Eating Vegan in Moscow: Highs, Lows, and Our New Second Homeby Randi / July 2, 2017
After Moscow, we began the part of our trip touring what Republicans would probably refer to as the ‘real Russia’ even though all parts of a country are real. A short high-speed train to Vladimir began our visit to Russia’s Golden Ring, small towns that used to be hugely important cities shaping Russia’s early history. And I mean early – Vladimir was founded in the elevensies by Prince Vladimir Monochromatic (something like that) of Kiev as a fortress town just because he was like ahh I need a fortress to protect my eastern lands and I’m all one color this is terriburrrr. Oh it was Monomakh. Anyway Vladdy was satisfied with his namebrand town as a fortress but his grandson Andrei could never be satisfied (and he also isn’t heeere how many Broadway references in one sentence can we do) so Andrei stormed Kiev and stole all the master craftsmen away and forced them to Vladimir to make it the new happening place. It became the Russian capital for a bit and had even more people than London at that time. London was so bum. The city’s population boomed as it became a political center and then a religious center, but then its population disappeared by the 1400s. Not like ah they were taken by aliens, just it shrank back to near nothingness because of Moscow being close and having the good opera and ballet and stuff. Today it is an industrial center with actually a completely vegan little cafe that does amazing wraps, a much more stable population, and lots of Medieval sites, mostly cathedrals, as most of the sites in this land are.
We got to Vladimir at about 8:30pm, so we went straight to our hotel to drop our bags and then find food. The hotel was called the Kinolenta, and I should have guessed before, knowing that Kino means movie theatre, that I would like this place a lot – it was indeed movie themed! There were little film reel decals everywhere and they had a big screen tv at one end of the main hallway with a few chairs. Okay that is as far as the theme goes but for this little town that doesn’t even have a movie theatre it was pretty cool. In our room, there was a photo of London, complete with a double decker bus, so that was incredibly comforting and such a fun coincidence. It was technically a hotel and it was a lot nicer than our last hostel (dreck), but it still had a hostel vibe – shared bathroom (at least just with the room next door (which happened to be our cousin’s (so I guess I can’t complain about that))) and SUPER LOUD PEOPLE. After we came back from dinner at 11:30pm, there were about 20 adults having some sort of meeting in the kitchen – which was across from our room – while their children ran around the halls. Ughhh people what is your liiiife be quiettttt. I thought maybe I’d get up early and exercise or something and give the noise right back to them but then they were up meeting again in the kitchen at like 7am! Dammit loud people who don’t need much sleep!
Anyway, aside from those people the hotel was fine and the staff was very nice. The woman who checked us in spoke no English but we had an okay time. Since leaving Moscow, we are really seeing the payoff from studying Russian. Thank god we did. We would be scah rewed out here where we are now. So we dropped our bags and went out on the town of Vladimir, which actually had a lot of town to its name. Lots of restaurants were still open, there was a McDonalds AND a Burger King (the boys of course got soft-serve at McDonalds for the equivalent of like 40 cents and I’ve never been so jealous you know soft-serve is my favorite and I haven’t even been able to have even hard ice cream on this trip) (okay that’s not true I did have ‘ice cream’ in Moscow at Avocado but it was completely freezer burn like they bought it 10 years ago and I was the first dunce to order it). We walked through the main sites – namely the Golden Gate, which we would be visiting the next morning – and took some night time pics on our way to a HappyCow recommended place called Khilinki Dom, which means Tavern House. It doesn’t have anything particularly stand out for vegans, but it is a Georgian restaurant which means easy to find veggie side dishes. Unfortunately the bread wasn’t like my babushka friend’s in St. Petersburg, but it was still bread and I won’t turn it away. I got a dish of rice with chopped peppers and tomatoes, which was pretty good, and a plate of grilled vegetables that I didn’t take a picture of because it would have been ridiculous – it was half a tomato, half a red pepper, half a hunk of eggplant, and half a zucchini, grilled as is. It wasn’t bad.
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After stocking up on water and apples at the biggest supermarket I’ve seen in a while (they had Alpro soy milk too! I had a baby vanilla one for dessert!), we had a lovely night listening to the kitchen meeting. The next morning we saw all the Vladdy sights, including the Golden Gate. Vladimir was once ringed entirely with earthen rampants, a bit of which remains that we climbed up. The whole city was protected by these defensive walls, and the Golden Gate is the part that still remains. We scrambled up the steep side of the rampant to get to the top and once there learned that there’s a pedestrian-friendly path on the other side.
