I’d seen him from a short distance, twelve months previously, he travelled alone aboard a plane to Moscow. He wore a dark tracksuit top zipped over a light t-shirt, and loose pale green shorts covered the knees he cradled by his chest. His hair sprayed out in loose brown curls beneath a khaki cap, highlighted by scribbles of grey. His pale thin lips lined a shallow smile, and his early morning eyes seemed glazed with relief. As his homeland slipped beneath a thin veil of cloud, he lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair, his lips parted just once to release his farewell thoughts: Let the journey begin, my friend. Today, he lay upright on the rippled white sheets of a double bed, in a simple, homely room on the island of Bali.

His hair was shorter, still a familiar fiesta of curls and slashed with new grey. His face was slimmer, his pale skin had darkened and his spirit was now windowed by black-framed glasses. His khaki cap lay upturned nearby, a tide of sweat had set a shade in the rim and it was filled with worn foreign coins. His loyal backpack leaned tiredly, resting its bruises and scars against a bamboo table. He lay shirtless, wearing chequered grey shorts between a half empty packet of Marlborough and a swollen blue notebook. Ambient music moulded around his quiet thoughts, and I watched in silence as his eyes circled the motionless ceiling fan. He lay in the path of a mirror, reflecting the figure of a proud and mortal curio. Though he sometimes heard me, I sensed he never saw me.

He recalled how he’d left Moscow, slipping east through Siberia to the rhythmic beat of a Mongolia bound train. It was five days before he set foot in Ulaanbaatar. While he absorbed the strength of the mighty Mongol race, he followed the whispers through the kitsch of their annual games. He described the grace of wrestlers, the poetry of archers and the fear that pecked at the calmness of preteen jockeys. Asia mesmerised him instantaneously. He looked musingly at the ceiling fan, he found its will to spin tremendous. After a short time living with local nomads in their ger and exploding dust clouds with the hooves of horses, he journeyed onward to Beijing. The Mongolians, he declared have a degree in simplicity, their eyes hang like painted canvases in a dusty exhibit of Untold Beauty. His arrival in Beijing was infamous, he writhed in agony for three days. At moments he became so dehydrated he had to use his fingers to pry his swollen tongue from the inner of his cheek. China was kind after this initiation, and even in the cruellest moments he learned patience, compassion and conviction.

He recalled a southwest mountain village where he’d sat and eaten beside a loyal friend, whose name, when he spoke it, started the percussion in his eyes. Following a humble feast they shared cigarettes and baiju with a decade or more excitable locals, who later produced a segment of bee larvae. After a pregnant pause, he swallowed the first of the pale grubs, beginning a long evening of song and dance, laughter and merriment. It says a lot about the Chinese, they’re xenophobes who roll out their welcome mats with a courtesy offered to queens. He shuffled on the bed, and then I listened as he rolled his memory onto the Tibetan plateau. He visited Lhasa, spending two weeks watching the evolution of monks, and the perseverance of pilgrims. He thought highly of the Tibetans. Lhasa radiates beneath a sky so alive, so pure, so blue. It mainlines your veins, and suddenly you’re as wise as the ocean, as blameless as boys, and as boundless as her eyes. He left the Forbidden City in a failing van. He drifted in and around whitewashed monasteries and indigo lakes, vast pale dunes and rich red forts, sought all the while by scores of grubby faced youths. As the traveller’s tale ascended to the base camp of Mount Everest, I picked up the thrill in his tone. He told of being caught out in tumbling temperatures beneath a canopy of curious stars. After a slow 10km hike he recoiled and spent several hours shivering uncontrollably beneath a stack of blankets, his eyes still retained that frozen glaze.

