Travel experience in Mongolia

Braving Mongolia unguided: My girlfriend and I recently fled the smog and noise of Ulaanbaatar, taking a sabbatical out to the modern town/ghost of the ancient capital: Kharkhorin.

The tourist guidebooks, local travel-agencies and, well, most of everyone else you may care to ask seem to suggest (with one beady eye firmly on extreme profitability I should imagine) that independent travel within Mongolia is both fool-hardy, if not nigh-on-impossible. It isn’t of course; it just requires patience and a bit of physical flexibility. We found this out for ourselves, pulling out from Dragon Bus-Station some four hours later than scheduled, 19 bodies deep in a twelve-seater mini-bus, piled high with luggage, children and livestock.

The old adage “it’s not the destination, but the journey that counts” has never been more appropriate than in Mongolia. During the nine-plus hours it took us to reach our destination, we witnessed some of the most spectacular driving, bravery, good-humored banter and incredible attention to public service from the driver and his assembled load. Stopping off for lunch in the one-horse town of Sansor, I observed a gentleman passed out, stone-cold drunk in the saddle of that one horse, the bewildered beast trotting around in large undulating circles, awaiting some sort of order or command. It never came though and we left horse and rider aimlessly circling a field as we bumped off into the desert.

Arriving at dusk, as the falling sun set ablaze the monolithic, stupored walls of the beautiful Erdene Zuu Monastery, we drove in loops around the town, dropping passengers and their cargo door-to-door, until only we remained in the bus. Through the internationally recognized language of pointing and facial gesticulation, our driver asked us to where we were to be dropped off, to which we replied, in all honesty “Um, we don’t know?!” whereon we were promptly dropped off at the nearest guest-house and told he’d be returning to UB three days later if we required a lift back? We gladly accepted and spent our time reveling in this almost saintly level of service and the other-worldly Mongol Landscape.

Written by David Bevan
THE UB POST