Friday, August 20, 2010

Blue Skies and Mutton

About four years ago I watched a DVD series which followed the actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on a motorcycle journey from London to New York.  The footage from the Mongolian leg of the trip is what first put into my mind that I wanted to come here.  It's a country of vast open spaces, nomadic culture, and a strong historical legacy.  With a population under 3 million people and a land mass twice the size of Texas, Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country in the world.  About 40% of Mongolia's population lives in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, and 30% of the population live as nomads, raising livestock and living in gers, traditional tent houses.

From Mongolia pt 1



From Mongolia pt 2

Sandwiched between two superpowers, Russia and China, Mongolia has been shaped by a desire to preserve the Mongol empire, which was founded by Genghis Khan in 1206, and by the power disputes between Russia and China.  Before coming here, I wrongly assumed that Mongolia would be similar to China.  The people look more Chinese than Russian, but culturally, the Russians have had much more influence on the country.  China's millennium-long history of wanting Mongolia's land has led to some very anti-Chinese sentiments, despite the fact that 70% of Mongolia's exported goods are bought by China.  In the 1920's,  Russia offered Mongolia a shot at real independence, but that was followed by more aggression.  In 1937 Russian leadership executed 27,000 citizens (17,000 Buddhist monks) in an attempt to eradicate religious power.

Coming into Ulaanbaatar (UB), the block concrete buildings are reminiscent of any Communist city from the Soviet era, partially because the Mongolian language also uses the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.  Store fronts are comparatively nondescript and the biggest shopping center, the State Department Store, looks like a 7-story office building.  Commercial branding and advertising  is completely understated by western standards.  Once I adjusted, I found it to be a pleasant city. The streets and sidewalks are clean (especially for someone coming from Manila!), car horns are not used excessively and there are plenty of good restaurants and bars to patronize.

Ulaanbaatar is the central hub for any kind of tourism in Mongolia.  Traveling outside the city into the country-side requires extensive planning and pure solo travel is mostly a bad idea.  Roads deteriorate very quickly into meandering tracks of dirt, and road signs are non-existent.  Without a knowledgeable driver, the chances of a breakdown or getting lost is high.  Because the roads are so bad, bus service is limited.  Informally organized shared vans is how most people get from point A to point B.  Locating accommodation can also be difficult.  In smaller towns there are no externally marked hotels or guest-houses.  But there may be accommodation, which is likely to be a single room with 6 mats on the floor and an outdoor pit toilet.  Without a translator, it would be difficult to locate these places.  Traveling with tents is the norm, so that it's possible to just set up camp wherever you happen to be when the sun sets.

From Mongolia pt 1

Mongolians have a long history of nomadic lifestyles and hospitality.  The ger tent is the accommodation of choice for the entire country.  Families can easily break down the tents and transport them with horses when it's time to move on to greener pastures.  Some families will live in ger tents during the summer season, when there is plenty of grass for the livestock, and then live in a city or town through winter.  Since traveling overland can be difficult, there is an understanding that if you stop at a ger, you will be offered whatever they have, which usually includes milk/cheese/yogurt from horses/cows/yaks/camels, depending on where you are and what's available.  Fermented mare's milk is a Mongolian favorite, I personally found it to be undrinkable.


From Mongolia pt 1


Most of guesthouses in UB also double as tour operators, providing vehicle, driver, guide, food and camping equipment.  Travelers are expected to self-organize and then a trip can be planned to suit everyone's needs.  Most tours last between 1 and 2 weeks, but 5 or 6 weeks is also possible.  Nearly all of the travelers I've met are passing through Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian railway, which cuts down from Lake Baikal in Russia into Beijing.  More than one person has given me a quizzical look when I've told them I've flown here from the Philippines.

The first traveler I met at my hostel was David, an American.  He is a semi-professional photographer (www.fotosbydavid.com - worth looking at) and it doesn't take very long to get the impression that he has been everywhere.  Now 49, he has been traveling the world and working odd jobs for the past 20 years, leaving behind a career in finance and letting the worth of his MBA slowly deteriorate.  I mentioned that one of the reasons I wanted to come to Mongolia was because no one comes here.  With a streak of cynicism, he role-played the scenario of me being at party, talking up my adventures: "Yeah, back when I was riding a camel in the Gobi........"
And then someone interjecting, "Oh, you got stuck on that tour too?"

