On The (Mongol) Road

Faithful readers, I know it has been a long while since I last wrote and I hope you are still out there. Out there in the world; in your houses, your apartments, a few of you in guest-houses, hostels, or hotels, scattered across the globe; some alone, some in pairs or groups; yawning at the end of a day’s work, drinking coffee in the morning, hung over, bouncing babies on your knees, and all of you (this is the one thing I know for sure) are gazing at some form of computer screen (notebook, phone, tablet, what have you) and, well, thanks for reading. I’ve had some technical problems that have kept me from posting for awhile – I’m still having some issues with “color management” so let me know how the photos look (some of them seem rather sepia to me, but I can’t figure out why it happened). In any case, I’m in Almaty, Kazakhstan at the moment, and this post will just be about Mongolia. It was about a month ago when I finally left Mongolia. . .

Yes, I made it across Mongolia, but I didn’t ride a horse – I took buses, vans, and jeeps. But don’t be mistaken, it was still no easy task. Less than a hundred miles outside of Ulaanbaatar the paved roads end and you drive along dirt roads. Sometimes the road is graded gravel, but more often it is just a bald patch worn into the grassland by tires – more trail than road. And there is no real public transit system in Mongolia, instead there’s a collection of men who own vans and wait around marketplaces until enough people want to go somewhere – and usually “enough people” means as many people as can possibly fit in the vehicle. It can take days to find a ride sometimes. And driving through Mongolia, I found it to be a land of intense contrasts. Vast open spaces, some of the most beautiful I’ve seen, are punctured by small decrepit towns that feel almost post-apocalyptic, the citizens the last people on earth, clinging to their rotting infrastructure, surrounded by a cruel world.

Richard and Simon, two doctors in their late twenties from Scotland booked a horse-trek tour through Mende, and I got to go along at half-price. The three of us and three Mongolian guides/drivers (Khiske, Amarra, Chudurru) piled into a van and headed to Arhangai, the central province of Mongolia. The drive took a day and a half, and the first night we stayed at a roadside ger surrounded by goat shit: thousands, millions, of little round black turds encircling it for fifty-feet. Our driver’s music of choice was Beyonce and I became more familiar than I would like to admit with Halo and If I Were a Boy, but I know Simon secretly enjoyed it.

Arhangai, near the city of Tsetlereg, was stunningly beautiful. Big hills of green grass capped with massive rocks or pine trees, lush vales with sheep, cattle, and horses, snaking streams that reflect the cloud speckled sky. The weather was warm and our hosts gracious.

We hiked and rode horses, but only for a few hours each day – the horses were still not strong after the harsh winter and tended to only want to gallop when heading home, knowing they were soon to be unsaddled and set free. Simon and Richard were great fun, two old friends who lovingly and continuously exchanged barbs and insults. On our last night, Khiske made Horhog, a lamb dish cooked by tossing red-hot stones into a pot of broth and meat. We drove back to Ulaanbaatar though the night with more Beyonce to accompany us.

Back in the city, I finally gave up the idea of big horse-trek. I got the feeling from talking to people that it was probably still too early in the season and the horses would be weak or very expensive. Plus, honestly, I was a bit daunted – I’m not a cowboy and I don’t know if I could handle two months with two horses. Simon and Richard were leaving (Simon home, Richard on further travels) and we had to make a night of it. I met up with the two doctors and a girl from Peace Corps at Budweiser bar (thats the Czech Bud, not the American). Simon and the Peace Corps girl flirted voraciously while we all ate dinner and drank, and soon enough a strip-bar sounded like a good idea – even Peace Corps girl was game. Above Marco Polo’s pizza in Ulaanbaatar is Marco Polo’s Strip Bar (they don’t combine the pizza with the striptease though, much to my disappointment.) It’s a large darkened space with a bar, a few tables and numerous couches and plush chairs for lap-dances. Young nubile Mongolians walk around in their underwear and occasionally try to get you to buy a dance from them, or sometimes do a little jig for free. Richard and I bought Simon a lap-dance to interrupt his ongoing efforts with Peace Corps and to add to the joy I requested Beyonce’s Halo for Simon’s lap-dance. He chortled happily and shrugged at Peace Corps – boys will be boys – while a topless woman gyrated in front and upon him. The bar closed, we stumbled down the stairs and to a nightclub where we danced to crappy electronic music until Richard and I found ourselves alone – Simon had disappeared with Peace Corps. After some late night buuz and drunken confusion about whether or not I could crash at the docs’ guesthouse (the manager of the guesthouse said no to my offer to sleep it off on the couch) the night was over. I found my way home to Mende’s and to sleep.

