Advertisement
Published: June 20th 2011
Wow! Where to start with Mongolia? In English, that was fantastic! In American, that was freaking awesome! In French - C'était incroyable! In Mongol, it is simply GOY (great)!
Leaving from Irkutsk, it was a 42 hour train journey to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbataar (colloquially referred to as UB). As our train was quite empty the provodnista (carriage attendant) rearranged everybody so that we ended up with our own cabin for this leg of the journey, which was quite nice as we could spread out and treat our cabin as a private room.
As we approached the Russia-Mongolia border the scenery flattened out and we progressively lost carriages from our train, finally ending up with only a single carriage to cross the border.
Crossing the border was in itself an interesting affair. Pulling into the Russian station, the immigration officers pile on and collect your passports and then head off to do their stamping back in their office. Then the customs officers come onto the train with sniffer dogs and do a bit of a shake down - sifting through bags, lifting mattresses and peeking into trap doors we didn't even know existed. Throughout the entire process
you're not allowed off the train or to go to the toilet (as the flushes are straight onto the tracks), so without a bit of pre-planning it can be a painful three hour process. Once our passports were returned we were allowed off the train for 20 minutes before our carriage chugged through no-mans land and into Mongolia, where the entire process was repeated again.
It was at some point during this journey that Claire realised that all was not right with one of her teeth. Arriving into UB at 6:10am (bizarrely an hour behind Irkutsk, despite being noticeably further east) we were picked up by Bob, the owner of our hostel - the Golden Gobi, and nervously asked if there was anywhere we could get some dental work done. We say nervously, as the Lonely Planet essentially advises to leave the country and head to China if you need any significant medical attention.
However, hoping that this wouldn't constitute
"significant medical attention" and not wanting to head to Beijing earlier than planned (not that this was an option anyway, with only two direct trains from UB to Beijing a week) we headed to check out Yonsei Freindship
Hospital, a Korean sponsored hospital. To cut a long story short, we walked in and saw a dentist straight away. She pulled out a wobbly back half of Claire's tooth there and then, before we returned the next day for a second appointment and a brand new back half. Overall the quality of treatment was great, and amazingly the combined cost of the two appointments was only £11!! Rich would have paid that just for the side benefits gained from the two painkilling injections...
As UB is not a particularly attractive city, the rest of our first two days in Mongolia was spent collecting our onward train tickets; watching Thor at the cinema (very entertaining movie, and some eye candy for Claire - all in 3D); amusing ourselves at local shop frontages signs such as a hair salon called
"Destroy - Hair and Beauty"; and deciding how best to see the rest of Mongolia.
In this regard, there are really two options. The first is to go on a Ger to Ger, a ger being what Mongolian's call a yurt. This which is where the company you book through arranges for you to stay with some nomadic families.
You need to find your own way to the first family, and then travel by horse, camel or ox cart from family to family each day. You do all of this with no guide and only a simple Mongolian phrasebook to aide communication. The benefits of this option are that it is supposed to be a more authentic experience, but a drawback is that you only see a very small part of the country as all the families are obviously within riding distance of one another.
The second option is to go on an organised tour. In this case you also stay with local families, but you have an English speaking guide and drive from one area of the country to another each day or two and therefore get to see a wider range of terrains and still have the opportunity to do a little bit of riding. The attraction here is having a guide (some may view as a drawback, or as a sanitised version), but as a downside we had a concern that you may end up spending hours inside a car only experiencing the country out of a car window.
Despite having a couple of
reservations, we decided to go for the first option and go for a ger to ger with a highly acclaimed (by Lonely Planet and National Geographic) company called Ger to Ger.
"Highly acclaimed" - bollocks! At a two hour induction they managed to fill us with zero confidence that they had any idea what was going on. Given that we considered option one to be the braver choice, a little bit of instilling of confidence would gave gone a long way. As it was, it was an easy decision to forfeit the US$100 non-refundable deposit and run back to Golden Gobi to organise a tour through them.
