First Steps in Africa

It was a long day of travel from Sevilla, where I spent one night to see a friend. Fortunately, all my connections went smoothly. A city bus brought me to el Prado de San Sebastian bus station, and I got on a bus to Tarifa twenty minutes later. In Tarifa, I walked through town, blown over by gusts of wind which attracted all the kite surfers, which in turn supported the hundreds of surf shops and schools along the boulevard, and got a ticket on the 1PM ferry.

Morocco's port city Tanger was nicer than I thought. I expected a dirty rambling city built on hustled money and sucker tourists. Just the cynic in me, I guess.

It was a bit dirty and a bit hustled, but a bit charming as well. Me and two Swedes wandered around the medina and the souks. I had to drag my luggage around, making me sweat even more in the heat. There were no lockers at the train station where I had booked an overnight train to Marrakech.

In fact, I hadn't showered since the day before in Sevilla, and my general feeling of hygiene was even worse due to the long stretch of traveling.

I found a barber near the main mosque and got shaved clean for $1.50, then we asked our way to a hammam, having to pay off a little kid one shop owner sent to lead us, and another guide who latched onto us and did the talking.

The bathhouse was full, apparently, but we still got to shower for another $1.50, no doubt a tourist extortion, but standing in the stalls with exposed rusty pipes felt like heaven after dragging around my guitar and pack through the heat and the sun, the souks crammed with people selling everything from cigarettes to steel lamps to spices to sides of lamb.

It's the middle of Ramadan too. Needless to say, it's not easy to find a beer, and not so easy to find a restaurant except for a handful of places that overcharge foreign infidels like myself and my two Swedish friends. We had a couple small meals, one in an outdoor cafe that's been around for 200 years, one in a small shady alley where the small shady man insisted he had no menu and quoted us prices that were much larger than the small portions.

Such is the fate of a tourist.

But for everyone that squeezed a few extra dirhams out of us, there were an equal number of people who were genuinely kind. Two young men stopped to chat with us and were interested in my guitar. They gave us advice and asked for nothing in return and were happy to practice their English. The two taxi drivers were happy to give us the rundown of the area in Spanish after we negotiated the fare, and the man who was getting a shave in the barber shop before me insisted on showing off his 59 year-old strength in a powerful handshake, and grinning with the few teeth he had. "American? Welcome!"

I did seem to get many warm responses from the many people who asked where we were from. The Swedes basically just confused most of the people when they explained where they were from, but everyone who heard I was American was enthusiastic.

Good to know we still have some rapport somewhere, even if you have to squeeze through sweltering alleys to find it.

Great Success!

Contrary to my general opinion on long-distance buses, I enjoyed the ride from Urumqi to Almaty very much.

The best part was that I was leaving China, which I was fed up with, mostly due to unbearable train rides of inconceivable length, the frustrating pursuit of a baffling girl, Kafka-esque visa processes, a long-ignored desire to move westward, and the overwhelming omnipresence of gray sprawls and humanity.

The bus had only two rows of bunks, making each wider and more comfortable than the three-rowed buses I had previously been on in China. The passengers were Kazakh, making them less prone to spitting, screaming on cell phones, and smoking on the bus.

Leaving Urumqi, I felt wonderful, thinking that I had gotten a lot out of the city, and I had nothing to regret about leaving. Reclining on my bed, I watched as a young boy clomped through snow in shoes far too large for him. Two pairs of beautiful Uighur girls approached each other on the street and kissed the others on their cheeks in perfect unison. I said goodbye to Chinese characters, BYDs, and filthy icicles.

I had plenty to read, the 1200 dense pages of Atlas Shrugged, and a headlamp to light up the pages when the sun fell.

Exiting China through their border, I was once again held up, my passport scrutinized, the supervisor called over to clear me. I expected it at this point. Entering Kazakhstan, a guard pulled me aside, filled out my form for me, and had me skip everyone else in line. “Welcome to Kazakhstan!” another said as he waved me through the exit gate.

It seemed like as soon as we got into Kazakhstan, the sky was blue and there were snowy peaks in the distance. We passed untamed open land beyond lines of trucks waiting to clear customs and get into China.

The weather changed from spring warmth, to gusty winds, to rain, and eventually snow.

The people on the bus were nice to me. I stood out, but not as a freak to be gawked at, but as someone to be interested in. People talked to me instead of wordlessly taking my photo, and one guy bought me a meal at a rest stop because I hadn’t changed any money yet.