The resilient city of Kathmandu became the stage to a fond farewell, to the girl whose name he chased around the orchards of his mind. He cast his eyes on his cigarettes before confessing it had taken many moons before he realised the feeling seeping from the Kathmandu shadows, was loneliness. The Kingdom of Nepal played stage to my coronation. The day I lost my queen preceded the month I found my Kingdom. It was there, in Nepal, that he first encountered Hinduism. He found sense in aspects of its tradition, Buddha had nudged him on an educational level, but Hinduism and all the myth and colour of its ways and words earned a place in his heart in ways he’d never permitted. He doesn’t believe in mortal gods, or the dictatorship he sees in other religions. The real Hindu takes strength from everything, and gives weakness to nothing. He looped around Nepal, taking to the rivers, roads and jungles before riding on the roofs of buses through the southern terai, stopping by the birthplace of the Indian Prince, Buddha before lowering himself over the border and into the heart of Hindustan, to India.

He smiled, as if trying to expel the gross history of this journey. His first night in India, he told me how drunk he’d gotten, attempting to forget the inward journey that choked him with anger, and drenched him in desperation and blood. I learned later that that aching anger would bind itself with love. He travelled the cities of the north with his parents. Together they took in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi; the glorious Mogul white cliffs of the Taj; the Golden Temple, home of the Sikhs; and the Buddha’s classroom of Sarnath. Between these, they fought with forts and took trains to temples before the three speared their way over rails to the southern, largely Christian city of Pondicherry. North India is crass and callous. You’re soul is robbed, your spirit burned and your destiny is devilishly realigned. Christmas was spent sowing seeds of kisses on that girl, she’d drifted on his whispers to bloom beneath the shadows of festivity and friends. He stopped his story for a moment to sip a sassy smile, though its cause would remain a private pleasure.

He then told me of the month of Janus, who opened a door to new beginnings on the isle of Sri Lanka. The surf and sands of southern Ceylon bore him the fruit of countless new friends, each was true, each loyal and distinct. One day, he fell upon the tragedy of two Sri Lankan brothers, whose family business, a turtle farm was destroyed “the day the sea is coming”, along with almost their entire family. I didn’t have to hear Nimal and Ruwan’s tragedy, I could see it in their eyes and feel it in my heart, and without words I knew she felt the same, we had to help. I listened to his thoughts on Sri Lanka, the gaps he left I figured were small parts of his self that he left in the sands to recover another day. The tea plantations, national parks and holy pilgrimages he spoke so sweetly of, sat beside his firsthand accounts of an island in turmoil, at war.

His return to India was more instinct than desire. He tore himself away from an island he loved and threw himself at the mercy of her southern states. He found shanti the day he rented an Enfield Bullet motorcycle, and found comfort from the loving arms wrapped around his waist. He described the thirty day journey in magnificent stages, from the temple strewn lands of Tamils, up and over the Western Ghats before descending their coats of grit and grim into the green glory of Kerala. All along their way they sipped hot sweet chai and snacked on wadis with a hundred, no a thousand locals. They pinched rice and sweet, spicy curries with their fingers from banana leaves and when their clocks chimed for their ‘hour of need’ it took just a shy passerby, or a hidden onlooker to attract a gaggle of intrigue and set them on their way once more. To thread a passage through India in this way, sweetened bitterness with bliss and spliced cruel with kind. Our path was scribed with poetries of passion, and slow ballads of awe and brilliance. The conclusion however, also brought a sequel to the Toodle-oo of Kathmandu, to his pillion, his equal and his muse. This time born of logic, laced with tears but remembered in gratitude.

He paused, then silently walked barefoot to his porch, as he sat down he drew his knees to his bare chest and lit a cigarette. The plumes of smoke moved thinly through the still, warm air of our Bali night. He stared up into the dim porch light, watching in wonder his self-made spectacle of careless wisps. He extinguished the cigarette slowly, drew a deep breath and continued his memoires, carrying his thoughts over the moss-covered rocks that surrounded a small hidden lawn. He recalled the three weeks of long days that followed her departure when he’d ventured into the state of Andhra Pradesh, going nowhere fast while thinking things over slowly. I knew it was time to leave India, when I was denied entry to a night train. My bribes fell on hollow ears, my begging fell on careless eyes and my will was spirited away on a feather, to a passive plateau. I’d lost the will to fight; I knew right there, right then that my time – for now – was up.

