Krasnoyarsk through Mongolia

Hello to everyone from a hostel basement in Seoul! It's been a whirlwind of a month or month and a half since I've last written. I spent a week on Lake Baikal, a month in Mongolia, and now upwards of a week in East Asia. In less than a month I will board a cargo ship in Shanghai and make my way across the Pacific for two weeks towards Seattle. The end is near. It feels weird. I put on a few pounds and got a few more wrinkles on my face. I met a lot of people and I made a few friends. I wrote a few songs. I heard some really awesome sounds. I trust myself a bit more - if I can take care of myself for six months in countries where I don't speak the language, without any support system at all, then I can take care of myself in the USA.

I don't have any huge takeaways for you here. No huge revelations. Just me taking it one day at a time, trying to squeeze as much juice as I can out of this traveling life while also keeping myself rested and healthy.

KRASNOYARSK - MAY 28-30
Krasnoyarsk is yet another Siberian city. It has some nice hiking but it was so hot when I was there that I didn't do that. I was only there for two nights. Truthfully, I was pretty done with Siberia at that point.

Notable events include:
- Seeing Freya, the Kiwi who I met in Perm, again.
- Eating a salad. They don't seem to believe much in salads in Russia so we had to make one ourselves at the hostel. It had fresh, uncooked vegetables that weren't drenched in mayonnaise. A real treat.

NIGHT TRAIN TO IRKUTSK, RUSSIA - MAY 30-31
And another night on the Trans Siberian Express! Meeting new friends and watching birch and larch trees fly by the window for hours.

Notable events include:
- My evening with my compartment-mates Mikhail and Sergei. Neither spoke much English. Mikhail was 60 years old and had a big moustache like Stalin and a flask with a big sticker of Stalin on it. He pointed at the flask and then at his moustache proudly. "STALEEN! STALEEN GOOD!" Then he pointed to his flask and said "Home. Home make." Poured me a cup and mimed downing it in one go, and then said "adin!" (Russian for "one!"). We took a shot of his moonshine and then looked out the window at the birch and larch passing by. Every fifteen minutes or so we would make eye contact again and smile and drink more moonshine, then go back to looking out the window. Five hours passed like this.

IRKUTSK, RUSSIA - MAY 31-JUNE 01
Irkutsk is the major city near Lake Baikal, which is the largest freshwater lake in the world. It was a welcome change from the Siberian cities. The architecture changed. There was all of a sudden color and sometimes even decorative columns on buildings. The people would sometimes smile on the street - or maybe there were just a lot of foreigners. It began to feel a bit more like Asia. Buryat culture is heavily present near Lake Baikal, and Buryat culture is a lot like Mongolian culture.

Notable events include:
- Seeing Boris and Amy, two of the travelers I met in Yekaterinburg, as well as Freya. At this point Freya and I were basically traveling together.
- Going to Listvyanka, a town on the shores of Lake Baikal. There I ate a lot of smoked fish, dunked my head in the lake (brr!), and took a short hike.
- Meeting Diedre, a 70 year old Australian woman who traveled every year and had some amazing stories.

KHUZHIR, RUSSIA - JUNE 01-03
I spent a few nights on the island of Olkhon on Lake Baikal, in the town of Khuzhir. Khuzhir is very undeveloped - the dirt roads are bumpy and the grocery store started accepting credit cards sometime this winter, because all the travel websites from last year assured me it would not. Olkhon was so peaceful, a great change from the bustle of cities that I had been in for the past eight months. There was plenty of time to just sit and listen to silence.

Notable events include:
- A tour of the north of Olkhon Island featuring some incredible cliffs. The water of Lake Baikal is so clear - maybe the clearest water I had seen until I got to Mongolia.
- Seeing a fox about 10 meters away.
- Taking a banya (sauna) with Boris and Freya and Jackie, a woman from Switzerland. A difference between European saunas and the banya is that in the banya you hit your back with birch branches to stimulate blood flow. Also, the cold water in the middle room was straight from Lake Baikal.
- Eating pozhe, a traditional buryat dumpling.

IRKUTSK, RUSSIA (again) - JUNE 03-04
Notable events include:
- Stepping inside a church on a Sunday. There was a service going on. Orthodox services are sung in their entirety. (Audio on the sounds page)
- The train ride from Irkutsk to Ulan Ude is the most beauitful part of the Trans Siberian, in my opinion. Lake Baikal is on your left hand side for the majority of the journey and makes the landscape much more enjoyable than the birch and larch that makes up the majority of the rest.

ULAN UDE, RUSSIA - JUNE 04-07
Ulan Ude is the center of Buddhism in Russia. There are Buddhist symbols on fences, contrasting sharply with the huge statue of the militantly atheist Lenin's head in the center of town. It was interesting to see the iconography of Russian/Buryat Buddhism, which is very similar to Mongolian Buddhism but not quite the same.

