Tales and Foreign Markets

The short version: I’m going to India on Saturday! Two weeks there, where I intend to visit Delhi, Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer and then back to Delhi to pick up my long-ago-booked flight to Bangkok on Sept 17th. That gives me a comfortable amount of time to get ready for my flight back to the UK in the wee hours of the 23rd – and hang out with Kirsten, and go to Chatuchak market one last time, and generally enjoy one of my favourite cities for a few days before it’s back to the rain and the grey and imminent winter. (And a whole lot of people/things I’m looking forward to.)

The (stressed, emo) long version:

So I mentioned how China has been driving me crazy in its spare time, yes? It obviously determined not to let up in my final days.

I got a bus from Xiahe to Lanzhou on Saturday morning, as the internet had told me I could fly from Lanzhou to Chengdu that evening. The internet lied, it turned out. First flight to Chengdu was Monday. I went to the train station and got the same story. I wanted to find out about other flight options, so I hauled my heavy stuff a couple kilometres up the road to the internet cafe, enjoying a newly formed large blister on my heel, and got a computer. I looked for some flights in the coming days. I found one for the next day. When I got back to the ticket office, that flight too was a lie of the internet. No one at the ticket office spoke ample English for me to say “I want to get to Chengdu, can you look up the various options?” Back in the internet cafe, I found that when I clicked through to try to buy the tickets, they vanished like a game of whack-a-mole. (I’d not been trying to buy them earlier because Air China won’t let you book online with a credit card not registered in the country of your booking, so I assumed its affiliates would be equally stupid.) Back in the ticket office, the Monday direct flight was gone, so I got a Tuesday flight.

There’s nothing to do in Lanzhou and no hostels – well, none that admit foreigners – but I got a nice hotel room for 13-14 GBP a night. Expensive for me, but hey, great value, and I did enjoy that room. I went off on a day trip on the Sunday, chilled on the Monday.

On Tuesday I got to Chengdu – I love flights, maan, so fast and easy – and hooked up with the second pair of people I’d been talking to about Tibet, after the first pair abandoned me for a group they met in Chengdu. We had a meeting this morning. Turns out a group of 9 can’t be worked out price-wise, due to needing an extra vehicle, so the other 8 gleefully split into two 4s – apparently people they met the day before are worth honouring more than someone they’ve been speaking to for several days – leaving me unable to go to Tibet.

Today was my last chance to book, really, once you factor in the days it takes to get the permit, the upcoming weekend when nothing can be done, the days waiting for a train, then the 10-day trip itself, then getting from Nepal back to Bangkok. And I can’t go alone for cost reasons. (Believe me, if I could…)

“You know, these things happen for a reason,” one of them said lightly.

Yes, I’m sure there’s a greater force engineering my travel misfortunes, not just bad luck. And, even if there is, this is meant to make me feel better how?

She then told me that I have a “strong attitude” because I was angry-upset at what happened, so she wouldn’t really want to travel with me anyway. (This remark didn’t actually upset me – I’m a terrible person for being a snarky Brit? brb LOLing forever.) I guess someone who’s said how they’ve been trying to organise something for 2 weeks, who’s been let down twice now by people who seemed keen to organise together, should be, what, singing a happy little song at it all falling through? Forgive me, you little twit, but no. (While I didn’t insult her at any point, I did tell her that the above things-happen-for-a-reason remark is incredibly patronising, which prompted her critique on my personality.)

I hopped straight onto the internet to look up how I’d get to Delhi, as the cool thing about Chengdu is it’s the popular traveller gateway to Tibet AND an international airport.

One thing I’ve recently found about China: same-day and next-day flights don’t really exist. This is strange to me.

But Air Asia’s website said they did have a flight tonight to KL, which’d put me in the exciting LCCT for 12 hours til another flight to India, AND Air Asia’s the cheapest option. Hooray! Except you can’t book online if it’s <12 hours til the flight. So I went to the reception desk to see if someone could contact their Chinese call centre - turns out the number on their website is wrong. The guy at reception called the general ticket booking office they use, and was told that if I went to the airport, I'd be able to buy the ticket there (unless it sold out in the meantime).