The ger to ger may well have ended up being fine, however we knew within minutes of the tour starting that we had made the right choice and have subsequently have zero regrets about our decision. What Golden Gobi put together was everything that we wanted to get out of our visit to Mongolia.
It's at this point that you may want to get yourself a cup of tea, because try as we may to cut this down it cannot be summarised further. With the number of highlights we ended up
taking 800 photos on a six day tour (excluding the ones we deleted as we went a long).
Now, are you sitting comfortably...?
The greatest testimonial to the tours of Golden Gobi was sitting in the common area in the hostel and hearing everybody returning from tours full of glowing praise. No filleted reviews on the website to go by, just hearing people's enthusiasm on returning. On that basis, it was another easy decision to say yes to extending our five day tour to six days even though that meant us returning to UB only 12 hours before our train departed to Beijing.
Getting up for an 8:30 start, Bob's mother cooked us breakfast and we watched people arriving from the latest train to pull in from Irkutsk. Amongst the ranks was the familiar face of Teresa, the Spanish girl from the Nizhny-Tomsk train, and trio of Germans we were certain we had seen before. Also fresh off the train was Michael, another German man who would be joining us on our tour.
Thus it was, that the three off us climbed into our vehicle and met Zula, our guide and chef, and Amara, our driver.
Special note is now made on our vehicle which Rich instantly fell in love with and affectionately dubbed the "Soviet Box" - a grey box with four wheels stuck on the bottom. Picture a child's first attempt at drawing a car and you will be imagining our transportation device. Enquiring into the price of one of these beauties, you can apparently buy one new for only £18,000 or second hand for as little as £3,000. Immediately considering cancelling the rest of the trip and driving one home, the lights only went out when Rich learnt that the fuel economy was an impressively bad 1km per litre. Maybe next time...
Heading out of UB we had a three hour drive to our first family, stopping twice en-route to firstly say a prayer for a good trip at a local shrine and secondly at a roadside restaurant for lunch (mutton).
This first family lived in the semi-Gobi and had already moved to their spring camp (all nomadic families move three times a year - in spring, summer and winter). Upon arriving the first step was to do the introductions, a process that was almost ritualistic. The doors of the gers
always point south (take note in case you ever get lost in the Gobi without a compass), the north is respected and is always where the men sit, guests sit in the west and the family in the east. Therefore, each time we did this ritual we would enter and sit in the west and would be presented with a small bite to eat and a cup of suutei tsai. Suutei tsai is mongolian milk tea, which is made from goat's milk, tea and salt. The addition of salt makes it an acquired taste, but even though neither of us like tea it was one that we acquired quickly.
The entire family lives inside one ger (about 8m in diameter) along with all their belongings as well. If you're interested, they cost anything up to US$1,000. The gers themselves were very pretty. Made from a wood frame and with a felt cover, they were much more nicely decorated inside than we had expected, with intricate painting on the wood frame of the roof and carpets hung around the edges to cover the wood frame of the walls. In the middle of each ger is a stove that is used
for heating and cooking. Depending on where you are, the fuel of choice is either dried dung or wood.
After a quick rest in our own ger, we each hopped upon a camel for a three hour round trip ride to some sand dunes. To see proper, proper sand dunes to the horizon you need to do a full Gobi tour (8-21 days). Given that we only had six days the semi-Gobi gave us a taste of what is was like, but we had to get there first.
"Choo" is the Mongolian equivalent of giddy-up, but unfortunately our camels were more interested in eating and drinking than they were in listening to us.
Eventually getting there, the few sand dunes that we did get to see were impressive. Probably about 15m tall, the sand was as fine as silk and, given that neither of us have seen large desert sand dunes before, were just plain old fun to slide down. As seems to be the done thing at the moment, we even had time to pose for some
'jump' photos before heading back to the gers. Sensing they were nearly home, the camels made a quicker return journey.
Bouncing along on the back of the camel, it was bruised bottoms all round.
That evening, after we ate with the family (mutton) and with a simple phrasebook in hand, Rich tried his hand at trying to speak some Mongolian. Apparently his accent is quite good, but apparently so was Michael's. So when Michael chirped,
"Richard collect dung" there was much laughter and merriment before Rich was handed a weaved basket, a pitchfork and was sent out to where the herd had been busy that day. Very busy indeed...
