Punch Drunk Dung Fire

Trans-Siberian

I left Beijing on what is commonly the first leg of the Trans-Siberian Railway. It wasn’t very crowded and the bulk of the passengers were Westerners – I shared a 4-bunk compartment with one fellow traveler. The train was not much different than others I had taken in China, although the dining car was a little nicer (but not much) and the first class cabins had their own bathroom/shower and fancy patterned upholstery (I was in third class I think, or was it second? I could never get it straight.)

At the last stop in China (Erlian) the train underwent a bogie change. A bogie is the wheel assembly of a train car – the suspension, two axles and four wheels. Each train car has two bogies, eight wheels. Why change the bogies? The track-gauge in China is three inches narrower than in Mongolia (which has the same rail width as Russia). The bogie-changing takes about two hours in total. The train is split in two parts and rolled into a large hangar-like building and each car is then uncoupled and parked in a hydraulic lift. The bogies are loosened, the car is jacked a few feet up, and then the bogies are rolled away and replaced with new, narrower bogies. Drop, fasten, couple all the cars back together and you’re done.

The change occurred in the evening around ten or eleven and it wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered the best detail about the wheel-change. The institutional Chinese dining car was replaced with a Mongolian dining car trimmed in ornate carved wood and decorated with faux weapons and paintings of Mongol horsemen. The menu changed too and offered a myriad of choices including meat-salad and borscht. I only ate breakfast and settled for a sausage and onion omelette. It was the first hint that I had really left the Far East and was somewhere else, somewhere in-between.

Ulaanbaatar

I was met at the train station by Mendee and his brother Tulgaa. Mendee runs Stepperiders, a horse-trekking company that offers a variety of horse-riding opportunities, including solo-treks. I had contacted Mendee in China and he had told me it was too early to ride horses as there was no grass on the ground yet, but he also mentioned that I could come up and help out with his company (he has volunteers every year) and see what it is all about and then in mid-May or early June head out across Mongolia on a horse.

When I arrived, Mendee informed me that the Stepperider’s camp wasn’t up yet, but I could stay at his brother’s apartment. Tulgaa, like many residents of Ulaanbaatar, lives in a square 1960s Soviet style concrete apartment building. He lives with his wonderful girlfriend, Jargal, in a one room apartment with separate kitchen. They sleep on the floor on blankets and quilts they unroll each night, and there was a set of blankets for me. Mendee and his family also sleep the same way. I think it is a combination of space (the apartments are not large), economics (beds aren’t cheap), and tradition (nomadic herders don’t cart beds around). In any case I’ve found it has been good for my back which has been suffering from sagging hotel mattresses.

(Tulgaa’s neighborhood, Mendee’s building)

I spent over a week hanging around Ulaanbaatar sleeping at Tulgaa’s and sometimes at Mendee’s with his wife, Baina, and their four children. They are all wonderful hosts and I want for nothing. I spent much of my time at a cafe that had good internet and decent coffee and was usually back at Tulgaa’s in the evening watching television – often American movies with English subtitles to help with learning English. Usually the movies are pirated screeners that have the “property of such-and-such studio not for broadcast” messages at the bottom of the screen and before the movie starts and you can see the DVD menu at the beginning of each broadcast and watch the phantom DVD operator select the English subtitles and start the movie. Hilariously, some of the the movies have the wrong subtitles – subtitles from another movie entirely. So, as Jean-Claude Van Damme vaults over a car hood firing an M16 and screaming something like “Get back! It’s a setup!” the subtitles read “Hey baby, why don’t you come over to my place tonight?”

But Mongolian produced TV has its gems too. Universe Best Songs, basically Mongolian Idol, is on every weekday night. The contestants sing mostly in English, but sometimes in Korean, Japanese, and Russian. Singing in Mongolian is, oddly, against the rules. Some of the contestants aren’t bad, and last year’s winner has a great voice, but much of the fun for me is watching someone completely ruin a song they clearly don’t understand. My favorite was a quiet young man who murmurred passively and almost unintelligibly through Sinatra’s I Did It My Way. Well, yes, I guess you did.

