Tag Archives for Ulaan Baatar

» FOOLISHNESS AND GENEROSITY IN GORKHI TERELJ, MONGOLIA

I’ve been in China for almost three months now, and had to leave the country in order to satisfy the requirements of my visa. My partner F. and I chose to go to Mongolia because of its wild, largely undeveloped openness. For nature. After the extreme urban clamor of China, this sounded perfect.

We flew into Ulaanbaatar (UB), the capitol, from Beijing, and spent two days there before heading to the countryside. I was told by some long-timers that UB used to be attractive when the country was still under Soviet “administration,” but it’s hard to believe. Today, it’s a dusty and vegetation-free city made of large Soviet-style concrete block architecture with paint peeling off from the extreme cold of UB’s winters. Tourist-focused shops, of which there are many, hawk camel, yak or wool knick-knacks and sweaters alongside various products, from vodka to war helmets, commemorating Chingiss Khaan. (If you spear your tourist bait on the hook of Khaan and the “Great Mongol Empire,” the largest the world has ever seen, it occurs to me that truthfulness might dictate you also have a slogan for Mongolia that goes something along the lines of, “Declining for 700 years and counting!”) Traffic in UB is horrid, and the roads are in various states of decay. Air quality is exceedingly poor, owing to two main factors: the widespread use of coal as fuel for heating, and the unplanned growth of a city built for 300,000 swelling to over a million in too short a time. Mongolia only has about 2.5 million people, and over a million live in UB.

We were happy to head for the countryside. Our host and guide, Bogi, drove us several hours to the northeast, and found a “nomadic” herding family for us to stay with for two weeks. They had a ger (yurt) and agreed to prepare two meals a day for us. Perfect.

I had imagined epic blue skies, and these were definitely present, as the photos in this post attest, but in June, there’s an equal amount of rain and high winds in northeastern Mongolia. After a beautiful first day, it poured for the next three, and I was going a bit stir crazy from sitting in our ger without electricity or any sitting positions comfortable enough for me to write in.

I decided to head out on a day of walking, hoping to find internet access at one of the many camps or couple of restaurants I’d seen when Bogi had driven us in. I wanted to check and write email, and I desperately wanted to know how Game 1 of the NBA Finals, pitting the Lakers against the Celtics, had turned out. I find my love of professional basketball almost completely indefensible, but since I admitted to myself my powerlessness over its hold on me, I’ve been able to accept my shame and more fully enjoy my love of millionaires bouncing an inflated ball around a hardwood floor. For me, there’s majesty in the game of basketball, because at its highest level, it’s a consummate team game, where communication and intelligence must match extraordinary athleticism. And in 2010, the Los Angeles Lakers are a simply gorgeous embodiment of this balance, playing a team in the Celtics who also exemplify the finer aspects of the game. I love playing more than watching, but after breaking my ankle last year, my playings days may be over…

But I digress.

The massive scale of grass floodplains and thin riverine forests here in northeastern Mongolia make them more suited to horseback riding than to walking, but I was a happy speck moving slowly through dung-maculated valleys full of the bleached skulls, spines and other stray bone bits of departed animals.

I walked for hours, sometimes joined by wary-then-playful dogs, passing alongside grazing horses, cattle, and several vomits of dandelion-munching yak (yes, that’s one of the suggested ways to refer to them, and I personally observed their great love of dandelions). Yak are improbable-looking creatures. I feel somewhere in my childhood media consumption that a muppet or an animal from another planet must have been based on the yak, with its wildly variant coat, cropped close to the body in some places and flowing like disheveled mane in others.

When you look at a picture of the landscape of an area like this, you can’t really see the impressively large volume of dung that occupies every slightly level, even faintly vegetative spot of earth. I feel that I have seen more varieties of dung, in more varied states of decay than I could have imagined here in Mongolia, despite having spent some time around ranches and farms when I was growing up.


