Mongolia, again.

So, I’m back from Mongolia, sitting in my Beijing apartment, feeling like I suppose all the other twenty somethings living in this crazy city feel. A mixture of stuck in a rut, and free to do absolutely everything. It’s a funny city like that. But Mongolia. Mongolia is different. For starters, unless you take a plane, it takes forever to get to Mongolia. I guess that’s true about most places, but at least once you get to most countries, getting around is relatively easy. There are trains and busses and they have tickets and schedules. When they say they will leave at 8:15, they generally do, or within a couple minutes at the very least. Not so for the wild Mongolian west. Out of the 9 days I was traveling, I spent approximately 120 hours on modes of transportation, and another 20 hours or so waiting to leave.

The funny thing about having been to Mongolia last summer though, is that I knew what to expect, I just had fairly awful luck, even by Mongolian standards. I took the train from Beijing, which should have taken about 30 hours and ended up taking an extra four, because, well I don’t really know why actually. We slowed way down to a crawl through the steppe for quite a while, and it sure as hell wasn’t so people could take better pictures out of the windows. But for all that, it was fairly luxurious since I had a berth to myself, so I napped a fair amount, finished my book, and shot the breeze with Stephan the Australian business consultant. He was a good guy, and traveled with a picture drawn for him by his four-year-old son, which he’d taped up above his bunk, much to the amusement of the sour-mouthed customs folk at the border. As far as I was concerned it made him a decent person, someone worth talking to at the very least.

After finally coming into the station, I spent the afternoon in Ulaan Bataar with a British couple on their way home from a year teaching in Korea, seeing the state department store, Sukhbaatar square, and wandering around a bit. It was nice to see the place through fresh eyes, though I’ll still stand by the assessment that UB is a dirty boring useless city. Beijing may be dirty, and the air might be enough to make you choke at times, but it is never boring and certainly not useless. Beijing is great, UB not so. So after a quiet night I shouldered my pack and went down to the black market to find a van going to Kharkhorin and a sweater. Why didn’t I just pack a sweater you might wonder, and well you might. I had, in fact, packed a couple shirts and a fleece jacket, more than should be enough in the beginning of September. But when I woke up the morning of the 7th, my first full day in Mongolia, I looked out the window to see a suspicious white substance (well, grey actually) covering the ground and buildings near by. They said it was unseasonable, but I’m not sure I believe them. Add cold to the list of Mongolia’s many attributes. So I had to buy another layer, preferably something both very definitely Mongolian and something that I’d wear again. I settled on a camel hair sweater, and it’s pretty snazzy if I do say so myself.

Finding the van wasn’t particularly hard since they line up waiting to head off to various parts of the country, and not only did I have the name in normal script, but in Cyrillic as well, thanks to the wonders of the internet. Eventually the driver of one vehicle, a blue Russian army van called a Porygong, said yes. We were to leave at 3:00, a mere 4 hours in the future, so I wandered around the market, and back to the van, and back around the parking lot. I wasn’t doing much but killing time and taking some photos to be honest, since I’d already bought my essentials and anything else would just weigh me down. They play a lot of pool in Mongolia, on crooked tables arranged outside of resturants mostly, and there were a lot of guys playing outside of the market in the snow. I found this funny for some reason. Not wanting miss an early departure, I ambled back to the van about 2:30 and sat down to wait.

The van didn’t roll out of the parking lot until 5:45. Until that time I played the point and say game with a little girl, who increased my command of Mongolian at least 100 fold. Admittedly, being able to say mouth didn’t come in handy later in the trip -- but still, I now have a working dictionary of nouns, which is a start, I guess. Though we started at 5:45, we certainly didn’t leave then. That would have been unprecedented. First we had to drive around town, dropping people off and picking people up, sometimes looking in two or three locales for particular individuals, or finding them somewhere and taking them somewhere else to get their luggage. Then we had to stop to buy pine nuts, and then again to buy gas. It was 9 o’clock by the time we got on the road, for what is usually a 6-hour trip. Doing the math, I realized this put me getting to Kharkhorin around 3 in the morning, 4 if I was lucky, which is pretty much the worst time to get anywhere.