Above the Gate is a Cathedral, I mean I guess it’s all connected but there’s a Cathedral and it’s another one of those Deposition of the Robe ones, because it was really important to Russians to commemorate where their robes went. In there, there’s a small museum that was 100% worth it because there’s a huge diorama along one wall that tells the story of Vladimir with lights and an audio track. We arrived at a good time when we were the only people in that room so they played the English track! And they turned off the lights because no one was looking at the other stuff on the other walls so it was LEGIT. I don’t really remember what it was about but like in the 1200s the Tatars attacked by climbing up the ramparts and being like ahh are we wearing Scottish plaid or do we have bad teeth oh neither there aren’t enough r’s!!! But Vladimir stayed strong and still was important religiously. I don’t know I was so distracted by the cool flashing lights.
What else did we see. Oh we scrambled up the super steep rampart next to the Gate for the view of the town center, which was really the theatre and this big PECO building! Cool that they provide electricity to both Philadelphia and Vladimir.
PECO!
random Vladimir cherry sculpture I like
We also went to the Old Vladimir museum housed in a 19th century water tower, which was cool. It had a little room on each floor up the winding stairs and then had a lovely panorama view at the top. The museum showed off such…interesting, shall we say, dioramas of what life was like in Vlad 100s of years ago. Apparently old-timey men with ridiculous bicycles flirted with Elizabeth Hurley while other women had unfortunate hairdos but gorgeous desks.
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One thing I’ve noticed in every Russian town we’ve visited so far is that they really REALLY hate the Nazis, which I like seeing. I mean of course they do considering how many people they lost in WWII, it’s really insane how many, but it’s nice to see constant reminders of anti-Nazism, especially when my own country is failing to do the same and even demonstrating overt anti-Semitism in things that should be all-inclusive like the NYC Pride Parade. Raging over that. F you Linda Sarsour.
After seeing all the Vladimir sights we wanted to see that day (lots of things are closed on Mondays and/or Tuesdays all over Russia), we went back to the hotel to grab our daypacks (they kindly stored our enormous packs for the next 24 hours) and went to catch the <1 hour minibus to Suzdal, the next of the Golden Ring towns on our agenda.
I think this guy IS Vladimir no just kidding
that isn’t Vladimir that’s Lenin he’s real big here
On the way to the Vladimir Bus Terminal (conveniently right across the street from the train station), we passed this sign on the main street:
 we literally walked into this! vegetarian kitchen!
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do you even veggie, bro? |
I MEAN. Could I BE any more excited? What a freaking fortuitous turn of events! I had read about Veggie Bro on HappyCow (it was literally the only other listing besides Khilinki Dom in the entire region) but it didn’t have an address listed so we had trouble internetting it. But it was RIGHT on the main street, on Bolshoya Moskovaya, I think it was called, and we just chanced upon it! So lucky! Of course we went in and luckily everyone was hungry so we got a lot. The man working the register was very nice and spoke the best English we’d heard in Vladimir, so he helped us order. They have various burgers and salads but really the draw there is the make-your-own wraps, because they are AMAZING. Seriously, after that sad sad Pret a Manger-style wrap I had on my first day in Moscow, this wrap was a g-d delight. You have to grill them, guys, that’s the secret to deliciousness and keeping them from getting soggy ugh that’s the worst. And amazing fillings. Husband got a seitan burger, Cousin got a falafel wrap, and I concocted a lavash wrap with seitan, shredded carrots, cabbage, cucumber, tomato, pickles, lots of fresh herbs (mostly dill, which I think I’m allergic to but that’s not part of this tale), and a secret Veggie Bro sauce. It was like a Greek gyro/god.
all vegan goodies! 
i wuv you wrap! wuv you! |
chef salad! 
pretty painting on the wall at Veggie Bro! |
pretty burger! not as good as wrap but still seitany goodness mmmm
It was SO GOOD. Erma P GERD. I also got the ‘chef salad’ which was just lettuce, beets, and hummus, with a SHITTONNE of paprika tossed around the plate (Jojo don’t look you’ll die!) so that was a little sad looking but I was due for some lettuce and hummus (which 90% of the time is what I eat for dinner when I’m by myself) so it was fine. Man alive I loved this wrap. Husband’s burger was good but the wraps are where it’s at. So obsessed. The lone young man cooking all the food back there is a talent.