When we arrived in Almaty, snow had begun falling. I had the phone number of a CouchSurfer, but no address, and no phone on which to call, and no money with which to buy a SIM card. I wandered around in the darkness for a bit before some of the passengers insisted on putting me into a sort of taxi. They threw some luggage into a massive van, and a kid drove me to an ATM, then let me use his phone to call my host, and dropped me off, no charge.

Not a bad welcome into Kazakhstan.

I Was Right!

I hate to admit it, but I was right. Dead right.

The bus from Vientiane to Kunming was miserable. It was about 40 hours over two nights. They call it a "sleeper" bus. I doubt if anyone got a wink of sleep at night.

Bunks are thin and short. Maybe tiny Asians can fit in them, but I can't. At night, it got cold, and condensation built up on the window, which I had to lie against, and a draft came in, despite the windows being as closed as possible.

Besides being cramped, my blanket, though thick and heavy enough, was both too short and too thin for the bunk that was cramming me anyway. The D-shaped railing on the side was necessary to keep me from rolling out of my second tier bunk on the switchbacks all through the Lao hills, but it also was supremely uncomfortable to keep rolling into.

Plus the roads were bumpy, windy, and often just short stretches of dirt.

The good news is that napping was not only possible but almost mandatory during the day. I was so exhausted from tossing and turning in vain to find a comfy position that I did have a couple decent naps.

We stopped to piss in the woods now and then, and food was taken care of at roadside restaurants that served Chinese slop under a cement roof. I've eaten worse though. After crossing into China, we stopped in the sunny and clean border town of Mohan and I ate breakfast with two teachers from Ireland, and a Malaysian guy on business or on holiday. He never cleared up his ambiguity. One Irish guy went into the restroom and came back declaring it "top 5 worst bathrooms, easy." And this is after two years in China and a 6 week holiday through SE Asia.

The claim stood until dinner time at a low dim feeding hall, when he called the former top 5 worst bathroom "Disneyland" compared to the cement shit-trough that passed as a toilet.

It was a quality operation, this transport. We took the small windy roads in China to avoid paying toll fees on the smooth highways, and we sat at a gas station outside of Kunming for 3 hours to avoid getting in at an ungodly early morning hour. When we finally got moving, we got in at 5:30AM.

No Contest!

I'm on my way overland to Beijing. I spent yesterday on a bus, and yesterday night on a train. I get on another train tonight. I'm in Bangkok now, and tomorrow morning I'll be in Vientiane. I get my second Chinese visa and then it's a bus for probably two days until I get to Kunming, China. In Kunming I get on a train for two days to Beijing.

The worst part about Laos is the absence of trains. I can't believe anyone would willingly take a bus in Asia when a train is available. Even sleeping next to a smashed cockroach exoskeleton in the overheated top-shelf coffin on the tracks between Hanoi and Hue was better than your average bus ride.

Bus drivers in SE Asia honk incessantly at absolutely anything animate in the road ahead of them. Awful local pop music blares out of speakers that you have no control over, and if you're extra unlucky, they also play the horrific videos that go with the songs and you can't pull your eyes away. Don't ever count on getting sleep on a bus.

When you corner, inevitably at too high a speed, you slide in your narrow plastic seat and slip over the armrest. For some reason, buses are extra rattly on what seem like decent roads. I don't know about other people, but when I sit too long my shins start hurting just below the kneecap. It doesn't make any sense to me, but it happens nonetheless.

Long distance trains, on the other hand, do not honk at all or corner too fast. They don't stop every ten minutes to pick up more people - in fact, traffic stops for them - and you will never slide out of your bunk or seat.

I'm not going to say I sleep great on trains. I usually can't get to bed too early, and wind up only getting really great sleep just before I have to wake up in the morning, but I can still sleep a bit, and at the very least laying on a mattress in my own berth with my legs stretched out is heaven enough.

It's no contest for me. I took one sleeper bus into China, and woke up in a multi-mile traffic jam with a Mongolian playing cards on my lap because my bunk location made for a good table. I'm gonna have to take a sleeping bus through Laos to get to the border, thank god drugs are so easy to come by there. I've talked to people that have just gotten off such buses in Laos and have nothing good to say about them. Some girls even said they got shoved into a multi-person bunk with a stranger.

I'll deal with it of course, but I'm going to be looking forward to getting on the train for two days once I get to Kunming, enjoying my personal space, the smooth ride and gentle rocking, the restaurant car with cold beer, and something at the end of the line worth traveling to.

Buses Buses Buses

It was time to get out of China. I was in the south and Vietnam was the next logical step. We left Yangshuo at 11:30AM on a bus and got into Nanning, the provincial capitol around 6PM. You wouldn't think it's too hard to find a taxi at a long-distance bus station after a bus gets in - and it wasn't - but it was difficult to get someone to let us into one for some reason.

