Leg Room, Carcasses & Paul Simon

As time is running out and my days are limited I’m going to play super-fast catch up here for the past twelve days. Translation: more pictures…fewer words. I last left off from Nowhere, Mongolia having hitched a ride with the Swiss Motorbike Gang…

60 Minutes Mongolia

Wednesday May 19^th: I nearly cried when the boys of With East In Mind rode out of our dingy guesthouse parking lot towards Ulaanbaatar at 8am without me. I was back all alone with a long way to travel and nothing but my thumb to get there, so I walked to the edge of town and set up shop.

Three hours later I landed a ride in the back of a northbound jeep. I never got to the bottom of who exactly the big wig sitting shotgun was, but he was clearly someone of power. He was short, bald, well fed, and did most of the talking. Accompanying him in the back were two aging press agents and one young cameraman from Mongolian TV 7. One of the elder gentlemen could not have looked more like Mike Wallace. I mean the flowing hair, the tan, the sh*t-eating grin. Christ, he was beautiful.

The pieces really came together during a detour to a nearby mountain top for the obligatory Ghenggis Khan vodka break. While milling around I flipped open my camera to pan the scenery. When baldy saw this he rushed over and essentially slapped my camera closed before I could lay a lens on him. With serious suspicion (and broken English) he demanded answers to who I was. After a bit he warmed to the fact I was nothing more than a harmless American tourist and gleefully rubbed a handful of nearby snow in my face. We posed for pictures and downed vodka. God I hope they email me those pics.

Back in the jeep and an hour later the big wig instructed our driver to stop when we passed a nearby monastery. The place was locked down like Fort Knox, but at baldy’s direction the head monk was summoned and we were granted a guided tour. Great experience, call it the fruits of hitch hiking. Upon emerging from the five hundred year old monastery we were greeted by the following:

(Got sandstorm?)

We eventually arrived at Kharkhorin (good luck with that pronunciation) where I found a crash pad, and to my surprise and joy a dozen twenty to thirty year old German archeologists about to celebrate their final night in Mongolia found me. The beer flowed and I accompanied them to a traditional Mongolian BBQ on the banks of a local river where I enjoyed the most barbaric meal of my life and indulged in more than a couple snorts of snuff. But hey, when you’ve hitch hiked all day and you’re standing around a fire on a riverbank in a beautiful secluded valley in central Mongolia having just eaten every piece of meat, fat, muscle, ligament, and cartilage from a goat’s leg, and the local herdsman extends a tiny bottle of snuff towards you…you obviously take a pop or two.

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The Last Leg

May 20^th & 21^st were recovery days. For forty-eight hours I held up inside an adequate hotel, extracted tiny pieces of Gobi dust from the depths of my ears, wrote, and rested. On the 22^nd I stepped over a flat cat, made my way to the local container market, and purchased a lift to Ulaanbaatar. The seven hour journey to Mongolia’s capital city was typical fare. The van was designed for eight yet we squeezed fifteen passengers in. Good times. I did come to two very important conclusions though. First, Mongolians are not shy about sing-alongs during long distance travel. Second, Mongolians enjoy the most beautiful native music of all the Asian countries I’ve visited.

Arriving into capital cities or any major metropolis is always a unique experience, and I’ve found the response usually follows one of two tracks. Either you’re entering a country via a major city in which case the city becomes your first impression of a nation and its people (e.g. Yangon, Hanoi, Mumbai, Shanghai). The response here is usually one of immediate bewilderment followed shortly thereafter by a strong desire to flee. The other response scenario involves arriving into a city after a long distance haul (e.g. Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Kathmandu, Almaty), in which case the civilized and concrete urban center becomes a welcome oasis of indulgences and comforts (i.e. cheeseburgers, running water, high-speed internet). My arrival into Ulaanbaatar undoubtedly fell into the latter bucket.

Around 9pm, just as the sky was darkening, my van dropped me off at an obscure bus stop on the outskirts of town. I had no map of the city, no sense of direction, and no destination. If I found myself in the same situation back in October I probably would have freaked a bit, but instead I took a breath and got Zen. After struggling to communicate with three sleazy hotel clerks I was finally able to determine the direction of the city center. I hailed a taxi and eventually landed at the city’s pseudo-grand dame hotel: the Khrushchev-era Hotel Ulaanbaatar. After paying through the teeth to use their business center and print out the 20 pages of the Lonely Planet Ulaanbaatar PDF I had sitting in my inbox, I was finally equipped with a map and information. At midnight, with a huge smile on my face, I finally got off the not-so-safe streets and into a comfy dorm room (comfy dorm room – oxymoron?) at the UB Guesthouse. The long overland haul from Novosibirsk was over.

(No Dead Cat Bounce here.)

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UB Sunday Funday

I’ve learned that most tourists loath Ulaanbaatar (‘UB” for short), but this blocky-Soviet jungle is rapidly becoming one of my favorite cities in Asia. It’s far from a typical Asian city, and if not for the large presence of Mongolians on the street you’d think you were somewhere in the west. UB does possess a certain charm, but it radiates more from its bright inhabitants than from its drab architecture. I drank my first real taste of UB on Sunday May 23^rd.

