Advertisement
Published: July 18th 2009
"Eddy! Great!" said the excited voice on the other end of the phone, "Where are you? Did you get across the border OK?"
Ten minutes later the voice had materialized into a person, our Couchsurfing host in Ulaanbaatar, Mobgolia's capital city. Begz was a small, thirty three year old man in a beret with a weathered face that, like many Mongolians, made him look older than he really was. Seeing him wheeling his bike, loaded with a 25kg sack of flower, a hoe, a rake and various other gardening tools, towards us down the train station platform, he could easily have been a character out of a Charles Dickens novel, perhaps an older, darker-skinned yet similarly-attired version of Tiny Tim from A Christmas Carol.
"I'm very happy you're here," he said, the same excitement I had heard on the phone still in his voice, "I asked my friends if the border is closed for the public holiday but nobody knew, so I didn't know whether to expect you or not."
"We were in the same situation," I said, "No one knew until the last minute."
We moved out of the train station and sat down on some
steps where Begz explained to us that he had a few jobs to do before going home but that we could get the bus and wait for him with his wife and children. He then spent the next twenty minutes drawing a minutely detailed map of the bus route, complete with every twist and turn in the road and every stop so that there was absolutely no chance we could get off at the wrong one.
The bus ground through the centre of town for fifteen minutes, much of it along the cracked and bumpy main street lined mostly with small shops and restaurants. Many had English translations of their names written on them, a surprising number to the tune of "Irish Pub" and "B.D.'s Mongolian Barbeque". The transition between the town centre and the outskirts was fairly sudden and almost before we had noticed it we were no longer passing shops, restaurants and concrete buildings but wooden houses and gers, or yurts, the traditional Mongolian felt tents in which fifty per cent of the population live. After another ten minutes we got off and walked up a dusty, steeply-sloping dirt track that led away from the road. After
one hundred meters, as directed by Begz, we opened a tiny door in the fence and walked down a high-walled alleyway that was only just wider than me and led out eventually into a fenced compound of perhaps a hundred square meters containing two gers and a wooden shack.
"Welcome to our home," Begz's wife said with a warm smile after we had knocked on the small, chest-height wooden door that, as on all gers, was set into the south side to protect from cold northerly winds. Her tiny, eight-year old daughter chimed in, "Welcome," after her.
"Take your shoes off and leave them here," Begz's wife told us, pointing to a sort of wooden crate which sat on the floor in front of the door and on which we were now standing, "but don't touch it with your socks - it's dirty and the rest of the floor is clean!" Without too much effort we managed to successfully manoeuvre our way onto the wooden boards of the ger's floor without transfering any dirt from the crate.
"Now can you wash your hands three times with soap," Begz's wife said, pointing at a sink to the left
of the door, "I'm sorry but there are many bacteria in Mongolia - outside is dirty and we want to keep the inside clean and healthy for the children."
In terms of structure Begz's ger was identical to others I would later visit elsewhere in Mongolia although his had a few features that betrayed it as a slightly urbanised version of the traditional nomadic home. Inside was spotless and very comfortable, the shiny wooden floorboards that stretched wall to wall not looking as though they could be easily packed up by a nomad intent on moving camp. The circular wall of the ger was only a few feet tall so the area immediately next to it was used for storage, cupboards, a TV, a computer, sleeping and anything else that did not require the need for an adult to be able to stand up straight. From the top of this wall a large number of wooden support poles led inwards and upwards towards the centre of the ger, joining together to make the middle of the tent much taller than the perimeter. A long, thin wooden chimney led up through a hole in the ceiling to evacuate smoke from
the large, rusty metal oven that sat on the floor in the centre.
Begz's wife sat us down at the far end of the ger and quickly produced a small, low wooden table from somewhere. Onto it she placed plates laden with freshly baked bread, along with some home made jam, butter and five cups of what turned out to be salty tea.
"It's from our cow," she said, pointing at the butter. "Begz milks it every morning and evening." I remembered seeing the animal tethered to a pole in the yard outside the ger and wondered how many inhabitants of the world's capital cities could claim to have one living in their back garden.
Begz's wife had to leave fairly promptly after finishing her tea, needing to pick up some medecine from the hospital and entrusting the care of her children to us. As her mother closed the door behind her the eight year old girl went to the edge of the ger and picked up a cardboard box out of which she emptied a large number of almost identical bones. "Ankle bones," she said, looking at us as if she expected us to understand exactly
what we were supposed to say or do immediately. She began laying them out in a horse shoe shape, each ankle bone with the same side pointing upwards. When it was finished she picked up a single bone and pointed to one side, saying, "horse," another saying "camel," yet another with "sheep" and the last with "goat." Still somewhat bewildered, we watched as she continued to pick up four bones, shake them around in her tiny hands and scatter them on the floor. Two of them landed with the horse side facing up so she picked up yet another and moved it the length of two bones around the horse shoe before pointing to me to indicate that it was my turn. I rolled one horse so only moved the length of one bone forward. In a virtually roadless country the size of Western Europe where amost half the 2-million strong population were nomadic herders, it was the horse that provided the traditional means of getting from one place to another.
