Erland’s Ranting

Finally, I get around to ‘the Mongolian diaries’…

Mongolia was fantastic. It was the place on my journey to Europe that I was most excited about and had set aside the most time for (well, still only 8 days) and I was richly rewarded. However, the great experience I had really only just eventuated, as you’ll see. Note for travellers: tourism in Mongolia in Winter is dead – my hostel was virtually empty and it was hard to organise anything. On the other hand, it’s really quite busy in Summer (apparently) and Winter brings the reward of fewer other tourists and the potential for a less “packaged” and perhaps a more authentic experience.

The train from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar was the most comfortable yet, following the gradual trend of improvement from Southern Vietnam – only one other passenger in my room, a large chair, quite clean and a private wash-room. Lunch & dinner were included, though the food was more than a little ordinary. The scenery North of Beijing seemed for the most part dry and rather desolate, though I couldn’t see out the window much of the time because I had the top bunk, however, passing through the mountainous areas – I think in the South of Mongolia – was pretty spectacular.

I’d been emailing Jargal, a friend of a friend (Finn – check out her blog, she’s the most honest blogger I know who’s not crazy) who lives in Ulaanbaatar and said that she’d help find me a good place to stay, but I hadn’t received her last email before I arrived so I had no idea where I was going – I had thoughts of looking for a money exchange, a payphone, maybe lunch. When I got off the train, rapidly pulling on as many warm things as I could access as I shifted from about 20°C to  -20°C, a young woman came up to me and asked if I was Erland – that was unexpected – then explained that she was a friend of Jargal’s, Tuul, and was managing the hostel Jargal had mentioned to me for her mother, who owned it.

Ok, so I got settled in to a nice place to stay right near the centre of the city and Tuul called Jargal for me and we arranged  to have dinner that night. In the meantime, I went out for an evening stroll in the pleasant -31°C air. The first thing I noticed, having never been anywhere in the world this cold before, was that the pavement and parts of the road were permanently covered in a layer of ice, making the simple act of walking quite a precarious activity. I changed money at the biggest shop in town – curiously named The State Department Store – and made my way back to the hostel. Dinner was at Modern Nomads, which turned out to be part of a whole chain of restaurants, though they are all a bit different and have different names. I ordered a meal that was a mix of four traditional Mongolian dishes – very heavy on the meat for a mostly vegetarian person, but a surprising amount of salad and vegetables given what I had heard and read – I guess the menu was designed with tourists in mind. I toppped it off with my first mug of traditional (sour-ish) Mongolian milk tea, which contrary to reports, didn’t make me sick at all.

Jargal invited a friend of her’s, Zaza, to dinner who in turn brought his friend, Basa, who I later discovered was also his business partner. Jargal explained that Zaza (whose name was actually Lkhamsuren Ganbold, which I can’t pronounce) had written a travel book on Mongolia, so he would have lots of information about what I could do with my oh-so-limited time. Zaza was a stockbroker and his travel book was actually more of an accommodation listing, but he did have a lot of useful information, had actually run his own tourist information centre for a short time (the Mongolian government provided no such service), worked in the UK for 6 years and in the few days that I knew him we became great friends.

The next day I spent wandering around UB (as Ulaanbaatar is known to foreigners). The city itself is pretty foul really – interesting, sure, but foul – it’s pretty much ringed by small mountains which keeps all the pollution in, especially in Winter, and all the buildings (apart from the outer suburbs which mainly consist of Gers – traditional nomadic canvas yurts) are Stalinist concrete blocks. In fact, the Russians built a lot of the buildings standing today in Mongolia. Here’s a scene that filled me with a sense of desolation – I think it communicates something of abandonment, decay, lost childhood, a sad and cold world devoid of play… maybe I’m being too melodramatic.

The other (even more) depressing thing I saw was the homes beneath the pavement… let me explain. One of the few things I’d read about Ulaanbaatar, the world’s coldest capital city, back in Australia was a story in the New Internationalist magazine (an excellent non-profit publication) that told of homeless children who live in the underground tunnels that house the sewerage pipes. The sewerage has to be heated in the Winter, otherwise it freezes in the pipes, so this is the only place that homeless people can sleep without literally freezing to death. I found out from Jargal, who knows a lot about these issues through her job with Save the Children, that it’s not just street kids but whole families that live down there. I couldn’t bring myself to photograph the one group of people that I saw actually down in a hole, but here’s what a Mongolian homeless ‘front door’ looks like.

Moving on to lighter topics, earlier in the day I was having a ball sliding my way along the icey footpath and wondering if Mongolian kids did it too, or if it’s one of those things that’s so ordinary that it’s not fun anymore… then I spotted a woman walking toward me with a child at the end of each hand giggling and sliding their way down the street. Some things are always fun.

My only real destination for the day (apart from the International Ticketing Office for my train ticket to Moscow, which was a f*ing nightmare to locate) was visiting the Choijing Lama Temple Museum. I was the only person there and a young woman – I’m not sure if she was staff or a volunteer – went ahead of me and unlocked each building as I progressed. It was beautiful, but strangely crowded by the encroaching city development.

The two things that were disappointing about my visit was that the batteries for my flash were dead (and it was quite dark inside) and that it was so bloody cold – my fingers were freezing from being out of my pockets and on my shutter button. Here’s a couple of the crazy, hundreds of years old, Buddhist artefacts inside the temple buildings.

If you think that’s scary, check out this one. There was also the ever-present symbol of the Mongolian horse – an animal I’m convinced is inseparable from the culture and national psyche.

On the way back to the hostel, I snapped this shot of the moon rising through the black smoke of burning tyres beside the road.

So, I wanted to get in touch with the Mongolian guy from my earlier blog – I called him and arranged to meet up the following morning. We met at the The State Department Store (the name of which lends itself to a Capitalised Tone, but is really a let-down on the inside) and drove in his enormous four-wheel drive to a Chinese restaurant for breakfast – it’s funny, this was his home city and he had no idea where a good place to eat was – he even called a friend to ask advice. Anyway, we talked about where we might go – he was still keen to drive me around the countryside – then left and he took me to see his apartment on the edge of the city. The building was clearly only partly occupied and he confirmed that very few Mongolians could afford to buy an apartment, even though I could see at least a dozen enormous apartment blocks in various stages of construction in the immediate vicinity. Just down the road, on the true edge of the city, was a gigantic Buddha.

This is where I found out that Mongolians used to have their own script which has all but died out – it was replaced by the Russians in the 20’s with Cyrillic. Here’s where I found it (on the far left, next to Japanese & Korean).

We walked around this area a little…

…then past a tank on a block and up the big hill nearby (another war monument) to a view across the whole city.

It’s not easy to spot in this photo, but there is a coal-fired power station actually within the city itself which produces both electricity and piped heating. This makes for shocking air pollution, as I’ve mentioned, a problem exacerbated by the fact that coal is also used in the cooking fires in most of the Gers in the city (I think there are around 250,000 people living in these canvas yurts in the outer suburbs). Behind me in the photo above is this:

Want to find out more about Mongolia? Hold on for Part Two, or I’d recommend this.