Arthur Ransome, where are you?

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived on the wild streets of London with all his friends.  They ate eggs because they cost a penny and you could cook them on the one burner hot plates in your shabby rooms.  Some of them built or bought caravans and took their families on the road to the countryside of Europe.  Some of them ran away to join the circuses of Italy and France.  But they painted and sang and discussed big ideas with all their days.  The women as well as the men, though when the babies started coming it was harder on them, these wild free lives could not comport with their families' chains.   Well this boy wrote stories for a living, stories about children going on adventures, to deserted island, on boats, the stuff of dreams.  And one day he decided to write the real stories of himself and all his friends.  And this too became the stuff of dreams.  Dreams that as the years passed, were forgotten.

Art rock cities

Went to an open mike poetry thing with Joanna, cause she was reading there.  Now I've been to many a poetry open mike, mostly somewhat sad affairs, safe spaces for slightly lost people.  This one was different.

Standing room only for the audience, the place was so packed.  And the groovy announcer fluffed the crowd and talked about good vibes and got people to cheer on command. 

Of the ten randomly selected poets about half of them were actively professional and a third were off book on their poems. 

They were properly miked in and there were stage lights. 

People whooped and cheered.  For every act. 

There were the open mike poets and then a band, rap over groovy guitars, which was actually good, and then a professional poet, who spent fully half his time vamping and joking with the audience.  He had a story about doing guerrilla poetry and getting thrown out of a bakery. 

The room laughed warm.

A DJ played bridging tracks. 

Oh London you city of art and life.  This stuff is alive on your streets not something we do to feel good about ourselves but something we do to feel good. 

In the british museum

I just held four objects

A 17th century Ganesha, devotees would look into its eyes to see God, so it was worn by many hands

An Egyptian eyeliner pot, from ancient Egypt. It was soft to the touch, and your finger fit in it to dab your eyes. 

An ancient Sumerian cuneiform used to worship a god.  They had the translation

A stone handaxe 350 000 years old.  It fit your hand.

The arc of history is long and it bends towards unspeakable beauty.  Incomprehensible achievement spanning so long.

Riding out of Riga

On the first day of our road trip out of Riga, j and I went to an ethnographic park.  These parks are dotted all over Europe, especially eastern Europe but I'd never been to one.  They basically take all the super historic but basically peasanty buildings from all over and all different time periods and restore them/ stick them together into this living museum.  I'd never been to one, in Europe anyway, so I voted to go to the outskirts of Riga where they had one. 

It was one of those moments of our profound luck magic again, in that we happened to go on the same day as the historical society of Latvia decided to have their pan cosplay party.  So the place was swarming with people in traditional dress doing dancing demonstrations and musical performances, selling traditional crafts, pottery and blacksmithing stuff. 

So we wandered through all the cool buildings, there was some awesome stuff like they had a construction of the granary/ hay barn where it was on a hill so you could basically load a two story building from the top. 

Also some really outfitted cottages with flower and vegetable gardens. 

But the highlight besides the people was really the mills.  They had three mills and one of them you could go all the way up it.  The heavy pine timbers and the great crushing wheels of its insides.  And when you climbed you could then look out at the forests and farmlands all around. 

Poem

Cherry blossoms bloom all night
In 21st century Japan
And they flutter in the livid light
Of every glowing hand

The right kind of people

When our plane took off from Tokyo a little cheer went up. Just an organic expression of the joy that comes when you leave the ground to fly across Eurasia in the night.

Jes and I listened to Hamilton on my bear themed headphone splitter while we picked out movies and sleep came easily. 

My phone exploded with love when I landed and there are pokestops here as everywhere. 

We'll fly to London in a couple of hours.

China-not a believer in over-achievement

So the sensibility in China really seems to be that there is no such thing as too much. Oh there's not enough-- you could have not achieved what you wanted to, that would be too bad. But there's really no such thing as going too far, achieving too much success. Did you get what you wanted? Then you did enough.

We started talking about this at the bird's nest Olympic stadium thinking about the Chinese Olympic bid in Beijing. And how a lot of the Western coverage, which never gets tired of trying to subtly tear china down, looked on things like the crazy over the top Olympic opening ceremony and stuff as a bit gauche, a bit nouveau riche. But in China of course there's none of this. There's like, yes we were planning that from ten years before we got it. And the land was cordoned from then, on the north south axis of the city where the forbidden city and all the major imperial sights are. Planned with their past and future in mind.

And you see it in like mentality as well, when people blandly say things like, yes well chinese children need to study during that time. Over-achievement? Not a thing.