The ankle bone game was simple and lasted a long time. Eventually Begz's older daughter reached the end of the horseshoe-shaped racecourse first, after which the two girls
dragged us outside into the yard and begged us to run around with them. Slightly embarrassed but unsure what to do, I could only comply. Thankfully, despite the shrieks and peels of laughter that our participation in this new game originally bought, their interest in it only lasted a few minutes before they ran back inside the ger and pulled out an electronic keyboard from somewhere in the shadows around its edge. They placed it on top of a box and began playing, experimenting with the myriad background tunes and bizarre sounds the keys could be set to make, including one that sounded like someone throwing up. Eventually they bored of this too and set it to play an exquisite piece of classical music. The nine-year old and the six-year old proceeded to take one another in their arms and solemnly began waltzing around the ger, the beauty and depth of the sisterly love complementing that of the music, the peaceful serenity of the moment keeping Lizz and I mesmerized for a quarter of an hour.
After a day spent out in town organising a driver and a huge eight-seater vehicle for our 32-day trip
around Mongolia's dreadful network of dirt tracks, we returned home on the last bus at half past eight. What started off as a fairly average standing bus journey rapidly became something similar to an enormous rugby scrum as the vehicle trundled its way through the capital's streets and more and more people piled on in an attempt to catch the last trip back to the ger quarter. Soon the jostling influx of bodies had forced me to the other side of the bus; I was being pushed not only backwards but also downwards and my legs began to buckle at the knees as the waves of people were pressed into me by those behind them. I felt something pushing at me feebly from the other side, near the windows, where I had thought there could not possibly be room for any more passengers. Looking down I saw a tiny old woman into whom I was involuntarily pressing my back and who I was worried I was crush like an unfortunate fan at a football match if many more people boarded the bus. "Sorry!" I mouthed, but her panic-stricken face just twitched at me then looked away as she increased the
strength with which she was trying to push me back.
When the map Begz had drawn us earlier, which I had only just managed to extract from my pocket amid the mass of bodies pressing into me from all sides, indicated that we were two stops from where we had to get off, we began to fight our way across to the other side of the bus. We made it just in time and jumped out of the doors to find our host waiting for us at the stop.
Back in the ger Begz's wife had a meal of lamb soup ready for us. Over dinner we told the family about the plans we had made for our trip around the country.
"First we're going to drive north for four days to the Darkhad Depression and spend a week or so trekking there and searching for the reindeer herders. Then we're going to drive to the far West of Mongolia, near Kazakhstan, and do about ten days trekking there, in Tavan Bogd, hopefully to find some of those people who hunt using eagles."
Begz looked at us and shook his head, seemingly in wonder. "I've heard
the West is very beautiful," he said, "but Darkhad, you know that's really a place without civilisation."
"That's why we want to go there!" I said, grinning.
Begz seemed not to notice and continued, "You know, somewhere near there there are lots of Ninjas."
"What do you mean, Ninjas?" I asked, mystified.
"It's what we call illegal freelance miners, there are about 100,000 of them around Mongolia digging for gold. There are huge Ninja ger cities where they camp out near the mine. But it's very sad, many of them are nomads who have become so poor that they've had to leave their families and do this, and lots of them die in accidents or get so ill that they can't even mine any more because of all the chemicals they use, like cyanide."
"What about the Dukha, the reindeer herders in Darkhad? Do any of them become Ninjas?"
"I don't know, I've never heard of them."
After the meal the conversation moved on to Begz's own travel plans. "You know, I'm only a librarian but we have some animals as well and my son takes them up the mountain to graze every
day. We've been saving up little by little and we think that in seven years' time, when I'm forty, we'll be able to travel round the world for three months."
"Where do you want to travel?" I asked, touched by the immense, years-long effort this man was putting into realising his dream in a society where international travel for most people was so financially unfeasible that it did not even feature as a concept worth considering.
"Well, first we're going to take the Trans-Siberian Express to Russia then head from there into Europe. After that we're going to go to New Zealand then hopefully visit Thailand before coming home. Most of the time we're going to be couchsurfing with people who've couchsurfed with me before." The excitement on his face as he talked about it would have been hard to conceal even if he had wanted to and he could barely sit still.
"It sounds incredible," I said, feeling embarrassed that he would have been saving up for most of his life by the time he had enough for a three month trip whereas I had saved up enough for a one year trip after a year
of working.
"How did you get into the whole couchsurfing thing?" I asked.
"Someone brought an American guy to me who'd told them that he wanted to stay in the ger quarter of Ulan Bator. They brought him to me because they knew I'm always interested to meet travelers, and anyway of course I was very happy to have him into my home. When he was staying here he told me all about Couchsurfing."
Upon waking up the next day I wandered outside to find Begz milking one of his cows. I said good morning then walked over to the fence and spent several minutes staring out at the mosaic of brown wooden houses and white felt gers that stretched out before me, divided into two halves by a dried up river bed along which a herder was leading his flock. If I looked to my left, far away in the distance, I could see the concrete buildings rising up out of the city centre like monuments to another world whose traffic, fast-food restaurants and Irish pubs seemed so far removed from the ger quarter as to be almost unreal. To my right, no
more than a hundred meters away, the housing and gers ended abruptly and the undulating brown plains that stretched unchanging for hundreds of miles immediately took their place.