Full and happy, we bought our minibus tickets for Suzdal. There are minis between the two towns every half hour or so, so you just rock up to the window when you want to go and you get on the next one. Don’t worry about them selling out, because apparently they don’t have a limit to how many tickets they sell for each bus. We were given seats 15, 16, and 17, but the seats only went up to #16! Then as more and more people got on we realized that it is a standing room only situation. Husband and I took turns standing and it was okay because I was listening to The Great Comet on my headphones (err day err day) even though I don’t think Russians on public transit know about headphones yet. It was packed full of smelly people as usual with that very distinctive Russian man b.o. but I had the voice of Groban in my ear and seitan in my belly so it was okay. No just kidding I was super nauseous the whole time.
lol this is the dumbest picture but hey minibus fun times but no fun
We arrived in Suzdal at a train station literally in the middle of a field with nothing else as far as the eye could see. If Husband didn’t have his phone I don’t know how we’d be getting around. Seriously how did people travel before smartphones? How did I travel across Europe in college without internet! I can’t even believe that was me. Despite appearances, our guesthouse was only a 20-minute walk away, down dirt roads and little streets with the most adorable houses, most of which had very intricate wood carvings decorating the exterior.
bus station in Suzdal
Cute carving on our guest house
Our guesthouse had a cute little rooster carving on the outside as well as a phone number to call in case the door was locked, which it was. Okay, but most travelers don’t have telephone access! Luckily we did, but guess what, lo and behold that number was out of service! We banged on the door for a good 10 minutes before deciding to go ask the neighbor if she could help. Five or 10 minutes after ringing the doorbell there, Neighbor Babushka comes out and speaks rapid fire Russian maybe apologizing? She was smiling and she had the keys to the guesthouse! She let us in and without stopping to breathe she explained how to use the stove, the samovar, the oven, the microwave, the television, all while speaking incredibly fast countryside Russian and I was like ahhh I have to peeee. Luckily when she showed us our room and starting explaining how to use things we would actually be using like the keys, something clicked in my brain and I ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD. Better than that, I communicated right back to her! We communicated the shit out of that conversation! I’m so proud. She seemed really proud of me too, I think. She didn’t slow down ever, btw, but every time we thanked her she would say no no I thank YOU! At least I think that’s what she said. I was sweating buckets throughout the entire conversation like my whole body was on red alert trying with every fiber to remember what I’d learned. I guess I learned something! I hated Neighbor Babushka when we were waiting outside in that sun and heat (first hot sunny day of course) but then we were BFF.
After that roller coaster of emotion, we hightailed it to the Suzdal Kremlin so we could see that and a museum before everything closed. Yes this is all still one day, the same day we saw all the things in Vladimir and ate that glorious wrap. The Suzdal Kremlin is not like the huge acreage of the Moscow one. This one is a very old fashioned white stone area with mostly cathedrals, including this beautiful blue-starred-onion-domed one that is one of the oldest cathedrals in all of Russia. I wrote on instagram that it was the oldest one but it’s one of the oldest ones okay just chill.
It’s quite cool that the architects had such fun with color and stars such a long time ago. Husband made a pun about this cathedral that I still have stomach pains over, many days later. He kept mentioning the ‘starry’ cathedral, which is funny/punny because it is covered with the gold stars of course but also because the Russian word for hella old is pronounced “starry” so you get it oh my belly oh oh oh the pain of his punning.
Oh outside the Kremlin was a honey-mead (this region is BIG On their mead and honey drinks) shop with MY FRIEND OUTSIDE!
Can you believe it? His famous line in Shrek is pretty much my most quoted thing ever so I was super pumped.
The Kremlin grounds reached on around a beautiful expanse of fields and river and it was really peaceful and lovely.
In some of the cathedrals were little museums full of more/endless religious iconography, including this one that I had a ball with trying to land the center square myself:
scale of 1-10 how bad is this like with religion
Husband and I also did a prom-style pose in the middle there but it’s too embarrassing to share here. I’ll share this guys cape though! Religious figures know how to cape but good:
hey jesus do you like my cape
On our lovely walk to our next site, we saw more lovely sprawling fields full of farmers as well as a tiny shack on the side of the road that had a legit kvass, mead, and other beverage brewing operation going, so of course we refer to it now as the funniest thing you can imagine if you were a fan of “30 Rock”:
The rural brewer
The rural brewer! Hopefully you said it in your head the correct way, which is “the ruhhh bruhhhr” . I crack myself up.
Next up was the Museum of Wooden Architecture, a hilariously cute outdoor museum site that has examples of real cabins and workshops and chapels and lighthouses as were used in regular domestic life of peasants in the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. All the structures were really used, taken from various villages in the region.
my kind of museum!
a peasant’s house
a well-to-do peasant’s house
It was such a great way to do museuming, especially since we lucked out with the weather this day. We saw the inside of a small peasant chapel, a regular peasant’s house, a ‘well-to-do’ peasant’s house, and the world’s biggest hamster wheel:
Guess what, it is indeed like a hamster wheel – but for hooomans! It’s connected to the well, and to lift the bucket up and down the human actually has to power the wheel just like a hamster ahhh I wish they’d let me try.