This is the Gorkhi Terelj National Park, in the Khan Khentee Protected Area, homeland of Chingiss Khan, in northeastern Mongolia. The nomadic herding families here, so heavily marketed as one of the precious cultural treasures of Mongolia, are, in fact, commercial operators who must hold commercial licenses in order to be in this area and who can no longer exist in their traditional lifestyle without the annual infusion of money they get from tourists between the months of June and August. My host family does herd cows and horses, but they are here, in this particular area, for the tourist money. They’re charging 30,000 Mongolia tugriks (MNT), or around 21 USD, for a ger and two prepared meals a day, which thus far consist mostly of rice, fried dough in various forms, and charred animal.

A copper miner on his way from Mongolia to Kazakhstan talked on the plane about how the meat-heavy diet of the Mongols was one of the keys to their conquest of the Chinese back around the 13th century. The Chinese ate rice and a lot of carbohydrates, and therefore had to eat once or twice a day, whereas the high-protein meat-based diet of the Mongols meant they could eat and then go several days before having to eat again.

It’s hard to grow vegetables in Mongolia, primarily because of the short growing season and also, it should be said, because of the herding and not infrequent overgrazing of ruminant animals, which removes quite a lot of ground cover and leaves what fertile soil (loess) does exist to dry out and blow away. It’s very dusty here. It’s been a dry and hot season so far, but it’s easy to see the plains and hills that have been grazed from green to brown where the animals have been set loose. (Below is one of the greener areas to be found in Terelj).

There are also, according to several locals I encountered on my day’s odyssey, lots of corrupt businessmen, mostly from UB, who bribe park officials to allow them to graze their animals in the national park, and my hunch is that if this is true, these businessmen are grazing animals on a far larger scale than nomad families or everyday herders, and thus they may be more to blame for the overgrazing.

Herding in Mongolia is brutally hard work that puts herders and the animals at the mercy of some of the most extreme conditions possible outside of Siberia or the Arctic. Wolves frequently prey on baby horses and other animals (the mother of a baby horse belonging to our host family was taken by a wolf just two nights ago), and temperatures routinely stay below -30 degrees Fahrenheit for months on end. Once or twice a decade on average a dzud occurs and kills millions of animals. A dzud, it was explained to me, is a certain set of weather conditions that turns the top layer of snow that accumulates in winter into an impenetrable sheet of ice. I was surprised to learn that most of the horses, cattle and yak in Mongolia are left outside to forage as best they can in winter. I did not know they could survive in such extreme cold (in California, I’ve seen horses with blankets draped over them when it’s in the 40s). But in Mongolia they can, unless a dzud occurs, and then they cannot find anything to eat and they starve and freeze to death. In 2008, around 8 million animals died.

I’d walked around 8km, pleased that my surgically-repaired ankle was issuing only minor complaint, and stopped into two camps to ask after internet access when a woman in a white Honda slowed on the road in such a way that made me think she was slowing to offer me a ride. But when I got closer to the road, she appeared only to be checking her cellphone, so I began walking back down into the valley before she honked and waved out the window and I walked back up again. In Mongolia, most of the steering wheels in cars are on the right, but hers was on the left, so I got in on the right side, smiled, and she began speaking to me in Mongolian which I, of course, had no comprehension of at all. I pointed forward, down the road, and said: Internet? She didn’t understand me until I said it with a trilled “Russian” “r,” “Inter-r-r-net?” Ah! She understood. I tried to explain, slowly, using my hands, that down the road, there was a hotel – hotel?, yes she knew hotel – and that I thought there was inter-r-r-net there.

She began driving. With our severe communication gap, I wondered where this might lead. Within fifteen minutes of driving, I calculated that I would be too far from our ger to walk back before nightfall, and I wasn’t sure if she understood what I was seeking.

