Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

This was written a few weeks before Touching Base, and before I arrived in the Tibetan exile community in India. I doubt many of you got far enough down that post to be expecting the full post from Tibet that I promised, but if you did, here it is.

Two years ago I spent a couple of weeks travelling in the West Bank and Israel. The holy city of Lhasa, more than anywhere else I’ve been, brought back those memories of Jerusalem. We had only a single week in the whole of Tibet, mainly spent in a Land Cruiser the steering wheel of which had a neutral position 90 degrees clockwise of where it ought, travelling the length of the Friendship Highway. It seems somehow wrong to have enjoyed that time, for fear that I’m becoming a kind of occupation junky, but the rich texture of experience we had there revealed a land of great beauty.

From the roof of our hotel, across toward the Potala Palace, the Lhasa old town appeared part Tuscan hill village, part refugee camp, only in a distinctly Tibetan architecture style that, until that day, I never knew existed. On the floor below, our (slightly malodorous) bathroom had imitation Hello Kitty tiles and our bedroom quite possibly the least comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in—pitted and rough like a tent pitched in a rocky field. At ground level monks roamed the winding market streets shopping for blenders and rice cookers, and Chinese soldiers kept watch on street corners, feet fighting to resist the western beats from nearby Tibetan music stores.

I never happened across evidence of the kind of day to day disruption of livelihoods we saw in Palestine (though I understand rapid industrial development and mining are destroying nomadic communities in the west), yet the presence of the occupation is overwhelming, and the atmosphere stifling. The Tibetan flag is visible only by it’s absolute absence. Pictures of the Dalai Lama are forbidden. Tibetan phrasebooks are impossible to find, and the only guidebook available inside the country is that published by the Chinese government. As I understand it, it’s difficult even to study the Tibetan language beyond a very basic level in school. Back in Hebron I was stopped in the street by people wanting to talk politics, everyone had an occupation story to tell. Here nobody did. People are afraid to trust their neighbours. Even alone they were reluctant to speak to us. There’s simply no sign of dissent. There are no Banksies on the walls here, nor hastily scrawled slogans of night-time activists. Though I’ve not been able to check all the facts independently, we heard stories of shocking discrimination against ethnic Tibetans and legal incentives for Han Chinese immigrants to colonise the country that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention.

Away from Lhasa the the Chinese presence is less pronounced, but every small town has its Chinese quarter, usually far larger than the Tibetan old town, crowded with restaurants and hotels hungry for a share of the Chomolungma (Everest) Yuan. The few monasteries that remain are sad places, more like museums than centres of prayer and study, with the monks banned from meeting together since the uprising in March. The street patrols by the People’s Liberation Army are less ubiquitous between Lhasa and the border town of Zhangmu, but convoys miles long crawl the shiny new roads through the high mountain passes.

Entering the Chomolungma National Park, for the final drive toward Base Camp, the tarmaced road disappeared, and it started to become apparent why a 4x4 was necessary for the journey. The Chinese rebuilding of the Friendship Highway became an increasingly less obvious work-in-progress, and the track narrower and rougher for the winding passes. The lower dragon-scaled mountains on the edge of the park looked ready to rouse any moment, but for the streams flowing down their sides that gave the whole area the artificial glistening wet look that I thought only existed in Unreal worlds. The larger ones had clouds gathered around their tops as if they were chimneys of some unspeakable power station.

Then, as you summit the final Gyatso La Pass, you get your first glimpse of Chomolungma. Our guide told us that the local name means “beautiful woman” in Tibetan (though Wikipedia says it’s “Saint Mother”), and it’s obvious why people become obsessed with her. The clouds had gathered at smaller mountains. Chomolungma actually produces her own, with the wind carrying the snow from the summit into the clear blue expanse. Descending from Gyatso La toward the Great Himalaya Range, I couldn’t take my eyes off her, turning my head from one window to another with the zigzagging road. And every time she appeared afresh from behind some lesser hill the wonder was just as great.

Base camp itself was a slightly sadder place than I had expected, though it’s hard to say whether that was because of lower tourism, or just it being off season for climbers. Walking the last few kilometres from the modern camp to the foot of the mountain the landscape had become dryer and more sandy and the cliffs more orange. I’m pretty sure Starbuck crashed somewhere near here in 105. In a last show of Chinese bureaucracy, it is forbidden to set even a foot on Chomolungma herself, and the historical base camp site is now only a small military outpost. We were able to climb a small hill for a close up view and photo opportunity.

