Two Thumbs Up

In case you couldn't tell from the previous posts, Mongolia is a pretty cool place, not to mention insanely gorgeous. I wholeheartedly recommend it! Hopefully someday we'll come back and spend a month traveling around the countryside, staying in ger camps and eating lots of fermented mare's milk (well, maybe we can skip that part). On that note, here are a few more pictures from our trip.

Nothing like a radiator to keep the ger from blowing away.

A little Illini pride (this caption was Joel's idea, btw).

A touch of Soviet class in UB.

So long, Mongolia.

People of Five Animals

Animals play a major part in traditional Mongolian life, so much so that Mongolians call themselves the people of five animals: cows (and yaks), goats, sheep, horses, and camels.

Seven to 10 goats are worth 5 to 7 sheep (but in spite of their inequality, apparently they can still hang out together when grazing).

Five to 7 sheep are worth 1 horse.

And 1.5 horses are worth 1 camel.

Things to Do in UB

After we got back from our adventure with gers and horses and such, we spent the rest of our trip in Ulaan Baatar. It only has ~600,000 residents, but when your entire country only has about 2 million, that's a pretty good proportion. For a city of its size, it has surprisingly decent restaurants, not to mention museums, monasteries, and shopping.

Let's start with the museums. We went to the natural history museum, the national museum, and the museum of political persecution. They were all rather dusty, but the contents were still impressive.

For example, did you know that Mongolia is a hotbed of dinosaur fossils? Several of said fossils are in the natural history museum, including a neat one of a velociraptor and protocerotops fighting to the death (scientists think that a sand dune collapsed on top of them and killed them in the midst of mortal combat). There's also a 9-foot-tall skeleton of a tarbosaurus, which looks a lot like a tyrannosaurus rex, as far as I can tell anyway.

Tarbosaurus!

At the National Museum of Mongolian History, we got to see some armor from the 12th century. And at the Memorial Museum for Victims of Political Persecution, which is dedicated to all the crappy stuff the communists did in the 1930s, we got to see a bunch of skulls with bullet holes in them. Seriously though, in spite of the peeling paint outside and the middle-school-history-fair feel of some of the displays, it was chilling.

I'm getting the sense that communism was a very, very bad thing for a whole lot of people.

Speaking of communism, UB is pretty much a Soviet creation--since Mongolians are traditionally nomadic, there weren't really any cities when they switched to communism. Adding to the Soviet feeling is the fact that they now use the Russian alphabet (they used to use a really pretty script that's somewhat reminiscent of Arabic, but they switched to the Russian alphabet to improve literacy rates, which were around 2% at the beginning of the 1900s). Anyway, UB even has its own communist-style square featuring a statue of Chinggis Khaan (Ghengis Khan) as well as a statue of Damdin Sukhbaatar, who declared Mongolia's independence from the Chinese in 1921.

Sukhbaatar Square.

Moving on to the monasteries...actually, most of the monasteries were destroyed by the communists (are you sensing a theme here?), but there's a pretty impressive one that's been restored--the Gandan Khiid.

Inside is a giant gold Buddha--no pictures allowed, sorry!

We also went to the Winter Palace of the Bogd Kaahn, the palace where Mongolia's last king lived. Construction was completed in 1903, and it somehow managed to avoid being destroyed by the Russians (alas, the Summer Palace was not so lucky). It includes a ger that's covered in the pelts of 150 snow leopards, as well as a bunch of crazy stuffed animals. Both the Gandan Khiid and Winter Palace look very Chinese, which made sense when we found out that China invaded in the 1700s. The Manchurians weren't the greatest overlords, and there's still a lot of antipathy toward China.

One of the monasteries at the Winter Palace.

Enough of the monasteries. Now it's time for the good stuff--the shopping. Mongolia has the best souvenir shopping out of all the places we've been to this year. It has lots of great, inexpensive art, as well as cashmere, furs, and other goodies. In addition to the state department store, we went to the Black Market, or Naran Tuul, which doesn't have a lot of souvenirs, but it does have a lot of clothes. I bought some cozy shearling boots for mucking around in during those cold Iowa winters.

