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Ulaanbaatar Zanzabaar Fine ArtsBig Buddha,Zaitsan

Ulaanbaatar Zanzabaar Fine ArtsBig Buddha,Zaitsan

It was on this morning that I started to feel the first real dose of travel fatigue.  Its something that builds up until you are forced to confront it. This morning I just had troubles getting started in the morning.  Eventually in the early afternoon I went for a walk and ended up and the Zanzabaar Fine Art Museum. It was small and easily digested. Plenty of interesting mongolian and buddhist artefacts.  They also had some deer stones.

I took lunch at a local crappy joint.  There was no english on the menu, and while they did an admirable job trying to communicate with me, it didn't produce much for results. I was trying to indicate that they could bring me anything from the kitchen, but perhaps in a post soviet culture it wasn't fair to ask them to take on the responsibility. Finally someone walked by with a plate of mutton dumplings and somehow I managed to order two of them, when really I wanted a plate of 6 just like the plate that I saw. Mutton grease has a particular quality that seems to stay in your mouth for hours afterwords.  The meal wasn't great, but it was quick and extremely cheap after the not so money friendly Russia. I liked the idea of picking a restraunt that didn't get many tourists, but I also wanted good food.

I headed back towards my hostel and stopped by a food market for some snacks and bottled water. I made a stop at the communist era State Department store which used to house the finest products socialism could deliver. Now its much like an ordinary shopping mall with the prices not so different from what you would find in the west.  I then made a stop at the post office and bought some post cards and letter envelopes and stamps. I went back to the hostel and spent a short while contemplating what to do next. UB is surrounded by some taller mountains and on the side of one of the hills was a monument to war dead. Instead of taking it easy I decided to galavant around some more.

I hopped on a bus heading towards the monument. I was a little confused about the bus fare but the ticket taker woman set me straight pretty quickly.  I wasn't sure where to get off the bus so I paid careful attention.  I jumped the gun and got off the bus a couple of stops too early but I didn't know and I didn't want a repeat of the Moscow runaway lost on a bus situation. I walked across a field and found myself in front of a 15 meter statue of Buddha. I decided to walk around the grounds, there were some pavillions and a giant bell and a giant drum.  Some people occasionally were beating the drum. There were a bunch of people around and it was much of a park like setting.  The sun was mostly set and lights came on. I sat on a park bench thinking. With so many strange things going on all around I always enjoyed taking some silent relaxing time among so much chaos.

After that I walked to the hill containing the monument it was quite a climb. I would say it was in the neighborhood of 150 meters. Half way up there was a place for cars that many people were making use of. The monument was done in the socialist art style that I had come to appreciate in Russia. The photos do a better job describing it than I can. I then took some long exposures of the city.  The view of the city was good, but the city didn't have a lot of distinguishing features that you could pick out.  I was a bit nervous with all the teens around in such an isolated setting, but none of them turned out to be that punky and there were a couple of mongolians there with some high power photographic equipment taking pictures much like mine. 

There was also a strange episode behind the monument with a western tourist looking down over the craggy abyss like he was contemplating "falling off" the monument. Maybe he was just a bit strange, it was certainly very dark back there.  I coughed and shuffled my feet to make my presence known and that seemed to snap his attention away from looking off the monument towards the ground far below.  He then left the edge and I was quite glad of it. Because the alarm bells were ringing in my head. I lingered up there for about 15 minutes.  During that time I watched for buses going past the monument and didn't see any, so I figured I would have to take a different way back to the center of town. My hostel had a great location just off the central square.

It took me 10 minutes to amble down the hill and then I walked to the main street leading back towards the center of town. I am sure that I could have taken a bus or a taxi. But for some reason I decided to walk. It probably wasn't one of my smartest moves as UB was a bit of a rough town.  The other real problem was the fumes coming from the busy street along with me huffing from my fast walking pace, it bothered my lungs, like my lungs was crying. UB had quite a polution problem because it had some large factories and powerplants upwind from the city and with the city being surrounded by mountains, it seemed to concentrate the pollution in a cloud over the city.  Also the older city diesel buses, belched out the thickest black smoke that could hang in the same spot over a period of 90 seconds.

After almost 40 minutes of walking I was back in my hostel and then spent a while reading my Lonely Planet Mongolia before finding a nice peaceful rest.

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