Well, it didn't sell out, but according to the ticket office at the airport, you can't buy an Air Asia ticket <24 hours before its departure. The incredibly helpful, nice people at the desk (<-- not sarcasm, this time) tried to find me other same-day options, but they all meant spending an extra 200 GBP.

I spent most of the bus back to the city centre in tears.

But I've got flights booked now, leaving late Friday night for KL, hanging around there during Saturday morning, getting on another plane Saturday afternoon to fly to Delhi. It's still the cheapest option - not super-cheap, but hey, it'll get me there faster than pretty much any other option too! - and I get to spend a couple of weeks in India after all, which according to Tori and her mother contains a lot of awesome things. Currently trying not to dwell on the above - it's in the past, while the future is far more fun - or on how I'm not going to Tibet, how I spent ages faffing about getting that expensive visa extension for nothing - with varying success. I wanted to blog about it just this once because while I prefer to record - and focus on - the interesting, enjoyable stuff, I felt like being honest about some of the background shite of travel.

But, to end on an up note, here is an awesome ceiling:

Original Ming-dynasty paintings of the 64 hexagrams used in the I Ching, in the Fu Xi temple of Tianshui, the town I visited on my day-trip out of Lanzhou.

The main kora is easy to follow: prayer wheels on the southern half, an obvious and well-populated path to the northern half. But Lonely Planet mentioned a longer route, walking along a road further west of the main kora’s circle, uphill to a nunnery and turning left along a path up one of the hills surrounding the town.

I found the nunnery – along the main road, a young nun in red robes shook my hand as she passed me – almost empty, besides two young nuns repeatedly prostrating themselves to the side of the closed door. They wear hand protectors when they do this, quite sensibly to avoid slowly skinning their palms, but it makes it look like they’re trying very hard to clean a small patch of floor.

The front of the nunnery’s main building:

From the small compound there’s no path leading “to the left”, as Lonely Planet suggests. I walked around the main building and, behind it, found a sheer wall of rock. So I left the compound and noticed a narrow path continuing uphill to the left, alongside a stinking channel used, evidently, as a toilet, and I saw a nun walking up it. A-ha! I walked up – it didn’t take many steps at ~3,000m elevation before I got out of breath – and before long stood in front of the doorway to someone’s house.

I backtracked. The wider part of the dirt road to the nunnery forked, so I took the left fork instead of the right (which had led to the nunnery). I could see the hill above, but no obvious paths up it. I was walking along a road in the Tibetan part of the town, surrounded by houses, just aiming up and for the town’s end.

Further along this road, it forked, downhill to a woman laying out some kind of plant to dry while her very well-fed cat looked on, grooming; I took the uphill path, and alongside one of the houses I noticed a narrow trail. I followed it. It took me up behind the houses, along the lower curve of a hill, until I looked up and saw a spire-like shape at the hilltop: the promised prayer flags.

There was no one path up the hill. Many narrow trails wound up its side. I took one that led me on a longer way round, away from the prayer flags at first.

Once I got to this part, I stopped seeing plastic bottles, confectionery wrappers and pill packets sporadically discarded among the plants – replaced by white squares of paper, a tangle of white fabric over a rock and tree, and these small pyramid-shapes tucked under jutting rocks:

Then I got to the prayer flags, strung between a pole and a far taller series of wooden shafts, beside the ruins of a hermitage: earth-coloured walls overgrown with what looked exactly like Mongolian stinging nettles. So I refrained climbing over them. Anyway, the prayer flags and the view behind them were thoroughly captivating.

Colours! Bright, bright colours!

And the ground around here was covered in the white squares of paper, like snow.

I walked along the ridge-top away from the prayer flags, passing a cairn covered in white fabric, admiring more views of the town below, until the path – from the prayer flags on there was a single path, walked by no one except me and two Tibetan women – went downhill back into Xiahe.

After a week spent backtracking from Kashgar and trying to find a PSB willing to extend my visa, I decided to go to Xiahe. Somewhere new! Somewhere with a Tibetan monastery and culture, in Gansu province, which requires no permit or tour. A week of the above as well as the various stresses of travelling in China was doing some unpleasant things to my mental state (when you’re writing in your travel journal “I feel like I’m going crazy” instead of “X was awesome”… yeah…), so this town was much-needed.

