Today I Learned

I love this comment. Most of the stops at stations in Russia were short - about 15 minutes or so. I would usually walk around the platform and buy something to supplement the borscht and vodka on the train. Sometimes it was a couple of bottles of not very good beer, sometimes some apples, and once a babooshka had a cardboard box with a bunch of these ice cream cones in it. I remember that the ice cream was distinctly different than what I was used to - not particularly good but it was fun to have. This ice cream was bought in a pretty rural Siberian area only 10 months after the USSR collapsed - I have no idea but would guess that 1992 version that I had was still the 'old taste'.

Yes, it was an awesome trip. In fact, we were adamant about travelling overland and tried to avoid airplanes if possible.

From Lanzhou to Chengdu with various side trips we were on buses for a bit over 600 miles, Chengdu to Dali was another 600 miles. Both of these legs were done on buses and were some of the most physically demanding and dangerous road trips I have ever taken. On the Tibetan plateau most roads were gravel. We were on buses with some windows that were broken in the open position (in December - the temperature inside the bus was often well below freezing), high elevation mountain passes that were snow covered, bus drivers that always turned the engine off on descents to save fuel, no toilets on any long haul bus ever. Sometimes we would be on a bus for 16 hours with just one stop in below freezing temperatures.

From Dali we took a bus another 200 or so miles to Kunming and then got back on a train to Guangdong for another 850 miles. This actually pushes the overland travel distance of this portion of our trip to over 10,000 miles. (Barcelona - Paris - Budapest - Moscow - Beijing - Lanzhou - Xiahe - Linxia - Chengdu - Dali - Lijiang - Kunming - Guangdong - Hong Kong).

Technically some parts of our trip were not 'possible' and therefore logistically impossible to plan. In these cases we just bought a ticket and hoped for the best - it pretty much always worked out. For example, heading into Ukraine without a visa was not 'possible' but it was also not possible to get a visa to enter the country. We bought a train ticket from Budapest to Moscow and went for it. We arrived around midnight at the border into Ukraine (Chop). My girlfriend was forced to stay on the train and I was taken off the train by armed border guards with both of our passports. I was held with a few other westerners in a secure room for about 5 hours with no explanation. At around 5 in the morning we were marched through the streets of Chop to a bank where we paid in hard currency (USD or German DMs) and were issued emergency visas. We were marched back to the train and continued on to Moscow. When I got back on the train my girlfriend told me she had spent a stressful night because the train left the station shortly after I was taken off. It travelled around 5 or 6 miles to a maintenance terminal where the bogeys were all changed (rail gauge-break). There was no explanation and initially she was justifiably freaked out and wasn't sure how we we would ever meet up again.

Emergency Ukraine visa. Visa to enter China on opposing page issued 8 days later.

In China, on some of the long haul bus trips we would stop to stay the night in towns that were not 'approved' for foreigners. Somehow they would find some place for us to stay. It was generally not where the local Chinese on the bus would stay. I imagine these were some undocumented locations which always seemed to be a significant walk from the bus station. It was always stressful because we had to walk back to the bus station in the morning (often at 5 or so AM) and there was always a concern we would miss the bus. In remote parts of China that were mostly inhabited by ethnic-minority groups locals had to place rocks across the road to get the buses to stop for them because the Han mentality seemed to be 'fuck the minorities'.

Local rabbit/small game hunter boarding bus after blocking the road with rocks. Somewhere south of Linxia in the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

Street scene from bus window somewhere south of Lanzhou.

Simply buying tickets in China for buses and trains was also difficult - especially in smaller towns. It took patience and resolve. There were times when we would go to the station and try to buy a ticket for the next day and were told that we couldn't buy tickets. We would just show up again the next day and try to buy the tickets again. I think the longest it took us to get tickets for a train was 3 or 4 days - we just kept trying and eventually it would work. Due to this, there was no way to keep any sort of a schedule so logistically it was pretty complicated. Hotels were also problematic because many were not approved for 'tourists' so we often had to wander around looking. In some cases we would just sit in the hotel lobby after being denied accommodation until they got tired of looking at us and they would somehow find us a room.