And then we just saw it everywhere. So this guy is wearing a green matching short and shirt combo which has like gold medusa heads, four each on the chest and back and one each on the front and back of the leg. Too much? Nah, they are then all encircled with pink roses.

Or our hotel our last night. There was a gold bull standing on a fountain. Not quite enough, so surrounded with four Grecian maidens. But how will you see it at night you ask? Don't worry, there's a disco spotlight. Then someone thought of adding rainbow fade lights to the water. Too much? Nah, they tossed it on there.

Meals are served often on a lazy susan so they can just bring out infinite dishes and you can just keep spinning to what you want.

And of course the shanghai skyline. There are like three of the top 20 buildings in the world, all built in the last ten years. Enough? Hell no, they all light up at night. Just any lights? Rainbow fade yo. And then you found many buildings saying things like-- but then if in between the rainbow colours, should I flash up words and pictures. Too much? No way. What if I display a lightup panorama of other cool places on my building top. Too much? Not a chance. I've got all these lights, what if they flash on and off in a pattern. Too much? Don't worry about it baby.

We walked down a skyway, a walkway which to aid in crosswalks, they just build as an overpass. And it goes over one road and under three other roads which web between it. Then, get this, the posts all have ivy growing on them and blue track underlighting. Too much? Just enough.

My parasol has a pagoda top, a floral pattern and is made out of foil material. Does it also need a lace ruffle? Of course it does.

Now the effect of all this is not exactly what you'd call good taste, but it doesn't exactly feel like bad taste. It feels like just a rejection of the whole concept of understatement in favor of statement. This is not something they are doing through lack of understanding or trying to mimic someone else. This is a bold announcement that we are here, we are doing this. Especially strong in Shanghai. There is this overwhelming feeling of damn right I said it in everything that's there. Yes we need another flag, dancing cartoon character, neon light. Why wouldn't we. Are we here or not?

Mongolia, the land sings

Every other train has struck straight across the emptiness of Siberia. Today it is different, we need to get around Lake Baikal, so the train curves around the lake which makes for an especially beautiful trip today. We have the mountains that ring Lake Baikal on one side of us and the lake with its small towns and beaches on the other. Jes theorises we'll go halfway up the side of the lake and then follow the river. So Mongolia is not as far as it appears, we just wind our way there. And I am lucky that this is my only morning train, so I can watch it more.

Ulan-Bator 18 days in Mongolia

We are on the first day of our tour, riding in a budget land cruiser over the steppes, when it occurs to me, I have come far enough. I have come to the ends of the earth, like the voyage of Prince Caspian I am looking over the edge, and now I am ready for the long journey home.

It is a cool moment to have this feeling because I am almost exactly at the halfway point of my trip. (December 15 to February 15 pretty much so July 15 when I got on the transsiberian would be the halfway point). It is a good time for a turning the bark back to shore kind of feeling.

For though from out this bourne of time and place, the flood may bear me far, I hope to meet my pilot face to face when I have crossd the bar.

Jes asks me what I mean: it's not the strangest or the furthest or the most intense place we have been. I think it's the emptiness. You can look out from any point and there's infinity in green fields and purpling hills. Tiny fragile gers dot the landscape, a family in a temporary home made of sticks and braided manes. The wind never stops, cresting up the mountains, sweeping the plains.

But time stops. People live on these plains- half of mongolia still lives in traditional gers- in the same way they have since the domestication of animals. For a country of only three million, population density is at hunter gatherer levels. You are looking back and forward in time across a landscape unchanged by the depredations of the human settlement cancer that grows everywhere. It is the edge of the world, the edges of human settlement, insofar as it can be found in 2016.

Mongolia is a land designed to write your own way. There are hills, even mountains, craggy and bare with windswept rocks. And of course the famous grasslands sweeps of plains with hills rising onto hills beyond.

Most of the hills though are shallow enough to climb, with grass reaching up them, to their peaks. Because of the cold, and the lack of water, the grass is short like ankle height, so you don't need trails, because except for the rising pine, there is not a lot of trees and the grass and tundra flowers are low enough to walk on.

This means that people, cars, horses, herds of goats can just strike out in any direction. They do so, and that makes paths, roads, trails which the next comer can follow, or branch off from.

We stayed three days in Ulaan Bataar, working out our budget, what we were going to do, finding activities we could afford, doing our laundry and also seeing the national museum and finding an IMAX theatre where we could watch american films.

After that we struck out to a ger camp just outside of town, though because of the hills, it could be miles and miles.