On the grounds, they had a cute little cafe and shop with lots of mead and honey jars and then something I thought would be for me – the seesaw! But as soon as I was about to sit on one end, I saw the saddest sign:
Children only! Fie! Fie upon your rules! I do love that that sign probably was the result of experience, though.
For dinner that evening, we went to a relatively famous (for this one-horse town (actually, sadly, they did have horse-drawn carriages all over so it was really a 10-horse town but really more like a 1-horse town you get it)) restaurant on the main street recommended by our guide book and (we think) by Neighbor Babushka, called Kharchevnaya. The menu had English translations under every dish, although they weren’t the most helpful. They were pretty freaking entertaining though:
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The Omelet is Natural! Cheerful honey moderately drunk! Meat motley crew!
The only vegetarian-looking things were that Omelet is Natural and some mushroom dishes. I asked about the mushrooms but she said they were cooked in cream. I asked if they could cook me mushrooms without cream, and she said they could give me potatoes. Like okay I know I’m being a nuisance by asking for changes but that’s just a whole different thing lady. Anyway it was okay, the potatoes were really good and I haven’t gotten sick of them just yet. I also got a salad-y pickle-y plate which I am accustomed to now, having had it at most meals it seems! But I like it! It’s good to have fresh vegetables and pickled stuff for probiotics. Pickled stuff has probiotics right? I’m counting on that to prevent illness. Haha just kidding we’re traveling through Central Asia for more than 3 months I’m gonna get sick.
The only vegetarian-looking things were that Omelet is Natural and some mushroom dishes. I asked about the mushrooms but she said they were cooked in cream. I asked if they could cook me mushrooms without cream, and she said they could give me potatoes. Like okay I know I’m being a nuisance by asking for changes but that’s just a whole different thing lady. Anyway it was okay, the potatoes were really good and I haven’t gotten sick of them just yet. I also got a salad-y pickle-y plate which I am accustomed to now, having had it at most meals it seems! But I like it! It’s good to have fresh vegetables and pickled stuff for probiotics. Pickled stuff has probiotics right? I’m counting on that to prevent illness. Haha just kidding we’re traveling through Central Asia for more than 3 months I’m gonna get sick.
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We said goodbye to Cousin after dinner, as his part of our journey ended and now it’s just the two of us. The next morning we interlaced our destinies and went to the big Monastery in Suzdal, The grounds were very nice, if the museums inside all the cathedrals and buildings seemed a little endless. But it was all worth it because the hunchback they have ringing the bells every hour is FIRE. Oh my god he did this incredible bell concerto for like 15 minutes I got only a 5 second video but it was awesome. I’ve never seen a noon-time bell ringing garner applause before. I’ve never seen any bell ringing garner applause before.
Aside from pretty but getting-standard cathedrals and museums of religious iconography (they had some naaaames back then), the Monastery also had a cafe with SOUP! I love soup. I asked about the shchi, one of my faves, but it had meat in it! It’s not supposed to! Maybe it’s supposed to. But lady was nice and said the mushroom soup had no meat. Yay! I asked for it without smetana – sour cream, which Russians put on EVERY SINGLE THING. I wouldn’t be surprised if people put it in their beer. I think they use the same spoon for everything because my soup had little flecks of sour cream in it but I did my best to fish them out and anyway I can’t even fathom how much accidental dairy and egg I’ve probably already had this trip so I didn’t go nuts over getting all the miniscule flecks out. I’m okay. It was really good soup! I mean it was fine but all soup is generally really good yay soup.
The monastery was surrounded by ramparts that we could walk through, and we were delighted to find that inside these walls were like little movie museums! Apparently Russian filmmakers have used the monastery very often in their films and so many movies were shot there. They had posters to a lot of them lining the walls, as well as a projector and screen set up. It would be cool to see a movie in there!
movie set
After we saw all the Suzdal sites on our list, we headed back for another minibus adventure back to Vladimir. This time, we both had to stand the whole time and ugh it was hot. Luckily, our reward for that journey was another meal at Veggie Bro! This time, I got a seitan AND falafel wrap (genius) with various veggies and sauces and it was sooo good. Husband got a smoked seitan and tofu wrap with BBQ sauce that was also really good. And I got the chef salad again, expecting that sad lettuce and hummus plate, but out came a gorgeous cabbage and red pepper slaw!!
I think chef salad just means whatever the chef feels like cooking up that day! In for it! I loved this salad so much and this wrap. And this place! I wish Veggie Bro had a location in London because I really want to go to them again but I don’t know if Vladimir really necessitates a second visit. We had a great few days in these Golden Ring villages of Vladimir and Suzdal, called such because they are ancient towns preserving the memory of the important times of early Russian history. They are very charming. But of course they are tiny little towns and we saw the things we had to see, so, I guess, that’s all she wrote. That night, we got on our first long overnight train, from Vladimir to Yekaaterinburg, a 24-hour journey. Next post will be my nervous breakdown on that train, before I knew what a nervous breakdown really was (cough wrote most of this post on a three-day train cough). Till next time!
