Boots on the Loose

It took around twenty six hours on the Trans-Mongolian express to get from Beijing, across the eastern edge of the Gobi Desert, and to Ulan Batar, Mongolia’s capital city.

Ulan Batar is an awesome capital city. I might actually put it in my top ten favourite capital cities. Somewhere around number ten, I’m imagining.

The train ride up was wonderful. Too short, in fact. It was shoulder season, and as well we were going the less popular direction of west to east. And so we nearly had the entire train car to ourselves.

It was REALLY interesting at the border because the track gauge is different between China and Mongolia. And so the train undergoes what is called a “bogey change”. Which means a few hours are spent lifting every single train car off their wheels (bogies) and swapping them to a different set. Wild.

We stayed in Ulan Batar at a hostel called “Zaya” which is run by a couple guys named Anand and Amar. This is the place to be if you ever go to Ulan Batar. Dirt cheap, and spic and span clean. Truly one of the best hostels I’ve been to anywhere.

With three weeks to spend in Mongolia, a trip back down to the Gobi desert was in order for at least part of it.

Forget this two to three thousand dollar tour business. Anand hooked us up with a driver and guide for around one hundred dollars a day. Divided by five people (two others were interested as well). Beautiful.

We would be gone for six days and five nights. We would see plains, mountains, livestock, sand dunes, canyons, and big skies. To name a few things.

There would be no internet the whole time. A true escape from the clutches of technology. It had been at least a decade since going that long without it.

I couldn’t wait.

Gobi Desert: Day One

It took a couple hours to get out of Ulan Batar. The population of the city is a paltry two million or less (paltry next to one of the Chinese cities we were recently in). So it doesn’t take long.

We transferred from one fucking awesome Russian van to a different, identical one and loaded up on supplies. We drove three to four hours south down some beautifully tarmaced road. We turned left at a turn off that only our driver had the ability to spot.

A good half hour of off roading to a nice canyon that was the edge of a big, inland sea about 10 million years ago. Very nearby we had our first “ger” (Mongolian yurt) experience. 

Generally when staying in gers in Mongolia, you stay with a family. You don’t actually stay in the ger they live in (although that is possible, but not common). They have guest ones setup instead. A bit like our airbnb cabins (l) at home, I suppose.

As well there are ger camps, but they are five to ten times the price. The gers we stayed in cost around five USD per night per person. Did I mention Mongolia is cheap, cheap, cheap to travel in??

All a ger is is a large, round tent with three to six beds lining the perimeter. And a dung-burning stove in the middle. The dung burns hot and fast and has a very faint smell to it.

In fact, after about the fifth night I finally figured out the familiarity of the dung-burning smell. On our trip through Ethiopia we visited a few of the tribes. Each one had a, shall we say… Incredibly strong scent to them. I’m now convinced, dung-burning is the base smell.

Detoxification Notes: Happy to go the day with my pocket computer powered down (because why use the word “phone” anymore, really…). Figured if I only turned it on while actively writing, it might last the whole time. Actually opened my book and read it before going to bed. How foreign.

Gobi Desert: Day Two

It was a relatively quick buzz back to the tarmac. A few hour’s drive to another turnoff. Perhaps an hour drive to the night’s gers.

The landscape was quickly becoming breathtaking. It is EXACTLY what you would expect to see. Big, wide grasslands with four wheel drive roads going every which way and not a sign or other sole for hundreds of miles. Both sides are flanked way off in the distance by mountain ranges.

Mongolia is in fact the most sparsely populated country in the whole world, if you look at people per square kilometre. It is the nineteenth largest country in the world, and only has three million people. Two of which are in Ulan Batar.

We drove perhaps ten minutes into the mountains from our ger to a place called Horse Camp. There is a three kilometre (or so) walk down a canyon which was still lined with (quickly melting) ice along the bottom. It was April after all.

The wind was absolutely howling. I would guess we were being pushed around by 100kph gusts. Literally, pushed around. In fact I would say it turned out to be the heaviest wind I’ve ever felt in my life.

Frozen rivers running below the ice we were standing on, rocks falling from the mountains above us, this is a place you would NOT be allowed to enter if we were in Canada. No way.

Back at the van we realized we had a bunch of ticks on us. Ugh. And every few hours someone would find yet another one. Jen found one in her hair a good twenty four hours later. Bastards.

The wind ended up howling all night long. It didn’t let up once. The temperature was down around zero as we got sprinkled with snow the next morning.

Apparently winter on the Mongolian steppe wasn’t quite through.

But it was no match for a toasty ger. Until the dung went out, that is.

The family that owned the night’s ger also owns a hundred or more very entertaining goats to watch. They farm them for their cashmere. 

Once a year during Spring time, each goat is painstakingly tied down. And upwards of one pound of fur is brushed out of their coats. Normally Mongolian cashmere wool is worth around forty dollars a kilo. But due to the less-than-ideal Chinese economy at the moment, it’s worth around twenty five dollars per kilo. Sad to see the little guys being so heavily affected by world economics.

As well there are Bactrian (double hump) camels everywhere raised for their fur. But it’s worth somewhere around a couple dollars per kilo.

Detoxification Notes: Turned the computer on for a couple hours to write. A lot of wondering what time and what day of the week it was throughout the day. But who really gives a shit in the end.

Gobi Desert: Day Three

It was another short buzz back to the good road. But the good road was unexpected for our driver: the Chinese have been busily paving a new one from the capital to the border. That rode wasn’t there the last time our driver was.

We stopped for supplies in a strange little town in the middle of nowhere. With the desert surroundings it was starting to feel more like being in the Middle East, not Mongolia.

A good few hours of very rough road after that, the distant sand dunes becoming larger and larger the whole drive. We setup shop at our next ger, then drove to the bottom of Mongolia’s tallest sand dune. And then climbed it.

