We arrived at Peking airport for our flight to Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capital of Mongolia, around 7:30am, several hours before our flight was scheduled to depart. We visited the cosmetics and perfume shop to smell the fragrances and to take advantage of the free samples of high-end lotions. When we flew out of San Francisco International Airport a few months ago, we’d both noticed that our feet stunk rather horribly, and we had the brilliant idea of putting perfume on a variety of tester strips, then depositing those strips into our shoes. It’s true that our feet smelled like a heady combination of Shalimar, Dior and Guerlain mixed with Eau de rotten-foot, but this was undeniably better than the lone foot smell that went before. Maybe our fellow passengers found it confusing instead of merely revolting for the 16-hour flight to Hong Kong.

During this particular visit to the Beijing airport beauty shop, F. was overzealous in her application of scented face lotions and was afflicted with burning red eyes for most of our flight because of it. There is no good reason I can think of for face lotion to be scented. I mean, if your face stinks I think the solution is probably more medical than cosmetic. I’d stuck to unscented lotions.

At 10:00, after I’d been reading a book (The Strange Case of the Dog in the Night-Time) out loud to F. for over an hour while our flight was delayed, we moved into line when our boarding section was called. This was when I realized with great horror that my passport was nowhere on my person, or in my bag. How could this be? Had I left it at the restaurant where we’d eaten? Had someone stolen it? (U.S. passports are worth a small fortune to people in China who know how to alter and use them.) I couldn’t imagine that I’d taken it out of my pocket, and as the last passenger before us boarded, I felt sick. Forgetting that my ankle was still mending from a bad break suffered less than a year ago, and that it had a troublesome three-quarters of surgical pin still embedded in it, I sprinted for the restaurant, where no one had seen my passport.

As my feet and heart pounded the length of the airport, I thought: I’d ruined our entire trip! Our quasi-honeymoon, as we’d called it, our collaborative writing retreat, our time to relax into each other and plan for our future! I’d carelessly let it all slip away by losing track of my passport and Chinese visa, costing us the considerable expense of the flight, not to mention that we’d now be stuck in the Beijing airport for probably a very long time, until an expensive expedited replacement passport and visa could be procured for me. I would not be able to re-enter China without these. What an idiot I was!

I sprinted back to the gate. When I got there, panting, a smartly dressed flight attendant told me that my passport and visa had been found at the security check. The flight had now been held at least fifteen minutes beyond it’s scheduled departure time and as we boarded an impossibly slow-moving courtesy golf cart, she informed me that they would hold the flight for only ten more minutes, and would then remove our luggage from the plane and have us meet with customs and immigration officials. Flights from Beijing to Mongolia only occur twice a week, and they are generally fully booked. It was clear that this cart would not get us there and back in that span, but I was incapable, with burning ankle and lungs to match, of sprinting any faster.

We got back to the gate in about ten minutes, and they were still holding the flight. With reproachful smiles, the attendants ushered us into the umbilicus. I was still an idiot for this mistake, but at least I wasn’t an idiot who’d cost us a lot of money and an interminable miserable stay in the airport. I’m fairly certain I will never make this mistake again and, in fact, as I type this, on the seventh day of my stay in Mongolia, my passport hasn’t been anywhere but against my body except for the two times I’ve showered, and even then I dried off as fast as possible and put my pants with passport on as hastily as possible.

Lesson learned. F. was utterly forgiving and charitable about this whole near-fiasco, never once exhibiting visible anger or frustration. And I think that even if I completely ruined the trip we’d been excitedly looking forward to for months, she would be understanding and not punishing towards me for my mistake. Which is just one reason why, among many others, I am a very lucky man. Even if she also kind of sort of broke my ankle last year.

During our flight, we chatted with our seat mate, a guy named Tim, from Nova Scotia, who was wearing a hat like Crocodile Dundee and that a-hole, Steve “The Animal Guy” Irwin used to wear before they both died. Tim told us he worked for a mining company that was setting up a work camp somewhere in the Gobi Desert. I’d heard that mining was the single biggest sector of the Mongolian economy, and that the Russians, Chinese and international mining interests from many other countries were salivating over Mongolia’s relatively untapped reserves of copper, gold, silver, and coal. So I was curious to chat with Tim, and he was eager to talk about his work.

