and suspension. The driver made some phone calls and told us somebody was coming from the nearby city of Jalal-Abad to fix it. We hitched a ride to a taxi rank in a village with the help of a BMW which seemed to be part powered by rap music and then a minibus and a another taxi eventually got us to Arslanbob and a cute little guesthouse.

Arslanbob is a great little village nestled in a valley between yet more Kyrgyz mountains and waterfalls and is most famous for the fact that it is home to the largest walnut grove on earth which locals harvest every autumn in huge amounts. I did a hike yesterday morning into the walnuts and the hills and met an old Canadian woman called Dianne. As a result i managed to hitch a ride to Osh with Dianne, her friend Judith, who was a former parole officer, their tour guide from Bishkek and a Russian driver who looked like a Bond villains right-hand man. We saw all sorts of places on the way (they were spending huge money on a 20 day trip through central Asia) and last night i stayed at a guesthouse in Osh with them, where a large group of Czech hikers couldn't understand why a young English man was traveling around Kyrgyzstan with two slightly eccentric elderly Canadian woman in an expensive German jeep. Neither could i. I like Kyrgyzstan.

And now i'm back in Osh which was the start of the Kyrgyz journey. In the next day or two i'll head west across the border and spend a few weeks in Uzbekistan which seems to be home to deserts and huge amounts of Muslim architecture. Kyrgyzstan has been a great country to travel in. It has amazing mountains and lakes, fantastic people, shit roads, knackered vehicles, more livestock than humans, its name has ten letters and only one vowel and as an independent country it's younger than me. It's been a very memorable place.

Karakol

This week i've seen blue lakes, gold toothed doctors, dead headless goats and white mountains.

I was in Bishkek staying in a guesthouse in an apartment block run by a Muslim who was having a hard time trying to stick to the rules of ramadan and occupying his time harassing an American girl. Bishkek is a sunny tree lined city with friendly people and Soviet style buildings, parks, squares and statues. It also has corrupt policeman everywhere who try to search you and steal your cash and is home to the funniest collection of T-shirts With Random English anywhere. The following are the pick of the bunch.
Remember My Name, You'll Be Seeing It Later
No Money No Crisis
Save Me
My Boyfriend Appreciates Me
No Romance Without Finance
You Were Never My Boyfriend

August 31st was Independence Day and was celebrated in the morning at a racecourse with a game called Ulak-Tartysh. Ulak-Tartysh is a very old game and unique to central Asia. It involves two teams of four on horseback, two raised pits and the carcass of a dead headless goat minus its entrails. Yes, you read that right. The aim of the game is to pick up the goat carcass and then throw it into your teams pit whilst blocking, stopping and preventing the opposing team doing the same thing all of which takes place on horseback in a field in the sunshine in front of a few thousand people, TV cameras and the president himself. It's as crazy as it sounds. We saw two games of this and it is a brutal sport with horses and riders colliding at speed all the time. The riders have extreme strength and skill - imagine riding a horse and bending down one handed to pick up a dead goat hook it under your leg, ride around and then take it with both hands and throw it into a raised pit whilst four other men are trying to grasp and take the goat and push and shove your horse with theirs. It's a bit like rugby. Except it's on horses and the ball is really very different. I'm thinking that an email campaign to the IOC for inclusion in the 2016 Olympics should be started soon.

Public transport in Kyrgyzstan is also a little crazy, although thankfully no dead goats have been involved yet. All buses seem to be minivans which all have the same schedule - they leave when they are full of people. I waited a while at a bus station and went to a one street town called Cholpon Ata on the shores of the huge Lake Issyk Kol. Cholpon Ata is famous in Kyrgyzstan for its beaches and Russian and Kazakh tourists sitting on the sand by the lake trying not to look fat and spending lots of money doing it. I joined them and looked poor, skinny and English. I thought i'd get a suntan. I almost got hypothermia. It was freezing. None of the Russians or Kazakhs seemed to mind at the gale blowing across the lake or the drizzle falling from the sky and that night my rumbling stomach problems that i've had since Kashgar became serious bowel problems and i left the next day to the town of Karakol in search of medical care.