Gateway to heaven? Naran Tuul.

We also celebrated our 5-year anniversary during the trip. Boy, does that make me feel old! We just did some sightseeing and then ate dinner at an outstanding Indian restaurant. It was just a little better than last year, when we had to sneak away from work to grab a kebab and Starbucks (ha!).

Self-portrait outside the Gandan Khiid. Awww.

And that, my friends, concludes our tour of UB. Stay tuned for a few more random thoughts on Mongolia, and then we'll get back to the smoggy but comforting environs of Beijing (bet you can't wait!).

Tasgany Ovoo

Ovoos are large piles of rocks that are usually found at mountain passes. The rocks are offerings for local spirits--when you see one, you're supposed to walk around it three times clockwise, toss an offering on the pile, and make a wish.

Love the horse's skull!

We didn't visit any mountain passes, but we did walk up Elephant Hill on the edge of UB to see Tasgany Ovoo. I wished for a safe and fairly painless trip back to Beijing since we only had train tickets to the border and didn't know how we would get back to Beijing from there--and I got my wish!

Making a wish.

Sleeping in a Ger

What really made our visit to Terelj special was spending the night in a ger, also known as a yurt. Gers are the round felt tents that Mongolia is famous for, although they're more like a portable room than a tent. We stayed in a ger next to that of the family that hosted us. It was a little weird having the whole thing to ourselves when the entire family was crammed into the other one (we counted at least 4 kids), but hosting tourists is a business for them, after all, so I didn't feel too bad.

We stayed in the ger with the yellow door.

It was a bit like camping in a cozy circular cabin. Beds lined the walls, and there was a small wood stove in the middle. It got pretty cold at night, but with the stove and warm blankets we were OK. We did wake up a couple of times in the night when the horses were screaming and the dogs were barking (at some sort of wild animal, I suppose--I just put my head under the covers and pretended they were just having some sort of party).

Early morning in the ger.

There wasn't any running water, which we expected, so we were happy to get back to UB and a nice hot shower. What we didn't expect, though, was satellite TV! Several gers in the area had satellite dishes, including the family we stayed with, and they made ample use of them.

Mongolian soap operas, anyone?

True nomads don't have electricity, but most of the Mongolians who live in the park are only seminomadic--they either stay there year round or during the spring, summer, and fall instead of moving around all year. (It's estimated that of 2.7 million Mongolians, about 25 percent are truly nomadic, 25 percent are seminomadic, and 50 percent live in cities and towns).

Mongolia isn't known for its exquisite cuisine, but at least it's hearty. They used to look down on the Chinese for eating vegetables, because vegetables are for animals--they subsisted on dairy and meat. Today they also eat rice and noodles. It was pretty much dairy overload the entire time. I love dairy almost as much as dessert (which is its own food group, right?), but it was almost too much even for me.

Breakfast--tea, cheese, bread and jam, and rice with milk.

With every meal, we had tea (which was more like salty milk with just a splash of tea), and for breakfast we also had some sort of cheese made from mare's milk. It was surprisingly tasty--very creamy and mild. Still, it just felt wrong to eat any kind of food product from horses! Luckily we didn't have to eat any horse meat--just mutton, mutton, and more mutton. And when we got back to UB, we ate lots of pizza and spaghetti to make up for it.

Terelj

Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country in the world, and the main reason people visit is to experience one of the few remaining unspoiled landscapes in Asia. Historically, Mongolians are nomads, and 50 percent are still nomads today. That means there's not a lot of infrastructure or cities and a whole lot of beautiful scenery. Most tourists rent 4x4s and travel around the countryside, but we were short on time and money, so we did a short stay at Terelj National Park, about 80 km outside of Ulaan Baatar. Everything was arranged by our guesthouse in UB, so we didn't have to worry about a thing.

Terelj National Park.