Gers, or yurts are a cylinder topped with a dome. They are special because they can be packed down and loaded onto a horse. The walls are made like climbing trellises, four sections that collapse. Then there is a central wheel at the top of the dome, (and you think, the gypsy wheel like in the banners but it's real, it's a real thing part of the house the keystone when you raise your nomadic home each new place). Between the wheel and the walls, there are a bunch of little spokes that make the dome, by angling up from the cylinder to the top of the roof. Each spoke goes into a slot at the top of the central roof and is tied to the trellis through a thong. In the rural or more authentic ger camps, the trellises are attached with bits of knotted goat hide and the thongs are done with braided horse hair. The walls of this construction are layers of fabric, canvas and felt. The felt some of the more authentic places smells like goat and sheep, because it is made by them, untreated and undyed.

Our first ger camp was very polished and pro, decorated. The hills around it were easy. We relaxed the first day and the second day we climbed up the biggest hill, the one with stands of birches halfway up. It was a couple hours to the top, and got steep, walking up animal tracks that were really just a way someone had broken the trail in before. And then from the crest of the hill you could see more ger camps and trees and grasses, and velvety purple hills in the distance and the city in another distance.

The next day I went walking on my own, for a bit longer, I took an easy way up on a road.

Roads in Mongolia are like paths, except instead of being a place a horse has ever gone before it's a place a car has ever gone before, but there were tire tracks in the grass. It took me up to the pass, and from there you can walk almost even, up and down along the ridge, so I went up to the crest of one peak, and then down the saddleback and back up the crest of another. And then cut down into a deep stand of pine. The hawks, golden, circled through the branches, they rode the winds along the peaks as well.

I made my way downhill with the silent breathlessness of a forest without undergrowth all around me. Walking at an angle, the easiest way, tree trunks march up, tree trunks march down. When I emerged, I was still higher than I expected, so I irresistibly turned back up to another peak. So then I descended down the rockiest part of the ridge, so I could watch both sides of the hill for the longest.

The wind never stops, coming up the mountains in gusts, whisking your clothes, your hair. It means it's never too hot, because the air always moves. And if you keep moving it's never too cold, because the sun is hot.

Ok so then back to UB, for like a day only really it was our host's family cottage. There were a bunch of little kids around there, who jes made friends with and we played the game of telling them the english names for all their toys as we brought them.

Our second week in Mongolia was the tour.

1- Our guide and our cook both had limited English but were the sweetest people. They had actually excellent mind reading capacity in doing whatever we wanted before we even said it. And the cook did a really nice job making the same 5 ingredients into a different meal every night.

So first day he took us out to a 6^th -8^th century ruin. It had this really cool sophisticated stacked rock construction. You could perceive and walk around the old city wall, and there was a watchtower out at the corner that was still standing and had an egg shaped dome. We asked if there was ever not wind, he said no. There was a little museum there that was really whatever they had dug out of the site kind of scattered on some tables. In general your ability to touch museum artifacts in Mongolia freaks me out man.

2-Kharkhorum the ancient capital of Genghis Khan is what we went to today. Of course the issue is that Kharkhorum has had some reversals. First it was rebuilt as a monastery to the Mongolian Dalai Lama in the 17^th century or something. Side note: Mongolia has its whole own buddhism and its own Dalai Lama. WTF? The level of things you can not know about the world is large yo. We learned heaps of cool things. For example, there's these gods called wrathful protectors who are blue and super violent and tread on all human sins. There is a female one and here's her story. So she had to marry a demon. She was not a fan, so after the wedding she got pregnant, but then she gave birth to her baby, and ate it, and then skinned her husband, and used his skin as a saddle blanket, and rode away on her donkey. GG. So you can recognise her super easy, because she is riding a donkey with the skin of her dead husband and picking her teeth with a baby. There's another one who steps on an elephant man, and another one who has like eight feet to smash eight dudes. It's like learning catholic saints through italian art all over again.

Then of course in the 20^th century the soviets bulldozed down kharkhorum and then in the 21^st century they tried to rebuild the monuments, but you know it's by no means original. But the stones are the same, these huge blue black stones from Ghengis' city.

And in the middle there's the foundation of where his central ger was, the ring of stones and the keystone in the centre where the wheel would have gone, all that time ago. I walked the circle around it, and it's huge you know, many steps to trace its bones.

3- We rocked out to a museum which had some of the old steles with the writing on them, a peace pact and rules for the management of the country. I think this is the night we stopped by the lake, and the clouds grew and I listened to fratellis over dawn, and the fishermen went out on their boats at dusk and there was a child dance party for sunset, and the worlds cutest family in half traditional clothing kept chasing each other around and going swimming and the boys drove in the horses and sheep in the afternoon.

