To the Middle of Nowhere August 26, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Airlines, Destination, Hotels, Moscow, Restaurant, Round The World, Tickets , trackbackThe train from the Back of Beyond is about to arrive at the Middle of Nowhere. A week out of Moscow across Siberia and five time zones later you somehow land up in landlocked Mongolia.
Galloping horses, endless deserts and grassland steppes. People with faces like unworked mahogany stand around in their tunic-like costume and ill-fitting boots with turned up toes. All are heavily wrapped against searing Siberian of Genghis Khan, Marco Polo and winds which bear `living’ Buddhas.
A flat-faced, slit-eyed courier smiles from her yellow moon face and says the baggage will follow on a lorry. It did and was dumped outside Hotel B, one of only two in Ulan Bator, capital of this People’s Republic. Built just a few years ago it looks battle-scarred by usage and needs a good smartening up. The bedroom lock is insecure and only one hot tap on a swivel trickles into both bath and basin. Mongolia is remote, not easy to reach and feels like it.
Everyone is out to please and eager to show off their millions of desert acres. They have not long entered the twentieth century and in many ways still live in the past. Remnants of their old ways still abound. When you have shown your disguised appreciation of the country’s monuments to the 1921 revolution and to the Great Patriotic War against Fascism and seen the palace where the last king lived, you will be taken to a Buddhist lamasery. There you are advised to hold your nose as you egg your way through groups of shuffling, shaven-headed and saffron-robed monks amid a stifling mixture of stale incense and body odour.
This is the country’s one remaining lamasery and its last vestige of Buddhist splendour. There are sounds of tinkling bells and subdued, mumbling voices as the monks, sitting in the lotus position on wooden benches, turn the pages of their scripture books. Outside they prostrate themselves on wooden prayer beds. They call this enlightenment.
Sixty miles east of the capital is Terelj. It’s a village of felt and canvas tents called yurts. There are also some wooden huts and everything is fenced in to keep out the wolves and curious locals. It’s a kind of health farm and you go there to sample a simple lifestyle which Mongolianshave been enduring for about 3,000 years and you are going to put up with for twenty-four hours.
To reach this desolate spot you set off at sun-up and head toward mountain ranges which scarcely ever get closer. The coach driver weaves his way through washed-out bits of road. The countryside is deserted but for groups of distant yurts which resemble pickable mushrooms. The rows of white tents are numbered like a council estate. A gravel path wanders between them. Here and there a duckboard keeps your feet off the mud. If yurt accommodation runs out, then there are the chalets. In the compound centre stands a model of a Buddhist temple and a prayer bed. It’s fun but utterly phoney.
They say 40 per cent of the population of about one-and-a-quarter million Mongolians still live in yurts. None has any sanitation. They are designed to be portable and enable herdsmen and hunters to move around the countryside in search of new pastures for their camels, sheep and yak.
A rickety building called a ‘hotel‘ is where you eat on the site. The washroom is outside, where there is a smell of scented Russian soap and bad drains. Mongolians, of course, use the steppe.
We share our yurt with an Australian couple. He snores and she complains about the lack of a good cup of tea. Because of our ‘unexpected’ arrival the restaurant can summon up only tinned salami, half cold packet soup and some dry cake. Americans in the group flee for their vitamin pills and demand hot water to make coffee.
A yurt is comfortable and a wooden floor raises it from the ground. Lino and thick carpets cover the floor. Exposed woodwork of the roof struts and main pole are beautifully decorated. It’s all rather like an old-fashioned gypsy caravan. But six-foot Aussies and Englishmen have to jack-knife their bodies at the four-foot door which leaks substantial amounts of air — as does the roof where the stovepipe pokes through.
A ‘chambermaid’ who looks about eighty goes from tent to tent with a wheelbarrow full of logs and lays all the fires in the dustbin-like metal stoves. We put a match to ours and it goes up with a rocket-like roar, heating the yurt in a flash. The reconditioned air attracts the flies so we wander round like lost nomads thinking about the next meal. There is not even a postcard to buy, let alone a stamp.
If you follow the electricity poles over the steppe to the next village, the people there are partially settled inside bricks and mortar. Down by the river the boys fish with rods cut straight from the surrounding forest and grill their catches on an open fire.
No-one asks for a re-run of this one night stand. ‘Scenery great, food awful’ is the consensus. The traditional beverage here is kumiss, a thick curdly drink made from mare’s milk which has been allowed to ferment. They say it contains eight per cent alcohol, and the locals down it by the gallon. You need an iron stomach as it tastes like someawful medicine.
We return to civilisation after a wash in cold water, a breakfast of buns and sour cream and a ride through knife-sharp mountain air. This is the stuff of travel.
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