We had planned to have one final night in the shadow of the mountain at Tingri, but following a landslide on the road our guide advised that we push on to Zhangmu directly from Base Camp. Crossing the Himalayas and descending the narrow gorge toward Nepal the desert of the plateau gives way to incredible lushness. The blockage on the road turned out to be not a natural landslide, but rather a team of over enthusiastic Chinese road builders, who’d detonated not only the cliff-side route of the new road, but that of the old road as well. After a couple of hours waiting while engineers made meticulous adjustments to the position of a large girder that appeared to be supported on nothing, and was due to form a temporary bridge, we were allowed to walk across to a waiting Land Cruiser for the final few kilometres into town.

And that, following one night in a hotel with a stunning view down the Bhote Kosi valley, was the end of Tibet. I’d like to end with “Free Tibet!”, or some other punchy, simplistic slogan, but, in truth, I barely believe Tibet even exists any more. A couple of weeks later in Pokhara, Nepal, we watched Seven Years in Tibet. To visualise the difference between the historical Tibet and the country we visited, and know that not one frame of the film can have been shot there, was one of the most emotional experiences of our journey so far. Later still, while staying with Mel and Steve, an imported copy of the Guardian we saw reported that even the Dalai Lama has now given up. Somewhere there’s hope for the people of Tibet, but I’ve yet to find out where it is.

Things I’m Missing

When not on the road, seeing amazing sights, meeting wonderful people or wondering how to teach English, I’ve been chomping at the bit to play some video games. According to the Steam web site there’s a licensed member of the Valve Cyber Café program in Dehradun, but I didn’t get the opportunity to find it. There are no members at all listed in the whole of Himachal Pradesh, so instead I’ve consoled myself watching trailers and episodes of Zero Punctuation in any café with a decent connection and a headphone socket. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, this only makes matters worse. Especially when I find the time to watch half an hour of Game Damage. It’s entertaining enough, but I’m not exactly sure what they think sets them apart from every other gaming TV show that’s been tried before—other than having one presenter who’s already more popular than Dominik Diamond and Violet Berlin combined. There’s only so many times Yahtzee is going to be able to have the final say on the death of point and click adventure games. Which, incidentally, he’s wrong about. The only genuinely good 3D point and click adventure was The Longest Journey (a bargain on Steam). Grim Fandango wasn’t point and click and, pedantically speaking, neither of them were “full 3D”, making use as they did of pre-rendered backdrops. I do want to play A Vampyre Story though, irrespective of what the reviews look like.

Sorry if you were hoping for enlightening travel insights in this post.

Touching Base

I suppose, as so often, I’d better open with an apology for the long absence. There’s been a lot going on, connectivity here is dodgy and, well, other excuses that I don’t imagine you’re interested in. After the makes dial-up look quick speeds of Nepal and the price fixing of the Pokhara Cyber Association, which set every café in the city at nearly three times the rate we were paying in Kathmandu, the internet cafés in India are a welcome relief. Sadly tough, the computers themselves are often still painfully slow. For the first time a café with half an awareness of computer security meant I was unable to patch Firefox to 3.x, so tried using (the surprisingly installed) Google Chrome instead. As a first experience with the software, it wasn’t pleasant—presumably because of it’s practice of running every tab as a separate process. When I’m being charged by the minute for access I like to try and do any many things as possible at once. One day I’ll find an internet café properly equipped with Macs, and that will be a glorious day indeed.

We arrived in India on November 17th, the day before our Nepalese visas expired. Leaving by bus from the border town of Banbassa the first obvious difference was the presence of railways. The second was the fascinating array of English language signage. From the board just up from a level crossing warning train drivers to be wary of elephants on the line through the poetic practicality of “we like you but not your speed” and “speed thrills but kills” to the direct quotes from western lyricists found on traffic signs of the winding roads up to Uttarakhand’s hill stations. The hi-vis “school zone” sign in Mussoorie, though, did make me think more of the Bexhill refugee compound than anywhere I’d actually want to send my children.

We spent our first two nights in India in Nainital, which felt rather like having spent two and a half months on the road only to find ourselves at home. Lonely Planet describes it as a town founded by homesick Brits reminded of the Cumbrian Lake District. The hills are somewhat higher than anything in Britain, but the comparison’s not unfair. The Victorian iron railings along the lakeside promenade seemed more Sussex seaside resort than Uttarakhand hill town. Even the voices overheard in cafés seemed to speak with a British Indian accent, and church bells rang out across the lake at night. I think a lake is something Bradford’s missing. The colonial legacy seemed to have left more European denomination churches than “local” religion. I did manage to make a brief visit to the Catholic church, and encountered a spiritual presence there that I’ve not felt in countless Buddhist or Hindu temples. Maybe it’s because it was a serving place of worship not a museum, or maybe I’m just conditioned to react in a certain way to enormous crosses.

