Trip not Vacation

Oh Mongolia.  Where to start?  We came because Mongolia's in a period of transition--the end of Soviet rule (remembered somewhat nostalgically) and the start of a corrupt democracy (decried in all the papers all the time).  Our first night was in Ulaanbataar--the capital--with lots of Soviet architecture--concrete buildings, stars, hammers and sickles, and so on.  Only the banks are truly new and striking.  The hotel was nice--showers were hot which meant a lot by the end of the trip--but I felt like I did when I was in Russia.  The thing had probably been bugged and felt stuck deep in the eighties, Russian-style.  One thing that countinued to crack me up over the course of the trip is that all beds are twins--there are no queen size beds which meant my parents couldn't sleep together.  This frustrated my father, who tried to get a big bed everywhere we went, heh heh heh.

The next day we took off for the Gobi desert and the Three Camel Lodge.  Many Mongolians are nomands who live in flat, round buildings--like a teepee of sorts--that can be transported on the back of a camel when they are rolled up.  We know them as yurts in the U.S., the Mongolians call them gers.  We stayed in gers for the remainder of the trip, of varying niceness.  All of them have some sort of covering for the ground, woven coverings on the walls, and a stove that is lit at night and the morning for heat.  Three Camel lodge was great--they had showers and a full bar and cold beer and good food.  The best beer in Mongolia, in my opinion, is Chenggis Khan (they love Mr. Khan and name everything after him...beer, hotels, vodka, and so on...he united Asia under Mongolia, Kublah was his grandson) but somehow Heinekin also makes its way out to the desert.  Chenggis is like Bud--if it's cold you can drink it without a problem.  Most places we went had fridges but they were almost never plugged in...and then Chenggis tastes like warm Bud.  Eh.  But Three Camel Lodge was great--we went hiking in a valley with soaring rock ledges and an iceflow and we ran down dunes that were four stories high.  That was how we broke the first camera--the sand got in the lens--the second camera had a software error and broke the next day...but we had another camera so we're okay, lots of photos were taken.

Like relaxation in Madagascar (there is none.)

The gobi is a big flat expanse of land with bones scattered throughout--camel legs and twisted horse skeletons and goat heads, all bleached white in the sun.  It's barren but very beautiful, with almost no gers for as far as the eye can see and the biggest sky with the biggest clouds I've ever seen.  The evenings are heaven--desert evenings with a wind that blows so it is the only thing you can hear in your ears--natural white noise that engulfs you and makes you feel calm, completely at ease.

Another day we rode camels to go see dinosaur bones.  Camels are like horses but slower, and they are steered with only one rein, which is connected to a branch that's been driven through their nose.  They were very cool and it was a fun day.

We also visited the first of many families.  My mom brought gifts for the children, crayons and coloring books and balls, and the families always shared food with us.  This was usually some sort of pastry made from sugar, flour, and water, and "milk products".  Ah, milk products.  This is a wide spectrum--there's dried yogurt that tastes like hard sour feta, goat milk which is a little gamey, fermented mare's milk that tastes like sour yogurt plus vodka, vodka made from goat's milk which tastes like vodka plus the water from feta cheese, fermented camel's milk that I refused to try because it was clumpy and because I saw my dad's face after he tried it, sheep cream that tastes more or less like cow cream, and yak butter that tastes like a rich and mild cheese.  Main meals usually consist of some sort of mutton.  Vegetables and fruits are rarely eaten and are hard to digetst for the locals.  It was interesting to give all of these foods a try...though by the end my sibilings and I didn't want to see anything made from goat or sheep for a long time, unless it was some kind of a coat.

Speaking of coats--there's a lot of fur in Mongolia, and it's really cheap, but they didn't have fur coats out beacause it wasn't the winter.  If you go in the winter you could get a great one.

We got a couple flat tires in the desert--more or less par for the course.  (Better than the one car that got three flats all at once after the attempted murder...keep reading....)  The roads are indistinguishable car tracks in the big big desert; I suppose a pile of rocks here and there tells the driver something that he can know after living in the area for a long time, but I would be terribly lost if I were driving, especially because everything is at least two hours away and more often four or five.  This means it's normal to drive two hours, hike for one hour, then drive two hours back to the camp.  Multiply that by twelve days and your vacation becomes largely a journey of journies--and while life is about the journey and not the destination and so on, man, I missed the 101 and 280 more than once.

