This past week China had its national holiday. That equated to me getting 7 days off of work to do whatever I desired. It turned out to be going to Mongolia with some of my fellow teachers, Mayu and Robin. Here are their stories (DUN DUN). Sorry, I just thought that sounded like a really cool intro from law and order.
Anyhow, since Qingdao didn’t have any flights to Mongolia we had to take the train to Beijing and fly out from there. During this trip I had many many “firsts.” One of them was riding in a train in China, which is a lot like riding on a plane that never quite gets the hang of that taking off thing. Train ride aside that first night we were slated to stay in a hostel. Now, when I think of the word hostel I think of that little chain of movies that came out where the tourists got savagely murdered by the staff and people around the hostel. I mean, the word sounds like “hostile” for Pete’s sake.
But the hostel in Beijing, called Fly By Knight, was really nice. They had soft beds and the owner, David, who is probably in his late twenties invited us to have some dinner with him and his staff. So we settled in that night ready to wake up at 5:30am to catch our flight to Mongolia.
Let me tell you, the Beijing airport is BIG. Now I bet you have been in an airport, and maybe even a “big” airport, but unless you’ve been to the Beijing airport you might not realize how much you’re overselling the word big. Maybe more so than that was how impressive it was with how open and tall it is.
As I stepped off the plane into the airport in Ulaanbaatar I remarked at how small the airport was. I think there was only one or two places to dock a plane, and definitely not more than one terminal. In fact, along the runway were scattered and tattered bi-planes, with holes through their wings and rust eroding at their metal frames.
We got in a taxi, that wasn’t really a taxi, but some random guy, trusting that he wouldn’t abduct us, and made our way to the UB Guesthouse. Hostel number 2. This one was…okay. Alright, it was nice, but compared to Fly By Knight it was kind of a downgrade. We weren’t going to be staying there long though. When we got there we booked a tour through the hostel where we would travel around Mongolia for four days and three nights. We grabbed a bite to eat at a local bakery and walked around UB for a while.
The owner of the hostel, Bobby (who is a woman), told us about the local Black Market. She assured us that the word “black” came from when the marked was established during communist rule and since it wasn’t “allowed” to sell the goods it was selling it was dubbed the black market. Well, this pretty much fits the definition of what I thought a black market should be. So I stuffed some Tögrög (Mongolian currency) into my pocket and made my way to the market.
It was packed. With people. With things. With animals. There were literally about 30 isles of leather boots. There might have been more, but my fellow teachers got bored after a few isles. We perused the goods there which ranged from garbage collected from dumps like random pieces of metal, plastic, shoes, cell phone covers and then there was some food stands. This was on the outskirts of the market. On the inside where the higher quality items were you could buy home appliances, furniture, clothes, shoes, fabric, strings and various odds and ends. It was like an Ikea on crack, and the crack was laced with a few thousand Mongolians. I ended up buying a camel hair hat, which I didn’t know existed. I also bought this knitted jacket thing (there is a picture of me later wearing it) just because I wanted something warm and semi-authentic from the black market. They had a lot of really good knock offs too, like North face and other European outfitter brands that I didn’t recognize. I didn’t want anything like that, so I went for the super hoodie for only ₮30,000, which is like $23. Not a bad price considering in the states that will sometimes barely buy you a t-shirt from the mall.
Below is a picture of these seeds that everyone in UB ate. All the time. There were shells all over the ground. Everywhere.
Victorious from our purchases we hopped on the slow bus back to the hostel.
I’ll get back to the slow bus comment in a minute, but I want to take a brief minute and give you some quick facts about UB and Mongolia. Mongolia’s population is only about 2.75 million people, and a million of them live in UB. I think just about every person has a car, most of them are Toyota Land Cruisers, so the traffic is really bad. I mean really bad. They seem to follow most traffic laws, but running red lights is very common and we did almost see an accident between a bus and a super tiny compact car. The pollution in UB is also really bad, I heard someone say it was one of the worst in the world. Since it sits in a basin surrounded by mountains the smog is trapped, and since there is scarcely rain the yellow haze just sits. Now you know why the bus was slow…kind of.
