Our modern culture has us constantly in a rush. My children and I spend so much time dashing between projects, work, family & friends. I really needed us to slow down and spend some time in the moment, to enjoy spending time together without viewing it as quality time.
This was certainly one of the main reasons that precipitated my desire to cross the globe with my 2 young children. Of course, I was bonkers to say the least! What on earth was I doing hiking these girls out of their school! My wish however was to spend more time all together and overwhelmingly I wanted us to slow down – which is why we decided to take the train from London to Singapore. Unrealistic expectation? Perhaps! We didn’t reach Singapore, but we did reach Bangkok using all forms of transport but flights!
The flights were brought into question when we were considering the environmental impact of the 4 of us jumping on and off so many planes, but hugely and also personally more importantly, I wanted us to savour our travel and really live in the moment. I didn’t want to be dashing to each soulless airport and alighting 6,000 miles away in a different country with no conception of how far we had travelled. Travelling by train was ideal. It was cheap, comfortable (for the most part) and the best experience we could have wished for.
Our journey started at Waterloo and the 1st couple of trains took Andrew (my partner) and I with Emily and Holland (then 8 & 6) across France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Belarus and into Russia.
Our visit to Moscow included visits to the Kremlin, Red Square, St Basil’s Cathedral and the Bolshoi Ballet. We couldn’t believe a visit to the Bolshoi was only £6 each! This was our first experience of Communism, which then led to an interesting chat with the children. We were able to show examples of communism, because they were everywhere, eg the underground stations were adorned with beautifully opulent ceilings with chandeliers and some stunning examples of art.
Our longest train journey
Our longest train journey was soon upon us and we stepped on to the Trans Siberian train no. 4 at Jaroskvaya station and knew we were going to be on board until we reached Beijing, some 6 days later. We were loaded with supplies, inc jam, bread, salami, apples, oranges and of course lots of coffee and hot chocolate! Our room for the week was a 4 birth cabin in Kupe (2nd class) and the girls had the top bunks, Andrew and I the bottom. There were approx 10 bedrooms per carriage with one toilet to share and 3 sinks.
There was a real mix in our carriage. Katherine was a 19 yo o
gap year student (English Lit) and she took great delight in having the girls everyday for a English lesson! Spellings and journals were discussed. There was a Mongolian Doctor who managed to crack my back into place one night. Orlando was an English man on his way to meet his wife and children in Japan where they were emigrating. There was also a Norwegian family of 5, which was fantastic because the children played constantly. In fact we all soon felt at home and I adored looking out the window for hours on end.
Counrty hopping
Passing through Siberia seemed vast and endless until one morning we awoke at 3am (a little hung over I might add, they don’t call it the vodka train for nothing!) to see Lake Baikal. It’s the largest freshwater lake in the world and also the deepest. Holding more than 20% of the world’s fresh water, more than all the other great lakes out together! It was stunning, even in the very early dawn.
After seeing Lake Baikal, the scenery changed dramatically. We were entering Mongolia and the Gobi desert where camels and yurts adorned the landscape. Teenagers and women ran to the train windows when we pulled into stations to sell their hot chickens, potatoes, fruit and water. Which by now were very gratefully received as our supplies had run out and we hated the food from the restaurant car. The food was divine, a time in our life I will remember forever on how much I really tasted and appreciated what I ate!
At the Mongolian - Chinese boarder, the entire train was hoisted high to change the bogeys. The children stared out the window as they took our wheels away and changed them with bogeys compatible with Chinese the railway. Then came the wait. We arrived in no-mans-land and waited here for over 7 hours with no access to the toilets during this time (they lock them as they flush straight on to the track). Luckily I had brought along a portable / collapsible potty! I can’t describe the psychologically impact of sitting on a train when it isn’t moving.
Eventually we pulled out of no-mans-land and into China. There was a fanfare as we pulled into the station with disco-esque lights flashing, welcoming us. We had just leaped 4 hours forward in time and it was around 2am, so everything seemed very surreal indeed.
The Chinese scenery was beautiful and lush compared to the Gobi desert. It rained constantly on the day-long ride towards Beijing. After swapping emails with all our wonderful new friends, we alighted in Beijing relaxed and happy.
I was revelling in spending so much time with my family; we had played endless games of mini monopoly and black jack, chatted till the sun set, cuddled together on the mini beds to the rhythmic sway of the train and laughed ourselves silly.
