21. LAZYBONES

I think we've run out of adventurous steam. All these months of excitement have left me feeling inclined to sitting around in cheap, sunny bars and having very little happen to me. After Laos, we managed to pass through Cambodia without really doing anything. In fairness, this probably put us more in tune with the locals than in any other country we've visited. They're not ones to over-exert themselves.

We did visit Angkor Wat, but I think pretty much everyone else in the world was there at the same time, so you probably already know about that. Then we headed to Phnom Penn, the capital. Busy, but essentially slow moving, like Hanoi on downers.

I didn't realise until I visited Cambodia the scale of the horror that the people have endured in recent history, which may explain why today they don't appear to give a hoot about anything. There's an occasional show of effort, but it's not really followed through. At our guesthouse in Phnom Penn, home-made signs had been tacked to the walls advising that drugs, prostitution, drawing on the walls and ironing in the rooms were not allowed. Well, the first thing the owner did after we checked in was try to sell us weed; he had women in the bar who if they weren't prostitutes were certainly over/under-dressed for the location; and someone had drawn a huge naked Buddha on our bathroom door. I can't prove this but I suspect there may even have been ironing going on in there. Scandalous.

Other than this naughtiness it wasn't a place that encouraged activity, rather having the feel of a Victorian madhouse or First World War field hospital about it: frazzled Englishmen and the occasional stray American sitting around drinking tea in their dressing gowns until late in the afternoon, staring dead-eyed into the middle distance and muttering occasionally to themselves. We tried to be a bit more active but the tourist sights of the city - killing fields and a former school turned Khmer Rouge prison - aren't the sort of things to write about in such a facile document as this blog.

Leaving Phnom Penn in a half-hearted search for adventure, we headed to more rural parts to visit some of the country's famous floating villages. Bobbing about on gentle waters seems to suit the Cambodian temperament, and charging foreigners $15 an hour to visit them seemed to suit the temperament of the Vietnamese lady who took us out there on her boat, so we didn't hang around long.

After that it was a few days in Kampot, a lazy river town populated almost entirely by ageing French drunkards and infant Cambodians who like terrifying foreigners by leaping out of the bushes and bellowing "Hello" at them, then we came back into Vietnam. Having realised we were doing not very much anyway, we decided we might as well do it on the beach, so headed for a lovely place called Phu Quoc island. Full of Russians, for some reason. Beautiful though. Mari, who's always more energetic and adventurous than me, went scuba diving, but I limited myself to snorkelling. The alien fish and blooming coral was possibly the most absorbing thing as I've ever seen as I bobbed a few feet above it on the service of the water. Even just bobbing about there was fun. I think I might finally be falling in with the local temperament.

20. BACK TO THE BIG BUDDHA

Buddhists: offering nothing in return

Back in Luang Prabang, the novice monks are preparing for the festival that marks the end of the rainy season and appeals to heaven for a good harvest. They nimbly fashion boats of shaped bamboo and blazingly colourful paper that they'll later float down the river dripping with lanterns.

In the sunshine outside their temples, the older novices fix together the pieces and whisper instructions to the more excitable youngsters who clamber around inside the dragon-headed boats.

Visitors are encouraged to talk to the student monks, who apparently like to practice their English. A fascinating prospect, but unfortunately it's a complete waste of time as they have nothing whatsoever to say. Activity without purpose or reward. Perhaps it's supposed to be; maybe there's some sort of lesson in there. But I think I can say that I don't need any lessons in wasting my time from a Buddhist monk. I'm already on the Seventh Level with that.

Obviously I'd like to say something more enchanting about the whole experience, but I can't. It was like tormenting animals: it's easy but it's not right.

We apprehended one of them who was lurking about near us as if he wanted a chat, but the boy was a nervous wreck: fidgeting with his robes, mumbling monosyllabic answers, shuddering his legs and gazing over our shoulders as if he was longing to be somewhere else. The whole thing had the feeling of an interrogation about it. Blazing sunshine, the unwilling suspect in baggy orange, Western persecutors towering over him... visions of Guantanomo Bay started nagging at my mind.

Have you ever tried talking to anybody who's recently joined Alcoholics Anonymous? I have, funnily enough.  It's piss in the wind. They'll answer you, but it's not really them. They've sort of severed the connection. This was a bit like that.  

Of course I could blame myself for all this, I could admit that I'm too demanding, too forward, too expectant of easy answers, too brash and too European. But I didn't. I blamed Mari. You're obviously making him nervous, I said; he's been educated in isolation with other young men, he's not used to talking to women. I need to talk to them by myself.

Mari was more than happy to let me continue my persecution of religious figures single-handed so I went off wandering the streets looking for another temple. Just walking the streets in Luang Prabang is fun in itself because they all have lovely names like Sissavangvong, Chittychittybangbang and Chattanouga-Choo-Choo, the tuk-tuk drivers are all asleep and there's a beautiful temple every few yards. Unfortunately I got pretty much the same response in every one.

Me: Is it ok if I watch you working?
Oldest novice: [Nods silently]
Me: The boat is for the festival?
Oldest novice: Yes
Me: It's very beautiful
Oldest novice: [Nods rather smugly, in my opinion]
Me: You've studied here for many years?
Oldest novice: Yes
Me: I've come from England. Life in Laos is different. I'm very lucky to have the chance to see this.
Infant novice: HELLO!!!!!!
Me: Erm... hello.
Infant novice: FA-RANG, FA-RANG!!! [Means, variously, 'Foreigner', 'Frenchman' or 'Long-nose', depending whose translation you believe]
Oldest novice: [Stern but indecipherable rebuke to the infant, sometimes followed by a slap on the head].
Me: Do you like to study here?
Oldest novice: Yes.
Me: Ok... well, maybe I'll just stand over there and take some photos. Is that ok?
Oldest novice: Yes please.

It's much more rewarding speaking to the ordinary people in Laos, particularly the guesthouse owners. They're all very animated. Madame Pap runs the cheapest lodgings in the village of Tad-Lo - seven mattresses lined up along a wooden floor - and is possibly the most charismatic person we've met in six countries. She says she's 45 but looks 15 years older; she's had a hard life, she explains. Her husband left her with four children to bring up and ran off to Thailand with a younger woman. He recently died from electric shock while attempting to change a light bulb. Madame Pap looks unperturbed by the news. She moves over to the light bulb and mimes out the action of a man being violently killed by electrification to make sure we get the point. Then she draws on her cigarette in the manner of a French philosopher and shrugs insouciantly, as if such an end were to be expected.

Her infant grandson is propped on the floor of her cafe, watching her wide-eyed. He also has "no Papa", she says. It seems he got sick, his belly swelled to an incredible size, then he died. Then his belly returned to normal, but by that time he was no further use to anybody. She shrugs again. It's very hot, she explains.

The child periodically bursts into unprovoked tears, as if he's understood something of the painful fates awaiting males of his line.

We were staying in a slightly more expensive place down the road - our own private shack, with larger and more interesting lizards hiding in the walls - but spent our days lounging in Madame Pap's cafe, which is the social centre of a village where nothing ever happens. Every day the manager of the tourist information office would come in for boozy three-hour lunch breaks then go and put big speakers on the window ledges of his office and blare out western rock music and snooze on the steps for the rest of the day. Local women trundled up, made half-hearted attempts to sell us trinkets, then passed out in the hammocks. If we ordered food, Madame Pap would light another cigarette and sit down for a rest. After about twenty minutes she might wander indoors in the direction of the kitchen. Another half-hour after that I might go in to find her watching TV and gently ask if she planned to start cooking soon. An hour later she'd emerge with a plate of noodles huge enough to make sure we didn't trouble her again for a while.

Down the road in Champasak, our host was the most easily amused man I've ever met. He wouldn't tell us his name; I did ask him but he just burst out laughing, like he did at everything else. At one point a German banged his head on the roof and I thought the man was going to explode with mirth. His biggest giggle, however, was reserved for when he sold us "VIP" transport arrangements to 4000 Islands. I should've known something was wrong. In the morning he walked us down to the river front, put us on a rickety four-seat wooden junk, and pushed us off while he stood on the sand shouting "good luck" and waving with both hands. I had the feeling of an early human setting off on an adventurous but naive sea discovery voyage, perhaps aiming to reach the moon. Amazingly we made it to the other side, and even more amazingly the bus turned up two hours later. Full. As I sat on the steps, my feet dangling out of the open door and over the bumpy dirt road, I wondered what the arrangements would have been if I hadn't gone for the VIP ticket. Maybe they'd have found some space for me on the roof rack. Well, at least it wasn't going very fast. If I'd fallen out I probably wouldn't even have died. Major skin loss and a big chunk out of my head, perhaps, but not death. I'm a VIP, after all.

Anyway, I don't want to engage in another prolonged Jeremiad about transport arrangements because I loved the country. And we did eventually meet a talkative monk. Maybe. On the steps of the Wat Phu temple, having cycled miles in the sun and dust to get there (VIP bikes - a full complement of wheels but no brakes) then huffed and sweated our way up the hillside. The temple was originally built as a Hindu worship complex - it's considered a template for Angkor Wat in Cambodia - but has now been taken over by the Buddhists. There's a very popular ceremony there each February where they slaughter a water buffalo by bleeding it to death and offer it's blood as a sacrifice. Now does that sound like very Buddhist behaviour to you? Locals love it, apparently, although I shouldn't imagine it's very popular with the buffalo. I couldn't get an answer to any of this from the monk, as he preferred to ask his own questions: where were we from, where have we visited so far, will we be going to his home town of Vientiane, do we like it Laos? Couldn't get away from the man. In fact, given the attitude to animal welfare, I've got reason to believe he wasn't even a real monk. He was much too interesting for that. Anyone can dress up in orange robes. I decided to get out of there before he invited us to his guesthouse and offered us some VIP transport tickets.