From Nainital we moved on to the Navdanya farm near Dehradun. Navdanya is the biodiversity movement founded by Vandana Shiva. They have farms and seed banks all over India where they grow hundreds of crop varieties under threat from de facto extinction beneath the growing weight of industrial farming and patented plants. Seeds are available to organic farmers at no cost—they simply return a portion of their first harvest to the seed bank, keeping another portion to replant the following season. The Dehradun farm was Navdanya’s first, and is also the site of an alternative collage called Bija Vidyapeeth. We turned up hoping just to see the place and volunteer in the fields for a few days. We’d been told we’d have to leave after four days as there was a course starting. For four days we worked, and ate beautiful food with the regular staff sat on the floor of the kitchen. Virtually all the food was grown on the farm, and I enjoyed some of the best potatoes I’ve ever tasted. Every day I would look forward to the gyrating twists of steam that danced above my chai in the dawn light. From there it was a walk out to the fields, usually to harvest mustard, though I also got to put years of canal holidays to good use winding the winnowing fan. Actually living something of the agricultural life, if briefly, gave a fresh insight into some well known parables. I don’t know if it’s the same type of mustard Jesus was referring to, but I found it hard to imagine this stuff growing into a tree birds could nest in the branches of. Crawling through the fields squatted down, painful though it was, did however really show how the harvest is affected by by the soil, and the plants were noticeably different depending on whereabouts the seed had been cast. It was amusing to watch the Egrets waiting around in the empty fields, and then hopping into line behind the plough as it passed, churning up… whatever it is that egrets eat. I guess they’re probably a pest, stealing valuable worms or something from the soil.

The whole place, however, was slightly chaotic and getting accurate information about what was going on proved awkward. It became apparent that people were arriving from all over the world for a course on Gandhi and Globalisation, taught by Satish Kumar, Samdhong Rinpoche and Vandana herself. The opportunity seemed to good to pass up, so we stayed for a further two weeks. Sadly, due to the political situation, the Rinpoche had to cancel, but every other part proved excellent. Satish might be disappointed that I thought he had more to tell the world about Gandhi than about spirituality, but he was a charming man, and an inspiration to learn from. I will be making it a priority to read his books. Vandana seems to have been a somewhat more prolific author, but I’ve picked a few I’d like to start with. She was only with us for two and a half days, but in that time it was as if the whole place came alive. Her speaking carried such authority that several people there said she had rocked their world, as she conveyed with clarity and researched evidence the injustice of globalised trade, and the horror of genetic monopoly. The other students were an amazing bunch also, with some involved in fantastic projects and others just setting out on grand journeys. I’ll be sure to link to any who have sites of interest as things develop. In particular, look out for our rainbow coloured WWGD (What Would Gandhi Do) bracelets. Some said it missed the point, but I think it’s an opportunity ripe for exploitation.

On a couple of days during the course they let us out of the farm, once to visit a Sikh temple, and once to visit a Tibetan monastery. The temple visit had always been planned as, apparently, every Sikh temple will give a free meal to all comers, 24 hours a day—a fine example of Gandhian principles in action. The food was basic but good and the temple interesting, though I have to confess I find centuries old religious shrines decorated with plastic flowers, flashing lights and drapes of finest viscose slightly odd. The monastery visit was planned at shorter notice, following Samdhong Rinpoche’s withdrawal, and it showed. No one really seemed to know what was going on. We got a look round a large stupa, and an even larger statue of Śākyamuni Buddha, before being herded back onto the bus to go… somewhere else. Some of us took matters into our hands and stayed for the afternoon, when we’d heard some kind of empowerment ceremony would be going on. I didn’t really understand a word of it, but it was amazing to see the maroon ocean as hundreds of monks assembled. In Tibet itself we never saw more than three monks together. We sat in and watched from the back, among the lay people. Apparently it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand, and you get empowered just by hearing whatever ancient text it is that the lama was reciting. The whole event felt religious, but had the atmosphere more of a festival as people sat on the lawn listening, but also chatting and doing their own thing. The Tibetan woman next to me had bought her English language copy of The Kite Runner to read during the ceremony.

The day after the course ended we missed the night bus to Dharamsala and ended up sleeping rough on Chandigarh bus station. I say sleeping. That’s probably the wrong verb. These kind of places ought to have internet cafés. I had a lot of catching up to do, and they’d probably run at a reasonable pace at 4am. I’d like to say it worked out worth it in the end, but I’m not quite sure I can bring myself to. We did, however, get to spend the following morning at the Nek Chand fantasy rock garden—a kind of dreamland of rubbish—which we would otherwise have missed. It’s an enchanting place, and well worth a visit, I just wished it could have gone on a bit longer. And that I could have gone there awake.