The next few travelers I met: Franco, Harry and Joe, were also characters in their own right, and not the typical 20-something backpacker from Europe.  I spent eight days locked up in van with these guys on a tour to Khovsgol Lake, Mongolia's second largest lake located on the Russian border and southern edge of Siberia.  Franco, Italian born and 49 years old has been living in Japan for the past 10 years where he teaches English, Japanese, Italian, Spanish and also speaks some Russian.  He doesn't know how many countries he as been to, he lost count after 100.  We called him Marco Polo.  Harry, a 47 year old Kiwi had just finished installing power lines in Iraq and was taking his savings to travel the world and find a place to set up a little hostel, probably somewhere in Southeast Asia.  Joe, 38 from Boston, has been on the road for almost a year and has traveled to at least 120 countries at this point in his life.  There was a point where Franco said, "So I was thinking about going to Sulawesi next year, what can you tell me about it?"  And of course Joe had an answer.

I had been a little apprehentious about spending 8 long days in a van with 5 other guys who I had just met, but time passed quickly and with a lot of laughter as we swapped travel stories.  Franco is the only European I know of who has crossed the U.S./Mexican border by floating across the Rio Grande on an inner-tube.  He started the story and I had to interrupt.  "Wait wait wait, you're an Italian citizen right?"
"Yep."
"So.......why wouldn't you just enter the U.S. legally?"

Back in the 80's it was difficult for an Italian without a permanent address to get a visa.  Franco was traveling South/Central America and was getting low on cash.  He had a friend in NYC who could get him a job as a waiter at an Italian restaurant, where he could make good money and then continue his travels.  The only problem was getting to NYC.  So he paid a Mexican guy to float him across the river, had a tense interaction with a police officer when he wandered into town, but eventually got to the airport.


The trip to the lake was not an easy ride.  I spent a lot of energy just hanging on, trying not to get tossed across our Russian minivan. The landscape is beautiful though, just miles and miles of hills and grass.  The first night was stayed near a monastery that was devastated by the Russians back in the 30's.  A small community of monks live there now and I was happy when at dusk they broke out a soccer ball and motioned for me to join them.  Once we got to the lake we had 2 days of horse riding and relaxing.


From Mongolia pt 1


From Mongolia pt 1


From Mongolia pt 1


Another reason for coming to Mongolia is that I would be here for the big national festival, Nadaam, where sporting competitions happen all over the country.  The three events are wrestling, horse racing, and archery.  The biggest events are naturally in UB, but the country-side festivals offer a more intimate look and were more enjoyable to be at.  As part of our tour, we stopped at a few small towns and got to see a mix of the festivities.


From Mongolia pt 1


From Mongolia pt 1


From Mongolia pt 1



From Mongolia pt 1

We stayed the night in one small town which could have been plucked from an old John Wayne western, complete with log cabins and everyone on horseback.  I was wandering around at dusk, taking pictures, when I stumbled upon a small community center with what sounded like church music coming from the inside.  It turned out to be a talent show for the Nadaam celebration.  I was looking a little lost, not sure what to do, when a girl my age saw me and led me in to find a seat.  She was from a bigger city a few hours away and was visiting family.  She spoke some English and invited me to the dance that was to follow.

The dance held in building that resembled a junior-high gymnasium, with pale blue walls and lit with harsh florescent lights.  A guy with an accordion-sounding synthesizer pounded out traditional melodies.  The whole town was in attendance, from 13 year old girls to the crazy old drunk guy who made his rounds pestering everyone.  Between each song, everyone cleared the dance floor and sat on a row of chairs which lined the walls.  The men were then obligated to ask the women for a dance.  Every 3 minutes, for an hour and a half, everyone sat down and then got back up, and then sat down and then got back up.  I was getting a little tired of this, and a little tired of counting the steps in each the dance when my new friend told me that the "free dance" was coming soon.  Once the free dance started, the everyone organized into a giant circle.   Eventually the circle got too big and it broke down into two smaller circles, everyone dancing in place and just looking at each other.  The weirdness of it all was compounded by the contrast between the women, who made quite an effort to get dressed up, and many of the men who looked like they just got down shoveling manure.