19. COSTLY TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON

Landing in Luang Prabang is like arriving in another world, even from Laos' nearest neighbours. And you've got to love a town whose name means "Big Buddha".

The misanthropic fever that infested me in Hanoi meant we abandoned our aim of completing this journey overland and got on the first plane out of the country. The alternative was three days of bus-bound torment, stopping overnight in Vietnamese outposts where there are probably still ageing  VC colonels who haven't heard that the war's over. Anyway, the flight took us sideways and backwards away from our ultimate destination, so it doesn't really count.

The otherness of Laos is there right from the moment we step off the plane in Luang Prabang International Airport. "Airstrip" would be a better description: a single ribbon of tarmac in an expanse of scrubbed yellow earth, jungle creeping in at the perimeter, overlooked by a single flimsy administration building. Everything is quiet once the propellers stop spluttering, but a marching military band and an African dictator on a podium wouldn't seem out of place.

Outside, the sunshine is thick and yellow as butter melting on a hot scone. Every sight and sound radiates warmth after the cold metallic clatter of Hanoi. Buddhist monks glide down the streets on bicycles, flame-coloured robes fluttering around them like fiery clouds. Colonial buildings in terracotta and dark, rich wood snooze in the shade of palm tees along the peninsula between the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers. The chirps of birds and crickets sweeten the air. Traders murmur and drowsy chants curl with the incense smoke from golden temples.

Nice, isn't it? But unfortunately we can't stay here.  Mari feels we haven't spent enough time wandering about in the wilderness - she'd have made a good Moses - so the next day it's a nine-hour bus ride to the hill tribes and jungles of the north.

The guide books promise that bus travel in Laos will be a miserable farago of breakdowns, overcrowding, vomiting locals and badly-behaved on-board livestock, but the slow climb up curved mountain roads turns out to be quite pleasant. The engine suffers only one minor breakdown, which the driver cures by hitting it with a stick, and we each have a double seat to stretch out on. We later met some people who'd hired a private minibus to avoid all the deprivations, only to have their driver invite along a man with a carrier bag full of live chickens.

The town of Luang Nam Tha is our starting point for a three-day trek in the Nam Ha National Protected Area. It's necessary to hire a guide for this, not least because the park is home to leopards, tigers, cobras, pterodactyls, polar bears, flying crocodiles, dragons, the Minotaur, and Cerberus, triple-headed Hound of Hell. Our guide, Voot, assures me I shouldn't concern myself with the tigers as those that prowl hereabouts are "quite small" and "oh, very very expensive sir". I think he might have missed the point of my question.

Luckily the fun-size tigers stayed away from us; the leeches did not. We regularly had to burn the little bastards of our skin. In spite of them I enjoyed the hike, up and down hills, through bamboo forests and along jungle streams, swimming in rivers, showering in waterfalls, and stopping in bamboo shelters to eat lunch cooked in bamboo tubes hollowed out into bong-like cooking vessels. Bamboo's really big round here.

But the highlight was overnight stays with local people. Northern Laos is ethnically rich and colourful and hosting trekkers helps tribes maintain their traditional lifestyles. We stayed one night with Khmuu people and one night with Lanten, sharing delicious meals (the raw duck's blood I could take or leave, mind), singing and drinking in the dirt-floored, bamboo-walled village bars.

These places are still remote enough for foreigners to be a source of fascination to local children, rather than a depressing begging opportunity. The children taught us rude Laos songs and I tried to help them with their English: they eventually managed a passable version of When the Boat Comes In but mangled The Blaydon Races beyond any sort of recognition. Lovely children, though. Happy as any I've met and completely undemanding of anything except a response to their curiousity. In the morning they followed us out of the village in a delighted rabble and turned out to be harder to shake off than the leeches, although in this case we were discouraged from repelling them with naked flames.

We even had the chance to visit the local school, bearing gifts of text books (the headmaster was delighted) and a football from me (the headmaster managed a thin smile). I was a touch disappointed with the response, particularly as I'd had to bargain energetically to get a decent price on the ball in Nam Tha market. When I tried to mime out to the stallholder that I ought to get a discount as I wanted to give it away for local children to play football, he seemed to think I was threatening to kick a baby if I didn't get the price I wanted. Didn't help.

Back to Nam Tha, then a two-hour minibus ride north to Muang Sing. This is the end of the road as far as travel in Northern Laos is concerned, a one-track frontier town with nothing beyond except the Chinese border (told you we were going backwards). There's really nothing to do here if you're not trekking - and even Moses admits we've had enough of that for now - except eat whole birds on sticks and drink Beer Lao. This is the only beer available in most of the country: asking for beer will get you nothing but blank stares, but say "Beer Lao" and you'll get a big, delicious bottle. It's as if they don't know there's a drink called Beer that's enjoyed in the rest of the world and think Beer Lao is their unique national secret. Well, it certainly helps to wash down grilled beak, and that's good enough for me.

18. TRAVEL SICKNESS

Hanoi is a collective madness; a pulsing hive of humanity where people are propelled, ant-like, by the momentum of the group rather than individual logic. The shared imperative - to move, to trade, to eat, to live - absorbs them into one great writhing organism and frames a snapshot of humanity as a single bloatsome parasite on the skin of the planet. To be alone among them is to be an alien species. They certainly look at me like one.

We are staying in a dilapidated guesthouse in the bowels of the old town. The buildings, the roads, the motorbikes, the people that clog the streets like dense fat, are all part of this single, breathing thing, this living machine, that swallows space and shits out rubbish everywhere. Viewed from above, all the motion might have an ominous multiplying pattern. From within it has the intensity and voracity of disease.

The only respite is Bia Hoi, the world's cheapest draft beer, sold from roadside stalls at around 15p for a big glass. Yesterday we sat at one of these stalls and watched a funeral possession. A line of ancient Buddhist nuns, spindly and shrunken, filed past us bearing flags and incense. Next came a band of men dressed like Greek holiday entertainers, playing mournful music and clanging bells. That's when I began to suspect it was a funeral and put the camera away. An old man shuffled backwards in front of the minibus that bore the coffin, bowing and nodding and muttering to the young relative who walked beside him carrying a black-framed photo of the deceased, an uncompromising-looking old woman. Behind the minibus a couple of hundred mourners plodded without expressions of grief, white bands tied round their heads. The procession turned away onto the main road, bringing a single artery to a momentary standstill. A few minutes later the band returned, instruments slung lazily over their shoulders, followed by the chattering mourners. A single cell in the body of the city had expired, and life buzzed on undisturbed.

People must grow up, marry, reproduce, spend their whole working lives and die in the old town without any sense of solitude, peace, and perhaps individuality.

There's not even escape from the fever indoors. Downstairs in our hotel a male and female staff member engage in bone-clattering arguments, roaring in each others faces, gesturing violently, shaking the floor with their stomps. I think they must be related. Several times they look likely to go for one another's throats, but instead the argument goes on, spiraling ever upwards in intensity when you thought it had started at the maximum, banging into our heads and battering away any hope of peace.

Up four narrow flights of stairs our room's unshuttable window faces out over the street. The city wails like a spoiled or starved baby. Even in the middle of the night, lone cars blare their horns into the darkness where there's nobody and nothing to get in their way. Just before 7am, hopelessly distorted public speakers start crunching out screeched propaganda speeches alternated with stirring orchestral music mangled by the ancient PA system. It stops at about 8, but by that time the shrieking, beeping and buzzing has built up into a single, constant, insurmountable blare that strangles my brain.

So the only purpose of the morning messages and music, as far as I can tell, is the same as the piss-boiling pop ballads that are slurped out with melodramatic posturing by hideous male/female duos on screens in every bus and train in the nation: that is, to fill the empty spaces, bombard the air with noise, and make sure that the people, already starved of physical room for living, don't enjoy a single moment of empty psychic space either; not one silent second of individual thought. And it's working. On all my travels through China and Vietnam, all those journeys, all that time spent watching, I have not seen a single person reading a book. Not one, young or old.

They've been bought off instead with baubles, trinkets and toys: they prod, finger and fumble with any sort of electronic device that generates loud noise and flashing light, dress themselves up like fairies and pose for ridiculous photos, fizz towards me from every direction on their zingy little motorbikes. It's been put to me that I have to appreciate that people in this part of the world work so hard, but it isn't true. They work long hours; that's not the same thing. Everywhere you go families of five sit outside their shops staring blankly into space; three men staff the ticket offices of empty tourist sites where one would be too many; taxi drivers lounge on their motorbikes in the sunshine, whispering to tourists in the hope of avoiding a job. Policeman patrol unresisting neighbourhoods stuffed six to a golf buggy as if expecting a riot. In our hotel it's impossible to get on the computers because they're monopolised by indolent staff members watching the same stupefying pop on YouTube.

