10 days of landscape

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.