When he returned everybody was put to work rounding up the 200-odd sheep and goats for some inoculations. It was really nice to see the whole family pulling together and getting on with what we assumed constituted their normal lives. Particularly cute was the three year old daughter carrying a baby goat that could have only been a few weeks old. Finally, to congratulate a job well done it was triple vodka shots all round. Lovely!
After breakfast the next day we hit the road, leaving behind this family and heading to spend two nights with a different family up in the mountains. It was on the way
there that a couples of things were brought home.
Firstly, aside from a few arterial roads there are no paved roads in Mongolia. To get around you simply need to know where you want to get to and head in that vague direction, knowing that it is to the right of the mountain that has an eagle shaped rock on it but to the left of the frozen lake. How Amara knew where he was going will always remain a mystery. However, we will definitely remember the journey because when you hit a medium sized bump before plunging into a large pothole (whilst trying to avoid three large bumps, several other large potholes and a herd of horses that decide to run out in front of the Soviet Box) you get thrown around a lot and you feel it. And Amara was a good driver....
Secondly, it really did hit home how big and empty Mongolia is. A quick wiki before heading out detailed that Mongolia has a population of just under three million people and that given it's size it is the third least densely populated country in the world after the Falkland Islands and Greenland. Given
the size of their populations (circa 3,000 and 57,000 respectively), they don't really count. Mongolia is even less densely populated than the Pitcairn Islands, which only have a population of 67!
Mongolia is huge. The landscapes are massive and just keep going and going. And it is all untouched! Beautiful grass covered hills against the bluest of skies have the feel of Teletubby land! There are steppe plains that are billiard table flat and rocky mountains that rise out of nowhere. And all over, it is covered by animals - herds of sheep, goats and more horses than you can imagine. There is something incredibly beautiful about a herd of 30-40 nigh-on wild horses playing in pools of water or galloping thorugh the scenery.
On the way to the second family we plunged the Soviet Box through a river and pulled up for an improptu lunch (mutton in pasta sauce). Arriving at the family's get camp, we went through the greeting ritual and then, with the afternoon to ourselves, we grabbed a couple of beers and walked down to a nearby mountain river and chucked them in to chill whilst we explored.
Being in the mountains, it
was decidedly colder in the evenings and at night. The trick to keeping warm was keeping your stove fully fuelled (logs in the mountains). For the most part we tried to do this, but were assisted by a member of the family coming into our ger each morning at around 7am so that it was nice and warm when we got out of our sleeping bags.
The third day was perhaps the best day of the entire tour. The main activity of the day was to go horse riding. After breakfast Zula told us at length the perils of riding Mongolian horses - given that they are nigh-on wild they are particularly jumpy and will potentially bolt at the sound of clothes being removed (i.e. velcro ripping), photos being taken or when approached by a wild dog. Suitably scared, we climbed onto the horses for a couple of hours riding to see a big dry waterfall (the river feeding it was still frozen), to a smaller waterfall that was flowing and to take in the overall scenery from horseback. Rich had never ridden a horse but quickly got to grips with the concept of clinging on for dear life.
After a bit of practice, everybody got a little bit more confident and with a few gentle
"choos" the horses would break into a trot (and maybe once a gallop) as we headed back for lunch (mutton).
In the afternoon there was more of the same, another couple of hours of riding doing a circuit up the valley. Unfortunatley, this time the horses were less interested in going at any noticeable speed and sometimes weren't interested at going at all. Similar to the camels though, when it came to the return journey the horses suddenly had a lot more energy. Claire's relationship between woman and beast was particularly impressive - whereby they had an agreement that the horse would follow the instruction of
"choo" for 30 seconds in exchange for 30 seconds of eatting grass. Therefore, on the return journey, Claire and horse played a game of leapfrog with the rest of the pack but as we got closer and closer to camp it became increasingly apparent that only one of the duo was actually in charge of progress.
