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  • Day 37

    Ulaanbaatar

    September 22, 2019 in Mongolia ⋅ 🌙 6 °C

    Our latest adventure started with a view from the train window of beautiful Lake Baikal, soon after which the train stopped in the middle of nowhere for two hours.

    This meant there was no time to shop at any intermediate stops, so we had a dinner of instant noodles and a few pistachios.

    In the middle of the night we crossed the border, an exercise which kept us awake for about three hours as two sets of customs people successively searched the entire train. The Mongolian guy even ripped the carpet from the floor.

    When we awoke we were in a new landscape altogether, with rolling grassy hills, roaming livestock and the occasional small settlement. Soon enough, though this gave way to Ulaanbaatar, a place not even its mother could call beautiful.

    Ulaanbaatar is a city of superlatives. Coldest capital city. Most polluted. Most congested. Craziest, most un-rule-obeying drivers.

    We stayed in the high-rise Khuvsgul Lake Hotel, very nice although lacking some of the finer details, for example in the Brickwoods’ case a door that could be locked. The room key was required to operate the elevators, but it only worked intermittently , so we had many a tedious and unwanted ride down to reception to get them to send us up to our floor using a master key.

    Chinggis Khaan Square, nearby to our hotel, is a vast public square surrounded by very attractive buildings, the centrepiece of which is the imposing Parliament House, with statues of Chinggis himself (looking a bit too obese to do much looting and pillaging, it must be said) flanked by a son and a grandson. The square is possibly also the only tidy, well-paved area in the entire city.

    We got out of town for a day and visited the edge of Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, about sixty kilometres out of town.

    On the way we dropped into the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex, with its 40 metre high stainless steel likeness of the great man astride his noble steed. We rode the elevator up through the bowels of the horse to its head for some great views of the surrounding countryside then took in some displays and a video of the construction of the monument. The video, all patriotic music and bad English subtitles, left one particular question unanswered - why?

    Turtle Rock (or, when viewed from a different angle, Lindt Chocolate Bunny Rock) was our destination in the National Park, and the scenery in the area was nothing short of magnificent.

    We wandered around the rock a bit, then made our way up a steep hill to the Aryaval Buddhist Temple, passing 142 placards with Buddhist bon mots printed on them and then walking up 108 stairs to the temple itself.

    The views of the national park were incredible. Clumps of green and autumn-yellow trees, rolling brown-green grassy hills and dark grey rocky outcrops stretched away into the distance with the dirt access road snaking through it all.

    We also visited a nomadic ger camp and tried the famous, and actually rather retch-inducing, fermented mare’s milk. If the taste wasn’t bad enough we had already seen it sitting outside in a calfskin container amongst the flies. Other than that though it was an interesting experience and the family very welcoming. The nomad’s life has certainly changed, with a solar panel attached to a satellite dish in the compound.

    Our drive back to Ulaanbaatar was a shocker, with two hours required just to make the last seven kilometres.

    It would be very unfair to describe Ulaanbaatar’s shortcomings without adding that the people were friendly, the eating and drinking very good and the sense of action high.

    It would be unfair also not to mention the at times violent history of the nation as it found its voice and independence over the course of the twentieth century. We looked at some of this at the Mongolian National Museum and left with a real feeling for the spirit and determination of the people. Besides, the taxi driver didn’t even rip us off on the trip to the railway station.
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