4- We made it to the Orkhon waterfall. There was a delightful extra hot hot spring there. We walked over to the waterfall, and there's a trail which follows it, and you can follow almost the whole volcanic crater edge. Because that's what it is, and better than that the whole river valley that leads to this water is world heritage listed, less for its beauty than for its culture, because this river valley made I think the domestication of animals and the herding culture possible, and it's still going on to this day. The cultural heritage listing extends to the present day culture cause you know it's the same culture.

Ok but the river valley means you have to ford little riverlets like a hundred times and sometimes there's horses and fluffy cows standing in the water. We had lunch next to a riverlet and we got to go exploring the river and little islets in between and I got my shoes wet. And then we got to the waterfall in the afternoon and got to have a massage and a hot spring and walk to the crater's edge and look at the waterfall crashing down. And then the locals were doing this thing, which our guide and Jes and this random guy helped me do too, cause I was scared but it was so cool, which is you could climb out to this island at the top of the waterfall, but you had to jump over some water, which was the scary part. So I basically jumped into their arms with them pulling me and then you were there at the top and could watch the water rush. And all the local boys were like balancing precariously and doing selfies and such.

5-The next morning we started out by climbing down to the base of the waterfall, which was a cool clambery climb where you had to seriously watch your rocks for a bit of it. And then you could enjoy looking up at the same waterfall, which was making rainbows this morning.

Then we climbed high up to Turkhun monestary, right up a mountain. We drove to the top of a high hill, and then there was a few kms of walking deeper into the woods, also mostly up and with the tracks in mud.

And then at the monestary you climb stairs and stairs like to heaven and there's a temple up there. It commands great views of the surrounding countryside. There is something different about looking at the tops of mountains from the tops of other mountains. And there were birds up there and old trees, and bells to ring. And then we climbed back down pretty quick because we blew our schedule so didn't want it to be too super late when we got down there.

But it was anywhere and remember you have to ford those million rivers. But we wound up behind this hero who was taking a shitty Toyota sedan through the riverlands fully laden with all his possessions and family. He would get out of his car and test each river for fordability with his feet, just wading into them splish splish splish until he found a spot that wasn't too deep, and then he'd drive his car through that repeat for like two hours until midnight and we followed him all the way out of there.

And now is probably a good time to mention a couple of days before when there was a massive hailstorm. We were climbing up into the hills and it started to rain and then it started to hail, big pebble sized hail, and our driver stopped on a mountain top while we waited it out, intense all around us and the wind. Then it stopped or slowed to rain again and we kept on but this was still in the riverlands and we passed so many people stuck in the mud or run off the road, and he had to skid us up this mud which seemed like a near thing for a while there.

6-We went south to this sand dune which giver you a bit of a sense of the Gobi without going to it. We stayed on a ger on a high hill which had an incredible view of the elsen tasarnai sand dune. The guy with the ger had horses and we got to ride.

Mongolian horses are different to the ones I have ridden before, short but strong shaggy mountain ponies, and their gait is different, more of a jog than a walk or a trot, a bouncy short stepped little walk that brisks up as they get faster. It was actually easier to ride, because there was never a jolt to it, and increasing their pace seemed really fluid. So it was one of the funnest rides in that way. But there was a weird thing where he kept the horses on lead ropes to him so we were all uncomfortably close together. He took us in a loop up and down the mountains and really that's the thing to do, Get a horse and a pack horse for your ger and a guide, and ride straight across. There is more world heritage listed stuff in the west of the country. And when I go back that's what I'll do, find someone who will take me and just head west, out across this ceaseless country.

We rode camels in the afternoon. Which I think is my first time, at least since like a zoo loop as a kid or something. It was decidedly less magical. First of all, deserts are sand. It's hard for me to attach to them. Secondly, camels are very bumpy. It was exciting to be so high, but the best part was it standing up and sitting back down. For most of the ride I felt like I understood how people who don't like riding horses feel when I drag them along to it. This is not fun for you or me buddy. I can see where it all went wrong here. Well it was fine, and a cool new experience. But the horse while perhaps more ordinary was a million times better. It was cool to watch the camel's strange gait and stride length and how its foot flexed against the ground though.

7- And then in the morning we went to a monastery which was the scene of the soviet massacre where they rounded up all the Buddhist monks and killed them cause you know. That's how they roll. It had lovely views of the sand and valley and hills where we had been playing. And Jes and I had a whole talk about soviet massacres and just wars. And then we drove down together to Ulaan Bataar.  