From Mongolia pt 1


Franco, Harry, Joe and I had all arrived in Mongolia at roughly the same time, and so we were experiencing the same first impressions of the people and personality of the country.  After 2 days, Harry was ready to leave Mongolia, saying that he had never met such an unfriendly population of people in his entire life.  Even Franco, whose stories exuded a certain optimism, was having trouble coming up with something positive to say.  After being here for 6 weeks, I feel like I can say that Mongolians are friendly, but they're friendly in their own stone-face sort of way.  Mongolians, especially in the country-side, aren't big on greetings and smiles.  For Harry, who has been living in rural Queensland, Australia, it's unthinkable to pass a car on a lone stretch of highway and not give a wave.  In Mongolia, the opposite seems to be true.

On our second day of driving we stopped for lunch in the rain.  Rather than cook outside, we drove to the nearest ger and invited ourselves in.  Lucky for us, the woman living there had been to school in Russia and could speak some English.  She was really great.  A little while later, a few Mongolian men came in and didn't seem to want to acknowledge our existence.  I offered them cigarettes, which they seemed to like.  This scene re-played itself in a number of different ways over the next week.  In retrospect, I think the men were a little shy, and there just isn't a culture of making a big deal about visitors.  It first felt like they were being rude, but of course that wasn't the case.  A few days later, we were staying in a town for the Nadaam festival.  Harry, venturing off on his own, opened the gate of the guest-house just as a guy was passing by on his motorcycle.  The festival was a 20 minute walk away.  The guy on the motorcycle just stopped and nodded for Harry to get on the back, and then drove him the festival, all with an expressionless face.  After that, I told Harry that he had to stop calling Mongolians unfriendly.

I also met a Korean girl, just out of university at one of the guest-houses, who was doing some volunteer teaching in UB.  I asked how things had been going and she said the first few months were really rough because she thought no one liked her.  After adjusting to Mongolian personality she felt better about her experience.  Another culture note is that it's not good to keep saying "thank you", especially for small gestures because it diminishes the worth of the statement.  It makes a certain amount of sense, but you can imagine that it makes for more subdued interactions.

From my guidebook:
The empty steppes have also made hospitality a matter of sheer necessity rather than a social obligation.  It would be difficult for anyone to travel across the steps without the hospitality  that has developed, as each ger  is able to server travelers as a hotel, restaurant, pub and repair shop.  As a result, Mongolians are able to travel rapidly over long distances without the weight of provisions.  This hospitality is readily extended to strangers and usually given without fanfare or expectation of payment; foreigners are often perplexed by the casual welcoming they receive at even the most remote gers.
We arrived back in UB on July 11th, which was both the official first day of Nadaam and the World Cup final.  It was nice to be in the Philippines at the beginning of the World Cup and then catch a few more games in Mongolia.  For two countries that have never had a horse in the race, the people in both countries were fervent fans.  Despite 2:30am kick-off times, people were gathered in outdoor big beer tents equipped with large-screen projection sets and lots of cheering, regardless of who played.  I think being abroad for the World Cup is a special experience.  It's really nice to see something so universally loved.  I was in Kenya during the 2002 World Cup, and the enthusiasm for any African team was religious.  It's hard not to feel good about an event that crosses so many cultures.

As part of the Nadaam festival, there was a big outdoor concert in the city square.  Walking down the street, I chatted up a Mongolian girl, Tsagii, to ask about the festivities.  It turned out that she was a Japanese teacher at one of the language institutes in UB.  We quickly became friends and she was happy to meet me for Nadaam the next day.  Tsagii invited me to teach English at her school and also mentioned she would be visiting some family in her hometown in the Gobi.  I was already thinking of heading in that direction for my next tour.  When I mentioned this to Tsagii, she invited me to join her as an alternative. The chance to get away from an organized tour and visit a little town in the middle of nowhere is exactly the kind of thing I hope for when I travel, so I was very excited at the opportunity. 