(family watching enigma show, mobile phones at the ready)

On weekends there are the “enigma” shows. Both shows feature a man and woman surrounded by consumer goods – irons, hair dryers, stereos, bicycles, blenders, etc. The hosts pose a riddle, an “enigma”, and viewers text-message their answers. The first few viewers to text the correct answer win a prize. You know you won when the host shows your number on his laptop computer that he spins around so it faces the camera. Tulgaa had already won an electric razor, and last Saturday he won two sets of Chinese Barbie Doll knock offs called Fashion Vogue. “The best welcome gifts for the children,” the package reads, “they will bring you a happiness, is your good colleague, collect them quickly!” Tulgaa gave the dolls to his nieces, Mendee’s daughters. He could seldom explain the riddles to me, but the answer that won the dolls was “an egg.” This weekend, another brother of Tulgaa’s won a vacuum cleaner.

(Mendee, Tulgaa, Tulgaa and happy niece, Jargal, Baina, Mendee’s mother)

Ulaanbaatar is a hardscrabble city, you’re just as likely to walk down a sidewalk to get somewhere as to cross through an empty lot past a derelict playground and a dead tree. In some areas, Gers (Mongol word for Yurt) crouch next to new high-rises. Mountains are always visible in the distance, as are smokestacks from the coal-fired power plants. Public drunkenness is not endemic, but I’ve seen my share of disheveled men stumbling down the street. From a bus I glimpsed two men lowering themselves into a manhole and I was unclear if they were city workers or homeless. A few days later I walked past the manhole and the two men were there again, this time one of them had fallen on his ass, too drunk to maintain balance, and was attempting to roll into the manhole. I’m guessing they’re not city workers.

Ulaanbaatar can also be a bit of a rough place, there is a sort of male aggression here that one finds in many poor places, but it is the first place I’ve had any actual problems. At Naran Tuul, the outdoor marketplace, a heavyset man beckoned me over to where he was sitting down with a box of nuts, bolts, and screws on his lap (his wares apparently). He asked me where I was from and smiled when I said America (Mongolians, in general, do like America) and offered me his hand. I smiled and shook his hand , but I didn’t get it back. He squeezed hard, growled and stood up, letting his bolts and screws bang noisily to the ground and scatter in a pile. “Um,” I said. He squeezed my hand harder. It started to hurt a bit, but not much. “Dollar,” he grunted. Oh, now it all made sense. “I’m not giving you a dollar,” I said. He growled. “Nope.” He let go, I walked away.

Worse than the grunting-gripper were the punching-drunkards. I was walking back from the produce market with Tulgaa and Jargal when a drunken man approached me mumbling something in Mongolian and waving his hand. I assumed he wanted money so I just shook my head and tried to side step him. I would’ve brushed past him except he clenched his hand into a fist and punched me in the ribs. It wasn’t a very good punch, but I did feel the need to sort of double over and step back to reduce the impact. Tulgaa said something nasty to him and we all kept walking. Ten minutes later, entering Tulgaa’s building a very drunk old man shoved me out of the way with his fist, a sort of punch. Tulgaa and Jargal were apologetic, but it had nothing to do with them of course. I felt sort of embarrassed for the reaction I was causing amongst the drunks in town.

Later that day, I met the same drunk old man on the stairwell where he was teetering on one of the landings precariously close to falling down the stairs. He put his hand up and said, “I am sorry.” I nodded and then he curled his hand into a fist and tried to punch me again. Jesus, what was this guy’s problem? He was so old and drunk I had no fear of his fist, I was mostly afraid of accidentally knocking him down the stairs while trying to bypass him. I managed to slip by him, laugh loudly and skip down the stairs while he swayed about trying to figure out which stairs went up and which went down. I haven’t been punched since.