He took to Singapore, a city he knew was a contrast to India, the homeland of humble heroes and fantastic villains. He drank and shopped and laughed and sighed, he ate and walked and talked. Singapore – for the visitor at least – is as neutral as Asia gets with the West. She’s loyal, where others are scheming, and she’s tender where others are tough. He stopped to watch an ant, struggle under a prized crumb of toast, and then from nowhere there were two, then three, and then four to help carry their loot awkwardly away. Touché. He continued, explaining how he flew to Sumatra, an island of Indonesia and one he discovered to be inlaid with treasures. He mounted volcanoes, dipped his weary body in lakes and his finale was attended by the fire-red, pendulous orang-utans. He took an onward flight to Jakarta, capital of the neighbouring island, Java, and en route he lost his prized possessions; his passport, and wallet of critical cards. Corruption in Indonesia was not beautiful, nor welcome. It’s a crime of the coward. If this nation weren’t so soft and sweet in other ways, I’d instil you with its sour side and stench. He spoke of other islands ringed with golden beaches, and cultures descended through lineages of lore.

It was here on Bali that I heard these nibs of his enchanting year in Asia. I listened for over an hour, in awe. I thought I knew the definition of my emotions, I thought I’d felt them all. Though the depths of those in Asia almost reduced my prior sentiments, to mere essence. Even in the shaves of silence I heard the enigmatic echo of his epic. I see his friendships in the constellations of his ebony eyes; I feel his compassion in the warmth of his palms; I feel his excitement in the nape of his neck; I see his astonishment in the furrows of his brow; I sense his caution in the flare of his nostrils; and I’ve heard his story, a thousand glorious times. A thousand glorious times.

A Thousand Glorious Times is a post from Trail of Ants.

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“Excuse me Sir, you are stay here?”, I turned slowly around, beads of sweat dripping feverishly from my brow. Somehow I’d wound up in the lobby of the imaginatively named, Beijing Hotel, a five star marbled metropolis catering for the rich and famous, and seemingly not the sick backpacker I currently portrayed. An hour earlier I had shunned the suggestion of Peking Duck to my Austrian friends – still with me since Mongolia – and admitted defeat to my impending sickness, under the watchful eye of Chairman Mao on Tiananmen Square and was attempting to find my way back to the hostel. Beijing Hotel was merely the stage to obtain some yuan to begin the long and shaky road home.

I explained my predicament to the snobs and made for the exit, muttering a colourful array of expletives, but gladly clutching a handful of yuan. I found a taxi to whizz me through the streets and ultimately – so it felt – to my death bed. Mr Wai tu Hai seeing an opportunity, doubled the fare before zig zagging his way through the cities Hutong district with obvious conspiracy. I knew he was conning me, but at just $4 the ironic thing was I’d of paid him double again to take me in a straight line. Eventually his torment stopped, and I stumbled onto the streets at the foot of the Beijing City Centre Youth Hostel to make the long journey up to the 4th floor haven I’d been dreaming of, as the elevator proudly sounded ‘ding’ my mouth bulged with vomit, the ashtray bin outside it’s steel fortress did well to hold the torrent. Each similar receptacle thereafter suffered the same fate, each time rendering me disconnected and trembling alone in the ever lengthening corridor.

My Austrian friends returned past midnight to hear my tale of woe, they’re medical students so thankfully I was in good hands. I hazily explained my symptoms – that with every sip of water, I would double the expulsion – they offered advice and eventually, after ignoring an incredible thirst I fell asleep, if not unconscious, awaking every hour to be reminded of my ailment. At one point I found myself lying in the corridor outside my room, revelling in the cooler air, only to be removed by staff believing I was drunk and treating my illness with a cauldron of laughter. They couldn’t understand my plight, nor my ongoing expletives, if only I could of mustered more bile.