Admittedly, first impressions weren’t great: a street torn up by roadworks, buildings covered in Chinese, a backdrop not particularly different to what I’ve seen before. It’s not Tibet. Once I got over to the western part of the town, though, I left some of that behind.

My first afternoon I walked the main kora (pilgrim path) encircling Labrang Monastery.

The southern section is prayer wheels, in long and far shorter sections, pleasant shelter from the cold rain. Each wheel is spun, or almost each, just a grab of the handle and getting it into motion, not spinning it around a certain number of times. I spun the wheels for about half of the southern section: some stiff, some recently oiled (that’s the source of the black track running down from its underside), some still spinning from the previous person. I got overtaken a lot, by red-robed monks and by lay women who wore robe-jackets folded down at the waist to make a skirt, exposing long-sleeved modern tops, and often had their very long hair in two braids that joined together at the ends, as I ambled, enjoying the absence of thought. It’s a very mind-emptying task, spinning prayer wheels, and surprisingly physical too.

Wonderfully calming, just what I needed.

Along the way are several temples, as well as this golden chorten (Tibetan for stupa):

The northern section of the kora is a dirt path between monastery and hill. Along the way, many people stopped to press their foreheads against certain – worn shiny-black – stones in the walls.

The woman closest to the wall had just done that and, I think because she noticed me with my camera out, starting laughing (in a friendly way) with her friend. The buildings behind are part of Labrang Monastery, which I visited the following morning. Elsewhere on the kora, a little girl kept running ahead while her grandparents (I assume) walked slower and stopped at the black stones – although once they were going to skip a stone and the girl seemed to be telling them off.

There’s a longer kora, up a hill and past prayer flags. I walked that today (slowly on the upward slopes, given the elevation of almost 3,000m), but I’ll save that for another post.

Labrang Monastery:

It’s pretty! Architecture porn for me, really. I tagged along with a Chinese tour group (they only let you enter in groups) and admired what I saw. Gold roofs, chorten, fabric decorations running along the top of several facades, prayer wheels on the roofs, the simple colours of white, black, reddish. The five fabric colours considered sacred in Mongolia are present here, too, though I don’t know if they all have the same meaning; white is the favourite. As in Mongolian temples, the insides of these are decorated with fabric in these five colours, usually brocaded with gold and hung neatly on the walls like long, thin, bright bricks. Like in this sneaky shot I took of a building’s inside from the outside, as photography is forbidden inside:

Inside another building I saw a display including giant animal horns and lots of tall tea-servers. But, back to those functioning as places of worship, as our group approached one building we saw monks removing their boots and entering, wearing yellow hats like a stylised horse’s neck and trimmed mane, which they then removed inside when they knelt of rows of red cushions. (Labrang monastery is one of the six major Tibetan monasteries of the Gelugpa order, or “Yellow Hat sect”, of Tibetan Buddhism.) Some chanted. Some leaned over and chatted to their neighbour. In side-rooms containing golden statues of various Buddhas, smaller groups of monks chanted and struck gongs.

The monks entering:

Outside the monastery, the main street shows the town’s multi-cultural status, containing Tibetans, Chinese and Hui (Muslim Chinese, not the same as the Muslim Uighurs), but inside I got a sense of the Tibetans managing to retain their culture.

(Both kora show this too. Especially as, on both, I saw no tourists, Chinese or other.)

That said, near the monastery you can buy prayer wheels:

I’ve also tried Tibetan food, all of it at Nomad Restaurant (highly recommended! ):
• Tsampa – floor and butter, tastes like lumpy dirt and looks like it too.
• “Nomad curry” – yak meat, potato and onions in a slightly spicy sauce, served with rice, very tasty.
• Momo – meat-filled dumplings, not wildly different to the Chinese and Mongolian varieties, surprisingly filling.
• Chomdi – rice topped with butter, sugar and [things], and I can’t say the butter-sugar topping worked for me.
• Rice with yoghurt, which works quite nicely. The yoghurt by itself is also tasty, although I declined the giant bowl of sugar placed next to it.
• Uh hur – chaotically shaped bread balls, sweet, fried, served marvellously hot.
• A flat, soft kind of bread stuffed with yak meat and a few scraps of vegetable, fried, quite tasty although greasy.