Tim said his company was headquartered in Australia, that they were setting up a copper mining operation that they’d be expending $40 million on this year alone, and that the camp would likely become the next biggest city in Mongolia once the operation got underway. He said the Mongolian government had a 20% stake in the operation, and that it presently employed about 50% Mongolian nationals, with an eventual goal of training enough Mongolians to have more like 80% Mongolians running the operation. I didn’t ask, but I presume the long-term goals of the company do not include selling the Mongolian government or people a larger ownership stake in the operation.

Tim shared that he had worked for mining operations in many parts of the world, including Nigeria and, most recently, Nevada. He had a wife and two kids, with another on the way, back in Nova Scotia, and was trying to convince his wife to move to UB.

“The tax advantages alone are huge,” he explained. Tim was a nice enough guy, warm and seemingly open, in typical Canadian fashion. He shared his Lonely Planet guidebook with us, as well as various information about UB that proved mostly helpful.

If we hadn’t been committed to a retreat of sorts, I’d have asked Tim if I might make the trek to his mining camp to see for myself what such an operation was like.

After touching down at Chingiss Khaan airport and making our way through customs and getting our backpacks, we were greeted on our way to the parking lot by a tall woman in tight-fitting striped button-up shirt, a short black pair of shorts (a “skort,” really), and high black heels, holding a sign that said “Brian Awehali.” This was Bogi, owner of the Mongol Guesthouse, where we’d be staying. For no good reason, I’d assumed Bogi was a man.

But Bogi was an entrepreneur running two separate guesthouses for foreigners, who often gets up at 6am to go meet passengers getting off the Trans-Siberian Railroad to see if they need lodging or a tour guide. I later learned that “Bogi” means “crystal.” When I asked F. how she would describe Bogi, she said: “like a modern boddhisatva, high cheekbones, full lips, small nose, and oval face… and she makes sweeping know-all comments accompanied by big full-body gesticulations when she talks.” Given Bogi’s heavy make-up, lipstick, skort and high heels, spiritual enlightenment would not have been the first or second characteristic I’d have ascribed to her, but maybe that’s just me.

Bogi was 24, from a Western Mongolian herding family, and she grew up with one sister and several brothers. Later, when she spoke somewhat disgustedly about two gay men who were coming to stay at the Mongol Guesthouse together, and professed no understanding of how that was even possible, I kept her country origins in mind when I opted to make jokes about love and passion having wills of their own, rather than judging her harshly for it. Bogi teaches English at a school in UB, but we had frequent challenges communicating with her. If we asked her something like: “Since you’re from here, what part of Mongolia do you think is best to visit?” she’d respond: “Mongolia, I know all”–sweeping hand gestures–”Yes, but… what part? East, west…?” Answer: “Yes. All.” Mind you, Bogi is an English teacher.

Two endearing things about Bogi: when she told us the words for “thank-you” and “hello” in Mongolian, she immediately pop-quizzed us sternly: “What’s ‘hello’? What’s ‘thank-you’?” She was also blunt about the foreigners who come to UB: “Mongolians like Russians, Koreans, Japanese, Americans, and Germans, but hate the Chinese.” When I asked why, she said: “The Chinese ruin everything.” She’s got a point, but I’m sure a thousand years of war and tension probably didn’t do much for Sino-Mongolian relations either.

The skies our first day in UB were epic, and as Bogi drove us into town, I marveled at how blue they were and how ridiculously distinct the clouds appeared. UB is not a pretty city, though the hills around it are lovely. Mostly, the city is a succession of drab Soviet-style structures made of concrete, with large dirtily-belching smokestacks and the curved flumes of coal power plants punctuating long stretches of crude wooden structures and gers (yurts).