Mongolia is famous for its horses, of course, and we had the chance to ride them during our stay. They're short, almost like ponies (although you're not supposed to call them that because Mongolians will get offended), which was an advantage for Ghengis Khan and his hordes--they could easily swing on and off the horses. The horses can endure the harsh Mongolian winters and provide transportation and milk. It was especially fun watching the Mongolian kids riding all over the park. They're amazing riders--and what an amazing place to grow up in!

My little pony horse.

Horses in the park.

We also hiked to this small temple. Buddhism has been around for ages, but most temples and monasteries were destroyed by the Communists. I'm not sure if this is an old temple or a new one, because it wasn't in the guidebook, but it made for a nice destination.

Monastery/temple/something like that.

We were expecting vast grasslands when we signed up for the trip, but the terrain is quite diverse in Mongolia--there are also mountains and lakes, as well as the Gobi in the south. Terelj is famous for its rock formations, and our camp had a nice view of Turtle Rock.

Turtle Rock.

What really made the trip was the fact that we got to stay in a ger camp with a Mongolian family and witness the nomadic lifestyle. The people we stayed with aren't true nomads--they pretty much stay in the same place--but they live in a ger and depend on their livestock (as well as tourists like us). Next time I'll write about what it's like to sleep in a ger. It's more comfortable than you might think!

The Trans-Mongolian Railway

I was wrong about taking the Trans-Siberian--we went on the Trans-Mongolian, which originates in Ulaan Bataar instead of Moscow. The trains are similar though and the route of course is the same. Anyway, travel is so busy in July and August that we couldn't get tickets directly back to Beijing. We ended up taking a local train to the Chinese border town of Erlian and then a sleeper bus to Beijing.

The local train provided some food...which we obviously didn't eat!

The local train left at 8 p.m. and arrived in Erlian at 9 a.m. or so. We slept through the steppes, but we were able to get some photos of the Gobi at sunrise. For the most part, the Gobi in Mongolia has more scrub than sand dunes, but it's still pretty dusty. There wasn't any air conditioning on this train, so the windows were down. The temperature was comfortable, but you can imagine what the train was like in the morning! It got so bad that eventually we closed the window in our cabin.

Sunrise over the Gobi.

Note the tail of the train and all the dust it kicks up!

After going through immigration and customs in Erlian, we headed straight to the bus station and got tickets for a bus leaving at 3 p.m., so we only had 4 hours to kill. One of my least favorite parts of budget traveling is killing time while waiting for the transportation of the next leg of the trip! Luckily, I had my laptop with me, so we watched The Painted Veil, a movie based on a book by W. Somerset Maugham and starring Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. It was set in 1920s China in an area that's really similar to Yangshuo, so that was kind of fun. Although it's a bit of a downer, it's still a good movie and I definitely recommend it.

Right-hand aisle of the sleeper bus.

Sleeper buses are better than regular buses, but in China they're quite cramped. There are three rows of beds, and I found the bed to be a bit short (and I'm not too tall myself)--poor Joel! We had no idea what time we would arrive in Beijing, but we expected it would be sometime in the morning. Since we were so uncomfortable, we were pleasantly surprised to arrive at 3:30 a.m. After a quick shower to wash the Gobi out of my hair, it was off to bed. Total travel time: 31 hours--the same as the Trans-Mongolian, but it felt twice as long.

Ulaan Baatar

We finally made it! The train from Beijing was much nicer than the typical Chinese train--I believe it's actually part of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which would explain why it's nicer (it's not Chinese). We had our own berth with two other people and a nice big window for checking out the Gobi Desert and the steppes (which are awesome, by the way). It was about 31 hours in all, though, so we were happy to get off--no matter how nice the train is, that's a long ride!

Tomorrow we're going to Terelj National Park and staying in a ger camp with a Mongolian family. Hiking and horses and yak yogurt will be involved, and that's about all I know. We're only staying for one night, and then it's back to Ulaan Baatar for more sightseeing (this is a shorter trip than the last--we leave for China on Monday). I'll try to post again when we get back from the park.