Day 289 - Palace Hotel(s)

---

The train arrived at Mongolia’s capital, Ulan Batar, bang on time (as usual) at 7:30am. Maybe a consortium of Russian, Mongolian and Chinese train companies could bid for Thameslink’s franchise. We had a reservation at the Palace Hotel and found a taxi driver to take us there, but when we check in and try to collect our onward train tickets from reception we are met with blank faces. There’s no sign of a reservation, so we are given a complimentary breakfast whilst we wait for the reservation manager’s arrival at 9am. To cut a long story short, it turns out that the Palace Hotel renamed itself the Khan Palace Hotel a few months ago and its sister hotel in another part of town was given the Palace Hotel name. How stupid of us for not knowing this before. Anyway we go to the other hotel, driven by the second worst taxi driver of our trip (the experience in Buenos Aires will take some beating), and were shown to our ‘super deluxe’ room, with 2 bathrooms, 2 balconies, the biggest bed in the world and living space several times bigger than the train compartment we’ve grown used to.

We walk into town and head for the post office - Mongolia is famous for enormous, colourful stamps so we thought it would be a good idea to send a load of postcards (because of the nice stamps rather than less space remaining to be written in). Unfortunately it seems they have now abandoned this practice but plenty of old souvenir stamps were on sale and we bought some for Ed’s Grandad.

The main square is absolutely enormous and you have to wonder why they made it quite so big. Maybe it was used for the entire Mongolian army to parade around together. The government building has been given a very impressive makeover and the north side of the square looks fantastic and imposing, and that’s before even considering the Genghis Khan and Buddha statues (two very different personalities!).

We visited the Museum of National History and really liked it, with better English explanations of things than we’d expected. At its height, the Mongolian empire was huge and by some measures the biggest empire in history. And Genghis Khan was a bit of a legend though opinions vary: the Soviet Union tried to eradicate him from the history books but conversely he was voted ‘Man of the Millennium’ by some international survey. What is indisputable is that he was a very capable military leader and not averse to being cruel to realise his ambitions. He did, however, according to our guide, die of an headache!

We walked through a shanty-type town trying to reach a Hunting Trophy Museum, and found it upstairs in a nightclub. Ed asked where it was and was shown a bedroom for some reason, but eventually we were led upstairs to a collection of stuffed animals and nothing written in English. We looked around the state department store - those communists did like running everything - before completing our Genghis Khan education with Chinggis Khan (the Mongolians’ preferred transliteration) beer. Finally we eschewed Mongolian food and went to a highly, highly recommended Indian restaurant called Khazara behind the wrestling palace. They tried to put us off with a signed photo of Steven Seagal by the entrance but we persevered and it was well worth it.

---