After collaborating with a British couple we were on the bus with, we got some guy to get some other guy to let us in his van. We all spent the night at an apartment hostel, quite similar to the one I stayed at in Busan on what was technically the first night of this trip. It was run by a talkative Texan named Weston who had questionable but entertaining parenting impulses.

The next morning we had another problem getting a taxi because the massive boulevards were jam-packed with such a torrent of vehicles that it was uncertain whether one would actually be able to stop to pick us up. We did make it though, and boarded a bus to Hanoi, again with the British couple.

Two days on a bus is not my idea of fun. You stop at piss-rank gang bathrooms and can buy only imitation Pringles and shrink-wrapped meat and flat Red Bull to sustain yourself. I guess it could've been worse though.

When we got to the Chinese-Vietnamese border, we were shuttled off the bus to the first processing building on the Chinese side by long covered golf carts. The Chinese official had a hard time believing that the handsome, bearded, long-haired man in my passport was the same handsome, clean-cut, short-haired guy standing in front of him. Just like the offical when entering China. Fortunately his superior came over and waved me through.

We were shuttled to the Vietnamese processing building, breezed through, and were shuttled onto another bus on the Vietnamese side. All in all the border process was like a casual drive through a leafy mountain park, a world away from the penitentiary-like marches on the Mongol/Russian and Mongol/Chinese borders.

The "bus stop" in Hanoi was a wide street even more choked with scooters and traffic than any street I'd seen in China. It was borderline inconceivable how a coach bus like ours could navigate the beat-up alleys full of scooters coming towards us, and even pull U-turns across roads that seem too dense to walk across. I guess if you're big enough, anything will stop for you.

As if two days on a bus weren't enough, Adam insisted on getting the hell out of Hanoi ASAP. He claimed it was just another city, but I thought it was possibly the most interesting city I've ever been to based on the few hours and one night we spent there. I can visit more on the way back.

We took a bus, part of a three-day tour, the next day to Halong Bay, a world-famous climbing destination of thousands of gumdrop karst pinacles towering above turquoise waters. Judging by the tour buses and hordes of tourists, it's also a world-famous tourist trap. Understandably so, as beautiful as it is, but that's another story.

The Border By Bus

Old Korean buses go to Russia to become new Russian buses. City buses running through the cities I stopped in had partially scraped off Korean lettering, and I even saw a bus from Gyeong-sang Buk-do, the province I used to live in. It really warmed my heart.

Long distance buses in Korea are extremely comfortable. They usually have spacious reclining chairs, three to a row. Sadly, it wasn't one of those buses that Adam and I took across the border to Mongolia and Ulaanbaatar.

I got into Ulan-Ude at 6AM and took a taxi to the opera house to meet Adam and get on our bus. It was an old Korean bus, sure enough, but it was four seats to a row with about a foot of leg space between the edge of your seat and the back of the next.

I didn't really notice the problem until the guy ahead of me reclined all the way. Whatever else can be said about this bus we were on, the seat really reclined a lot. Bad news for my legs. I couldn't get comfortable enough to really get a good nap, which is a shame, because the roads were actually smooth enough to sleep on. Theoretically.

I sat next a Russian Buryat girl on her way to finish her final year at the university in Ulaanbaatar. She was a strange case. She had light eyes, bleach-blond hair, and what looked like bleached skin. I guess she wasn't a big fan of the appearance her race bestowed upon her.

Adam was three seats up since I wasn't sure if I was going to get the last couple days out of my Russian visa and wound up buying our tickets separately.

It was a twelve-hour trip. It doesn't seem bad compared to three days on a train, but twelve hours is still a long time. About two of those hours were eaten up by customs procedures. Twice, Russian officials got on our bus to check our passports and visas, then we went through the customs building, and were checked once again.

The Mongolian side was a lot quicker. We went through the customs building and then an official checked our documents once we were on the bus again. It was at least half as long. Communism - 0, democracy - 1.

We immediately saw horses roaming the plains and hills on the Mongolian side, and cruised through run-down shack towns occasionally before stopping at a heavily Westernized Mongolian restaurant for a long overdue lunch. It was the first thing we had eaten since we left about 9 hours previously. My eyes were almost bigger than my stomach, but I finished my beer, fried chicken-layered-on-beef-and-cheese, salad and rosemary potatoes.

By the time we got to Ulaanbaatar, we still had a long ride ahead of us. The traffic in the city is a complete fucking mess. It was like we were on an overcrowded and really slow conveyor belt, but we finally got in and were met by the woman who ran the guesthouse we booked for our first couple nights.