Getting off the horses we were in agony. Perhaps the stirrups were too short, but our knees hurt the
most. The horse riding was great fun, but it was a relief thinking back that had we gone on ger to ger we would have had to do that for 4-8 hours each day. That would have hurt a lot more!
We now had a couple of hours to kill before dinner. Michael headed off for a walk in the hills, Claire relaxed with a book and Rich stuck his head out of the ger to see an interesting sight. The man of the house (ger) and Amara were holding down and killing a sheep. A balance needs to be struck between telling the gruesome details of what happened and portraying the reality of events, but in short the method of killing the sheep involved lying it on its back, putting a 10 inch cut in its belly and reaching in and cutting the main artery to the heart. Once the sheep was dead it was picked up and brought into the ger (presumably because it was cleaner) and was skinned and skilly fully butchered with hardly a drop of blood hitting the floor. As with the herding of the sheep, it was really impressive to see the whole
family getting involved - although the children emptying the contents of the stomach and intestines doesn't get any points for cuteness.
When Michael returned and sat down for dinner (mutton soup) in our ger he was annoyed at having missed the whole thing. However, after our dinner we were invited into the family's ger to enjoy some of the freshly cooked meat. Speaking to Zula, the cost to the family of killing a sheep is around US$100 - which is equal to the annual income of the poorest families in Mongolia. The meat of the sheep will feed the family for 3-4 weeks and they use every last bit. Without a fridge, in order to get the meat to keep they need to dry it. However, all the tasty bits in the middle (the bits we normally throw away, or put in sausages) are cooked and eaten straight away. And so it was that we were faced with a big washing up bowl full of recently boiled heart, lung, liver, fat, intestines (stuffed with onion and blood), pancreas (stuffed with onion, blood, fat and liver) and stomach.
A mixture of culinary intrigue, bravery and politeness ensured that Rich
tried everything and Claire tried everything minus the lung and pancreas. In summary: the heart and tasted like ordinary meat; the lung was strangely textured and didn't really taste of anything; the liver was fine but less agreeable when offered rolled in a slice of fat; and the intestine and pancreas were actually quite tasty without being Walls sausages. However, the stomach was like chewing on a bit of tasteless old leather - after a minute of chewing (during which the hairs of the stomach wall fall off) you just need to accept the fact that you are going to have to swallow this bit whole - gulp! Bizzarely, this was the bit the kids kept going back for more of.
In need of something to wash this down with, Rich asked more in hope than expectation if there was anywhere we could get a beer around here (our supply had run out)? This lead to one of Rich's highlights of the tour. Leaving Claire and Michael in the ger with the family, he headed off in the Soviet Box with Amara and Zula to find the nearest
"ger shop". Sitting in the front seat; hurtling across the bumpy
terrain in the pitch black; driving through a two foot deep river; past a herd of 40 horses and a frozen river; and all in the name of finding a beer - it was awesome!
Returning from the shop with ten tins of beer, a large bottle of coke, some sweets and some chocolate we settled down for a few games of cards (a new Mongolian game called 108) with the family. The kids obviously don't get to drink coke very often, and after Claire and Zula had managed a glass were fighting over the bottle - grabbing it from one another and drinking huge gulps straight out of the bottle before wolfing down a handful of sweets. Can't imagine they slept much that night...
The next day we had some fresh goats yoghurt with our breakfast before we had to leave for our next destination - the Tsenher Hot Springs. This was not before getting a nice group photo with the family, promising to send them a copy of the photograph back with Zula and Amara on their next visit - no doubt it will end up with a pile of photographs every other tourist probably sends
back.
Driving to the hot springs did not take too long, but along the way we stopped at the highest point along our route at around 2500 metres above sea level. Arriving at the hot springs, we had the afternoon to relax and enjoy the scenery, to have a dip in the water and to have a much needed shower. Amongst the reasons for not mentioning showers and toilet breaks, besides the fact that they are not highlights you would ordinarily share on a blog, is that there have been no such facilities available. Therefore, after four days of smelling bad a shower (even one smelling of sulphur) was hugely welcomed. Within five minutes of arriving at the camp, and despite it only being around 10 degrees, Michael had instinctively put his towel down on the sunbed - obviously a creature of habit.