The next morning we arose and took a ride in a 4 door Hyundai to Terelj National park where we were to do some hiking, horseback riding and were going to stay in a ger (pronounced gee-air or gyare). The car ride was a bit bumpy, but we got to know one of our ger-mates, Matthew, who is from France. We talked and got to know each other on the way into the park. I think one of the things that amazed me most about Mongolia was the landscape. I have never really ever seen anything like it. It’s just so…treeless. In the park, however, trees and rocky mountains seemed to be more prevalent as compared to the rolling grassy hills in the western parts of Mongolia.
A tour group met us there to take the same car back to the hostel. They suggested that we take a hike over some hills (which are quite steep at times) to see this huge rock formation that looks like a turtle. He said it was called “Turtle Rock.” Well, I’ve seen turtles and I’ve seen rocks, but I haven’t ever seen one that looked like the other. And apparently neither had any us, or our newly acquired Argentinian friends, Cecilia and Santiago. So we struck out on our mini-adventure at around 10am, well before our 2pm lunch curfew.
After about half an hour we crested the hill told to us by our tipster. The one where we would be able to see this turtle shaped rock. Well, we all saw it, but I can testify that it did not look like a turtle. And I have several pictures as proof, see for yourself, does it look like a turtle? Does it?
Well, me, Matthew, and Santiago weren’t convinced so we decided to hike all the way to the turtle to have a closer look. The girls stayed behind on the hill to have girl time.
The journey there took about an hour and was full of good conversation and the sharing of cultures. I can say now that besides the beauty and experience of being in Mongolia that the people we met contributed equally to the quality of our trip.
Guess what? It still didn’t look like a turtle from up close. But we got to have a cool experience combined with a few cool pictures.
After we had lunch we got settled up for our horseback riding trip. We were led by…Khangis…or something like that. I really can’t remember the kids name. But he is 15 and basically takes care of the horses and the other animals on the property. After an hour of trotting around the countryside we got back to his property where we were allowed to take a horse and just ride around. It was pretty cool, but for some reason, after I had just gotten the hang of having my horse gallop he made me switch horses. After the second switch we heard some quick galloping coming from where Matthew had just been riding when all of the sudden we saw his horse come tearing around this bend, riderless, with the saddle hanging off to the side and things flying off the horse. I started running toward where the horse came from, fearing that Matthew was badly hurt. As it turns out the worst of his injuries was a minorly bit lip and some dirt from head to toe. Needless to say, none of us were keen on getting back on the horses for a quick gallop.
Before dinner Matthew and I decided that we would hike to the top of this small mountain to watch the sunset. It was a tough hike because I think I’m a bit out of shape as well as the fact that it was at a higher altitude. It really beautiful though, being up in these foreign mountains and watching the sun set on a part of the world I’ve never been to before. We made the steep, and kind of dark, hike down and headed to our ger for my first cold night in a hut.
Here is the small mountain we climbed to catch a view at a beautiful sunset.
And that was just the first day.
Day two consisted mostly of a van ride out to the western part of Mongolia. I think we were in the car for a total of about 8 hours. And it was bumpy. But it was good to watch a different landscape speed by. Someone told me that Mongolia looks a lot like Wyoming. Well, I’ve never been to Wyoming so the landscape was very new for me and it held my attention for a long while as I watched the treeless hills roll by. We made it to our next destination just in time for dinner. One unfortunate thing about this day was that it was mostly spent traveling down bumpy roads in a cramped van.
I learned my lesson from the ger the night before and stayed up a bit later than the other people with me so that I could keep adding wood to the fire. I think one problem we had the previous night is that it got dark at like 7 so we all went to bed at around 9, and from 9 until 7 the next morning is a long time to not be putting wood in the fire. So this night I loaded up the stove and went to bed smothered in the 80ish degree air. It was nice while it lasted.
This is me with my fellow teachers, Robin (middle), and Mayu.
