stuff 'n other stuff

Over the weekend I read a short compilation of some of Chekhov’s letters home during his overland journey to Sakahalin in 1890 – before the Trans Siberian railway was built.

Chekhov is an amusing and candid letter writer. As well as being incredibly rude about the inhabitants of Tomsk he describes the society he finds there and the growing presence of Chinese and Japanese in eastern Siberia as well as articulating the very Russian fear that they will lose the territories to the Chinese, or perhaps the Japanese as a result of being double crossed by one of the great powers of the time.

I read the compilation purely for interest and as background for our planned trip to the hopefully not too wild east. But the thing I found really interest was Chekhov’s description of life in the prison settlements on Sakhalin -and their undoubted resonance with descriptions of life in early colonial Hobart and Sydney with prisoners and trusties everywhere doing ordinary jobs, despite their possibly brutal pasts.

I’ve heard it claimed that Russians tend to think of Australia as a sort of British Siberia – far away, and settled in the main by convicts and exiles. No matter the truth of this, there are clearly parallels, perhaps uncomfortable ones.

Lost, one poem.

it was about ethernet cables. No, I didn’t write it, but thought it charming and saved it to a hard drive somewhere.

Saved it in the days before evernote, before dropbox.

My guess is that it’s on the old Toshiba laptop, last used in 2007, and no, I can’t remember the password.

Now I can’t find it in Google. Might as well be gone.

Structure your content, people, or else it’s gone, lost, unfindable in the cosmic overwhelm …

As part of planning for our Trans Siberian trip I’ve been doing a little background reading.

Now you would expect the opening of the rail line to the far east and Siberia to have an impact in Russia, but it also had a significant impact in the west – as suddenly the north of China, the various foreign concessions, Japan and Korea were in reach. Not two months by ship, but perhaps two weeks by train from London.

Businessmen, missionaries, adventurers and the like could actually make the journey and be back in less than half a year. Something that carried on well into the thirties with people like Robert Byron settling in Beijing and adventurers like Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming passing through

The result is an outpouring of books about the TransSiberian and guidebooks telling you how to travel, what to take, etc.

Like today’s Lonely Planet’s the guidebooks of the time offered advice on hotels, best places to stop, what to take with you on the train.

Now we tend to find late nineteenth century adverts slightly amusing. Portable rubber baths and Dr Jaeger’s sanitary underwear tend to produce a slightly preposterous, Pythonesque, caricature of Victorian and Edwardian travel.

Baedeker’s 1914 guide to the Transsiberian doesn’t mention rubber baths but it does suggest taking several changes of woollen underwear for the journey.

This isn’t quite as stupid as it sounds. Nowadays we’d tend to think of cotton but of course brands like Icebreaker have been agressively promoting merino base layers for backpacking in part because it doesn’t get as smelly as synthetic thermals – washing and drying it might be a different issue, and of course the eponymous Dr Jaeger’s woollen underwear was sanitary because of its ability to absorb smells.

So given our twentyfirst century fixation with cleanliness on the train the answer might in part lie in good sensible nineteenth century advice from an age where coping with poor washing facilities along the route was the norm …

Some of you may remember that a couple of years ago I became mildly obsessed with the questiona as to whether the anglo-saxon cleric Sighelm could have visited the St Thomas christians in Kerala.

Of couse it really wasn’t about clerical interactions but really about how well established trade routes were before the rise of Islam and how disrupted they were and whether that would turn his journey into either fantasy or a story based on remembering earlier journeys.

The key thing about Sighelm’s (possible) journey is that it quite easily follow the trade routes for pepper in the opposite direction, and that there was a now half forgotten infrastructure of christian monasteries and guest houses along the route.

However, while concentrating on spices I forgot the other great mystery of the east – lapis, the blue stone that comes only from Afghanistan. And as it’s prized, people traded it. In fact the have traded it for a long time, as seen by its presence in Sumerian grave goods in Ur.

Both Florence of Worcester and William of Malmesbury mention that Sighelm returned safely from India. It is of course more than possible that one chronicle entry was derived from the other but William’s comment about the aromatic liquors and bright jewels could have a kind of sense to it if Sighelm came back part of the way on a spice trading boat to the Gulf and perhaps picked up some lapis in Dubai, much as you can even today …

The federal government announced an initiative last weekend to get all schoolkids to learn an Asian language.

While laudable I suspect it won’t work. Chris Rau has an excellent piece in this morning’s SMH explaining one set of reasons.

I’ve got another set of reasons. Learning Russian taught me that to learn a language is to learn a culture, the names of shops, how other people’s power bills work and the rest. Simple things like sour cream coming in green top bottles is something you need to know to interpret ‘he had a smile like a half open green topped bottle at the back of the fridge’.