Notable events include:
- Seeing the statue of Lenin's head. It is apparently the largest bust statue in the world.
- Drinking kvas, a traditional fermented drink that tastes kind of like kombucha.
- Going with Freya to Ivolginsky Datsan, the main monastery in Russia. Inside is a self mummified monk. He told his disciples it was time for him to die, to lock him in a room and to come back in 30 years. He then started meditating. 30 years later Russia was Soviet, and when the vault was opened the monks found that his skin color was not the skin color of a dead man. Fearing that the Soviets would not take kindly to news of this "miracle," they buried him in an unmarked grave. He was exhumed again in the 90s, and scientists have confirmed that he is indeed nowhere near as decomposed as he should be. He has been dead for over 100 years but the monks swear he is alive, that his hair and nails don't grow but his body is still body temperature and sometimes he sweats. I can say with certainty that his skin color is definitely not that of a dead person.
- Seeing Diedre, the older Australian woman, again! She came into the hostel and said "I heard someone singing and thought 'Wow, there are a lot of singers on the backpacking circuit this time. And then I listened a bit more and realized it was you!'"

ULAN BAATAAR, MONGOLIA - JUNE 07-09
There are 3 million people in Mongolia and half of them reside in Ulan Baataar. The city is growing rapidly and struggling with keeping traditional Mongolian culture while adjusting to modernity. There is a lot of Russian influence and a lot of Chinese influence, but most Mongolians I talked to see Russia as their friend and China as their enemy. They remember the time when Mongolia was the most powerful nation on earth but know that time is gone.

Notable events include:
- Being told "Don't ever trust a stranger," by the first Mongolian I met, the one who gave me a ride from the bus stop to my hostel.
- Seeing Nina, a backpacker I met in Yekaterinburg.

NORTH MONGOLIA - JUNE 09-17
Freya and I took a two week tour of Mongolia another with two other backpackers, Elliott and Florence. We had a guide, Mando, and a driver, Daugo. The amazing thing about Mongolia is that it is so empty. We would drive down paved roads and see one man every fifteen or twenty minutes riding a horse or a motorbike and herding sheep, goats, or yaks. Maybe once or twice a day we would pass through a town with 500 people. A few times a day we might see another settlement with 50 people. When we were on unpaved roads, we saw significantly less people.

Notable events include:
- Eating mutton. So much mutton. Mutton every day.
- Sleeping in gers (yurts) owned by nomadic families almost every day.
- Sitting by Lake Khovsgol. It was even clearer and cleaner than Lake Baikal.
- Learning a Mongolian card game from Mando.
- Horseback riding next to Lake Khovsgol.
- Freya's birthday!
- Seeing reindeer.
- Seeing 3000-5000 year old gravestones called deer stones. They weren't in a museum. They were just out in the middle of nowhere.
- Swimming in the White Lake.
- Climbing down into the caldera of an inactive volcano (don't worry, Mom).
- Climbing down into a cave formed by volcanic activity.
- Teaching my traveling companions Texas Hold Em. We ended up playing that or gin rummy almost every night.
- A night at a hot springs.
- Seeing Erdene Zuu Monastery, the oldest active monastery in Mongolia. The imagery in Mongolian Buddhism is very similar to Tibetan Buddhism but different enough to show how traditional shamanism influenced it.

MONGOLIAN GOBI - JUNE 17-22
The Gobi is much different than the north of Mongolia. No surprise, one is plains and lakes and the other is a desert.

Notable events include:
- Seeing camels! They have two humps in the Mongolian Gobi. 94% of camels in the world only have one hump (dromedaries). The vast majority of the two-hump camels live in the Gobi.
- Helping a nomadic family put up a ger.
- Learning and practicing Mongolian wrestling.
- Hanging out with a foal for a full day. He wouldn't leave the nomadic family camp.
- Stargazing. There were more stars in the Gobi than I have ever seen before. That's what happens with literally no light pollution, I guess.
- Seeing a monastery that was destroyed by communists during the Purge. Hundreds of monks were murdered. I sat in meditation for a little while in one of the ruined temples. As I closed my eyes, I saw a spirit approaching me. I wasn't sure of his intention - I was definitely getting some malevolent vibes. So I told him that I was not here to mess with anything, only here to observe and make sure something like this never hapened again. Then he disappeared.
- The Flaming Cliffs.
- Riding camels.
- Climbing up a 1000 foot sand dune that had a 60 degree grade. It took 26 minutes and I was dying at the end.
- Seeing two ice valleys. The ice hasn't melted all the way, even in June.
- Seeing carving on rocks from around 5000 years ago. Again, they weren't in a museum! They were still in the same place where they had been carved.
- The White Stupa.

ULAN BAATAAR, MONGOLIA (again) - JUNE 22-JULY 01
Notable events include:
- Coming back from the tour and having something besides mutton.
- Taking a day trip up to a national reserve to see the last truly wild horses in the world (mustangs were domesticated and then got free. These were never domesticated).
- Seeing a throat singing performance (see the sounds page for audio).
- Going to the big black market.
- Meeting a Mongolian at a bar who heard I played bass and offered me a gig the next day at a music festival. Their bass player had just dropped out. He introduced me to the rest of the band who were at the bar as well. The lead singer and I had almost gotten into a fight because he was drunk and rowdy twenty minutes earlier. I went to bed at 4 am after hanging with the band all night, then got up at 9 to learn the songs before leaving at 11:30 to go to sound check. We play the gig, I play OK, only miss a few changes. Then the guitar player tells me that the lead singer is the son of the President of Mongolia.

I'm actually in Seoul now but I don't want this to run on too long, so I'll talk about Beijing and Qingdao and Seoul in the next update. There will probably be only two more! On through to Tokyo or Osaka and the other all the way back home to Oakland/San Francisco. Pretty incredible. I traced a circle walking a straight line.

Much Love,
Tennessee