Just a quick geography lesson:  The Gobi region refers to most of southern Mongolia and northern China.  It is a desert region, but the iconic sand dunes account for less than 3% of the area, it's mostly hard dirt and rock.

Tsagii's home town, Zunbayaan, is accessible by train, just 13 hrs south of UB.  The route follows the Trans-Siberian Express.  Zunbayaan used to be a prominent military town, but went into a decline after they downsized their presence.  Nowadays, a Chinese company drills and ships oil, but no money is going back into the local economy.  The town is surrounded with hollowed-out, concrete apartment blocks. Through the hot afternoon hours, the town is nothing but a dusty ghost town.  As the sun sets and weather becomes tolerable, people slowly emerge from their homes.  There is not much to do there, but it was nice to get a little glimpse into this community.

We stayed with her aunt and uncle, who live a small, 3 room house.  Her cousins, 2 girls in college, were also home for the summer.  They were incredibly gracious hosts, giving me "the bedroom" while everyone else slept on the floor in the living room.  Tsagii's uncle, Tau, quickly became a little overbearing, as he had the personality of that drunk guy at the bar who wants desperately to be your best friend.  He knew two English words, "James" and "ok". Every 5 minutes he was checking to make sure that everything was "ok" and performing over-dramatic charades to show me how to perform simple tasks such as washing my hands, or to needlessly point to the television if I wished to watch it.  Tsagii was apologetic and maybe blamed a bit of his behavior on his drinking.



The whole of Zunbayaan looks bombed out.  Tsagii's uncle gave me a tour, which included an abandoned oil rig, and an overgrown swimming pool, which he was proud to point out as Mongolia's largest swimming pool, and an abandoned army tank.  Tsagii hasn't lived there since she was a small child and has a good sense of humor about the appearance of the place.  We also visited a ger just outside of town as the camels were coming in for the night.  Tsagii and I took a quick ride around.  Now I can tell everyone I rode a camel in the Gobi, and it wasn't a tour!  





Surrounding the town are a number of historically-significant religious sites because of an influential 19th century Buddhist monk who lived in the area.  The whole family and I spent a day driving around to visit each site.  There is a sacred mountain shrine, where we threw vodka into the wind as an offering.  There is also an "energy center" near a small temple that will give healing energy to anyone who lays on the ground there, and a few small caves where a monk meditated for 108 days straight.   It all sounds more exciting than what is was.  Throughout the day, Tsagii's uncle encouraged me to do shots of vodka with him, which we took from the plastic coin dish that came from the car's console.  I'm not an expert on these matters, but I think when you're doing vodka shots out of used car parts,  it could be a sign that it's time to cut back.



Back in UB I spent a few days teaching English at the institute where Tsagii worked.  They offered me $8/hour, which I think is a pretty respectable wage.  It was more difficult than I anticipated, mostly because I had no curriculum to follow, and the dozen students in each class were at all different levels.  For the first 10 minutes, I asked a lot of questions and got nothing but blank stares in return.  Eventually they warmed up to me and things got easier, but it was a rough start.

I was trying to figure out my next move when I met Baghi, a 27 year old girl, at a nightclub.  She is a former tour guide, currently doing a bit of event organization and promotion.  In the coming week, her friends from Italy, a couple, were coming to Mongolia for a special tour.  Baghi had been their tour guide the year before and they had maintained the friendship.  Now they were coming back and were hiring Baghi unofficially, by paying her way, to visit two remote regions in the north and west of the country.  The first planned leg of the tour was to the corner of western Mongolia, high in the mountains, where the population is mostly Kazakh (the Kazakhstan border is 24 miles from Mongolia).