To add insult to injury, just as we were finally heading out of town, the driver’s wife, who was acting as manager of the endeavor, turned back and said to me, Kharkhorin no. I first expressed my surprise, then my disbelief, and lastly, very obviously, my exceedingly large displeasure. She made it clear that we were going to a completely different province, which was apparently much more interesting, and that of course I should be okay with this. I made it very apparent that I was not, and demanded to be let off the van, with my money returned. This turned out to be the crux of the matter, since my van fare had already been spent on cases of fizzy apple juice, and therefore could not be remitted. After a couple minutes of angry silence, it was decided through some mysterious phone call that we would, in fact, go to Kharkhorin.

However, just as it was my nemesis, Mongolia proved to be my savior as well. The trip took an extra, inexplicable 3 hours, and they left me off the van on the outskirts of town around 6:30 in the morning, leaving only 2 and a half hours to sunrise. Had we actually arrived at the expected time, I would have been one cold camper indeed. Why the extra time? I have no idea. Apart from the normal traffic stops where cops flicked their flashlight around and yelled at the driver for having too many people, we had no earthly reason to take so long. No spectacular breakdowns or side trips across the steppe. We were just slow.

It’s true; there were too many people, but hardly in record numbers. In a van with seats to hold 11, we were 17 including two children, hardly over the practical limit. The best I’ve heard is 23 in the same type of vehicle, not counting children. I was sharing the back seat with three other men, the Cowboy, the Kid, and the Wise Guy. The Cowboy didn’t say much, but when he did it was in a long slow drawl and often with a twinkle in his eye, as if he were secretly laughing at everybody. Mongolia is full of cowboys, and their style speaks to it, but this was pretty much the perfect specimen. The Kid was a country kid come into the city for a while to visit relatives I would guess, and though he could speak no English he could write a few words, which, due to their limited scope, didn’t actually come in handy either. We did figure out that I was two years older though, with the help of my notebook and a lot of gesturing. He’d just bought a new leather jacket, and laughed at all the jokes at my expense. Next to me for the duration of the trip was the Wise Guy, a large smelly man who took great delight in making me say that I was stupid and suchlike, playing the parrot game. He would say something and I would repeat it back, much to the amusement of all the other passengers in the van. I smiled and took it, as one has to do in that situation, but got slightly concerned when he mimed my suicide, and then laughed and gave me a thumbs up. That one is as yet unexplained.

I didn’t have a destination within Kharkhorin, so, after much gesturing the van left me off in the outskirts of town, on the equivalent of Outer Pleasant Street in Brunswick, or the KMD in Waterville. Either way it was the highway access road with lots of shops, and a couple hotels. It was this road that I paced, back and forth, back and forth, for three hours, trying to keep the cold from setting into my knees. I wasn’t entirely successful, but I did survive, and it established me as the new guy in town for all the school kids on their way to school. The moon was almost bright enough to read by, as it often is in Mongoila—and I even had a book, but that would have entailed sitting down on the cold concrete, which was out of the question. So I paced, until around 9.

At 9, slightly after the sun had come up for real, a newish looking Landcruser originally destined for Japan (based on steering wheel placement) pulled over, and a man with a brown cowboy hat leaned out of the window and told me to get in. The last time this happened to me the driver was a Chinese mobster named Jerry, I like to think so anyway, so instead of throwing caution directly to the winds, I first enquired of the Landcruser’s destination. When the couple inside said breakfast, I’ll admit it didn’t take me long to get into the car, and off we rumbled to one of the tourist ger camps on the outskirts of town.

My saviors, I never did learn their names, were friends with the owner, which meant we got free breakfast as a favor, or something like that I hope. The man driving worked up at the school, doing management and economics, and his wife was a lawyer. They were certainly the upper crust of Kharkhorin, which, despite its sleepiness and rather diminutive population, around 10,000 tops I’d guess, is a regional center. This explains why there was enough work for a lawyer, though what she actually did is quite beyond me. I don’t think there is much litigation that goes on, and I’d imagine that most wills and such are handled privately. Her English wasn’t particularly good, though it was better than my Mongolian, so I never found out.

I explained that I was looking for my friend, and, concerned, they called her number—but no dice, the phone was turned off, so after breakfast we repaired back to their ger on the other side of town.