The only people who work hard are the hawkers, clinging to me like sweat everywhere I go. They're impossible to repel, offering pastries, shoe repairs, T-shirts, spring rolls. All day they pound the streets, morning to midnight, impossible to discourage, rolling with the knockbacks, feeding off the tiny sustenance of the sales. The same boy who repaired my boots half an hour ago follows me to tell me they need fixing. Trying to fend them off distracts me from avoiding the motorbikes and black-windowed cars that surge in all directions at every intersection. These people are going to get me maimed or killed. This is madness. I have to get out of Hanoi.

17. ZOOM AND THANG

Cat Ba Island is, according to our guide book, Vietnam's "adventure sports Mecca". By Mecca I suppose they meant the most sacred site of Islam, but the island's main town has more in common with the chain of popular bingo halls. Gaudy neon lights reflect in the blank eyes of pleasure seekers and the grinning teeth of touts, and the whole place has the tawdry whiff of a Blackpool holiday about it.

True, the island itself is alive and breathing with beauty: wet, dense jungle, vegetation exploding across the hillsides in stunning varieties of green. In the harbour, ancient limestone karsts spew hundreds of feet upwards into the mist like sudden molten eruptions while red-sailed junks, shanty houseboats and tiny fishing craft loll on the warm green waters of the South China Sea. But I can't enjoy any of this at the moment, because I'm stalking through the sweat-fogged evening town looking for a man named Mr Zoom who I believe has stolen my underpants.

Zoom runs the cheapest guesthouse on the island - a bargain four US dollars for a double room, and the mosquitoes eat for free. For the first two nights we stayed with him, his big, jolly presence was inescapable - sleeping on a campbed in reception, buzzing up alongside us on his scooter as we walked through town, serving up food in his nearby Mr Zoom's restaurant. Then, a couple of days ago, we gave him our laundry. He said we'd have it back within 24 hours, and he hasn't been seen since.

At the same time as he disappeared, the hot water stopped working in the hotel. Cat Ba has experienced a tourist boom over the last ten years and far too many hotels have been built. Dozens now stand near-empty along the sea front; in Zoom's we're the only guests apart from a silent man on a laptop. I'm worried that the value of our laundry has exceeded the plummeting value of his business and he's decided to sever his hot water supply contract, abandoned the hotel and gone off to start a new life somewhere far away with my underpants.

The issue has now come to a head as we've signed up to go on a trek through the jungle tomorrow and it strikes me that I ought to at least start off wearing clean underwear, given the likelihood that something will go wrong.

I stomp towards Zoom's restaurant, like most on the island nothing more than scaffolding poles and tarpaulin with plastic furniture underneath and outside. One of his underlings approaches to greet me.

"Yes sir! Please sit down," he grins, muscling me towards a table.

"Where is Mr Zoom?"

"Yes sir, here!" he says, pointing to the sandwich board saying "Mr Zoom's".

"No, no. I need to speak to Mr Zoom."

"Here."

"Mr Zoom, the person. The manager."

"OK!"

It occurs to me this very helpful man can't understand a word I'm saying. I test it out.

"I haven't changed my underpants for two-and-a-half days," I tell him.

"OK!" he says again, the same can-do grin fixed on his face.

I prise myself away and head back to the hotel. Another staff member is sleeping on Zoom's vacated camp bed. She snaps to life when I arrive.

"Where are my clothes?" I ask. Having just woken up, she looks, understandably, as if I should know that myself. "Washing," I say. I struggle to think of a mime for 'laundry'. It's times like this I wish I wasn't such a lazy sod about learning local languages.

Somehow, though, she understands my mime and luckily she doesn't think its a game and come back with a mime of her own. Instead she plucks out two bags of freshly clean and refreshingly cool pants, although they're a bit sweaty by the finish. Zoom eventually re-appears a day later, having been to Hai Phong, no doubt in his own underpants, and the hot water is magically restored. To be fair, the island is so sultry we never really needed it.

The whole thing makes me feel I might have trust issues with the locals. Zoom, for instance, is not an international underwear thief but only what he purports to be: the intensely friendly owner of a bargain hotel and restaurant. To test out my new found confidence and trust, we book a full day adventure cruise and transport to Hanoi with a character calling himself Mr Victor Thang.

It's not a name that inspires trust to Western ears, is it? Furthermore he speaks quietly, unlike everyone else in Vietnam, which makes me wonder what he's up to. He seems very nice, though, and there isn't much else to do in Cat Ba town apart from wander up and down the sea front laughing at badly translated restaurant menus that offer dishes as exotic as "Fat Body of Religious Interest" and "Appealing Comedy Discharge". (Both out of our price range, thankfully.)

Not pictured: old ladies in Benny-Hill style pursuit

And what a fine time we had on Mr Thang's tour. The most entertaining thing I've done so far is hire a motorbike scooter in the hill town of Sapa, largely to escape from some persistent tribeswomen traders. But Mr Thang's tour ran it a close second, the only drawback being that on this occasion we weren't being pursued by cute little indigenous old ladies in traditional dress. We boarded the boat at eight, basked on the upper deck as it cruised among the bay's hundreds of rocky islets, enjoyed a delicious on-board lunch with a merciful absence of comedy discharges, and spent the afternoon kayaking through caves and lagoons and leaping from the boat into the warm, still sea. Last stop was the beach on a place called Monky Island. We trooped all the way to the highest point on the island in the hope of seeing a monkey but there were none, which made it doubly frustrating to find a couple of them sitting in the beachfront bar when we returned. To be fair, the monkey's tried to make up for it by stealing people's clothing and biting a Vietnamese holidaymaker on the bottom. How we laughed! She's probably got rabies now.

And so ended our stay at 'adventure sports Mecca'. We never got to play bingo, but the trip did restore some of my faith. And Mr Thang's ferry and bus tickets even got to us to Hanoi on schedule, the first on-time transport I've encountered in Asia.

16. THE MONKEY HUNTER

A gentle cruise along the river.

After the romance of Beijing, our train journey south to Guangxi province is grittily realistic. It's a 27-hour trip in the "hard sleeper" class: bunks are stacked three high in compartments of six and it's enough to make me realise I'm not, perhaps, as hard as I thought I was when I booked the ticket. I should've gone for the more expensive "soft sleeper", or maybe even "bloody-great-wine-drinking-poofter-in-a-cravat sleeper". But there's no such thing. Hard sleeper is the second highest class available. The lowest is something called hard seat, where you probably have to be harder than the bastard lovechild of Rambo and Margaret Thatcher just to get in, and from which the passengers stagger at the end of the journey looking like extras in a film about Japanese PoW camps.

We had the top bunks, which put us closest to the air con but also, unfortunately, closest to the speakers. The Chinese love noise. Noise of all colours and pitches, as long as it's loud, preferably irritating, and ideally highly repetitive. The speakers start whining at 7am with warbling Chinese pop and folk then go on until late at night with a film soundtrack consisting entirely of screeching tyres, deafening machine gun fire, women screaming and a bloke saying something like "We're gonna kick your ass" in a Chinese-American accent every 15 minutes or so. I didn't have the heart to look at the screen.

At the end of all this we emerge blinking into the heat of Guilin, a steamy and magical landscape. The city is built along the banks of the Li River and surrounded by limestone karsts. The stone being less dense that the surrounding earth causes it to compact and pile upwards hundreds of feet into the air like gnarled and rocky tower blocks or soaring abstract sculptures. I've never seen anything like it.

There's a huge park where you can walk among the peaks and even on steps up to the top of the most accessible ones. You can also see monkeys, but unfortunately we had only just found some when a local man came tottering along the path shouting what sounded like curses up into the trees. It looked to me like he'd spent the morning drinking himself into a rage over some imagined grudge between himself and the monkeys - maybe one had stolen his wife, cheated him at cards or crashed into his car without insurance - and he'd eventually decided to come and have it out with the furry little bastards once and for all. Sure enough, he soon produced a catapult from his back pocket and started taking aim at the primates. Somebody managed to calm him down before he did too much damage and the monkeys had a chance to show that agility beats evolution in hand-to-paw combat. They'd have torn him to bits.

Hoping to enjoy the scenery among a little more sanity, we headed out to the town of Yangshuo, where you can take a cruise along the river on a bamboo raft. We seemed to be the only people in our hostel but the river itself was like the M25. Still, it was pleasant enough to sail among the karsts, waving at the other tourists passing us at a distance of inches. We spent the evening drinking in a local bar where we'd been led to believe that the proprietor, a pot-bellied woman calling herself Monkey Jane, would eventually get naked and swing from the rafters. I wanted to see if any of the locals would come in and take pot-shots at her with their catapults. Didn't happen, unfortunately.

Next it was another 24 hours on the train west to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. From there we headed North to a mountainous region where Mari wanted to do a trek along something called Tiger Leaping Gorge and I very much didn't. It's one of the deepest gorges in the world, stretching a brick-shitting 3,900m from the highest point to the furious bubbling waters below. I decided to wait in a pleasant little market town called Shuhe eating bison meat on sticks. Apparently there weren't any tigers to be seen leaping the gorge anyway. What a rip-off.

We'd come by bus, but the only tickets available for the overnight return journey back to Kunming were in the dreaded hard seat. I was steeling myself to have to be punched repeatedly in the stomach by a shirtless man in a bandana to prove my fitness for the ordeal, or maybe eat my own turd in a sandwich of broken glass, but all I really had to was elbow my way through a very lively throng and see off some sort of madman who was competing for attention at the ticket window.