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A Train Journey to Beat Them All: Ulan-Ude to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia
July 8-9
Dear little laptop diary,
Dear little laptop diary,
I didn’t think I’d need to write to you on this train. It was supposed to be barely 9 hours, just a get on-go-to-sleep-get off-in-Mongolia one, as we left Ulan-Ude. But Real Russia, the company that booked most of our Russian train tickets (we didn’t want to risk missing our preferred dates and routes if we did it ourselves) made a mistake with our agenda, and told us our train was at 8:47pm tonight, when it was really at 3:47pm today. (Someone I bet added five hours to get Moscow time (which all trains in the country run on) instead of subtracting. Idiots.) So instead of getting another day to explore Ulan-Ude as we wanted, we rushed around to check out, see a final museum, and walk in the heat to the train station. It was a soul-crushing walk for me, as I have more weight in my pack than ever (stupid good vegan nonperishable food finds I keep finding and buying and then needing to pack!). Well that part was just spine and neck crushing. The soul-crushing part is how nervous I am about the Mongolia border crossing. It can take well over 4 hours, with the train stopped and bathrooms locked. I can’t go for more than 2, and I can’t do anything about it especially in a room with two strangers, so I’m just dehydrated and super g-d nervous. I told myself that as soon as we got on the train, it would be okay, I would sit, and use the bathroom, and make my bed, and relax and read as I learned from our previous trains.
Well.
Tiny laptop, this is a Chinese-run train. They alternate who does this route, the Russian trains or the Chinese trains. Remember my previous posts about how rough the Russian trains were? Like I said about the minibus on Olkhon, I think the universe is messing with me, because those were luxury compared to this Chinese one. It’s been an hour and a half and I’ve cried three times. The attendants are men, whereas the Russian ones were all women. The Russian women were nice, whereas the Chinese men are surly, smoking IN THE carriages and hallways, and don’t speak a word of English or Russian, just Chinese. The toilets are similar, except worse – no toilet paper, no paper towels, no soap. Thank god we packed an emergency roll of toilet paper; we just never thought we would need it on the sleeper train. The attendants keep locking the bathroom closest to them, which is closest to us, I think just for their own personal use – it’s not an official locking time or anything because they keep telling me just to use the one at the other end. There are two bathrooms per carriage for approximately 40-50 people. You cannot keep one for your own usage. I could cut a bitch for that. On the Russian trains, the bed sheets came in plastic wrap with a small hand towel included. Here, the sheets were just handed to us loose, dirty and grimy, and there’s no towel. No toilet paper, no soap, no towel, no bathroom access, and it’s five hours longer than I was prepared for. This really sucks. The Russian ones, I was in the moment when I wrote those diatribes, kind of going overboard considering they were all in all pretty nice (well, the rooms, not the toilets). But this is all disgusting. And we are going to be traveling by train in China for 5 weeks after Mongolia, so there is a lot of this to come. I am so upset that we didn’t have one more nice Russian train! I can’t believe I’m saying that!
Shoutout to my friend Sarah for gifting me a packet of toilet seat covers. Thank the Kiwi god for you.
The two men – yup, it’s two men again – in our cabin are a mixed bag. One is a Chilean man about our age, and when we arrived he was laying on my bed. Oh no no no, dear. He had a lot of stuff on his, I guess. But he ended up being very friendly, and he speaks English well and is nice. The other man is German, and he said he was a vegetarian so I was really excited. However, he is one of those. The weird ones. He seems to really be only a raw foodist. He has a hand-cranked food processor on the table full of nuts, a lemon and bananas on his little wire shelf, and his entire suitcase is full of various supplies, all food-related. He just said he was preparing his breakfast, for which he hand-cranked wheat into a flour (I think, he said it was wheat) (this is a different hand-cranked machine than the nut processor) and added some seeds and probably goji berries, I was trying not to stare. I mean it all sounds great to me, right, but then I asked if he makes a porridge of it with the samovar water and he said ‘no I don’t cook it, that would make it unhealthy.” boy bye.
He smells bad too, as total hippies usually do.
