11 Days, 1 shower, 2 Frenchies, 1 van, 3 wheels, Infinite space and time.

To describe Mongolia I would 3 words: Big, Beautiful and Boring. That was my experience. Please don't take these as any sort of fact, they are just the opinion expressed by one tourist on a 2 week vacation. Which I think is why I was bored. I came from a place, Busan, South Korea, where I was going out almost every night, going to the beach and to bars and baseball games. Going hiking, riding my bike, playing volleyball. Sitting out in the street drinking cheap beer and eating cheap, tasty BBQ. I was having a great time when I left, and getting to Mongolia and traveling the country was a big change. If I did this trip 1 year ago I would have been in heaven...like a pig in shit. Then I was in the groove of traveling independently to out of the way places and seeking solitude. But now I am used to companionship and having a full social plate.

So yes, I did think Mongolia was beautiful and it is a country that still retains much of it's cultural identity. Just out in the countryside, be prepared to entertain yourself a bit, or get used to talking to the yaks.




Part of the reason I was so enthralled with Mongolia was the clouds. I'd see these photos of clouds that look like they are just lined up in the sky for you to jump from cloud to cloud. And they go on infinitely towards the horizon. Every sunny day looked like that in Mongolia. I'd just look out the window of our van towards the sky as we bumped along the bouncy road and say, "that's awesome."


Part of the little tour I joined was a 1 hour free camel ride. Yippee!! I've ridden 1 humped camels before for 3 days in India. That was not comfortable. But 2 humps wasn't too bad. You just plop down in between the humps and off you go. But as you'll notice, my camels humps were lacking. They just sagged over to one side and weren't very graceful.


Another exciting part of the tour I joined is that it came with 2 french people! Emily and Jeremy were their names. They are on a 10 month tour of Asia. In order to make a trip in Mongolia, you pretty much have to join a tour. I showed up on Sunday afternoon, met Jeremy and Emily on Sunday evening at the UB Guesthouse. I convinced them the Gobi desert was too hot and boring, they should take a tour of northern Mongolia with me. And they did. We left Tuesday morning with our van, guide, driver, meals and lodging, all for 42$ a day...not too bad I think.

They were nice enough and we talked about some of the same places we both traveled too. But they...or I should say Emily asked a lot of questions to the guide. Questions such as: "When can we make zee horse?" "Is it possible to make zee horse here." "We really want to make zee horse, we can make zee horse tomorrow, no?" They really wanted to GO ON A HORSEBACK RIDE as we say in UuuuMerca. We eventually did "make zee horse" a few days later and it brought one of them to tears.


Rounding out our Motley Crew was the guide and driver, Our drivers name was Auggie and our guides name is...I forget, that's how memorable she was. I won't mince words here. she was pretty crappy at her job after about day 3. And I know a thing or two about being a crappy trip leader, I used to be one. She gave us lots of good info the first few days and answered all the Frenchies questions politely, but after a few days it seemed she had to point out all the nice things she was doing for us and her tone of voice just seemed like anytime she spoke she was trying her hardest to be nice. It's hard to describe, but it was obvious she wasn't really digging us. I stayed cool till about the last 2 days. But by then her tone and attitude were getting pretty tough to handle. We figured any question we asked could be the one to send her over the handle bars into full meltdown. The Frenchies lost patience with her a few days earlier.



Every night we slept in a ger, the the traditional nomadic home of the Mongolian family, dating back to the days of Genghis Khan. They are very spacious inside, with room for 6 beds or so, a table and a stove. A more traditional ger that is actually lived in has more of a kitchen, and tables. For sleeping you roll your mattress on the ground. Now a days most gers have solar panels and satellite tv. and sometimes you can even get cell phone service if your ger is in the right spot.


Part of being a tourist was having one of our hosts come into our ger in the morning and make a fire. We were very thankful for that, since it would get down to freezing some of the nights. They would also make a fire in the evening. Most of our nights were spent in the ger, the 2 Frenchies and I, reading, playing cards, drinking vodka, drying our wet clothes, napping and staring at the ceiling.


Traditional robes, like the ones these gentleman are sporting are still very common in rural Mongolia. They are made of silk and called "deels."


Some of the traffic passing through a rural city at lunch time. It was heavier than normal this day. people from nearby villages had come to town for some traditional wrestling and horse racing. Unfortunately were on the tour and couldn't stick around for the festivities.


This is an example of a Mongolian toilet. it's hard to have plumbing when there's not much running water. They just dig a whole, put some boards over it and call it a squatter.


By now the tour has taken us up to it's northern terminus, before it returns back to UB. We are at Khosval Lake, a massive body of water, north of 50 degrees latitude and near the Russian border and Lake Baikal.

Up on the lake shore I came across these 4 men collecting downed wood. It was a very old school operation. They would drag the log near the truck, then cut it into smaller pieces with something they call a chainsaw, though it looked like nothing I'd ever seen. Then 3 guys would roll the log up 2 other diagonal logs used as a ramp. They filled their truck twice this way. I took a few photos, but the older fella started saying something in Mongolian, something like, "look at this punk foreigner with his camera. We're out here working our ass off and all he wants to do is take a picture." So I put down the camera and helped then load some logs for a few minutes. I was tired very quickly.