The journey itself wasn't as bad as I might have expected. It's crowded, sweaty and uncomfortable, of course, and many of the passengers look as if they live on a train, carrying all their possessions in tattered old rice sacks. They stare at us like zoo animals, obviously wondering what rich foreigners are doing in here. Policemen occasionally saunter through the carriage brandishing batons and shout at people who didn't seem to be doing much wrong. A group of young men loitering around the medieval toilet chunter on at me and giggle to one another, probably delighted to have shown their mettle by insulting an Englishman in a language he can't understand. But most of the people seem to treat us as guests, giving up the more comfortable window seat so Mari can rest her head and try to sleep. Doesn't happen, of course. A westerner would have to be narcoleptic to sleep in here. But some of locals, lugging their lives around the province in search of a living, look like they're enjoying their best night's sleep in months.

So I was hard enough for the hard seat after all. But I might still need to practice my Rambo-like qualities. Next stop is Vietnam.

15. THE BEIJING WALTZ

Transport for locals

Beijing is the last stop on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, completing a journey of almost 7,000km for the creaking, tired trains that shimmered youthfully out of Moscow a week before. For us, with diversions, expeditions and stops, it's taken more like three months. Although our wandering will continue from here, it still feels like the completion of an adventure to arrive in this thriving city of 16 million people, all of whom seem to have gathered outside the station to greet us. Most of them are in the taxi queue.

The place contrasts with everything we've seen so far. It's both more modern and more historic than any city we've visited; verdant with trees, bushes and parks where Ulaan-Baatar was desolate with dust and rubble; and unlike anywhere in Russia, it offers all sorts of eating, drinking and sleeping possibilities that don't come at a cost equivalent to losing your eyeballs. We attacked the city's street food like hungry dogs, which is probably what most of it was made from. Finally, unlike Russia or Mongolia, most of the people in Beijing are sober, and some of them even appear untouched by heriditary madness.

All this pleasantness, and the fact that I've visited before while Mari hasn't, gave me a relaxed and proprietorial air, as if I were something of an expert. This confidence took a bit of a knock when I agreed to a rickshaw ride that turned into a half-hearted attempted mugging, but even that didn't really come off. The driver took us down a back street and demanded 100 times the agreed price; once he realised the intimidation wasn't getting him anywhere he stomped off feeling, I hope, thoroughly humiliated by a good telling-off from Mari. What a little shit (the rickshaw driver, not Mari).

Everything was going so well, in fact, that I even felt secure enough to visit a local barbers. You'd have to be demented to submit yourself to any Russian or Mongolian man armed with scissors, razor blades and alcohol-based products, and over time my hair had grown so luxuriant and bushy that it was causing delays at passport control. Hutongs - teeming alleyways and courtyards where generations of Beijing families have lived out their lives in cramped community - are lined with local barbers. Unfortunately I picked a place that featured barber's chairs, mirrors, sinks, scissors, razors and gels, but didn't seem to be in the business of cutting hair. After I'd convinced the man to do it he went about the task so hesitantly, and had to be so coaxed into continuing after every few snips, that I'm convinced it wasn't a barbers at all and all that equipment was used for some other sort of business. God knows what. Maybe it was a high-end Halal butchers.

Eventually he gave up altogether and wouldn't continue for anything, clearly not buying the idea that I might like all the parts of my hair cutting to the same length. I had to finish it myself back at the hostel. Mari would have helped if I could've waited until she stopped laughing, but by then the hair would've grown back even more joyfully abundant than it had been in the first place.

Equipped with my experimental new haircut, we visited the tourist sites - the Lama Temple, with its 18-metre high statue of a giggling golden Buddha carved from a single trunk of sandalwood, and the Forbidden City. The huge palace complex was built in the 15th Century by the first Ming emperor at Hollywood expense, and five centuries later finished up being the setting for an expensive Hollywood film, so maybe he knew what he was doing all along. In between it housed the simmering court of concubines, eunuchs and mandarins and each successive Son of Heaven, until the last boy-Emperor was dethroned in 1911 and exiled within it to his own lonely opulence while the Empire dissolved into ashes outside the walls. Today you can buy an audio guide when you go there and have the whole thing mellifluously explained to you by Roger Moore.

Mari also went for a trek along the Great Wall with our friend Christoph, but the last time I was there I became paralysed with fear I would fall off. Recalling my Altai humiliation I decided to give it a miss.

Instead I stayed in town rambled through the hutongs. These are really the place to be. You can get lost for hours, watching the old women gossip, the children play, and the old men taking an afternoon stroll in their pyjamas or playing endless games of chess. When you're thirsty, you stop at a small shop for a 40p bottle of beer and drink it outside on a tiny stool in the sunshine. Every street is a market; people lay out cloths of exotic fruit and the air crackles and sizzles with the cooking of all kinds of meat, vegetable and insect. (The scorpions are crunchy but sadly lacking flavour.) This is how we spent our days.

Evenings were even better. At first we had passed them drinking with Aaron and Lambert, who we'd met in Mongolia and bumped into again trying to make a living selling pizza on Beijing's main tourist bar street. They were living in a tent on the roof. Unfortunately the whole thing turned sour when their local sponsor/business partner - a temperamental American called Justin - hurled the portable oven across the street, cast over their trestle table like Jesus in the Temple, and screamed "IT'S ALL FUCKING OVER, YOU HEAR ME?" while trying to persuade them they were drawing too much attention to themselves and might fall foul of the police. With such insightful management, the enterprise was doomed.

Instead, Mari and I took to sitting in the little neighbourhood between the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower, watching the local life. At night a man would bring a speaker out into the square and all the street's old people would gather to waltz in their pyjamas to Strauss under the stars. Eventually, we even got the courage to join in. Well - Mari waltzed, I stumbled and tried to avoid her toes. Nobody seemed to mind us being there. You couldn't do that in Ulaan-Baatar, and in Moscow you'd get shot.

14. THE OLD MAN AND THE RIVER

Luxurious upholstery, crap steering.

Ulaan-Baatar is one of those places that everyone seems to be trying to get away from. At least all the foreigners there are busy trying to be posted somewhere else, get a visa for Russia or China, buy a ticket out of the country, or organise a trip to somewhere else in Mongolia. The locals, mainly, just seem to be trying to get out of their heads.

We were trying to organise a Chinese visa. The queues outside the embassy are enormous; on our first visit we only just managed get in to pick up a form and get kicked out again. On the way out I answered a few questions from various people who hadn't even managed to get that far.

When we went back two days later, queing an hour before opening, I was approached by a Frenchman.

"Excuse me," he said, "are you the guy who gave a short speech the other day about the problems you've been having with the embassy?"

"Er, maybe. I was just answering question. Yes. I suppose it was a speech."

He had more questions. So this time when we got out (still no visas) I didn't wait for the questions and addressed the crowd with my views on Chinese bureaucracy. Mari thought it might be a good idea to leave town for a few days. We'd already met the president of the Mongolian Choppers Club - a very camp little round man with no shirt - in a biker's karaoke bar, and the city couldn't possibly offer us much more after that.

But getting to the Mongolian countryside is a pain in the arse, due the roads being made out of hardened cowshit and the bus engines pretty much the same. It was supposed to be a 17-hour bus ride to the lake we wanted to visit; one person we spoke to said it had actually taken him 40, without a seat, to get back. Apparently the locals pass the time by drinking vodka and punching each other in the face. So we advertised for some fellow travellers and hired a van and driver.

We were two Phillipinos, one Englishman, one Estonian, a Spaniard, and a Swiss. (Swissard? Swissle? Swissman?) First thing to do was write down all the provisions we needed for our ten-day trip and each draw out a selection of items to buy. I pulled out the following:

• 24 cans of gas
• 3 litres of vodka
• 20 toilet rolls
• A roll of bin bags

I felt a bit embarrased going to the supermarket for this but it must be a fairly standard week's shopping in Mongolia because nobody batted an eyelid.

Next morning our driver came to pick us up in the van. His name was Unur and he looked like a Mexican villain from The High Chapparal.  The first thing he did was take me to one side and assure me, through gestures, that he didn't drink. Not a drop.

The first day's driving went without incident; the second day we made it as far of the town of Moron, which I think is named after the bloke who designed it. On the third day we actually arrived at Khovsgol lake. Two solid days in the van might sound boring, but it wasn't - it was unspeakably, brain-curdlingly, gut-chewingly tedious. I could've snorted all 24 cans of gas, drank the three litres of vodka, and thus probably made good use of the toilet rolls and bin bags, before we even reached our destination. The Mongolian countryside is stunning - green-golden plains peopled by camels and wild goats, eagles swooping overhead in endless blue sky, lone horsemen fluttering across the horizon and hills ruffled like satin sheets shimmering in the distance - but it doesn't half get samey after a while. It's no wonder Genghis felt the need to invade Russia and China. He probably just wanted to bypass the visa application process.

Anyway. After two days communicating with Unur through grunts and gestures, we found out he could speak Russian, so Mari was able to talk with him a bit. We told him we wanted to go fishing in the lake and he said he'd help us get a license. After much driving in circles round the nearest village and getting dismissed from various departments, he somehow got us directly into the office of the District Political Administrator. This was a big man in full military uniform with epaulettes extending about six inches beyond his shoulders. He didn't like the look of me but kept grinning at Mari. As far as I could tell, he was assuring Unur that it was quite impossible to grant a two-day fishing license to me - presumably on the grounds that our great-grandfathers never entered battle together and I probably couldn't even drink five litres of fermented mare's milk without throwing up and wetting my pants - and then he gestured that he'd like to see the size of my rod. By the time I'd fetched it back from the van the license was written out, among much fraternal back-slapping between Unur and the Generalissimo. By this time he was grinning quite manically at Mari. Unur ushered us out of there.

