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.