So then we went back to UB and then we had some more adventures when we tried to go to western Mongolia.  I wrote this next part in bits and pieces while I was in Mongolia so it:s choppy but it should give you a feel for the, um, emotional state I was in:

Bone-jarring, teeth-griding, body-wracking roads are a way of life in Mongolia; it will take you five hours to travel 100 miles and by the end you are poured over with dust--in you hair and your luggage and your mouth.  This was a lesson well-learned when Mongolian Airlines cancelled its flight to Uglii because they didn't have enough planes.  Day before we learned that our trip to Western Mongolia, the mountainous region famed for its eagle hunters (like U.S. falconry, but with eagles instead) would require not a three hour flight, but a two hour flight and five hour drive.  Essential to understanding the demands of those five hours is picturing a Russian-made VW bus filled with the five of us, our driver, our guide, and our baggage...no air conditioning, windows that flop shut at any decent speed, a center of gravity that allows the car to lean far over any steep road edge, and in our case, badly tinted windows that made the whole thing strangely dark even at the height of the day.  Reading is next to impossible because the constant bouncing (no paved roads...no flat roads...no road signs...just piles of rocks in the middle of the vast expanse) moves your eyes about a half an inch up or down every three seconds, giving you the distinct pleasure of reading the same paragraph in Time Magazine three times.  I would have a more positive outlook if it weren't for two scary incidents on the road, and about twenty hours in the car over the course of four days...while also forgoing hot showers, any control over our meals, and a bed to sleep in (sleeping bags baby).  Call me crazy, but it was a pretty strenous time.  Before I tell my scary stories, a quick note: we passed time deciding which of our friends could have made the trip without a total breakdown.  The list was short--you can ask me if you were on it but I'll probably lie to you if you do.

The areas we were in bordered Khazakstan--great homeland of Borat.  The population is eighty percent Kazhak and people speak Kazkak...so this was my opportunity to vindicate the Kazhak people from Sasha Barron Cohen's jaundiced humor.  After the fact, I can see where he gets it...and there are things both better and worse than Borat would lead you to believe.  About five minutes after we were crammed into the car, bouncing along the streets Hovdt--the province center we were flying into and driving out of, consisting of muddy brown one story buildings and gers, smelling like dust, burning trash, and cow dung--a purple Jetta-looking Russian car barrelled by us on our left, cut in front of us with two feet to spare, and fishtailed wildly five or six times before coming to a rubber-burning stop in the middle of the road.  The driver of the car wouldn't get out--he waved our driver to come out and see him and there was no way we could pass his car, which blocked the street both ways.  Turns out the guy was drunk--totally, completely wasted at nine in the morning.  He was a fat, red faced Mongolian from a provice different than our driver's, and he looked like he wanted to fight.  Finally he was pacified, and so we continued on, looking for a gas station.  (There is no model of efficiency in Mongolia--your driver will always fill up gas after you get in the car, not before, and you have to go to all four "gas stations" to find one open, operational, or containing gas.)  The whole thing wound me up--not only was the guy drunk and on the road, but none of us had seatbelts, none of the glass in the car is tempered, and neither our driver or guide seemed to think it was terribly dangerous that a belligerent drunkard almost slammed into us at high speed only minutes before.  Then I notice, after we get gas, that this guy is following us.  He ends up driving directly toward us--I see a head on collision coming--stops at the last minute, and demands money for vodka.  No way in hell.  Then--and this is something that happens in the other story too--after threats and yelling and fights, he shakes hands with our driver and calls it buddy buddy.  Weird.  I secretly hoped he would flip his car and die somewhere down the line, before he killed someone else.

We got to the camp five hours later.  I'll return to that in a second, but I want to fast foward three days to our drive back.  This time a Khazak man was driving us, an older man who was probably in his sixties, who had a wife we had met and five kids.  I fell asleep during the ride, one of those great head-banging-against-the-window-but-it's-better-than-staying-awake-the-car-ride-is-so-long moments, when we pulled off the road to meet two other vans--groups of tourists we knew--because one of them had a flat.  With them was another Khazak's truck--a big thing with a horse in the back and, it turns out. a penchant for breaking down.  Apparently we had passed that truck sometime earlier and not stopped to help because we were tourists and that's not common practice.  The other vans had stopped, and now, with all three vans and the truck in the same place, pulled over, there was trouble brewing.  The truck divers--there were two, plus a two or three kids, were dangerous, drunken louts.  My Mother woke me up, saying "A fight, James!"

