We arrived
early doors in what is officially the coldest capital city in the world, Ulaanbaatar, and were met
at the station by what was - after plenty dour Russian receptions along the way
- a very welcome warm smile from our lovely Mongolian guide, who said we could
call her Anna... I think our chances of ever pronouncing her name right were
slim.
The man himself
Statue of one of the Mongolian nation's founders: Clearly not impressed by this building
We went for
breakfast, changed some money (me changing from Roubles to Mongolian Togrog and
trying to get my head around another bewildering exchange rate - my evil maths
teacher at school was right, I really should have realised that despite
calculators etc, you can't beat good old mental arithmetic) then headed to the
Gandan (Gandantegchinlen Khiid = 'The Great Place of Complete Joy') monastery,
which was indeed great - lots of holy buildings with different functions, some
with young monks chanting, and some where they were meant to be working to
learn texts, but were mostly joking around having fun.
But sadly
at the busy entrance to the main temple, which houses a huge gilded Buddha God
statue it was difficult to be reflective since (as we'd been warned may be the
case) pickpockets were clearly operating around us with lots of carefully
subtle scanning of our pockets while we weren't looking, and the occasional
'accidental' grab at peoples' pockets.
After that
we (now about a 12 strong group having joined others who had stopped in
different places) drove out of the city and were soon on dusty tarmac, and then
after an hour or so onto sandy tracks before arriving at the Elstei ger camp.
The camp
was great, with friendly and fun Mongolian staff, but although we were staying
in gers, I can't pretend that we were living on the steppe in the way that the
nomads do. We had 4 beds with mattresses
to each wood fuelled stove equipped ger, and running water with showers and
flushing loos in a communal block which also had a big dining area.
That
evening Anna introduced us to some games involving the anklebones of
sheep. About half the size of a cork,
they can be used a bit like dice as they'll always land on one of four sides,
representing (as the top part of the bone resembles them) horses, goats, sheep
or camels. We played a game involving
flicking the same animal type into each other to win points with maybe sixty
anklebones.
Down it comes
...and off it goes (there were two bundles this size for the whole ger)
The next
day Anna had lots of Mongolian activities lined up, including archery,
dismantling a ger, wrestling and horse riding, and we visited a traditional
Nomad family (who were now staying put near the camp). There we tried traditional nomad's food, most
of them based on mare's milk and straight off a large central stove. Some were very nice, others with salt and fat
weren't so hot. The fermented mare's
milk (apparently 2% abv) wasn't bad at all.
Having met Dave, a Welsh guy coming the other way, in Irkutsk, who had battle scars from an attempt at mongolian wrestling, I decided that I wasn't man enough to face the challenge, but more than half of the guys were willing to have a go. BTW, the interesting outfit is like that because women used to enter (and sometimes win) wrestling competitions, so the outfit was changed long ago to leave no doubt re. the gender of competitors.
As a man (just), I did get to participate in the eagle dance ceremony that happens before and after each round. The guys above fought bravely, but were no match for the Mongolians, who wrestled around for a bit, then lifted up the challengers, spun them around, and dumped them
on the ground. For the final, we saw how it's done properly.
Once our
horses had been caught and rounded up, we were told a few basics - mainly not to
stroke or pet them at all, and that the way to make them go was to say 'CHO'
quickly. The youngest amongst us, Steve
decided to go riding despite being badly allergic to horses, and risked his
horse thinking that every 'atischoo' from his frequent sneezes was a command to
speed up!
Gengis Khan had his men trained to ride at speed, while firing arrows backwards at enemies - that was my attempt to do the same, but riding at (low) speed and with a camera!
But it
wasn't a problem - apart from a few surprising occasions, the horses basically
did what they wanted and ignored our attempts to tell them what to do. Keiran, on his yellow horse (Gengis Khan
always rode on a yellow horse, so they're considered the best in Mongolia) was
the only one of us who was in control, and cruised around and ahead of us as
our horses plodded along stubbornly. But
there was some argy-bargy, my horse would not let the majority of the others
past us, and frequently chomped at the necks or backsides of other horses that
he didn't like.
That night
the Mongolian vodka flowed maybe a bit too easily, some very sore heads in the
morning when we had to reluctantly head back into the smog of UB, ready to
catch our final Trans-Mongolian train, destination Beijing.
This train
only goes weekly, so was much more full of tourists than the others, with
people and groups I'd met on earlier parts of the journey from Moscow
converging to cross the Gobi Desert and into China. As above, the Mongolian restaurant car on this last train was by far the most fancy, but the Samovars weren't anything special...
At some
points so much dusty sand made it into the train that we could see it like a
fog in our compartment, and I felt the occasional sandy crunch between my
teeth, but eventually the clouds of sand cleared before sunset, and we went on
to Zamyn-Uud, the last Mongolian stop, and our cue to fill in more Mongolian
forms and a bunch of Chinese forms too.
Then we
rolled over the border past armed guards, before arriving at Erlian to hand
over our passports and forms, then went backwards and shunted around for an
hour while the carriages were disconnected one by one and moved into a huge
warehouse.
This was
where the carriages had to be jacked up individually (with us all still on
board) to have the wheels / bogies changed to allow for the slightly narrower
guage Chinese tracks. An incredible
logistics operation, which didn't need many engineers, but it took several
hours before the carriages were re-connected and we chuntered back to Erlian to
go through Chinese customs.
So getting
to bed between 1 and 2am, we slept most of the way through Inner Mongolia, and
woke up to dramatic scenery as the train rumbled along steep valleys in Heibei
province. Eventually we arrived at the
end of the Trans-Mongolian line in Beijing,
wondering if the low visibility which we'd had since about 10am was due to low
cloud, or the smog.
A good find by Ewan:
