I am fortunate to be able to travel often between St.Petersburg (where I have an apartment) via Moscow to Ulaan Baatar (where I have an apartment). In actual fact I have discovered that this route is also the most convenient and quickest to get from Europe to Asia. It is a five to six hour (depending on time of year and jet streams) Aeroflot jaunt from Moscow to UB, both being so far north the plane is literally flying across the top of the world. In fact by the time the flight reaches Ulaan Baatar, it is closer to the United States (Alaska) than Moscow.

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My new book about China’s Silk Road ambitions has just been published, fortunately to great reviews. It’s what I’ve been working to complete all summer, although its actually taken a full 12 months to put together. The book contains trade and demographic details of all 60 countries participating in the project, as well as details of Chinese funding for the scheme, complete overviews of the overland and maritime routes, and the potential logistical bottlenecks to developing road, rail and sea links.

For example, China’s desire to have hi-speed rail all the way from Shanghai to Singapore will never get off the ground if Thailand and Malaysia cannot agree to develop the rail routes between Bangkok and KL. That is a lucrative airline route and interested parties don’t want competition. Likewise, upgrading Vietnams rail system to hi-speed will cost 50% of the countries GDP. So much needs to be done…

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Travelling and living in places such as Ulaan Baatar is wonderful for putting one immediately into a different universe. Everything changes, the expats you meet are more quirky, interesting, the country provides more challenges, even dangers, and there are relationships not found anywhere else. One such is Mongolia’s visa-free arrangement with North Korea, while the DPRK Embassy is a couple of streets away from my apartment. Hush hush, but the Americans and North Koreans unofficially convene in Ulaan Baatar when they want to talk. Which is not very often, but it does happen.

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Autumn comes early in Mongolia, and with the many fresh water rivers and lakes the country possesses it is a heaven for river fishing. This far north is very much Eurasia, with species of fresh water fish to be found here just as they are in Northern Europe including Britain. With the advent of mass sea fishing, the more delicate – and bony – river fish have fallen way out of fashion in London, which is a great shame, because as any Russian will tell you, fish such as Bream, Perch, Pike and many others make excellent eating.
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Continued from previous post

The following morning we set off for the nearby Red, or Flaming Cliffs.

Roy Chapman Andrews had spent years here, convinced about his theory that dinosaurs laid eggs, and his first discovery of them was in this area. Today, parts of the Cliffs are still strictly off limits to travelers, with paleontologists still exploring fertile areas. The cliffs themselves are the remnants of a huge prehistoric inland sea, with the Gobi desert floor being the ocean bottom. Mongolia was warm and wet in these times, and clay sediments laid down over millenia proved a fine preservative. Even today, and in the easier to access areas of the cliffs, one can still come across dinosaur bones emerging from the red sandstone; wind constantly erodes the cliffs and the bones of long extinct animals protrude from the cliffs, some of them hundreds of feet up.

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Roy Chapman Andrews is a legendary figure in exploration and scientific research, and especially so in paleontology. The character Indiana Jones was apparently based on him, and during the 1920’s, based on research he had conducted at the University of American Museum of Natural History, had a hunch that many species of Dinosaur had evolved in the now barren region of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert. Setting out on numerous expeditions, he was eventually proven right, with the discovery of the first dinosaur eggs (this proving their evolutionary link to modern birds) in addition to discovering many new species. He wrote about these in several successful books, where the battered fedora hat, rifle, and belts of bullets whilst seated on a Mongolian horse would be duplicated by Harrison Ford decades later. Andrews though was the original.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Vineyard, Chateau Divnomorskoe, is on the Black Sea, and produces some of Russia’s best, most expensive, and hard to obtain wines. Fortunately I live a block down from St. Petersburg’s oldest and most exclusive wine merchants. This is the 2012 Sauvignon Blanc. Expensive means USD50 a bottle – about 2x the going rate for a decent Russian wine. So what’s it like? Well – excellent. And for fifty bucks better value than many European wines. It’s… dry enough, yet with peaches and almonds, and an excellent wine for fish (salmon is on the grill) or for a late summer evenings tipple. You have to hand it to Tsars, they really do know how to get a lot of things right. Can you imagine Chateau Merkel or Obama? Russian Wines have been doing very well in European competitions recently as well, with Chateau Divnomorskoe winning several awards at a number of competitions
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Stolichnaya is one of the great Russian brands – everyone knows it. Although it has its roots in the Imperial era “Moscow State Wine Warehouse #1“, now better known as the Cristall Distillery, Stolichnaya as a brand didn’t make an entrance until 1938. Rather brilliantly, almost immediately after making its debut, the warehouse was requisitioned during war time and converted to making industrial strength alcohol, turning out millions of bottles of “Molotov Cocktails” to throw at the Germans. Post war, production returned to vodka and the Stolichnaya brand really began to take off as a Soviet Union primary product, a position it retains today. Part of its success is the fact the distillery was based in Moscow – the capital is reputed to have the best waters for distilling grain – and after holding a personal tasting test of various Russian vodkas sourced from all over the country I am inclined to agree. For me, the strength of Stolichnaya is its slightly oily quality, it has a viscosity not found in other vodkas, and I enjoy that. Today, the brand is subject to a somewhat complicated ownership dispute, actually resulting in two variants being of the market – one branded as Stolichanaya, which is owned by the Russian state (FKP) and distilled in Russia, while the other brand “Stoli” is owned by a Russian private group (SPI) and distilled in Latvia. The dispute over who is the ‘real’ Stolichnaya continues.

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Ok, Ok, I know its not Champagne if it’s not from Epernay, France, but these vineyards have so much in common with the Champagne region they practically share the same DNA. Abrau Durso was created at the insistence of Tsar Alexander II in 1870, and thus has very strong imperial connections. The Russian Royal Family had developed a great love for Champagne, and especially Cliquot, whose famous Widow had specifically targeted the Russian market and had for years shipped bottles for consumption to the Russian court. Unlike the British, who preferred their fizz to be dry (hence the name “Brut” – a play on the French declaring this to be a ‘brutish’ way to be appreciating their precious wines) the Russians preferred sweet, or demi-sec (semi-sweet) wines. Madame Cliquot supplied the demand for many years until the Tsar decided it would be appropriate (and presumably to enjoy even more of the stuff) if Russia could make its own. He dispatched loyal courtier Prince Lev Golitsyn (who must have thought it the most excellent Russian royal command ever) to oversee the project, and in collaboration with Feodor Geiduk, an agricultural expert, decided upon a small, rugged valley about 20 kilometers north of Novorossiysk. Abrau Durso is named after two streams, the Abrau that forms a small, natural lake (the largest in the North Caucasus) and the Durso, which falls to the Black Sea two kilometers distant. The first grapes were planted in 1896 and included Riesling, Portugieser, Aligote, Sauvignon, Saperavi, and Muscat.
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In years gone by, the Devonshire-Ellis family built ships, owning the John Brown & Co shipyards.
From these yards came many historic vessels, amongst them HMS Hood, the Luistania, Queen Mary, QE2 and the Royal Yacht Britannia. The British Admiralty and Cunard were major clients, but what is less well known is that unlike their competitors, John Brown & Co would also provide technologies and supervise the building of vessels to overseas shipyards – an early form of technology transfer.
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