Sihpromatum - Backpacks and Bra Straps

by Savannah Grace

  Backpacks

  and

  Bra Straps

  Sihpromatum Publishing House

  Copyright © Savannah Grace 2014

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of non-fiction. No part of this book may be reproduced, in whole or in part, without express, written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may this publication be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Sihpromatum Publishing House

  Contact: sihpromatum@gmail.com

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support is appreciated by the author.

  ASIN: B00N3M4FNU

  Visit our website at

  www.sihpromatum.com

  Cover photo courtesy of © Ammon Watkins 2005

  Author photo courtesy of © Breanna Watkins 2011

  Edited by Kathryn Davis at www.expertsubjects.com and JoAnn Cleaver

  Cover and interior design by Heather UpChurch at www.expertsubjects.com

  To my incredible family for always

  supporting and loving me.

  We share the pains and triumphs together.

  Contents

  Author Note

  World Map of Four Year Journey

  Map Legend

  Backpacks and Bra Straps Map

  Chapter 1: New World

  Chapter 2: Making Headway

  Chapter 3: Too Much of Too Little

  Chapter 4: Revelation in the Flame

  Chapter 5: Sorcha

  Chapter 6: Miss Fire

  Chapter 7: The Unexpected Highlife in Low Class

  Chapter 8: Longsocks

  Chapter 9: 100 Days

  Chapter 10: Heartbreaker

  Chapter 11: What Now?

  Chapter 12: A Rough Night

  Chapter 13: Bucking Bronco

  Chapter 14: As the World Turns

  Chapter 15: Living on the Edge

  Chapter 16: Drugs, Police and a Watermelon

  Chapter 17: Trucker’s Purgatory

  Chapter 18: Night Runs

  Chapter 19: Cause and Effect

  Chapter 20: The Ways of Old and New

  Chapter 21: Fowl Play

  Chapter 22: Taking a Walk Down the Silk Road

  Chapter 23: City of Sands

  Chapter 24: School-To-Go

  Chapter 25: Smuggled Goods

  Chapter 26: Family Feud

  Chapter 27: Privacy

  Chapter 28: A Holy Province

  Chapter 29: Little Miss Unpopular

  Chapter 30: Hello Money

  Chapter 31: Changing Faces

  Chapter 32: High Hopes

  Chapter 33: Compromises

  Chapter 34: Through Her Eyes

  Chapter 35: Flying High

  Chapter 36: Yakity-Yak-Yak

  Chapter 37: Acclimatization

  Chapter 38: Sherpa Chaperone

  Chapter 39: Slip, Slide, Scary Ride

  Chapter 40: You Raise Me Up

  Chapter 41: Winding Down

  Chapter 42: Up, Up and Away

  Note from the Author

  Sihpromatum (Sip-row-may-tum) – A blessing that initially appears to be a curse.

  I put this book together with significant prompting from blogs, post-cards, family reminiscences and extensive journal entries. Some original blog entries are reproduced directly in the book and identified by double stars. ** Some names were changed. Written in Canadian English.

  Join our journey and check out photos along the way at:

  www.sihpromatum.com

  The Four Year Journey

  Map Legend

  24/07/05 - 11/10/05

  Mongolia/Russia train border crossing

  Irkutsk, Russia

  Khuzhir on Olkhon Island in Lake Baikal, Russia

  Tomsk, Russia

  Barnaul, Russia with Sorcha

  Semey, Kazakhstan

  Almaty, Kazakhstan with Longsocks

  Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan

  Songkol Lake horseback riding, Kyrgyzstan

  Osh, Kyrgyzstan

  Irkeshtam at the Kyrgyzstan/China border

  Kashgar, China

  Urumqi, China

  Turpan and Aydingkol, third lowest geographical depression, China

  The Singing Sand Dunes in Dunhuang, China

  Golmud, China with Daisaku

  Lhasa, administrative capital of Tibet

  Shigatse onward to Friendship Highway, Tibet

  Kathmandu, capital of Nepal

  Mount Everest Base Camp Trek, Nepal

  Distance Covered in this Book

  New World

  1

  A sudden nudge in my side jolted me awake as a rough, heavily accented voice shouted, “Passport! Passport!” I rolled over and froze in the glare of two cold, deep-set Russian eyes. Unable to move, I tried to decide if I was more shocked by the rude awakening or by his blond hair and white skin. That doesn’t look Mongolian, I quickly determined, thinking of the two friends, Future and Baagii, we’d just left behind in Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaanbaatar.

