40 Days Since the Beginning, 40 Days to the End

Greetings from Beijing! I have left the clean air and grassy steppe of Mongolia and am now in the thick of the smog of Beijing. I've been hanging around here for the last three days, and I'll be moving on to Yichang (Hubei) on Saturday. The train ride to Yichang is 22 glorious hours, but luckily it's an overnighter, which hopefully means I will be able to sleep through a good chunk of it. I'm planning on catching an upstream boat from Yichang to Chongqing. The boat goes along the mighty Yangtze River, and passes through the Three Gorges. I've passed the half way point of my trip now, and so in just over a month, I'll be flying out of Hong Kong, bound for Toronto, via a four day layover in San Francisco. Between now and then, my plan is to do the Yangtze river thing, make my way through Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Guanxi. I've made the difficult and sad decision to cut Tibet from my schedule....I'm going to have to save it for my next trip over.

I feel like I need to make some closing remarks on Mongolia, seeing as I left it a little short the last time. I've decided that Mongolia has been by far the best travel experience that I've ever had. It is the least developed country I've ever visited, which was fascinating. Four days of horse-trekking around Khovsgol Nuur National Park was probably the coolest thing I've ever done in my life. Like I said before, Mongolians are so incredibly friendly and helpful, and are just a tonne of fun to hang around. I was really quite sad to leave Mongolia, and so I've decided that I'll have to make a return visit within the next few years. I want to go back and see more of it before Macdonald/Starbucks/KFC decide to move in. I'm thinking that next time, I'll definitely have to do a lot more horse-trekking, and perhaps ride a camel and learn how to milk a yak.

I visited Beijing in 2005, and so I've already seen a lot of the major tourist sites; this time around, I'm just hanging out, and trying to do some trip planning for the next five weeks.The one major site that I missed in Beijing last time around was the Great Wall of China. As I've previously mentioned, you're not a hero/man until you've climbed the Great Wall, and so yesterday, I became a superhero/man. It was a 10km hike, and it took 3.5 hours to make it to the finish line. Let me tell you, I was one sweaty beast at the end of the walk. There were actually salt stains on my shirt from the sweat. I also have the world's worst farmer's tan, that has slowly but surely been developing since Mongolia. When I get back to Toronto, you can all feel free to make fun of it. My knees are a little achy today, but other than that, all is well.