When I left Nomad Restaurant tonight, they gave me a packet of Tibetan playing cards, presumably because I went there 5 times. =D

It’s been good to regain my sense of travel-fun.

(A note on climate: Xiahe’s altitude-induced mostly cold weather went from “this is an entertaining novelty” to “WANT THAILAND” in under 24 hours. I don’t know what the evening temperature is, but when I go out for dinner, I’m wearing jeans and boots, a two-layered t-shirt, a short-sleeved jumper, my thin Mongolian jacket and a scarf and I’m not what I’d describe as “warm”. Not sweating much is nice, I guess – handy, too, as my hostel’s hot water is “solar-powered”, which translates to “you will never, ever enter the shower at the tiny window(s) of hot water, ever, Alex, so it’s wet-wipe baths for you”. I cannot bear the thought of a near-arctic shower with the air temperature here. Direct sunlight at lunchtime/early afternoon is good enough that I like to duck into the shade, so I do get to thaw each day.)

I came to the west because I wanted to see some bits of the country that don’t necessarily come to mind when most people think of China. This is, of course, partly because the area that’s now Xinjiang province – or the Uighur Autonomous Region – has spent a lot of its history separate from China, and has required “reunification”. (The propaganda in the museums out west is awful.) I also wanted to see something different, after the common threads in SE Asia.

As the Emin Minaret suggests, I certainly got different architecture.

I do love tasty beautiful architecture.

These are tombs in Kashgar: the Tomb of Yusup Has and the Abakh Hoja Tomb. The first is the resting place of Yusup Has, a famous Uighur poet of the 11th century, while the second contains Abakh Hoja, a former ruler of Kashgar, and many members of his family.

A closer look at the mismatched tiles of the Abakh Hoja Tomb:

I spent some time admiring this.

The entrance to the Id Kah Mosque has a quite different colour scheme.

Behind that is a large courtyard with many trees to supply shade (needed in summer), and a second building that’s currently undergoing renovations. On platforms out the front of the second building are red prayer mats.

Islam is very present in the Uighur region, most notably in the mosques and what people are wearing. Not all women wear headscarves, although in general they dress more modestly than the Han Chinese. Some women wear headscarves that don’t really cover their hair, combined with T-shirts and short trousers, which reminded me of Malaysia. Others wear clothes that fully cover the body. In Kashgar the dress code is stricter than in, say, Urumqi or Turpan, and I saw women who’d draped brown fabric completely over their heads. That I found creepy. (A ‘I hate this hiding of women’s bodies’ kind of creepy: you don’t even see the woman’s eyes.) Modified Arabic is the script, although the Uighur language is Turkic; Chinese is on most buildings, at the government’s influence, but Arabic script’s there too and in certain areas pushes the Chinese aside. Lamb is on the menu. Pork is definitely off; I even got a chocolate bar that specifically stated its lack of pig-derived ingredients. Bread, usually unleavened, is on the menu too. Lots and lots of bread. I’m drifting onto a not necessarily Islamic level of influence here, just Arabic and Persian culture coming across the Silk Road. I saw several businesses called Iskandar.

By Kashgar, most Uighurs didn’t look very Chinese. The region is very ethnically mixed – I saw people who looked close to Chinese, but darker, others who looked close to Pakistani, some who’d pass for white-ish British, and plenty in-between. Hair remained dark and never got very curly (except for the Han Chinese with perms), while I only saw two people with light eyes.

Going back to clothing, many of the men wore taqiyah, and these were on sale plentifully in the big market. (Called the Sunday Market, because it’s biggest then, but it’s open every day.) Row of hats!

This market, finally, ditched the Chinese souvenirs I saw from Beijing through to Gansu province: the Mao kitsch, the “old” coins and jade, things on red string, seal stamps, random bits of rock, Mahjongg sets and Chinese-style calligraphic art.