  His flawless features made the border guard appear rather young. He made my knees shake, but not in the way they usually would have in response to his blue-eyed beauty. It was an involuntary reaction to the machine gun that was strapped over his shoulder and lying securely across his chest. The uncomfortably close barrel was pointed directly down at me, causing me to go slightly cross-eyed. I actually would have found him quite handsome, had he not terrified me so much.

  He didn’t give me a chance to reply before stretching out his hand and again demanding, “Passport! Passport!” The second of the two military officials was rousting the others, flinging his arms around at them to convey a sense of urgency. My mom and my two siblings, Ammon and Bree, began digging in their daypacks while he glared at them disdainfully. I was grateful when Ammon, my eldest brother and our designated leader, reached out to deliver his passport to the guard towering over me. This released some of the tension from the situation and bought me a few seconds of time – time which they apparently were not willing to give us voluntarily.

  I fumbled with the daypack that was protectively strapped to my ankle to find my own documents. I hoped I wouldn’t do anything wrong enough to warrant being yelled at again this early in the morning. As he flipped through the pages to find my visa, I glanced cautiously at the soldiers’ high leather boots and camouflage uniforms, still startled by this scene. I subconsciously nodded in agreement with what I’d written in my journal just the night before: “New adventures come with each new country.”

  My heart pounded as they scowled down at each of our visas. Oh please. Oh please. Work! Our Russian visas were one of the only two we’d applied for before we took off on our intended year-long backpacking trip. I knew they were a hundred percent legit, but these guys could have scared me into believing my name wasn’t Savannah. To my immense relief, they finally left us in peace after what seemed like endless confirming looks from passport to person, a few grunts, and a quick entry stamp.

  “Wow. Those were some real, freakin’ Russians. They look like they came right out of a movie,” Bree, my older sister and the dreamer in the family, announced. “Cool!” She was leaning over the bunk bed above me. Remnants of sleep still creased her face, yet her manner was alert and bubbly. I cringed a little, hoping the guar
ds hadn’t heard her upbeat tone. If first impressions were anything to go by, such cheeriness must be illegal here. Surely, she’d be reprimanded.

  “Welcome to Russia,” Ammon said, slipping his passport back into the money belt tied around his skinny waist.

  “That was awesome. That one guy looked just like Drago from Rocky 4,” Bree continued as she jumped down from her bed to join us on the lower bunks. The static made her long brown hair reach like branches for the bunk above. At eighteen, three years my senior, Bree was often mistaken for the younger sister.

  “He isn’t Russian. Dolph Lungren is Swedish,” Ammon countered.

  “In the movie, he is, and they are here, too. So there!”

  “Way to stereotype, dork.”

  “In the movie, he’s a Russian,” Bree repeated, certain she was making a legitimate argument. Ammon slapped his forehead, exasperated with her movie-script take on life. This habitual gesture had undoubtedly contributed to the receding hairline he already sported, though he was only twenty-five.

  “I can’t believe that I’m actually here in Russia,” Mom said, distracting them. “When I was a kid, it was behind the Iron Curtain, and there was no way anybody was ever getting in. And now, here we are…”

  Wow! The biggest country in the whole world. It wasn’t as if I’d magically stepped from a television screen into an IMAX theatre, but still… I just felt so small.

  “They’re still searching the train,” I said in disbelief several hours later.

