World of Wonders

BRAZIL : meet the most famous Mestres of capoeira

July 18 to August 10, 2008

Brazil, Brazil… What does this country have to do with the first part of our trip considered as adventurous with treks? Nothing! You are right! In fact, Brazil was not part of our plan. We decided actually to add these holidays before the true departure for our round the world trip. Crazy, isn’t it… The real reason is that we’ve been practicing a brazilian martial art for about 3 years now, CAPOEIRA, and we followed our friends to Brazil for a trip half capoeira half holidays. We discovered the amazing Rio de Janeiro, the charming Salvador da Bahia, the beaches close from Recife, and the beautiful landscape of Jericoacoara in a bit more than 3 weeks.

We also spent a week in a tiny town called Siribinha, to take part to a capoeira international meeting, where we met the most famous masters of this art. This wonderful experience made us understand more the cultural part of our sport, and feel capoeira get into our blood, with also the maculele, the singing, the samba, etc. We shared all these moments with two of our good friends, Anja and Andry, and we met also 8 additional friends of our swiss capoeira group during this very famous week of “Ginga sem limite”. What a dream! Brazil is such a great country… and with great food! We flew back home and had three days to get our final stuff ready for the big jump…

CHINA : live the 2008 Olympic games in Beijing!

August 14 to August , 2008 

Beijing 2008, the Olympics, wow! What a start in our trip! We were really lucky to stay 4 days in the city hosting the summer olympic games, and also be part of it: we watched 4 events, yoohoo! We started with the fantastic evening of Track & Field, showing the 100m men final: amazing, crazy, unbelievable. The atmosphere in this beautiful stadium, the Bird Nest, was incredible and colourful! We then went to watch the individual gymnastics finals,and also the table tennis men team final, with a stadium full of Chinese chearing for their athletes… impressive. And we finished with a major event: the last swimming finals, with the 8^th gold medal and record for Michael Phelps; what an emotion in the swimming hall, historical!

These first days in north east China gave us time to dicover the main attractions of Beijing (the Forbidden City, the great wall) and also to make a 3 days excursion inside the land. The 1st stop was in Shaolin temple, home of the world famous Kung Fu academy; and the 2nd one was in Xi’an, home of the Terracotta warriors. Well, Xi’an was also the first place were Scarlett had stomache problems! We have to mention it, because digestion problems take also a major place in our trip with all these different types of food, hahaha! Back to Beijing, it was time for us to experiment one of the most famous train in the world: the transsiberian, which allowed us to go from Beijing in China to Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia.
 

MONGOLIA : stunning steps and friendly people

August 24, to September 4, 2008

Welcome to Mongolia, the country you can visit only between the end of June and the beginning of September, because the rest of the year, temperatures are below zero… and in winter they can reach -40 degrees celsius, argh! Luckily, they have homemade vodka… they kept telling us it helped them to be warm during winter…

After a night in the Transmongolian train and a beautiful ride through the Gobi desert, we arrived in Ulanbaatar, the capital. There, we planned our tour with the travel company Happy Camel, and a french guy joined us for this adventure. This is how we got started for four days in central north Mongolia, with some stops at an old monastery and at some gorgeous landscape view points, in between the 6 to 8 hours we spent every day driving on terribly bumpy roads. But don’t we want to discover Mongolia for its stepps, its animals in quantity, its ger lost in the middle of nowhere? Of course we do. And that’s what we did! We were also really lucky to stop one night in the ger of our driver’s relatives. That’s how we found ourselves milking an horse and a yak’s female (I don’t remember the exact name), trying typical food, and riding an horse during two hours with incredible scenery around us. Like a dream! Talking about food, it seemed that mutton and goat was part of every meal… And after two days, everything smelt like mutton! Our clothes, our hair, our hands, all the food, our sleeping bag, etc. Great… Drink some airag (horse fermented milk) on top of this, and you’d have the full taste of Mongolia! =)

