Mongolia

This was such a wonderful trip, I am sorry I have to leave. I was so lucky to be traveling with wonderful people, we just spent the whole time laughing and joking.

The journey started with the Trans Siberian Express from Beijing to Ulaan Baator. You can stay on this train for six days all the way to Moscow but that must be a hellish journey because there are no showers and the toilets are smelly. When you flush the toilet it just goes straight onto the track, really, you can see the track and when you are sitting on the loo, you get a draft on your bum. Its very strange, the loo roll and the soap runs out fast, there is water but no hand towel. You get used to these things and just carry pocket tissues with you in your pocket all the time.

The train leaves Beijing at 7:40am and there is a mad panic with people trying to find their carriage and get their stuff loaded into their compartment. There are four bunk beds in each compartment but the one I was allocated was packed floor to ceiling with food and drink. We never found out what this was about but there were three or four people loading boxes of food from dried sausage to beer, noodles, jars of sauces. We thought maybe they buy stuff in Beijing because its cheaper and then sell it in Russia. Its pandemonium when the train is about to leave with all this stuff packed in the corridors and people complaining and squeezing past. After a bit when the train had left, the conductor moved me to the next carriage to share with a father and son from Maine and a nice lady from Mongolia who was traveling with her daughter and grandson, she spoke a few words of English and she told me she lived in Ulaan Baator. In the other carriages next to mine there was an English lady traveling alone, two young French Canadian girls and a family from Florida, it was all very cozy and we spent a lot of the 30 hour train journey chatting to each other or looking out the window at the wonderful scenery.

The food on the Chinese side is grim but its included in the price of the ticket so I ate it. When we go to the border with Mongolia it was about 10:30pm, the Chinese border people come on and do a lot of passport checking, give you forms to fill out and stamp your passport in a very serious manner. Then they throw you off the train in the middle of no mans land where there is only a duty free shop, so we bought some cold beer and stood around in the dark chatting and getting pissed. They play a very strange selection of music from Mozart to The Last Call. It was totally surreal. It takes them about two hours to change the undercarriage on the train because the track in Mongolia is 10cm wider and then you get back on the train for more serious passport checking and stamping. During all this process the toilets are locked and after so much beer one young American peed off the side of the train onto the track, the Chinese didn't like this at all and took him away for a good talking to.

Once in Mongolia, we started to pass through the Gobi desert and the amount of dust the train stirred up was amazing, we closed all the doors and people walked about with handkerchiefs over their mouth. The Mongolian dining car was a sight to behold, all carved wood and carpets and the food was delicious although this time you had to pay for it. On the whole, Mongolian people are much more friendly than the Chinese people. Mongolia is a strange and wonderful place, its between China and Russia and was part of the USSR but during the time of Ghengis Khan, the Mongolian Empire included China and stretched from the Yellow Sea to the Danube. The people are so happy and friendly and welcoming, since the communist period ended, tourism is booming and the country is changing rapidly.

The next day I was just slobbing in my hotel when my guide turned up to take us sightseeing around the city. There were four people in our group; me, Stephanie from San Francisco, Sheri and Rich from Chicago. Our guide was Gana, a young Mongolian guy who spent two years learning English in Southern California. Stephanie and I shared a room and luckily the same sense of humour, it took Gana a while to understand that nothing we said was serious and we were just joking all the time but once he caught on, he joined in as well and we spent the whole time laughing and making up mad stories about what was going on. This tends to happen a lot in Mongolia like you would ask how long it was till we arrived at the camp and you would be told about two hours, then twenty minutes later you would be there. Or you would say do they have cold beer and the answer would be no - the generator isn't switched on.

The driving
Our driver was so friendly and happy and spoke a few words of English, he was driving an old grey Russian minibus which he kept clean and occasionally would open up the engine to check or look underneath - we never found out what he was doing but maybe he was just keeping it going. Everytime he saw someone else on the road (not often) he would stop for a chat about which roads were open or closed. There are no real roads as such, you just drive across flat grassy plain (Steppe) or rocky sandy desert. There are tracks which make the journey a bit smoother sometimes. Most of the time its very very bumpy. There are no road signs and no visible land marks, occasionally the driver will make a right or left turn for absolutely no apparent reason, he must have known were he was going though because we always arrived at a camp. It was interesting after three hours driving when we had to ask him to stop so that we could pee, one time Sheri asked him to stop where there were more "features" ie the land was not just totally flat to the horizon. The sky is huge and clear and it really looks like you could fall off the end of the world. Even the flat parts of Mongolia are 1,300 metres above sea level, the weather is often very hot and dry and sometimes the wind whips up sand storms that blow the dust everywhere and you really cannot see a thing. The driver was excellent at spotting wildlife and stopping for us to take pictures, we saw gazelles - they run alongside the minibus and can reach speeds of up to 85 km per hour. We saw yellow beaked swans, black necked cranes and once we caught sight of a wolf.