In contrast to my own overall negative experience of UB, F. found it to be a surreal “ethereal concrete city,” somehow “charming,” not least for its odd juxtaposition of Asian-looking people filling a Russian-looking landscape. Sometimes F.’s abstracted relationship to things vexes and mystifies me, but sometimes I am also just a bit jealous of her ability to ignore or overlook even overarching unpleasantries.

The next day, while eating at a vegetarian restaurant, I struck up a conversation with a woman from Colorado—let’s call her Becky—who turned out to be a climatologist and, she was exceedingly quick to point out, a Fulbright scholar. Becky had perfectly braided hair, smooth manicure-grade hands, and an earring and necklace set of matching bright blue felted balls of wool. Becky claimed UB was the most polluted capitol city in the world, especially in the winter, because everyone burned coal to heat their homes and the extreme cold requires that they burn it constantly. She claimed the sky was gray and you couldn’t see it in winter because of all the coal smoke. She also claimed that Mongolia was being more impacted by climatological change than any other country, a preposterous claim if you take into consideration places like the island nation of Kiribati, to cite just one example, which is in the process of disappearing altogether, due to rising sea levels.

When we told her we were heading to the countryside, Becky commented that we’d really appreciate taking a shower once we got back to UB. Then, when we shared that we were presently staying in a flat upstairs from the restaurant we were in, and it turned out she lived in the building as well, she briefly bitched about how loud it was, and how people in UB made noise all night, adding, “I have no idea when these people sleep.”

Giving her some benefit of doubt, I wondered if it was particularly hard to be a woman traveling alone in Mongolia, and if perhaps she was experiencing some culture shock. Still: These people. I’ve heard this phrase repeatedly from foreigners in China and in Mongolia, and it never fails to sound ugly to my ears.

In the main square of UB is the capitol building you might expect, with a giant statue of Sukhbataar in the middle. Sukhbataar was a courier and mail dispatcher who won national fame for his bravery in the 1921 battle against the Manchurian-Chinese army. Mongolians who resist or thwart the Chinese are heroes.

Sukhbataar’s fame in Mongolia is eclipsed only by that of Chingiss Khan. There was a detailed article about Khan in the MIAT Airline in-flight magazine (along with another article about a man trying to bring surrealism to Mongolian art, which sounded intriguing). Khan succeeded, despite obscure beginnings as a boy in the countryside, and despite commanding a fairly small group of men on horseback, in establishing through the almost complete militarization of society an empire the size of which no one on earth has ever exceeded. It lasted from around 1207 until 1368. One of several keys to the success of his army was that they didn’t care at all if it was summer, spring or arctic winter: they were relentless, while their unfortunate neighbors thought fighting wars in the winter was inhumane. Under Khan, the Mongols also invented one of the sounder war-time strategies of the past thousand years when they decided that killing all of the leaders was better than slaughtering peasants. (Khan and his heirs also basically created China when they unified it through conquest, and made previously warring dynastic quarrelers share commerce and knowledge, though the Chinese are aghast to admit the truly long view of their origin, growth and metastasis. See Jack Weatherford’s superb Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World for lots of interesting details about this. It’s what I read on the plane to UB.)

In UB, before heading for the northeastern part of the country, we first headed for a bank to exchange currencies. There’s nothing like wildly disparate exchange rates to impress upon a person the convoluted mysteries of the international currency system. All currency, not just the Chinese yuan, is manipulated, and although economists will tell you the value of a given currency owes to many sober, well-reasoned factors, it also true that it’s just one big consensual hallucination, with a few elites pulling strings to various advantage, and often to the detriment of ordinary people with no clue about such abstruse manipulations. In China, the 100-to-15 yuan-to-dollar exchange rate has seemed luxurious. (Awesome! That whole meal cost just… $3.) Here, 10,000 Mongolian tugriks (MNT) equals seven dollars. When F. stepped away from the window, she was holding a thick 900,000 MNT wad, and after I exchanged my own money, we were Mongolian millionaires.

How absurd. (On a sidenote, what’s with a currency whose basic unit can’t buy a single solitary thing? Even the Chinese yuan can buy you a bread roll or pastry. You can buy something for $1 US. You might not even be able to buy dust for one tugrik).