It was unclear to me when, exactly, Mendee was going to set up the camp. One day, though, he said we would go up to the campsite to see it. He and Baina and I headed over to his parents’ house, and along the way we stopped at a small Buddhist temple. Inside the temple was a medium sized room with altars and paintings on three sides and two long benches running down the center. In one corner were a few seats and a desk with a secretary-type woman behind it and in another corner three monks sat chatting and eating. Baina spoke to the woman behind the desk and we sat down and waited. Others entered, some sitting down and some circling the room clockwise, bowing to Buddha icons, and spinning the prayer-wheels. A woman was having her child blessed and another woman brought her aged mother in. They sat on the benches where they were joined by monks who chanted and burned incense in censers that they waved at the recipients of their blessings. Small bells were rung.

We sat and waited. Baina was waiting to enter another room. It was like a doctor’s waiting room, the door would open, someone would leave and then the secretary would call out a name and the next person would enter.

“What’s behind the door?” I asked Mendee.

“The Llama,” he replied. “Baina is going to ask him what day is good for setting up camp.”

Ah! At last, I would know when I might move out of the city. Baina was called, spent a few minutes behind the door and then we all circled the room, spun the wheels, bowed at the Buddhas and left. Actually, I didn’t bow, but I did spin.

“So?” I asked when we were outside.

“Sunday or Thursday,” Mendee said. It was Thursday, so that meant either three days or another week. I was rooting for Sunday.

“Your choice?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Mendee’s parents live in Yarmak, where Mendee grew up, a sprawling poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar where the skyline is dominated by the huge “Power Plant #2”.

There are numerous areas in Ulaanbaatar similar to Yarmak spreading out from downtown. The roads are unpaved and bordered by wooden fences that form the blocks. Behind the fences are dirt lots with clapboard houses, gers, outhouses, and almost everywhere a big dog that barks and growls and runs to the end of his chain whenever a tourist walks by (that would be me). There’s no running water or sewage in Yarmak and the locals get their drinking water (it still needs to be boiled) from water stations.

After a bite to eat at Mendee’s parents’ we headed up to the Steppriders campsite. It’s about 30 miles outside of Ulaanbaatar, which basically means it is in the middle of nowhere. Ulaanbaatar is a city of about a million people but unlike cities in more populous countries, Ulaanbaatar doesn’t slowly fade away – there are no rich bedroom communities or swaths of industrial buildings, no suburban sprawl or interstate hugging franchise restaurants – after Yarmak, it basically just ends. There’s a small airport and then there’s open land with scattered groups of cows, sheep, and horses.

About halfway to the campsite we stopped at an ovoo, a cairn of rocks piled in holy or meaningful places, often at the top of a peaks or passes. A cow was grazing on the cairn, eating the prayer flags perhaps. We all got out, circled the ovoo three times clockwise, tossing a rock or two onto the pile as we did so, and then got back into the van and continued on our way.

At the campsite, Mendee burned some incense and splashed some milk around as an offering to the gods. It’s a beautiful, austere landscape. The lack of green grass and the cool wind made it seem a little uninviting, but I was excited to move out there.

My Night With Zula

I hoped to be moving to the camp on Sunday, but that Friday I had a date. Earlier in the week Mendee had taken me out drinking and we had ended up a club called Stella. While we were sitting around drinking a woman who I had noticed laughing and dancing in her seat a few tables away came over to our table. She told me her name was Zula and that she was half Russian. She spoke a little English, but I couldn’t understand everything she said and nodded my head a lot. She was clearly drunk and after a few minutes she told me she had to go back to her table, but we agreed to meet later and she entered her number into my phone. She was not bad looking, and seemed like fun, if possibly a lot to handle. I sent her a text-message a day later and we agreed to meet on Friday.

On Friday we met at Club Havana, a Latin themed restaurant with notable Latin American fare like hamburgers, steaks, and pizza. We ordered a pizza (sausage and bacon). There were Mojitos on the drinks menu at least, and I suggested Zula try one, but they were out of mint and rum and Zula ended up with something like a vodka-tequila-and-coke. I stuck to beer.