“Ulaanbaatar-r-r?” she said? No, I did not want to go all the way to UB, where I would likely be stuck for the evening, with no way to let F. know that I was fine and not to worry. We drove and then drove some more. I learned that her “English” name was Giny, and that she had a daughter, 15, a son, 13, and no husband. She handed me a thick presentation book for a Mongolian Horse Expedition Outfitter, and by pointing and smiling, explained that this was her business. One of the pictures showed her smiling astride a lovely chestnut horse with a thick mane. She pointed to other pictures in the book, and said “Kree-un.” After she said it again, I understood she meant “Korean.” Then she pointed to her mouth and said “Mongol, Kree-un. No English.”

Giny was wearing a snug-fitting plush pink top, and unlike most of the women I’d seen out here so far, her skin was smooth and clear – her hands looked well-moisturized and not nearly as rough as I’d expect on a woman who rode or trained horses for a living. I learned that she was 38, and had a moment of small shock when I realized I was older than she was. I’m not accustomed to seeing myself as older than people with 15-year-old children, even though if I do the math, that’s not terribly noteworthy, and this is clearly a case of my not updating my own self-image to match my actual age of 39. If I make it to 60, I bet I’ll still be having moments of mild displeasure or shock when someone refers to me as “sir” or “mister.”

Giny called her daughter on the phone, then handed it over to me. Her daughter spoke some English, and I explained to her what I was looking for. Then she spoke to Giny. Then Giny drove on, ever farther from where I was staying, giving no sign I could recognize that she had hope we’d find any internet.

I was beginning to feel very foolish for having been so keen to find internet access when I was in the middle of a national park in Mongolia. Still, I was enjoying this adventure as well, and I had a feeling that Giny would not strand me in the middle of nowhere. I thought perhaps I’d be spending the night in the home of strangers, and the idea held some appeal.

Giny pulled over. She looked at me. She said something in Mongolian. I asked her in English if we should go back, pointing back the way we’d come. We stared at each other for a moment, and I thought that Giny was really quite lovely.Then we both laughed and she turned around and we headed back. She made a few more calls. After the third one, she let out a celebratory sound and said “internet!”

We drove back, past the spot where she’d picked me up, and I thought that it was remarkable that this lovely stranger had now driven 50 or 60km to help me. We came to a sign that said “Ayanchin,” and she made a turn and we drove up a long dirt road, where I eventually saw a large white 3-story Western ranch-style house, about half a dozen white gers, and a three-story geodesic dome. This would have been noteworthy under any circumstances, but it was particularly unexpected in a place predominated by blocky Soviet-era concrete structures and the soft circular rising shapes of canvas and wool felt gers.

When she pulled up in the driveway, she looked for her business card for maybe ten minutes, then finally just wrote down all of her information for me. I gave her mine in return. She refused my offer of gas money or compensation of any kind. I hoped I might see Giny again, and made a mental note to look her up for a horseback riding excursion.

The place she’d dropped me off at looked like someone’s home. I walked up to it. The door was open, and there was a mat that said Welcome. I stepped inside and a woman who looked Mongolian walked by. I said hello, feeling awkward at having stepped into someone’s home, and she pointed behind her, to my left. The dining room was, in fact, a restaurant, with six tables and a well-stocked bar at one end.

As I came in, I asked the bartender if they had internet, and he said they did, so I took a seat by a window, plugged in, and surveyed the menu.

Traveling sometimes makes me exaggeratedly appreciative of some simple comforts of home. I am embarrassed by this fact, especially when I’m in a place full of ex-pats, as I often am in China. For example: In Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’ve been based during my travels in East Asia, I sometimes find myself at an Irish-themed ex-pat joint called The Shamrock, with an all-Chinese staff wearing green shamrock-festooned vests and serving poor fascimiles of Irish and American food at inflated prices. I always feel a sense of embarrassment at being in the place, and I like to hunker down in the least visible corner and enjoy my precious internet connection (which all the ex-pat places have, in contrast to most Chinese places). I try to be enormously polite, almost to the point where I’m conveying a kind of apology.

