When I thought of Siberia, I remembered concentration camps, snowy winters and lots of unhappy Russians. Never once I imagined sandy beaches, scorching summers, and a load of happy tourists at Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world.
I usually preferred a more authentic, off-tourist destination. However, I can’t recommend enough the tourist-trap Olkhon Island, the largest island in the middle of Baikal, a popular base for travelers to get lost in the tranquility and wide-open space.
(See this post for tips on planning, traveling and transportation cost from Moscow to Beijing.)
There are many more popular stop-overs along the routes not only what listed below, for example, Novgorod, Omsk, Tyumen, etc. I stopped at fewer places because I preferred to stay longer at one place, and I became lazy to haul my heavy bags on and off the train.
The trains, the people and the stops.
I needed to get out of Kowloon and Hong Kong island fast for I couldn’t stand the thought of staying another day swimming in noises, crowds, pollution and turning into a shop worm. The last destination on my list which I hadn’t visited, Lantau Island, was known for the world largest sitting Buddha, Disneyland Resort many beautiful beaches. Given the airport was located on Lantau Island, spending my last days there before flying out was the most logical option. However, I faced the same problem as I had prior to Lamma Island: bad time-management and popular tourist destinations.
Traveling on the Trans-Siberian trains through the longest rail track in the world is an experience of a lifetime. Everybody has heard of the word Siberia, but only some have an idea where it is, and only a few want to get there.
Siberia is more of a concept than a place, unless you live there. Some might imagine danger when they think of Siberia. After all, Siberia is a former hang-out for exiles and convicts, an ice-cold place in a remote part of communist Russia full of Russian mafias.
I ran away from Kuala Lumpur’s and Singapore’s shopping arena like a contagious disease because I contracted it BIG time during my entire time Hong Kong, a seven-day being a hedonist in a place where people seemed to live, eat and shop.
Kuala Lumpur’s wide array of shopping malls would have been a material bliss if I had not come from Singapore a few days ago, a country where inhabitants are described fondly as educated, ambitious, hard-working and materialistic. They work hard, play hard and like to indulge in material things. Singapore has the largest percentage of mobile phone users in the world. They probably have the biggest expense for cars, paying at least 15000 SGD (~15000 USD) more just to own it. (I knew two people who paid 17000 and 19000 SGD.) No, this is not the cost of a car.
And the materialist crown goes to…
My walkabout accidentally turned into a pilgrimage to 21st-century bazaars during the last three weeks in Asia. There was no way I could prepare myself for a full-blown shopping attack from the countries which strived to be the best of the best providers for all our “needs.”
‘Ghetto’, in the dictionary, is defined as a slum area where a group or groups of minority live. If you ask Asians, it is where they forbid their children to come near let alone stay the night. On the other hand, to ‘white’ people, ‘ghetto’ provokes a sense of anticipation and promises an exhilarating adventure as in the New York Times’ Top-10-things-to-do-in-Hong-Kong.
I did something complete out of my character.
I threw my bag to the side and slept at the beach without having a tent nor a sleeping bag. I brought nothing for a sleep-over except the clothes on my body, a scarf, a thin sheet, tooth paste and tooth brush.
It wasn’t the lack of a comfy pillow, clean linen and a sleeping surface that worried me. Those who knew me well could assure that this act was unlikely for I was afraid of darkness, sometimes to the point that it paralyzed me, preventing me from being out in the open at night by myself.
Do you know that your electronic existence and that of everyone else rests on my eBay sellers’ shipping labels which I threw into the trash bins without a second glance?
I had an eBay account which I hardly used until I moved to the Czech Republic (CZ). Having only 10 million people, a relatively small market, businesses in CZ can’t be that competitive. Prices here were much higher compared to what I used to pay in the USA and richer Western European countries like UK or Germany that hs a bigger population and more developed economy.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