Having traded emails with Markus #1 I met the Swiss Boys in the city’s main square at 1pm sharp on a beautiful and sunny Sunday afternoon. After handshakes and a few laughs we quickly retreated to the nearby Grand Khaan Irish Pub and set in for a long one. By 1:45pm I was staring at a most beautiful image: an American cheeseburger & fries, my first since Southeast Asia.

Like a cartoon runaway snowball our Funday Train gather speed and picked up passengers. With an eccentric collection of expats in tow we migrated to a nearby brew pub where Lady Gaga’s entire videography played on the largest plasma TV I’ve ever seen. Am I in Mongolia or California? The day’s crawl was a grand one: brew pub to Korean restaurant to Irish pub to local expat hangout Strings, where a tall American shocked the local crowd by dancing around a bottle of Ghenggis Khan larger placed on the floor. Great times.

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An Evening with Tony Stark

The evening of Monday May 24^th marked a milestone in my journey; my emergence from the Pop Culture Black Hole Vacuum I’d been living in for four months now since Avatar in Bangkok. For $2.90usd I sat front and center for the 8:50pm showing of Iron Man II. I may end up seeing it again before I leave as I missed the final fifteen minutes with an emergency trip to the bathroom (too much info?).

(Sam Jackson: Best enjoyed subtitled in Mongolian.)

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A: Leg Room, Carcasses & Paul Simon Q: What are five words never before joined in the history of man?

Sitting in UB with almost three weeks to kill before departing Beijing for home I found myself faced with an extra week to kill (not a bad problem to have). Way tired of making decisions for myself I decided to do what 90% of the travelers in UB do, and join a tour. So on the morning of Tuesday May 25^th I put on my tourist hat. For the next six days/five nights I’d be instructed where to sleep, when to eat, and what to look at. Perfect.

My company would include a male driver, a female guide (complete with a 60% mastery of English), a German, a Frenchman, and a Swiss couple. I was a bit worried about unpleasant flashbacks to my thirty-hour Tour de Suffering experience when I stepped into the familiar Russian Furgon van that morning, but the endless legroom suppressed any outburst.

Six days & five nights in a nutshell:

• We traveled nearly 1,500km, only 700km of which were on pavement. If I never drive another dirt road in Mongolia it’ll be too soon.
• I saw somewhere between 100-150 animal carcasses in various stages of decay. With springtime only just beginning to yield the necessary grass to fatten up the endless and skinny herds of cattle, horse, goat, sheep, yak, and camel that grzae the Mongolian steppe, the landscape is literally dotted with the rotting bodies of those not strong enough to make it into summer.
• We slept in four separate authentic gers (pronounced gears) at four different locations throughout central Mongolia. I took over duties of building and maintaining the fire in each one.
• After three days without running water I bathed nude in the still-frozen White Lake.
• We stood together in amazement as the sky was bright enough at 10:15pm to read a book.
• I stood alone in amazement the following morning as the sky was bright enough at 4:35am to read a book.
• Paul Simon’s Graceland and Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken got time on the iPod. I wondered if Little Feat had ever been played in Mongolia before. I’m gonna say no.
• We collectively grew tired of eating animal meat for breakfast.
• After a friendship developed, our driver proudly claimed to know three Americans: George W. Bush, Michael Jackson, and Stephen O’Neil. That’s some pretty money company if you ask me.
• We enjoyed not a single vehicular breakdown.
• I drank nearly ten pots of Mongolian tea: water + milk + salt. Salt?

Our final evening justifies more than a bullet. We spent Saturday May 29^th at the sand dunes of Mongol Els, also known as Small Gobi. Following a great horse ride at the White Lake, the four men expressed great interest in one final ride. So as the sun sank over the nearby sand dunes, as if scripted out of a movie, a lone Mongolian horseman/cowboy rode into our camp driving something like a dozen semi-wild steeds. Four horses were saddled with razor thin traditional Mongolian riding saddles and the five of us set off west. No picture or film could capture the feeling the four of us felt as we whipped our horses into a gallop towards the rolling dunes. The light, not to mention our guide, could not have been more perfect. When we reached the foot of a large dune we dismounted and the cowboy tied our horses together. Then, without warning, he broke into a sprint up the dune face and we all followed after. When at the top he began drawing elaborate horse and camel pictures in the fine sand with his finger. When this was over he proceeded to engage each of us in an impromptu wrestling match. At 4’6” he could have been the strongest sixty year old man in Mongolia.

The view from the top completed every Mongolian fantasy the four of us had, and the looks on our faces said as much. On our return, half a km from camp, the five of us lined our horses up together and in unison broke into a run to the finish line with leather whips cracking and commands of “CHOO! CHOO!” filling the air. After many thanks were exchanged the horseman rode off into the sunset in a cloud of dust. It was surreal and beautiful. It was travel perfection, and we all shared the sentiment.

(4:47am – Looking east)

(4:47am – Looking west)