When we got to the lake and Unur saw how desperately incompetent a fishermen I was he must've realised that all his efforts with the license were heading down the toilet, and recruited another local contact of his to help. A 4x4 skidded up and a stout old man leapt out brandishing a pair of rubber wading dungarees with built-in wellies. The waders were pushed up against me for size and I was delighted to see they didn't fit; no matter - the old man bundled me into the jeep and we sped away, leaving Unur creased up with laughter. I didn't even have time to tell the others where I was going, which was good, because I didn't have a clue.

Eventually we bumped up to a secluded river and got out. I was still worried about having to wear the waders but the truth was far stranger than that. When we got to the river's edge my new friend got into the wading suit himself, crouched down and gestured at me to get on his back.

I tried every sort of protest I could think of but the old man was having none of it: he was going to carry me over the bloody river and we'd bloody well catch a bloody fish. Eventually politeness bound me to get on.

That was a strange feeling. I kept wondering how I came to be riding piggy-back on an old man across a Mongolian river. It vaguely reminded me of a scene from the Bible that I couldn't quite recall. I was snapped out of this musing when the current got too strong and the man started wobble and veer downstream. The water was flooding into his waders and filling my boots, but we made it to the other side.

Obviously I didn't catch a fish and within 10 minutes the line was hopelessly tangled and the hooks were lost. Time to go back. I really didn't think he had the strength for the return journey; I pointed out that my feet were soaked anyway, then offered to take my trousers off - a big step when you're alone with a fisherman in the Mongolian wilderness - offered to take my trousers off and walk. Again, no dice. This time my worries were well-founded and halfway across the old man capsized. I managed to land on my feet and was only soaked up the waist but he was completely submerged, mostly because I'd pushed him further down in an effort to save myself. Rather than smacking me in the face he seemed to find the whole thing hilarious and we drove back to camp fishless and drenched but new best friends.

The next day Unur went on hunger strike after a dispute about taking us to see some local reindeer herders. We managed to calm him down eventually and he took us to see a local rock instead. The rock was big and rock-like but while we were there I did get the chance to realise a long-held ambition of riding a yak. I tried to organise a yak rodeo in Cheltenham a few years ago by sneaking into a local farm but the yaks ran away when we approached them. This one was tethered and had no choice.

Never did I encounter such a slow-witted and obstinate animal. It wouldn't start; once it started it wouldn't stop; and at all times it wandered off in any direction it fancied regardless of the way I was steering it. As a method of conveyance, I can report that the old man was faster and much more amenable, although susceptible to break down at crucial moments.

After my journeys on the old man and the yak, I had intended to make this blog a three-way "road test" review of various Mongolian transport methods by riding a horse as well. We eventually finished up in a tent with some old nomads (the alcoholic mare's milk is utterly, utterly disgusting) and after we'd eaten their supplies we asked to ride the horses. Mari went first and did a couple of graceful laps of the valley; I was prepared to go next but before I could step up, our Spanish friend attempted to mount the horse with a bit too much gusto and put it into a fright. It tried to throw him off but his sandal was caught in the stirrup and he couldn't either fall off or stay rightly on, instead being thrashed about with his bollocks banging lustily against the animal's hindquarters and his body flapping ecstatically in all directions.

It was quite a sight. The horse bucked, leapt and ran in demented circles; the rest of our party chased it around; the Mongolians laughed and shouted advice; and I stood watching and quietly decided not to bother going next. I really thought he might be killed. He held his nerve, though, and eventually managed to fall off with nothing worse than shin injuries and, I would imagine, very sore chestnuts. I tried to interview him about this immediately but he didn't want to discuss it.

Judging from the pained expression etched into his face as he lay motionless on the ground, though, I'd say Mongolian horse riding isn't a good bet for the novice either. So, in the absence of any old men to carry us, we decided to take the van back to Ulaan-Baatar.

13. VLADIMIR AND GENGHIS

In 1220, having slaughtered their army, stripped them of their riches, and burned down most of their homes, Genghis Khan told the people of the once-great city of Bukhara that he had been sent to them by Eternal Heaven as a punishment for their sins. If they had not been guilty of such vanity, Genghis said, then such cruel humiliation and misery would not have been visited upon them. But by crushing all such vanity, he would fulfill destiny and bring about Heaven's will of equality and harmony for all the people of the world.

I don't know if Genghis was directly involved in the development of the bus service from Ulan-Ude in Russia to the Mongolilan capital of Ulaan-Baatar, but he certainly would have approved.

12 hours it takes, without air-conditioning or toilets, on the heaving bus, over crumbling roads, with two torturous border crossings thrown in.

First off, we must get out of Russia - even more time-consuming than getting in - and they won't let us go before we've answered a series of taxing questions.

"What's in the bag?" a burly woman asks me. "Guns? Drugs?"

"Yes, just the guns and drugs today," I want to say. "Nothing else. Can I go now?"

But I don't have the balls. Instead I say "Clothes." She looks suspicous, but obviously decides nobody would have sheer nerve to just make up a hare-brained story like that, and lets me go through.

Outside, after various other lengthy routines, we're herded back onto the bus and driven a few hundred metres through no-man's land before we all have to get off with our bags again to face the Mongolian procedures. These are based around ritual humiliation of the enemy.

We're all marched inside the building then a female soldier chooses to six of us to march back outside. After 20 minutes standing she takes us back in again. I knew Genghis was a military paragon out here, but I didn't realise they also borrowed tactics from the Grand Old Duke of York. Eventually she hands us over to a male counterpart, who arranges us into changing formations and combinations, sends various people to the front and the back, forcibly moves us around with his hands, and does everything except demand we take our pardners by the hand and do the dosey-doh.

When I finally get to the front, the man on the passport desks stares at my photo for a long time, instructs me to stand facing him exactly, scrutinises me doubtfully alongside the passport likeness, and finally points at me, says "Your hair... very different!" and bursts out laughing.

After that we get to stand around being pestered by hawkers for a while, a quick introduction to the local toilets, which throws us in at the deep end, so to speak, then it's back on the sweatmobile for the seven-hour slog to Ulaan-Baatar.

It all seemed so different last night. Our final night in Russia was spent in the combined bar and sauna of our hostel on the outskirts of Ulan-Ude. Vladimir - who may have been the hostel manager or maybe a taxi driver, it never became clear - insisted all the guests joined him for this "Russian tradition". As soon as we agreed two more semi-naked Buryat sauna men appeared out of nowhere and became very excited. Everyone got in the wooden sauna cabinet, Vladimir started throwing beer and boiling water on the red-hot stones and the naked men started whipping each other with birch sticks and grunting ecstatically. The fatter and sweatier of the two was the local police chief, apparently. It was so hot I thought my eyeballs were melting.

Once our skin started peeling off in layers we were allowed outside to have buckets of cold water thrown over us and play a game of drafts; quick swig of beer then back in the sauna. "Fifteen times!" cried Vladimir as shoved us in, "Russian tradition!" By this time he was wearing a Red Army civil war hat and wielding a shower head as if he meant to whip the fat sweaty police chief with it.

This went on till 2am, when most of the guests had escaped and the rest of us looked like shiny old men's testicles. We left Vladimir and the naked policeman scrubbing each other's back and sneaked off to pack for our 7am bus journey.

Now, crawling through the rubble of tiny Mongolian towns on a packed bus, dehydrating ourselves with beer and saunas till the middle of last night doesn't seem such a good idea (though it does make the absence of a toilet more bearable). Eventually the towns themselves dry up and there's nothing but hills and grassland as far as the eye can see. No trees, no rivers or lakes, just the odd cluster of nomad tents and the dots of horses and cattle. The views haven't changed since Genghis went on the rampage, or long before then.

Eventually, famished and dry, we reach the outskirts of Ulaan-Baatar. The streets are thick with rubble and dust and the city looks like it's been devastated by a recent war, although there hasn't been one. We wonder what we've let ourselves in for. Maybe Genghis wasn't delivering righteous retribution after all. Maybe he just liked bringing a little bit of home to every place he visited.

12. PANTS

"Sacre Bleur!"

No time for a blog at the moment, so here is a picture of a cow eating a Frenchman's underpants near Ulaan-Baatar.

11. WATER, AND OTHER RUNNY THINGS

Squatting in the not-quite-long enough grass between the ancient, rusted railway line and the cliffs over the world's deepest lake, praying that the ominous rumbling I could hear was only my diseased stomach and not the approach of the daily train carrying hordes of camera-wielding tourists hanging from the windows, pestered by the continuous Siberian drizzle, I looked out over the lake, unchanged in millions of years, and thought: what am I doing here?

I suppose I was always heading to this point, but it didn't feel any more normal when it arrived. We got off the train in Irkutsk: "the Paris of Siberia", they used to call it - presumably referring to the state of the toilets - and felt we both needed some nature. Lake Baikal was one of the key milestones of our journey, something we've both longed to see, and after the millions in the cities and the miles in the trains, it was beginning to take on the status of a promised land.