This might be a good time to explain what I was doing ending up in a random Mongolian town at 6 am, with no guidebook, phrasebook, or discernible plans. I did have my friend Emilia’s phone number, and our one and only plan was to meet in Kharkhorin on the evening of the seventh or after. After that the plans were fairly vague, but they involved some kind of Mongolian adventure. We figured it was just as easy to meet in the countryside, and saved Emilia an extra trip to the city. Besides, Kharkhorin was a small town, so meeting each other shouldn’t have been a problem, and it wouldn’t have been, if Emilia had been there. In fact, it wasn’t even after she arrived. The whole thing worked out rather well really, though I guess that’s getting ahead of myself.

Concerned about my rather lost status, my savior in the brown hat solicitously called the Peace Corps volunteer, Ryan, who taught English in his school. What followed was a rather strange conversation where I assured Ryan that no, he didn’t know me, but that a kind gentleman had fed me breakfast and that I was looking for Emilia, the short Swede with red hair and two horses. He’d met her the previous week at the crown café he said, but hadn’t seen her since. I had a lead. I would go to the crown café. I sat in their ger for a couple more hours, being fed cookies and candies, and watching top 20 women’s videos on Mongolian mtv, and talking a bit with Brown Hat’s wife. Around noon when it became apparent that calling wasn’t going to work, I set out to wander around the town hoping to run into Emilia. I brought Doctor Zhivago, but at The Wife’s insistence, left my backpack in their ger because it was too heavy to carry around. After making a couple circuits of Kharkhorin’s economic center, which consisted of three streets, I settled down to wait in front of the crown café, the principle backpacker hangout. I spent the day there, reading Doctor Zhivago and asking about Emilia whenever someone showed up. Almost everybody had met her at some point, and I learned that she’d set off approximately a week earlier with a French guy. Towards afternoon some Czechs pulled up, and expressed their hope that she hadn’t gone to Testserleg, which they had just been through, but very quickly because it was quarantined with the plague.

They still have the plague fairly regularly in Mongolia apparently, usually around this time of year since it’s spread my marmots during marmot hunting season, which is apparently now. I guess someone in Teterleg ate some marmot at his or her grandmother’s house, but that could just be rumor. In any case, no one could go into or out of Tetserleg, and those passing through were given a receipt at one side of town with their time of entry, and had to book it to the checkpoint at the other end in order to be let out of the quarantined zone. This is fairly ridiculous in 2006

I didn’t think Emilia was at Tetserleg, at least not according to the polish guys who had been some of the last westerners to see her. They were shaky on the details, but thought she was heading north to some waterfall, in a direction quite away from Tetserleg. On the other hand, word had it that the French guy didn’t know how to ride a horse. Perhaps he’d fallen off and broken his leg? I sat and brooded.

Through the afternoon I checked back regularly on the ger where my backpack was interned, but my saviors of the morning had left apparently, locking the door. When by 8:30 or so they still weren’t back I sat down for some dinner at the crown café, well spent with a couple of crazy Québécois biking across Mongolia, and afterwards asked the proprietor if she would please tell me how to say, when will they be back? And, my backpack in locked in that ger. Armed with these key phrases I set off to find somebody who had a spare key. Luckily I found some people who’d seen me sitting in the ger that morning, and they took me off on a search all around town, including at stop at the house where a 17-year-old girl who spoke some English lived. She didn’t have a key, but they thought we should get married anyway. I guess I should take it as a complement since I obviously couldn’t even keep track of my stuff. The first thing she said after introductions was, they have gone to France. I’ll admit this practically floored me. Of all the places to go. But no, they were going, but they hadn’t left yet, they were just gone for the night. I breathed again. We never ended up finding a key, but did spend a lot of time walking through the narrow streets of the residential districts, somewhere I hadn’t been. Dogs barked a lot, Mongolian dogs are generally a pretty nasty breed, and nearly everyone has one. When strange and scary dogs barked or, worse still, hurdled toward us and the trusty mahx, possibly the mellowest German Shepard I have ever met, my betrothed would let out a small scream and clutch my arm. I don’t particularly like barking dogs either, but I did what one does and remained confident and kept my back straight.

