Round the World 2008

JUNE 15,2008

This morning I said goodbye to the folks from the Mongolia tour at Millie’s, an American Diner in Ulaanbaatar popular with foreigners. It’s always hard to say goodbye at the end of the tours. Last night we went to a show of local Mongolian dancers and contortionists and then had our final dinner at a Mongolian Barbecue restaurant. We ended the night at a UB nightclub.

I flew to Beijing this afternoon and arrived just after a rainstorm. I was immediately impressed at how clean the city is on the taxi ride from the airport to my hotel which is in a very nice neighborhood close to Tiananmen Square. I went out for a walk and it was amazing to walk through Tiananmen Square and then across the moat which surrounds the Forbidden City. I walked towards Wangfujing Dajie, the shopping district and passed one of the “snack streets” where vendors sell such delicacies as scorpion, cicadas and starfish. I settled for grilled shrimp and a spicy cold noodle dish with garlic and cilantro.

I spent a few hour on Wangfujing Dajie going through the brand new modern shopping malls. From what I’ve seen just today, Beijing is a large and exciting city where I’ll spend 4 days exploring before starting the next tour which goes across to Shanghai where we’ll catch a ferry to Japan.

Over the past few weeks we traveled through the Mongolian north and I got a chance to see what rural nomadic life is like. The countryside is vast and we covered large distances, sometimes driving over ten hours in a day, without seeing anything other than the natural landscape. There were twelve of us in the group plus our leader Masha and our two drivers, Sansar and Bolt, driving across the unpaved roads in two Russian 4×4 vans. Like my earlier trip in the Gobi we spent a night with a nomadic Mongolian family. Masha, our guide went up to a random family living in yurts and asked if 15 people could spend the night. It’s customary for the family to agree…in return they get a dinner provided by our group, plus a small gift from each of the travelers. The family we stayed with kept animals (horses, sheep, goats) and upon arrival invited us into the yurt/ger for the traditional reception with goat‘s milk tea. The head of the family was nicknamed Curly and loved to be photographed and have photographs taken of his grandchildren. When we left, one of our group members gave Curly a digital camera that he had just replaced. Curly and his wife lived in three yurts with their son and daughter, their spouses and children. After dinner we presented the family with the gifts. My gift was a bottle of vodka which Curly immediately opened and passed around for our group and his family to drink. We asked the family questions about life on the steppe and they asked about our lives through Masha who interpreted. They were very curious as to where we were from and what we did for work. Soon we were taking turns singing songs to each other. They sung traditional Mongolian songs and we ended up singing Christmas songs to them since they were the only songs that the Australians, British and the Americans in our group all knew. We split up in two yurts at bedtime sleeping on the floor side by side next to the family’s beds.

The majority of our accommodations on this tour were in yurt camps which were run by a local family. The scenery along our route was incredibly open and beautiful. We spent a few days at Khovsgol Lake which is just south of the Russian border and the sister lake of Baikal in Siberia which is the deepest lake in the world. There pine forests and yaks roamed around wherever you went. Although June, the lake was still frozen over and was just beginning to melt at the shores. We also spent a few days at White Lake where we went horseback riding and hiked up and into an extinct volcano.

Most of the yurt camps have dining halls where the people, usually families, who run the camps served us meals. At White Lake they even had a yurt which was called “The Disco” where our group stayed up into the late hours making all the noise we wanted since the tourist season was just starting and we were the only residents of the camp. There were many poker players in our group and games became a nightly event where we won and lost thousands of tugrik which was easy to do since there are about 1200 tugrik to the dollar.

We passed many interesting towns along the way. Some were small rural villages while others were towns clearly built during the Communist era. It was unusual to see a foreigner anywhere we traveled and we got used to being stared at by just about everybody in the towns where we stopped. At one village we met a guy from Moscow who was bike riding from Irkutsk in Russia to Ulaanbaatar over ten days, which was impressive considering the extreme weather (from hot to cold and wet to dry) we experienced during our trip.

One day we visited the Amarbayasgalant Monastery which is like an entire village. It‘s one of the few remaining Buddhist monasteries since most were destroyed during the Communist years. We also spent a few nights near hot springs where an evening swim after an afternoon of horseback riding was perfect.

Being back in Ulaanbaatar is strange after experiencing such a different way of living. Our group got on well since we all had in common the desire to visit and see Mongolia. Not many people do. Experiencing the nomadic way of life which people have been living for thousands of years and seeing the raw natural beauty of Mongolia has truly been an unforgettable experience.