Back to Ulanbataar, we flew to the western part of Mongolia: Bayan-Ulgii. An incredible flight with a nice view on the land below us, and an interesting landing, not on concrete, but on dust! In Bayan-Ulgii, there is about nothing going on, except the market. But in the area, you can find quite a different type of scenery: mountains, glaciers, national parks, lakes, and the famous eagle-hunters! We were back on the road with a fantastic guide-driver named Dosjan, who made us discover this gorgeous area. People who live around there are mainly Kazakhs; their country is only a couple hours and mountains away. We stopped one night in a family that Dosjan knew, and we could enjoy the typical kazakh (and also kyrghyz) meal: the “beshbarmak”. It is basically a plate of lamb, and the different parts of the meat go first to the older man (biggest bone), then to the second one, etc. The children got to eat the tiny ribs. They usually make this meal for special occasions, with guests. It was delicious! The next two days we went trekking with a night of camping next to a ice-blue river, and the third day we went to see the petroglyphs in the area, and stopped camping next to a lake, where an unknown family invited us to have dinner in their ger. It was an incredibly nice trip, and we would recommend anyone going to Mongolia, not to forget to visit the western part also!

KYRGYZSTAN : the celestial mountains by horse

September 7 to September 23, 2008

Kyrgyzstan? Where is that? This small country is part of the ex USSR and stands just below Kazakhstan, which is west of Mongolia? Understand? If not, we propose you have a quick look at the google map (look at the left menu bar) we made where you can find all the places and paths we've been to during the past months. Now, you wonder why we went there... One of our good friends has been travelling in this country every summer for 16 years now, to make horse treks in the great mountains and discover new paths with the company Shepherd's way. based in Barskoon, next to the lake Issik kul. So we decided to join him this year for a 12 days tour in the celestial mountains! We were six swiss people, one cook, one guide and one shepperd, and of course, nine horses. We rid the horses up and down the beautiful kyrgyz valleys, crossed the cold rivers, camped every  night with temperatures anround zero, and even went up a pass at 4000m! This pass was the highlight of the trek,with an incredible view on the Tien-Shan mountains and on one of the world's longest glaciers, "Inylshek", which we ridd along during the last 4 days. I think to understand better how beautiful it felt to be in such a virgin landscape, you should simply have a look at the picture, which you can find in the album Kyrgyzstan on the left menu bar!

WEST CHINA : Kashgar and the silk road

September 23 to September 28, 2008

The mythical silk road… who never heard about it? We were really lucky to discover two parts of it: the one from Kyrgyzstan to Kashgar by the very famous Torugart pass, and the one from Kashgar to the border of Pakistan , also called the Karakorum highway. These two roads have majestic scenery, and just to imagine the merchants traveling with their goods on their camels in the old time gave us chills. But of course, today you will find more trucks than camels, and you will not find any merchant on the roadside with silk or spices anymore. We took the option of the road to go through borders, to see how it’s like, and because flying is also expensive at the end.

It took us a full day to drive from Naryn in Kyrgyzstan , to Kashgar in western China , and one thing is sure: we hadn’t seen so many trucks on the road in our entire life! The roads were really bad, we had a flat tire on the way up, waited two hours on the top for our Chinese vehicle to come pick us up, and found ourselves in an empty bus just for us two on the way down. Wow! It was the most incredible trip ever, not knowing if we would arrive or not at our destination: Kashgar.

Kashgar is mostly ouigur (muslim from central Asia ) and still has an old city with traditional houses, markets and fabrics, and we especially loved to eat in the small street restaurants for about 80 cts for a meal. It was fantastic! We felt good in this non common city, enjoying the culture of this Chinese minority.

An excursion on the Karakorum highway brought us to outstanding views on the sand dunes, the red mountains and the Pamir chain of mountains, close from Pakistan . All these colors coming out of mountains are just unreal! Some adventurous people even climb the Mustag Ata, a 7546m summit. Amazing.
After a week in the western Chinese area, we made a 3 days long trip to Lhasa in Tibet: we took a 26 hours ride by train from Kashgar to Urumqi (northwest China), then the next day we flew to Xining, from where we could get into the very famous Qinghai Tibet train (again about 20 hours). This trip was great for meeting Chinese people, sleeping in the same compartment as us. It was the best part of it, a human experience! Well, note that the Tibetan landscape at more than 5000m at some parts was just something you never see normally in a train!

TIBET

September 30 to October 10, 2008

NEPAL

October 10 to November 7, 2008