Mongolia its Grrreat

That said UB is not really Mongolia, but you’ll have to come here anyway. All international flights and trains stop here. The trouble starts when you figure this out and try to leave UB. It’s not as easy or as comfortable to traverse the country as it is in other places. It’s best to have a plan to escape UB before you even get there.

Once you do get out into the country you can really start to enjoy yourself. The countryside is great, but the people here are the best assets that Mongolia has. They’re extremely generous with everything they have (especially their Vodka – made from fermented mares milk, YUM) and are always ready to help out.

Mongolian Kid and Friend

Mongolia is a bit different than the other countries we have visited thus far. There is only one real city, UB, and there is very little infrastructure to support public transport around the country. As we mentioned in Off We Ger if you want to get out into the countryside, which is really THE reason to come to Mongolia, then you need to a) join a tour; b) hire a jeep; or c) be completely raving madand take the local long distance buses. You could also fly, but since that wasn’t remotely within our budget (boohoo), I’ve left it out.

Tours run the gamut from budget backpackers piled into Russian vans that look like VW buses to the Golden Circle gang who get flown into luxury ger camps and driven around in shiny Landcruisers. (Yes, I’m a little envious.) Many travelers join together a group of 3-4 people and hire a jeep and driver. This can work out to be a pretty good deal since you choose your route and have freedom to stop whenever and wherever you choose. Since there were only two of us and we were not organized enough to find other people to share the costs of a jeep, we skipped option b. Our disorganization and adversity to tour groups ruled out option a as well.

So as you may have read, we went with Ger to Ger, an organization that supports sustainable tourism among nomadic herders. Good organization, good philosophy, a little loose on some details, but still a very good, authentic and low cost experience. That said, taking the bus to and fro was pure, sheer, total hell like no other. And yes, I had the bruises to prove it.

In terms of lodging, outside of UB, the main choices are basic hotels, ger camps (both luxury and budget) and camping. Mongolia is excellent for camping and it’s free. Just pitch your tent and snooze. Many ger camps seem to cater to foreigners offering less authentic experiences at tourist prices. And from what I’ve heard hotels range from grotty to decent. Not a lot of luxury in this category. Lucky for us, we stayed at what may be one of the nicest guesthouses outside of UB. This was mighty welcome after a week of no showers. AND they had a cafe with a vegetarian menu. Sadly we missed the veggie burger, but did have some tasty bakery treats for the bus ride.

Within UB, pretty much the same lodging choices exist except that there are loads of guesthouses and some nicer hotels. Our guesthouse was bare bones at best, but to be honest we didn’t mind since we were the only ones there most of the time. Plus the owner was a really great guy. As always, dorms are cheaper and most places have shared baths. We paid a pretty average $16 per night for a room with a double bed (and literally nothing else!).

Food is relatively inexpensive in UB and even cheaper in the countryside, though choices are more limited there. UB has a surprising plethora of western restaurants thanks to the number of NGOs and foreign aid agencies. Though the food was inexpensive by western standards, it was a little bit more than we had been paying in China and India. Still a bargain. If you visit UB, don’t miss the weird mix of flavors at Los Bandidos – Mongolia’s only Indian-Mexican restaurant. We went three times for the nachos.

Overall, Mongolia is pretty good for budget travel. The lack of infrastructure outside of the city prohibits it from being super cheap, but we managed pretty well on an average of about $50 a day including the trek, transport, food, lodging, etc.

Nadaam - Not Just for Men Anymore

Nadaam is basically a big three day celebration of Mongolia’s favorite sports – Horse Racing, Archery and Wrestling. There’s also something called “Ankle Bone Shooting” in there but no one outside of Mongolia knows what it is so it’s often forgotten. Nadaam is celebrated all over the country in early July, but the biggest “festival” of them all is in UB. That’s where the tourists and the big opening ceremony is.

The opening ceremony is quite something to see, tickets are hard to come by and the National Stadium is packed to beyond capacity. As the opening ceremony ends the Wrestling begins.

Mongolian wrestling is somewhere between Sumo wrestling and a shoving match – the first guy to put a knee on the ground looses. There are no weight classes so of the 512 participants in the first round – you can usually put your money on the fattest two reaching the final.

Second to wrestling is Horse Racing. Never will you meet a people who love their horses more than Mongolians. And they don’t care for these little one mile tracks we have in the West. Mongolians races are over 18 miles in length. And the glory for the winner goes not to the jockey, but the horse, then the trainer, then the rider. The riders are all boys between maybe 6 to 12 years old. They sing to they’re horses before the race, and in some cases during. Some of them should concentrate on staying on the horse. It’s not uncommon for riders to fall off, and there’s no penalty for a horse finishing the race without his jockey.

Archery is the only sport at Nadaam that allows both men and women to participate. Archers can only use traditional Mongolian bows and their perform ace is based on accuracy. Well, what else would it be based on?