Instead:

Whenever I walked through this bit of the market, I got asked if I wanted to buy some fur. Why yes, I would love to wear an entire fox.

Nuts and dried fruit were very widespread.

I don’t think even this photo captured how this fabric shone.

Other items included Uighur knives (quite attractively decorated in a simple way, cannot even be carried onto an aeroplane in checked luggage according to Lonely PLanet, perhaps because they become sentient at 33,000 feet and hack their way through the plane to the pilot, but the bus and train companies in China are quite happy for me to bring them on board, raising questions about what all those X-ray scanners are for), little lamps that might contain djinn, even more colourful hats, melons, brightly painted saddles, a big bag of saffron, oh and dried starfish and snakes and bits of hedgehog and other critters at the spice stalls too, a lot of them all along a row that smelled wonderful.

Presumably the hedgehog-bits have a medicinal property, presumably you grind to a fine powder before ingesting. I have no idea.

Markets and architecture are some of my favourite things, and help make a place distinct; the people do that too; so does the land, which out here is desert and very barren, more so than the Mongolian Gobi, except for near water where suddenly there’s green. Tall, thin trees dominate. Big crops are grapes, corn, melons, peaches. The buildings and the land are far closer than in eastern China, once you’re away from the modernly developed town centres.

And there are little things that make it clear the Uighur region is a different place, like this donkey and cart of melons.

As said in my last post, I spent a couple of days in Turpan (or Turufan). It’s an old Silk Road stopping point in the world’s third lowest depression – reaches 154m below sea level – and, apparently, it gets hot. I didn’t really notice the heat, what with its delicious lack of humidity, but my guidebook tells me that temperatures as high as 49C have been recorded there. To protect walkers from the sun, some streets are covered with vines. The grape-producing kind. The tasty grape-producing kind – small, sweet green grapes featured in my Turpan diet.

The grape trellises and shiny pavements drop away quickly at the end of Qingnian St, as the non-developed Uighur part of town begins.

Houses the colour of the earth, some with those brightly painted doors. The mosques, too, are bright.

Fields of grapes began appearing, some with people crouched among them, picking or just talking. No signposts said ‘Emin Minaret’ (at least, not in English), so I kept going straight, hoping for the best. Passed geese. Women washing clothes in a roadside stream. People sitting on carpeted beds out the front of their houses. A man leading his donkey, which pulled a cart of cut vines. The road curved and I followed it, and saw the minaret above a field of vines.

This is what it looked like, once I found the compound’s entrance:

(More to the right of the boxy entrance is under renovation.)

The interior didn’t wow me – basic columns supporting the ceiling, floor covered in prayer mats, no people – but that minaret! I love minarets – and mosques as a whole – for their variety across the world. This Malaysian mosque to the blue and white Iznik tiles of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, the Chinese pagoda-style minaret in Xi’an’s Great Mosque to the little Uighur street mosques to this, founded in honour of General Emin Hoja by his son in 1777/8.

Just look at that minaret!

And then I walked back through the town centre in a minor sandstorm.

It appears I haven’t blogged about China at all. Well. Since Beijing and Xi’an – at the latter I saw the terracotta warriors and some tasty markets and walked all the way round the big grey city wall – I’ve been moving almost every day. Xi’an to Lanzhou to Jiayuguan to Dunhuang to Turpan and, later today, to Urumqi. Heading west by train and bus along one of the Silk Roads.

Most of my time is spent on public transport, sleeping – if I don’t manage to sleep on the public transport – and getting out to the various points of interest in/near the town. Travel here is fun and frustrating, interesting and tiring, like all travel, really, but some of the difficulties are more pronounced. The language barrier, oh my. I spend my spare time, after I’ve tracked down a train/bus ticket office and pointed my way to a ticket, watching things on my laptop or seeking supermarket snacks that I can identify. (Some Chinese snacks, I cannot tell if it was an animal, plant or lab invention.) The lack of wifi since Xi’an has just made blogging that little bit harder to fit in.

