Posted 1:37 AM by Gobbler
Roll on For Britain part 2

BRING ME MY TRAIN, SO THAT I MAY RIDE ON IT
 
Oh now i come to think of it i had a small problem with the chinese passport control because they were confused as to why i claimed to be english but i had written that i was 'british' and my passport distinctly indicated that i was from a place called 'The United Kingdom'.  I dont think they really understood what was going on but they let me through.

They were a little more clued up on the russian side.  Once they had let me through passport control after the nerve-wracking wait i put my stuff through the metal detector.  "Go to number three please" a man said, indicating a table.  Off I went, and once i had gort there the big soldier pointed to a part of my bag and politely said to me in english: "What is in this part of your bag?"  "Errrrm, souvenirs."  "Show me please."  "OK.."  I replied, and as I began to unpack my bag a crowd of 8 or ten soldiers gathered round to look.  Luckily they werent carrying guns and luckily I hadnt spotted a pockmarked, stained wooden post anywhere or i would have got really edgy.  It didnt take a huge amount of brainpower to work out what they were after, it always occured to me that it might be slighty dodgy carrying around four large knives from Xinjiang in northwest china, but it was not possible to post them so i had no choice.  After pulling out everything else I pulled out the knives and place them on the table.  It appeared that the game was up as the soldiers nodded to e3ach other as if saying "Ha, just what we thought"  and the english speaking soldier picked one up, unsheathed it and said "Souvenir?"  "Oh yes" I said, "souvenir, absolutely"  but he loked doubtful.  A few  of the soldiers passed around the knives examining them, including the stout grey-haired one who looked as if he had seen a campaign or two, who appeared to be in charge.  A few questions later it looked like i might be in some serious poo, but eventually the grey haired one gave the nod and i was free to go.

A few minutes later, when i had repacked my bag and walked out of customs, i realised that i was in some serious poo.  i couldnt get back on the train, indeed there was no longer a locomotive on the train.  it wasnt going any further and i could get back on without causing trouble which i was keen to avoid.  No more plastic straw hat w3ith the lovely plastic flower in it.  No more half eaten tin of fried dace with black beans.  No huge loss but i was very hungry and it was the only thing i had eaten all day.  What was worse was the i had no immediate prospect of getting food because i didnt have any money.  It is illegal to use foreign curreny in russia, and here i was stuck in some grizzly border town without a russian rouble to my name.  Fortunately there was an ATM atthe station, unfortunately when i tried to use it it told me that i had exceeded my account limit and that therefore it wasnt going to give me any money.  If this was true then i was in some very serious poo indeed and i spent the next few minutes stumbling around outside contemplating just how much poo i was in and hoping for some kind of salvation.  Salvation might hve come in the form of the taxi driver offering to give me a lift to vladivostok for a hundred dollars, 3000 roubles.  This seemed a ridiculous price, but if i couldnt find any roubles then i might have had to take it.  I went back to the ATM to see if it had changed its mind.  It hadnt.  I tried accessing my credit card account, the only button i had not yet pressed on the machine.  it worked and a swift 100 roubles came my way.  Unfortunately, being my credit account, and there being 50 roubles in the pound, it cost me about 150 rouble to get the money, not the greatest deal in the world, so i then got out another thousand.  With some serious robles in my back burner i was ready for action again, and went to the ticket booth for a ticket to vladivostok.