Ankle Bone Shooting is the strangest sport at Nadaam for foreigners to get their heads around. As the name may suggest you are playing with ankle bones and trying to flick them at a target some 10 or 12 feet away. You probably played something like this in middle school with a piece of paper folded into a square, that you would try to flick across a table. Well, here there are a lot more ankle bones than paper, and it’s played by grown men who sing and chant while they do it.

Nadaam in UB is interesting, were we to go back I’d like to check out the country version – sans opening ceremony and TV coverage.

Hell Bus 2007

Your choices in leaving UB then are limited. Here they are in order of preference:

1. Fly – Absolutely the best way to travel in a country double the size of Texas having no real road network.
2. Train – Connecting only a few points, but safe and reliable
3. Hire a Vehicle – If you must venture out on the Yak trails that double for roads here, hire someone to drive you, and only you to your destination and back. Expensive, but in the end worth it. There are loads of people with Land Cruisers and old Soviet era Jeeps and Vans making a living off of people just like you.
4. Don’t Go at All – You should seriously consider this option if the above won’t work for you.
5. Mini Bus – The worst possible option. Are you familiar with the works of Wesley Willis? “Freak-Out Hell-Bus” is a good description for the Mini-Buses in this country. Mongolians take almost everything the own with them when they travel on these damn things. The bus will be oversold by 50%, the aisles clogged with bags, and unless your sitting next to the door you’ll have to climb over seats to get out of the bus – I am not making this up.

Also, it’s good to go into Mongolia with a plan. Otherwise you’ll like spend a day or three in UB trying to figure out how to get out of UB and into the countryside. Mongolia is a great place, but getting out the the good stuff can be a drag.

Trekking in Central Mongolia

Before we set out on our ger to ger adventure, I thought we had asked all the right questions, but you just can’t help it when some of the answers are well…wrong. Take food for instance. When two vegetarians are going trekking far, far away from any 7-Elevens into the heart of meat lovers land, you want to make sure you have an adequate amount of food to keep you going. And we did. We packed what we considered to be ample food and snacks to get us through the 6 meals we understood we’d have to provide for ourselves over the course of the week.

Well, imagine our surprise when at lunch on the first day we found out that we were to provide our own food for lunch everyday. Oops. That’s 5 more meals. Well, if we each eat one peanut butter sandwich for lunch, have 8 peanuts and 2 cookies, we might just make it. That is unless our bread molds by the end of the week – which it did. There was also the small detail about providing the herders with a tent and some food on the two nights that you camp out with them away from a family ger. Uh, what? Didn’t know about that either.

So while this sounds like a disaster in the making, it really was not at all. We were extremely fortunate to be tagging along with a French guide, Noemi, and her family for the week. Not only did they share their tea, curry and chocolate with us on a few occasions, but Noemi in all honesty acted as our guide as well. We learned so much more than we could have on our own and were able to communicate a bit more with the families. She also provided food and tents for the herders when we camped, saving us from looking like total dimwits had we been on our own. We owe her something good!

Logistics aside, we had a great time. There’s a vastness about the Mongolia countryside that at times could have been boring, but really just made us appreciate that we were far away from it all. And learning a little about the life of a nomadic herder was really quite interesting. There are no crops, just animals and only ones you can herd such as yaks, sheep and goats. The families move to different valleys or to higher land depending on the season or their needs. They just pack up the ger and go. Apparently a ger can be assembled in less than an hour.

In the summer, families live off the more than 40 dairy products that can produce from these animals and in the winter it’s dried meat. Nothing is wasted. Yak hair can be used to make ropes, sheep wool can be turned into felt for gers and mare’s milk is fermented into an odd tasting home brew. Lucky for us, we got to sample more than a few of the local treats – lots and lots of cheese which is dried and quite hard but kind of grows on you after a couple of days; the yogurt which is divine; and a kind of thick heavy cream which you can layer on top of your bortzig (Mongolian donuts) or eat with fried pancake-like bread. Mongolia is certainly not a good place if you’re lactose intolerant, but we did just fine.

Visiting a families’ ger involves a lot of tradition and ritual which we got to experience first hand. Visitors sit in specific places inside the ger, you always receive food and drink with your right hand or with both hands, you never set down a cup of tea without taking a drink first, and you at least act like you’re tasting the airag (fermented mare’s milk) when it’s passed to you…even at breakfast! We survived all this ritual and even the snuff passing with little drama.

So thanks to Noemi and the wonderful families we visited, and despite the misinformation, the many blisters on our feet and the fact that noone came to pick us up at the end while we sat in the middle of nowhere, we had a great experience.

And lucky for us someone at a ger not more than a few kilometers away had a jeep and was willing to drive us 100 km! Or we may still be eating dried cheese and playing cards with our young friend Benti in Central Mongolia.