i'm gaining momentum

dear reader, it has been a long while since i mentioned anything to do with flying eastward for the journey of my life. you would be forgiven for thinking that it's an idea fallen by the wayside. e'en when i first considered it; i wondered if it were to be one of those things that i talked about doing but never followed it through.

well, here i am to update you. firstly and simply; fear not proxy-traveller, it is still going ahead. the silence has been only a by-product of how the governments and immigration services of countries with ancient communist histories work. russia and china seem to have a strange dislike for organising in advance. you can't get visas or train tickets or flights or hotels or anything more than 45 days prior. so a quick burst of mathematics and a consideration of the length of a 30 day holiday and, yes, you've got it... some, well, a lot of the planning has to be unnervingly last minute. the tiny organisational goblin in my head has been habitually biting his nails for the last eight months, but to be honest i've revelled in it. this holiday was born out of an inner drive to be more spontaneous. i think we've managed that with the "planning a 9500 mile journey across the darkest reaches of asia in the fortnight leading up to it" thing.

okay, anal mathematicians, a lot of it is more than 2 weeks in advance, but where's the drama in that prose?

matthew and i have in the last week and in the week ahead come by: visas for russia, mongolia and china, accomodation down the road from the kremlin, train tickets along a ten-thousand mile stretch of threadbare railway, a loop tour of the altai mountains and mongolian gobi desert flats on horse and camel back, a 10k walk along the peaks & troughs of the greatest wall of china and, of course, aeroplane seats to moscow and from beijing home.

we will see and feel extreme cold, tropical humidity, the deepest and clearest lake in the world, mountains, valleys, deserts, the largest expanse of sky.

in my reading about the land i am to pass inconspicuously through i have found descriptions of a stark and ghostly place. (my particular fascination has been the open spaces of siberia). siberia is a sterile desolate gap with a swarming, rich and long history. an open prison in recent times, and a raucous barbarian kingdom before that.

i wanted to share a couple of passages from the book i'm currently reading. they are entirely copied from "in siberia" by colin thubron, the most entrancing book i've read so far about this world. read on...

"its true name is unknown. perhaps it never had one. but the civilisation buried in the pazyryk valley was the easternmost piece in the vast scythian world which by the seventh century BC stretched from from china to the danube. the scythians were indo-europeans: a tall, hirsute people who at their zenith tormented the persian empire and subjugated the medes. ever since they touched the sphere of greece, the fear or romanticism of historians staged them as barbarian nomads...
one day somebody - perhaps here in the altai - conceived the idea of no longer driving a horse, but of sitting on its back... they fought on stocky geldings, firing twenty poisoned arrows a minute at full gallop ambidextrously... their only permanance was death, in the great heaped tombs called kurgans. and at pazyryk, by the action of water filtering into the underground chambers, they were frozen solid in time."

and

"... blue must be the colour to which all others purified in time.
it is the peculiar clarity of [lake] baikal which elicits this. as the transparent and slightly alkaline water deepens, other colours are filtered through the light spectrum, until only blue, the least absorbant, remains... lying over the fault-line between two tectonic plates, whose separation is gradually dropping its floor lower, the waters plunge to a depth of over one-mile: by far the deepest lake on earth. its statistics stupefy. it harbours nearly one fifth of all the fresh water on the planet: equal to the five great lakes of america combined, or to the baltic sea. if baikal were to be emptied and all the world's rivers diverted to its basin, they would not fill it within a year.
it is, too, the oldest of the lakes... it has endured the tertiary era, for over twenty-five million years. of the 2,000 species inhabiting its depth, 1,200 are unique to it... but common fish which swim in from its rivers disappear into unexplained extinction. its waters seem to cherish the strange, but kill the ordinary"

now tell me you don't want to come too...

in your absence i will write all i can while i travel, with small hope that you may join me there when i get back.

'kay bye.