In the end, it was late evening by the time we finally arrived in McLeod Ganj, home of the Tibetan government in exile, and we were all anxious to get a good night’s sleep as quickly as possible. The following day we moved into a working monastery, which seems to be the cheapest place in town to stay, and started to do a little exploring. We got tickets for a Tibetan music concert that evening, that provided an answer to the perennial question “what does a monk have on his iPod?” The answer: it sounds a bit like Tibetan Boyzone. To start with it seemed it was going to be more a mime show than a music show. Thankfully, as the evening wore on Ronan’s influence died away a little, but it was all performed to backing tracks by solo vocalists. The one man who appeared with a guitar clearly confused the sound engineers, and the feedback spoilt things slightly. The whole show was performed in front of a large painting of the Potala Palace, and it was odd to think that we had been there only a few weeks ago when most of the others in the audience live in the perpetual hope that they will one day see it again.

We spent the weekend on a two day hike up to Triund and back. If the last few kilometres to Everest base camp had been like hauling the One Ring up Mount Doom, this was more like Caradhras—an unrelenting and seemingly never-ending ascent, but one that followed an established mountain pass. Given how it had a name and all, I’d kind of expected an actual place at the top. It turned out to be just a small government run guesthouse and a few shack-like stalls looking out over the valley. The government guesthouse was pretty pricey, so we ended up paying one of the shack owners the same price as we paid for a double room back in McLeod Ganj to sleep in his cold, dark lean-to. He was able to give us a pretty decent dinner and breakfast (not included), and as we were eating I heard what I think must be the most offensive radio advert I’ve come across. The India Today media group was asking people to join their private war on terror with the tagline “Be the change—log on to india today slash war”. I’m not quite sure I can see Gandhi declaring war on anything. And has the rest of the world learnt nothing from seven years of disastrous Bush foreign policy? The Times of India was reporting a few days later that more Indians are killed by lightening strike than terror attacks, calculated as a daily average. Apparently, eight people a day die from lighting strikes in India.

On Monday, the other’s left me. It’s now Friday, and I’m talking over a class teaching “Advanced English” on Monday. I’m not sure I even know what advanced English is, but I’ve sat in on the class the last three days, so hopefully I’m learning something from that. I’ve committed to at least a month’s stay here in McLeod Ganj. If I’ve any time left over once I’ve finished worrying about the next day’s class, I might get to spend some of that time seeing the rest of the sites. It feels like I’ve barely scratched the surface. For one, I’ve not even been near the Dalai Lama’s temple yet. So, of the Tibetan experience, I’m sure I should have lots more to write. And a post on Tibet itself should be following fairly soon.

Adventures in remote places

Roald Amundsen, one of the great Norwegian explorers who we hear very little about in England, but who beat Scott to the South Pole, once said that adventure is just bad planning. I guess it is a credit to Ger to Ger that our travels in the Mongolian countryside continued to feel like an adventure, despite us (mainly) moving to a well planned itinerary.

The plan had been that we would stay with four different nomadic families over the course of eight days and seven nights, with someone from each family leading us on horseback to the next. The changes began when we turned up for our orientation session, briefing us on nomadic culture and how we should behave. It turned out that the bus we would be taking to the Terelj National Park had moved to a winter timetable. Perhaps that should have told us something, but the immediate effect was to delay our start from 7:30am to 3:30pm, and our return from 4pm to 8am the following morning. We would now be staying eight nights. Initially this seemed like a really good deal. By night four, as our water bottles froze inside our tents, it seemed less so.

It was a great privilege to be staying with nomads and seeing something of their lives, particularly as the plan appeared to fall to pieces still further and one of the families we were supposed to stay with had gone to Ulan-Bator to have a baby. Instead we ended up staying with his sister for one night and then travelling onward on foot to the sister’s mother’s house, lead by our absent host’s deaf mute brother in law. After pitching our tents we were invited for milk tea in a ger which seemed to contain an unending flow of people. Milk tea is a salty, milk drink almost (but not quite) entirely unlike tea. The family we were staying with was large, and the relationships between them seemed only to become less clear as time went on. Everyone was introduced to us in terms of their relationship to the absent host we’d never met, and they all seemed fascinated by us. Most were around our own age, and were brothers and sisters of the new father we had not met, but there were also several small children about who’s parentage I mostly remain confused. With this family more than the others the experience felt somehow authentic. Everywhere we were welcomed wonderfully and had a great time, but here, in two nights, where they were not used to regularly hosting western travellers, we felt we became more a part of the life; rather than being shown a carefully prepared front. Some of them would simply sit and watch us, which was slightly uncomfortable. One of the older brothers and the youngest sister, however, tried their very best to communicate with us. One of our guidebooks contained a translation for the phrase “my camera battery is empty”. I would never have imagined that to be so useful. Their gers were situated at the end of a long plain, at the foot of rocky cliffs leading up to the mountains. Aside from their few tents and livestock there was nothing else to be seen. When, at one point, a couple pulled up in a people-carrier blaring 80s sounding foreign synth-pop the contrast created a scene that appeared almost post-apocalyptic, as if they’d arrived to sell guns to Sarah Connor.