Beijing was frenetic
Beijing was frenetic. There’s no other word for it. And we had arrived in the middle of the busiest Chinese holiday of the year. We were bamboozled at every turn by the sights and smells. The night markets had a magical bustle where we tried amazing foods including traditional Peking duck, horsemeat and cow’s tongue. Emily screeched loudly one meal “there’s an onion on my plate”!! We collapsed into hysterics that the onion was the problem and not the chicken’s foot or gobble next to it! The girls loved the Chinese food, which is vastly different to the Anglicised Chinese we are served here. Noodles were made fresh at our table and thrown into a deep cooking pot in the centre, where we delved with our chopsticks to discover the glorious strands only seconds later. We were once served a whole (and I mean whole) lamb at our table, which fortunately was shredded before we picked the pieces out we were prepared to eat! The only food we refused to try were the sea horses skewered onto sticks ~ this was just too upsetting.
We did the touristy bit in Beijing, visiting The Great Wall, Forbidden City and The Summer Palace. It was all magical, and only slighted marred by the overly fast pace of the city.
Our next train journey took us deep into south China and across the border into Vietnam and the capital Hanoi, which has to be one of our favourite places. The atmosphere was alive. Glorious buildings dating from The French Colony, the freshest, tastiest food on the planet and a wonderful mix of frantic yet laid back pace of life. I drank and got slightly intoxicated at the strength of the French coffee at a café, as the children delighted at having as many mango smoothies as they could manage. The Bia Hoi home-brewed beer was only 6p and the girls were welcome wherever we went at whatever time. The Vietnamese are wonderful, generous and friendly, and they loved the girls and their blond hair! We sat well into the evenings on the side walks sipping Bia Hoi, watching the many mopeds zoom past, laden with whole families and sometimes animals. Indeed once we saw a whole dead cow!
The mornings are the trading hours and the pavements are primarily taken up with parked mopeds and women chopping meat (chicken, beef, mutton, dog and sometimes snake) - there is no room to walk. Which pushes pedestrians in the stream of moped traffic in the road. We all quickly learnt that if you wait by the side of the road intent on crossing, you'll be there for hours. You need to walk out and they'll avoid you by swerving. They don't go fast, but it seems scary with sometimes 70 mopeds coming towards you, all laden with at least 3 people.
Funnily Vietnam has very few squat toilets compared to China which has plenty of them and we are all now experts at squatting. Especially Emily - who in my humble opinion has used the worst ones in the world. There was a toilet in China that you could cut the smell with a knife from 100 yards away; it was 2 small brick walls where you squat and your waste simply falls in between. It was a hell pit and Emily used it.
Plus at the Forbidden City, Emily used a toilet that had no walls; so when you entered the female toilet, there were a row of Chinese ladies all squatting in a row. Again, Emily used it with nonchalance and a completely blasé attitude.
Ha Long Bay
We visited Ha Long Bay, a world heritage site, which was one of our trip highlights. We were on board a 'Junk' Ship, our cabin a miniature hotel room with restaurant-standard Vietnamese seafood. The skyline was unlike any other and left me in awe. We spent the first day kayaking around the South China Sea and I felt like I wanted to stay forever. I felt immense peace and was quite simply dwarfed by my surroundings. It was so amazing - I'll never forget it.
A night on board the ship with other guests was followed by a 2 hour trek up a mountain on Cat Ba Island the next day. The humidity was incredible and we were literally dripping with sweat by the time we reached the summit. The children raced ahead and put our physical endurance to shame.
Further south on the train again to Nha Trang and a week on the paradise Whale Island where Emily learnt to Scuba Dive. Then further south again to Ho Chi Minh City. A visit to the war museum and the Cu Chi tunnels left us in tears with enormous admiration for the Vietnamese.
Our style of travel changed when we left Vietnam as we climbed on board our boat which was to take us out of the Vietnam along the Mekong River to arrive 2 days later in Phnom Penn, the capital of Cambodia.
We didn’t stay here long, apart from to see the Toul Sleng museum and the Killing Fields. We make a decision not to take the girls to the Toul Sleng museum as we had heard that the photographic images were very disturbing, but they did come with us to the Killing Fields. Here we explained how many millions of children, women and men were executed by the Khmer Rouge. It was very difficult answering their question on why people could go to the extent the Khmer Rouge did to torture, maim and kill. We stood in silence in front of the towering memorial filled with skulls and the mass graves where they had uncovered over 9,000 bodies.
It may be puzzling why we would take the girls here to explain to them about the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot and his regime, but they were witness to the still evident tragedy in modern day Cambodia and this history deserved to told and explained in a way they could perhaps understand.
