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Ulaan Baatar
Streetscape. Nine days in a WUZ with six other people! And showering just twice during that time.
Twenty-four hours after leaving Beijing I woke up in the middle of the Gobi Desert: sand everywhere, especially across the train tracks. We reached Ulaan Baatar by lunch time, and I had already seen everything one comes to Mongolia to see: stocky horses, sheep, goats, yaks, cows, sand, gers (traditional tent-houses) and lots of sand. Nevertheless we spent a day buying up supplies for our proper crossing of the Gobi.
A WUZ is a large 4x4 Russian Combivan. It is as tough as a tank and will go anywhere: which is just as well considering that outside of the main towns Mongolia has no roads. It forded wet and dry rivers like a lizard, climbed cliffs as if it were a mountain goat, and sped across plains faster than a yak.
We (as Ali described us) were "Ekhme: Driver Extraordinaire, content with his never ending supply of cigarettes, a limited selection of cheesy Mongolian pop tapes played on loop and a bottle of vodka to wash away the day; Menelaos: Greek, 25 year old Couchsurfing enthusiast; Régis and Mireille: a French couple,
Ulaan Baatar
Another streetscape. both 29 at the beginning of their world tour; and Alison and Gillian: the mother and daughter team".
The Gobi Desert is the second largest in the world, so no wonder it took so long to cross. If the scenery was sometimes monotonous it was always awe-inspiring. The vast space, the ever-changing colours, the light reflections that make one imagine a river or an ocean is straight ahead. (That's why the local brand of bottled water is called "Mirage of Gobi".) Occasionally we stopped to look at rock formations of grotesque beauty but the main attractions were an ice-filled gorge in the midst of beautiful hills, and a line of white sand dunes that stretch for 100 km in front of a range of purple mountains with a line of green grass in front. The wildlife is just extraordinary: herds of stocky horses, or cows and yaks, or sheep and goats, occasionally deer. Besides the marmots the ground is alive with a variety of rodents. They look like furry mice, rats, guinea pigs, squirrels, hedgehogs; and there are rabbits too. Great flocks of bearded vultures were the most exciting birds we saw. Hawks, cranes, cuckoos were two a penny.
The Gobi Desert
Country town: the fence is essential because of the dust and the winds. We stayed with farmers who maintain and extra ger or two for tourists. A ger is the traditional Mongolian mobile home. I watched some young people erect one next to ours one afternoon. They covered a nifty circular wooden frame with canvas and thick felt and laid lino on the floor: all in about three hours. Everything has to be tightly tied and weighted against the strong winds. Wooden doors and door frames are an innovation of the last fifty years. Satellite dishes are a more recent addition, but not yet ubiquitous. The size is such that six single beds fit nicely inside the circumference.
We ate rice with dried mutton, noodles with dried mutton, dried mutton dumplings .... and various sorts of hard biscuit. We spent an hour riding camels and afterwards were invited into the home of the camel driver. He had just killed a sheep (or goat). We sat on the floor around the metal stove and a saucepan of cooked "bits" was passed around. We used the knife that came with it to cut off a bit for ourselves.
The provincial towns appear desperate places: probably a factory or some sort of "works"
The Gobi Desert
Desert Industry. with old tall chimneys belching black smoke, some soviet-style administration buildings, a rectangular park, and (thankfully) a public bath house. A shopping centre is an oblong building with virtually no windows. There is a narrow central corridor inside, with small shops on either side. In one town we went to the "container market", so called because the stalls are set up each in its individual metal container. There are a few "nice" houses on a N. European model, ugly communist-era blocks of flats, and ger suburbs. Because of the desert winds and desert dust high fences are really important. So each home consists of a square of dirt yard with two or three gers set up within the fence. Water comes from an artesian well down the street.
It is a hard life for these people, even in the summertime. They don't smile as readily as some folks do, but still, they are truly friendly.
Mongolia isn't all desert. In one amazing day we moved from seeing sand dunes and dromedaries at breakfast to viewing yaks and fir trees before supper. It was a long drive that day: thirteen and a half hours on no roads, with surfaces
The Gobi Desert
Sand dunes and a camel ride. getting more and more bumpy as me moved into a land of streams and valleys. Most beautiful valleys tho, with green swards, wooded hillsides and deep ravines. After that trip Ali and Menelaos enjoyed horse-riding. The rest of us … just rested.
On that last leg of our journey we saw some things of permanence. The first "permanent" buildings in Mongolia were Buddhist monasteries, after one of the Khans brought Buddhism from Tibet in the 16th century. However, thanks to the soviets in the 1930s these were to prove rather less than permanent. (A Buddhist thought there!) We set out to climb through forest to Tövkhön Khid; due to swarms and swarms of march flies only we fly-hardened Aussies made it to the top. Once there, Ali and I saw some tiny wooden buildings which were the recently reconstructed monastery, with just two monks sitting inside chanting.
We also drove to the monastery of Erdene Zuu, which had been built out of the stones left lying when the Chinese devastated the legendary city of Karakorum in the 17th century. Inside vast walls, only three temples still stand out of over sixty that were there before the soviets destroyed
Ulaan Baatar
Museum piece 1: most of them in the 1930s. Monastic architecture in Mongolia is a curious mix between the Tibetan style and Chinese, tho the practice is firmly Tibetan. Chenggis had been Shamanistic and in the time of the great khans religious freedom existed, with Nestorian Christians, Muslims, Buddhists all accepted into the mix that existed in what the Mongolians claim was the largest empire ever. (Brits: is that true?)
The Mongolians hate the Chinese, whom Chenggis Khan overran first in the 12th century, eventually moving the Mongolian capital to Beijing. ("In Xanadu did Kublai Kahn (Chenggis's grandson) a stately pleasure dome decree…" etc, - ST Coleridge). The Mongols also reached as far west as Spain. But the empire contracted, and in turn the Chinese overran them 500 years later, culminating in the aforementioned destruction of Karakorum. They only left Outer Mongolia with the fall of the imperial system at the beginning of the 20th century, tho Inner Mongolia still remains firmly part of China. Outer Mongolia seized independence then, supported by a White Russian known as The Mad Baron; but of course the Reds could not tolerate that and a period of confusion ended with the establishment of a soviet state.
Ulaan Baatar
Museum piece 2: With the break-up of the USSR, Mongolia became independent again.
It is a remarkable country, so large that in two weeks I only saw a tiny part of it.
Videos: Gobi Images Seen in Mongolia How to Build a Ger Great Loos of the Gobi (I'll see if I can improve the upload quality of all of these sometime soon.)
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Ray
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Finallly
I'd read this post before but it was nice to see it with the additional pictures.