I can’t get over how the train attendant men are so mean and just smoking in the carriage. It’s so smoky. I can’t really convey to you just how smoky it is. I wish I could say my eyes were tearing from it but it’s the opposite; they are so dry they hurt in my head. Like I can feel them being super dry in my head. It’s weird and awful. And my lungsss mannnnn. I’m just breathing in cigarette smoke with mean Chinese men and feeling like crap. I think this is just a breaking point after weeks of travel, longer than I ever have traveled. Am I going to be completely miserable all through China? I’m so nervous now. I was so excited about China and now I’m just sad. This really sucks. It sucks not being able to communicate with the attendants. I didn’t think of learning Chinese phrases yet – we’re not even in China! We’re going from Russia to Mongolia! How on EARTH could these attendants have gone all through Russia “caring” for passengers (this train began in MOSCOW) without speaking something besides Mandarin! I think they are lying about not understanding any Russian. They have to! Ughhhh. All the signage is in Chinese characters too. It’s so frustrating. And my belly hurts. I had a pear and some crackers for dinner, which was not smart because now I’m super thirsty and I can’t drink water because the border crossing is coming up soon and who knows how long I’ll have to hold my pee. Z is in the restaurant car which actually has a few decent looking dishes (vegetable soup with no sour cream?? what a find!) but I can’t eat it because again, I can’t pee for 4 hours at least. I can hear some of you saying “just don’t drink so much water” but I have barely had water today and I barely had any on the minibuses from hell but I still had to pee AND I have debilitating headaches if I don’t drink a lot of water. (And before you say um that’s not normal, I know, and I’ve been exhaustively studied by endocrinologists, and it’s just how my body is, no disease or anything. I just have to deal with it, which is hard on this Chinese crap machine.
Please tell me I’ll at least be able to find vegan dumplings in China. If I’m spending five weeks traveling in disgusting paperless toilets and I can’t even have vegan dumplings I will cry. Again.
So tiny laptop friend, my only friend on this godforsaken cigarette factory. We just made it through the Russian exit border and the Mongolian entry border. It took about 3 hours, I think. I’m trying not to look at the clock because then my body will be like hey girl why haven’t I peed five times in that amount of time? The Mongolian border agent looked through my passport twice as long as she did the others in our cabin, which was worrisome, but maybe she was just trying to show her female dominance to me in front of three males of the species. Before the Russian border agents got to our cabin, I RAN off the train and RAN to the station and peed super fast and then RAN back outside to make sure the train was still there, I was so scared of missing it that I was hyperventilating. As soon as I got outside and saw tons of fellow passengers standing on the platform I breathed a sigh of relief and also regret that I didn’t pee more. [ed. note 10 days later: I know this is a lot of oversharing about my bodily functions but guess what, you ain’t seen nothing yet. #diarrheainthemongoliancountryside]
Anyway, I made it, hungry and thirsty but we’re now officially in Mongolia. We finished at the border at about 12:30am and we land in Ulaan Baatar (even though there are so many a’s, I’m tempted to add more) at 6:30am. So it would be okay to get five hours of sleep or so before a big day of sightseeing but it’s so freezing cold, all of a sudden after it was boiling hot most of the evening, that I am actually using the disgusting wool blankets the train provides and I’m sure have not been washed in a good 4 years. Can’t wait to get to the hostel and wash this gross train experience off. But we’re at that point in our travel where even DURING a good shower I still feel dirty, and as soon as I get out of the shower I’m officially gross again. Fun times!
As crazy as all of this is, the craziest part is that the scenery on this route was the most beautiful yet. We didn’t expect that at all! It definitely helped to have something so nice to look at when I was standing by the open hallway windows trying to get fresh air. I hope China is nothing like this train, but we still have all of Mongolia to go through before we find out!
Dunhuang, China: The Mogao Caves and the Start of Our Silk Road Journey
It’s unclear when exactly we should say we began our exploration of the ancient Silk Road, not one road so much as a cross-continental network of trade routes and passes from China, across most of central Asia, and possibly all the way to Rome. (Sea routes stretching from Indonesia to Africa were also part of it, but we didn’t do any watersports; it’s all desert from here on out.) Xi’an was considered a terminus of it, but today it’s such a modern busy city that it didn’t seem very ‘Silk Road-y’ to us when we were there; we were still in ‘China’ mindset and not ‘incredible desert history’ mindset. But there’s no question that once we landed in Dunhuang, our journey through the Silk Road had begun. Dunhuang was one of the most important historical sites of the Silk Road both then and now, and it has provided tons of insight into the dealings and relationships among people, religious groups, and states from ancient times. If you go to Dunhuang, you are unquestionably there to go back in time and learn about its role in the Silk Road.