  “Here they come, just like Inspector Gadget.” Bree busily sang the theme song. Directly above us we heard the “clunk, clunk, clunk” of armed soldiers tromping on the roof, the metal buckling a bit under their weight. Every so often, they’d start shouting to each other in their rough, foreign language. Russian had a completely different sound and tone compared to Mongolian. Though I’d heard it described as “cats in a fight” more than once, I had actually started getting used to how the Mongolian language sounded by the time we left.

  We could see the guards out our window, checking beneath the carriage on their hands and knees. They were vigorously searching every nook and cranny: the roof, steel wheels, rafters – everywhere. I had no idea what they were expecting to find, but maybe this was just their usual protocol.

  “You’d think if they knew we were going to be parked here for hours and hours, they wouldn’t have been in such a dang frenzy to see our passports,” Bree declared. “How long do we have to wait, anyway?”

  “Yeah, and did you notice they locked the bathrooms?” I asked. “But I guess I can’t really complain about them. They’re so clean. Actually, almost everything on this train is nicer than what we’re used to.” Unlike all the other trains we’d been on over the last couple of months, our four-person compartment was a perfect place to wile away the hours. Two bunk-style beds with ample head space sported clean sheets, blankets, and even pillows, which were a welcome change from our usual day-pack “pillows.” The mattresses were actually cushiony, like a couch, instead of the heavy wooden planks to which we’d become accustomed. Our relatively luxurious haven was adorned with thin blue curtains, and I was surprised to see carpet on the floor. Even the small plastic vase filled with artificial yellow and white flowers made me feel spoiled. The smallest details were taken care of, and they made a noticeable difference to the cozy atmosphere – everything but food, surprisingly. Luckily, Mom was prudent enough to buy supplies and bottled water in Ulaanbaatar or we’d have starved. With only hot water provided on the train, we prepared and ate tons of instant noodles as we relaxed, read, and drove Ammon completely bonkers with our incessant chatter. When a porter left cheap slippers for all of us, we felt a bit like royalty. And yet, when Mom had first forced this trip on me, I’d have called this place a dump, I thought, laughing at myself as I happily put them on.

  As a result of my parents’ separation, Mom had decided to pack up everything and go as a family on a one-year backpacking trip around the world. The news had been as unexpected as my dad walking out on us in the first place, and my whole world fell apart all over again. I’d tried everything I could think of to prevent it from happening. I’d even made an attempt to stay home, but since Dad had just moved in with his long-time, long-distance girlfriend, staying with him was not an option. Had I been welcome, I still would’ve chosen this, even if I’d known that it would involve finding goat hairs in my food, not showering for days (sometimes weeks), and using squatty toilets.

  It had taken five months to give away most of our once-treasured possessions while we waited for Ammon to finish his degree. We’d miraculously managed to compress our entire five-thousand-square-foot-home lives into a small storage unit and four sixty-litre back-packs, move out of our rented house, and fly off to Hong Kong. My old self – the spoiled, fourteen-year-old self – couldn’t have imagined a more miserable situation, but almost from the moment we stepped off the plane in Hong Kong, I began to realize, for the first time in my life, how privileged we’d been compared to how most of the rest of the world lives. But this Russian train was a huge step up from the really basic way of life we’d experienced in China and Mongolia, where it seemed that everything was stripped down to the bare essentials.

  Soon we were playing our ongoing card game of Daifugō – or Jerk, as we liked to call it – the Japanese version of the game we call Asshole in the West. Depending on our ever-changing ranks, determined by the points we earned, we were required to physically switch seats and trade cards at the beginning of each new round.

  After we had played a few hands, Ammon spent the next few hours retelling his Russian experiences. He and a buddy – fellow university student – had gone on a three-month backpacking trip through Northern Europe in 2004, and they ended up in Russia for two weeks. Memories of their misadventures had made Ammon somewhat apprehensive about returning.

  “So, anyway, this big babushka…”

  “Whoa, wait. What’s a babushka?! That’s a hilarious word,” Bree said.