The truck drivers were upset that our van didn:t stop to help them originally--which is something Mongolians and Khazaks might do for each other day to day, but when drivers have tourists, they don:t stop.  This ticked off the truck driver--um, I guess I should say threw him into an uncontrollable drunken rage--and when I woke up I saw him punch our driver in the face twice, chase him, and kick him and hit him a couple more times.  The attacker was maybe 27--not a fair fight against a frail sisxty year old guy.  Most bothersome was that the other two drivers of the tourist vans didn:t step in and try to stop the fight.  I didn:t get out of the car because 1. my siblings were in the car and they were my priority, 2. I didn:t know why the fight was happening and I don:t speak Mongolian, and 3. because there were others on the ground already.  Well, somehow our driver got away from this guy and started cleaning the blood off his face while the attacker sulkeda ways away, but I guess he wasn:t satisfied, so he picked up a rock, ran back toward our driver, and tried to smash his skull in.  I learned later that both he and his drunken buddy were making death threats the whole time and that:s why no one was doing anything (bad excuse on their part). It also explains why I could see them making throat slitting motions during the whole ordeal. Well, long story short, we would have had a dead driver if the women in the group hadn:t interceeded, somehow talked the attacker out of his attack mid-attack as the men (finally) restrained him. The guy tried to attack our driver a couple more times, finally cooled down, and--are you kidding me--offered our driver a couple bucks and a handshake and an entreaty to be friends. We got out of there--our driver had to see a doctor when we finished the last three hours of that wrenching drive because his kidneys were hurting him and it gave me great pleasure to pass the truck again, broken down with no one to help. It was attempted murder, and on impulse, and it scared me and it put a damper on the next couple days, seeing as we were traveling on frayed nerves as it was.

This is what I think: the life in the Mongolian countryside is so hard that people become accustomed to manual labor and death. To handle the sheep you grab them by the horns and rope them up. Horses die, camels die, goats die. You live and die by your hands and life is simple and pure and that is idealyic, ｂｕｔ　it also means that there is less of a social filter between emotion and action. Anger leads to fighting, and alcohol more often than not leads to anger. I think all of this is helped along by the remoteness of the area because there are no police for hours and the police that are around have little power or are corrupt. And that has also led me to another realization--I don:t like being in areas where there is not some decent rule of law. My parents were not irresponsible to take us to Mongolia--ｂｕｔ　now that I:ve experienced a freak accident--this is the first time in thirty years something like this has happened to our driver (though drunk driving seems more ｃｏｍｍｏｎ than our guides let on)--I want the insurance of a solid cop.

I:m afraid that these stories will overshadow the good in Mongolia, which is ample. At the same time, in many ways they did cast a shadow on the second half of our trip, so maybe that:s the most honest way to tell it. And anyway, the story of attempted murder is far more juicy than the rest of my stories, but they:re okay too. So all the hullaballoo about the flight and the long drives was so that we could get to some snow capped mountains in the west of Mongolia near the town of Ulgii where we would live with a Khazak family and see their eagle--which they steal as a chick and train to hunt wildcats and foxes and wolves, before releasing it back into the wild in after a couple years. The eagles ride on their master:s arms while the master is on horseback, and then take off and attack their pray and crush its skull. The eagles are HUGE--something like a four foot wingspan, and they:re very heavy--I had one on my arm, ｂｕｔ　in all the pictures I look terrified, because I am--the eagle is hooded and if the hood falls off the eagle can see where it is going and then starts flapping around even though it is teathered, and those talons and wings are strong enough to do some serious damage.

The Khazakh people we stayed with were very kind--they had a couple kids and I made some new friends--they loved my sunglasses and watch (no you can:t have them, no way) and they also loved lotion because the air is so dry up there (and so I gave them some of that instead). I went horseback riding, grabbed goats and sheep by the horns and lined them up for milking, and tried to surmount the language barrier--I was unsuccessful most of the time ｂｕｔ　we all had fun. The Khazaks look a little different from the Mongolians; they:re more fair skinned I think--less oriental overall--and they were very nice--not like Borat at all.

The last leg of our journey in Mongolia was right outside Ulaanbaataar--we went horseback riding in the mountains. Mongolian horses have shorter legs and so the ride is smoother at a walk and trot, and they like to gallop too, so we had some fun climing the mountains. It was beautiful--sheep and rivers and meadows and gers and forrests that made you feel as if you were in the alps over the summer. But by the end we were all ready for a hot shower, as real a bed as you　can get in UB, and Japan.  My mother is amazingly tolerant of strenous trips--quickly she forgets the jostling for the beauty of the people and the memories of our time in the countryside, so this is my warning to you in --when you hear from her everything she says is true--Mongolia is a magnificent place--but it:s worlds and worlds and worlds away from the lives you live, and to see what we saw, you:ll have to endure some truly trying terrain.