Peking!

We have finally arrived. It has been a horible journey from Mongolia to China through the dessert of gobi. Of course it's amazing for the first minutes, but after some time it gets boring and quite hot too...

after arriving in Peking we at first hadto find out, where our hostel is and it took us about one hour in the taxi to get there as the taxi driver was only able to read the adress in chinese - which we didn't have ;)

so this our first day here, we are going to see the forbidden city today, so I might post someother interesting fotos soon!

PS: I have added some pictures to the mongolia post aswell!

Peking

Mongolia

We arrived in the capitol city Ulan Bataar on wednesday morning after a long long journey with some 7 hours waiting on the border to mongolia. However, checking of our passports and visas just took 45 minutes...

There is this one saying that fits perfectly in this context and which we had to mention quite often during our trip: "eta rassia - that's russia." We actually picked it up from locals so it's not that we are the only ones who complain about the russian police, train company, etc...

Due to the fact that we all feel a little bit sick, we are not able to do any tours. But actually we enjoy our time in the city, going out is quite much fun and cheap aswell. Hope i can show u more pictures of UB.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lucas.windhager/Mongolia

Baikal Lake and Irrkutsk

We were quite glad about going to Baikal as this would have been our only time to relax on our journey. After arriving in Irrkutsk, we straight went to Olchron, an island in lake baikal. The cool thing about it: it's like every backpacker is speaking about this one island as it's really fantastic over there. So it realy reminded us of the movie 'the beach', lol

Again we 'tried' to camp in our tent but a thunder storm didn't want us to stay any longer so we escaped to next hotel where we stayed in the lobby for one night ;)
We actually liked that place so we decided to stay there for the rest of our nights on Olchron aswell. We met some really great guys from england over there, who stayed in our room. I guess you can say that we had a good time with those lads ;)

We met again in Irrkutsk, which is the biggest city near Baikal. Esa, Carl and me just spent there one night, we travelled to Ulan Ude were we are now.

Tomorrow morning we go to Ulan Baator, so we will leave Russia after a long long journey which lasted for 3 weeks.

Hope to upload more frequently in future but this will depend on the www-conections in Mongolia ;)

cheers!

Baikal Lake

Krasnoyarsk

Hey There!

It took us ages to find a working internet connection, so I am glad to make a little update on what has happened so far now. I am sure there is something worth mentioning.

In Krasnoyarsk, we heard about this gorgeous place called Oficianka, so we headed there and builded up our tent. After one cold night we decided to stay at the house ('datcha' on russian) of this old man we met on the bus. He was a great guy and we cooked together with him with vegetables we took from his garden - awesome, i can tell you...

We also went to this National Park where we got some climbing lessons, for free of course, just to mention the great hospitality of russians.

Krasnoyarsk

Kazan

We just arrived in Jekaterinburg. So I thought I post a couple of pictures of our stay in Kazan, the capitol city of Tatarstan. It's a nice city with the one biggest mosques in Europe and the smallest metro system in the world ;) Also the Kreml of Kazan is very beautiful

Some of the pictures show the place were we stayed: it was one of those infamous giant buildings with concrete slabs (Plattenbau). In there there was actually a hostel ;)

Kazan

Moscow

As I promised. Here are a couple of pictures of our time in Moscow, which we left on saturday.
I know it's not that much, but as I will be there studying in September I have the opportunity to show u more ;)

Two of the pictures show a station of the the underground system of moscow. Mind that those ones show a modern station, other stations are rather old and very posh!!

There is also a picture of the giant footbal stadium of Moscow where the Final of the Champions League was played. Carl and me saw a match of Torpedo Moscow (2nd best Russian league). Probably one of the worst matches I have ever been to but Carl and me still had fun :) (probably because of the somehow 'funny' style of Russian football and the quality that is even worse than the Austrian 4th league, lol)

Moscow

Vienna - Kiev

Hi there!

Esa, Carl and me are going to travel from to Bejing - by train. In this blog we will keep our mates at home up to date were we are and what we have sen already.

Click on the picture below to see our album from our journey to Kiev. We stayed at Martin's place, a former colleague of mine from university.

Note that we already in Kazan. We will post pictures of our stay in Moscow soon!

Vienna - Kiev