Come morning the improvement was dramatic, but weakened by the experience I trembled another farewell to my Austrian supporters and lay my head back, waking periodically to sip water and take stock. I believe the episode was brought on from drinking the ‘boiled’ water from the train, letting it cool over hours to quench my healthy thirst. Whatever it’s origin, if you are planning a RTW trip and using TrailofAnts.com as a reference then I cannot stress enough the importance of your health, be that your medical kit or the way you look after yourself on the road you should make it your full time job while dragging your backpack over ditches and dunes. This is my third illness in a month, and in the heat of Asia I have learned some valuable lessons, not only of my health but of the kindness of others, inparticular the Austrians. I rarely suffer from illnesses, let alone of this frequency but they are all avoidable and simply required me to think a few steps ahead, I’ve just learned it the hard way and hopefully you’ll benefit from a healthy author portraying the vibrancy of this vast, colourful collage of continents.

Preceding this episode, I embarked on my final leg of the Trans-Siberian. My compartment shared with 2 elderly Danes intent on their own self-importance and a Mongolian lady whom at first was a picture of elegance but who hours later was dripping vodka from her berth down onto my bed, shouts of disdain meant nothing, and wouldn’t even if we shared a common tongue. She was heading to Beijing to see her son, upon disembarking the train she had returned to her original self and I couldn’t help wonder if he had ever been aware of this ugly side to his darling mother. Again, it seemed vodka – a residual evil of Russia’s hold on Mongolia – had claimed another innocent victim, and I was soberly suffering it’s consequences.

Rolling into Beijing Train Station, I felt like a borrower rolling through a Monopoly board contested by two heavy smokers; random clusters of high rises, clung together by a choking smog. My short expedition with the Austrians (who by now had been joined by a new friend, Ralph) took me by metro to Tiananmen Square, at 3pm I looked skyward to see the sun struggling to penetrate the pollution that lay overhead. Never have I seen pollution so apparent as in Beijing, and coupled with my illness it only accelerates my lust to head west into the country to enjoy the freshness I know this country holds. How the Olympic Committee ever saw this city fit to hold The Games, I’ll never know as all I can imagine is an Olympic Village adorned with athletes appearing as if they were enjoying a 60-a-day habit. The Forbidden City, The Temple of Heaven, The Summer Palace can wait; I’ll return when this city has cleaned up it’s act, and I’ll breath a fresh sigh of relief as I look skyward, hopefully sheltering my eyes from the glare of the sun while cherishing every mouthful of Peking Duck that tenaciously flirts with my taste buds.

Feeling Peaky in Peking is a post from Trail of Ants.

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Dumdum-De-DUM, dumdum-De-DUM, dumdum-De-DUM. It took me the whole 5 days from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar, to decide how I would portray the drum of the Trans-Mongolian train I alighted this morning. Say it with me, dumdum-De-DUM, softer, dumdum-De-DUM, emphasise the capitals dumdum, De-DUM, one-two, three-four, dumdum-De-DUM. Never has a journey left me so relaxed. To my right are a set of antelope horns, the hostel foyet is filled with lounge music and all I want to do is hug the keyboard, close my eyes and drift off to dreams of faraway places. Dumdum-De-DUM.

It would be nigh on impossible to capture the rolling landscapes, the trivial pleasures and the romantic motion of my Siberian journey in words, even pictures would fail to bring the episode to life. At 7:30am this morning I hauled my backpack off carriage 6 and said goodbye to a smörgåsbord of new friends. In the 5 day spell aboard the Trans-Mongolian route, the train and it’s cattle underwent a mystical transformation. The sturdy carriages gradually lost the raw intrigue and a network formed, that I can only liken to one of a small village. My immediate neighbours consisted of 2 Swedish and 2 Dutch to one side and 4 Italians to the other while my housemates took the form of Austrians, Tony & Eveline and Erdenebaatar of Mongolia (seemingly the only Mongol in the village). Life it seemed, couldn’t be better.