As train stations go the train station at this town wasnt a bad one at all, but had the major deficiency of not having any trains.  "Take me to Vladivostok!"  I commanded "Niet"  they replied.  "I commmand you to summon a rtain to bear me to vladivostok!"  I continued.  "Bugger off." she said.  Someone tapped me onthe shoulder, it was the taxi guy.  2000 roubles for a bus to vladivostok.  "I must take the train!"  I insisted.  Someone else assured me that there was a train the next day, but noone could tell me when.  "The guidebook distinctly advises me that there is a train!"  I cried, "Where is the god damn train?!"  The lady in the ticket booth told me that if i wanted to get a train to vladivostok i had to go to the ticket office on the other side of the track, which made sense enough, so off i went.  But there was no train station on the oher side, just a market with some drunk people in it stumbling around (impressive asit was not yet two in the afternoon, although almost four russian time) and a bus station.  "Give me my train, so that I may ride on it!"  I bellowed to the heavens, but there was no reply.  What was i to do?  noone would sell me a train ticket, i couldnt understand a word of what most people were saying, and I was faced with the unpalatable prospect of spending the night in the grim town with all the large aggressive looking alcoholics.  I couldnt take it.  I took the bus.

Im now in Vladivostok and having a very interesting time, and plan to leave tomorrow.  But buying a ticket could be a little trickier than i had suspected, and I havent managed to get a ticket yet, so we shall see.  All to be revealed in the next edition of "The Great Train (with a bit of bus) Ride"

Vince:  Basically, theres not much you cant pickle.  do you remember eating pickled eggs when we went down to see fr boniface that time?  They are grim
Evil Uncle:  I always wanted piles.  One of my top ten maladies.  another of them is trench foot.  I dont suppose theres much hope of getting that on the train though.

Posted 1:08 AM by Gobbler
Blog Warfare Part Three

So now we are at the third part of blog warfare and havent had a sniff of any warfare of any kind.  let us put a stop to that immediately.   While in haerbin i took the liberty of visiting the Japanese Germ Warfare base nearby.  Took me ages to work out how to get there as the bus did not seem to be where it was supposed to be and once i got on the bus the fact that i didnt know where i was going or when to get off struck me as something of a problem.  Fortunately there was a lady on the bus who spoke english and she negotiated with the conductor for me, who then turfed me off the bus at the appropriate spot.  it wasnt the most appropriate of appropriate spots because they have meoved the museum.  this was a bit of a blow as you can imagine, but happily theyve only moved it up the road and so i was able to get my look around a nice blown up base where the inquisitive japanese polished off somewhere around 3000 people by injecting them with diseases, making them inhale gasses, freezing them, incinerating them, putting them in a vacuum, and so on and so forth, all in the name of science.  Im fully in favour of doing things in the name of science but wholly agree with the general assessment that they went rather too far in this case and werent following the geneva convention too closely.  The base was destroyed shortly before the end of the war to hide the evidence, and then, so the story goes, the scientists secured safety for themselves by giving the americans the experimental data...

Roll on for Britain

That was pretty much the end of haerbin for me, although i very nearly missed the train which would have kept me there another day.  as i was walking down the platform to my carriage they started closing the doors so i had to leap on which didnt please the carriage attendant very much.  There wasnt much he could do to sttop me getting on however ass i was bigger than him.

This took me to the border with russia.  There, everybody piled onto busses and departed.  as this is the Great Train Journey of about 10,000 miles from yangzhou to london it would be clearly inappropriate behaviour for me to start taking busses about the place.  Innapropriate but convenient, as i was about to discover.  Long after the  busses had departed, the ticket office was still closed.  I suppose it was about 7 in the morning .  by 8:30 i had my ticket for the 9:30 train.  Passed through customs no problem and settled down on the train.  I believe there were 2 people on the train, but there might have been as many as 7.  Although the guidebook promises a daily train to vladivostok there was none on offer and i could get a ticket only to a town on the way somewhere in russia.  I had no idea which town, the name not surviving the translation.  but i was promised that i could get a connection from there to vlad. 

Sometime before christmas the train decided to leave and after a very pleasant couple of hours winding through forest we arrived at the border town.  After a while it occured to me that the bloke shouting and waving to me outside the window wanted me to get off the train and go through customs.  Thinking we would be back on the train to continue the journey i left my hat there. 

