We hopped the 7:45 train from crowded and dusty Beijing and made the thirty six hour journey north to Ulaan Baatar in Mongolia. Sharing our compartment were Karin and Jacob, two Swedes who had just exchanged wedding vows a couple of days before at their embassy in Beijing. Sections of the Great Wall made an appearance every so often between the crowded cities and overdeveloped land as we sipped our tea, but by the time we reached the Mongolian frontier it had become dark and all I could see as I gazed through the window was my own reflection. Through some sort of miscalculation or miscommunication, the tracks in Mongolia and Russia are a different size than those in China and the rest of the world. We waited for two hours at the Chinese border as they switched the wheels on each individual carriage to accommodate the new tracks and swapped the Chinese dining car for a Mongolian one. It was another two hour wait at the Mongolian border most of which I spent sleeping in my top bunk, only momentarily lifting my head in order for a customs official to compare my sleepy face with an only slightly more lively passport mugshot.

Friendly locals

We awoke to the wide open spaces of Mongolia, a far cry from China where every square inch of land is spoken for. The desert went on for miles and we chugged along until everything turned green and we reached Ulaan Baatar. On the approach to the city some smiling kids ran up purposefully to give the finger to the entire length of the train – I guess punk kids are the same all over the world. Dreary Soviet concrete apartment buildings fill the city blocks of UB while Russian made vehicles clog the streets. Drivers honk and yell at each other instead of accepting the organized chaos, yet once and a while a car would stop for a pedestrian – it started to feel a bit more like home. A sign hanging on the guesthouse door warned that “outside is not so safe” and everyone we met warned us of pickpockets and even those that don’t speak English offer the pantomime version. The Cyrillic alphabet (named after Cyril who invented it), a confusing mixture of backwards numbers, letters and characters, adorned all the signage - yet another completely foreign language to us.

We arranged with Jacob and Karin to hire a van with Baatra as our driver and Daava as our interpreter/guide and embark on a nineteen day jaunt in the countryside that would take us through the Gobi Desert and as far north as Kovsgol Lake. We were not sure of what to expect of country life as the Mongolian greeting in our phrasebook translates loosely to “hold the dogs.” Baatra commandeered us through muddy, rocky, dusty roads and through many streams and rivers. We never tired of watching sheep and goats that got caught in his path fleeing for their lives in front of the van yet still unable to make a collective decision (all decisions must be collective) on whether to go left or right to safety. The end result is an entertaining zigzag with invariably half a dozen sheep on one side of the dirt path reversing their initial decision of staying put and instead risking life and limb to dart in front of the van to get to the other side. Baatra humoured us by stopping the van at every white skeleton or camel from UB to the Gobi in order for us to take photos but did not share our morbid fascination in photographing them. While skeletons held little interest for him, rabbits were an entirely different story. One morning he spotted a hare and abruptly turned the vehicle off the road and chased it for a good ten minutes. Anytime the flustered rabbit stopped momentarily, Baatra would lay on the horn and continue the chase, his boyish grin flashing us in his rear view mirror.

Ger Accomodation

Most nights we stayed in a ger which is a round tent made up of sheepskin and canvas and supported by wooden poles and a trellis that can easily be set up or taken down. Through the southerly facing door you can see a small table with tiny chairs behind a stove which dominates the center, it’s pipe poking out of one of the pie shaped windows above. Gers are suited to the Mongolian population’s nomadic lifestyle as they are easy to relocate when necessary. Summer is a season of tough work in preparation for the winter and the nomads follow their animals to the wide open pastures. In winter they take shelter in villages to bear the brunt of the cold together. The tendency of not owning land is obvious in the Mongolian diet – meat is heavily relied on as well as unpasteurized milk products and little or no vegetables are available. We supped on camel, antelope, mutton, and yak and enjoyed dairy treats such as yak butter, dried yogurt, fresh goat’s cheese, and the most popular drink, fermented mare’s milk (airag). As we passed by gers in the countryside kids would chase the van with water bottles full of it, much pushier salesmen than the kids at home with their lemonade stands.

Every village in Mongolia seems to be the same; tall fences with metal gates line the empty dusty roads and a symphony of barking dogs can be heard at all times. Nothing appears to be marked and every junction looks like the one before it. Baatra and Daava get around by asking every second person where to find either the showers, the shops or the well. Village wells are found in the middle of the fence labyrinth and are quite modern in that they usually consist of a hose coming out of a small building. Country ones are covered holes in the middle of nowhere with a leather pouch dangling on a rope and a trough on either side for roaming animals to come and drink from. Unless they get creative, households are not set up with running water so everyone goes to the local showering hole for a good wash. This usually means a very long queue of Mongolians. Showers are a business in Mongolia and during our nineteen day trip I was only able to have three. The price of a shower can be twice the cost of dinner so I guess people want to get their money’s worth – singles are given a half hour and couples forty five before the employees come a knocking.

A visit to the local watering hole

We visited Yolyn Am (Eagle Canyon) and spied several circling eagles, a scary looking vulture and visited the small interactive museum nearby. The museum was full of dinosaur eggs and bones laid out on a table for your licking pleasure. Daava got us started by telling us (unconvincingly) that we could tell the authenticity of the dinosaur bones if our tongue stuck to them. We never noticed this phenomenon but decided that licking dinosaur bones on display was too fun to be missed. We also got right in there with the stuffed reindeer, antelope and gazelle exhibits but stopped short of draping the snow leopard skin on our backs and prancing about. Before setting out, we played a fortune telling game with goat ankle bones. Secretly, you pose a question to the bones and depending on how they land (as a camel, goat, sheep or horse) the bones will give you an ambiguous answer not unlike the more modern magic eight ball.

Sunset on the Dunes

For our last night in the desert we camped right in front of the massive dunes and crawled out of our sleeping bags at five just in time to watch the sun rise. We would be heading north from here and although it is supposed to get quite cold we can hardly believe it in the intense heat of the Gobi where there is not so much as a shrubbery to take shelter under.

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