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Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
47° 55' N 106° 54' E
Sep 07, 2006 04:31
Distance 439km

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Transit to Ulaanbaatar

Text written in: English

It was an early morning and I certainly didn't mind leaving the prison/ falling apart dorm that was obviously a relic of the soviet era. It was cheap and near the market and bus station and seemed to attract a special breed of people. There was some confusion about my room and I was supposed to have paid more so that I had the room to myself, instead there was an extra bed and I worried a bit about sharing it with a snoring Russian drunkard. The hotel also had a 11:00 pm curfew which I made sure to observe. There were some security cages that prevented you from going to some of the upper floors and the basement on the stairs.  The place certainly seemed like a fire hazard for trapping people.  Even the front door was locked when I tried to leave at 6:45 in the morning.  Luckily it didn't take long to produce the gatekeeper so that I could be on my merry way.

It was a cold morning and I quickly put on a hat and my neckband.  I had about 10 minutes of walking towards the central square across from the opera house that they were renovating.  There wasn't any sign where the bus was supposed to leave from so I waited in a place that seemed consistent with the lovely map that the travel agent had drawn for me.  Within a few minutes of me arriving others starting showing up in the area with suitcases.  I was outside long enough to start feeling the first real chill of winter.  There was frost all over the place.

When the bus showed up I was surprised at how nice it was.  It was about 2/3 full and left only 10 minutes late.  There were only a few people of Russian ethnicity on board, most of the folks where either Buriat or Mongolian, while I couldn't tell the difference, I found out later that they were Buriat when we were filling out Mongolian entry cards that were in Mongolian and English, and there was a little bit of a panicky reaction in some people.                                                                                    

As time passed the scenery unfolding was quite beautiful, a whole series of rolling foothills and occasional mountains in the distance.  Wide sweeping river valleys.  It was starting to become similar to many of the pictures I had seen of Mongolia.  I was clearly leaving the last vestiges of Russian European culture and going someplace strange, someplace full of possibilities. For some reason after the great depth of the Russian train journeys a 12 hour bus ride didn't really feel so long. Leaving early in the morning I would still be in Ulan Baator in time for a later dinner.  After a few hours we stopped at the top of a large hill where you could see very far around.  There wasn't any facility so the men walked one way and the woman walked the other.  There was an Ovoo (pile of stones) adorned with prayer flags and some offerings. It didn't take long for all of us to file back into the bus because it was Septmeber 7^th and it was starting to get overcast and later it started snowing.  That day it was snowing over a large portion of central Mongolia.

At some we crossed over the main river running through Ulan Ude over a gigantic and quite rickety wooden bridge.  The bus traveled quite slow over the bridge in case one of the floor plates sucked in a tire. It would have made many people more nervous than it made me, but I was certainly alert. The river valley was quite beautiful.  It was a dry land, some stands of trees in wetter areas near the river, but for the most part it was grassland.  After that we started going through a series of hill moving our way up to the Mongolian plateau which stands at about 1700 meters or 5200ft. The increase in elevation along with an incredible wind serves to make Mongolia among the coldest places in the world (that actually have cities and farms, anyways)

The boarder crossing of Mongolia and Russia by train is something of legend and typically takes between 6 and 10 hours to make it across.  This makes the train journey between Ulan Ude and Ulan Baator a 24 hour trip.  When I saw the bus schedule listing a 12 hour trip and the ticket was cheaper than the train ticket by about half I decided it was a no brainer.

We stopped at a small gas station not so far from the border and I went in and was trying to purchase a bunch of food to get rid of as many rubles as I could mange.  I had about 8 dollars worth left.  The store was incredibly small and the bus quickly stuffed about a dozen people in enough room for 5.  The second woman in line sat there for at least 4 minutes bothering the clerk, looking at things and being indecisive. I was the fifth person in line and barely completed my purchase of some chocolate and an orange before the bus driver tried to leave me behind.

When we made it to the boarder post there was quite a line of timber trucks from Russia headed into Mongolia.  There wasn't a line when we arrived, we got off the bus gathered our luggage and carried it into the boarder post.  It was certainly a new building and resembled a small high school. There were a few boarder guards sipping coffee in a lounge with the door open so we could see that they didn't care that we were waiting.  After 10 minutes they opened up the customs line x-rayed every other persons bag and then we waited for about 45 minutes while all of us made it through the immigration line.  I was in the 1^st third and was of course prepared for problems, mostly because it was Russia and it didn't really matter that my documents were in perfect order with the appropriate visa registration stamps. But really I don't think anyone had to give out a bribe and with the limited amount of human traffic the post was getting perhaps they either weren't corrupt or taking in plenty of money with the cargo trucks.  By the time we were finished with the Russian side it had taken only 1 hour.

We boarded the bus and drove a few hundred meters to the Mongolian side and I was shocked and happy that the entry forms had an english side. The boarder guards had the words Boarder Guard on their uniforms.  Mongolia uses the Russian Cyrillic alphabet along with an addition letter or two, but transliterations into the latin alphabet, or between the two different alphabets, are difficult to pick out.  Mongolian has a lot of coughing sounds and in the beginning I couldn't even make out individual words when I was listening to it. It was at this point that the wind picked up and it started snowing pretty hard with small snow flakes.  There wasnt enough room in the immigration waiting gallery so we disembarked from the bus in groups of about 10.  For some reason the Mongolian border post was a flurry of activity compared to the quiet inside of the Russian one.  Perhaps we had beaten the daily rush.  Sitting towards the back of the bus I was among the last to get in line. I did spend a couple of minutes helping a Russian Buriat couple fill out the customs sections of their entry card. Really none of the items applied to individual travelers who weren't trying to import items of value.

