MONGOLIA
In the evening six thirty we board a rather plush train bound for Ulan Baator. Mongolia feels a whole deal more laid back than China. The first two things I notice and appreciate is the absence of people hawking up phlegm, and much fewer people smoking. Nobody smokes on the train.
The train winds through the Gobi Desert, an undulating expanse of near bald grassland. Gers spot the landscape, we see camels, horses, cows goats. The occasional car. Lots of cute tiny brick houses. Evening passes to night, I sleep.
Ulan Baator arrives not very long after breakfast time, and we head off in our separate little groups. I’m kind of tired of exuberant American accents and am looking forwards to just having a quite time landing and figuring out what to do next.
At the train station a woman asks if I have a place to stay. Instead of batting her away, I go with her. Not interested in her offer of a camel safari, but I will go to the hostel on offer.
At the wonder Mongolia hostel, a downstairs flat in an old block of flats, a bespectacled French woman asks if I would like to go on a nine day tour with herself, her man and one other. I have two hours to decide.
Okay. I’ll go. Really I would have preferred to just stop moving for a day or two before doing anything else, but in the absence of any kind of clue as to what to do, I’ll go.
At midday we meet the tour arranger, Sowwo, a young man who seems nervous lime he has some sort of drug addiction or something, our driver to be whose named is Numching who seems like a down to earth smiley chap, and an Indian woman called Sheetal who seems to have done most of the tour negotiating.
We arrange the trip, agreeing the nitty-gritty money stuff and then spend the afternoon doing our food shopping for the trip.
The following morning, we set off for the north in the direction of Khuvsgol lake our first proper stop. We only get halfway on account of a rear wheel suddenly going flat. We stop by the side of the road whilst it gets fixed. About an hour later the other rear wheel decides to detach itself completely from the vehicle and go rolling off into roadside grass for a few hundred metres. Fantastic trip this is going to be. We haven’t even left the tarmac yet. We get rescued by a passing motorist who has the tools to resurrect the mashed up wheel and its broken bolt stubs.
After a couple of hours we park up next to a small stream and camp for the night. The stars are incredible.
I am invited by Sheetal to sleep in the big tent. It’s going to be a squeeze with four of us in there. Me and Sheetal get cosy. First time I have touched a woman in five years. I am full of nervous beginningness.
The next day we make it up to Khuvsgol Lake, effectively a seaside resort for landlocked Mongolians. It’s busy but still very nice. I walk out with Sheetal for an afternoon, and experiment with some kind of romance. I’m not sure what’s supposed to happen, I have never been one for casual traveller romance. I’m probably not the easiest of choices for such things. Sheetal is beautiful. She has a wonderful smiley face, fabulous long black hair and is a go getting woman operating out of Mumbai, running her own business offering camping holidays for kids around different parts of India. This is her first time out of the country, and she is eager to make the most of her freedom. She has some funny traits, but nothing so far that I can’t handle.
Our time together is tricky. She wants everything straight away and I’m a cautious slow mover and not very confident. She is forgiving.
Our travel partnered Sandrine and Fabrice seem to be having their own undercurrent of difficulties. Sandrine being somewhat bossy and Fabrice being rather quiet and submissive. Over the next few days, Sandrine and Sheetal crash into each over the cooking, Fabrice gets drunk with Sheetal and admits how much he feels hen pecked by Sandrine. I get angry at Sandrine for trying to interfere every time I help with the cooking. Me and Sheetal continually don’t quite meet in bed though I like her a lot. This is all over the course of the next few days. After Khuvsgol Lake we head towards White Lake in an off road manner. Tarmac evaporates, and dirt tracks are the order of the day, varying from relatively unbumpy and reasonably straight to ‘how do we get past this river without sinking into a bog never to be seen again?’ And ‘Oh fuck I think the car is going to roll over it’s so steep and bouldery’.
At the small ger-town of Muron, Numching’s Toyota Land Cruiser finally grinds to a halt having failed to sufficiently oil his engine. Now a piston has gone bent and he seems to have totalled his engine. We spent a morning sort of abandoned in some drunk guys front garden whilst an assortment of local mechanic guys pronounce our tour vehicle dead. We call Sowwo, the only person we can actually communicate in English with, and tell him that we have no confidence that our tour is going to work with a continually fucking up vehicle. He puts us into a local hotel for free and the following day we get a new driver, a gruff looking older fellow and a new car.
