#excellent job!!!!!! I Am Eating The Bars Of My Enclosure

[nelyoslegalteam]

I admit I made that last post hoping it would cause you to bite things

-@outofangband

it DID make me bite things before he was even himself he was designed to be subjected to the horrors how am i meant to feel anything less than the Entire Spectrum Of Human Emotion about this

him fate awaited with fell purpose…….

[lindoig1]

Heaven - or almost!   Day 10.

We ate fiery beef noodles at a place opposite our hotel for breakfast. Not quite sure whether the hotel doesn’t do breakfast or whether what they provide is not suitable for westerners, but they gave us a voucher for beef noodles as I said - if we wanted anything else, we had to pay for it ourselves as well as try to explain to the cook what we wanted. Everyone who came into the cafe seemed to get the same order, but the cafe threw in a somewhat strange, but perfectly fine, boiled egg each for us. We have noticed that many places have a lot of eggs floating in some sort of hot stock and the look of them turned me off a bit, but they tasted fine even if we got eggs that had been in the soup for a week - how would anyone know?

Then it was off to the mountains to the Heavenly Lake near God’s Mountain (Mt Bogda).  It was well over an hour’s drive to where we had to go through security and buy our tickets. Oops, they don’t take tickets from foreigners so we had to get checked out at the Police Station and after 15 minutes or so, we were suitably accredited and cleared to rejoin the queue to go through security again. You then walk across a courtyard and go through security again. I wonder what they could have missed the first time that we could have acquired in the 50 metre walk across the razor-wire enclosure that warranted the second examination? Chinese people seem highly regimented and simply cop whatever ridiculous bureaucratic procedures are applied. They all line up neatly until the door is opened and then the queue collapses and it is all push and shove to be first inside. They wedge themselves between us and surreptitiously edge forward or sidle around and between you and then try the same manoeuvre with whoever is next in line. Only problem is that 500 others are trying to pull exactly the same stunt on them. I have to say that the security nonsense is getting to me. You have to show your passport or ID card 10 times a day and everything has to go through the X-ray machine even if nobody is there to monitor it - even to get into our own hotel lobby. You get patted down with greater or lesser intrusion/excitement at least a couple of times a day and I have observed that as westerners, we get a lot more scrutiny than the locals.

We are now in the CORRECT station waiting 4 hours for our train. At the first X-ray station, they confiscated Heather’s dry hair shampoo, at the second X-ray station 50 metres later, they confiscated our plastic fruit knife and hair cutting scissors. They made us open all our bags and did a thorough job on Heather’s, but when my bags were all open at their insistence, they didn’t even lift the lid, just waved me through. But they were VERY interested in my binoculars.  They mimed a lot of birdwatching moves until I understood that I had to get them out of my backpack. They turned them over, shook them, peered through both ends, examined them again from every angle and eventually handed them back with true eastern inscrutability and a flick of the hand to send me on my way.

Anyway, back to the Heavenly Lake. We all lined up in our thousands and progressively boarded a cavalcade of hundreds of buses to be driven 10-15 kilometres where we all had to get out and walk/climb close to a kilometre through a slightly tacky ‘traditional village’ lined with stalls selling mostly non-traditional souvenirs, food and other wares. This path led us to a larger enclosed buying opportunity with some similar items as well as plenty of others, all at upmarket prices. We escaped with our money belt intact and finished our walk to where we lined up dutifully so a different fleet of buses could take us the remaining 30-40 km up the mountain to the lake. Interesting that we alighted the first bus maybe 15 metres from where we boarded the second one, but a sturdy fence and a plethora of police and security guards prevented anyone taking a short cut to miss the tourist trap. Despite it all, the walk wasn’t too bad and the hawkers not too aggressive although Heather was struggling a bit with the stairs in what turned out to be quite a hot day.