So, like I said, the Silk Road was not a road, and not even just because of mountains! It was formed by local traders determining which routes they could travel without dying of thirst, pretty much, and mainly went from one oasis to another. It also included the least deadly mountain passes, though you had to be careful of the season (snow!). Also, contrary to the idea that individual traders ventured from China all the way to Europe, most evidence shows that traders stuck to their local routes, like a very extended game of telephone but for trading. Or I guess a more appropriate comparison would be to the track and field race where you pass the baton. At camp we called it the…I wanna say Fenchurch Street but that’s just because I miss my tube line. Um…steeple chase! That’s it! (Those are similar phrases, right.) Is that a thing people say or is it just passing the baton? Whatever. It was like that where you go just a bit of the way yourself and then pass your crap to an associate or new trader friend. So the romantic notion of traders with endless caravans crossing the desert with innumerable treasures to bring to western Europe is not very accurate.
But actually, the idea of the Telephone game works too, because these traders shared information of all sorts with each other that blended into new cultures, traversing the continent and beyond along with the silk, but also with all kinds of other goods, animals, cultural and religious ideas, and Yom Kippur breath. The most important item passed throughout the lands was not silk but paper – documents, books, and even scattered personal notes are what teach us the most about this history and how people traded and what spread successfully and how far it went. And while there are many famous Silk Road sites that have provided immense knowledge through excavations, we’ve learned the most about this spread of communication and ideas (and goods) from one place – Dunhuang, and its Library Cave.
Dunhuang is an oasis town in Gansu province, squeezed in between the Gobi Desert (yes we made our way allll the way back around) and the Taklamakan Desert (fuck it was SO DRY my eyes hurt in my head). An important early Silk Road city, it’s now known for its outstanding Mogao Caves, an extensive cave system that served as Buddhist temples and housed (and still house) incredible examples of religious Buddhist art – in fact, the largest collection of Buddhist art in the world (painted on the cave walls, mostly). Constructed for meditation spaces in the 4th century, the caves were not well preserved (and still aren’t very) so what there is to see is pretty miraculous. No pictures are allowed inside the tiny dark caves – great idea to try to preserve what’s there, although some caves were closed due to ‘excessive carbon dioxide’ (meaning they aren’t regulating the number of visitors well enough. Also, smoking is allowed. If you have a problem with air quality and too many people affecting the condition of the cave preservation, maybe don’t allow smoking in there FFS, CHINA).
In addition to the art, the Mogao caves gave the world its most important contribution to history with the Library Cave, a hidden room in the caves which was walled up to hide thousands and thousands of documents – in fact, over 50,000 documents, including over 15,000 books and over 1000 scrolls. Some scrolls date from as early as the 5th century and all dated from before the cave was sealed in the 11th century. The earliest complete printed book was found here, The Diamond Sutra, from 868. The documents are in at least 17 languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Uigur, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Sogdian, proving how far peoples and ideas travelled.
The walled-up cave was discovered in 1900 by a monk known as Daoist Wang, at least according to the book I’m reading (Z’s book calls him something a lot less fun). Daoist Wang was self-appointed as the caretaker of Dunhuang when it had long been falling into disrepair. One day he noticed something going on with the air in them there caves and knocked an inner wall down, and found a room positively crammed with piles of documents stretching 10 feet tall. Hoo boy, this was a big deal, and he knew it. He asked the Chinese government if they wanted to pay for him to have all the documents shipped – he knew how important these were to Chinese history – and the govvies were like nah we don’t have the money to pay for that. Big mistake. Big. Huge. An explorer named Aurel Stein soon heard about the discovery and made his way to Dunhuang to charm Wang into letting him buy some of the documents and take them out of China (to Britain and India). Stein gave Wang like a Benjamin, maybe two, and took TENS of thousands of documents. He is a controversial figure, for many reasons. One, he knew they were worth more, but like, so did Wang, and Wang could have charged more. Also what was Wang gonna do with that money he lived in caves. Two, people are mad at Whitey McSteinface for taking the documents away from their home (are you too good for your HOME?), but the Chinese government wasn’t interested at first so why not bring them to a place with better preservation methods and people and universities who actually want to study them? (NB, you’d think this string of me siding with colonialist kinds of thinking would mean I side with the British Museum on the Elgin Marbles controversy but I saw IN PERSON the whole f-ing modern advanced thing that Greece has since built for them so there’s no reason now! Shaaame!)
