Must-See Mongolia

Mongolia is a spectacular country with some of the most generous hospitality and unique experiences you could ever hope to enjoy.

We're back in the capital of Ulaan Baatar after an amazing 10 day trip into the Mongolian countryside. I'll start by saying that the hallelujah chorus stuck up as we drove back into the city in the knowledge that a hot shower and change of clothes was in our immediate future. The last 10 days have been pretty full on, we have been sleeping on ger floors at night and by the end of the trip we had every Mongolian mammals manure over our trousers and half the Gobi desert in our hair.

The night before we left on the tour we went to dinner with a group of people all departing on Gobi trips the following day. For some reason that completely baffled us later, someone suggested that we go to a Mongolian restaurant for a taste of the local cuisine. UB has a plethora of western restaurants so it's pretty easy to eat any kind of food. Instead of savouring a big pizza or burger for our "Last Supper" we headed off for a big cheap dinner of mutton and noodles. This proved to be a very big mistake to make the night before heading out into the Mongolian wilderness where days of mutton lay in wait for us.

The countryside of Mongolia is completely desolate. There is not a lot there at all at all. Of the 2 million people living in Mongolia, about 850,000 of these live in the capital, UB and everyone else lives in traditional gers in the countyside. One of the first things you notice about the countryside is the sheer emptiness of it. Traditional nomadic herdsmen keep goats, sheep, camels, horses and dogs. There are no such thing as fences, the animals forage for grass during the day .. the average Irish cow would probably last about 10 minutes before getting hungry. When the animals have eaten everything around the ger or if the season changes the family takes the ger down and moves it to a new location. It's a nomadic lifestyle where nothing much has changed (even the gers) in the last 800 years. All the families we visited were in their autumn places and getting ready to move to their winter location to endure months of below freezing temperatures. The gers themselves are a simple wooden frame supported by two central columns covered in felt with a smoke hole in the centre. Apparently one can be put up by two men in a couple of hours.

Joining us on the trip were our friends Roger and Cindy and our trusty guide/driver/translator/all around top guy Miga. We headed off in good spirits stopping at a supermarket to buy some presents for the families and extra supplies for ourselves (highly necessary stuff like Werthers Originals, tinned peanuts and noodles). We had only gone a little way along the road when we came upon a truck that had careered into the ditch at the side of the road. The boys got out to help unload it's over sized cargo of pine nuts and push/tow the vehicle back onto the road. Everyone helps each other out ... it's necessary because there aren't very many other cars on the roads so if you breakdown you can be there a long time. We had a fully paved road for about 4 hours the first day and then we turned off into a dirt track. We didn't drive on another paved road until the last day of the trip when we were about 30 minutes outside UB. Needless to say with so few cars on the road the road rules become a bit arbitrary - but one thing that made us chuckle was going past a truck parked up in the dead centre of the 2 lane road (on the only good bit of paved road going)....as we went past we could see the two guys asleep in the cab, seemed like a reasonable place to park for a nap...to them at least.




:: Erdene Zuu in Kharkhorin ::


We spent our first night in a tourist ger in the small city of Kharkhorin. Tourist gers are beginning to pop up near popular sights to provide comfort (read hard bed) accommodation for the increasing number of tourists visiting. A musician, in full Mongolian dress, called Baska knocked on our door after dinner to inform us that he would be coming around to our ger later to perform a concert. Baska also happens to be the local air traffic controller for the town - you wouldn't have guessed it in a million years! All the other tourists from the gers around us crowded into our little ger. To be honest it was a bit infuriating because they were all on their day 9 of their trips going the opposite direction and they smelt. They also sat up on our nice beds in their bare feet and didn't make any excuses for it. By day 5 we would feel the same. The concert was great, Baska was master of numerous Mongolian instruments, an expert throat singer and knew lots of songs about horses (Mongolia's most precious animal) The concert became an extended event after a bottle of vodka was produced ... it turned out that Baska was a sing for your supper kinda guy. Miga, our guide also surprised us by pulling out a flute and singing some duets with Baska.

:: Air traffic controller by day ... ::

Our family ger experiences were a dive off the deep end into a world of the unknown. We pulled up to a family ger and all clambered out and in the door making sure to enter and move clockwise around the space. The doors are tiny and at some point we all whacked our head on the way in much to the amusement of all the families. Once welcomed inside the ger we would sit on the floor and drink some tea (watery milk with some tea stalks and salt in it) and eat some Aaruul (curdled milk, dehydrated and thoroughly dried in the air and sun).