Having given up on the horse idea, I had to use public and private vehicles to get across the country. Through couchsurfing.org I’d found a Mongolian who hosted travelers in Erdenet, the next city north of Ulaanbaatar. Sumya picked me up in his van with his wife, three children, and another couchsurfing traveler – Jose from Barcelona – and drove us the seven hours to Erdenet. In Mongolia, you don’t measure distance by miles or kilometers, you measure by hours – the worse the road, the longer the trip. It took us about seven hours to get to Erdenet. Jose and I spent 3 days with Sumya and would continue to travel together for another 2 weeks. Erdenet is a boring concrete city, a smaller version of Ulaanbaatar. But the kids in our neighborhood seemed to have fun in their playground.

Sumya was a great host, he took us to Amarbayasgalant, a famous monastery in the middle of nowhere – everything not in a city in Mongolia is “in the middle of nowhere.”

We visited his parents in the countryside for a night and shared a foul-tasting bottle of vodka with Sumya and his father.

Back in the city of Erdenet, we stared at the gaping hole in the earth which is the world’s fourth largest copper mine. We took a tour of small yogurt factory where Sumya’s sister-in-law works. Then, on our last morning, we took showers – I was beginning to smell after four days without washing. Our next stop was Moron, pronounced Muh-run (there’s an umlaut over one of the ohs).

The bus ride to Moron took fourteen hours, including a dinner stop, after which I took two Valium and fell asleep with my head at a right angle, one shoulder banging into the side of the bus and the other with a Mongolian woman’s head bouncing on it. In Moron, Jose and I stayed with Patrick, a 24 year-old Peace Corps volunteer. Patrick lives in a ger, like many of the residence of Moron, and he’s a mellow guy from Colorado who seems to honestly like his existence in Moron. It’s a city of around 30, 000 – a sprawl of fenced in gers and houses surrounding a few blocks of old concrete buildings.

At night, outside smoking a cigarette, I could hear the dogs of the city barking; a constant background noise akin to traffic in a big city; the barking washes through the town in waves, the dogs barking to each other in the distance, an echoing cacophony of woof woof woof, and it moves from dog to dog, getting closer and closer, until the dogs next door and the dog in Patrick’s yard start going too, close and loud, then it passes, fading back into the distance. And the stars shine bright and clear in the cloudless night sky.

Three hours of hip-to-hip travel in a van found Jose and I in Haitgal, near the shores of lake Hovsgol. We stayed at a guest-house that proclaimed “hot showers” but the showers weren’t working. The outhouses were nice though, with sawdust to shit into instead of the usual smelly pool of sewage.

In the morning we walked twenty kilometers along the shore of the still mostly frozen lake (it’s 136km long) to a tourist camp. Lake Hovsgol is dubbed “The Switzerland of Mongolia”, pine tees grow thick on the mountains surrounding the lake and many buildings are made of roughly hewn timber.

We stayed a night at the lakeside then one more in Haitgal, getting a van back to Moron in the morning. The van was crowded when we got in, but the driver proceeded to drive around town picking up passengers, one after the other, each finding some place to cram their ass onto a seat until there seemed to be no room left in the van, but more people arrived and shoved themselves in, like a reverse circus-clown act. By the time we left we had 15 adults and 3 children jammed into 9 seats.

Back in Moron Patrick helped us try to find a ride to Uliastai, in Zavkhan province. We couldn’t find a ride that day, but the next day we found two people who were “maybe” going, but it didn’t work out. Finally we found a man who absolutely had to go the next day and we got a ride with him. This isn’t free, this is the transit system – two days of waiting around to buy a ride somewhere.