Inside the post everything was also pretty new and I had heard a rumor that it had recently opened. Everytime someone opened the door a cold blast of wind battered against all of us. The line was something of chaos until a large gentlman made it clear that as a group we would no long crowd against the booth so that the guard looking at our passports could do his job in peace without interruption.  Because I was already towards the back of the line and I knew the bus wasn't going to leave until the last person made it through the station, I didn't really press towards the front in the typical Russian way. After I got the immigration stamp I walked over to the disorganized customs station and had my form stamped mostly for the fun of it and then walked out the door to a very impatient bus.  There was only one person behind me and the bus driver was already trying to leave them behind. 

We had made it to Mongolia and the whole process took less than 2 hours, much faster than the train journey and I made sure to later brag to my fellow travelers. Right as we were crossing the bus driver let on a couple of money changers.  They had very thick wads of Mongolian currency (togrog or tugrick).  Its like they were feverish gamblers throwing down cards.  After hearing reports about difficulties enchanging rubles I was glad to get rid of mine no matter the exchange rate. I had about 8$ worth and I knew my money would go a lot farther in Mongolia than Russia.

After a few more hours we stopped for a late afternoon lunch in the town of Darhan. With 30,000 people it was a nice size city by Mongolian standards.  It was ugly, poor, and largely falling apart. Like so much of  Buriatya the desolation reminded me of a Clint Eastwood western.  When the crowd got off the bus I followed them as I wouldn't have had an easy time figuring out which building was the eatery.  It was an odd sort of fast food place with about 6 mini kitchens, each with a menu complete with pictures (yay!)  I had no problems ordering some decent food.  The bathroom was a pay bathroom and seemingly better than the Russian standards.I did suffer some gastrointestinal distress from this meal over the next two days (or I think it was that meal) and it made me realize that I had been pretty lucky in Russia. I sat with a man who spoke at least 30 words of english. We didn't get much past names but it is nice to have someone around who is on your side if something goes down.  Mongolia immediately felt a little bit like a strange land and it was clear that people were staring at me with a bit of interest. I was certainly the only western tourist around. After we got on the bus and it started rolling away one of the passengers made it clear that we were missing someone, the bus driver waited for a minute by slowly pulling out of the parking lot, but ultimately they got left behind. I was glad that it wasn't me.

I started watching the country side, we drove past gers, white Mongolian roundhouses that are ideal for semi nomadic herding. We also drove by zillions of animals, sheep, goats, a few cows, and even a large herd of Bactrian camels (two humps).  As we proceeded south the land got drier and harsher.

When we arrived in Ulan Baator (which has many different latin spellings) it was clear to me that this would be my first foray into a third world larger city. The city had ger suburbs which I saw from a distance.  Being an asian city the streets had about double or triple the activity, people walking, selling things, you name it. The streets were a mix of cars that you weren't sure how they kept them running, leftovers of Mongolia's time as a soviet puppet state, and very nice SUV's.   The international donor community was also everywhere in Ulan Baator (UB).  One of the major western contributions seemed to be in the banking sector.   The central part of the city probably had most of the wealth of the entire nation in a small area.  The city itself was just under 1 million people and contained 1/3 of the population of Mongolia. The country is about the size of Alaska and has 2.8 million people.

My bus pulled up in front of the Bayongul hotel, really the place looked pretty nice.  I had oriented myself on my map as the bus was pulling up and I had some decent directions and also for a change my hostel had a big sign on both sides of the building and was only a 5 min walk after I arrived.  Bolod's was a pretty informal sort of place, you could pay for your room when you felt like it.  It had two dorm rooms and a small kitchen.  The staff usually slept in hidden sort of linen closet which had a sheet over it instead of a door in front of it. Bolod was an older Mongolian man who was very friendly and helpful and spoke excellent english.  I walked back to the Bayongul and acquired a bunch of 10,000 togrog bills, each one was worth about $9. The guests at Bolod's seemed to be a mix between some truly odd people and people who had traveled everywhere with a zest for life.  It was certainly a crossroads for interesting people and I am not really sure how I fit into this mix.  Somewhere in the middle I suppose. I walked around a bit and found an internet café and bought some fruit from a street seller. I also walked by a ger souvenir shop, but didn't go inside as I had no interest in trinkets.

I was certainly a bit disillusioned by UB.  I had figured that there weren't too many places more out of the way and isolated from the rest of the world.  I was expecting a city that was a bit different.  Instead there were plenty of 5 star hotels, the gap, and the other accoutrements of decadent western society.  There was even a Calvin Klein billboard outside my window. It certainly wasn't a large hostel, but also it wasn't super busy as tourist season trailed off abruptly starting on the 1^st of September.

As I was settling down for sleep a woman came to the hostel. She was about my age, and the stench coming from her was amazing like she didn't believe in hygiene.  Even worse after she left the room, there was still plenty of the same stink coming from her backpack and all her belongings.   I removed some of my negative thoughts about her when I heard the next morning that she had spent 2 weeks volunteering in Tsetserleg helping some nomads move to winter camps.  She also told a story about how the snow covered the whole route that she came back on and that she had to get out of the jeep so it could slide down a steep hill.

It was a long day and I fell asleep like a baby, wondering at the possibilies for the upcoming portion of my trip. It was also the beginning of Segment 2 of my life trip, Mongolia and China.