Armed with our wads of cash, we then walked around, took in the giant five-story shopping mall called the State Department Store, looked over lots of cashmere and felted wool sweaters and handicrafts, and picked up two bottles of quite good Chingiss Khan vodka that Tim, the Canadian miner from the plane, had recommended.

Mongolians, I think it’s fair to say, can really drink, and I was glad to have this vodka to share with Baul, a son of the herding family we wound up staying with, over many heated games of chess. I’m an adequate chess player — fundamentally solid, but possessed of no genius flair for  the subtleties of the game — and I actually dropped the game years ago, once I discovered Go. But it was supremely pleasant to attempt creative, slightly drunken “Monglish” communication with Baul while being generally overmatched on the checkered battlefield. I think we eventually fought to a draw in the win-loss column, while F. wrote or read (she doesn’t drink), but the several-game matches in a cozy candle-lit ger were always followed by the deepest and most dreamless sleep. I could not help but think, as we passed weeks with Baul’s family, that they were better — not in some stupid, condescending idealized way — for having a vital relationship to their natural world and its rhythms. Watching their daily lives, and their devoted work with their horses, then being invited on a ride, on hard, small wooden saddles secured to horses much wilder and freer than those you encounter on fairly gentle, accommodating American horses, made me feel truly humbled and contemplative about what I had lost or given up in mostly unwitting sacrifice to my modern, and relentlessly-advertised, life. Due mostly to globalization and the reach of media, many people in traditional cultures are clamoring to have the advertised fruits of the life I, as an American from a middle class family, know to be mostly hollow or anyway slightly rotten. And this is, to my mind and heart, tragic.

On our second day in UB, it was Children’s Day, a national holiday in celebration of children. Many businesses were closed, and there was a big parade down the city’s main street, with children in costumes on floats, children in dress-up clothes walking, children singing… and military troops marching. That makes perfect sense, right? We watched the parade from The Amsterdam Cafe, which seemed like the place where every ex-pat in town was hanging out. The place was almost full, and besides the staff, only one customer appeared Mongolian.

While we sipped decent coffee and used the wireless internet connection, I read a copy of the not half-bad English language Mongolian Messenger, and noted the mining-centric Bloomberg commodity price listings right on the front page.

Inside, among other mostly informative articles, was this: “Base metals plunged on Monday, with copper prices falling to their lowest levels since February, after signs that China’s economy was slowing spooked investors already worried about fiscal problems in Europe.”

The Messenger also published a report from the National Statistical Office listing various social and economic indicators for Mongolia for the first four months of 2010. For non-mining-related factors, almost all indicators looked healthy save for a dramatic drop in live births for livestock. For mine-related matters, total industrial output had risen 12.7%, “mainly due to an increase of main industrial products such as coal, crude oil, iron ore, molybdenum concentrate…copper, metal steel, and steel casting.” The report also noted that during the same four-month period, the rate of extraction of crude petroleum and natural gas increased by 260% over the same period in 2009, and that the mining of coal and lignite extraction of peat increased by 65.2%.

There were no alcoholic beverages being sold this day, and I initially thought this was because of Children’s Day – no drunk adults; good idea! – but it turned out to be because it was the first of the month, and in Mongolia, there is a prohibition on the sale of alcohol on the first day of each month. I could not get an explanation for why this was so, beyond “Because the government says so.”

Later that day, a massive dust storm rolled across the city, making it impossible to walk without getting grit in our eyes and throats, and we both had a persistent dry cough for several days after.

Before we drove from UB to Gorkhi Terelj, a protected area to the northeast that Chingiss Khan came from, Bogi took us to the city’s black market, where most of the same products we saw in the part of town catering to foreigners were being sold for about one-third the price. The vast majority of the products were imported from China. Mongolians may not care for the Chinese, but they are landlocked and trapped between Russia and China, and they are not at all above getting most of their cheap goods, as well as most of their produce, from the Middle Kingdom.