Travels in Mongolia

by James Madsen

Oh Mongolia. Where to start? We came because Mongolia's in a period of transition--the end of Soviet rule (remembered somewhat nostalgically) and the start of a corrupt democracy (decried in all the papers all the time). Our first night was in Ulaanbataar--the capital--with lots of Soviet architecture--concrete buildings, stars, hammers and sickles, and so on.

Only the banks are truly new and striking. The hotel was nice--showers were hot which meant a lot by the end of the trip--but I felt like I did when I was in Russia. The thing had probably been bugged and felt stuck deep in the eighties, Russian-style. One thing that continued to crack me up over the course of the trip is that all beds are twins--there are no queen size beds which meant my parents couldn't sleep together. This frustrated my father, who tried to get a big bed everywhere we went, heh heh heh.

The next day we took off for the Gobi desert and the Three Camel Lodge. Many Mongolians are nomads who live in flat, round buildings--like a teepee of sorts--that can be transported on the back of a camel when they are rolled up. We know them as yurts in the U.S., the Mongolians call them gers. We stayed in gers for the remainder of the trip, of varying niceness.

All of them have some sort of covering for the ground, woven coverings on the walls, and a stove that is lit at night and the morning for heat. Three Camel lodge was great--they had showers and a full bar and cold beer and good food. The best beer in Mongolia, in my opinion, is Chenggis Khan (they love Mr. Khan and name everything after him...beer, hotels, vodka, and so on...he united Asia under Mongolia, Kublah was his grandson) but somehow Heinekin also makes its way out to the desert.

Chenggis is like Bud--if it's cold you can drink it without a problem. Most places we went had fridges but they were almost never plugged in...and then Chenggis tastes like warm Bud. Eh. But Three Camel Lodge was great--we went hiking in a valley with soaring rock ledges and an ice flow and we ran down dunes that were four stories high. That was how we broke the first camera--the sand got in the lens--the second camera had a software error and broke the next day...but we had another camera so we're okay, lots of photos were taken.

The Gobi is a big flat expanse of land with bones scattered throughout--camel legs and twisted horse skeletons and goat heads, all bleached white in the sun. It's barren but very beautiful, with almost no gers for as far as the eye can see and the biggest sky with the biggest clouds I've ever seen. The evenings are heaven--desert evenings with a wind that blows so it is the only thing you can hear in your ears--natural white noise that engulfs you and makes you feel calm, completely at ease.

Another day we rode camels to go see dinosaur bones. Camels are like horses but slower, and they are steered with only one rein, which is connected to a branch that's been driven through their nose. They were very cool and it was a fun day.

We also visited the first of many families. My mom brought gifts for the children, crayons and coloring books and balls, and the families always shared food with us. This was usually some sort of pastry made from sugar, flour, and water, and "milk products". Ah, milk products.

This is a wide spectrum--there's dried yogurt that tastes like hard sour feta, goat milk which is a little gamey, fermented mare's milk that tastes like sour yogurt plus vodka, vodka made from goat's milk which tastes like vodka plus the water from feta cheese, fermented camel's milk that I refused to try because it was clumpy and because I saw my dad's face after he tried it, sheep cream that tastes more or less like cow cream, and yak butter that tastes like a rich and mild cheese.


Main meals usually consist of some sort of mutton. Vegetables and fruits are rarely eaten and are hard to digest for the locals. It was interesting to give all of these foods a try...though by the end my siblings and I didn't want to see anything made from goat or sheep for a long time, unless it was some kind of a coat.

Speaking of coats--there's a lot of fur in Mongolia, and it's really cheap, but they didn't have fur coats out because it wasn't the winter. If you go in the winter you could get a great one.

We got a couple flat tires in the desert--more or less par for the course. (Better than the one car that got three flats all at once after the attempted murder...keep reading....) The roads are indistinguishable car tracks in the big big desert; I suppose a pile of rocks here and there tells the driver something that he can know after living in the area for a long time, but I would be terribly lost if I were driving, especially because everything is at least two hours away and more often four or five. This means it's normal to drive two hours, hike for one hour, then drive two hours back to the camp. Multiply that by twelve days and your vacation becomes largely a journey of journeys--and while life is about the journey and not the destination and so on, man, I missed the 101 and 280 more than once.

So then we went back to UB and then we had some more adventures when we tried to go to western Mongolia. I wrote this next part in bits and pieces while I was in Mongolia so it:s choppy but it should give you a feel for the, um, emotional state I was in:

Bone-jarring, teeth-grinding, body-wracking roads are a way of life in Mongolia; it will take you five hours to travel 100 miles and by the end you are poured over with dust--in you hair and your luggage and your mouth. This was a lesson well-learned when Mongolian Airlines canceled its flight to Uglii because they didn't have enough planes.

Day before we learned that our trip to Western Mongolia, the mountainous region famed for its eagle hunters (like U.S. falconry, but with eagles instead) would require not a three hour flight, but a two hour flight and five hour drive. Essential to understanding the demands of those five hours is picturing a Russian-made VW bus filled with the five of us, our driver, our guide, and our baggage...no air conditioning, windows that flop shut at any decent speed, a center of gravity that allows the car to lean far over any steep road edge, and in our case, badly tinted windows that made the whole thing strangely dark even at the height of the day.

Reading is next to impossible because the constant bouncing (no paved roads...no flat roads...no road signs...just piles of rocks in the middle of the vast expanse) moves your eyes about a half an inch up or down every three seconds, giving you the distinct pleasure of reading the same paragraph in Time Magazine three times. I would have a more positive outlook if it weren't for two scary incidents on the road, and about twenty hours in the car over the course of four days...while also forgoing hot showers, any control over our meals, and a bed to sleep in (sleeping bags baby).

Call me crazy, but it was a pretty strenuous time. Before I tell my scary stories, a quick note: we passed time deciding which of our friends could have made the trip without a total breakdown. The list was short--you can ask me if you were on it but I'll probably lie to you if you do.