When Begz had finished milking his cow he stood up, dipped a finger into the pot of milk and flicked three drops into the air.
"What was that about?" I asked.
"It's like an offering, giving something back for what we've received," he replied. "On your travels, if you're staying in someone's ger and they give you milk or tea or vodka you should always do the same. Hey, come and look at the trees I'm planting."
He led me over to a spot behind the ger where he had planted a number of saplings.
"I found them at a rubbish dump. I want to grow them because the ger quarter is so bad for the environment, everyone always burning wood fires all the time. I want to do something good to counteract it. Also it will be nice for my couchsurfers to sit under them when they're fully grown! Today is my day off so I'm going to spend it planting more!"
After breakfast, I
Ulaanbaatur graffiti
Many Mongolians surprisingly told us they liked the Russians but hated the Chineseplayed chess with Begz's ten year old son. Having got me to a stage where I was pretty sure it was impossible for me to win he offered to switch the board around so that I now had his pieces and was winning. Fairly quickly he took most of my pieces and again was in a position of almost certain victory. Once more he offered to swap colours and this time got me into check mate. I tried to salvage some dignity by playing him again but this time he beat me in three moves.
"He's the school champion," Begz said, beaming proudly.
On Begz's recommendation, that afternoon we visited the Choijing Lama Temple Museum, a monastery that had been converted into a museum of Mongolian Buddhism. Although it was closed for a national holiday, some kindly soul noticed us hanging around the entrance and unlocked everything. Inside the walls we found one main temple with four smaller ones surrounding it. Wandering the aisles in between the exhibits in the main building I stared almost in disbelief at the grotesqueness of some of the humanoid monsters represented in the masks, statues and idols on
display; multiple limbs, multiple heads, insane eyes, lolling tongues, razor sharp fangs were everywhere. Anyone depicting such abominations in medieval England would probably have been locked up but here they figured into the religion enough to be the main exhibits in the main museum of Mongolian Buddhism. Wandering further I discovered the most appaling monstrosity yet, with no less than ten arms and five heads, having sex with an ordinary woman in a tantric position. I was reminded of the Buddhist belief that Tantra can bring one swift Enlightenment that would ordinarily take many reincarnated lifetimes to achieve, or isanity if it is misused. Most lamas tend to believe that the sexual positions should be imagined, not carried out, but the sculptor of this particular piece had obviously had different ideas.
Further on were some more normal statues such as that of Padmasambhava, the man who is alleged to have brought Buddhism from India to Tibet in the eighth century. Sakya Pandita, the Tibetan abbot who spent much of his life instructing the Mongols in the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism on the request of Gengis Khan's grandson, was also there.
Walking the streets of Ulaanbaatur it did not
take long to realise that Gengis himself, or Chinggis, is something of a national hero in Mongolia. The name given to the young man Temujin (allegedly born with a blood clot grasped in his fist and who as a boy killed his own half-brother over hunting spoils) after he united various warring Mongol tribes can be seen everywhere in Ulaanbaatur. Bottles of beer, vodka, pizza parlours and banks are among the many places one will see testament to the man who oversaw numerous individual slaughters of millions of people and spawned the largest contiguous empire the world has ever seen, stretching from the Pacific Ocean to Eastern Europe.
That evening was to be our last in Begz's ger. Over another bowl of lamb soup I questioned him about ger etiquette, anything we should know before setting off on our trip.
"Well," he said, "first of all you should never speak while you're eating."
"Oh. Sorry."
"No, no, no," he said, laughing, "I don't mind because I understand, you know, but nomads out there in the steppe, they're much more traditional. You need to be careful to observe their customs. Don't tell them their food is delicious while you're eating, just eat quickly without stopping and really show them that you think it's delicious! After you finish a bowl, hold your spoon if you want more food, or lick your bowl if you don't, to show them that you really really enjoyed the meal!"
"Sounds good. Anything else?"
"If there are three gers together you should probably always knock on the door of the middle one. The oldest people always live in the middle one of three, and they'll be the most traditional and most likely to welcome you properly. And always sit in the east of the ger, to the left of the door; the west is for women and the north is for the head of the family, but they'll invite you there if they want to."
The next day we set off in our enormous Russian eight-seater. Within minutes the last signs of civilisation had disappeared out of sight and we were bumping and grinding slowly northwards along a dirt track, often no more than a pair of ruts snaking across the vast, barren, brown plains that stretched as far as the eye could see. We were to pass the next four days in this manner.
Click here for advice on
independent travel in Mongolia
Advertisement
Tot: 0.059s; Tpl: 0.016s; cc: 10; qc: 27; dbt: 0.0236s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
JonathanCampion
Jonathan Campion
Thanks.
Absolutely stunning blog: well-written, good pictures and good information about modern and ancient Mongolia. I guess conversations with people like Begz are what make travelling so rewarding. You know how much I envy your travels, one day we'll find time for a joint blog. J.