That evening we relaxed in the hot springs and enjoyed a couple of beers; walked up a nearby hill for some nice views; ate dinner (surprisingly, no mutton) and played some games of 108 whilst we waited for the sun to set. When it got dark one of keenly anticipated highlights of the trip (and
what Rich had been looking forward to most) was on show - the stars! In the middle of nowhere, with no light polution or any clouds to obscure the view, the array of clouds was stunning! There were millions of clouds to look at, so many that the Milky Way looked in itself to be a cloud in the sky. All you could do was look up in awe and appreciate the moment. That, and try and take photographs using a cheap tripod and our digital camera. Given our camera is just a point and shoot digital camera, the results of the photos only give a glimpse of what we saw but are still very impressive. Unfortunately they are better viewed on a larger screen and in the dark.
Having done short hops of driving each day so far, progressively getting further away from UB, much of day five was spent driving back in the direction of the capital. En route we stopped off at the Erdene Zuu Monastery, which was the first Buddhist monastery built in Mongolia. Built in 1585 using stones from the ruins of Karakorum (the ancient nearby capital of Mongolia), it is surrounded by a
wall featuring 100 stupas. The number 108, being a sacred number in Buddhism, and the number of beads in a Buddhist rosary, was probably envisioned, but never achieved. By 1872 the monestary had a 62 temples inside but in 1939 the communists had the monastery ruined, killed over ten thousand monks and now only three small temples and the external wall with the stupas remain.
On a hill outside the monastery sits a phallic rock, angled at a valley which is meant to be.... well, you get the picture! The phallus is said to restrain the sexual impulses of the monks and ensure their good behavior.
Leaving behind the monestary and phallic rock, we continued our long drive to the edge of the Hustai National Park, where we would be camping for the evening. Along the way we cheered every time that we reached a stretch of smooth tarmaced road, eventually pulling up at a random bit of semi-Gobi that Amara considered was sufficiently flat for us to set up camp for the night. Arriving just after 8pm, we didn't have long to pitch our tents and to collect a few twigs worth of firewood from the surrounding
sand dunes before it got dark. After watching beautiful sunset, we ate our dinner (you know what) and played a few games of 108 in the back of the Soviet Box before lighting our little fire and retiring to our tents for the evening. Going to get to sleep that evening, with the wind blowing across the sand and through the shrubs, it sounded like was a herd of animals directly outside our tent - and for all we know there may well have been!
The next day was the final day of our tour, and our final full day in Mongolia. During the morning we packed up camp, and rather than take the option of strolling the nearby dunes we made the choice to sit in the back of the Soviet Box and to help Zula make some
"huushuur" (fried mutton dumplings) from scratch. Rich now has the recipe, and has promised to recreate these with his own twist (i.e. some more oomph) when we get home.
After that, we headed into the Hustai National Park, stopping briefly at the park gates to watch an amusing badly editted video about the main attraction of the park -
the Przewalski's horses. These horses are considered to be the species of horse from which modern horses evolved. Przewalski horses are stockily built in comparison to domesticated horses and generally have shorter legs. By 1969 the species was completely extinct in the wild, but a few horses survived in zoos in Munich and Prague. A reintroduction process was started in 1998 and there are now over 250 horses, all descended from approximately nine horses captured in 1900. Following on from this reintroduction, the Przewalski horse has been reclassified from
"extinct in the wild" to
"critically endangered".
Driving into the park, we went for several kilometres without seeing any horses but we did see a load of gophers zipping across the ground into different bunkers. After a while, Zula spotted something disappearing over a hill. Pulling up at the side of the track, we headed off on foot. Going over a small hill we came across a small pack of seven or eight horses and were able to stroll up to within 20 metres of them to have a good look. Prehistoric may be the wrong word, but its fair to say they don't look as evolved as their modern
day counterparts. Climbing another hill we could see another herd a little further away, with a foal amongst them - so their numbers are obviosuly still climbing!