In the middle days of our time away we were due to visit the “Princess Temple”, a ruined shrine to the wife, or possibly daughter, of some long dead Mongolian ruler. Details are sketchy, and it doesn’t seem to have an entry in Wikipedia. We’d been told before we left that we were due to camp over night there, but as we neared the area and begun to hear of it’s remoteness, stories of terrible weather in the area and rumours of wolves nearby we were less keen, and rather concerned about the prospect of being left there alone. The evening we arrived with his mother in law’s family our mute guide communicated to us in sign that we would be leaving for the temple the following morning. On the morning of our fifth day, awaking to find the small river between our tents and the family gers frozen over, we set out by ox-cart unsure of what we would find.

What we found were some of the most spectacular landscapes we’d yet seen, a ruin with a truly magical atmosphere, somewhere nice to have lunch and, thankfully, a safe return to our tents by the family ger before nightfall. So far we had been travelling mainly in lowlands and grassy plains. In this trip we set out into the mountains. We had been told in the International Intellectual Museum in Ulan-Bator that Mongolia is “the homeland of the dinosaurs”. We were travelling nowhere near the areas famed for dinosaur finds, but it was not hard to imagine giant lizards roaming the rugged landscapes we passed through. Towering rock formations contrasted with the falling golden leaves of autumn and marshland which the ox was none to happy about pulling us through. Facing off the back of the cart watching the world disappear, it all felt rather like something out a dream, a feeling only reinforced on our arrival. Hopefully Tansy might upload a couple of her photos, but only the bare frame of the temple remained, with the remains of a caved in burial crypt visible behind. The whole complex was surrounded by what was clearly once a high wall, presumably enclosing well tended gardens. The whole place was now overgrown with wild trees, and carpeted in a think layer of fallen leaves. It was the kind of place where the loot would be purple, if only it wasn’t so peaceful. We had lunch outside the walls, around the blackened remains of someone else’s camp-fire before setting off back.

We stayed with two more families before returning to the city, each a little closer to the village. The last even had mains electricity to their three gers. One of them was empty, so we were fortunate enough to be able to sleep “inside”. The fire kept us warm, and returning to the ger from the toilet at night, the skyward pointing lights created a sight like three miniature pyramid stages. The experience was amazing, but after eight nights I was very much ready see Ulan-Bator again. It felt like coming home. I heartily recommend Mongolia, but come here for the scenery and the people, not for the food. Nine days of goat and noodle soup, goat dumplings, milk tea and, worst of all, salty black tea were quite enough. I can’t help feeling that what we’ve seen here can’t last long. Our children will never have this experience. At the absolute outside I give it twenty years before the remote dirt tracks we travelled on are tarmacked. Closer to the capital they already seem to be getting over them quickly, and we saw that the fords can be hazardous for the trucks the nomads now use to move in winter.

The only real disappointment would be not having got to do more riding. We only got two days, and after that I was glad to stop. I had a new found understanding of why cowboys in old westerns have that distinctive gait. But some more time on horseback near the end, once I’d healed a little, would have been fun. In fact, I didn’t even make it to the end of the second day—our guide saw how much pain I was in and flagged down a passing ox-cart to take me the rest of the way. I was taken on by two men who looked for all the world like Americans, one a highly convincing cowboy, but after only a short distance we stopped at a seemingly random ger, dismounted and were invited in. Watching everyone else disappear over the hill on horseback, along with my phone, wallet and passport, and with no language or clue what was going on, I was rather scared. Sat round a table in cigarette smoke-filled ger, our host produced tankards full of white liquid from an oil-drum sized vat. It seems “horse milk” was the only phrase of English he knew. I had no idea mares’ milk even could be fermented. As you would expect, it basically tastes of gone off milk. Once we’d all four had a glass of the airag, a bottle of vodka was opened. Apparently there’s a rule that once a bottle of vodka is opened it must be finished. Then there was a two litre coke bottle again filled from the vat for the road. I did eventually arrive safely at the next ger with the others, but feeling slightly ill.