Aurel Stein was also the first person to describe in great detail everything he saw at the Dunhuang caves (see it’s historically necessary to describe everything you see and do in too much detail, for posterity!), and contributed most of what we know about how they were before the onslaught of other explorers, researchers, universities…and tourists. Today, foreigners can’t really book tickets. The website doesn’t have functional English, but also I think hotels and hostels and tour groups just do it for foreigners and there’s no discussion. But you do need to book tickets in advance, because they only let in 6000 tourists per day – and it REALLY should be less, considering the aforementioned CO2 problems harming various caves. We hired a guide and driver from VisitOurChina to get our tickets, pick us up and drop us off at our guesthouse, and provide a private tour of the caves. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, I guess. No, they are a bad company and I strongly urge you never to use them. The local guide they hired for us was great, but what they didn’t tell us (and I don’t think she realized we had paid (through the nose) for) was that private guides cannot lead anyone through the caves – you are put into large (LARGE) groups with other (AWFUL LOUD RUDE) tourists and led around by an official site guide. So we paid all that money for nothing. We were livid, and not just because the huge Italian tour group we were put with was full of rude awful people who snuck photos in the caves despite that being prohibited. I know, Italians betraying me, my own people.
I do not take that shit lightly and we got a partial refund of our money, but if we didn’t have to deal with the excruciatingly frustrating Chinese tendency to deny blame and never apologize and make things as hard as possible (and also, what contract law?!), I would have fought for all of it. YOU HEAR ME, SOPHY? YOU ARE A LYING LIAR WHO LIES AND YOU HAVE TAINTED THE NAME OF TOY GIRAFFES EVERYWHERE.
Despite my blood pressure being at red alert the whole visit, both at our being cheated and at my own people betraying me with insane rudeness, our visit to the Mogao Caves was pretty special. You start in a newly built visitor center and you watch two movies, one about the caves’ history and one about the visit. I mean at least I think that’s what they were about. It was dark and comfy and cool in there and I had a very nice nap.
After the movies, you get on a giant bus to the actual caves. We did not know about this. It’s a 15 minute bus ride away from the visitor center to the caves, down a freaking highway! WHY NOT BUILD YOUR NEW VISITOR CENTER A TINY BIT CLOSER TO THE ACTUAL THING WE ARE VISITING? FFS CHINA.
Then you find out your tour company is a bunch of lying liars and you fight but can’t do anything about it because the official site guides are the only ones with keys to the caves (they remain locked at all times except the few minutes you are in them) so you piss and moan like an impotent jerk and then you acquiesce and try to enjoy the damn thing. And it was indeed amazing. The paintings on the cave walls are of varying degrees of preservation, some barely visible, but some (a lot) are gorgeous and clearly visible still. It’s pretty awesome. It’s also very very hot (SANDWICHED BETWEEN TWO DESERTS I SAID) so bring water and a hat and whatever you have that might reflect the sun away from you. My hands have aged so much I can hear them saying “Muriel? Muriel hasn’t lived here for 50 yeeeeears…”
We spent probably 3 hours between both the sites of the cave complex. After we got back to our guesthouse, we wanted to go into the desert to see the enormous dunes and the famous oasis of Crescent Lake, about a 30 minute walk away. Unfortunately, my dry eye syndrome has been exacerbated, to say the least, in this climate, resulting in ocular migraines like I’ve never had before, so I had to take my contacts out and lay in the dark for a while while Z explored what he said (so meanly) was the most amazing place. He took good pictures but I’m so mad I had to miss this. Stupid dry climate.
SAND EVERYWHERE
Once I could stand the pain, I realized it was like 9pm and I was hungry, so I went into our little fake adobe village to find food. Oh so we stayed at a place called the Silk Road Yododo Inn, a hostelish guesthouse with one nice woman and a very rude man working, nice rooms, but the common spaces were just enormous sandboxes. Not joking, the space in the middle of the guestrooms was all sandbox. Complete with little plastic shovel. It was insane. The room seemed nice but we saw later that it was dirtier than it first appeared, with sand in the sheets (blech) (but of course; it was a sandbox) and dirty walls and quilts. Outside, a bar played super loud music until midnight. And when that music finally stopped, a neighbor down the hall seemed to be hammering into the wall. I think he was moving furniture because Z saw a man carrying a vanity table or something absolutely ridiculous even disregarding the time of night. We can never get away from ridiculous. The guesthouse was on the second floor of a sandy adobe village looking place. So weird but cute.
the ground outside was sandbox too
I thought I might have good luck at the Western Restaurant (full name) but no, they did not speak English or understand my phone asking for no meat (what do you mean no meat! Okay I bring you chicken). I got them to bring me a bowl of rice covered in bok choy, which is better than nothing. The next day, we went to a little food shack hole in the wall place and got delicious noodles and veggies. Shacks are always better, we are learning.
yummiest shack food
Overall, despite my eyes and my head and my eyes in my head and the lying liars who lied to us, our short visit to Dunhuang was nice – very informative and interesting. We are lucky to have gotten to see some of the amazing caves and their art from so long ago, even if most of documents are back home in the British Museum (where we are members, lol). The history here is incredible and it was exciting to begin the real Silk Road section of our journey. Even if it mostly means dry air and burnt skin.