The minivan to Karakol would've made me laugh if i hadn't have spent the whole journey trying not to throw up or shit my pants. The ignition didn't have a key but simply had a screwdriver wedged into it. A screwdriver was also the weapon of choice to open the boot, first to turn the lock then to prize it open so you could put your bag inside. As we were zooming along, the drivers door would randomly open without warning and then be quickly closed by the driver again as he was changing gear, talking on the phone and overtaking a tractor. In Karakol i found a doctors clinic and wandered around aimlessly clutching my Russian phrasebook and looking as sick as possible. A pharmicist took pity and showed me to a stern looking Russian woman doctor with gold teeth who thought that i could speak fluent Russian and immidiately bombarded me with questions and words that meant nothing. I pointed at my stomach and tried to point to the word "diahrea" in the phrasebook. She snatched it out of my hands and pointed to the word "rabies". I shook my head. Then she pointed at "encephalitis". I assured her as best as i could that i didn't have any sub-tropical mosquito diseases. Eventually she found the word "diahrea" and after poking my stomach a bit and pointing at more words she charged me one dollar and wrote a load of Russian on three pieces of paper and gave them to the friendly pharmacist. I don't know what they put in Russian/Kyrgyz medication but within two days i was bouncing off the walls and taking solid visits to the toilet again.

Karakol sits in between the eastern edge of the lake and two mountain ranges. On a clear day the snow capped peaks seem to surround the drab unassuming town and i spent two days hiking up and down a sunny valley filled with trees, a white water river and immense wonderful white-topped mountains. I'll be here for a day or two more and then head west trying to avoid dead headless goats, vans held together with screwdrivers, fat sunbathing Russians and, of course, rabies.

Bishkek

Kyrgyzstan is ace. China is rubbish. Here's why.

I got a 20 hour overnight train from Turpan to Kashgar with Crystal from Canada and Theo from Holland. We grabbed a taxi in Kashgar and the driver asked us all where we were from. "Ah, Canada. Very big country," he said to Crystal. "Well, China is a very big country," we ventured. The taxi driver turned slightly in his seat and with a wink and a smile said, "You're not in China." Damn right. Kashgar was at the crossroads of the old silk road. A meeting place for traders and travelers from east Asia through to Europe and back again. It was the Hong Kong or Singapore of it's day and it still reeks of a bygone age with markets and bazaars, donkeys and car horns, kebabs and mosques, dust and dirt and the Chinese army in abundance none of which will be appearing on any postcards very soon. Kashgar is Kashgar.

On the Friday that i was there me and two other English fellas, James and Martin, went for a wander around Kashgar taking in markets and alleyways and people and sounds. We came back to the centre of town to see a row of about 15 jeeps all armed with huge guns, side arms and even bayonets lined up in front of the main square and the mosque. The men in the jeeps were casually pointing their guns at the market and shoppers on the other side of the road where we stood. It was a very provocative sight. A mosque, a town square, a load of jeeps with guns, a road, shoppers and then us stood there with our cameras. Just as i was about to take a picture, a group of policemen appeared and shouted at me and James. They took our cameras from us and looked at our pics and then handed my camera back, with looks of disapproval, before taking James to the police station. We met up later and giggled like school kids who'd been caught doing something wrong. The whole time we were in Kashgar we saw dozens of police or army patrols on foot or in massive trucks, always armed and always telling tourists not to take pictures. They are extremely paranoid and obviously have orders to stop any demo or violence, whatever size, and to minimise any publicity, however small, from the area.