Still, here in Gorkhi Terelj, I was thrilled to read a menu in English, and even more thrilled to see that it listed salad. Two different kinds of salad! With lots of vegetables listed! Oh happy day! I ordered one with beets and carrots and cabbage and cucumbers, along with a beer, and I opened up my netbook and deepened my happiness even further when I read that the Lakers had taken the first game of the series with a display of serious defensive grit and superb offensive execution. I sat there, enjoying my salad and beer, reading about basketball and checking my email and writing down and emailing to myself as backup as many details about Mongolia as I could remember.

On my way out, I saw a very tall, white man smoking a cigar and folding his arms over the top of his big belly while he surveyed three Mongolian workers who were hammering strips of tar paper onto the plywood roof of a new structure that looked like it was shaping up to be a garage. He was eager to talk.

“John,” he said, extending a big hand. He had a predictably firm-to-the-point-pf-painful grip. I have large hands and, as a holdover of my upbring in the Midwest, I know to look men like this directly in the eye, and to shake their hands with a firm grip, as if I might take pleasure in crushing someone’s knucklebones. He told me about this thing they were building – “they don’t know a damn thing about this kind of construction, but I just have my way of doing things and I tell ‘em how it’s gonna be done,” puff puff…

I’ve encountered lots of men like John. So I wasn’t surprised when a great deal of his conversation turned to a reflexive and all-encompassing hatred and distrust of government.

The government in Mongolia, John said, was corrupt, and they “stole everything.”

This made me think of an article I’d read a few days earlier, in the English language Mongolian Messenger. The title of the article was “Officials Defend False Income Declarations,” and here is one choice paragraph from the article, detailing a state servant who made false statements about income and property:

“The Anti-Corruption Agency found that Dornod Aimag’s Governor Ts. Janlav did not declare his private house where he now lives, four apartments which are owned by his family members, building with purpose for small-enterprise, [MNT]50 million income from selling his two-story private house, as well as 23 percent of shares of Dornod Company that is owned by his wife… MIAT Executive Director R.Bat-Erdene did not declare shares of Araknids Company, which is owned by his wife, a Nissan Murano car which was purchased for USD 24,000, a two-story private summer house and USD 6,500 in income from selling his Mercedes Benz C-180.”

John, who’d said that this “lodge” was really just his way to have a second home in the country, claimed corrupt officials were “scamming this ‘nature preserve,’” and getting free grazing for their livestock out of it. In UB (which he pronounced so it would rhyme with Darth Vader or masturbator), he snorted, the government was getting aid money from the U.S. to build the roads. In one breath, he disparaged the Mongolians in this area of Terelj for not paying taxes, but in the next breath, he was praising the Chinese economy for being great because “they don’t pay any taxes!” In similar fashion, after pointing to overgrazed hills in the distance and saying the government ought to just get rid of all these herders, because they didn’t “know shit about the land,” he told me he’d been the first to put up a fence around here, and that people hadn’t liked it. Mongolia proudly advertises in much of its tourist literature that it’s a land without fences, where people can ride and walk freely wherever they like. Then he said since he’d done it, others in the area had started putting up their own fences, and that it just “broke his heart.”

As he said this, I imagined John’s heart as a giant ham, beating away greasily somewhere above his belly.

At one point, John also talked about “squatters” all over the natural park. “Squatters?” I said. “Yeah, they say they’re indigenous and have a right to it,” then snorted. “There aren’t any indigenous people almost anywhere in the world. Just go back far enough and you’ll see what I mean.”

I changed the subject and asked him about mining. Mining’s the biggest business in Mongolia. He said yes, that was the big business, but that it still wasn’t shit. I mentioned that it seemed like a big deal, and he said “Listen, you know how much coal they mined in all of Mongolia last year? 20 million tons [actually more like 5 million metric tons]. They don’t know real mining here. They took 240 million tons out of Colorado last year [actually more like 32 million tons]. You can’t even find a mine here – just try!” Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, and it’s hard to find anything if you don’t know where it is beforehand, but this hardly seemed worth pointing out to John.