  “Babushka is Russian for an elderly woman,” he answered quickly in order to carry on with his story, “but seriously, she literally just picked up my table while I was still eating and walked off with it…. And I was, like, what the hell?”

  Bree and I couldn’t contain our laughter.

  “Oh, it won’t be that bad,” Mom said, brushing off his worries. “Plus, you’ve got us now. The two of you looked like trouble back then. A couple of scruffy backpacking guys versus a harmless family like us makes a big difference.”

  “That’s what you think, but the stories keep going. I knew a guy who got chased down the street by a crazy babushka with an axe. And let’s not even begin to talk about airplanes!” Ammon continued his rant, not taking his own advice. “I met a Polish couple who were on a plane that crashed. Russia’s notorious for that.”

  “No way. Don’t tell me that,” I said, putting my hand up and hiding behind the cards.

  “And they survived?!” Bree leaned in to hear the answer.

  “Yeah. And the crazy thing is that someone took their seats, so they ended up having to go to the very back,” he added. Annoyed by the inconvenience and rudeness of the people who had taken their original seats, the couple reluctantly found room to sit near the rear of the plane. When it crash-landed because the wheels failed to open properly, the guy and his girlfriend miraculously managed to break out through a back door and jump down. The girl broke her leg and even with that they managed to scramble out relatively unscathed. The plane went up in flames, and there were few survivors.

  “So if they’d sat where they were supposed to, they would’ve died?” I asked.

  “Sounds that way. And as a side note, the back of the plane is statistically the safest place to be. Keep that in mind,” he said, arching his brows.

  “Well, luckily, we won’t be taking any airplanes,” Mom said. “And that still doesn’t mean everyone here is bad or mean.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ammon said, signalling toward the s
olid tank of a woman who appeared to check our tickets yet again. She filled the doorway, glaring down at us and extending an open hand without bothering to speak. Mom cheerfully handed them over and received a stern look in return. Mom, Bree, and I had agreed earlier to try with all our might to get her to show even the faintest smile when we’d run into her as we’d boarded the train, but she was proving to be very impassive.

  “Placebo,” Mom said as soon as the she-tank turned to leave. Ammon laughed out loud at her effort to speak to the woman. Mom’s faulty pronunciations never failed to amuse us.

  “What? How are you supposed to say ‘thank you’ in Russian? Isn’t that it?”

  “Spasibo,” Ammon corrected.

  “Well, never mind. I’m making a friend,” she said, ignoring our laughter.

  “I really don’t think she wants to be your friend, Mom,” said Ammon.

  “Well, I still think we can get her to smile by the end of this train ride,” Mom kept insisting.

  “Good luck with that.”

  “Don’t let past experiences affect your view of new people,” Mom poked. “Plus, we all know it’s the pretty girls you’re afraid of anyway.”

  “Don’t even get me started on that,” Ammon growled.

  Making Headway

  2

  We spent seven long hours at the border with the washrooms locked, but four bursting bladders later, we were finally zipping through a white birch-tree forest.

  “It sure is different,” Mom commented as we gawked through the glass. What an understatement that was! I felt like I was witnessing a miracle. We had experienced a similar, drastic change travelling from China’s vibrant rice fields to Mongolia’s camel-strewn landscape, but this definitely topped that transformation on all levels.

  Just the night before, we’d fallen asleep travelling through a remote landscape filled with sand, tent-like homes called gers, and big friendly smiles shining out from dirt-smudged faces. The world outside our window now revealed none of these things. Instead, it was mystically damp and slightly foggy from a lingering chill. Slender white trunks were etched with distinct black markings. Though the trees stood tall in silent beauty, the scarred bark gave the impression that lots of slumbering ghost stories lurked among them. Everything about this landscape was mysterious and eerily calming. I was mesmerized by the little wooden cottages peeking out from the woodlands as if waiting to be stumbled upon by a fairy-tale character. The soft grass on the thick forest floor was speckled with a light coating of off-white flowers, and smoke drifted from the chimneys and hung heavily around the leaves.