A busy family ger is a far cry from the plush tourist gers.
The more well off families (less than half of the ones we stayed with) had satellite TV and a light running off a car battery.... in every case these families were highly addicted to soaps beamed from Korea! Each family we stayed with was very different, all were extremely interested in us all, our countries and what we thought of Mongolia. One surprising aspect of the nomadic family life was the importance they placed on education. All children over 7 years were sent away to live in the nearest village so that they could attend school. This leaves families without an all important pair of extra hands, we also met a little boy who was too young to go to school along with his older brothers and sisters and so felt lonely as the only kid around for miles.
The family gers are all laid out the same way. The doorway always faces south. The khoimer, which is directly opposite the door, is where valuable objects are stored or displayed, as well as a small Buddhist shine. Most families also keep a collage of photographs of family at the back of the ger. There is a dung fired cooking stove in the middle of the floor, some families have a bed each side some families sleep on the floor. The male area is on western or left side of the ger. Here a man keeps his bridles, Airag (fermented mare's milk) and Arkhi. Women traditionally have the eastern side of a ger, where they keep kitchen utensils and their belongings.

:: The Mongolian horses are small but very strong (proof sitting 2nd from right) ::

The Mongolian people use EVERY part of the animal ... there is no such thing as waste . As water is precious it is used sparingly. People drink milk 24X7 .. horse's milk, sheep's milk, goats milk camels milk. Their diet consist of noodles, lots and lots of mutton and horse meat. Often times breakfast, lunch and dinner are the same meal. Women take great pride in making Airag, the fermented mares milk. Heaving with live bacteria this is sure to toughen any digestive system up.

One family we stayed with held the title of having award winning Airag (from the local show) ...always good to sample the gold standard beverages! The women work hard milking the goats and horses mulitple times a day, looking after children and cooking the meals. The girls in our group were put to work milking the horses and goats and making the dinner while the boys relaxed. Ok ... well once they had to cut some wood and carry a fence.

Our ten day trip of 2000KM looped around the must see spots of Mongolia including the awesome Gobi desert sand dunes, Flaming Cliffs and Eagle valley. The highlight was without doubt climbing the towering sand dunes of the Gobi desert. We arrived there at sunset to see the sun spectacularly disappear behind the dunes. Waking the next morning to a gloriously sunny day we scaled the 250 meter high dunes and hiked along the ridges at the top. It was an incredible experience. The dunes form very steep sides, looking very much like snow on a mountain. The wind at the top was whipping and kept challenging your balance as you inched along the sharp ridge lines. Some of the sand that is windswept was firm enough to hold your weight if you managed to put your foot down flat, other times it was like climbing straight uphill in porridge. The climb up was hard, the walk along the top was exhilarating, the run straight down was a great rush after the hard work.
Most of the tours are done in big Russian vans that look like duplo lego cars. They are notorious for breaking down and apparently you have to stop every couple of hundred kms to let the engine cool down and start up the engine a couple of times during the night to prevent fluids from freezing. Our van turned out to be a 10 year old Mitsubishi so it was plush in comparison! Suspension is all important on the atrocious roads. Well not so much roads as car tracks through grassland, rivers and mountain passes. Miga had an incredible sense of direction, working only off landmarks and contours (and directions from a few friendly horsemen along the way ;-) ).

One of the challenges was finding where his friends Ger was pitched when we went looking to stay...they are all white and most are dotted away from sight of the roads.

Our vehicle only broke down twice .. a puncture in the middle of the Gobi desert turned out to be a cracked swing arm. Miga managed to MacGyver himself out of the situation which was just as well because we hadn't seen nor didn't see a car for the rest of the day.

:: Russian Van ::

We went to a village the next day to find a welder .... some creative wiring was used to connect up the welding machine to the towns power lines (direct from the generator). Doesn't look particularly safe!

We trundled through a couple of the local provinces main villages on our way around the South of the country. We would stop to pick up some supplies at the local markets. If you ever get the chance, grab yourself some fresh pine nuts, everyone here munches them when they are in season (cracking the kernals from the husk in their mouth). One thing that added colour to these markets were the surprising find of outdoor pool halls, basically 6 or so tables surrounded by the obligatory youths...

Thanks to our guide Miga we had an incredibly memorable and authentic experience of Mongolian life. We even got to taste a marmot- acquired on the black market at a roadside cafe-ger (seemingly they are not meant to be hunted anymore)

:: Miga and our trusty Mitsubishi ::

:: The Marmot (deceased) ::

We really enjoyed our time in Mongolia, it was a privilege to have spent time quality time with all the families. Each night we would drive, sometimes for miles looking for a family. We would pull up to a random ger and the family would welcome us in and give us food and their floor to sleep on for the night, it was an overwhelming display of hospitality and generosity which is a rarity these days in most places in the world. The Mongolian people carry on their traditional simple nomadic way of life surviving harsh conditions. As television and mobile phones penetrate the wilds of Mongolia (ahead of roads and running water) one has to wonder how many more centuries this way of life will exist for.

As I said at the beginning ... a hot shower, de-sanding and a couple of nights in a softbed back in UB was welcomed by all. Following the trip we chilled out in UB for a couple of days, enjoying some of the..ahem... imported cuisines before jumping our train for the last hop of our journey that begun in St Petersburg...through the Great Wall into Beijing.