I mentioned that a guy from Nova Scotia I’d chatted up on the flight into UB worked for a Canadian mining company setting up a camp in the Gobi, and that he’d said they were spending $40 million this year alone on the operation. John said “Oh, that one’s not going to be up and running for 5, 6 years. Peanuts. Mostly metallurgical grade coal they make steel from.”

I said the guy from Nova Scotia had told me it was a copper mine.

“Yeah, yeah, they’re all over the place,” he said as he threw the butt of his spent cigar on the gravel driveway.

I commented on how surprising it was to me that a country as sparsely populated as Mongolia had such a high literacy rate. I’d read and heard from several people that the rate was around 98%, and I’m pretty sure that exceeds the literacy rate in the U.S.

“Oh yeah, 100%. You can’t find a Mongolian who can’t read,” John said nodding vigorously. “But that’s all changing. The Soviets used to run the school system, and they were–” he brought one hand down in a chopping motion across his other forearm. “Serious.The Mongolians learn their old language and their new one, just for starters” he continued, “then a lot of ‘em also know Russian, Japanese, Korean…”

I said that I was amazed by it, and impressed at how many Mongolians I’d met who spoke four or more languages.

“Yeah, my wife speaks four languages. But I’m lucky. I been here ten years and haven’t learned any Mongolian.” John said this with pride as three of the 450 Mongolians he claimed to employ labored away on his new garage.

John had also told me that he never had foreigners at his place, except for a few Chinese, who “always want to buy the place.” At just that moment, a dark late-model 4-wheel drive Nissan Murano, one of the vehicles of choice for police and Communist Party officials in China and, from what I’d observed in UB, for officials in Mongolia as well, pulled up and stopped. It was too clean for this environment, with an elegant looking Mongolian woman behind the wheel and an all-business looking white guy in the passenger seat, who rolled down his window. He had a gray contemptuous look on his face that reminded me of the fish-hook sneer Dick Cheney has, owing to nerve damage from one of his many heart attacks. The gray man and John stared at each other for a full ten seconds or so. The woman in the driver’s seat looked mildly alarmed. John finally said “What’s the good word?” to which the gray man replied flatly, “This the place? You got the works, the house, the dome, some yurts?”

I took that moment to say good-bye, thanking John for his time and saying I had to hurry back. He waved feebly as I departed, preoccupied, like the wave was merely an afterthought.

The hike home was long but rewarding, despite the blisters forming on my feet. Knowing my route, I went farther from the road this time, through alpine tundra and over great loping hills with statuesque stone outcroppings at their peaks. Marmots occasionally emerged from holes in the ground and darted away, but I saw no wolves or roedeer, which are said to be common in the area. I read that brown bears, also once common to the area, are on the decline in the Khan Khentee, mostly because of a Chinese and Korean-driven thirst for bear gall bladders, which fetch upwards of $300 USD per, and are used in Asian medicine.

Many birds, including Daurian redstarts, Siberian blue robins and black kites flew near to me along my way, and perched on rocks and branches near enough to reach with my hand, looking inquisitive and unafraid. I also saw maybe a half dozen Steppe eagles and hawks, but they kept their distance. After rolling hills, and with the sun sinking perilously low on the horizon, I descended through birch and larch forest and picked my way through moist lowlands, where tufts of earth had to be stepped on like lilypads to avoid sinking into what I amused myself by thinking of as “the grimpen myre,” where some prehistoric Mongolian version of the Hound of the Baskervilles might be waiting to scare me to death. There were certainly piles of dung large enough to plausibly have exited from a prehistoric beast.

I arrived just before night fell, and my host family brought hot milk tea and stoked the wood stove in the ger for the night. I sat drinking tea while I watched the last blue of the sky fade in the circular hole in the center of the ceiling.

» NEAR DISASTER, MINING, AND BEING A MONGOLIAN MILLIONAIRE

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.