Ending the trek with a flourish

We certainly did enjoy the monastery I mentioned in my last real post. If Carrie says much about it, I’ll link to her blog here. As for myself, I’ll just summarize by saying that a kind monk gave us a very thorough tour and explained the religious significance of the fixtures. It was a beautiful and interesting tour, but here I want to dwell on the hospitality we have enjoyed in Mongolia.

We spent our last night on the road as guests in another ger, this time in a little settlement with ten or twelve gers and a permanent bathroom with two toilets, two showers and four sinks. When we arrived, our host family invited us into their adjacent ger to enjoy fresh Mongolian pocket breads with lamb “sweetmeats” inside. (Kidneys, I think.) Our hosts made sure we were comfortable, increasing the water pressure when they saw us in the bathroom, covering our ger for the night when it got cold, and otherwise making us feel welcome and cared for.

Meg continued in her own way to care for us; for example, with delicious and extravagant dishes at every meal. On the day we went to the temple, she even took us out to lunch and ordered a sampling of traditional dishes from a menu we couldn’t have even read.

I don’t know why we doubted, then, when Meg announced that we’d look for some nomads when the weather turned chilly as we approached our intended picnic site on the shore of Ogii Lake. I would have been happy enough eating in the van where we parked overlooking the lake, but instead we barreled down a bumpy dirt track and across unmarked steppe to find nomads who hadn’t yet moved away from the area. We lit upon a family preparing to move. They had already loaded most of their stuff onto trucks, but they still had a ger standing and Meg went to introduce herself. Carrie and I were timid about getting out of the van, not wanting to force ourselves upon unprepared or unwilling hosts.

The family, however, took us in like long-lost relatives. They sat us down in their ger and presented us with salty milk tea and a plate heaped with sweet crispy shapes made from dried cheese. I’ve never had anything like those cheese snacks, and I enjoyed snacking on them as Meg prepared lunch for everybody. The nomads dug out a huge pot from the stuff they’d packed onto their truck and Meg made a vegetable-beef stew, noodles and mashed potatoes. We took photos and pantomimed gestures of goodwill at each other. Carrie and I had a great time. I was sorry I’d already run out of Belarusian souvenirs. I had not imagined we’d experience anything like this.

I delighted in the landscape and the views during our ride back to Ulaanbaatari just as much as I’d relished them on the way out of the city. But this time, it felt different. Meg, Temuulen and Ogi had become dear to us, and we rode with family. Temuulen lay across the back seat, resting on Meg and me, trying to teach me to speak Mongolian. Ogi grinned into the mirror. Carrie chatted with Meg about Mongolia and about life.

We’re spending our last few hours in Ulaanbaatar now, updating our blogs. Carrie and I haven’t spoken much yet today, but we agree on one thing: We want to return to Mongolia.

From 2015-09 Beijing-to-Minsk

My night of wreckage

There will be no pictures for this blog post because most of the action took place under cover of darkness. I am surprised that everybody is being so nice to me after what happened.

It all started when we went to bed in our ger, or Mongolian tent. We’re spending the night in a little ger community, and we have three beds. Our guide and her daughter took one bed, and Carrie and I took the other two. Our driver slept in his van. Everybody in our ger went to bed around 11:00, some reading later than others. Certainly, however, everybody was asleep when my phone rang around midnight. It didn’t just ring, either. Somehow the volume rested on maximum, so the phone fairly bellowed.

I snaked out of my sleeping bag and lurched over to the phone, which finally responded to my second or third attempt to answer Alla’s call. She’d been confused about how recently she’d missed my call and thought it would be OK to call me at midnight. I mangled the Russian language in my attempt to explain that she’d awoken an entire village and then I went off to the community restroom, which has flush toilets.

When I came back, I silenced my phone and went back to bed, wondering whether I’d remembered to latch the door but deciding not to thrash around anymore because the door squeaked and I hoped to notice if an intruder intruded. Some hours later, the door indeed squeaked and I could see that it wasn’t fully closed. Uh-oh. I couldn’t see inside our ger and I didn’t want to be a jerk and shine my flashlight on the other beds so I decided to go to the restroom again and I’d worry only if I didn’t encounter one of us there.

The door of our ger community was tied shut. Huh. Nobody could have just gone to the toilet through that gate. I looked around, peed on the fence and returned to bed, locking the door. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard a tugging on our door. I looked. A flashlight went on, lighting up the crack between the door and frame. More tugging. I slithered out of bed again, and found Carrie outside, trying patiently to solve her problem.

In the morning, I went out to the bathroom and took a shower. Carrie came in as I shaved. Presently she called to me from the other side of a door, asking for toilet paper. I went to get some, but couldn’t find any inside the ger. I tried to get some from the van instead, but Ogi had locked the door. He woke up saw me at the window, rolled over and fell off the seat in a tangle of blankets. Still half asleep, he then proceeded to fall over the back seat in his efforts to fish some TP from the cargo area. This completed my night’s work, since he’d probably been too far from the ger to benefit from my previous efforts.

I’ll try to be less destructive in the coming days.

Nomadic days

Carrie and I are bouncing across Mongolia in a very rugged Russian minivan whose design probably hasn’t changed since Soviet times. Ogi, our driver, has added a second fuel tank, some Buddhist religious devices and a lot of cigarette-lighter sockets for the convenience of passengers with the right adapters. I got out my computer because we’re now on a paved road, but that doesn’t make it smooth. Yesterday we spent many hours on dirt roads in the Hustai National Park. We saw some small wild horses, the ancestors of today’s horses, and we visited a field of stone monuments left by the Turks who occupied Mongolia before the time of Genghis Khan.

These interesting details were the things of guidebooks but we experienced much more. Fragrances, for example. We walked on aromatic herbs that perfumed the air as we traveled, and we slept in a ger breathing the aroma of the horse-milk yogurt brewing at the foot of my bed. We picnicked in a sunny field with mountains ahead of us, cashmere goats and Turkish relics to one side and tree-dappled foothills to the other. Many people brightened our day: Meg, the guide; her precocious and enthusiastic five-year-old daughter Termulin; Ogi the driver and even the most-amazing Altaa, who owns the ger and maintains a Buddhist temple originally built by her ancestors, destroyed by the Soviets and restored by her mother.

We hiked up this morning to visit the ruins of many other Buddhist temples in the hills behind the ger where we slept. Persecution drove Buddhists farther and farther into the hills, and when they got driven out their temples began to decay. Near one temple, we found a bush particularly filled with the delicious little red berries we started sampling yesterday. We feasted on them until Meg reminded us that we still had places to go and things to see. That’s why I’m writing in the car. I don’t expect to have much down time, and I’ll want to be on my feet in this beautiful land as much as possible once we stop.

The last time we stopped, Meg gave us camel rides. I’d heard stories about camels being cantankerous creatures, but ours cooperated nicely. They got down onto their knees so we could mount, and then stood up gracefully to walk. We sat on blankets between the humps, cushioned by the camels’ thick and rich fur. I wove the fingers of my left hand into the oily wool on my camel’s front hump, and rested my other hand on the smoother hairs of her flank.

Now we’re approaching a monastery. A young monk in red robes runs towards us on the road. It’s time to get out.