Siberian cities are odd. Russian men, for instance, retain a taste for fashions that might be considered more than a little bit camp in the West - camouflage fatigues, sailors hats - and combined with the huge number of construction workers, ubiquitous police officers, traditionally dressed Buryat people, and an almost universal fondness for big moustaches, it makes the whole place look like a giant Village People tribute act. I've never been comfortable with gay disco, so off we went for the near-solitude of a hike around the Circumbaikal Railway. It was originally built as a branch off the main Trans-Siberian line at the start of the 20th Century, but nowadays is used mainly to transport tourists who have the sense not to want to see the lake on foot. Not us, though: we'll walk it.

We started off in Khultuk: I don't know if it would be fair to call it a one-horse town, because the only horses I saw were in tins in the local grocery shop. If you put all the tins' contents together they might tot up to a single horse, I suppose, although probably lacking any of the nice bits: a horse with 18 hooves, 25 testicles, 13 eyeballs, two arseholes, enough hair for seven tails, no rump or flank, and more shins than legs. I think I bet on such a creature to win last year's Cheltenham Gold Cup, but that doesn't mean I want to eat it. The local smoked fish was a treat, though, as was the beer. It was to be the last for a while.

87km, five days, a fair bit of rain, a lot of diarrhoea, about a millions steps on railway sleepers, and dozens of long, dank, dark tunnels later, we were in Listvyanka, "the Russian Riviera". The problem was the scenery hadn't much changed along the way: although the distance we'd covered is discernable on a picture of Baikal taken from space, it's actually a pretty tiny part of the lake's whole expanse, so we'd not seen a fraction of the wonderful diversity of nature that surrounds this geological phenomenon blah blah blah... I just wanted a beer and a proper toilet, actually, but Mari likes that sort of wilderness stuff, so next it was off to Olkhon Island for more hiking, camping, marching, general deprivation and inconvenience. She's going to kill me when she reads this, by the way, so I hope somebody's enjoying reading it. I'm quite enjoying writing it, as it happens. Hello Mari, love you!

Anyway - Olkhon Island. A bum-numbing six-hour minibus trip and ferry crossing from Irkutsk. For the first part of it our driver, who looked unnervingly like Peter Schmeichel, was driving like the bloke out of Vanishing Point, but about three hours into it the tarmac ran out and the journey became more akin to travelling on a BMX bike - except the progress was slower. To be fair we were probably covering quite a lot of distance if you include the sickening sideways lurches, leaps into the air, twists to avoid potholes and so on, but the actual forward motion was minimal. Impossible to read a book, with all that juddering and shaking, so there was more time to enjoy staring at the interminable Siberian countryside.

For the hideously uncompromising "modern economic and military powerhouse" image presented by Russia's western face in Moscow, it's incredible how the vast majority of the land is still a place of abject backwardness and poverty. Out here, you can see how people quite literally scrape a living off the land: they sit by the site of the roadside with weak flowers and buckets of tiny berries, waiting all day on the hope that a driver will stop and buy some for coppers. We saw dozens of them, as well as one bloke just dancing - dancing, I say - who I presume must have become utterly demented by the sheer endlessness of it all. Really, I think when it comes to the point that you're dancing alone without music by the side of a near-deserted road in the Siberian wilderness, and you're not even dressed as one of the Village People, it would be kinder just to shoot him, but I'm not sure if they still do that sort of thing out here. Maybe not. I'd probably have been shot for first-degree cowardice in Altai if they did.

Anyway, we made it to Olkhon Island. From Khuzir, the island's dusty main settlement - which looks a bit like the Wild West with backpackers - our plan was to head to the North, where there are forests and hills. Instead, for reasons neither of us could really articulate, we headed to the South, where there is only shoreline and flatland. Camping in the mist on the deserted, rocky coast, after all our miles on trains, buses, boats, and foot, it felt like we'd reached the end of the world, or at least the end of Russia. In reality we'd done nothing of the sort; it stretches on for two thousand more miles like this, to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. But we've seen enough of it, and next we'll take a sharp right to Mongolia and deeper into Asia. I sense that soon I will look back on my Lake Baikal toilet experiences with greater fondness than I have suggested here...

10. UZBEKI BALLS

The third-class bunk carriages of Trans-Siberian trains are packed, top-to-bottom, refugee style, with the migrants who beetle in their millions across the former Soviet republics in search of work, family, homes. Crammed tight in amongst them, we seem to be the only people who are here for a laugh. It's often no laughing matter.

Last night the train wormed its way through the coal-blackened heartland of industrial Russia - mining towns, steelworks, former Gulag settlements, nuclear waste reprocessing facilities, all the highlights really - growing fat on a cargo of grimy, shirtless men and blank-faced women who sprawl slug-like on their bunks. The carriage feels soaked in booze and sweat. I woke up with the sun burning white as a welding torch in my eyes, head and limbs aching. Four steelworkers bound for Achinsk were bunked across the aisle. One had spent the night screeching from his bed, like a man tormented by hallucinations, that the train was too hot. Funnily enough, this did nothing to actually cool it down.

They got off and were replaced by two men from Uzbekistan who wanted to talk to us. Mari translated, as always. I grinned and nodded. They were heading to Irkutsk, to work as welders. The younger of them spread out what I took to be sweets on the table. Keen to show willing, I popped one in my mouth and regretted it bitterly, instantly: it was about the size and shape of a squash ball, but not as tasty. Hard like chalk, but with a bitter, incredibly salty flavour. Maybe it's not even edible, I thought, maybe he was trying to give us some soap - we must stink by now. It was too late to warn Mari - she'd had the sense to bite off a tiny section, then smuggled the rest into her pocket. Next he offered them to two Frenchmen: one hid his away, the other took a bite and hurried off in the direction of the toilet.

Conversation dried out. The young Uzbek took to staring morosely out of the window. At first I thought maybe he was depressed because nobody liked his salty balls, but later he showed us pictures of his wife. He also showed us his wedding video on the mobile phone - not a highlights package, I think, the whole thing - which looked like great fun. Lots of singing and dancing. No balls in sight.

On the subject of his balls, he said they would turn hard later and become impossible to swallow, so he advised us to enjoy them now. And he assured us they tasted better with beer. But still no takers. He had what looked to me like a solid brick of uncut Ryvita on the table as well, but he wasn't sharing that, thank God. Time rattled, slowly, like the train.

Eventually, we creaked away from the rotting shipwreck of a city that is Krasnoyarsk, over the 1km-wide Yenesei river, and into the wider expanse of Eastern Siberia. The forests again fell away into massive steppes, split by rivers twice the size of the Thames that barely register a crack on our map of Russia. Inside, the train is dry and hot. Some unthinkable distance ahead of us our destination, Lake Baikal, opens up like a huge blue eye in the blankness of Siberia: the oldest and deepest lake in the world, big enough to cover the whole Earth in a 20cm-deep puddle or, if every other supply disappeared, keep humanity in fresh drinking water for 40 years. Unless that Uzbek keeps peddling his balls, in which we could probably drink the whole thing dry in a couple of minutes. I look out of the window too, licking chalky remnants from my teeth, and try to keep thinking about the lake.

9. VASSILY AND VITALI

Not a good snake

God knows what it was aboout the phrase 'Altai Mountains' that made me think my hysterical fear of heights wouldn't be a problem. Maybe it was the fact that the venture was described as a 'walking tour'. May it was when the travel agents told us all we needed to bring was comfortable shoes. Or maybe when we wrote to them and told them I was afraid of heights, and they said 'We don't suppose it is dangerous or scary'. I imagined gradual inclines and walking among, not up, the mountains.

Perhaps I just fooled myself because I didn't want to spend 10 days alone in Novosibirsk while Mari went on the trip. Novosibirsk is not one of the world's great cities - a sort of Siberian Birmingham. Whatever, off we went, and it didn't go well. If I've been guilty in this blog of creating humour by making other people look ridiculous or incompetent, at least I don't exempt myself. Now it's definitely my turn.

After a 12-hour bus trip to Altai, we were met at the starting point by Vassily, our guide for the tour, and his son Vitali, who was second guide. Vassily spoke not a word of English, Vitali enough to put together some broken, heavily accented phrases. The rest of the group either didn't, or didn't want to. That's fine, I knew what to expect and I'll have Mari to talk to.

We started with a 78km motorboat trip across Teleskoe Lake before the first day's walking. While we met our fellow walkers, Vitali didn't say much. Vassily busied himself putting on camouflage gear, mending things with his teeth, and generally giving the impression of a man who had once survived after a helicopter crash by eating the bodies of his dead comrades. It's times like this, I thought, when I'm glad to be so skinny. If it all ends in cannabalism, I'm the least attractive prospect for the pot. Having said that, I don't have any practical skills to justify keeping me alive: this one can make fire with sticks; that one can hunt; I could keep a semi-humourous diary of our descent into godless barbarism. Doesn't really cut the mustard.

Vassily split up the food supplies for the week - they seemed reassuringly abundant, and certainly felt so when we added it to our backpacks. We were also carrying clothes, tents, sleeping bags, mats and equipment for the week. After the boat landed, though, it was a flat and easy 10km walk to our first camp. Vassily  was becoming ever more military - giving us, literally, the marching orders; the exact line to follow; intstruction on how to carry our packs. 'He says you have to hold the bag lilke this if you want to rest in the mountains,' Mari translated, 'otherwise something about falling rocks or falling off.' Great.

On the second day we marched 24km, but it wasn't so bad on flat ground with kind weather. The third day was rest and fishing. Well, Mari and I made our customary unsuccessful swipe at the local fish community; Vassily fished. He pulled one out on his first cast, missed a couple, then got two more. I kept expecting him to dive into the water and come up clenching a salmon between his teeth.