Zula told me she had a kid, but her husband was out of the picture. She said she hated Mongolian men. I shrugged, finding it hard to express my feelings on that subject. She said she wanted to dance and suggested we go to Stella again. She also told me she had to be home at 10pm because of her child, which gave us only an hour. What the hell, we went to Stella.

When we got to Stella it was pretty crowded and we were seated at a booth with four Mongolian men. We ordered beers and did a little dancing. One of the men from our table, a thick fat man in an unbuttoned white shirt over a white tank top, seemed to want to dance with Zula, or to not let me dance with her – he kept stumbling between us. He was, of course, quite drunk. Back at our table, the most sober of the men told me that this was a “veery dangoorus club. But I vill keep you okay.” Great.

“I tell them we married, okay?” Zula says. Umm, okay. Eventually I buy the men a 20 dollar bottle of vodka, the fat man in white disappears, we knock back shots of vodka, and everything seems to be good.

Ten o’clock rolls by and Zula says she can stay out until midnight. Her hands are all over me, which is sort of nice, but sort of disconcerting because the only other physical affection I can see in the whole place are men high-fiving each other on the dance floor. The Mongolians tend to dance in circles and Zula tends to dance with me. I feel like everyone within ten feet of me is watching me. Midnight goes past and I ask Zula if we’re leaving soon. Now I’m drunk and would quite like to leave, but I’m also wondering about her child, or her story. Then Zula asks me for a loan; could I loan her 400 dollars? I should have seen it coming I suppose. Maybe I’ve become used to the much more forward Chinese “you want massage?” and the even more forward Thai “you like boom-boom?” Or, maybe I misunderstood Zula. She seemed happy enough to continue hanging out after I told her I wasn’t going to loan her anything, but I was a little dizzy and tired and the loan question started to weigh heavy on me. Who asks a guy she just met for a loan other than the most obvious answer? Plus, she wouldn’t leave the club and I’d rather have been taking her home, or asleep, at this point instead of listening to the crappy Mongolian singer who had taken over for the half-decent DJ.

“Oh, there’s my boyfriend,” Zula said matter of factly.

“Boyfriend?”

“It is no problem, okay?” she rubbed my shoulder. It felt like a problem. I felt over my head. I felt drunk and hot and sweaty and wanted to go home. Zula seemed impossible to convince. Finally I just told her I was going home and left. A few angry text-messages were exchanged and that was that.

I wandered the night-time streets of the city, a little lost, but happy to be breathing fresh air and not drinking. After about half an hour I flagged down a cab and told him I wanted food by making fork and mouth motions. It was two in the morning and I wasn’t sure there was any food available. The driver took me clear across town and dropped me at a hole in the wall with no windows, one customer, and a guy in a three-piece suit who seemed to be in charge. I asked him for buz, which are similar to big Chinese dumplings. I couldn’t make him understand what I wanted; he understood buz, but wanted more information from me. Finally someone else came in and ordered food, including buz, and I pointed at his dish and then at myself. Finally, they made some food for me – seven big buz (which is more than I wanted). I ate five of them and gave the other two to a man who sat down at my table and told me in English he was a taxi driver (it was obvious I needed a taxi). I argued the fare with him before getting in the car and he took me home to Mendee’s, offering to find me a girl for the night along the way and asking for a tip on top of the ludicrous fare. I said no to both offers and happily fell onto Mendee’s couch (his one piece of furniture) in my jacket and went to sleep.

A Ger of My Own

Better to have loved and – well whatever. Sunday rolled around and we loaded a flatbed truck up with Ger materials and drove up to the campsite with five other guys and some of the kids. We pulled all the stuff off the truck and then a Ger was assembled.

The Ger was mostly finished, but the floor was still half dirt and half woolen pads. The plan was for me to stay there a day or two until the camp would be set up and running. I could keep an eye on the stuff and get a little taste of Ger living. I’d brought some bottled water, some fruit, and a few Snickers Bars for fast snacks. Baina had given me a bag of rice, potatoes, carrots, garlic, onions, and a piece of meat. I had my little camp stove and pot and the big rusting Ger stove. While the guys had been setting up the Ger a few of the kids walked around with bags collecting dung to burn in the stove.