China needs Xinjiang province more than Xinjiang province needs China. Uighur people have been there for centuries (since the Silk Road and probably before) but as China's economy booms it needs the oil and gas and minerals flowing out of central Asia which borders the province. So they're modernising it, building roads, train lines and hospitals and apartments that nobody really asked for whilst destroying the old alleyways and markets and marginalising the culture in favour of development, trying to include Xinjiang and Uighurs into China Inc. with the rest of the country. It's strange and quite sad to see a kind of economic colonialism in action but who am i to criticise? I'm British.

Anyway, enough of all of that political human rights boring crap. I saw a thousands of goats on a Sunday morning in the drizzle. Kashgar Livestock Market is uniquely unique. Farmers and herders from, well, from everywhere, bring goats, sheep, cattle and donkeys on foot, jeeps, trailers and tractors to a market on the outskirts of the city and then shout and haggle over the price of animals that will be turned into a load of kebabs or hand bags or milk or whatever it is you make donkeys out of. Animal mayhem every week.

At 10am on Monday i got a bus from Kashgar to Osh in Kyrgyzstan. Actually, that's a lie. We left at 11.30 as the passengers on the sleeper bus were secondary to all the cargo that was loaded onto it. Pipes, boxes, TVs, chairs and massive amounts of food was the real cargo. We got in the way really. The bus took 20 hours to get to Osh and we climbed out of Kashgar (after fixing two wheels and a puncture at a mechanic in a village) and arrived at the border in the late afternoon. We all piled into the large immigration building to be confronted by some angry looking border guards. All the foreigners (about 10 of us) had to line up and hand in our cameras. They were all looked at. Three of us had pictures of the Chinese army including me. They took our passports and memory cards, copied and deleted the pictures that they deemed "illegal" and then allowed us to pass through. I didn't care much as i'd copied all my pictures to CD-ROM at a travel agents in Kashgar but it was strange seeing the lengths the government is going to try and hide what's happening in Xinjiang. The border guard gave me my camera back. I asked if i could take his picture. He didn't really see the funny side.

I find China intoxicating. It's people, landscapes, cities, foods and drinks all fascinate me but i won't care much if i never go back. I've had enough. And to emphasise just how OTT the officialdom of China is we crossed into Kyrgyzstan to be greeted by yet another man in an army uniform who stepped onto the bus and looked blankly at us. Then he grinned a huge grin and said in a loud proud voice, "Welcome! To Kyrgyzstan border! Come on!" and waved his hand toward the door and three ramshackle green corrugated bungalows that passed for immigration. We lined up by the side of the the first green structure waiting to hand our passports through a window where a man was sat at a desk with two computers humming along to Baby Don't Hurt Me by Haddaway and smiling for no reason. Then we had to have a "medical examination" where a man in a mask in another corrugated house asked me if i had swine flu whilst pointing to a cold sore on my face. When i assured him that it wasn't swine flu but a cold sore on my face he lifted up my t-shirt and looked at me stomach and then rubbed my arms to double check which must be some kind of swine flu testing procedure i'm not yet aware of. A man from Austria who had long hair and a large beard was asked if he was Jesus. Martin got told he looked like a movie star. I'm sure if there are any highly contagious diseases making their way across the Chinese border to Kyrgyzstan that they will be detected with extreme efficiency.

I guess when somebody mentions a country that ends in "stan" people think one of two things. War or Borat. Kyrgyzstan is neither. We arrived in Osh early that morning to find a happy and friendly little city with hustle and bustle and colour and kebabs. Endless kebabs. The next day i got a shared taxi to the capital city Bishkek with two people who were on the bus from Kashgar, Trish from the USA and Aki from Japan. The journey was 12 hours and passed through some majestic scenic mountains and lakes. I was sat in the middle of the back seat whilst Aki spent the almost the whole trip sleeping to my right and Trish read War and Peace to me left and all the time i gazed through the taxi's windscreen which had a crack in it like a lightening bolt. The driver was a huge gruff man who sat next to Casper in the passenger seat who was a student from Osh and asked us questions like "How hot is Miami?". I like Kyrgyzstan a lot.

