Trans-siberian: More Mongolia

Morning archery session at the ger camp,  aiming the blunt-tipped arrows at a sheepskin target. The arrows arc through the air with a satisfying flair. 

Impromptu volleyball game with some kids before reluctantly heading back towards the city. On the way, we stop at a religious site on the side of the road – a pile of stones, topped by an object covered in fluttering scarves, mostly blue, strung with prayer flags. 

Closer inspection reveals other items around the stones – small clay pots, buddha statues, crutches, a picture frame. As instructed, I choose a stone from the earth, and walk clock-wise 3 times around the pile, the edge of the stone rough against by finger. (I am reminded of the Cruz de Ferro as I contemplate the  possible significance of various offerings).  When my third circle is complete, I toss my stone to join the others, and Niema fills me in on the background of these religious sites, called an ovoo. 

Ovoo fun facts:

• These sites are significant to both Buddhists and Shamanists.
• The piles are begun by a priest, probably because the place has a spiritual vibe or energy. Then passing people add more rocks, scarves, flags…
• The tradition began long ago, when men going to war carried a stone from their hometowns and, when they reached the mountain pass carrying them to their uncertain future, they dropped the stone. Coming home from war, each man picked up his stone; those that remained were a memorial to the fallen.
• Blue represents long life, which is why blue scarves are prevalent.

 Back in town, we meet a local guide, who brings us on a tour of the Ger District of Ulan-Bator, which ended up being one of the most interesting parts of the trip for me, and highlighted the vast difference in life experiences between people in different parts of the world.

UB has a population of over 1 million people, and 68% of them live in the ger district, while the rest live in apartments. Electricity is available in the District, but water must be purchased at, and carried home from, the communal well (which is connected to the city water supply, so it doesn’t run out). Stoves are used for cooking and heating, and there is a new program that allows people to exchange their old wood or coal-burning stoves for a more environmentally-friendly stove, at  a fraction of the cost, in an effort to reduce air pollution. 

The District has a lot of car mechanics. K-12 education is free to every Mongolian – even in the country, nomadic kids can go to boarding school, paying only for food (and perhaps contributing a sheep or some wheat). Every Mongolian – man, woman, child – is also entitled to 700 square meters of land. Once claimed, it is theirs to keep, sell, or leave as an inheritance. There are rules governing where people can claim their allotment. Slowly, people in the District are selling their land to developers, who are building apartment blocks. They are, as we were told, sitting “on a gold mine”, and are in a position to not only receive a good price for their land, but perhaps a new home in the apartment block.

We visit a ger that is home to a man, his wife, and 2 of his children. Two of his sons, out of six children, have gers in the same plot of land. The sons are off completing their stint in the army. The man has stopped working – he used to work in the big market – and is now taking care of his grandkids while their fathers are away. His wife cleans at the local university.

            We sip traditional drink – milky green tea laced with salt, cupping the bowls in two hands, and learn that the man of the house is an archer. He moved his family to UB six years earlier, purchasing this plot of land, because their nomadic lifestyle didn’t provide enough work, or resources, to support such a large family. The ger is large, and their possessions seem a mix of necessity and sentiment – dishes, cooking pots, three beds, painted cabinets; and archery medals, family photos,  an animal skull.  Wedged above the ceiling struts is an old bow; easily five feet long and unstrung. These days, people use trucks to move their lives, but this ger and all its contents would have required five camels to transport it to the city.

            A chubby-cheeked child totters in, clutching the door frame for support, but our coos and waves only make her burst into tears, and she is snatched up by her mother as we ask the man of often he practices his archery. He laughs. Not often. He’d like to, but, you know… life. But he takes down a bow and flexes the string, demonstrating his technique. 

We inquire about entertainment – how do they relax? 

“Talk to each other” (A smile) “Gossip.”

Imagine that.

Here in the city, there is more to do, of course, and even in the country, solar power now allows TV in the gers along with lights, as long as the sun shines. Looking around, the simplicity of this life is appealing – a minimum of possessions, the ability to move your life in a single day. The diet, on the other hand,  is not so appealing: In the country, with no refrigeration, the summer diet consists mainly of dairy products. Then before winter sets in, livestock are slaughtered to take advantage of the natural freezer. Even in the city, this is the way. Our tour guide tells us that last winter, her family had six sheep slaughtered, and kept the meat, wrapped in plastic, on their apartment balcony.

Her parents still live in the ger district, she and her husband opted to take their three children, and her grandmother, to an apartment, because they could afford to do so. 