Put out, Mari and I went off for a walk. And that's where the trouble started. We headed off on tomorrows route along the river and eventually the path started curling, very narrowly, around the side of a mountain that rose high into the clouds. Off high in the distance, it seemed to get thinner, the drop ever higher. Convincing myself it was just perspective, Mari and I plugged on, trying to conquer my fears before the next day. Instead I was reduced to an ever more panicked state and we decided it was better to go back.

I'd already seen enough to spend a sleepless and somewhat embarrassing night worrying myself sick, slapping myself around the face and trying to convince myself I could do it. By the morning, I believed that I could. But I couldn't finish my morning sludge, which was a bad sign as up until then I'd been wolfing it down greedily. All there was to eat. Half an hour up the road I was in big trouble.

I don't have any problem with being high up as long as there's a barrier between me and the drop. When there isn't, and the path is rocky and narrow, and I can see it rising ever more precariously however hard I try not to look, the fear is hideous. My whole body hollows, legs shake, head spins, eyes stop seeing and instead my brain plays repeat tapes of things falling from very great heights. Sweat drips off me. I was a mess.

When I told them I couldn't go on, they tried everything with me. Holding my hands, relieving me of the backpack, allowing me to walk behind Mari... but I flatly refused to continue. It's tempting to say I was behaving like a girl, but it's not true, because there were girls there and they were plodding along quite happily. I was behaving like a pampered coward.


All I wanted in the world was not to have to continue up that mountain. "I can't do it. I can't." Actually, that's probably not true. People are always telling me I need to confront my fears and feel a sense of achievement. But why? I'm supposed to be on holiday. If our lives had depended on it; if there'd been a holy man offering enlightenment at the top; if it would have solved the world's problems then I could have gone on. But for a load of cod-therapy speak and a group hug at the end of it? No thanks. 


I refused. Vassily was clearly disgusted, probably thinking I was putting the whole mission in danger and playing into the hands of the enemy, whoever that might be. I pleaded to be allowed to go back and camp alone until they returned but he wasn't having it. Clearly I couldn't be trusted. His son, Vitali, would have to accompany me.


Vitali looked every bit as delighted with this prospect as I was. I could understand that. Four days in the Siberian wilderness sharing a two-man tent with a complete stranger whose language you don't speak is not an easy prospect. I didn't take the decision lightly. When we got back, he tried to convince me I'd be ok, it wasn't too late to catch them up, if I could just get round the last corner on the hillside the rest of the week was easy.


I looked up doubtfully at the mountain. Clouds were settling around it only about 100 metres higher than our current point. I didn't belong up there. Besides, he had a vested interest in telling me it got easier. I decided to stay down below and face the music. At least until my ipod batteries ran out about an hour later, after which it was time to face the awkward silence instead.


Vitali made heroic efforts with his English. Fortunately he was a football fan and that gave us enough to start up a conversation. But given the limits, it couldn't go far, and soon the silence was back. We contemplated the enormity of the the boredom and awkwardness that stretched out for four days before us.

How that young man must have hated me. It was alright for me; I knew the alternative was far worse. For him, the chance to spend a week walking in the mountains he'd loved since childhood with people who spoke his language had been replaced by this. At one point I thought I saw his eyes redden with tears; they must have been from pure anger and frustration. 



After that, though, he never let it show. I've nothing but praise for his dignity and self possession in not only resisting the temptation to strangle me, but to actually keep up conversation and pleasantness. Quickly, we marked out our roles. Mine was that of preposterously ill-suited Englishman. I have an allergic reaction to mosquito bits which can result in anything from excess swelling to big angry red blisters to open weeping sores. I need a constant regime of of repellent sprays, soothing creams and anti-histamine tablets to stop myself looking like a leprosy victim. I must have looked a right tit, constantly fishing around for remedies in my pathetic little first-aid purse. I might as well have wearing a top hat and carrying a china tea pot.

The silence fell again.

Ants have an interesting life, when you follow it for any length of time. If you glance at it all it looks like meaningless scurrying; but you actually sit and stare down into their world for, say, hours on end, you can see there's a huge amount going on down there. Lots of overcoming huge obstacles, locking horns and wrestling with rivals, ant sex, struggling to drag huge loads that will serve in the feeding of whole communities or the building of some cathedral-like super structure they'll probably never see in their lifetimes... it's interesting stuff, it really is.

We had to save our drips of excitement: making fires (which I constantly got wrong), cooking in the big pot (same) and walking. Ah, walking. The next day we had to walk the 24km bag to base camp. How we savoured the prospect; how wrong we were.

There are people who will tell you that the journey back always seems quicker. I've been one of them. It's a load of horseshit.

We set off, for reasons Vitali explained and I couldn't understand, at 11am, instead of the 5am start we'd taken on the way there. Our target was to cover in five hours what had taken us eight in the other direction. But we were walking without any of the enthusiasm or novelty that had carried us out there, and the sun was baking hot. It bleached everything outside me brilliant white; inside, my mood was pure blackness. I cursed the stupidity, the vanity, the cowardice, the bus, the boat, the gods that had brought me there. I hated every dusty step. Sweat dripped of me, down to my heavy, lurching shadow, and the bag tore constantly backwards on my shoulders.

After a while I thought delirium must have been setting in because I actually began to appreciate my surrounding when we sat down for a break. You couldn't call it peaceful: everything was motion and noise. The river rumbled past us, buttercups swayed across the fields, wasps and flies busied themselves, butterflies floated before my face... only the mountains were dignified, silent and ancient. Fuck this, I thought. I poured a bottle of water over my head and got back to cursing everything around me.

The oasis that kept us going was a village, a little before our camping spot. If we made it before the local shop shut we could replace the daily sludge with pies, chocolates, even a tin opener to actually eat the canned meat we'd been pointlessly lugging along in our backpacks, unable to open. As the Mongolian horsemen turning out in the fields to point and laugh at me came more and more regularly, I knew were getting closer.

When we'd passed through the village, before dawn, it was a sleeping collection of hovels. Now, to my fevered eyes, it looked like salvation. Idyllic. Children and cattle meandered along the single dirt road, local drunks slumped against corrugated tin walls waved at us, those who could stand stopped us to shake our hands and ask Vitali our business. I don't care what he was saying about me and wouldn't like to know.

There weren't any tin openers in the shop - it wasn't a Waitrose, funnily enough - but there was enough variety to lighten our steps for the last kilometre. I looked dreamily ahead as a young boy chased cows with a stick while his mate pelted them with stones.

"That boy is throwing stones at the cow!" I said to Vitali.

"Oh, yes yes," he answered, as if this were something to be positively encouraged. All is right with the world.

We still had an evening and another full day to kill when we reached the base camp, but I've learned that time passes easier with access to consumer goods. That's my gift of knowledge to the Russian people. We were able to ignore one another and concentrate on our crisps.

When the rest of the party got back, of course, Mari told me Vitali had been right all along. I would've been fine if I'd just managed to keep going for another half hour round that narrow, terrifying corner. Mind you, I'd only have found something else to be scared of: apparently while they were on top of the mountain they saw some bear shit. (And yes, folks, it was in the woods. I don't know if they also saw the Pope up there proclaiming his

Catholic beliefs, or ducks demonstrating the watertightness of their arses.)

The most fearsome animal I saw was a snake - a fucking snake! - but I got told to calm down. It whipped around my feet and under a rock when I was coming back from fetching some cans of lager I'd stashed in a plastic bag in the river. I reported what I'd seen to Mari, who told Vitali. By this point I thought I better not bother him direct.

"A snake? Here? No, there are no snakes."

"I've just seen it! Over there!"

"Oh. Well then... it was a good snake."

That's when I knew they were bullshitting me. I ask you, when did you ever here of a good snake? Even the bloody bible can't come up with a positive role for snakes. If I'd seen a bear they'd probably have told me it was only Baby Bear and I'd be alright as long as I didn't sleep in his bed or eat his porridge. Bastards.

Anyway, I was justified the next morning when one of the women, Svetlana, went to the same river and came running back screaming and doing jazz hands in front of her face. Everyone went to see what the fuss was and there was our snake, about half a metre long, writhing round a tree like that fucker out of The Jungle Book.

"Oh, that snake. It is a bad snake."

Of course it's a bad snake. Everyone kept their distance except Vassily, who tried to pick it up by the tail. Christ knows what he wanted to do with it - maybe slap Svetlana about the face with it and tell her to pull herself together, or fasten it round his head like a Rambo bandana. Luckily, the snake wanted no part in the whole farce and buggered off. Later Vassily admitted he'd put all of us in trouble by provoking the bad snake. Cheers Vass, that's what we're paying you for. Nutter.

Then it was over. Nobody fell off a mountain, nobody got eaten by a bear or poisoned by a bad snake. Just an easy 10km hike back to the lake and another long, slow boat trip past countryside that so unendingly beautiful it gets really boring after a while. We have two days staying in a wooden shack at a sort of no-frills Siberian Butlins with extra cheesy disco karaoke canteen hell and squat shitters, then it's the 12 hour coach trip back to Novosibirsk. Siberia's Birmingham will be the closest I've got to civilisation for a long time.

8. OMSK

Never go to Omsk.

