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Excerpt from the Trip Info Pack: The Internet
Russia and Mongolia are very switched on to the internet. An added bonus for visitors is that, because computers are an expensive item to own, many young people use an Internet Café for their surfing needs – so there are lots of net-cafés around. The average price is $1–2 (US) per hour, depending on speed of connection and sleaziness of surroundings. Be prepared to tolerate the other users, like gamers playing top-volume games. Even those wearing headphones might shout out the most severe swear-words when they are killed in the game, or their underpants are eaten by The Bug-Blatter beast of Trall. Our staff in Mongolia can point you to some net places in Ulaanbaatar, but don’t expect high speeds (we waited for 12 minutes for Yahoo! to load). Be aware that in China, internet access is very strictly state-supervised.
Cash
Neil has been enlightening me on the essential ticking of pre-trip check-boxes. All this talk of preparat ion brings up the essential prerequisite of hard cash – in a daunting three different currencies. Neil provides words of reassurance:
“Currency is almost the least of your worries before you leave, because all three of the currencies you’ll be using (Russian, Mongolian and Chinese) are officially only available after you’ve arrived. What you need to do is take US dollars or euros as a kind of ‘working’ currency, and then obtain local currencies once you get there.
“Increasingly you can take the pound, although for the moment, when you get to Chinese cities other than Beijing, you give them our banknotes and they ask ‘Who’s this fat lady…?’ We can never win with that one. Every year we say to take euros or dollars, because you can change them anywhere. And then you get annoyed letters, usually from UKIP members: [Neil adopts a colonialist accent, reminiscent of the last days of the Raj] ‘What’s wrong with the British pound? We managed to change the British Pound in Ulaanbaatar!’ Alright, well, jolly good! But just suppose you hadn’t been able to!? I can always bank on hearing that one,” he says resignedly. “If you tell people ‘Oh, they’ll take the pound everywhere!’, then of course you’ll end up with a stream of letters saying ‘We couldn’t change it anywhere!’ You can never win! We try and tell people what the local conditions are going to be like, but after a certain point it’s up to them…
“Almost everywhere you go nowadays you can find an ATM. As well as being convenient, you’ll also get the best exchange rate from it, so that’s going to be the answer to currency changing”.
There are still some strange assumptions to contend with, however, even where ATM’s are concerned:
“People think that in Russia they’re going to be black lacquered, made of wood, painted… No! It’s an ATM for God’s sake, exactly the same as you have at home. Also, they don’t have any idea yet which of our destinations are flourishing modern cities, like Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia, and which are places where you can’t even find a shop, let alone a bank or an ATM. We tell people where they can expect to change money and also where they won’t have a chance at all. But there’s still this expectation, which is largely wrong, that you can always find someone who’ll take US dollars. It’s no different in Oxford street: maybe you can find, eventually, one shop that will take US dollars, for a rotten rate and after a long search. You need to use the local currency.”
Basically then, taking euros and US dollars, and then changing them when you have the opportunity for Russian roubles, Mongolian tugriks and Chinese yuans, is the way to go.
Food And Vegetarian Skin-Flint Religious-Nutter Spies:
So, now we’ve got the money sorted, what shall we buy with it? How about that other essential thing, sustenance:
“There are two aspects to this: whether you need to take anything with you, and what you need to know about the local food. We give people a run down on what the local cuisine is, which local dishes and specialities you might like to try while you’re there. And also for vegetarians: which of these foods would be suitable and how you can steer yourself through the local menu, still try the local dishes, and not have to eat meat or poultry.”
Or fish, remember, for vegetarians in the strict sense of the word. As you slip away from metropolitan Russia, however, veggie choices seem harder and harder to come by:
“Mongolia is probably the hardest country of the three for vegetarians. There’s no real understanding of vegetarianism. They do understand that some Buddhists from China are vegetarians, and this gives them a good old laugh at the expense of ‘those stupid people who won’t eat meat’. They know vegetarianism exists, or at least they know the word exists, but that doesn’t necessarily help you.
“Because our programmes in Mongolia largely centre on one particular lodge camp outside town, we’ve been able to sort it with the owners that they have a completely vegetarian menu available. In fact, for the last four or five years they’ve invited a chef over from Lahore. People get there and find that Indian curry is available! So they are more than happy with that usually. The difficulty is for the ‘Islington’ vegetarians, who are right on and very aggressive about being vegetarian, but they at the same time they want to have Mongolian cuisine. They should be so lucky! The Mongolian phrase for ‘What would you like to eat?’ translates literally as ‘How would you like your meat?’ So you can see the problem. All three countries, to a certain extent, share the social stigma that meatless meals are what the very, very poor in society eat.
During the Soviet era there was, as Neil puts, rather a ‘unique’ view of vegetarianism:
“If you didn’t eat meat then the reason for that must be because you were some kind of religious nutter. They’ve mostly got over that now, particularly in Russia. They’re terrible hypochondriacs and heart disease is endemic. They understand now the idea of following a meatless diet because it’s better for your health. The idea of vegans, though, they really can’t get on with. I think this is where the ‘religious nutter’ thing comes in, because during Lent religious Russians eat an entirely Vegan diet. You go into any restaurant in town during Lent, and in addition to their regular menu, without even asking for it you’ll be brought ‘our Lenten menu’, for anybody who wants it.
“In China a new problem arises: Vegetarian diets are strongly linked with Buddhism, which is frowned upon by the State, so anybody who is a vegetarian is also a political spy, or could be. So they are quite suspicious. Alongside that however, they do have traditional Chinese dishes which are Buddhist monk dishes, on the menu of every restaurant! Of course, in China there is more than one cuisine. Each region has it’s own cuisine. Generally speaking, most of the different cuisines have a decent spattering of vegetarian, and mostly vegan dishes.
So, in conclusion: “You’re either a ‘nutter’, a ‘skin flint’ or a spy. You’re doing things which are not normal within their society. But,” Neil concedes, “they’ll try and help you if they can.”
Happy eating.
Next time: Tips And Tales (Part 5)
Bloody Tourists: yes they mean you. False Expectations: giving the people what they want. And Xi’an, how one historic town says it all.
[Photo by Ivan Walsh]