The last question we direct at our host is about the anchor tattoo on his hand. From his army days, he says. It was the fashionable thing to do. This is a landlocked country, we mention, puzzled. How does anything nautically-themed become a trend?

            “We dream” he says simply, shrugging his shoulders.

            As we exit, a tiny pair of felt booties are drying on the roof, and they seem to represent something – a simplicity, a freedom, a family.

Trans-Siberian, Stage 2: Mongolian ger camp

Here we are in a ger in Mongolia, nestled in a scenery I never could have imagined, in one of those moments that makes me so grateful for the life I lead and answers the question of why I travel....

Notes from the road: 

Impromptu sheep market out of trucks on the roadside.

Sun shines on the hills.

Two kids struggle with a loaded wheel-barrow.

Stream meanders, cows graze.

Pile of sheep-skins for sale on a tire.

River winds lazily through the valley, past a plain dotted with trees and herds.

Horses swish their tails, yaks amble. (And we stop to take photos, of course).

Spines of boulders, pine trees, and steeper slopes leading to rocky peaks.

After a plentiful lunch we headed off for a walk, despite the drizzle, pausing in the gazebo on the hill to learn about ger construction traditions.

Ger Fun Facts:

•       The size of a ger is based on the number of latticed wall sections it is built with; the larger the number the larger the circumference. (Math teachers wonder, if I know the number of wall sections, can I calculate the diameter?)

•      The walls are covered by felt, which is made by compressing wool by dragging it behind a horse!

•      Wedding gifts for young couples often include a ger or it’s accessories: furniture, animals, etc. 

•        These  more permanent ger camps are vacations spots for mongolians who want to escape the city for a weekend.
• 
  

As the rain trailed off,  we headed off across the fields, followed by a dog with a lanky, wolf-like way of moving. The wet grass soaked my shoes in seconds, but it felt so great to move that I didn’t really care. Wildflowers bloomed among rhubarb and cow pies as we skirted the hillside and entered the forest; the rain falling yet again and prompting our guide, Niema, to open his yellow umbrella. Soft-needled larches and white birches, purple columbines along the dirt path. Into a clearing as the sun breaks free, only to illuminate the mosquitos looking for a meal. Swatting and twitching, we admired the view back down to camp.

Eager for more, some of us continued on to a nearby monastery.  Down the other side of the hill, we emerged from the trees to shining sun and views of the valley stretching away to our left, ger camps dotting the nearby slopes. To our right loomed piles of boulders that we made our way below, still followed by our canine companion. 

At the head of valley, the monastery lies halfway up the slope of the mountain, and the path is lined with wise proverbs. We paid a man to let us inside, just as he was locking up, and he cackled, poking at us with his umbrella and saying something that was, at least to him, very amusing.

            The inside smelled musty, and every surface was covered with fabric or painted in bright colors – cushions on the benches, pointed tapestries on the pillars, a riotous altar around a golden buddha, who managed to look peaceful in spite of it all.

                      

            We were ushered out with the umbrella, and I was still photographing details of the exterior when I realized I was about to get left behind, so I rushed to follow the group down the hill, eyeing the rain coming over the mountain.  We couldn’t outrun it, so we trudged along, retracing our steps. By the time we emerged back at the camp, the sky was clearing yet again, and we paused on a grassy hillside, basking in the bright heat of the sun as it dried our clothes.

We made our own dinner that night – dumplings. Niema demonstrated each step, from forming the individual pillows of dough, to rolling them out into a circle, to filling it with minced meat with garlic and onion, to carefully pinching the top closed. There are different ways to form dumplings, involving different pinching techniques. We attempted three of these techniques. We also learned that if you host Lunar New Year celebrations for your family, you will need to make more than 1000 dumplings to make everyone happy.

Our hard work was devoured in minutes, and we lingered and chatted before heading to bed, the ger warmed by the wood-stove in the center, as a group of Mongolians partied a few gers over, their laughter ringing out until the morning hours.

Trans-siberian, Stage 1

June 18, 8:05am. 

The K3 train pulls out of Beijing Railway Station, shuddering to a start and officially beginning a 9000km adventure on the rails.

The sole inhabitants of Car #5 are two uniformed provodniks, 1 Russian tour leader named Bob, and six travelers who are now, for better or for worse, in this together.

The sky is blue behind the dusty haze, and we stand at the open hallway windows, glad for the cool breeze after abandoning our attempts to open our own window. (Luckily, we soon discover that the fan in our cabin is not just any fan, but an oscillating wonder that hits all corners of the cabin). 