What the collapse of the Soviet Union taught me is that language is evolving and transitory. Brands changed, new loan words arrived for example profakapit’  – to fail to deliver a project – and suddenly while Dostoyevski remained Dostoyevski and Tolstoi Tolstoi, newspaper and magazines became incomprehensible.

I have this fear that on our planned trans siberian trip that at best I’ll sound like an anachronism from the last century, or at worst find myself incapable of organising a taxi.

And this is the point. Learning a language, and being able to use it requires continual engagement. Yes, if you learn the basics in school you’ll probably be able to muddle through getting a taxi, a hotel room or a meal, sometimes with hilarious consequences for example the time Laos where the staff in a restaurant in Vientiane mistook our accents and decided we must be Russian and gave us the Russian rather than English menus.

You won’t be able to do more than that. If you get good you can probably understand the instructions about how to put together a set of valves. You won’t be able to go out for a drink with people, talk about soccer or anything else.

So learning Asian languages will give a generation a basic familiarity with the sound of a language and maybe better able to help visitors or ask where the toilet is. Useful, but it won’t deliver a generation of upskilled literate managers

We’re beginning to get serious about our attempt to travel the trans siberian.

Technology is the easy part – either our old Asus netbook, which has the virtue of being light and robust, or possibly the windows netbook – which is a little bit heavier. The real discriminant will be whether the old Asus netbook with its older browser copes well with the sites we use a lot.

Blog posts and notes can be saved to either a memory stick or an SD Card, and I still feel there’s a lot to be said for Moleskine notebook and a couple of good quality pens.

Either netbook will give us skype, and we have an old Nokia 2G phone with an Estonian (!) phone number as backup.

The real problem is clothing. The bane of travel really is laundry and getting it done.

Upscale hotels in Europe and the States usually provide a good if expensive service. In south east Asis you can usually find a laundry that will wash (usually very robustly) t-shirts and undies for a couple of dollars.

Travelling the train will be different. While we’ll have stops along the way we’ll need some quick drying easy wash clothes – but preferably ones that look half decent.

And that’s the problem – undies are not too much a problem but finding decent looking travel pants and shirts is a little bit problematic. Basically we need clothes that can wash and dry overnight in a hotel shower, but which are breathable enough to sit in for a long time.

This is quite important – we’ll be on the train for several days at a time with minimal washing facilities. While we can probably manage a strip wash in the wash hand basin we’ll definitely need to freshen up at the end of each leg. The implications is that our clothes will need to as well.

I tend to prefer natural fibres as they don’t build up a pong quite so quickly, but natuatl fibre clothing eg canvas pants, tend to be heavier, and take longer to dry  than synthetic. They also tend to look better.

So the trick is to find stuff that’s a compromise – looks good enough to be presentable, doesn’t get smelly quickly and yet washes out easily – if it’s sufficiently lightweight we can of course take an extra change. Based on our trip to Laos in 2005 we need to aim for between 12 and 14Kg to be able to lug stuff about comfortably, especially as we’ll be lugging bags on and off trains.

Having had to run the length of Milan station before now, while dragging two cases and toting a 10 kilo overflow bag we’ll definitely be aiming for light – one backpack and a small daysack each.

This probably means only taking the basics plus some better looking casual city clothes for Moscow and Petersburg.

If we end up in London, as we plan to we can pick up a few extra clothes there, and if we want to save weight on the return flight send them back ahead of us.

Even though we’ve had a cold winter, the garden is already producing with the first chilli of the year …

As we’ve said we’re tentatively planning a trip along the Trans Siberian from east to west.

As part of the planning process we’re putting together a wiki with links and planning information while we try and sort out what we want to do and how we want to do it.

We had thought about being utterly foolish and getting the train from either St Petersburg or Moscow to Berlin and on to London, but getting Belarus transit visas in advance is looking tricky …

Here in Canberra, we moved into summer time a couple of weeks ago, suddenly making it light to half past seven in the evening, and suddenly the heating hardly comes on in the evening.

One of the supposed benefits of daylight saving is the idea of giving more people time in the evening for gardening, strolling and just generally taking the air. Undoubtedly true.

The other is saving energy. That I’m not so sure about – sure we have less heating in the evening, but it’s still cold in the morning meaning the heating is running for longer first thing – and in these days of low energy light globes, that’s probably the prime consumer of energy.

Later on, in summer when we start getting 30C and higher , we’ll need to run the cooling  in the late afternoon or evening – something we would do for less if the evening had had an hour to cool down.

Once, I’m sure, daylight saving offered clear benefits. Domestic electricity use was mostly for lighting and a bit of heating. Central heating and cooling were not common. Gas came in bottles and was used mostly for cooking.

Nowadays our energy use patterns have changed – we use gas for heating, electricity for cooling and the rest …