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Alex Mumzhui with his Brompton on Silk Route to China.

Silk Road

Alex Mumzhiu
2006-03-20 17:44:21

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shocked. I already wrote to you that I stayed in Guesthouse dorm in Ulan Bator where I met so many interesting people. So I decided for the future that I always will stay in dorms. Private bathroom do not worth these contacts with interesting people, which I miss when stay in a single room.

Beijing surprised me by its cleanness. Chinese still dump garbage on the ground and spit, but the army of janitors works day and night and pickup an every used bus ticket, every butt. Central streets are absolutely clean. I did not noticed much pollution ever because people ride bicycles. Comparison with India which I visited a year ago was definitely not in a favor of India.

Hi, I am in Hong Kong, a miracle city. I came here on a train from Beijing, but I have to write, eventually, proper chronological description of my travel. Here it is: I started from St. Petersburg, Russia Sept 29 2001 by train. I had stops at Ekaterinburg, Irkytsk, Ulan Ude, Ulan Bator and Beijing. I actually buy tickets from point to point, because the situation with stopovers was not clear. My entire rail road bill was about $300. In Russia I traveled by 4 seat hard sleeper (kypeinii vagon) in China 6 seat hard sleeper. Contrary to my expectations Chinese train was surgically clean and very well organized. Russian train was the same as it was 20, 30, 40 years ago, but it is OK. I spent 7 nights in trains before I left Russia. My neighbors were serious middle age men, mostly on business trips,mostly mid-level managers. Soon after leaving St. Petersburg the scenery behind the windows became the endless forests with abandoned collective farms fields overgrowned with small bushes and forests again. One of my neighbors look at the windows and exclaimed rhetorically: "Why do we need so much land. Why don't we give it to somebody else. It is good that at least republics are now separate. But it is still so much land" Most of my neighbors agree that in Soviet times, it was ...