Some things I’ve seen:

At Jiayuguan, a reconstructed bit of Great Wall and the fort that marked the end of the Wall, the end of China, beyond which lay less civilised peoples. The Wall was made with local materials, so while it’s made of stone near Beijing and surrounded by lush green plants, in the desert it’s made of earth and plants. It’s narrower too. Near Beijing, four or five horses could ride abreast. In the desert, two people can walk together. The reconstructed bit climbs the side of an almost plant-bare hill to two watchtowers, offering a view of a small oasis farm-settlement, bright green amid the sandy landscape, with the more modern town of Jiayuguan on the horizon and far to the south, mountains capped with snow. The fort, containing the Chinese commander’s houses, was nearby. The reconstruction was a bit less tastefully done: regular bricks painted the appropriate colour, as far as I could tell. Oh, China. The Chinese posted here in the past didn’t have a lot to do: stare at the desert, see traders pass through, complete various drills and duties.

The desert out here is even more barren than in Mongolia. On the train from Jiayuguan, I saw land where nothing at all grew. I also saw the islands of green trees and houses and fields with mudbrick shelters at one side, presumably to protect against the prevailing wind.

At Dunhuang, where you can be sitting at the bus station and see, over the wall and a construction site and tall, thin trees, a sand dune like a hill, I got a bus out to the Magao Buddhist grottoes. The caves were built into the cliff in the first millennium and surprised me with their boxiness and how they’re side by side in neat, packed rows, maximising cliff space. The Chinese have built concrete walkways and at first I thought this a bit over-modernising, but originally the walkways were of wood and a wooden facade concealed each cave, protecting its paintings. This wood disintegrated in the time before the caves’ rediscovery by non-locals, exposing the outsides to the sun and the interior to oxygen, which blackened some of the paint. Still, the colours are amazingly bright and a lot of it’s original – statues tended to get replaced in later dynasties, while murals were often left alone. Lots of lotus patterns, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and Apsaras, and some storytelling scenes (lives and deaths of Buddhas). Saw the now-empty Library Cave that got ransacked by Europeans. A few texts were on display in a nearby museum.

At Turpan, I got in a minibus with a group of Chinese tourists who got really annoying by the end of the trip (grabbing my arm and talking at me in Chinese) and I saw several cool things. Uighur villages, containing boxish houses the same sandy colour as the land and, sometimes, bright painted doors, and colourful mosques that have four small pillars at the entrance gate. An old man gave me a tour of his house, with its small rooms and multipurpose raised platforms for sleeping, food prep, lounging around, and a room at the back for the sheep. The women wear headscarves but often bare their forearms and lower legs. The people look almost the same as the Han Chinese. Around their houses are vines, covered in sweet green grapes. I saw more grottoes, their murals almost entirely removed by Europeans, but a multiracial scene of rulers making offerings remains. I saw a karez, one of the underground channels bringing water from the mountains to the town, utterly touristified, the channel lit with changing disco lights and a route that forces you through several souvenir shops selling almost the same stuff I saw in Beijing and Xi’an. Mao memorabilia, “old” coins, jade, seals, boxes, “old” manuscripts. The fabric is different. (This, mind, is not for Western tourists. There are very few of us here. This is for Chinese tourists, whose government builds awful tourist parks around many of the interesting or scenic sites. I rarely see them buying souvenirs, though, besides fruit.) I saw the ruins of Jiaohe, a Chinese garrison city dating from the Han Dynasty, protecting trade interests in these barbarian lands. For some reason the Chinese tourists stopped at a lookout point, while I wandered ahead on paths among old building-corners and walls and monastery-remains.

Today, still in Turpan, I walked through an Uighur part of the town to the Emin Minaret, which is one of the most beautiful minarets I’ve seen. It appeared above the vines, made of sandy brick, wide at the bottom and narrowing to the top, covered in geometric brick-patterns. In, naturally, a small tourist park.

Photos of all this will go up as soon as I get a bit more organised.

Now I’m hungry and want to pop into the bazaar before I get a bus to Urumqi.

I got to Beijing two days ago after 36 exciting hours of train, border-crossing bus and sleeper bus and have already been to the Great Wall and enjoyed the sight of Tienanmen Square lit up with fairy lights at night, but first: Naran Tuul market in Ulaanbaatar.