Finally we set off for the white lake. It’s a bit weird having a new driver. We liked Numching even though we couldn’t talk with him. He was a warm smiley chap, like many Mongolian men seem to be. Unfortunately, he seemed to know nothing about car care…
At the white lake, not enough personal space to meditate and look after my own needs culminates in me going and sleeping on the other side of a hill without telling any one. I’m struggling with so much emotional stuff flying about. Sheetal spends the night awake and upset worrying about me. Oops. I never intended that to happen.
After the lake we visit a volcano which is fairly spectacular. Sheetal is having her period and is not feeling quite right.
We head of further south alongside the shallot river. It’s not called that, but that’s what it sounds like its called. We camp there. It’s mind-buggeringly hot and there’s no shade. Me and Sheetal spend the afternoon snuggling up under a mosquito net hiding from flies and Sandrine and Fabrice.
The next day we start heading for UB, stopping en route for a minor falling out about a loaf of bread. Sandrine sends me into a shop to get a loaf of bread and when I return with one she moans that it’s not sliced. I tell her it’s all they had and if she doesn’t like it she can go and buy the bread herself. I’m fed up with her picking holes in whatever anyone tries to do. I feel like she s playing some sort of power game, and I’m not going to play it out with her.
When we finally return to the Wonder Mongolia Hostel in UB, we finally all get some down time and we all make up and apologise, which is really good.
Its Naadam the national festival which means the city is absolutely chockablock full of people. The city roads are crammed with stuck traffic. The countries borders are closed for a week and Sheetal has to massively alter her plans. We were going to spend two days together before she went back to China to help on a kids camp, but now she only has one day as she is obliged to catch the only train that is crossing into China tomorrow. There won’t be another until next week, after her Mongolian visa has run out.
We have a lovely day together and visit part of the Naadam opening ceremony in the city’s sports stadium. which basically amounts to visiting a very packed market and fete kind of thing. We eat at two restaurants and then after having declared that she didn’t want me to walk to the train station with her, I end up sitting on the train with her saying goodbye. I feel weird about it. I like her very much even with her funny habits. It’s not like I don’t have my own funny habits.
Anyway, she only wants short term encounters, from what I can work out, so my hang ups don’t really matter. It feels like a curiously liberating experience for me to be able to enjoy someone without worrying how the future might go.
Sheetal has gone, and I can’t communicate with her easily for a while.
The next day I have to decide what to do next with the two weeks I have left in Mongolia. I either wait six days for the embassy’s to open in order to find out what my exit options are or…
The following morning I head back to the hostel that Sheetal had been staying at, the blue marmot. When I had visited there the previous day I had had a sparkly conversation with an American guy called ‘J’. He had mentioned that he was planning on heading west the next day to try and take part in a village Naadam somewhere then go hiking for a few days.
When I get to the hostel he’s still there and yes I am Welcome to come along with him. A Danish woman called Pauline plans to come with us. We all go and buy bus tickets, but then she changes her mind and decides she wants to get out of Mongolia as soon as possible.
Me and J get the 7pm bus out west and finally get off at 3am having talked non stop all the way. I can’t remember the last time I had an intellectual conversation for so long.
An English speaking Mongolian woman spots J, speaking English and asks if we want to come back to her brothers ger camp to stay. Of course we would love to!
Nancy is an interpreter and has been living in Seattle for the last twenty years and has come back with her husband and daughter to get back to her roots. Her husband is in UB visiting his sick mother whilst we all get driven back to the camp by Nancy’s brother. It’s almost daylight by the time we reach their camp but we all manage to squeeze a few hours sleep in.
We have arrived in a flat river valley, with gers spotted along the rivers length. It’s quiet excepting a rumbling breeze, occasional voices and the sound of distant and not so distant animals. Dogs bark occasionally, yaks grunt happily a few hundred metres away. Motorbikes and four wheel drives pass rarely. The sound of hooves from a hundred horses thundering past of their own accord further away.
Over the next couple of days, Nancy is the star family guest and by turns, me and j are guests too. We visit relatives and get plied with an endless assortment of dried yoghurts, mares milk arak, goat stew, more curds, cream, bread, weak but hot tea (half milk half boiling water with literally three or four tea leaves in it) more dried yoghurt. It’s all very tasty, but it gives my digestion rather a shock. It’s all very rich and fatty and I’m very stuffed. My bowels are behaving strangely. We visit the local Naadam. After some negotiation about J being a foreigner, J is allowed to take part in the wrestling and puts up a formidable struggle. Ultimately he gets knocked out after about a minute which is probably just as well; no doubt he is saving his opponent from a lifetime of future humiliation from his mates.