At the top of the street lived Lancastrians, Gavin and Les and together with our extended community we rolled through 29 stations, exchanging jokes and learning about our different quirks, cultures and goals. The social highlights of the day were pulling up at a station and alighting to stretch our legs, maybe meeting a new neighbour and watching with admiration as the network filtered out and undertook their desired task. Along the daytime stations, there were usually 10 or so local ladies selling their produce; dried fish, beer, bread, fruit, ramin noodles etc, which meant there was always a feast to be had with my housemates when we returned to our home in the period after.

It’s hard to fathom where time went, for one I still shun the opportunity to join the watch-wearing masses. Days were candidly filled with long breakfasts, followed by a stroll down to the local cafe, where Victor would afford us a scowl and a few slams upon the table should we dare request a top up. We new he laughed inside. Following the morning coffee, I took pleasure in hanging out by an open window, just watching the world roll consistently by. Dumdum-De-DUM.

There was a phenomenon occurring upon Train 4, time outside was quite obviously changing but time within it’s steel frame, curiously remained the same. I slept when I was tired, ate when I was hungry and drank whenever I felt like it. A little too often, perhaps, as I nursed my pounding head under the sheet seemingly missing the “best station along route”, according to Eveline. One day I popped down the street to Gav’s place, purely to discuss topics of choice over a game or two of chess. Another day I chose to stay in my home for a few hours, making sign language with Erdenebaatar and Tony over a bottle of exceedingly strong vodka, while enjoying some Mongolian pop music on his laptop. Overtime Tony, Eveline and I became accustomed with the national sport of the Trans-Siberian, ‘hunting’. To those outside of the Trans-Mongolian world, this was simply taking photos, but with Tony’s colourful spin on the English language bringing a whole new slant to it. As with all good neighbours, I saved farts for the first-class carriage and always opened our, freshly smelling home to passing strangers.

Along the route I battled with three dilemmas. The first being the feeling of “oh go on, you’re on holiday” while I removed the 5th Marlborough Light of the day from it’s cardboard casket. I’m not sure I can compare a 2 year jaunt to a holiday, on the subject of vices at least. The second dilemma being the urge to take photos at every opportunity. I always fall into this trap, and I’m glad I nipped this one in the bud early. I find much more pleasure in selfishly keeping moments to myself, while only capturing a premium selection of what a scenario had to offer. The third dilemma was my realisation of failing to register my Russian visa in Moscow, this is an old Communist hang up, but a rule all the same. Aboard the train, there was nothing I could do but bury the dilemma to the back of my head and await my fate at the border town, Sukhbaatar. Ironically my meal at Sukhbaatar was the quintessential last supper; one of dried fish, bread and water. We made jokes to lighten the mood, and it was with a hearty sigh of relief that I took back my passport from the overtly stern official. Mongolia, here I come.

Arriving in Ulaanbaatar today, I reminisced over the reasons for my coming here. Initially it had been purely a wind up to a former girlfriend, Laura. I knew she’d never consider Mongolia in our feeble attempts to plan a duel RTW trip, but as I stubbornly argued it’s case against the backpacking heavyweights of Australia and Thailand I became intrigued. Sitting here now, paints a Gobi Glow upon my face that even Genghis Kahn would struggle to eradicate.

This week is the Naadam Festival, my primary goal along The Trail while all other time will be spent absorbing the Mongolian culture while looking forward, and planning my next destination, China. But before then, I’ll grab a coffee, light up a Marlborough and reflect upon my first week along The Trail while humming it’s inevitable theme tune; “dumdum-De-DUM, dumdum-De-DUM, dumdum-De-DUM”.

Trans-Mongolian; it’s right down my street. is a post from Trail of Ants.

Consider visiting my travel blog to explore a wide variety of travel related articles, and score yourself a 7% discount on your next travel insurance policy with my World Nomads promotional code.