Women at the gate collected 50 tögrög from everyone entering. My first sight was of clothes stalls – bras, pants, bright t-shirts – and cheap stationery and jewellery. Nothing especially interesting. My guidebook had told me that the covered area contained traditional clothing, so I headed down there and found a row of carpets and a row of deels (a full-length robe/jacket) and jackets.

As shiny as this one row was – with boxes down the middle, combining the roles of seat and storage – I didn’t like anything I saw enough to join the locals in trying things on and buying. I wanted to see more. I walked through the large selection of modern clothes stalls until I reached the pots and crockery and brooms and buckets.

Scattered among them were stalls selling religious paraphernalia.

Nearby I found a row of toilet paper sellers, an area full of bikes and bits of bikes, next to tents and sleeping bags and other camping equipment.

Cool-boxes on wheels moved slowly along the market’s lanes, selling water and fruit drinks.

In the other direction, I found saddles.

I found the little antiques section.

I found giant rolls of felt, orange furniture, rolls of lino flooring, stoves, satellite dishes and solar panels. All you need to assemble a ger. Given the price of buying one – 500,000 to 1,000,000 tögrög, which is 230 to 460 GBP – many urban Mongolians choose to live in a ger rather than an apartment.

I came away with the blue fabric and some little badges from the antiques section. No item of clothing. That I found in the State Department Store’s souvenir shop: an off-white jacket with brown trim and excellent sleeves. It seems to be a modern riff on the older style. Now I need to get to a colder part of China so I can actually wear it! (Beijing = would you like your humidity and thick air pollution on a very warm day or a stinking hot day? I haven’t seen the sky since arriving. Just grey.)

At risk of starting with the obvious: Mongolia is big. Anyone who’s looked at a world map has probably noticed the big chunk of land between China and Russia. I drove through a bit of it, from Ulaanbaatar down to the Gobi and back up via Kharkhorin, and every day I was amazed at the size of the place. It felt so much bigger than anywhere I’ve been, even Australia.

(It’s also nearly impossible to capture by camera. My memories of it are far more vivid than any photo.)

Our small group of 3 other travellers, guide Zola and driver Tseren moved slowly south, away from green grasslands into the more arid lands of the Gobi – where plants still grow, sparser.

We saw quite a lot of those in the Gobi. Having only seen the one-humped variety, I was surprised at the small, floppy humps on these camels. The Mongolians keep camels, horses, goats, sheep, cows and yaks, and all of them blocked the road at various parts of the country. Sometimes a man on a horse kept watch over the animals. Usually, a small number of gers – the nomadic homes made primarily of felt and wood – sat nearby, white dots in the landscape. Right by the road, I often saw buzzards just sitting, waiting – quite handsome birds. Saw marmots, adorable little plague-bearers, and a clicky, buzzy, whirring array of insects.

Every night except one I slept in a ger, ranging from plain for-the-tourist gers to a family’s, full of orange furniture with a Buddhist shrine and family photos.

The first night, when the moon was tiny and no stove chimney kept part of the roof uncovered, the inside was completely dark. I couldn’t even see vague outlines. I hated it. Fortunately, most nights a bit of light seeped in. In the warm Gobi nights, they weren’t too warm; in colder nights, further north, they were comfortable, and cozy when the stove was lit. The beds were hard but I don’t mind that. Most nights I slept very well.