We all pile into the Toyota Landcruiser and drive alongside a group of about fifty children galloping full pelt across the steppe in a horserace. Horse racing is for children only as the adults are too heavy for the horses to be able to cover the four kilometre run. The children entering can be as young as two. No that’s not a spelling mistake. It’s as if the race is some sort of initiation into the ways of adulthood.
Before we had left in the morning, a puffy eyed unhappy looking couple had joined us for breakfast. Last year their ten year old son had died in the race. Nancy informs me that children die every year doing the race.
Mongolian steppe life seems to be free from fences, as well as burdensome health and safety regulations. I’m sure if they were introduced, the free spirit of the Mongolians would wither.
In the afternoon at a relatives ger we watch two herdsmen dismember a goat. Two young girls of about seven and four are quite happy to regard the proceedings, one chewing idly on some random dried animals body part. We exchange crazy yoga poses whilst waiting for dinner.
We watch one of the women expertly clean up the offal, squeezing out the intestine contents and then running hot water through them which makes them blow up like balloon octopus tentacles.
My dad was a butcher, and it reminds me a little of being young and watching my mum and dad turn an animal into separate food items. A curiously mesmerising spectacle. From life to death to dinner to life again.
The men throw the carved up goat meat and bones into an enormous pan. Hot rocks from the wood stove are added along with whole potatoes. A lid is put on and it is left for an hour or so to cook.
Between times, we chew on more dried curds and sip milky tea.
Finally after years of fantasising, I am sitting in a Mongolian ger, waiting for a goaty dinner. Family chatter happily in the most complicated language I have ever had the pleasure of listening to. Imagine somebody reading out scrabble letter combinations endlessly with lots of clicks and sighs thrown in. The oddest language I have ever heard. What makes it particularly special is that it’s not part of a tour package, I didn’t pay for this to happen. I just woke up the previous morning not knowing what to do and followed with J who also had no particular plan to be in a ger. It was mere good fortune. So that’s nice.
On the last day with Nancy and her belly laughs brother Tao we go for a trip to a volcano and a lake. Which I soon realise turn out to be the same volcano and lake I had visited a few days previously…. It doesn’t matter. It’s still a nice day out. On the way we visit a sacred site (there are many). A tree hung with hundreds of blue ties is the focal point. People offer it stones, sticks, sweets, paper money and make their wishes for a better life. I follow suit, asking for a clear sense of how best to use my talents for a happy and fulfilling life.
Back at camp base, it’s an early night for tomorrow me and J set off for a two day hike along the river.
In the morning Tao and Nancy drive further into the shallow river valley that we are planning to walk. The idea is to follow the river back to Tao’s ger and then back up to the main road about five miles further.
The walk is simple, apart from having occasionally negotiate grass hummock islands in sometimes marshy water.
Following the river is a delight. Ger camps stud the route; each one we pass insists on plying us with hospitality; milk ‘tea’ (basically just hot water and some version of milk), dried curd chunks, cold horsemeat or a bone to chew. Much as we enjoy hospitality, it’s not really our plan to stop and chew the Mongolian fat every five hundred metres. We have a walk to get on with, and we soon start feeling the need to fend people off. I can’t help but wonder that if I were on my own, the actual walking bit of the hike would cease to be important, and the route back up to the road would probably become immensely tangential and conversational. I feel a little frustrated that we are passing by so many interesting looking people.
It seems that pretty any Mongolian that can speak English will be living in the city somewhere. So far I have had my best ger camp conversations with Michelle who is seven. Everyone else is talking scrabble rocks and clicks from incredibly open faces and clear seeing eyes. I would so love to be able to talk with them.
Walking on, we pass numerous herds. A few herds of yak, but mostly this area seems to be horse pasture. The horses walk, trot and gallop en masse, utterly unrestrained by confinement in tiny fields. Only the freedom to roam. It’s quite some wonder to see them this way.
In herds of up to a hundred, they stand in the river keeping themselves cool, churning the water in a rush of white water if we walk too close past them.
We reach Tao’s ger but no-one is home. We carry on to the main road, passing a flock of seven falcons who seem completely unbothered by our passing.
At the road we hitch, taking a ride from the third vehicle that passes. During the thirty miles to Tetserleg, I develop mild food poisoning, probably from eating out of the same tin can that I last used in India. Which gave me food poisoning then also…
We stop at Tamir Rock, the same inexplicable enormous rock that we visited on previous tour. Last time I played a game of cards with some kids. This time I had my fingers down my throat.