Before everyone left, Mendee showed me what kind of dung is good to burn. Dry dung is good, frozen or squishy dung is no good. Cow dung burns longer than horse dung, but horse is what was mostly available. It may sound a bit distasteful, but really the dry dung resembles clumps of dry grass and dirt and hardly smells at all. Mendee’s father showed me how to pile the dung in the stove and light it up with paper, it’s basically just a wood burning stove – it can burn wood, too, of course, but Mongolians use dung because there just isn’t that much wood to be had. Mendee showed me a few branches laying around and pointed to a copse of leafless brush up on a hill and where I could find more fallen branches. Then he and everyone else left and I was alone with my ger.

I got the dung burning good and cooked some rice with meat, onion, and garlic. I went out to walk around, but the wind was whipping about and it was freezing. I grabbed a few sticks of wood and another bag of dung and hunkered down for the evening by the stove. I had my sleeping bag, so I was warm at night, even if it was cold in the ger.

The next morning, as I was pissing on the grass, I saw Margja herding a group of horses along the hillside. Margja tends to Mendee’s horses and deals with their care and management and lives a few hills over from the camp. He was about two-hundred yards away, standing with a horse that had fallen behind the main herd and didn’t seem to want to move. I waved to him and went inside to make some coffee. A few minutes later he showed up and pointed to the horse in the distance and made a shivering motion. I gathered the horse was cold. I pointed to a rug on the dirt floor questioningly. He nodded, grabbed the rug and walked back to the horse and draped it over its back. He rode off on a horse with the rest of the herd and the cold horse laid down under its blanket.

It was chillier than the previous day and I spent most of my time gathering wood and dung to burn. Later, Margja came back over the hill on a motorcycle and got some water from me for the horse. He rode up to the horse and spent half an hour giving it water and then returned with the rug. The horse was dead. I gave him a cigarette, we smoked and then he got on his motorcycle and drove away. The dead horse lay where it was.

I collected more dung and wood. The dung burned fast and I found myself resorting to wood for a longer and hotter flame. I cooked dinner, read my book (the collected short stories of Saki) and when the sun went down I went to sleep. I had burnt all my dung and wood.

This was the view outside my ger the next morning (also on the frontpage).

It was damn cold and I had no dung. I retreated to my sleeping bag and dozed off. I was awoken by a knock on my door. It was Hishkee, Baina’s brother. He’d come to relieve me. Thank god. I packed my stuff, leaving him the sleeping bag and camp stove and he drove me down to the main road and helped me flag down a passing car for a ride back to Ulaanbaatar. It was interesting living alone in the ger, but since I had nothing to do and no one to interact with, I was happy to return to Ulaanbaatar.

It’s gotten a lot warmer in the last few days – yesterday was positively hot. The camp is coming together, I’ve gone up to help a few days and spent some in Ulaanbaatar. I’m not sure what my plan is now. My fantasy plan was to ride a horse across Mongolia, or even further. I will definitely do some horse trekking, but Mendee has told me not to expect more than twenty or thirty kilometers a day on a long horse-trek, which seems strange to me as I can walk twenty kilometers a day with a pack on and I smoke cigarettes. I thought horses were, well, strong as, um, horses. It would take me over two months to cross Mongolia at that rate and I’m not sure I’m up for it, not to mention visa and schedule issues. Mongolian horses are smaller than western horses, and it has been a rough winter, but even so I expected more mileage. Mendee says it has to do with letting the horses roam free from time to time and that they get weak when they spend long periods without ever getting to cavort on their own. I believe him, but I don’t understand how Ghengis Khan managed to maraud across Europe on such horses. Perhaps he fed them the leftover bodies from his skull piles.

(the music on the front page is Mongolian throat-singing.  I saw a performance, but the recording is just something I downloaded off the net.)