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Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
47° 55' N 106° 54' E
Sep 28, 2006 08:27
Distance 567km

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Transit to Ulan Baator

Text written in: English

It was a cold morning, and I had long accepted that tourist season was long over, and I felt more like a lazy goose who couldn’t make it south for a winter than a tourist.  Even when on a great trip sometimes you have to admit that you are just another silly tourist in the pack, but sometimes, well, you get a bit lost.   And what’s wrong with that?

 

It was early when Ichime woke me up and we shared a modest breakfast.  There was still an icy chill to the morning air when we set off on horse for the 10km back to Khatgal.  The end of my horse riding career was a failure. I was riding the 13 year old horse, it was still feeling grumpy from the long long ride. When we got to a 300 meter section of dry river bank, which was a river of rocks, the horse decided it wasn’t listening to me.  Nothing short of a good beating would have made it walk.  So yes, ichime came quickly back and grabbed the tether.  Lucky for me I wasn’t a Mongolian, and it was too early in the morning for much of anyone to see.  It would have been a serious matter for a man to have another man lead his horse.  Sad sad it was, but that’s how I finished my last 10km on horse.  Ichime was also in a hurry, so 45 minutes  of trotting, still was hard on my butt even after 400km of riding.

 

I showed up at my guesthouse and did a lot of sitting and thinking.  There wasn’t much else to do while waiting for a ride out of town. The women at my guesthouse, who always made me a bit uneasy said that she would call about a ride to Moron.  It was only 4 hours, not exactly an epic journey.  Somewhere around late morning I was having a patience contest.  Transport in Mongolia never really leaves, so its not like I was missing a ride by sitting around watching the wind blow.  So the contest was weather I could out wait a report on the update of me getting out of town.  I won quite handily when she told me that perhaps she should see if her friend the the driver was coming by.  He wasn’t but he called a friend and about 30 minutes later a driver showed up in a big Russian 4WD van. Sadly it wasn’t jam packed so I knew we would drive around town for another hour trying to find passengers.

 

  Khatgal is rather small, but its still spread out, every house has a fenced in yard.   The commercial part of town can be walked in about 10 minutes.  For a while it seemed like we were doing laps. For the passangers it’s a contest to see if you can be one of the last people on board. I had to negotiate my fare, knowing I was paying 25% over the going rate but not caring so much, what is an extra 2 dollars?

 

So when it seems like you are going nowhere, everyone gets the message and the van goes from half empty to bursting at the seems in just a few minutes of flurious activity. I am not sure how it worked out but we made the 4 hour trip in just over 2 ½ hours.  I was quite surprised when I looked at my watch and I could see the dust cloud coming from Moron, far in the distance.

 

I had a strong desire to get going on my merry way to Ulan Baator, for at least a few days I had been dreaming of a visit to the cinema and some crap food at a western style “fast food” joint.  Yes yes, I was craving civilization. I walked around the small parking lot of vehicles filling up for various destinations. There were only two destinations that I could recognize, most of the transport was quite regional.  I walked through the market knowing that there was another parking lot of vehicles.  

 

In the second small lot I found a vehicle with an Ulan Baator sign written in the Cyrillic alphabet.   So I asked if they were going to good ole UB, and they said yes.  I question whether they were leaving today and they told me they were leaving in 3 hours. I chuckled a bit about that, but clearly they were going to leave when full, and they expected to leave that day.  So I quickly agreed on a price, later on I would learn that it was just better to pay them when the other passengers did. Always, any country, any time.  Don’t let yourself be singled out for paying separately from the other passengers. Again I knew what the local rate was and still paid a little extra.  Honestly I am not sure how they made enough money to maintain the vehicles on the off road routes through Mongolia. 

 

I wandered a bit around the market and found some paper for writing letters.  It wasn’t good paper but real stationary wasn’t available.  Without any other way to communicate, I wrote a bunch of letters.  I wrote more letters while horsing around northern Mongolia than I used spoken words.  And the funny part is that I did most of my talking with my horse, mostly encouragement, or a bit of questioning. So yes I needed civilization.

 

As I was leaving the market I had a bad feeling about the men I had left my bag with.  Call it some paranoia, but their van was parked next to the lot, not exactly inside it.  I had given them my big bag since I couldn’t really care it around the regional metropolis.  So I walked back to pretend to ask them some question, and wasn’t surprised that they were driving around trying to drum up more business, because that’s how it was done.   Surprisingly one of their fellow drivers sensed my dismay gave me the vans liscense plate number which later turned out to be correct and I realized that I hadn’t been the victim of a scam.

 

I found the internet, but it wasn’t working. I bought myself a bottle of water, and headed towards the post office and communications center where the internet was working.  How do you find the post office in Mongolia?   Its easy, look for a radio tower.

 

I sent out some emails with news of my adventure.  I felt better after sending those emails, it was the last thing I had hanging over my head. 

 

I went to the same restaurant that I visited with Essei 17 days earlier. There was a man playing a game with balls, akin to the addicitive qualities of Tetris on a computer.  I ate well and good and then wandered around more.  It was a small town. Really it only had a small commercial zone.  At 5:00 I went towards the market to catch my ride which was “leaving” at 5:00.   I recognized the van before it stopped to pick me up on a street at least a 10 minute walk from the bus stand.  I recognized the plate number I had been given and then gave a wave.

 

What followed was the standard drive around town, so I saw many residential districts of Moron (more-own).  At one point we were waiting in front of a random magazine for an hour.  It was me, the driver, his two friends, and two passengers.  Around dark we found a few more passangers and then we drove around town for a full hour, mostly driving, making a few stops.  Then we went picking up passangers until we actually seemed to be making progress, before that I assumed we weren’t leaving that day.  So after we were full to the gills we drove around for another 20 minutes, and made 2 more stops, picked up a rifle, and some more cargo, sacks of flower or grain.

 

When we pulled out of town is was 10:00, at the petrol station, the canteen style restaurant was closed for the evening.  So we drove back into town and ate at a nicer place.  Eating dinner together was a great experience.  There were about 14 of us, one guy spoke some English and translated some introductions. Everyone was quite nice and I felt a certain camaraderie among the men after committing to such a long road journey together.  The menu was dual language English-Mongolian, I was impressed with that. I ordered something that was 3$ I later realized that I had ordered something expensive so I had one hell of a platter of food.  I readily shared what I couldn’t eat, but I had to beat some of the men with a stick before they would eat it.

 

It was after 11:00 when we finally go going.  I was expecting about 20 hours on the road.  Well it wasn’t a road, but over 600km of off road choose your own adventure traveling.  No signs, only a few bridges over unfordable rivers. When we left town, there was singing.  It was a Mongolian pop ballad, and my friends were quite joyful when I joined in on the song.  Lucky for me the song was a bit repetitive, but damn it was a good feeling, I felt so triumphant.  I had conquered without doubt a somewhat remote and daunting travel adventure.  And even better I felt like I had done it with style.