Day three marked our trip to Erdenezuu, which was the ancient capital of Mongolia. At KK there is a large enclosed Buddhist temple area with many different buildings and shrines to their many different gods and protectors. One thing I found interesting was that there seemed to be a different diety for each problem people seemed to have. Man, wouldn’t it just be easier to have just one person to be in charge of all that? But it was interesting to see their different culture and how Buddhists worship.
On the way out of the temple we saw this guy with an eagle. Apparently in a few places around Mongolia people have eagles and other birds that they will let you hold for about a dollar. I thought, why not? So I have the guy my ₮1000 bill and put on this huge oven mitt thing and donned my eagle. The scary thing was that they would make you shake your arm up and down trying to make the eagle put out his wings for a good picture. But when you did that he would sometimes try to fly away, which was a little scary considering the size of his talons and beak.
After that little adventure we headed out to lunch and then to the miniature version of the Gobi desert, which was about three hours away. So we took another bumpy ride to an area of Mongolia where it looked like someone had spent a lot of money to import playground sand where it shouldn’t be in order to make a tourist trap. But that wasn’t really it at all. I guess I never thought about the fact that deserts are formed, that they don’t just exist or don’t exists. There has to be somewhere in the world where the landscape is in between making a full blown desert. And I think that’s where we were, because there were a lot of little formations that I saw and thought to myself: “That is totally how a sand dune could form.”
At this destination we got to ride camels out into the dune area of the desert. I have never ridden a camel before, but with the saddle set up they had there I can say that it is equally as comfortable as riding a horse, or equally uncomfortable depending on your comfortability threshold.
We were able to dismount (which was it’s own unique process) and walk up the biggest sand dune there. I’ve never walked up a steep slope made completely of sand before, but it was pretty awesome. And to top it off, I didn’t even get any in my shoes ☺. At the top we could see around and it was pretty beautiful. My fellow riders decided they wanted to take one of those stereotypical jumping pictures. So here it is.
After our camel ride we headed back to ger number three to watch the sunset before dinner started. In my opinion this was one of the cooler sunsets, because there were these dark clouds hovering above the mountains which gave a really cool contrast to the brightness of the sunset. I took a bunch of pictures of it as well as trying to take a panorama of the sunset.
[Here is a brief aside to anyone wanting to take a panorama and stitch it together manually. Make sure all of your camera settings are on manual, or at least the same. In one of my pictures I had to mess around with the colors afterward because it didn’t look the same, and still kind of doesn’t]
But here is that picture anyway.
After watching the sunset we headed into our ger for our last dinner together as a group. We got to eat this one by candlelight since it was already so dark. About two hours of cards followed this picture, and then bedtime. In the morning we headed back to UB in our van. We were a bit closer that we had been in Erdenezuu, so it didn’t take as long to get back to the hostel.
Once we were back in UB we went back to the bakery, which also served western food, where I got a philly cheese steak, Mongolian style. It was surprisingly good. It gave me enough nourishment to make it all the way through the many exhibits at the National History Museum of Mongolia that we went to after our early dinner. I haven’t been to a museum in a long time so I think going in this one gave me a sensory and information overload. After the 15th room or so I had taken in way too much information, so it was time to go back to the hostel for the night and just chill.
That last night I met some people from different parts of the world on different journeys for different reasons. It’s pretty safe to say that I am probably never going to see any of them again. There is something unique about that fact when you talk to someone. After getting pretty late I headed back to my room to read before waking up for our flight the next day.
And I made it back to Qingdao safely.
I think that overall I had a really great experience on this trip. I know I already said this, but I think that part of what made this trip great was meeting cool people like Santiago, Cecilia, Matthew, and Nina. People I would have never gotten the chance to meet had I not decided to go on this adventure. I love nature, and I love seeing different parts of the world to see just how different nature can be, but I don’t think I am cut out for the whole living out of a backpack thing. Well, at least not on the level where I feel like every day I have to do like 12 different activities to get the most out of my trip. I have told several people this before, but I think my personality is more suited for landing in one place for a week or two and just hanging out, preferably with people I like ☺. Seeing the sights was good, but I’m going to be looking forward to my weekends in QD for a while.
Thanks for reading this little novella. I hope you enjoyed the pictures and my experiences in Mongolia.
clayinqingdao 