The camps
We stayed in tourist ger camps. Gers are an amazing feat of engineering. The Mongolian people can put them up and take them down in minutes. They are round and the frame looks like garden trellis then the roof is like the spokes of an umbrella but made of wood, the whole thing is covered in felt with a small wooden door. After you've banged your head a few time going in or out, you remember to duck. These are tourist camps, you sleep in a ger, there is a big ger for the dining room and there is a concrete shower and toilet block. There are hot showers but the water pressure never gets above a trickle so you need to be patient. The camps are totally in the middle of absolutely nowhere as far as the eye can see. It was the start of the season so in most of the camps, we were the only people which made the sense of remoteness even more acute and delightful.

They serve western style food, there is way too much food, three courses at lunch and at dinner. For the first few days, we asked if we could have traditional Mongolian dishes but Mongolian food does not have a great variety, its mostly meat and that is either in dumplings or in soup so after a few meals of dumplings we gave up.

Our guide
We liked to torment him when we got bored, we would ask him to go catch a baby goat so that we could stroke it and take pictures of it. Then we would read the guide book and ask him to find us some fermented mares milk to try. He told us it was too early in the season for that but he did find us fermented camels milk which made us happy. It tastes like runny yogurt, its very alcoholic, we also tried the distilled version which is clear and very easy to drink, even more alcoholic and tastes a bit like neat gin. He quickly caught on to our desire for baby animals and pretty soon there would be baby goats, baby camels, small children, etc whenever we stopped. The baby goats are funny, they run away at first but after a while they come right up to you, they like to head butt things (anything) and they will try to eat anything including your clothing. The guide book recommended giving gifts to the children so whenever we saw one, they were besieged with pencils, crayons, colouring books and sweets. The guide book also said beware of rabid dogs so whenever we saw a dog, we would say ah, the rabid dog. Mostly they were just family pets and quite friendly although a bit ragged looking.

The people
2.5 millions people live in Mongolia and 1.5 m of them are in the capital UB. The centre of the capital is mostly ugly Russian style buildings but there are occasion more interesting Mongolian buildings like the wrestling palace (wrestling is a big thing in Mongolia and they say that the best Sumo wrestlers are from Mongolia). They are not really into football here but they are all watching the world cup, its on the TV everywhere you go so maybe it will catch on and there will be a Mongolian team in the next world cup. Around the city there are ger camps were people live in traditional style nomadic housing but have just moved them into the city - it looks a bit weird. Outside the city, you can be driving along and in the middle of nowhere there will be a ger with a satellite dish outside it. One time we stopped and saw a family combing the goat to remove the extra winter hair, it was a bit like cat grooming.

The journey
We traveled a bit west and then south from UB and caught an internal flight back from Dalanzadgad. The saw the ruined monastery at Khogno Khan, the ancient capital of Mongolia at Karakorum, the remains of the Erdenezuu monastery, the Orkhon waterfall (although there was no water - not enough rain), the ruins of the Ongiin monastery, the flaming red cliffs at Bayanzag (this is the area where the dinosaur bones and eggs have been found and you can still find tiny fragments of dinosaur bones in the sand. The guide told us that you can tell its dinosaur bone if it sticks to your tongue and then demonstrated that for us), the Altai mountains and Khongorin Els which is a massive sand dune 800 metres high (this is called the singing dunes and they kind of hum more than sing, they also vibrate when they do this and Stephanie freaked out when she was standing thigh deep in the middle of vibrating sand - its caused by the effect of the wind on the dunes - its quite weird when you see a whole area of sand vibrating). Then we saw the tiny glacier at Yoliin Am in the Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park - its about 19km long and in a valley which gets very little direct sun, its not very deep during summer but it doesn't totally melt away so its very much a tourist attraction.

One night we stayed at a luxury camp called the Three Camel Lodge, we decided to treat ourselves to a massage - it was wonderful and then we watched DVDs and drank cold beer. The highlight of the trip was riding the camels over the sand dunes, this was really cool but a bit sore on those of us not used to riding. When I got off, I could hardly stand up and the nice camel man was laughing and supporting me. The next day we road horses on what was supposed to be a short stroll to the glacier and back however, on the way back my horse decided to bolt for home and I hard to pull really hard to get him to stop. I was scared out of my wits and shaking like a jelly when he finally stopped but I didn't fall off and later we were all joking that I galloped across Mongolia like Ghengis Khan.