I slept the night in the ger that the Québécois had rented for the night, out back of the crown café, finally going back after a fruitless search, and in the morning, following a large breakfast of bread and butter, jam and eggs, I set off again in search of my backpack. This time they were home, and after more thanks and some embarrassed laughing, I took my pack and hightailed it out of there. Perhaps this was ungrateful, but I was just happy to have my earthly possessions back and didn’t want to loose them again.

After a quick tour of the monastery a kilometer or two out side of town, I went back to my post outside the crown café, and about 3 o clock or so, just after the revolution had brought all the characters together for the second time, Emilia showed up, covered with dust and grinning. There were no horses in sight; they had been left at a friends place more than 100 km away. They delay was due to the ridiculousness of getting rides in Mongolia. But it was good. We had beers to celebrate. I had been waiting in the right place.

We set off for a nearby valley later that evening, taking some gear and some food, with general plans to hang out and maybe explore a bit but generally just relax and catch up on everything since may. We hadn’t gone more than 5 kilometers though, before some people at a riverside party called us over to sing and drink mare’s milk. This was more like it, the real Mongolian Experience, even if they did keep foisting bowls of milk on us, more that necessary by far. Everybody did some singing, and I put together a rendition of Row Row Row Your Boat as a round. It worked out pretty well and I think everybody had fun. No longer was I Martin, or even Moxie though; one look at the glasses, and Harry Potter was my new name. For some reason, every Asian thinks I look like Harry Potter. It’s just old hat by this point, though I personally don’t see the resemblance. I mean, I have square glasses for god’s sake.

The next day was about as lazy as they come. Some four legged beast had stolen our bread, so we walked back into town for some more supplies, and ended up sitting a good part of the afternoon by the road, enjoying the warmth and having a beer with some German cyclists. It had gone from bone cold to hot hot hot in the past three days, and everybody appreciated it. This was more the Mongolia I remembered. We went back and moved camp a kilometer at most across the river to a grove of trees which afforded a wind break and lots of fire wood, made dinner and went for an early bed, tuckered out from all the sitting around.

The next, we explored the valley though we found nothing particularly of interest, including the spectacularly boring tourists we found camping a ways up, who didn’t even offer us a glass of water or milk. This really, was why we didn’t like them. It was hot and we were thirsty. After heading back to camp for a swim in the river and a nap on the bank, we sat down to make dinner, and almost immediately were set upon by a group of 12 or 15 10th graders, out for a party. They’d lugged an enormous quantity of food and mares milk out, and decided that the other side of our grove was a perfect place to settle. Eventually we went over and made friends by sharing vodka, and spent the rest of the evening playing with them.

For dinner they made a Mongolian specialty whose name I never quite caught, which involved a 20 gallon steel milk jug full of potatoes, onions, chunks of meat and rocks preheated in the fire. The rocks served to cook everything from the inside as well as the out, searing the outside of the meat as it was boiled in the soup. I was easily the best food I had the whole trip, and it was their first time making it. How many 10th grade classes go out to cook by the river? After dinner there was lots of wrestling, and I’m happy to say I held my own against the tenth graders, beating all but the two guys bigger than myself, all though the last bout ended with what might have been the breaking of my nose. It certainly bled a bit, and wiggled more than it should have, but the following day there was only minimal swelling, so who can say for sure. On careful inspection this morning, I will say that it now seems to point a bit to the right. Perhaps it has always done this though, who can say for sure? They wanted to play the Mongolian version of Rock Paper Scissors, which works the same way except with all fingers, where the index beats the middle, the middle the ring and so on down the line. Not to be one-upped. Emilia and I taught them Bear Ninja Cowboy, acting as cultural ambassadors of the finest degree, if I do say so myself. Around dark, maybe 10 o’clock or so, the kids all picked up and went home, and we went to bed.