Running down sand dunes is in my top three favourite things to do in the whole world. No joke. And this one did not disappoint.

But before you can run down a sand dune, you have to climb it. And actually this was probably the most challenging one I’ve ever climbed. I don’t know why. Perhaps the sand was that much finer. Or perhaps it was actually taller than the ones of the Sahara or Namib deserts. I would have to google it later to find out.

Ended the day with dinner prepped by the lady of the house. And then paid the neighbouring ger camp to have what would be the only shower of the excursion. Quite the treat.

Detoxification Notes: Started to really wonder if anything important had happened that I felt the need to know about. But really it had been a whopping two days without Internet. So almost certainly not. I noticed the night’s ger actually had wifi, incredibly. But opted to not connect to avoid the urge to go through emails while in the Gobi desert.

Gobi Desert: Day Four

Woke up early to do a morning camel ride into the desert. A wonderful way to start the day.

Last time we were on a camel, we endured the ride for an hour or two from the town of Douz out to the Sahara. With a Tunisian dude walking behind us wearing a leather jacket yacking on his cell phone the whole time.

This time was different. A very authentic lady from the place we were staying helped each of us saddle up. Tied us all in a line. Then saddled herself up in front. And away we went.

Nothing but the morning sun, a calm breeze, beautiful sand dunes in the distance, and silence. Oh, and some camel farts mixed in there too.

The day’s drive would be a shorter one. Perhaps an hour to a town where we stopped for lunch.

Mongolian food is exactly like the rumours, if you’ve ever heard rumours about Mongolian food. Pretty much all there ever is to eat is noodles with mutton. If you’re lucky there might be a beef option, and hopefully some soya sauce on the table.

Vegetables? Err… Good luck. Perhaps a soup will be on the menu. And if you’re lucky there’ll be a bit of potato with the mutton dumplings in the soup.

All that said, I’ve tasted far worse. Sometimes the mutton is actually decent. Easily doable for a week long stint.

Perhaps another hour or two from the town to the night’s destination. Which is another beautiful spot a cross between staying on the moon, and the Grand Canyon.

That particular area is rife with dinosaur fossils from around eighty million years ago. And in fact is the first place in the world that a dinosaur egg was ever found.

I somewhat decided that night during our evening sundowner ritual… I think I want to be buried when I die and not cremated. One of the keys to life’s happiness is to do with leaving a legacy behind. And what better way than leaving something in the ground that may be around eighty million years from now. Like my femur.

Detoxification Notes: Becoming very comfortable and happy about lying in bed and reading a book before sleeping. Ended up having to borrow some juice from the ger’s solar panel as my battery was finally getting close to the end. And I really didn’t feel like going back to pen and paper and then having to type all this later.

Gobi Desert: Day Five

Easily the toughest day of driving. Left at the usual 9:30 a.m. but didn’t get to our destination until around 8 p.m. Pretty beat up feeling from the four hundred kilometres or so of off-roading.

Picture starting in one of the comers of your favourite prairie province or state. And then driving the perimeter of it in the back of a van. Without using roads. Or seeing hardly anyone at all. Like the year is 1816, not 2016. This excursion is sort of like that.

Did a pit stop around lunch at some ancient Buddhist monasteries that were destroyed by the Russian communists when they took over in 1937. They killed pretty much all the Buddhist monks in the country at the same time. No need for commentary there. But a beautiful, peaceful site nonetheless.

Eventually pulled up to a family busily harvesting their goats’ cashmere. The sun almost setting behind us. They had a guest ger we could use, but unfortunately it only had two beds in it (there were five of us). A bit desperate, we took them up on it and made due. Three of us on the floor. I had a fine sleep in the end.

As it turned out, that was easily the best, most authentic ger we stayed in. Man, the Mongolians are kind and welcoming. Obviously hosting guests is lucrative for them. But actually I don’t think that’s what it is about. I think it was always like this. I think you always could have knocked on someone’s door here, and they would have let you stay in their house. In fact, our guide always stayed in the hosting family’s ger with them. None of whom she had ever met before.

It was fun watching our driver try to find our destination that night. We would be bumping along, swerving this way and that on the dirt roads that constantly come and go. A motorbike would crest over the hill in front of us. Our driver would come to a stop and turn off the van. They would come to a stop beside us.

Out of the van we would pop to stretch the legs and watch the action. Our driver would offer him a cigarette. A map would sometimes get drawn in the dirt on the ground. Or perhaps pointing and gesturing would be all that was necessary.

It would sure be nice if we could move back in this direction a little. Such community. But I don’t think it will happen without a revolution of some sort.

Detoxification Notes: Didn’t touch the computer all day. And didn’t really think about the outside world at all either.

Gobi Desert: Day Six

Said our goodbyes to the hosting family and drove to the canyon right around the corner. Sat and took in yet another moment of peace and serenity.

A couple final hours of off-roading and out we popped onto the modern day terra firma. A couple hours straight north on tarmac and we found ourselves back in Ulan Batar!

Detoxification Summary: I feel great right now. Moving forward my goal is to no longer look at my pocket computer while lying in bed at night. I will go back to reading books instead. Books make you a better person. Watching clips on the internet does not. Neither does playing Bejewelled.

How about this: if I spent fifteen minutes reading every night instead of doing what I do (nothing, really), I would have read for 730 hours over the last eight years. About the time since I got my first pocket computer. At around eight hours per book, that’s nearly one hundred books I could have read instead!

I would also like to keep email checking to perhaps two times a day. At most. Facebook and the like? Sure, of course. But I need to implement a program to curb the infinite scroll death spiral. Ick.

The bottom line is, a better balance will be found. Thank you Gobi Desert.