Ulan-Bator itself is not an especially beautiful city. Before we left for the countryside I had no great love for it. It does have an impressive market of enormous scale where you can buy just about anything. But, unlike that in Riga, the food section was disappointingly small and, for a country who’s primary diet is dairy based, Mongolia seems to have a distinct shortage of decent cheese. Instead, the so called “Black Market” seems to be the perfect place to buy cheep imported clothes. We’ve visited several Buddhist temples, mostly now museums after the Soviet purges, but they’ve taught me little about Buddhism beyond demonstrating that almost every image I had of the faith was wrong. There were a lot more gory paintings and wrathful gods than I expected. We did meet an American Buddhist who lives in Kathmandu, so we may yet learn more from him once we get there. The State Department Store is, like every such place, full of many kinds of overpriced goods, but is still obviously the product of a nation who’s market economy is relativity young. Next to GUM, it barely seems worth mentioning. One attraction that does deserve a mention is the International Intellectual Museum. Dedicated to the 50 years of work of eccentric Mongolian wooden puzzle creator Zandraa Tumen-Ulzii, this is something truly unique. It contains everything from ornate jewel encrusted wooden puzzle chess sets to the most ridiculous plastic tat. Our guide, who clearly loved her job, would tell us with glee how even the display cabinets in the museum were “made of puzzle”, before Mr. Zandraa himself came out to perform child’s magic tricks in the middle of the tour.

I won’t end by talking about pain au chocolat, as I’m sure the others will cover those at length. Instead, I’d like to make a quick plug for the activities of my friend Ben, who’s camping in parliament square this week in protest against the grotesque treatment of asylum seekers by the British government. Check out their blog.

Two week anniversary

We’re two weeks in and, predictably, I’ve been updating much less regularly than I’d hoped. I had loads of things I wanted to write about, but I’ve forgotten them all now. The ideas came to me the other night when the battery was dead on my phone so I couldn’t make notes of them. The others are doing rather better than I—they all brought paper journals. Ben’s even put up a few photos on the Wanderers site so, if your reading this elsewhere, head over there to check them out. I’ll try and compose something for a longer post before we head out to the wilderness on Friday, but I just don’t have the patience for this machine any more. Gana’s Guest House has two computers, which is an improvement over where we were in Moscow, but no wi-fi, which is not.

Day 7

So, it’s the 7th September, we’re one week into our journey and this is the first time I’ve got near a computer for long enough to write a proper blog post. I’ve been writing small updates to my Facebook status using every few minutes of wi-fi I can find, so add me on there for more frequent updates. The temptation to switch from Blogger to Wordpress is increased by the fact that Google have not yet managed to put out a decent update method for the iPhone. No way that’s going to happen while I’m on the road though.

Anyway, we’re in Moscow. Moscow is huge. Not just in terms of the 10.3 million population and 1000km² area—everything is just massive: the roads, the buildings, the nectarines. It feels oppressive, like the architecture of totalitarianism. Everything around dwarfs us so completely. The best example is probably the metro system. It’s easily the most elegant underground system I’ve traveled on, and yet seems designed to remind the user how small they are. It’s almost like walking through Rapture. I think I now know where Ken Levine got his inspiration.

When it actually gets round to being a little more welcoming though, it seems like Moscow has some idea of what it’s doing. We appear to have arrived in the middle of the celebrations of the city’s 861st birthday (an odd number, I’m still trying to work out if they celebrate like this every year). As we walked toward the Kremlin today many of the eight lane highways were closed to traffic and instead filled with stages. We’ve seen some rubbish performances and some downright strange, but we also stumbled across a free concert by (I think) André Previn and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra.

On Wednesday we leave Moscow for Ulan-Bator on the Trans-Mongolian railway. We arrived here yesterday on the overnight train from Riga, so we’ve a little experience of long distance trains, though we would have been completely stuck were it not for a few helpful English speakers who showed us on our way from one station to the next, how to use the metro and helped us buy our tickets. There’ve also been people who’s help has been a tremendous blessing, despite us not having a single word in common.

We made our journey from Bradford to Warsaw without spending a single Euro on travel. I could write about every driver who picked us up, but the post would go on forever, and I’d have no stories left to share with you all when we get back. Perhaps the most amazing lift Lavina and I had was from a young Polish guy who took us all the way from the ferry in Dunkirk to Wrocław in south west Poland in one 13 hour drive fueled by two entire tubes of caffeine tablets dissolved in two liter bottles of water, and no sleep. Had I known that was his plan I might have been reluctant to get in his van, and yet we felt safer in there than with several drivers who took us much shorter distances.

We perhaps cheated in little in taking a taxi from Warsaw airport, where the final truck dropped us, to the station where we met Ben and Tansy, but the sun was baking and the walk exhausting. From there we took the overnight bus to Vilnius, where we spent most of a day, before taking another late bus to Riga. Thankfully, the first hostel we walked into at around 11pm had space for us, and we got out first bed since leaving home four days earlier. I was very impressed with both Vilnius and Riga, though our visits were fleeting. Riga is beautiful. Every third building seems to be a castle, and the other two are either art-nouveau masterpieces or peculiar wooden builds that look like something out of the American west. Vilnius had much less grandeur, but just as much beauty. I lost count of the number of churches we looked at that day, but St. Anne’s was a highlight. We also got the opportunity to paddle in the river Vilnia, which is not something I’ve ever wanted to do in the river of a capital city before, and discovered what looked like some kind of amazing artists collective in a mural covered gallery beside the river. Sadly the gallery was closed, but we took a few photos.