Bishkek is a cute little city and somehow i'm staying in a guesthouse in an old Soviet apartment building with a Muslim and two Israelis. I managed to get a Uzbekistan visa here the other day so i'll be there in a few weeks and i also did something that i didn't want to do but had to - i bought a plane ticket. I fly from Tashkent in Uzbekistan to Baku in Azerbaijan at the start of October as visas and boats across the Caspian Sea were too much of pain in the arse and time consuming. And it means that i'll have more time to see the mountains and the mild craziness that is Kyrgyzstan. I can hardly wait.

Osh

It's been a while. Due to the long arm of the Chinese government i haven't been able to use the internet for a while as it was shut down in Xinjiang province in western China. But now i'm in Kyrgyzstan.

I left Beijing from the gargantuan Beijing West Train Station (airports are smaller) on a train bound for Langzhou. I had only a seat for the 21 hour journey and the train was full to bursting with hundreds of lunatic people pushing, shoving and shouting to get a bag space and a place to stand. I got sporadic sleep through the night and woke up to see a small girl opposite me shit herself and make the whole carriage stink of baby shit. I got chatting with a friendly man, who bought me two beers, and Ping Mei, who was a student at Langzhou University. As the train rolled through a dry yellow scabby mountain landscape Ping Mei told me that her university had a guesthouse where i could stay for 10 yuen a night (about 1 pound). Unfortunately it was like an underground prison with communal showers (in a completely different building two blocks away), hideous toilets and beds that creaked like old ships at sea. Still, one pound.

Langzhou is an industrial smoggy city with 3.2M people in the middle of a valley and has buildings that seem to want to compete with mountains that surround it on the banks of the Yellow River. I had a proper tourist day avoiding any "funny" sounding museums and instead sticking to cable cars and parks and temples and shops and food. The faces of the people were changing as i came west from Beijing too. There was a huge mosque in the centre of Langzhou which was a taste of things to come. I met an idiot in my dorm who was a Chinese student at the university. We went for some noodles and he asked me what i thought about Taiwan.
"Well...erm...i think it's complicated," i said trying to be diplomatic.
"Yes, me too," he said to my surprise. "If Taiwan want to be independent country...there must be war," he said happily, making it very uncomplicated quite quickly. We argued over hot tomato and egg noodle soup. I would say that it was wrong to erode people's cultures and languages. He would agree. I would point out that China was doing exactly that. But it didn't matter what i said, even if he agreed and contradicted himself he would always end with the same conclusion - he would shrug and say, "But it is China." Tibet. Maccau. Xinjiang. Taiwan. Hong Kong. But it is China. Fuck everybody else. If China wants, China gets.

Xinjiang has been in the news recently. You may have heard about the riots in the city of Urumqi on July 5th. Ten years ago 90% of the population in the huge western province of Xinjiang was Uigher, a predominantly Muslim population who were officially taken over as part of China earlier this century. Now the population is less than 50%. The Chinese government has encouraged people to resettle to Xinjiang giving them financial support to make the Han Chinese population grow and supplant the Muslim Uighers who speak there own language and have there own distinct culture. It has, obviously, caused huge problems. The Koran and the Call to Prayer are banned. Their language is not compulsory in schools. Uighers feel that their culture is being eroded and taken over by the Chinese. It is. So they eventually rioted and burnt buses and businesses and people and generally tore Urumqi up for a day or two. There were revenge riots by Chinese against Uighers. China doesn't do riots. China doesn't do demonstrations. Hell, China doesn't even do strongly worded letters. The internet was shut down throughout the whole province. International phone calls were banned. The army was called in. I knew little of the situation there and bought a sleeper ticket for Turpan, slap in the middle of Xinjiang.