Love from books

From Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones:

Once more I saw how yellow and bloodshot his eyes were. How sick he was with malaria.  How sick of everything he was.  How sick of being a human being.

"Turn around," he said.  I did as he ordered.

All the lovely things in the world came into view- the gleaming sea, the sky, the trembling green palms.

We were alive, I suppose. That was us moving like ghouls to complete the burial tasks, our mouths and hearts stunned into silence.  I suppose I must have breathed.  I do not know how.  I suppose my heart must have continued to pump blood.  I did not ask it to. If I'd known about a switch to pull in order to turn off the living part, I might have reached for it. 

From The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma:

I have come to believe that it was here that the first mark of the line between Ikenna and Boja- where not even a dot had ever been drawn before- first appeared.

Hope was a tadpole.  The thing you caught and brought home with you in a can , but which, despite being kept in the right water, soon died.

Listen, days decay, like food, like fish, like dead bodies.  This night will decay too, and you will forget.

Then the figure answered and I heard it loud and clear- as if no cause, no bars, no hands, no cuffs, no barriers, no years, no distance, no time had come between the time I last heard his voice and now; as if all the years that had passed were nothing but distance between when a cry was let out and the time it tapered off.  That is: the time I realized it was him and the time I heard him say "It is me, Obe, your brother."

Kyoto

This is ripped off of an email, but hey it's what I've been up to for the last week. Hugs all.

The aquarium was set up by fantastic Japanese design principles. So you took an escalator all the way to the top, and then you walked a slow spiral down. You know the Guggenheim?  It's the famous modern art museum in NYC that's built by the same design principle which makes for a very easy and pleasant visit. You can't get lost, because you only go one direction, and it's a gentle downhill slope the whole time.

What's especially cool about this is that the tanks can then be incredibly deep, like three stories deep, which means the animals have their little enclosure and can dive with a lot more room than it appears. It's also cool because of course the ocean is a vertical ecosystem as much as a horizontal one, and you get to experience it that way.

So at the top they have otters, I love otters so much, because they're always doing something. These ones were gnawing their adorable little paws in a cuddle puddle together. Then down to the ring tailed something from Japan I'd never seen, and this awesome Asian wombat kind of creature who looked like he was made for a Disney movie. I'm talking big eyes fluffy body.

Ok on to the fish which is what you care about. They had a coral reef tank but it wasn't the focus. I mean reef fish are pretty, but 1. I have been snorkelling in way better real reefs than are in this tank and 2. They just didn't bring out the big guns, you know the top level rainbow Hawaii fish or whatever.

Dolphins! They had a variety I had never seen which had black and white stripes. Like markings, a white underbelly and then the top of them mostly black but with some white striping as well. And they were so active, both cresting their fins over the water surface all the time and diving down, sometimes two together like a pair. And here's the thing, because of the structure of the aquarium you encountered this same tank like two or three times, so the same dolphins you saw diving from the top you would then see them underwater further down.

They had king penguins and like three other kinds, and at one point one penguin made a pile of snow and stood on top of it and another penguin bit him on the tail. The king penguins formed an orderly line to jump in the water.

The biggest tank had whale sharks and hammerheads. Woah hammerheads look small when compared to whale sharks. And like at least four varieties of rays and some schooling fish. The muscularity of the whale shark tails were like the best part of the whole thing.  They just did this slow loop and they were huge, but that was the middle tank so you did a slow downward spiral across the whole tank. See what I did there?

And there were some fish I'd never seen, things that looked like bass, but huge and prehistoric and a fish with legs also like the size of a dog and fish that looked like half a fish.

And the jellyfish section was very special, some incredible colors, like blooming roses some of these.

Ok while I'm here I might as well talk about the 10,000 tori temple. It was a temple to the goddess Inari. Inari you will remember is not only the delicious sweet tofu pocket which is a food, but also the goddess of wealth and prosperity. Her symbol is the fox. Foxes apparently love inari the food as a special treat. The fox is a trickster god because wealth and prosperity is tricksy.

But the temple is structured with you know those square gates in front of the temple, tori gates. So you can go on a path that's 10, 000 of them in a row, just a really long archway up a hill of these gates and along the way there's a million little shrines and bells and fox statues. Very pretty. And I had inari fox soup at one of the little cafes. And a bunch of girls dress up in traditional kimono and go up the temple, presumably for a reason.

Jes and I hung out at a cat cafe where each of the cats had like a dating profile you could read. It was pretty cute.

We made friends with everyone at the Nepalese restaurant and bar down the street, and that's actually how we wound up going to the aquarium because they recommended it.

And of course Japan is a pokemon go wonderland. We're busily levelling.