This plan to blog the journey seemed a lot easier before I set off, before we had any idea how much we’d see in such a short space of time. I’ll try and stick to the highlights so as not to overwhelm/bore you all. If you made it this far, thanks a lot!

Setting off

It’s not quite stupid o’clock yet but it’s getting on that way. Certainly it’s later than I had hoped. Not that I imagine I would have slept well tonight anyway. By 7am tomorrow we want to be by the motorway on the first stage of our trip, looking for a ride to Warsaw. My bag’s almost packed now. I think I’ve spent most of the evening just moving things around, from one small pile to a slightly larger pile and back again. I feel woefully under-equipped, under-skilled and under-prepared. I’ve realised as I’ve been going through all my clothes that I have no idea what I really need to cross the Himalayas. I also don’t own any shirts which are long sleeved (to keep out the mosquitos) and yet cool (to be worn in hot whether). And all the long sleeved t-shirts I own are dark coloured. Apparently mosquitos love dark colours. I do have a passport with all the right visas in though, so hopefully that’s all I really need.

I guess I’ll probably look back on this in a few months time and think myself quite frightfully naive. I’m trying not to set my expectations for a life-transforming experience too high, but everyone I speak to seems to think that’s what it’ll be. I figure if I just hope to enjoy the trip for what it is then I can’t be disappointed. If I gain marvellous insights about myself or the world then that can only be a bonus.

I’ll be aiming to cross-post everything both here at my personal blog, and at Wanderers, a joint blog that Ben has set up for all four of us to use. Anything I write on Spherical Bowl will also be automatically imported into Facebook as a note, so if you know me on there, check my profile now and again for updates. And, of course, comments can left in any one of those locations.

See you in 2009!

Filling in the gaps - part one

I needed to scan my visas, so while I was borrowing my friend’s scanner I took the opportunity to do something I’d been meaning to do for a while - scan some of the harder to find cover artwork that’s been missing from my iTunes library. I figure there must be others out there who have these CDs but are missing digital copies of the cover art, so I’m sharing them here for your benefit. That has to be fair use, right? This’ll be part one of a continuing series, but it'll be a while before there’s another one. I’ve started with some stars of Greenbelts past: four albums each by Coastal Dune and Why? They’re not terribly good scans, and the sleaves themselves have suffered some wear and tear, but they’re better than nothing. The Till We're Old cover isn’t square, so I’ve saved it as a PNG. Transparency appears to work in coverflow within iTunes, but not in coverflow on the iPhone. If you have better versions of any of these, leave a note in the comments.

Rising Sun

Past experience has taught me that I ought to write up my thoughts on Greenbelt as soon as possible, else I end up saying nothing at all.

There’s something somehow unique about Greenbelt. I just love it. Unexpected tragedy excepted, the end of Greenbelt is the saddest time of my year, in a way that even the end of Glastonbury can’t match. Greenbelters sometimes joke that it’s the third festival after Christmas and Easter, made all the more apt this year by the peculiar preponderance of carols. So, to misquote Wizzard, today I really do wish it could be Greenbelt every day.

That would, of course, be both foolish and impossible. Festivals exist to celebrate and inspire the lives we live for the rest of the year. So what were my highlights of this year?

First, Beth Rowley, who was simply stunning. And she played Greenbelt before she went massive, so it felt like one of our own coming home. Stephen Sizer never ceases to impress, with both his factual knowledge and his ability to cut through theological nonsense. He also pretty much saved my faith a few years back, by being the only writer able to offer a comprehensive biblical explanation for why my God is not a racist, so that was another point in his favour. Following her appeal last year for the church to rediscover the sin of usury, Ann Pettifor was this year calling for a Grand Jubilee cancelling all first world debt. Yes, that includes your mortgage. Her place in my mind as the greatest prophetic voice of our time is just about secured. Finally, Believe is a terrifyingly brutal yet thought provoking play in which Linda Marlowe portrays four women from the old testament and forces us to consider the impact of faith in today’s world. I needed a visit to the organic beer tent when it was over, but it’s probably a highlight not just of this Greenbelt, but of all eleven I’ve been to.

I guess part of what I love about Greenbelt is that, after all that time, I can barely walk around the site without bumping into someone I know. So my lowlight would be not having had the time to catch up with everyone I would have liked to, knowing I’d not even spoken to others, and also that some who should have been there weren’t.