7. THE COMMANDANT

There are a great many trees in Russia, and I think I've now seen most of them from the window of a train. Lots of different types, but mainly the silver birch. The silver birch is Russia's national tree. Do we even have a national tree in Britain? If so, does anybody know what it is? Maybe the oak, but I don't imagine anybody really cares apart from Bill Oddie. For Russians, the national tree is close to their heart. In the case of the carriage attendant on our first Trans-Siberian railway journey, I think this may be because her heart is made of wood.

She barks commands, witholds tickets, prowls the corridor with an angry hoover, thwarts any attempt to escape to the rest of the train, and probably spends the rest of the time hanging upside-down in her cabinet with her wings folded across her chest. Bryn Thomas, in his smugly rose-tinted "Trans-Siberian Handbook", says that exploring the train is one of the great pleasures of the journey, but he offers no advice on getting past the gimlet-eyed robobitch who bars any egress from your designated area.

We aren't welcome in the restaurant car, either, after an early dispute with another hardliner behind the counter who considered it acceptable to sell us a different beer to the one we'd asked for then charge us twice the price. Apparently the difference will have to come out of her wages now. My heart bleeds. But that's because I've actually got one.

Confined to the safety of our private cabin, Mari and I play chess to pass the time, but she's already beating me three frames to nil and I can't have any more of that. So the view from the greasy window becomes my constant companion. Journeying into the heart of real Russia we pass a catalogue of geographical and historical landmarks, but unfortunately I've slept through most of them: the obelisk where Europe ends and Asia begins; the slow climb into the Ural mountains, and the wonderfully named city of Perm, where I hoped to see bubble-haired scousers mooching on the platform, all passed overnight as we slept.

I had hoped to stay awake for all these - I've waited a long time for all this - but it was impossible. The previous night was spent almost sleepless in the waiting room of Vladimir station, which turned out to be a dosshouse. We had hoped the 31 rouble entrance fee would serve to keep out the nutters, but it simply reserved the space for a more flamboyant class of dosser.

A man splayed out on the bench behind us had an emotional, two-hour, one-way conversation on a mobile phone that can't possibly have been connected to anyone, and in front of us two carrier-bag laden babushkas played out absurd Russian comedy of petty disagreements and pantomime gestures. It all seemed quite amusing until dawn, when one of them sat, rested her tiny head in bony hands, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

As well as being the residence of the Russian Bum Improv Theatre Co, the waiting room seemed to serve as the last post for young Russian army recruits to say goodbye to their families before being carted away to whatever hell awaits them. Every few hours an officer would lead in a squad of sullen recruits and order them to sit before they were joined by wailing mothers, rigid fathers, awkward girlfriends and determinedly boisterous mates. If they paid the entrance fee. The woman in command of the waiting room made absolutely clear that they may be the Russian army but if they didn't pay their 31 roubles they weren't coming in. Those who didn't have the change could only wave and reach out hands through the metal fencing. If Russia had put it's women alongside its men on the frontiers of Moscow, Napoleon might never have set his muddy boots in the city.

So the upshot of all this is that I was a bit tired by the time we got on the legendary train, and I slept from one continent to the next. What I did see, as well as trees, is a succession of post-Soviet shitholes: Kirov, named after the rising star of Communism who was assassinated in 1934 by a "lone nutter" probably acting under the distant orders of a jealous and paranoid Joseph Stalin (if Stalin really wanted rid of Kirov he should have just shown him the town he planned to name in his honour; the man might have died from disappointment); a place famous for the production of fireproof bricks; and the town of Bum-Kombinat, which may be the last word in shitholes. And onwards, into the night.

I woke up in Yeketarinburg. The last Tsar and his family were held prisoner in a dingy merchants house here in 1918 before being shot in the cellar by Bolshevik heavies and dumped dead in an old mine. It is a pivotal point in Russian history. I can't appreciate the gravity of my surroundings, though, because I'm desperate for the toilet, but am not allowed in before, after or during station stops. This marks a pivotal point in my deteriorating relationship with the carriage attendant.

200km on from Yeketarinburg and we are, at last, in Siberia. Changes creep into the landscape: trees occasionally give way to a flush of purple flowers in a boundless meadow; the village hovels are more gaily painted; we cross broad, lazy rivers and brooding swamps. Then the oppressive trees close in on us again.

All the way, the cheesepop being piped through the cabin's speakers by the commandant is compulsory, breaking down resistance like the Barney theme tune continually inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. But there aonly eight more hours to go until we reach Omsk, our destination for this leg of the journey. I never thought I'd say "only eight more hours" about a rail journey, but when we get there we will have travelled 2,500km, in 41 hours, across three time zones and two continents. I shudder to think what the chess score will be by then.

6. IVAN

St Petersburg was a gentle introduction, as European as it is Russian. After that we took am overnight train to Moscow, which is so Russian it slaps you in the face, offers you some smoked fish, insists you drink a glass of vodka, then accuses you of being a spy and threatens to revoke your papers.

The insistence on vodka, at least, came in the aptly bear-like shape of Big Ivan, the first person we met when in the city. He was sat alone as if expecting us in a cafe where we ordered beer and and greasy meat pasties called cheburak.

"Vodka is better," he said from his table nearest the counter, and invited us to join him. That was it. I already knew he'd be called Ivan.

He bought the first (large) vodka. Mari, being female, was allowed to decline, but I'd read my Russian ettiquette guides and took the whole 100mg glass in one. Ivan looked horrified.

He bought the second one too, a smaller measure. "Please, not all at once," he said.

Ivan was a crime reporter for one of the Moscow papers - I didn't believe this until he showed me his photo in his regular column - and sketched a grim picture of guns, drugs and immigrant tension in the city. He also said he was a tourist guide (I assume he uses a different spiel for that one) and a police officer.

"The problem is there aren't enough jobs for people," he told us later. No Ivan, and that's probably because you've got them all.

He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands for a man with at least three jobs and it was me who eventually had to call an end to the session, feeling I'd had more than enough. If you are going to get drunk in Moscow, it's a good idea to do it with the local crime correspondent. The conversation serves as a constant reminder why you must get too witless.

We swapped phone numbers, but didn't see Ivan again after that. He texted me a few days later and asked me if I wanted to watch the England game with him in the bar, but I was already tucked up in bed, exhausted with the baking hot claustrophobia of the city. And besides, I think Ivan probably gets too see enough high-expense misery and suffering in his job, as a tourist guide.

5. THE SCYTHIAN

Have you been waiting long?

After all my self-indulgent ramblings about the great leap of imagination I'm taking in travelling to St Petersburg, it's a bit humbling to arrive and find I've been beaten to it by so many Western tourists and, in particular, chattering teenage Americans. They are everywhere, backpacked and brightly clad, cleanly scrubbed, along with Europeans of every sort, making just one more stop on the travel trail that's contracting the planet.

There are Russians, too, of course - millions of them. Pushing into queues, jamming the metro, jostling through the streets and generally bringing the place alive against the gaunt backdrop of the architecture. They drink vodka in cellar bars and eat pickles, of course, and every one of them is more than willing to toast Dostoevsky, but really they're just... normal.

That's not to say the city disappoints fanciful expectations. It's every bit as classical, grand and crumbling as you could hope; the history cracks on the street corners and creaks beneath the bridges. There are golden-domed churches at every turn; inside them medieval icons weep and headscarved old women creep forward to kiss them and cross themselves, just like they've been doing for centuries. In the churches it's possible to feel like an intruder in a secret world.

But mostly you're just a part of the crowd. Or queue. Or something like a queue, except that people join it from the middle, or at the front, and look genuinely annoyed if you try to stop them.

The Hermitage Museum - the greatest in the world, it says - seemed at first to be just one long queue. We waited an hour in the vast courtyard of what was once Catherine the Great's Winter Palace and when we got to the door I could see that the queue continued inside. I looked up, to the third floor window, and I could see a single line of people progressing at snail's pace past the artwork. There are, apparently, three million pieces inside. This was going to take a while. I thought of putting my hands onto the hips of the person in front and trying to spark off the world's biggest conga dance, snaking merrily around all four wings, three floors and hundreds of rooms of the palace while the portraits of Tsars and saints looked down in thin-lipped disapproval. It would certainly help to pass the time.

Inside, though, we got a proper taste of the passing of time. The staircases, the chandeliers, the throne rooms, and the millions of man-hours it must have taken to build them, are dizzying. It must have been a bloated imagination even to dream of something on this scale, let alone dispose of the unspeakable wealth it would take to actually create it. Generations died for that wealth. And before that, the building materials had spent hundreds of thousands of years squeezing themselves into being beneath the Earth. This place is big, and rich. Rooms of Van Goghs, Picasso, Titians, two Da Vinci's... that's just in one section.

And in a dark, cooled room, in a neglected corner of the museum, the oldest resident of them all: the body of  a Scythian lord or King, preserved for thousands of years in the frost beneath the Altai mountains, is stretched out alongside the finery his superstitious people buried with him - huge woven cloths, a carriage, the petrified body of his favourite horse. His skin is blackened and tight over ancient, lanky bones, and he lies on his back, waiting still for the other life he was promised. Greater cities and palaces than this one have risen and fallen while he slept, and still he's waiting... only for me to come here and gawp at him. Imagine his primitive fury.

Without realising, I reach out towards the Scythian and my hand strikes the glass. The curator rushes over and busies me away, warning of alarms. It's fair enough. After a thousand generations trapped in an icy grave, I doubt he's in the mood for a Conga.