Mongolia: where weird things happen

While I was travelling through Russia, I experienced smooth changes as I moved along. When I arrived in Mongolia however, the change was big and sudden. For ten days, I would keep thinking “what the fuck?!” (pardon my French) in all kinds of ways. These are the things that I won’t forget soon.

The randomness of Ulan Bator

The capital of Mongolia doesn’t have a sightseeing reputation, but I was very curious to check it out anyway. It turned out to be one of the weirdest looking cities I’ve ever seen. Standing on Sukhbaatar Square, the heart of the city, I looked at the enormous static parliament building, where a statue of a sitting Genghis Khan was staring right back at me. On both sides of the square, pink, green and yellow neoclassical buildings were minding their own business. Behind me, a super modern mini Manhattan rose above the city. In its shade, the grey skeleton of an unfinished apartment block. This random mix of styles, old and new, is what the entire city looked like to me, with some lost temples and gers added here and there. Not beautiful, but so fascinatingly weird.

Sukhbaatar Square

Rain in the Gobi desert

“What should I pack for the Gobi trip?” I ask the hostel lady who I booked my 6 day-tour with. I’m planning on taking the absolute minimum so that I can leave the weight of my big backpack behind. Hiking boots, wet wipes… “Should I take my jacket?” I ask.
“Oh no no! It’s very hot in the Gobi, you won’t need a jacket! Maybe just a sweater.”

Flash forward two days later. My tour mates and I are hiking down the beautiful Yol valley while rain is pouring down from the dark grey skies above. My sweater is doing a really bad job at keeping me dry. When you’re soking wet and cold, it can get a bit hard to embrace the moment. But then we arrive in our ger, our Mongolian host lights the stove, we put on dry clothes and let the other ones dry on a rope. Hot soup is served while we’re playing cards. And just like that, a situation that started off quite badly is eventually turning into one of the highlights of the week.

The Yol Valley, not long before it started raining

Driving through the Gobi desert in a van that needs fixing

I really liked the four wheel drive van that was taking us through large parts of the Gobi, mostly offroad. Every day, we would be shaken all over for hours in a row, as we were heading to our next destination. I’m not sure how much the van itself was loving all of it. Every time we stopped for a break, the driver crept under the car to start fixing it… He must have done a good job though, because the van never actually broke down, lucky us!

Our van at one of the ger camps

On the menu: mutton!

Most of the days, we had lunch in one of the few villages that would pop up out of nowhere in the middle of the desert. Our tour guide Jane would translate some of the menu items or suggest some dishes. Dumplings with mutton meat, noodles with mutton, vegetable soup with… mutton. On the last day, one of my tour mates made Jane translate almost the whole menu: mutton, mutton, mutton.
“Is there any dish without mutton?” he asked. Miraculously, Jane found a dish with chicken.
“Jane, have you ever seen a living chicken here in Mongolia?” was his next question. Jane seemed unable to answer, so my tour mate decided to go for mutton again anyway.

Staying in ger camps

In the Gobi, we stayed in a different ger camp every night, which was a very interesting experience.

Upon arriving, we would first drink milk tea with the host family. Sometimes, we were offered snuff. This is a very strong smelling substance, of which you are supposed to wipe some on your hand and sniff it. And then hope you don’t start coughing or sneezing. Another time, we got to try their typical goat cheese – well, sun dried goat yoghurt actually (my tour mate suggested it could be patented as ‘GoYo’).

After this meeting, we were shown our ger for the night, where we would each sleep in a sleeping bag on a hard bed. After enjoying dinner cooked by our guides, we played cards. Even when it got dark, thanks to the light bulb in the ger, connected to a car battery. Tooth brushing was an outside activity – when you rely on bottled water for this, you suddenly realize how much you really consume otherwise when using a tap…!

Going to the toilet at night is a pain in the ass (eh, not literally though, luckily): too dark, too far. But when the sky is cloudless, the Milky Way shining brightly over the desert night makes you thankful that you actually had to go.

Milk tea and cookies in the ger

One of the gers… and the toilet in the background

My Gobi crew

24 hours of sickness

So there it is: my first (and hopefully last) travel sickness story. I’m not sure if the aforementioned mutton had something to do with it, or if it was the vodka orange I had the evening before, but I didn’t feel all that well on the second last day of the tour. I barely ate at lunch and just smelling the food made me feel nauscious. Upon arriving at the ger camp, I went to rest a bit on my bed. But then my stomach called, not in a good way. I ran off to the toilet. Interesting detail: at the ger camps, the toilet is a wooden cabin around a hole in the ground, 50 to 100 metres away from the camp. I made it though, and felt instantly better aferwards. That’s when I decided that it should be ok to participate in the horse riding trip we were about to take.

You guessed it: it was not ok.
I had asked Jane to explain the situation to the horse guide, just to be sure I could get off the horse anytime if I needed to. She did, and told me I would just need to call him (“Char” was his name) and say ‘stop’. Once on the horse, I realized that the constant stumbling was turning everyting inside of me upside down. After 20 minutes, my stomach alarmed me for the second time that day.
“Char!” I yelled, “Char! CHAR!”
The Mongolian guide turned around and looked at me. I said ‘stop’ but he didn’t react. When I tried to get off the horse, he understood, hurried of his’ and helped me get off mine. I could run no more than 2 metres before my body decided to stop me right there. After this embarassing moment, I decided to walk back to the camp. I was definitely done with horse riding for that day.

I was lying on my bed and even the water I had drunk, made me feel awful. And there it was again, I could hardly believe it. I started making my way to the toilet cabin, when suddenly I was being followed. A Korean woman from another tour, who was also staying at the ger camp, was running behind me, yelling at me.
“Are you going to the toilet! Wait! Let me go first! My phone! In the toilet!” I wasn’t even listening, something about her phone, she forgot it there, so what? I wasn’t going to steal it! I started walking faster, but she kept awkwardly following me and yelling the same thing. I had to lose her, and quickly, so I turned around and said: “I have to throw up!” She completely ignored my statement.
“My phone! The toilet!” I saw her running to the cabin after I stopped, I hadn’t made it. She came back carrying her phone wrapped in toilet paper. Back in my ger, I explained this strange incident to my tour mates. They had some interesting information on what had actually happened.
“Her phone had apparantly fallen into the toilet hole… She’s still cleaning all the shit off of it.”

Otherworldly landscapes

The Gobi has unbelievable landscapes, and they were quite varied, too. I will let the pictures speak for themselves…

‘White Stupa’

Khongor sand dunes (with camel!)

Khongor sand dunes (with me!)

‘Flaming Cliffs’

Did you know…

…Ulan Bator probably holds the record for most karaoke bars in one city? It seems like there is at least one in every street. They are everywhere! And of course, I could not let this occasion pass me by. I went to a karaoke with a hostel-formed crowd, and on my last evening I went again, this time with a bunch of Australian expats.

…no alcohol is sold nor served in Mongolia during the elections? I never found out why. But you can guess I found out it was election time while I was there…

…the money is worth almost nothing? 1 Mongolian Tugrik equals 0.00037 Euro. Yet, the biggest existing banknote is 20,000. So paying for my tour in Mongolian money left me piling up banknotes as I never did before!

Next story:
Beijing: my reset week
More about the Transsiberian:
From Moscow to Beijing: life on the Transsiberian train
The Transsiberian: crossing Siberia
The Transsiberian, from city to city