We reach Tetserleg. J goes off to find me a can of coke and then a hostel. By the time he has found a hostel I have drunk the coke and am feeling a million times better. The hostel is crap, it doesn’t even have a shower. I can enjoy this kind of non-facilities for free.
J has met some people who are taking horses across country. They are full of stories of them learning the hard way… Horses breaking out into unstoppable galloping, falling off numerous time, one horse running away never to be seen again and another one being stolen.
For some reason I want to join them, and end it when we realise that it will obviously involve the procurement of a horse and all its kit, and extending our visas in UB and this then find in the group wherever they are it all seems too complicated for a two week trip. We opt for plan A which was to continue to the eagle hunting area in Altai. Then Sheetal contacts me and wants to see me in China, and J changes his mind and opts back in to the exploding horse caravan..
I don’t know what to do. I am confused and miserable and probably I am testing J’s patience somewhat.
J heads for UB to sort out his visa extension, whilst I spend a day doing nothing to sort my head out. I spend several hours waterproofing my tent whilst being an item of curiosity for possibly every drunk in town. Which becomes a little tedious.
Eventually a drunk guy at speaks minimal English insist that I stay his ger. Him and his friend take me in a taxi back to his friends house/ger.
Hospitality ensues, bits of meaty mutton bone, warmed noodles, bread, very nice tea. A viewing of the family photos. The TV on in the background. Friends is on, dubbed into Mongolian. The male actors all sound like homer Simpson, talking Mongolian of course. The drunk English speaker has previously attempted to set me up with a prostitute, which, when I turn down the offer he presumes that I must be gay and attempts to kiss me. He manages to plant a full on smacker on my ear which succeeds only in making my right ear deaf with ringing for an hour.
I am housed in a ricketty bed in a ger in the garden/scrap of waste ground. Drunken kiss man tries to join me. I hastily get out and sleep on the floor.
An hour later thunder strikes and I discover the ger is minus a proper roof. Rain pours in and I manage to find a corner that isn’t doing weather. I imagine drunken kiss man is probably getting soaked to the skin. I feel disinclined to interfere with his situation.
I leave in the morning, turning down breakfast, and wanting only my own company in order to arrive at a sense of what I need to do. Numerous messages between me and Sheetal and finally I am clear. I am going to China.
I spend a happy afternoon in a cafe talking to other travellers, feeling normal and happy again.
After that I go camp on a hill. A small cocker spaniel decides that it loves me, and refuses to leave me alone. In other circumstances I would have loved to have her around, such a cute friendly dog that it is, but I need to get on with some things and have to get in my tent to escape her attentions. Bless.
Someone throws a clod of mud at my tent. I hear some kids laughing. They are soon gone.
Through the night the little dog is protecting me, barking sometimes at passers by. It rains heavily and the barking ends. Thinking that the dog has finally seen the sense to go and find somewhere dry to stay I think no more of the dog. In the morning the little dog is curled in a tight little ball shivering like crazy with wet and cold. Immediately on seeing me it tries to get inside the tent. I cry a little for the dog for my having abandoned it. If I wasn’t travelling, the dog would be mine. She is a sweet little thing that just wants love.
The coach journey back to UB is uneventful, excepting a rude Italian who is very snotty about the fact that I have accidentally sat in his seat. On the non stop video screen, endless Mongolian ballads all start to look and sound the same. There’s a strange reassurance that maybe my experience of Mongolia has in some way become fulfilled when the music starts to sound boring and the food starts to frighten me.
At the wonder Mongolia hostel I meet a Canadian woman who has ridden a horse for two thousand kilometres through Mongolia and is now running a welfare project out on the steppe somewhere. I am instantly besotted. What am I doing going back to China ? I am so confused.
A train sits in UB station. This is not my train though, this one is going to Moscow. Sudden urges to go to Russia. In theory, I could have got a two day transit visa for Russia, giving me enough time to slip through the country and catch the merest of glimpses of Moscow. Not much point in that really. Would be nice to see the place properly one day. Probably on a motorbike.
On the train I am sharing my cabin with two nice Taiwanese ladies. We have the usual kinds of chat and talk about the virtues of being vegetarian. I have just gone back to being veggie today. Mongolian stodge is enough to make anyone go vegetarian.
At Zamyn Uud in the morning, my Taiwanese harem has gone, they got off at an earlier stop at rubbish o clock in the morning. Instead I am now somehow hooked up with Lianzo and his mum. They are hippies from Breton. He is a musician and into 70s acid hippies Gong and Robert Wyatt. What’s Robert Wyatt doing in my head at the Mongolian Chinese border?
Richard Terry 