Sain Baina Uu from Ulanbataar

Time is tight, so here are some excerpts from sent email that will elucidate our current travels ever so slightly:

All is well here, staying in Ulanbataar Mongolia until tonight, then to Beijing. This town reminds me a bit of Makassar Indonesia- lots of action, good markets, really friendly people.

Russia was an amazing place to visit. In all we got to visit St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kazan, Omsk, Tomsk, Kolorova, Krasnoyarsk, Abakan, Kyzyl, Irkutsk, West Baikal (Olkhon Island), and Naushka, but only for short visits. Wish we could have stayed longer, but what a great experience! Maybe next time we will get to go to Vladivostok and the northeast islands.

Now we are in Mongolia, another amazing, and very different, place. We spent 7 days sleeping in yurts (ger) of nomadic families, mostly in the Gobi desert. This is something I never thought I'd do. It was the most expensive thing we did but there is no way we could have done it on our own without help from local experts, and it was a fantastic experience. Mongolia is largely a Buddhist nation and the concepts of detachment from material desires really really make sense here. If something can't be carried during the seasonal move it can't be kept, and that includes the housing. Each yurt weighs 250 kg, the maximum weight that a camel can carry. (The yurts are therefore fairly small and sometimes hold very large families - Western concepts of privacy go up through the hole in the roof along with the dung smoke.)

Speaking of camels, Mongolia has 10 livestock animals per person so we got to know a lot of goats, sheep, camels, cows, horses, and some yaks. Rode a camel to the giant (600 feet high) sanddunes. Crazy. All my Beaver Bank posse would have loved it, including the mongolian 'highways', basically a bunch of winding criss-crossed dirt roads, made for 4 wheel drives and strong hearts. We drove 1800 km in all (by 'we drove' I mean that Gigmei, the professional driver we hired, drove us - we never could have found our way around the countryside, there are no roadsigns whatsoever and endless possibilities for error - would have been fun to try though).

It is so amazing the way the nomads live here, so multiskilled they are in the art of survival - they are herders, mechanics, solar experts, climatologists, cooks, and all around hardy individuals. I can't imagine a way of life more different from my own, and I wish I could have spent more time here, maybe grown to understand it better. But I am honoured to have had the exposure to such human and natural beauty.

Now we go to the busiest, craziest, densest city of Beijing! Cant wait to ride a bike there.

Will elaborate on all these things and more Russian stories, some day...

Chris