8 or 9 or 10 hours later, I forget, we arrived in Uliastai. We found a crappy hotel with half functioning electricity and a dingy bath-house in the backyard (a dollar for a shower). In the morning, after our low pressure trickle showers, walking around, Jose turned to me and said, “this is a shit hole.” I try to be more optimistic, but I have to admit he was right. The surrounding mountains were pretty but the town was just a collection of concrete buildings in various states of decay. At the “best” restaurant in town we’d met a 28 year old German named Stefan. Stefan worked in construction, he’s lived in Ulaanbaatar for eight years, and was in Uliastai to put a roof on a flour factory. He was a good soul, if perpetually drinking (beer, vodka, more beer), and the first night we met him, he told us he would make us breakfast and sure enough, the next morning he fed us eggs with salmon roe, blue cheese, bacon, toast, and tomatoes (he’d brought it from Ulaanbaatar). It was blissful to eat something Western and with some flavor (thanks Stefan, it was a real treat.)

It was “Children’s Day” in Mongolia, a holiday, so no vehicles were leaving town, but Stefan got his friend, Ingha, to drive us to the top of a sacred hill that has a great view of the valley below.

Ingha gave an offering of milk to the hill and then we all drank a bottle of vodka together.

Ingha is a Khoomi singer and teacher, that’s the Mongolian throat singing, and while he drove he gave us a sample of his throat singing and later, at the restaurant, he played “Yesterday” on the piano. We drank some beers with Stefan, who told us about his life in Ulaanbaatar – a daughter, an ex-girlfriend, mugged three times (once with a rock, once with fists, and once by strangulation.) It sounded rough, but he was sanguine about it, telling us he loves the countryside. “You’re really free out there, you know? In a way you can’t be in Europe.”

The next day we left for Altai. Stefan found us a ride in the morning that was leaving “now.” Now in Mongolia means “sometime today” and we didn’t actually get in the van until 3pm. Then the van drove around town for three hours, picking up passengers, looking for passengers, getting packages, getting gas, and getting more passengers until we finally left town at six.

We rolled into Altai around 2:30AM. The driver let us off at the main hotel and we wandered in like zombies, hungry and tired. We couldn’t understand what the woman at the desk was trying to tell us and she finally ran upstairs yelling and returned with a drunk Mongolian in his twenties named Hangart who asked us, “What you need?”

Hangart told us all the rooms were booked and then he drove us in his car to another hotel, which was also full. Apparently there was some government function in town that day, hence the lack of vacancies. “It’s okay,” Hangart slurred, “I take you home.” He took us to his apartment about half a mile away, where he lived with his father. His father was a small quiet man with gray hair and a drooping gray mustache. There was no food but we ate some candy and Hangart gave us his bedroom to sleep in. Hangart told us he had to go drink more with his friends and left. In the morning, his father gave us coffee and we left with our bags. We asked some locals where to eat breakfast and they took us back to the same hotel we’d arrived at. We sat down and ate some meat, eggs, and rice. Hangart showed up looking worse for wear and told us he was on a three-day drinking binge. “Yesterday – drink, today – drink, tomorrow – drink more.” He wanted a bottle of vodka and we felt it was only considerate (since he put us up) to indulge him. He drank, we ate. We wanted to find a ride to Hovd, because Altai was a bigger shit-hole than Uliastai. Hangart took us to his car where a friend of his was passed out in the front seat. “I drive you to minivan station,” he said. We told him we didn’t want to drive with him. “You’re drunk, man,” Jose said. Hangart bobbed and nodded his head and we walked down the street to find the minivan place. Hargart’s dad drove up in his car and offered us a ride – had he been looking for us? I don’t know. Dad drove us to a minivan area, but there were no rides to Hovd, then to the market where there was also nobody was going to Hovd. We thanked him again and found a cheap hotel room – no seat on the toilet and the water only worked sometimes (so you can only flush sometimes.) We spent the day between the minivan stand and the market, looking for rides to Hovd. No luck. We ate lunch and went back to the hotel. I felt sick and vomited my two meals into the half-flushable toilet. Every 10 minutes I would flush it again, slowly cleaning the puke out of the bowl. Then a runny shit in the toilet, squatting over the seatless rim (2 or 3 on the Bristol scale, doc.) Fortunately it flushed after that. I went to sleep sweating and shivering.