I had already read about the region, and was intrigued, but had not met any other travelers venturing off in that direction.  Going there alone would have been cost prohibitive for me.  Baghi invited me to join them and help me arrange my flight and the necessary border permit.  For reasons that aren't important, I wasn't able to join Baghi's tour, but was able to fly out with them and to join an Austrian guy on a similiar tour.

Arriving in Olgii, the primary city in the region is a little surreal.  This is the guidebook's intro:
Traveling to Mongolia's western most province gives one the distince feeling of reaching the end of the road, if not the end of the earth. High, dry, rugged and raw, the isolated, oddly shaped province follows the arc of the Mongol Altai Nuruu as it rolls out of Central Asia towards the barren wastes of the Dzungarian Basin.

From Mongolia pt 2


We spent our days driving, camping, and visiting gers.  Sleeping at an elevation of 8000 ft, the temperature dropped to about 25 degrees the first night.  I kept thinking about how this was August, the hottest month of the year, and there was ice on the tent.  People live in the ger camps only in the summer, letting their yaks and goats graze while they can, and then move down to lower elevations in the winter.  It's a hard life to live. Every ger could offer us the same basic food:  yak-milk tea, yak cheese, yak yogurt, dried biscuits, and sometimes dried meat.  It gets old quick.  Our own food also got old pretty quickly.  We had some variation of  boiled potatoes, carrots, cabbage, rice and fried bits of fatty mutton 3 times a day.  Back on my first tour to the lake, we were complaining about the food and made up joke:
Q: What does Mongolian food taste like?
A: Whatever supermarket-brand bbq sauce you've drowned it in.

Whatever.  It was funny at the time.


From Mongolia pt 2


From Mongolia pt 2


From Mongolia pt 2


I spent a few days hanging out in with Baghi in UB and she did a good job of explaining some of Mongolia's history and culture to me.  With such a long history, and such a small population, Mongolia has been fighting to preserve it's existence for a long time.  There is an aspect in the mindset of Mongolians that distrusts foreigners, especially when it comes to preserving Mongol blood.  At one point, the Chinese tried to breed out the Mongol race.  Now it's taboo for Mongolian women to date Chinese men, and those that do risk having their heads shaved as a type of scarlet letter.  I experienced a little of this animosity myself.  Just walking down the street with Baghi or Tsagii elicited some very unfriendly stares.

Baghi's older sister married a Korean man, which the family is ok with.  However, her sister is not allowed, by order of the family, to raise her son in Mongolia.  When the son is 10 years old, he can come live in Mongolia.  The reason for this is so that her son will never be mistaken as a pure Mongolian.  Learning the language so late in life will guarantee that he talks with a Korean accent, which will effectively bar him from a career in politics.  Last year, when the son was 5 years old, her sister requested to move back to Mongolia, but the family decided that she had to wait another 5 years.  Baghi insists that family relations are good, and she has been to Korea to visit her sister.  It's the responsibility of each Mongolian to protect the blood.

I also heard another story, from a German guy who has been living in UB for the past year.  His friend (also white) was dating a Mongolian girl.  One night they were walking down the street and someone spit at her feet and said something about polluting the blood.

For the most part, walking around UB was a pleasant experience for me and as far as I know, seriously violent crime is not a big problem.  But Mongolian guys seem to be really aggressive.  One night I was walking around and another guy, with friends, abruptly stepped in front of me and stared me down, like he was just waiting for an excuse to start a fight.  On another night, 3 guys were walking towards me and out of nowhere one took a full swing at my face but pulled the punch at the last second.

There aren't really official taxi's in UB.  Any car is potentially a taxi and if you stand on the side of the road with your hand out, someone will stop.  There is an understanding that it's about $1/mile.  One night I took a taxi home at 3am and got into an argument with the driver about how much the fare was.  In my mind we had agreed on a price before I got in.  He basically tried to keep my from opening the door, and when I finally got out, he started pushing me against the car.  I should mention that like most men in Mongolia, he was also a lot bigger than me.

I have some big news to share as well.... I got married!!!  Here is our wedding photo:


Unfortunately, my new wife has to stay in Mongolia to take care of the yaks....They don't milk themselves you know.


From Mongolia pt 2