#outer mongolia

It took me a while (…) but I’m finally getting into Nick Middleton’s Extremes along the Silk Road. I’m kicking myself for having waited so long, as the book is turning out to be a lot of fun, and filled with information and nicely-observed detail. Middleton’s a good writer – to the point and amusing, very British in his approach to the idea of crossing the Gobi Desert as part of his exploration…

A 13-year-old eagle huntress in Mongolia

7510 km (Beijing Main Station, Beijing, China) 8350 km (Erenhot Station, Erenhot, inner Mongolia, China) 8360 km (Zamyn-Üüd Train Station, Zamyn-Üüd, Mongolia) 9070 km (Ulaan Bataar Railway Station, Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia)

Although I’d been on the trains at this point for over 45 days and 7,500 km, plus lengthy side excursions, it was in leaving Beijing that the longest journey really begins. Here I joined the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which ultimately connects the Chinese capital to Moscow via Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia. I was also finally joined by oscarneill, who will travel with me across Russia to St Petersburg!

When I was young there was a certain group of places that carried an elevated mystique, borne in exotic names that appeared in stories, rhymes, games, or in my dad’s giant hardback Times atlas. Kuala Lumpur, Timbuktu, Old Peking, Transylvania, Tokyo, Lapland, the Sahara Desert, Mandalay, Jakarta… As I slowly visit some of these they become real, and ‘Outer’ Mongolia was surely the most unbelievable. 

1.3 million people live here on the edge of the Gobi Desert, about 45% of the total population of Mongolia. Much of the city centre’s buildings are 1950′s soviet concrete apartment blocks in serious disrepair. Hundreds of thousands of people live in huge ger quarters that surround the city, and fill the hillsides to the north of town. Have a look on Google Maps. There are a great many permanent houses, businesses, shops and temples as well as the tent settlements, and this is a place I would love to revisit. Wandering there you can really feel enveloped in the vastness of the settlement around you. 

Ulaan Bataar is hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and always dry. It is so dry as to often have no snow even at -40°C. At this time of year (late spring) the sun sets slowly and darkness doesn’t fall until almost 10pm. This confused me badly after a month in southeast asia, and left me feeling something like jet lag. Mongolian people are so helpful, friendly and beautiful! Best was the feeling that the people we passed on the street couldn’t care less about a couple of lost tourists, as they hurriedly get on with their own business. This was so welcome after the constant plucking attention in Vietnam and China.

The train took us across vast expanses of the Gobi and the steppe, after leaving the more mountainous north China, straight through the Great Wall. Another extended late night border crossing, where the trains are modified for the different rail gauge in Mongolia/Russia. Change some money, adjust the watch, keep moving. Slowly and finally turning west toward home.

These are a few cameraphone photos from this section of the journey. 

Incredible :)

As issued in 1990 by the postal agency in Outer Mongolia, featuring characters from The Jetsons among some of the Glories thereof.

But first, we need to go back a bit. In the spring of 1995, I was finishing up my last months of university. After years of my father constantly asking me, “When are you going to graduate?” I was about to do just that with a degree in English literature. (And for the record, I wasn’t on the six-year plan. I graduated in four years. Even my mother was exasperated by dad’s constant query of when I would finish.) So, what does one do with a degree in literature? Join the Peace Corps, of course! I still remember how excited I was when I returned home one afternoon to find a big, fat envelope from Peace Corps, informing me that I’d been selected to go to Mongolia, and by the way, I needed to be ready to go by the end of June. My mother promptly went out and bought the Lonely Planet edition of Outer Mongolia. She then proceeded to laugh herself sick reading descriptions of food markets and how to buy bread (at that time, the author could not).

After a somewhat frazzled month of procuring long underwear and packing, at long last we flew to Ulan Baatar, the capital city. There we landed, all 13 of us, a few of us sans luggage. We’d barely gotten over jet lag and retrieved all of our missing luggage when we were bundled into vans and taken out to the middle of the countryside to a horse camp. Horses were everywhere. People were everywhere. Mongolians were celebrating Naadam. To this day, one of my clearest memories of Mongolia is looking across an expanse of grass-furred hillsides, seeing a long string of horses and riders across the steppe. The only sky I’ve ever seen that compares to Montana is that of Mongolia, that ethereal blue that goes on for eternity.

Naadam is the largest of the Mongolian festivals, celebrating the three manly games: horse racing, archery, and wrestling. Wrestling is perhaps the crowd favorite, but my heart was with the horse racing, for obvious reasons. I was used to seeing large groups of people on horseback. Regardless of culture, a good rider is still a good rider, a good horse is still a good horse, and the first horse across the line is the winner. Some things don’t require language for understanding.

Mongolian horses are much different than horses I was used to seeing in the US. They are much smaller than Quarter Horses, more akin to Morgans in size. Sturdy, raw-boned but sure-footed, Mongolian horses don’t have the heavy muscling I was used to seeing on horses that perform ranch work. What they didn’t have in muscle, however, they made up for in stamina. They needed that stamina for long days of work out on the steppe, gathering sheep and herding other horses.

In Mongolia, horse races are more similar to what in the US, Canada, South America, Europe, and the Middle East are considered endurance rides, where horses race for much longer distances 25, 50, or even 100 miles in a single day. Mongolian races don’t have the vet checks to test the horse’s soundness and physical health along the way, but horses generally aren’t going as far and they’re carrying lighter weights as the jockeys are children.

We may consider them young to be riding in races, but Mongolian children are demon-good riders. Many carried small quirts and sang to the horses as they rode. I was told that singing encourages the horse to run faster. Jockeys, however, don’t play quite the role that jockeys or riders do elsewhere in the world. Should the child come off, the horse will keep running. In Mongolian horse racing, a riderless horse can win the race.

All the photos for this post were supplied by Enkhmanlai Myagmar, known to me as Manlai. He was the youngest of two brothers of my host family up in Sukhbaatar, which is where I lived. Naadam may celebrate the manly games, but to my thinking, it also celebrates friendship, even almost twenty years later.

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