Truly inspirational
We moved on to Siem Reap by coach where Tania, who makes the Hug-a-Bub sling and whom I had met in Byron Bay 6 years previously had moved to Cambodia and set up a NGO helping the street kids after visiting on holiday and being very deeply moved by these children’s plight.
My plan was to set up camp near The Green Gecko (Tania’s NGO) and work there with the children. First though we went to see Angkor Wat.
It was here we spent 3 days with our Tuk Tuk driver visiting the city of Angkor Wat, a beautiful and vast Buddhist Temple. The temperature was reaching 35 degrees by early morning with the humidity at around 80% so for the most part we quite simply couldn’t appreciate these most magnificent buildings. The girls did however find it very exciting when we came to Ta Phrom, where Tomb Raider was filmed. It was spectacular and very pleasantly in the shade. The tress grew at obscure angles from the rocks like nothing we had seen and the girls played and conversed with the Cambodian children who were a constant presence in our life there. We were now used to their pestering to buy postcards and bracelets, as at first Emily in particular had found it very daunting being pushed, shoved, touched and shouted at!
The morning of the 6th June, we awoke and biked across to The Green Gecko HQ! Here Tania had set up her NGO which was a safe place for the street kids of Siem Reap to eat, wash, learn and play.
It was amazing! Approx 50 kids had descended on the small house down a bumpy dust road with classrooms, a kitchen, some toilets and a place to shower. It was run by volunteers, of which I was now one. In our time there, I helped set up the medical room, looked after the kids with activities and teaching basic English skills and even helped the parents of these children set up small businesses selling books. Emily and Holland came with me everyday and went to each classroom applicable to their age, often helping the other children with spelling etc. Then played outside with them and learnt that you need no toys at all to have a wonderful time. They made bracelets out of banana leaves and swung and chatted in hammocks, making deep friendships with these incredible Cambodian children.
It was a wonderful month, we met some truly inspirational people and the girls learnt what desperate conditions these dear children and their families lived.
Before The Green Gecko these children were begging on the street, often looking after very young siblings as their parents were either unable to work due to being a landmine victim or being a drug addict and as a result relied heavily on the children being the main wage earner. Girls had the threat of being sold by their families into brothels. At the Green Gecko they had a chance of life, with food, laughter, education and most importantly love.
A month later we reluctantly left and travelled north to Laos, which was the start of our most adventurous journeys to date. We squeezed into a cab with 2 other passengers which took us the 10 hour journey across bumpy dust roads to northern Cambodia. Here we stayed the night in a very remote town before crossing what turned out to be an unofficial border crossing. We then caught a boat into the 2 thousand islands in southern Laos and stayed for 3 days on a small island with no electricity.
We met a Laotian family with a little girl Emily’s age called ‘A’ who took us to a remote village where she took Emily rice farming for the day and after we sampled some beautifully cooked fish and veg. No one here spoke much English which was unusual, but A was able to do a lot of the translating. They lived in wooden huts on stilts and lived off the land and sea. I envied their live style and even though they had ‘nothing’ they had everything. It was simple and perfect.
Our journey further north took us through the stunning landscape of the Bolaven plateau and then an overnight bus ride to the capital of Laos, Vientiene. After some kayaking, cliff jumping and tube riding in the touristy Vang Vieng we had the scary ride through bandit land to beautiful Luang Prabang (where I insisted we take the windowless local chicken bus on the 10 hour drive as bandits don’t hold up local buses).
Luang Prabang was our 2nd favourite destination where we met a lovely family with a daughter Holland’s age, visited crystal clear waterfalls, rode on Elephants, shopped in local markets, ate fish off sticks and watched sunsets from Buddhists temples.
Nearing the end
The end of our 4 months was near and the only journey left was to Bangkok. We took the hard route (as normal) and went on a 2 day boat trip to Northern Thailand. It went though very dense jungle where wild elephants had known to be spotted drinking by the shore. We stopped at a wonderful village to stay the night before entering Thailand the next day.
All at once we hit Westernised civilisation. Thailand, apart from the stunningly dramatic scenery could have been any Western Country in the world. There were shopping malls, cinemas and restaurants. The girls and I spent a day shopping for knickers and t shirts and then went to see Harry Potter at the cinema
For more information and for donations for the Green Gecko please see
http://www.greengeckoproject.org/
For invaluable advice about travelling by train anywhere in the world please see
http://www.seat61.com