As I said earlier, we finally did, "make zee horse." and it was a memorable experience. We decided to make a 2 day trip up through the mountains and along the shoreline of Lake Khosval. in order to do this trip he had to hire a horse guide, as well as pack horse. Though the cost was minimal. The first day was pretty standard. We trotted and walked with our horses until we reached a nice ger camp on the lake. We hungout there and explored the lake front, relaxed and enjoyed the nice weather.

The return trip back was much more adventurous. We awoke to very threatening skies. It probably would have been a good idea to get an early start avoid as much of the rain as possible. But in Mongolia time as we know it doesn't really exist. There are no clocks and watches. People just go somewhere or do something when they feel the time is right. And for our guide the time wasn't right, or he wasn't drunk enough, I'm not sure. he spent the morning drinking Korean beer and fermented horse milk, called airag. By the time we departed at 11am there was a solid drizzle that would persist for the next 5 hours. 5 hours that we would spend on the back of a horse trekking up and down the hills that skirt the edge of Lake Khosval. By the 4th hour Emily was in tears. Her and Jeremy's fake North Face jackets from Nepal and China just weren't keeping them warm. She no longer wanted to "make zee horse." She wanted to be in her ger with a warm fire crackling, which was understandable. It wasn't a very fun ride. Our guide kept himself energized with an endless supply of Korean beer that he would pull out of his robe. I went into some sort of meditative haze where I wasn't cold, but I wasn't warm. i just told myself I wasn't uncomfortable, I wasn't tired and I wasn't hungry...and I wasn't French.


Mongolians are damn good basketball players. I see them playing all the time. They are better than Indians and Nepali's atleast, but not as skilled s the Chinese. Koreans are pretty good too lots of passing and teamwork, and no one is tall. Anyways, I hopped in and played 2 on 2 with these guys. The tall guy had moves like Hakeem Olajuwon. The rim was made of re-bar and tended to be a little bouncy. The court had a few pieces of yak dung on it that could mess up a bounce pass. But that didn't matter, they were still smiling and playing hard, and I had a great time playing with them. Basketball is still basketball, and we still had to put the round ball through the round hoop.


At the top of most hills you'll see Buddhist markings like this. They are religious. But they are also used in the old days as navigational points, before Russian jeeps and motorcycles. All the blue ribbons represent the sky. There were also a few bottles of vodka and horse skulls placed on the monument.


The next few photos are just a selection, or a basic representation of all the wide open beautiful landscapes that graced these eyes for 11 days. For days we drove through some of the longest, greenest most untouched lands I've ever seen. And the great thing is, that the majority of the time the land belongs to the people, the nomadic herder, the guy with a ger and few hundred goats and sheep. Rarely would we see a fence, and it was probably there to keep the animals out of their small little yard.

The best analogy I could come up with was this: Mongolia reminds me of Montana 150 years ago. (Not that I was ever there.) When the native people still roamed the land and chose what to do with it. It was a time before the USFS, NPS, BLM, DNR, WWF, EPA, barbed wire, and fashionable ranches for Billionaires. Mongolia is millions of acres of open land and sky. Free for people to roam and make a living off.







Mongolia is mainly Buddhist country, though it was banned when it was a communist country under the wing of the USSR. There were still temples and landmarks around the country from previous centuries. One of those temples was the Amarbayasgalant Monastery. (I won't be typing that word again.) It was built in the early 1700's. And it recently received an infusion of cash-probably from Richard Gere, as they are building new dormitories, a golden Buddha full of rice and a large white stupa. This large white stupa looks exactly like the Buddnhath Stupa in Kathmandu, by the way. This stupa, in Mongolia is up on a hill with an amazing view of the monastery and valley.

A quick little tangent, This valley was amazing. I set off on a little jog, towards the setting sun. I found a nice jeep/horse track that rolled along a river and took me deeper into the trees and meadows. I ended up running for 90 minutes and returning after sunset. The endorphins I felt made up for the sticky dirty feeling I had after not showering for 10 days.


Sometimes when a horse dies and it's a strong or special horse, the owner will cut off its head and leave on a hill top. There, the vultures and scavengers will pick its skull clean. This is called a sky burial and it is done only for the best horses.


Earlier in the tour we visited the Karakorum, (which means black rock in Mongolian and in Urdu, some how.) It is the former capitol of Mongol dynasty in the 13th century and of and on it's also been home to the Erdene Zuu Tibetan Monastary. Many meetings and battles have taken place in this area since the time of Gengis Khan. Between Mongols, Uigers, Chinese and smaller bands of ethnicities.

Now it's a tourist attraction with a few monks taking up residence as well. You can find them in the monastery spinning their prayer beads and chanting in Tibetan as they read the Kangyur, or Tibetan prayer book.



I hope you've enjoyed reading about my little journey. Mongolia is an amazing place, so large and vast. I didn't even get down to the Gobi Desert, or over to the high mountains in the west, or over to the rarely traveled to east.
If you want to see more pictures. I have some on my Flickr page, which you can get to at the top of this page.