The journey to the old silk road town of Turpan was an uneventful plough through the edge of the Tibetan foothills and through desert lunar landscape for 19 hours. When i got off the train i was shouted at for using a bin that was on the same platform as a slow oncoming goods train. I got passport checked as i left the station. I got my bags x-rayed when i wanted to buy a ticket and was told to take out the nail clippers from my bag. I chucked my bag in a corner and told the fat security woman to piss off. What did she think i was going to do? Start trimming complete stranger's nails without consent instead of buying a train ticket? I'd been in Xinjiang province for five minutes and i felt like lobbing a few Molotov cocktails about myself and i'm an English atheist.

Turpan is the hottest place in China and the third lowest depression in the world. It was also a dull Chinese city. Any historic or cultural aspect of the city from Silk Road trading days were gone and neatly replaced by a one-size-fits-all Chinese architectural uniform that could've been in any city in the east of the country. I hired a taxi for the day with Halik, a nice man who nabbed me at the station, and saw the sites that were left for the benefit of Chinese tour groups from the east bringing money and a superiority complex. There was a wonderful old village called Toyoq covered in dust and history. We went to Jiaohe ruins which, 1600 years ago, held 6500 people in the middle of a desert and when i went it contained a tour group of Chinese policemen who seemed quite content to use the millenia old rocks and decayed buildings as a climbing frame for picture posing. Halik invited me to have some food and drinks with him and his friends that night which is how i came to find myself eating spicy chicken and knocking back shots of Muslim fire water (which isn't something you can do everyday) and i seem to remember throwing up in a hedge before getting a taxi back to a smelly dorm in a cheap hotel.

In the cheap hotel i met a bunch of other travellers who i met up with again in the amazing city of Kashgar where we got shouted at by the police, had guns pointed at us by the army and pictures deleted from our cameras as we crossed the Kyrgyzstan border last night high up in some mountains. But i'll tell you about that in a few days as i've already written way too much.

Beijing again

I'm leaving China's captial later today on another over-crowded train to central China. After being here for over a week i'm ready to move on again.

Beijing is huge. Massive. Really, really big. Six lanes of traffic cut through mammoth glass and stone buildings spread over colossal areas. It's an imposing place designed to demand attention and awe. But for all its size it's not actually big enough. The new metro trains and stations cannot cope with amount of people. There aren't enough ticket windows at the cathedral sized train stations. Buses don't run frequently enough, restaurants have too few tables, roads are not wide enough, temperatures not cool enough, prices not cheap enough, people not quiet enough. It's a city of excess all the time. Perhaps it's because there are millions of domestic tourists here on holidays clogging everything up. Perhaps there are just too many people. Whatever, I would recommend Beijing hugely to anybody but don't touch the place in summertime.

The best way to see the excess is by bicycle. There's nothing quite like cycling around Beijing using the wide, large (of course) cycle lanes that pass along all the roads and then ducking down an old alley way or hutong and getting lost, finding a park or big (again) temple, pagoda or another oversized building site.

Smoggy days here are weird. You can't see the sky or the sun or even clouds but you're sure it's above the pollution somewhere. There are times when the air seems to hang from the chunky new buildings and stick to your lungs. People in Beijing, and China at large, have a tendency to hawk their lungs up and spit parts of it out onto the floor. I joined in. It was the only way i could breathe peoperly.

I saw the now iconic Olympic Stadium and Aquatic Centre which are both awesome and best seen at sunset when they are lit up and make the whole area look slightly alien and unreal. I found some of the silly museums here as well. The Police Musuem was full of guns and propagander and the laser shooting range was closed which was the only reason to go really. The Underground Musuem was closed (maybe they filled it in) which was a disappointment. In the 1960s Mao fell out with the Russians and ordered tunnels to be dug under Beijing in case of, well, i'm not really sure why as he was as mad as a bag of badgers but the musuem was a tour of some of the old tunnels. Was. The Tap Water Museum is impossible to find and the Red Sandlewood Musuem can stay where it is at the end of a metro line as i've decided that i'm crap at finding stupid musuems. It didn't work in Seoul and it's failed here as well. I should just stick to being a normal tourist.