Customs was an interesting experience.  They had a look at my passport and then wandered off into a sideroom with it, not reappearing for about 15 minutes.  This was unnerving, just what where they doing with it all that time?  I half expected everything to go very wrong and to get denied entry or thrown in prison or something like that, but in the end all was well and i passed through.  TBC

 

Posted 4:45 AM by Gobbler
Blog Warfare part 2

I arrived in haerbin yesterday morning.  I mgot there on the train.  IT wasnt the most high qualtiy train in the world and i only had a hard seat on it.  On paper i should have suffered lightly on the 14 hour trip given that i managesd a 45 hour seat without too many heartaches, but for some reason it didnt seem such a picnic.  Partly due to the dodgy air con and bloke next to me who a)dribbled when he was asleep and b) drifted into my lap as he slept.  when we arrived at 6:15 the next morning i hadnt had much sleep, but a new chinese matey, the very same mister dribbler (who also saw fit to wake me up every half an hour of the last two to tell me that we were almost at the station!@##@#$%!@#$^#^&) was deterined to further assist me by finding me accomodation.  This i did not want in anty shape opr form but could not in my hazy state work out how to get rid of him, so acquiesced.  he ended up gettign me a room at the hotel in the station.  i dont know whether or not 'hotel' is the correct noun.  certtainly the 'station hotel' thinks it is but i have always felt that a fairly indispensable feature of any hotel is the fact that it has a shower or bath somewhere on the premnises, and i am startled to announce that this particular emporium did not appear to have any such facility anywhere discernable.  I even asked the staff and they pointed mer happily to a room which only contained two banks of sinks.  Nice! 

So, even though i had paid ready money for the station 'hotel' i didnt spend the night there  btu chose to move somewhere actually listed in the guidebook.  But that was not the end of it because before i had managed to find the place i w2as enticed into a grotty doorway by a couple of smiliong women offering accomodation.  20 kwai sounded good to me, and i even got my own room. (previously it had been a dormitory)  Admittedly it was slightly smaller than a prison cell and had no windows ecept ones near the rook that had been painted the same bland pale yellow colour...

Posted 4:13 AM by Gobbler
Blog Warfare
 
Have I told you this before?  Im nto sure. The day before yesterday I took the liberty of visiting mr Chairman.  Not Chairman Jon currently gallivanting around southern china, but the big man himself, who actually wasnt/isnt that big, Chairman Mao.  His size varies greatly on which statue you look at and there are plenty of statues of him that i have seen, and almost all, in fact all that i have seen, have legs.  this is the peculiar thing:  the real chairman mao appears not to have legs, at least if his body is anything to go by, which you would have thought it would be.  Thats right.  I queued up with all the other thousands for a quick glimpse of the great man, and he seems to have been significantly shortchanged in the legs department.  either that or they couldnt get a big enough jar to put him and cut his legs off.

Of course its not actually a jar, but jar might be the technical term for it, as he is pickled.  Not pickled like an onion, which is in vinegar, or like lord nelson, who was in brandy, or even Tosh from the Bill, who was pickled by a wide variety of alcoholic beverages, but pickled like lenin and stalin and ho chi minh in phemaldehide or some kind of gaseous mixture that stops the rot.  Having already had the dubious pleasure of seeing ho in hanoi there was not particular novelty in seeing mao, but as im also going to moscow I can complete the trio by seeing lenin as well, presuming hes still on display.  i think stalin is still around somewhere as well but, not being as popular now as he was when he had 100,000 tanks under his personal control, he's been dumped in a shed somewhere.  Which is probably doing nothing for that fantastic moustache of his.  In all honesty Mao wasnt looking too perky, a little yellow around the gills as they say, and a little black around the ears.  Perhaps this isnt totally surprising, as hes dead, but i seem to remember ho chi minh looking a little better, and he is about ten years more dead.  It seems that Hanois makeup department is running a higher quality establishment.

Currently in Haerbin in north east china.  And how, you may ask, did i get here?  Well, let tell you.  But first i'll save this in case the computer decides to crash/hangup/die/explode.  and then we will here all about blog warfare...

Vince: Ah, Schonborn.  Always a peculiar character...