The situation seemed bad the next day – we were used to the lack of transport by this time, but it really felt like it might take many days to find a ride to Hovd. People just laughed at us when we asked. I was still sick, but not puking, I’d eaten a few pieces of bread and some water. Jose’s time was running out and he decided to go back to Ulaanbaatar (he was headed to China). It’s easy to find a ride to Ulaanbaatar, even though it is 1000km away – all traffic goes to UB – and he found one quickly that departed a few hours later. I almost wanted to cry when he left. I felt like crap, it was drizzling rain, I hadn’t showered in four days, my feet smelled of cheese, I was stuck at the ass-end of the world with no ride and all I had to look forward to for dinner was some sort of boiled starch and meat with no seasoning. After he left, I wandered around town, to the minivan area, then to the market – nothing. The sky spat down on me and I drank bottled water to fill my tender stomach. The regulars chuckled at me, repeating “Hovd” over and over again like it was a really funny word. I wanted to strangle them. Then, passing by the minivan area, “Hovd?” a guy asks – a guy I’ve never seen before. He’s heard I’m looking. Yes, I tell him. Before I know it I was in the front seat in a Nissan Pathfinder (the fare was double the minivan price, but I wasn’t complaining). The Pathfinder was so stuffed with people (three women, three kids) and baggage that the driver had to lash my backpack to the roof. We left Altai around 5pm and got two flat tires on the way. I arrived in Hovd around 2am and crashed in a hotel. The shared toilet at the hotel had a seat, but not attached to the toilet, the wrong size, with leopard print – as if Hugh Heffner or Liberace stopped by one day and gave the hotel a replacement seat.

On my own in the morning, I wondered what to do. There are some lakes near Hovd that are interesting – sort of desert landscape apparently, but I didn’t know how to get there without paying for a tour all by myself. I went downstairs to get some coffee and ended up talking to a Mongolian woman who is a tour guide. She was leading a tour of French tourists, she told me. She asked me if I want to come along. I made some sort of groggy statement about food and price and such and she told me not to worry, it will be free. A few minutes later I’ve stowed my big pack at the hotel, grabbed my day pack and I’m in a van with four French retirees heading out to the lakes. The tour guide, Undradl, told them about me and they all agreed to take me for a night out on the lakes. The only caveat is I have to find my own way back,because they will continue eastward to Uliastai.

I spent the day with them – they had two vans (one for passengers and bags, the other for food and tents). There was a cook, a guide, and two drivers. They had coffee and watermelon, chocolate and cookies. Watermelon! It was wonderful.

In my rush to join them I had forgotten my sleeping bag and that night (which became windy and a bit rainy) the Mongolians gave me their dels (long quilted jackets) and I curled up in a small tent with three dels and my parka for a pillow. I fell asleep to the flapping of my tent in the wind and dreamt of sailing, heading to Aus. or Oz, and tornadoes, Dorothy and the Emerald City, not in Kansas anymore am I? Not in Oz either, but pretty happy. It was a really nice day.

In the morning I was dropped off at a small building by the dirt road and for 15 bucks I found a ride back to Hovd with three guys in an empty van. The ride should have been cheaper, but I was happy, I had a whole day and night gratis. I thanked Undradl and the Frenchies profusely and headed back to Hovd, where I found a ride to Bayan-Olgi (only 10 bucks!) I fell asleep on the way to Olgi and woke up laying on an empty seat staring up at the sky through the window. The car is so still, I can’t figure it out. Where am I? There’s a snow capped mountain in the distance. Shouldn’t we be moving? Shouldn’t there be people in the van? I hopped out and found that we had a flat and the van had been jacked up and the new wheel was already bolted on – I slept through it all. We have another flat a few hours later and it took an hour or more to get the new tire onto the rim, but I didn’t care because the scenery was amazing.

In Olgi I stayed with another Peace Corps volunteer, Laura. Olgi is in Mongolia, but the vast majority of people who live there are Kazakhs. They are Muslim and speak Kazakh, not Mongolian. I didn’t have time to take a trip to the national park nearby, but I enjoyed relaxing in Olgi, eating some shish-kebab (finally, meat with some spices) and having a few beers in a small park/beergarden near the mosque (Kazakhs are pretty relaxed Muslims). I had left my passport with a Russian tour agency in Ulaanbaatar and they said they could courier it out to me in Olgi. I had been nervous about it during the whole trip across Mongolia, worrying that it would get lost or held up in some bureaucratic limbo, but it didn’t – it showed up on time, hand delivered to me at the beergarden. With my passport and Russian visa, it was time to leave. It only took me one day to find a ride to Western Siberia.