The week was a real adventure. The four of us left Ulaanbaatar in an old Russian 4×4and drove for 2 days over flat nothingness before we got to the south of Mongolia where the best of the Gobi is. The Flaming Cliffs and the Khongor Els Sand Dunes were amazing where we rode camels across the sand. We rode the two humped camels and they were a little harder to ride than a horse I thought. Pretty strange animals. We also went to Yolyn Am, a scenic mountainous and surprisingly green area which still has frozen waterfalls and lots of packed ice that doesn’t melt until late summer.  

Bayra was our driver and Hoki was our cook/interpreter. Camilla, who I’m traveling with is from Rye, New York and has been living in the Philippines for the past 6 years. The driving has been some of the wildest off road driving I’ve experienced with the vehicle tipping several times to the point where I thought it would roll over and literally flying off your seats in the back was a regular occurrence. On the ride to the south we saw gazelles, wild camels, wild horses and an assortment of small mammals and birds. 

We stayed each night in a ger which is a round, portable, tent-like home that the nomads live in so that they can move around quickly based on season, weather and finding better feeding spots for their animals. It takes about an hour to build and an hour to disassemble. On our first night we stayed with a nomadic family that had just moved to their new site that day. We slept on the floor of the ger side by side with the family. Our hosts were very nice and one of their daughters spoke some English which she learned at school. Nomadic children go off to a city boarding school for months at a time since there are no schools in the desert. We woke up the next morning to a wicked sand storm which was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Visibility was almost nil and I couldn’t even see the outhouse from the ger. The walk to it was extremely painful with the sand hitting every part of your body with the powerful winds. Definitely a new experience. 

For the rest of the week we stayed in ger camps so we had our own private ger. The nicest was the one at the base of the sand dunes where we stayed for two nights. There was a couple from the UK in another 4×4 who we kept running into at the ger camps who we spent time with and ended up going on the camel ride with after the second sand storm of the week died down.

One evening, the family that ran our ger camp invited us into their ger for goat milk tea, which actually was very good. They gave us fermented yogurt to eat which was like a cheese. I took one bite and it tasted so bad that I couldn’t have another. Since I already broke two Mongolian customs by accepting the snuff bottle being passed around with my left hand instead of my right (as I read I should in Lonely Planet), and not taking my shoes off when entering the ger, I pretended to eat the cheese and then casually snuck it into my backpack…but the second I did, our host looked down and caught me red handed. He finally started to laugh because I was such a tourist. 

We got back into Ulaanbaatar this evening and one of Camilla’s work colleagues met us at the airport as a surprise to her. He works for the Ulaanbaatar office of the same relocation company. He found out she was flying in from the Gobi so decided to pick her up. We all went to dinner together tonight and the colleague, a Mongolian, will give us a personal tour of Ulaanbaatar tomorrow. In the evening I’ll meet the group for the tour of North Mongolia.

I had a little problem getting through immigration last night but not because of the visa, which I thought might be an issue. The border agent was suspicious of my passport because of the additional pages that were taped in by the US State Dept. When I had the pages added, I noticed they were taped in crookedly. Anyway, after about 5 officers inspected it and getting a supervisor, they finally let me through. Luckily I didn’t need the visa.

I spent most of today trying to find a trip to go into the Gobi Desert in the south of the country. I have one week before my tour begins of the north. There was a group in the hostel that needed another person for a Gobi trip that was 9 days long…but then I wouldn’t make it back in time for my tour. After a lot of legwork, I was able to arrange a tour where I’ll be traveling to the Gobi in a 4×4 with a woman from the US who is flying in from Beijing tonight. We’ll be accompanied by a driver and an interpreter/cook. We’ll stay some nights in yurt (ger) camps and other nights in homestays with nomadic Mongolian families. It worked out well because my traveling partner needs to be back in Ulaanbaatar by week’s end as well, so we’ll drive to the desert and then get a flight back. I had heard that flights from the Gobi were hard to book because they only fly twice a week, but the woman who helped me set up the trip who runs a neighboring hostel is from the Gobi Desert and told me she had connections. She had her mother call somebody at the airlines and we were able to get on Friday’s flight.

Ulaanbaatar still has several signs of its relationship to the USSR during the cold war. There are lots of big plazas, monuments and Soviet-style architecture. While exploring the city I stopped in the State Department Store where I bought a backpack. I’m already on the 3rd backpack of this trip. I noticed that even though cars drive on the right side of the road here, about half the cars have steering wheels on the right, while the other half have the wheel on the left. Another unusual thing about Mongolia is that no coins are used. Only paper notes that get smaller as the value decreases. So I have a bunch of these tiny little bills in my pocket that are worth about one US penny each. Sorry no pictures today.

I’ll be ‘disconnected” this week while in the desert. I hope to write an update over the weekend before leaving for the trip to the north of Mongolia.