The city sprawl is soon behind us, and the green train winds into a range of sandstone mountains, craggy, covered in a carpet of vivid green shrubs. Rivers wind in steep valleys, a lake spreads out under the railway bridge.

Tunnels keep suddenly plunging us into whirring darkness, cutting conversations in mid-sentence, before we burst back into warm sunlight and a new view.

Once through the mountains we emerge at the foot of a dammed lake, windmills turning on the other shore. Ranges of hills spread along the horizon. We move through surprisingly green fields – corn, fruit trees, even vineyards. Poplar trees bend in the wind, and though I can’t hear them, I know they are whispering.

Blocks of small houses, identical terra-cotta tiles.

Sun hats dot the fields.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t this.

Lunchtime brings our first encounter with the dining car – veggies and rice and a little mystery meat - not bad for a free meal. The other diners are mostly westerners, other adventure-seekers heading into the unknown. 

Standing at the window, face to the breeze; clouds feather against clear blue sky, hills and fields slide by, somehow barren and verdant all at once. I feel a sense of freedom as it’s all falling behind, nothing to do now but take it all in and fall back into the rhythm of the road… as unpredictable as it may be.

More gleaming rows of young corn, just about knee-high and right on schedule. Occasional villages and ugly industrial moments marred with smokestacks and broken windows.

A gradual flattening. Now windmills spin, cows graze on meager grass, and the sky fades out to the horizon, where a line of clouds billows and climbs… so much beautiful space.

June 19 

We pulled into Erlian, the last Chinese outpost, around 8:30pm last night. Six hours later, we pulled away from from the Mongolian side....

We gave our passports to the uniformed officers, then loitered on the platform in the deepening twilight as classical music danced through the cool air.

We reboarded to witness the changing of the ‘bogies’ – the wheels and undercarriage. It was quite the process: jacks were used to hoist the entire train, before the wheels were slid out and the new wheels slid and connected.

We watched from inside our car, sticking heads out the windows, as much for the ‘fresh’ air as a view of the process. 

It was 11pm as we left the shed, rejoined our engine, and headed across no-man’s land. I dozed in and out, hot and restless, as the process continued – passports given back, forms to fill out, passports handed over to a different set of uniforms, passports returned yet again. Each step seemed to take longer than the last, and underneath it all was the growing awareness that I really, really needed to pee. 

Finally, after 2am, we were on the move in Mongolia. Drunk with exhaustion, we were relieved when the toilets were at last unlocked and we were allowed to sleep. 

 We must have passed through the Gobi desert in the night, waking to a wide expanse - the Mongolian landscape sliding by – wide-open plains stretching away to the horizon, a carpet of short stubby grass. Rain falling in deep purple curtains behind us, blue sky showing in patches between layers of clouds.

Herds of sheep.

Two-humped camels.

Stout and sturdy horses.

Round white gers.

Occasional lonely houses. 

It was beautifully bleak, even as the landscape began to have more texture: low hills in the distance, the ground undulating softly, patches of yellow grass.

The low gray skies and spattering rain added to the bleak impression that UlanBator immediately gave. The roofs of houses were colored in bright shades, but around them were crooked fences, white gers, and dirt roads. As we drove from the station into the city center, we passed a wide array of buildings – crumbling to stately, gray to colorful. And kapaoke (karaoke) bars everywhere. It is a city that seems to be trying very, very hard.

As was our hotel. Unfortunately the water was off when we arrived. Apparently this is not entirely uncommon, as we learned from our guide, Niema, as he calmly discussed how he dealt with a month without hot water in his apartment while the pipes were being repaired.

Thus denied our chance to get cleaned up, we set off again in our tour van, splashing through puddles and getting the lay of the land, driving past the main square with its requisite horse statue.

We devoured a much-needed meal at a local cafeteria, where various combinations of meat and vegetables sizzled on animal-shaped metal plates and the local beer was surprisingly delicious.

Sitting on rug-covered steps, we enjoyed a cultural show, which was a perfect introduction to traditional Mongolian music and dancing….
Wild haunting tunes that made me think of wide-open spaces, 2-stringed instruments played with a bow or plucked like a guitar, horns and flutes, dances with a cheeky and flirtatious vibe. Fur boots, colorful costumes, ornate headdresses.  A limber contortionist, bending hot-pink and sparkles into unbelievable shapes; and throat singing, which was weird and wonderful all at the same time. Masked figures ended the show with a colorful parade.

In the next installment: an inside look at a ger, monasteries, bows and arrows.
More photos from this stage and beyond can be found at http://wicky.smugmug.com/.