I stayed in a friendly hostel and got drunk almsot everynight with a collection of other travellers and holdiay makers including an English fella who was cycling around the world, a Finish guy who fell down a man hole and all sorts of other drunks and sweaty backpackers swapping stories and having fun. It was light relief from the Uzbek embassy hunt that i eventually completed. I found out that i needed a Letter Of Invitation (LOI) from Uzbekistan and these cost 35 dollars from an online central Asian travel agents who need all kinds of documents. So i started an Internet Cafe With A Working Printer Hunt and then a Fax Machine That Actually Fucking Works Hunt and i'm still no closer to getting a LOI needed to get the visa. I wanted to get across central Asia without using a plane but Turkmensitan can go screw and Azerbijan visa laws give me a headache so i'm going to have to get a plane from either Kyrgyzstan or (if the visa gets sorted) Uzbekistan to somewhere in eastern Europe or Turkey as i want to travel in China not spend all my time dicking about getting visas for countries nobody's ever heard of. Ah well, it could be worse. I could still be working for idiots in Seoul.

But i'm not. I'm going to Lanzhou later today which is famous for being one of the most polluted cities in China (and, therefore, probably the world) and then further west onto to the silk road cities of Turpan and Kashgar. I should leave China on the 24th of August for Kyrgyzstan so i'll write more crap between now and then.

Beijing

I've been in China for a week now and i'd forgotten just how funny this place is.

I was in Yantai in 2007 and it was a friendly dump by the sea but i put that down to the fact that half of it was being knocked down and rebuilt. Now it's almost finished and it's still a friendly dump by the sea. I sat in a small park/town square and watched Yantai pass by. In one corner of the park square there were a group of old people (probably three times my age) doing tai chi exercises which invloved holding their arms out and saying "aaaaahhhh" or patting themselves on the legs and body. In the other corner of the park a small group of people were practising their numb chucking skills. Yes, numb chucks. Six people just playing around with numb chucks. Then a guy set up a stereo next to me and some middle aged people paired up and started doing some kind of rhythmic ballroom dancing in time to the music. All the while kids ran around with plastic kite things and two woman rode around on wobbly skateboards. I didn't really know where to look.

The 14 hour overnight train to Beijing wasn't much fun but it was worth it. If Seoul felt like a coat i'd not worn for a while then Beijing felt (and looked) like a friend you haven't seen in ages whose moved up in the world, got himself a new house and car and lots of money and isn't ashamed to flash it about. But underneath all the fancy new buildings and cars that friend is still the same. It's quick with a smile and a frown, enjoys getting drunk and shoving all kinds of food in it's mouth and will probably always have unhealthy traffic flowing around in veins and arteries whilst welcoming anybody to come to the party to continue the fun. Beijing is a unique place in a unique country. The rate of change here is huge. Since i was last here in 2007 there are four new metro lines, completely new massive hotels and gargantuan shopping centres and sometimes just whole postcodes flattened and rebuilt again. Who knows when or if it will end.

I've spent the past week here waiting and then getting a visa for Kyrgyzstan and also wandering the streets failing to find the Embassy of Uzbekistan which aren't activities that will appear in any day tours or guide books anytime soon and with good reason. I did managed to see an area of the city called Factory 798 which contains a load of disused factories that have been converted into art galleries for Chinese modern art. Some of the galleries still have old machinery bolted to the floor and exposed pipes running overhead. It was a great way to spend an afternoon away from the Uzbek embassy hunt which is still ongoing. Hopefully next week i'll find it along with the Beijing Police Musuem (where you can fire laser guns at stuff, apparently), Beijing Underground City, The China Red Sandlewood Musuem and the Beijing Tap Water Museum. I'll try and do all that and write some more pretentious crap before getting a train heading west next Friday.