stuff 'n other stuff

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 …

No, not another long post about the the post October 1917 civil war in Russia or the importance of early twentieth century East Asian history.

I have, over the past couple of years, accumulated too much leave. So much that I now get emails from HR asking me to get rid of some of it.

Well J and I could do with a long holiday somewhere. We’ve had various plans, Spain, Central Europe, and the like, or perhaps Vietnam and Cambodia but we’re feeling the need for the exotic, genuine travelling like our Lao trip.

We had had plans for Syria to look at Byzantine and Crusader remains and then to travel down through Jordan to end up at St Catherine’s in Egypt.

We started planning that trip before the Arab spring, but even if there was to be a peace settlement in Syria tomorrow, there has been too much blood to make the trip practical or enjoyable, even though the Jordanian and Egyptian portions are certainly possible.

So we thought about South America. And then we saw an article in the weekend paper about someone who went horse riding in Mongolia.

Now I tend to consider horses nasty smelly bitey dangerous things, but perhaps because I’d been reading about Ungern von Sternberg and Mongolia I read the article.

And that sparked the thought, why don’t we go to Europe via the Transiberian ? We like trains, it’s most definitely exotic, and we’ll have a range of experiences to blog and write about?

The man in seat 61 confirmed we weren’t being in the least bit stupid, so we’re now planning a trip for next year, starting from Beijing – we did think about Ho-ChiMinh as a starting point, but thought that might be better as a S E Asia trip -with the aim of ending up in London for a week or so’s R+R before flying back …

I’ve been watching Rory Stewart’s programs on the new great game on SBS. Yes, I know they were on over a month ago but as we watch very little television we tend to accumulate shows – for example we’ll probably end up watching Boardwalk Empire in January despite the fact it started running three or four weeks ago.

Mr Stewart has produced an extremely intelligent and literate account of the Great Game and engagement by Britain and Russia in Central Asia.

And running through his account is the unspoken assumption that in order to understand a region you also need to know something of its languages and culture – something that appears a little out of fashion these days.

Now as I’ve said at length I’ve been doing a lot of reading about the post 1917 civil war in Russia as part of my ongoing fascination with the place.

In the course of this I’ve just finished a biography of Baron Ungern von Sternberg, who was clearly a sociopath, a sadist, and someone we would nowadays lock up for a very long time.

However, Sternberg despite his many faults was probably responsible for Mongolia not being assimilated into China in the 1920’s as had happened earlier with what we now call inner Mongolia.

Mongolia is comparitively rich in mineral resources and next to resource hungry China. There is also a railway line across it that would allow easy trasnshipment of minerals from Siberia.

Now I live in Australia. Our economy is resource dependent – ie we dig stuff out of the ground and sell it to China, Japan and Korea. It would be better for our economy if we made things here but in the main we sell raw materials.

This means that our major competitors are other raw material suppliers, and Russia and Mongolia.

Understanding about Mongolia’s history is part of the process of understanding why Mongolia may not wish to be dependent on China just as understanding the story of the Japanese occupation of Korea and Manchuria is useful for understanding current antipathies. And of course why China may prefer to buy from Australia rather than Russia and Mongolia who my be more averse to a close economic relationship than we are.

And to understand these things needs an understanding of history languages and cultures, and often quite esoteric knowledge.

We seem to be going through a phase where studies of other cultures, languages and histories are not esteemed. Mr Stewart’s programmes give us one reason why we should esteem them more. New footage of people in China trashing Toyotas gives us another.

While we would be stupid not to pay attention to economic realities focusing on the short term economic benefits of downplaying the humanities and allied subjects risks prejudicing our long term economic well being

I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading around the history of the Russian civil war, renewing my fascination with that period. Given the upcoming centenary of the first world war, and the probable emphasis in anglophone countries on the events of the western front, it’s probably worth also remembering the scale of the changes wrought in the east with the collapse of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and the emergence of new states and polities, not to mention the various conflicts and revolutions that came in its wake, the most important of which, for its impact on the history of twentieth century was the October revolution in Russia.

Working through the history of the Russian Civil War and the Allied intervention can be daunting. So many acronyms, places and absolutely stupendous scale can reduce one to a state of complete confusion. So much so that I’ve put together this spreadsheet to put events in sequence. I don’t claim it to be comprehensive, but it’s as accurate as I can get it from the sources available to me.

It has also got to be remembered that this was not a simple green versus blue civil war like the American Civil War or the Spanish Civil war.

In very simple terms, the Bolsheviks mounted a coup against Kerensky’s Provisional Government. In some place the local authorities declared for Lenin, in other places Kerensky. Army officers, who were in a mutinous state anyway individually turned their attentions on the Bolsheviks in part because they were propped up by western aid. It is an open question how many of the white generals might in time have rebelled against Kerensky.

At the same time, various political groupings, mostly in Siberia, tried to stitch together a Provisional Government mark 2, which was in turn deposed by White forces under Kolchak. It is telling that after Kolchak’s coup parts of the Provisional Government’s forces defected to the Bolsheviks rather than fight for the old order.

In other places, in the Baltic, in the Caucasus various former polities tried to re-establish their former states which had been absorbed into the Russian empire, much as happened in the post 1992 break-up of the Soviet Union.

It also has to be remembered that the dramatic changes in this period affected the lives of millions and was built of many individual tragedies.

The most obvious of the tragedies was the extra judicial execution of the Tsar and his family in the basement of the Ipatiev house in July 1918.

We now know that they were all shot or otherwise murdered. We’ve found the bones. Modern DNA testing has disproved all of the imposters no matter how plausible. In the 1920’s when Shanghai was full of taxi-dancers claiming to have been countesses or princesses and ex-countesses working as nightclub entertainers the various imposters probably seemed a quite a bit more plausible.

Not now, we’ve found the bones.

It’s interesting however to look at how the myths might have come about. If you look at the July 18 1918 New York Times it has a report of the execution of the Tsar. Interestingly it says quite explicitly that only Nicholas has been shot and that the rest of the Imperial Family was in detention.

It also states that Nicholas may have been shot by the Ural Soviet to prevent capture by the Czechoslovak legion. (Strangely there have been whispers that the British in Murmansk had a house prepared for important personages – certainly one of the original plans was to evacuate the Czechs via Murmansk – and it would be only natural to speculate that someone thought that they might be taking the Tsar and his family into exile via Murmansk. How they were going to get them from Ekaterinburg to Murmansk is another mystery,)

Searching the newspapers of the time it’s also clear that no one had any real idea of what had happened with various fictitious accounts circulating, and even after the capture of Ekaterinburg by the White forces there was still a lack of clarity, as well as perhaps a reluctance to believe the extent of the murders.

And while the original investigators did not find the bones of Alexis, there was a report put out by the Bolsheviks a few days after the extra judicial killing that Alexis had died of exposure – the circumstances of suffering from exposure being unexplained.

In short no one at the time had any real idea what was happening, and if that was true for the imperial family it must have been so much more true for individuals and an opportunity to perhaps reinvent themselves.