In the morning, when it was warm enough to get up without shivering, we broke camp and headed back into town to try to get a ride back to UB, since I was hoping to leave on a train the next day. This time the day spent waiting was much more enjoyable, sitting in front of the crown café, eating pine nuts and generally doing some more relaxing. Mongolians eat pine nuts in enormous quantities which is harder than it sounds since the shells have to be cracked without breaking the inner nut, or there’s no getting it out. It basically serves to provide entertainment during all the interminable waiting. So Emilia and I ate pine nuts all afternoon, and Ryan the Peace Corps volunteer stopped by to chat. He seemed glad that I’d found Emilia, and shared some of his Peace Corps stories, most of which involved far too much drinking at the behest of his Mongolian hosts. It’s a hard country on the body in general, dropping to –30 degrees consistently in the wintertime, with nothing to eat but mutton and noodles, pickled carrots and the occasional potatoes. And vodka of course. He said he’d gained 12 pounds over the last 15 months, though I still wouldn’t have guess he was more than 120. Still, Mongolia wouldn’t be my first choice if I ever joined the Peace Corps, but then again, that’s not really the point I guess.

Our van picked us up at 5:30, only an hour and a half after they said we were leaving, and only drove around for 2 and a half hours before heading out of town. Not only that, but it was impossibly empty, only holding 13 people when we left, which must be a record of some sort. In addition, instead of an unkillable Russian army van, it was a Hyundai, which had the advantage of bench seats instead of individual ones, which get uncomfortable when one has to sit over the gap. It seemed to good to be true, and, as is often the case, it was.

Maybe 45 minutes out of Kharkhorin the van broke down, and after about an hour of messing, the men upfront push-started it, and turned around. They didn’t head back to town, but to a very closed looking store maybe 10 minutes away with a hill in front of it. They parked on the hill, and went back to trying to fix the van. I’d decided it was an alternator problem, based on the fact that the overhead lights dimmed every time they turned the key, and that when we had driven, they’d done so with the lights off. Knowing that we had a broken alternator didn’t really make me feel any better about the situation, though I did get to bask in the glow of knowing symptoms of alternator trouble, a very manly thing to know if I do say so myself. We spent at least three hours on that hill, going to sleep and waking up again because there really wasn’t anything else to do. The other passengers seemed not to even notice, and certainly weren’t complaining, so we followed their example and tried to ignore the fact that it was 2 in the morning, it was cold, and our driver and his friends were trying to fix the alternator with scotch tape.

They gave up finally, and we started limping back to town, driving with our headlights off, at a maximum of 20 km and hour, to be met at 3:30 by another van, into which everybody sleepily transferred, and in which we roared off towards UB with headlights and everything. We got there at noon. Call me a commie but I swear that the privatization of transportation isn’t doing Mongolia any favors.

The afternoon was spent happily buying tickets, showering, checking email and heading off the black market to spent my last tugrug on sheepskins from which I hope to make a cunning and warm vest. I’m not sure about the legality of such things from the customs point of view, but I’m prepared not to make a big issue of it, hoping that when I get back to the states I might be able to do a good impression of the Man With No Name. That’s really what everybody is going for, after all. We had a triumphant dinner of Thai food at exorbitant prices and a stop at the grocery store for train essentials and then with the slamming of a car door I headed off, back to china.

I took a train the 12 hours to the Mongolian border, and then spent the entirety of the next day waiting in lines trying to cross it. Mongolian train stewardesses aren’t nearly as friendly as Chinese ones, and not only made me pay for my sheets, but woke me up to take them away in the morning. But I got back at them alright by stealing the plastic bag they came in, which, if I manage to hold on to it, will someday grace a wall in the Connelly abode. Unlike the trip up I was in a full berth, but my companions were Chinese construction workers, heading back to the border to get new visas, so the conversation was good and there were no misunderstandings.

The day of lines was fairly hellish, though maybe just really boring, as it took the border crossing theme stretched it for a good six hours, first waiting in lines to cross a checkpoint in a van, and then the Mongolian customs, back to the van to wait to cross no mans land, and then to the Chinese side, where they made us pay for our entry cards. While 75 cents is not a particularly exorbitant price, it still seemed rather excessive to pay for the privilege of standing in line and then getting laughed at because of my passport picture. Sometimes it just works out that way I guess.

I hung around the long distance bus station, got some noodles with a girl who’d just come from driving from England to Mongolia as part of the Great Mongol Rally and then got on a night bus around 3:30. The bus took just over twelve hours, spitting me out sans notebook just after four in the morning this past Friday. Which, though abrupt, seems like a good place to end this particular story. I'll get some pictures up soon, I promise.