The lake was suitable heavenly - very beautiful set in very steep towering hills against the broad background of a regiment of snowy peaks to the north. The water was glacial (there are 2 glaciers in the part of the range we could see) and deep emerald - also just deep, 100 metres at its deepest with an average depth of 60 metres. We paid a small fee and joined a boatload of local tourists for a half-hour spin around the lake. (We haven’t seen a single westerner for at least 4 days.) It was a pleasant enough trip, but no commentary, even from our guide who we have marked down heavily on a number of counts.

Our guide recommended that we go to his friend’s place further up the mountain for lunch because the food near the lake was tourist food and very poor. A little apprehensively, we agreed and Rachid collected us in his car and drove us up to his village - a collection of yurts. It was quite nice up there in the forest, quiet and with fewer people than we have seen outside our hotel rooms since arriving. We selected a few items and he and his wife cooked them for us. Nothing special, but quite nice, more than we could eat and a little on the expensive side, but we are tourists after all. Rachid and his wife were very courteous, Kazakhs but living in China for 40 years.  Rachid (at least) spoke excellent English and Heather had quite a yarn with him while I looked unsuccessfully for birds - saw hundreds of black-eared kites, very like our black kites, but only a single rook apart from them.

After lunch, we returned to the lake and I had a short walk along the boardwalk while Heather rested in the blazing sun, then it was into the bus that took us all the way to the bottom without providing any further buying opportunities. En route to find our driver, we discovered a geological museum in the entrance hall near the bus station and spent an interesting half hour or so finding out a bit about how the mountains and lake were formed. There was a lot to see and read and at least one more floor that we never explored so had we known and planned things better, we could happily have spent a couple of hours in the area.

This probably all sounds a bit flippant but it was a really nice day. The mountains are truly spectacular. Steep and rugged, rocky and riddled with jagged aretes slicing the slopes in all directions, strata running at all angles, a hundred shades of green, but with heavily scarred areas of slippage - truly dramatic, quite breathtaking, absolutely beautiful. There were horses, cattle, sheep and goats in numerous places along the roadside, some of the most colourful stock I have seen. The sheep, in particular, came in black, greys, browns, white, creamy-yellow, a range of fawns and beiges and red, really red, at least Hereford red. Many sported a combination of 2, 3 or 4 colours.  I have never seen sheep like that before and the horses and cattle were almost as colourful. There was a small river and a couple of minor creeks rushing the snowmelt to lower pastures, and the trees and grass were a mix of dazzling greens and the shady glades looked very inviting in the heat. To add to the natural beauty, there were quaint pagodas perched high at the very precipices of some mountains, a scattering of yurts here and there, and a couple of temples near the lake. All very interesting and picturesque. It was an entrancing day in the country even if the administrative hassles were frustrating and really quite ludicrous.

There was a fair bit of debate on the way back to town about what to do next. Our guide said it was too early to go to the station and suggested we go to a water park, but we were both pooped and didn’t want to do any more walking or climbing any more steps. We also got the feeling that the driver didn’t want to extend too much and the guide said we should give him an extra 100RMB for his time. We weren’t worried about the money, but just wanted to sit down with a cold drink for a while so we finally settled on a bar and we shouted them both a drink.

We sat and talked a strange mixture of language, signing and interpretation and when we were sufficiently recovered, it was off to the station. Another long walk to get to the entrance and then the multiple passport checking, X-rays and security hassles got into full swing. An hour or so later, we were inside the ginormous waiting room with 4 hours to go and huge crowds occupying almost every seat. Interesting that half of them left on the next train and the rest left on the following one and we got very lonely all alone in the mammoth waiting room. Another young couple came in just before our train was starting to board and the four of us set off with our baggage to climb two sets of at least 100 steps each up to the platform. The other couple were young and strong, but ended up as whacked as we were by the time we finally made it to the top. More hassles about our tickets and passports, but it was finally sorted and the train got under way about half an hour later than intended. Not sure if that was just because of us, but soon after we got our papers back, the train headed out into the night.

It is now 1am and I am going to sleep. More drama are possible ahead at the border - a process scheduled to take more than 8 hours!!!