Finishing in the park, we finally headed back to UB and checked back into the Golden Gobi - greeted by Bob at the door as if a long lost friend. Also on the steps of the hostel were another couple of familiar faces. If you cast your mind back to our first blog entry, the English couple that we had queued at immigration with when we arrived in St Petersburg were now also checked in at the Golden Gobi. A small world, but even stranger perhaps is that Michael had spent three days with the same guys when he was at Lake Baikal.
After a lovely, refreshing shower and a quick pop to a near by photo store we headed out to dinner with Zula and Amara to say thank you for giving us a lovely trip (don't worry, we also gave them a tip and a photo of us all at the second family's ger). We let them choose the restaurant, and fortunately it ended up being a Japanese restaurant
and happily nobody ate mutton. After a final game of 108 (it really is a good game) and a slow walk back to the hostel we said our final good-byes.
Without wanting to waste our final few hours in Mongolia, we met up with Stephanie and Greg who had now arrived in UB and were trying to get to grips with what they hoped would be their new home for the next year. Due to alcoholism in Mongolia, on the first day of each month it is not possible to any alcohol. This was re-confirmed by the waiter in the Thai bar / restaurant we sat down in, but after watching a few trays of cold beers go past us every couple of minutes we beckoned over the manager to enquire further. Although not legally, apparently exceptions can be made - cheers to that!
The next morning, we caught the Thursday train to Beijing. As a rather nice consequence of there only being two trains a week between UB and Beijing, the train was jam-packed with people who have made the long journey from Beijing and who have stories to tell. On this final leg of the Trans-Mongolian,
we shared our compartment with a quiet German girl and an annoyingly chatty US domiciled India man. It was not the fact that he was chatty that was annoying, nor really the subjects that he chatted about - he just had a knack of making conversations that you would happily have with most other people somehow annoying. Thus, when he came back from the restaurant carriage after six beers it was very satisfying to shut him up with puzzles like
"name the only four countries in the world that have only one vowel (not even repeated) in their name" and the mental puzzles picked up from the Nizhny - Tomsk train. Even more enjoyable was his reaction when, presumably having not been since his drinks, he realised he needed the toilet just as we pulled up to the border and that the window of opportunity for relief had slammed shut for the next couple of hours.
The border and immigration process at the Mongolia-China border was much the same as the Russia-Mongolia border except that they need to change the bogies (the wheels on which the carriages sit) at this border crossing, as the Russian and Mongolian tracks use a different gauge to the rest of the world. The process for this is to pull the train into a train shed, separate all the carriages, disconnect the wheels; lift the carriages up on large hydraulic jacks and slide in the new wheels. All of this is done with the passengers on board, so provided an opportunity to look out the window and observe it all happening.
The final amusing element of the immigration process was the Chinese immigration official's refusal to believe that Claire was who she said she was. Looking at her passport photo, he just did not believe she was herself. After a couple of mumbled exchanges he settled on a suitably tricky security question -
"what is your name?". Now, if you had gone through the trouble of obtaining forged documents, or were trying to travel using somebody else's passport, surely the name would be the first thing you would have learnt? You would have to pity anybody who has tripped over that hurdle before.
Crossing over the border at midnight, the contrast between Mongolia and China smacked you in the face. The Mongolian border town was a dark group of old double story buildings in the middle of the desert. A couple of kilometres over no-mans land and the Chinese equivalent had high-rise buildings, bright neon lights and what appeared to be a model of the Eiffel Tower.
Waking after the best night's sleep that we had managed on any train, there was so much to look at out of the window - mountains, farms, cities, highways and people - lots of people! We had just left the third least densly populated country in the world and had arrived in the most populous. This grew more and more apparent when, after 8,015km of train journeys, we finally pulled into Beijing - one of the largest cities in the world...
Advertisement
Tot: 0.231s; Tpl: 0.019s; cc: 8; qc: 51; dbt: 0.0797s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Duncan
non-member comment
Keep it coming guys
Another excellent and gripping installment in the saga...well written, indeed so well written that I can't believe my neice had a hand in it! Enjoy Beijing guys, China is fasconating in its own right!