Mongolia
After being ripped off for the taxi fare to the Blue Sky
Hotel in Ulaanbaatar, we were pleasantly surprised at the hotel itself. It had
mixed reviews on Trip Advisor, but it is centrally located and very modern. The
room was excellent – the hotel caters mostly to business people and seems to
have overcome earlier reported teething troubles. Our room was on the 15th
Floor, giving a good view of the (it has to be said, not very pretty) city of
UB.
UB has grown at a rapid rate over the last few years and
continues to boom along due to mining activity in Mongolia. About the same
population as Perth, some two thirds of Mongolians live here, so the rest of the
country is very sparsely populated. UB sits in a flat bowl at about 1300 metres
altitude, surrounded by a ring of hills. There’s plenty of new construction
going on, both commercial and residential - however, due to the extreme cold of
winter, the construction season is only about half of the year. UB has all the
problems of rapid growth – too much traffic (huge morning and evening jams),
insufficient road infrastructure, and smog when there is no breeze, which is
often. Mongolia averages 260 days of sunshine each year – they call it “the
land of blue skies”. However, low precipitation makes the country very dry.
There are few trees and the countryside makes the Nullarbor look like a forest.
In spite of all of the above, the place is actually very
interesting. We took a day trip out to see the Chinggis Khaan (Genghis Khan)
monument, and along the way we stopped to view some local wildlife (reindeer,
camels, eagles and vultures), bought some yak and camel wool socks, saw a herd
of yaks strolling along a valley by the road, visited a picturesquely sited
Buddhist monastery at the end of a long climb, and got to ride on a Mongolian
horse at a small farm. The farm visit came complete with Mongolian tea (weak
milky tea with salt) and snacks (tough cheesy curd sticks and delicious bread),
all served inside a ger by the matriarch of the household. We had been calling
these round buildings “yurts” but were corrected by our guide – apparently
“yurt” is a Russian word, and the Mongolians call them “gers”. There are still
plenty of these in the UB suburbs, but they’re rapidly being displaced by high
and low rise new apartments and houses.
The horse plays a central role in Mongolian culture and in
their famous history of the conquest of most of Central Asia and much of
Europe. The story of their move north and west, from Attila the Hun through
Chinggis Khaan and onwards, then gradually losing most of their gains, is
hugely interesting and they have an excellent small museum at the monument
site. Chinggis Khaan is revered as the founder of Mongolia, however his name has
also been heavily appropriated for commercial use – beer, vodka, (both
excellent) and numerous other products are named after him.
For our day tour, we had a well maintained 80 series
Landcruiser, an excellent guide, Baagi, who had learned his good English while
working in Ireland (!), and a good local driver. I say “well maintained” in
that the Landcruiser ran like a Swiss watch although the seat belts didn’t
work, but no-one here bothers about that. The 4WD was definitely needed as the
trip into the farm with the horses crossed a couple of semi-frozen creeks with
lots of mud, despite the fact that winter hasn’t started yet. 4WDs are very popular here, as outside of UB
and a few main highways, roads are pretty rough, and snow covered for much of
the year. Also, as we discovered when a section of road was closed for road
works, they don’t make a proper side track, or have a one-way system with
lights or lollipop men as we nancy Westerners do – instead, you just drive off
down the embankment and slog through the mud and slush until you can get past
the road works. An excellent system (no stuffy Health and Safety rules to slow
things down), and having a 4WD makes it all easier. We saw heaps of both right
and left hand drive vehicles – currently they have no rules covering this, but
the government is thinking of insisting on LHD, as they drive on the right side
of the road. However, this idea is very unpopular, as a major source of
vehicles is 2nd hand cars from Japan, which are cheap and in good
nick. This could become a Mongolian election issue! Despite all of the modern cars on the roads,
there are still a few rough and tough Soviet era Russian campers and pick-ups
on the road. The only low note of the day trip was that we arrived back at UB
during the evening traffic jam – 1.5 hours to travel the last 4 Km! However,
the newly elected Democratic Party government has promised to fix it, providing
something for UB residents to look forward to (possibly for a long time).
Outside of UB there are lots of camping grounds, mostly used
by locals escaping UB on the weekends. Many of them have wooden hut style
buildings, but there are lots of gers as well. They offer games rooms, snooker
tables and wi-fi internet, which seem incongruous in their outback surroundings.
Thursday saw us up at dawn’s crack to catch the train to
Beijing. A crisp minus 6 degrees necessitated some warm clothes. The train was quite
full, with a mixture of Americans, Germans, Indians, and Kiwis in our carriage.
Our visit was way too short. We didn't have time to go
fishing, which is popular among the locals, nor to chase any bears (protected)
or wolves (fair game for local hunters). It would be great to come back and
explore more of the “outback” of this country, from the big lakes in the north
to the deserts in the south. Some photos below.
