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.