I drank milky tea offered by the families, sipped a tiny bit immediately – one reason for this necessity is to prevent a spirit/ghost drinking the tea – and waited til it cooled down for the rest. Once, I drank the fermented mare’s milk, airag, a traditional Mongolian beverage. It tastes of vomit. So gross. I passed the bowl along. Milk is a major staple of Mongolian diet, along with meat. Zola cooked a lot of Western food for us, but a few times I got the local food: meat dumplings and rice served in milk like soup, meat-stuffed fried flatbreads that tasted like English pie, a flour-and-water carbohydrate that’s chopped up like pasta but tastes like bread and is served with meat. As a modern touch, the second and third of these included some vegetables, in form of carrots, potatoes and onions. In one ger, along with the milky tea, a bowl of yak butter was passed around. Get some on your finger and eat it. Tasted pretty much like regular butter, to me, but my dislike of butter may bias me against its particulars. (“They’re just passing around butter. Why?”) There’s a certain taste to some Mongolian food, the dumplings and the breadish stuff, and while it’s not full of complexity I think I’ll try cooking it sometimes in the UK. Eating dumplings in Ulaabataar makes me think of sitting in a ger, watching a girl prepare them, watching a woman pour milk into the giant metal bowl on the stove used for preparing milk tea, watching a monk chant sutras in Tibetan for a sick baby. The children were generally adorable. I played football – more like rule-flexible penalties – with a group of them at one camp. At another, a tiny boy with surprisingly blonde hair wandered around butt naked but for his little boots.

We spent most of the time in the van, driving sloowly along dirt tracks – a couple hundred kilometres in a day was a long, almost full day’s drive – so time spent with the families, at camps where they didn’t put the tourists in a different area and leave us alone, was small. Other activities included a short camel ride at the base of a 300m sand dune, climbing the sand dune in the evening, a fairly short horse ride (horribly uncomfortable), watching a group of Mongolian men psych themselves up for jumping in the very cold water at the base of a waterfall (even the one wearing a wolf’s anklebone tied around his lower leg – symbolic of courage, Zola said, or a souvenir shop purchase – cried out when his friends splashed him), visiting monasteries mostly destroyed by the communists in 1937, climbing on the remnants of winter’s ice in a narrow mountain canyon where we glimpsed, far off, the silhouette of an ibex against the blue sky, seeing a penis-shaped rock wrapped in the bright blue fabric I love so much and seeing, of course, countless ovoo. When Tseren remembered, he sounded the horn three times on passing one: a modern sign of respect. The older tradition is to circle the ovoo three times and add a stone to the pile.

300m-high sand dune and the gers in front of it:

The weather ranged from hot to British, with one of the temperate areas being the small mountains where we saw the ice: a little haven of greenery and lilac flowers and something herby-smelling. Along the tourist path – foreign and local tourists – to the ice canyon, Mongolians sat with souvenirs.

In the grassier areas of the country, full of wildflowers and a small, herby plant and the Mongolian equivalent of the stinging nettle, the smell on stepping out of the bus was sometimes so, so beautiful. I couldn’t name it, unfortunately.

Not everyone outside Ulaanbaatar is a nomad, moving their gers two or three times a year. Some live in towns/cities: clusters of gers and houses, fenced from each other, with tall wooden poles delivering electricity cables like bare trees. These aren’t impressive places. We usually stopped in them long enough to stock up on extra drinks and chocolate, from shops where you point to what you want on a shelf behind the counter, and fill up on petrol, and then we left.

One of our stops was Kharkhorim, the Mongol Empire’s capital for a while. Today it’s little different to any other countryside town/city. It does, however, contain Erdene Zuu monastery, partly rebuilt recently since it too got destroyed in 1937, and the temples are quite beautiful.

On the inside they contain banners in the 5 sacred colours, giant golden Buddhas, offerings made of gold, offerings made of cake, gongs and prayer wheels. Similar to a prayer wheel, in the Tibetan-style one was three tiers of shelves holding cloth-wrapped sutras that you spin three times. Red-robed monks chanted.

I could go on. One morning, in our ger, two children set up on a little souvenir stall on the orange table: embroideries of camels in the desert, tiny felt gers, hanging decorations made of felt animals and shapes on string (there was a fox at the top of them, so shockingly I bought one). For all that I spent a lot of time sitting in a van, there are stories. The Mongolian euphemism for going to the toilet is “I’m off to watch some horses.” A slightly old, tatty eagle was put on my arm. I still can’t really show you how big this place is. With the exception of Deborah K, you’ll just have to believe me.

Now I have to sort out accommodation for Beijing, as I’m starting my two-day journey there tonight with a night train to the border. I’ll write a market post on the train.

I’ll be back here someday.

Spotted in the supermarket yesterday: