Author: Marina

Our first morning in Mongolia was after sleeping in the freezing Stalag Concrete at the Customs compound at the border. We lay there in the tent. Jim is capable of speaking clearly and having 100% cognition within .25 seconds of opening his eyes; in the morning or the dead of night. It’s amazing. I, on the other hand, require several hours after becoming vertical, caffeine, protein, carbs and nicely scented bath products like lavender to really become awake. Prior to those items I slur my words, have blurry vision and the cognitive might of a slug. Often I will wake and look over at Jim and he’s looking at me, his bright blue eyes wide open, lying perfectly still. That’s what it was like our first morning in Mongolia. I looked over and there he was, eyes bright blue and awake, I slurred; wwwwwe aarrr nnnn mmmmmongoliiiia. Jim replied, Can you believe it?! We are in Mongolia! So, it was logical that we would greet each other thusly every morning while we were in Mongolia, underlining the incredulity of the fact.

Part of the disbelief came from the fact that we had come such a long way, over a long time and we were at the end. Nearly the end. Part of the disbelief came from the fact that we were in MONGOLIA. I mean, geez, who goes to Mongolia? Part of it came from the fact that we were well aware that we had the toughest part of the trip in front of us and we were a wee bit tired. Just a little.

If you read the Stalag Concrete post you know about our yurt stay our second night in Mongolia and return to our prison the following morning. At approximately 4:30 our third day we got word that we were being released. I would love to say that I was relieved. But that’s not what I felt. My emotional state was much closer to an insane prisoner locked up against his will that was going to lose it and go ballistic and turn into the hulk and bust out. Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. If they don’t let us out I will turn into the hulk and level this place. So when we learned we were being freed my reaction was more one of “that’s convenient, now I don’t need to level this place”. True.

So, we packed up, allowed the guards to look at all the VIN numbers etc. on the car, hand us our import paperwork and we drove out the gate only to be stopped. STOPPED by the road tax police who pounced on us and the three other cars that had been incarcerated with us to demand the payment of a road tax and the purchase of insurance. They stopped us 25 feet from the exit gate. Now really, we could not have taken care of these details during the previous three days we sat around in a pen? Honestly, you have never seen a group of people at 100% frustration level deal with the frustrators with such patience and tenderness as we did with those two officials. I think we were sooooo beyond fried that we knew if we allowed ourselves to let down just a little we would have exploded.

Now, Mongolia has approx 42,000 kilometers of road, of which 2000 is paved. Can you appreciate the irony of us paying a road tax? Whatever. The insurance part however I haggled because there was a good chance we were not going to drive the car all the way to the finish line and I didn’t want to cough up $150 US. While we were trapped in the compound Jim and I had started talking about turning the car in before we arrived at Ulaanbaatar. There are five drop-off points in Mongolia where ralliers can turn in their cars. Mongolia is large. The 19th largest country on earth and the most sparsely populated. Breaking down in Mongolia is no picnic. We were thinking we would turn in the car in Olgii and rent a jeep to drive to Ulaanbaatar (UB). That way we could really enjoy the drive, as in drive fast, and not have to inch our way the last 1000 kilometers. You have no idea how excruciating it is to drive 30 miles an hour for days on end. I would rather stick a needle in my eye (we did it in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan).

We headed down the road to Olgii and got lost for a bit but then found our way and were delighted to encounter tarmac for the last 15 kilometers or so. We rolled into town soooooo excited about seeing this exotic land. We pulled in front of a hotel and within five minutes a semi-inebriated rallier stood in the entrance… chaps we had met at the border inviting us into the downstairs bar for a beer. Unbelievably we joined them. No shower. No hairbrush. No reacquainting ourselves with porcelain and running water. Straight to ice cold beer. It was, as Nadia would say, “especial”.

We soon discovered we could not rent a jeep and drive it to UB. We could rent a jeep and a driver but it was prohibitively expensive. So, we decided to turn in the car and fly to UB. We spent the day walking around Olgii, which is very tiny and being enchanted by the Kites that circle the sky constantly. They are a raptor-like bird of prey and fill the trees in the early morning and late afternoon. It is so amazing to see a tree full of these birds that pretty much look like a hawk. They are a little bit bigger than the red tailed hawks we have at home and made me feel like I was in the most exotic place on earth.

Long story short, we hired a guide to drive us South for a couple of days since we could not get a flight out of Olgii for four days. Why? Because every college student in Mongolia was flying to UB to return to school on September 1 and every flight was sold out. Well, every one of the once-a-day flights. At this point we could have driven in the same amount of time but only if everything went perfectly and with the ground clearance of the Panda and the front shocks gone the odds were not good that everything would go perfectly. We turned her in and I cried. She had been our home. Our friends and families had been with us the whole way with their happy faces smiling at us. It was so hard to walk away…

Our guide, Dosjan, had a superb Toyota Land Cruiser and it was SO FUN NOT TO DRIVE OR NAVIGATE! We drove to Khovd and visited a Buddhist Temple on my birthday (AWESOME!) and spent the night in Khovd. The next morning we drove to a cave with paintings that are 13,000 years old, visited a nature preserve on the marshes of a lake and visited eagle hunters! On the way back we stopped at Dosjan’s sister’s house and had tea with her family. He didn’t call, we just showed up, it’s the Mongolian Way. He said he always stops to see her, I love it. We got a great taste of Mongolian roads (not), signs (nonexistent). We heard about other teams getting terribly lost and it’s easy to see how. The water crossings we did with Dosjan we would have had to do in the Panda, we were on the main road to UB, and there is no way we would have made it without a tow.

Every day we see and or do something we have never done before. These experiences are stacking up one on the other.  Even though we are in Mongolia now I feel as if I still haven’t mentally processed Siberia, or Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan or, you get the picture.

In every country, every city, nearly every night we dine with new friends. Last night there was a man eating by himself who looked like a foreigner so we invited him to our table. We spent the evening with John, an American who has lived in China and just wrapped up a trip there, currently from Manhattan who works for a NP that is hired to do diplomatic work with China. Great conversation, great spirit of camaraderie. In Oolgi we met two Americans who had been in Oolgi for only two days and beginning a two year Peace Corp post there. We had dinner with them, one from Encinitas and one from Houston. Fun young men on a mission to make the world a better place and fully prepared to live in places with no running water and winters of 30 below weather for 6 months…. shudder. We have experiences like this every day.

We had a similar experience in Siberia. Half way to the Mongolian border from Barnaul, Russia, is a tiny artist’s colony; Chemal. We pulled in at 6:00 on a Sunday and everything was pretty much closed up for the night but we found a nice B&B. As we sat outside having a piva (beer), a Russian family vacationing for the weekend invited us over for some homemade cranberry schnapps. We ended up spending the whole night with them, eating, drinking and using the Banya they had rented for the evening. Alex, the father, invited his friend, the Chief of Police of Chemal, to join in the festivities. We sat and drank schnapps and drank schnapps and drank schnapps and then the Chief made a call and within the hour someone approached with a shopping bag which he gave to Jim and I. Inside, an enormous bag of Altai herbal tea which we haven’t tried but he says is famous in Russia for it’s health benefits, Ginseng for Jim (we told him we had 7 kids and everything was okay in that department… he had a good laugh!), some other female herb for me and some Altai dried mushrooms which are going in to a risotto when I get home (excited!). Then I asked if we were going to have problems at the border with the “tea” which looked very, well, herbal. LOL, they thought that was hysterical! Lot’s of teams saw pot growing wild in that area, though we did not.

The Banya (sp?) is a kind of sauna but more complex. It’s a building separated from the house and they said everyone in Russia has a Banya. Sure enough as we drove through the edges of the city we saw entire neighborhoods of tiny cottages with a tiny yard and kind of patio covering with a picnic table beneath. We think they are Banyas for people who live in the giant Soviet era apartment blocks in the city.  At any rate, you go into the banya and the first room is where you undress. You go through a door into a room that has a wood burning stove and a bench and faucet and plastic tubs. Here you wash up with cold water in a hot, dry, sauna. Then you go into the next room and there’s a regular hot rock sauna with wooden benches and a bucket of water and ladle. What’s not so regular is there is also a bunch of birch branches with leaves tied together in a bundle. You get all hot and steamy and then you thrash one another (or yourself) with the birch branches. It’s supposed to be super therapeutic because of compounds in the birch. I do not know about that but we had a good time whipping each other after six weeks in that tiny car! We were sooooooooo relaxed when we emerged we could barely walk the four flights to our room.

I have more pictures but it is just excruciatingly slow…. been at this for 2 hours and the exploration of UB awaits!