Oh, and seeing my name in the programme was kind of nice too. It made me feel important, even if it wasn’t really deserved.

Radiohead on a Spectrum (and a printer, a scanner and some broken hard drives)

Chewing Pixels is fast becoming my number one place to discover the curious and the beautiful online. I don’t think I’ve shared any of his links outside of Facebook before (I do most of my blogging there now), but I’ve been too active on there of late, and this place has been looking rather neglected. Anyway, this time it’s the graduation project of one James Houston, until recently a student of Glasgow School of Art’s graphic design course. It’s a remix of Nude from Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, but he explains more at his Vimeo page.

Beyond this, I have had several posts in draft for a while —a sort of mini series of technological complaints— but I just can’t seem to find the time to finish them off. If I’m feeling energetic I’ll get them up over the next week and a half. I know this is supposed to be a blog about faith and prayer in Bradford. Maybe I’ll get back to that once I return from my travels. I the meantime, I’ll try and post some updates whenever I can find an Internet cafe.

Glastonbury '08

Dear Michael,

It’s now been nearly a week since I left your farm, so I thought I should write and thank you for another fantastic festival. To no-one’s surprise, you proved all the critics wrong. Tickets finally sold out, as we all knew they would. And those who said that Jay-Z would be bottled off stage clearly have no understanding of what Glastonbury’s all about.

I think my highlights this year were Jay-Z (obviously), The Verve, The Ting Tings and Vampire Weekend. The albums I’m most likely to buy next based on what I saw are Marry Me by St. Vincent and Youth Novels by Lykke Li. I would be getting The Langley Sisters’ album as well, but they don’t appear to have one yet. I’d not intended to see The Verve, but had a snap last minute change of heart on leaving Suzanne Vega’s gig in the Acoustic Tent. They turned out to be much better than I expected, though there was really no need for Richard Ashcroft to dis you like that. The same is true of the Ting Tings, who I'd expected to hate, ’cause I find that song really annoying.

Next year, I’d love it if you could book Sigur Rós to headline. In my opinion, they are the greatest band in the world right now, and they deserve a place on the world’s greatest stage. I still consider their performance on the Other Stage in 2003 to be the best gig I’ve ever been to, but I want to see them where those epic sounds really belong: in the dark, with the light of the top of the Pyramid pointing skyward above them.

I suppose I have to confess before I end that my actual highlight this year was Katie Melua. So, a special thanks for booking her. None of my friends would come and see her with me and, quite by accident, I ended up on the front row. I don’t think I’ve been on the front row of a gig since I was about 16. I felt well old. And probably looked like some kind of weird creepy stalker man. I’ve taken some abuse for saying I loved her set, and I guess I’ll take some more, but I don't care. I think I could literally listen to that girl sing the phone book.

Apple's offensive pricing strategy

So, yesterday was MacWorld Keynote day…

Seven days ago, Apple announced an imminent price reduction on the UK iTunes store, for the first time bringing about standardised music pricing throughout Europe. In their press release Apple threatened to reconsider its continuing relationship in the UK with any record label that does not lower its wholesale prices in the UK to the pan-European level within six months. Suddenly it was clear why Apple is unpopular with the record labels. Why only one major label has opened up their DRM free music to Apple. Here was a retailer genuinely working for the good of the British consumer, threatening to reshape the music industry for the benefit of the customer rather than the corporation.

Yesterday Steve Jobs stood on a stage in San Francisco, and announced a slew of cool new products. Time Capsule is a wireless bass station with a built in hard drive, designed for use with Leopard’s rather excellent Time Machine backup utility. This would be great, except that one month ago I bought an Apple wireless bass station with the intention of connecting an external drive for that exact purpose. But it’s OK, because Jobs says that Time Capsule is very aggressively priced as they want people backing up their content. Time Capsule costs $299 for the 500GB version, or $499 for 1TB. Bargain. And not that unfavourable when compared to the price a standalone drive for my existing Airport Extreme base station would have been.

Right now, one dollar equals just shy of 51 pence sterling. That should make the 1TB Time Capsule something in the region of £254. I’d probably lose out considerably ebaying my Airport Extreme so soon after buying it, but it’d be worth it for the hassle free wireless backups. In the UK however, Apple are advertising Time Capsule at £329—the best part of £80 more than it should be.

The same is true of their rather attractive new laptop, the MacBook Air. Steve Jobs advertised it at $1799, or £917. I’d expected a slight UK premium on that, maybe £999. An $1800 dollar laptop really should be sub £1000. Once again however, Apple are selling it at £1,199—over 30% more than in the US.

I guess, when it comes to the price of Apple’s own products, they won’t favour the British consumer until the courts compel them again.