Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
November 12th-19th, 2007
by Dan Murdoch
NORTH POLE COLLECTION
+DEFEND THE SMELL TO PROCESS
+ DEFEND THE SHRINKAGE TO HANDLE
=HEALTH UNDERWEAR
Slogan on the box of the thermal underwear we bought.
WHEN I got on the train I was in Europe. When I got off I was in Asia.
It’s not true, but that’s how it felt. I’d only really headed south, hardly east at all, but the people looked entirely different.
Asian.
Well Mongolian actually.
The train pulled in around 6:30am, an hour early. Typical that I get the only train to arrive early in the whole of East Asia at the very time I'm in a comatose sleep in a decent bed. The Trek had clearly already hit the city because the assembled touts claimed to know where the guys were.
“They are at our place,” a kind looking lady told me.
I trusted her but didn’t want to be complacent so asked a few questions about the gang. She had all the answers so I went with her.
The hostel the boys found had a TV in the front room. No one was up yet and I hate to wake them, so I flicked on BBC World.
Asian Business Review came on; normally I would have lapped it up. I love the news, it has a meditative affect on me, but this morning I realised I really couldn’t give a toss.
News Anchor: “So the rise in interest rates could have an effect on the equities sector?”
Expert: “I believe so and that means firms like...”
Absolutely no interest.
Dealing so intently with life’s little problems: eating, sleeping, moving, has made the issue of Asian economics seem a little removed.
The Northern Ireland Secretary flashed up on screen. Ian Hayward MP I think. It was the classic shot, standing outside parliament, interviewer out of shot. I hadn’t heard a politician talk for months. Maybe he’s just shit, but it was so depressing. I don’t remember what he was talking about, in fact he wasn’t talking, he was regurgitating some message in slow deliberant dullness, so devoid of charisma he may well have been a government autobot, constructed in the depths of Downing Street from faded manifestos and thoughtless think tanks.
The hostel was great. The UB Guesthouse. Very professional and friendly. Full of other travellers, nice atmosphere, helpful staff, cheap dorms.
But we had heard that a guesthouse down the road had free wifi, and so I went and checked in there. It didn’t work for Macs, only Pcs. We have three macs and two PCs in our touring circus.
Chinese visas were done pretty smoothly. I wrote that I was a journalist on my form and it caused a bit of a stir. They demanded my press card, photocopied it and asked a few extra questions. But I got the visa fine.
I had raced to UB (Ulaanbaatar) from Russia because we planned to leave straight after getting our visas done.
But this is Trabant Trek. Of course we didn’t leave. There was work to be done on the cars. Turned out I could have had a weekend in Irkutsk and then taken the two hour plane, rather than the 35 hour train. But there we go.
This is Trabant Trek.
The neighbourhood we were staying in was full of pretty well-dressed folk. The kids are hip-holy, a little skatery. Then the odd traditional orange sash and gown. There’s a young indie vibe, plenty of independent retailers like the Homestay Hip Hop Shop. They love their hip hop.
Despite the appearance of the locals, who look entirely Mongolian, in many ways this place feels more European than Irkutsk. It could be Eastern Europe. Everything is anglicised, or maybe that should be Americanised, and there are far more English speakers than in Siberia.
We pass King Pizza, California Restaurant, the Detroit Bar (slogan: ‘Shut up and Drink’). Americans don’t even need a visa to get into Mongolia and, like most of the places we’ve visited, English-speaking locals found my English accent more difficult to understand than the American’s accent.
I wondered around Sukhbaatar Square in the centre of the city.
City squares. Across the world people have the same idea. Clear a big space in the middle of the city and whack a great statue or column up there with a national hero on the top, in this case Sukhbaatar, who liberated the country in the 20s. Try and flank the square with a few good buildings, maybe an opera house or a museum and a voila, a centre for civic pride and national identity (and protest: Trafalgar, Tiananmen, Catalunya, Mayo).
My fleeting affair with the Russian language is now over. It’s amazing how much of the world speaks Russian. Before this trip I hadn’t really thought about it, but we’ve been using Russian since early August, when we arrived in Georgia. Three months of it and we’d all picked up a fair amount- OJ’s pretty hot at it, and we can all read the Cyrillic alphabet now.
But Mongolia has it’s own language, and then we’re dealing with Chinese. This will be a problem.
Some nights it dropped to –20c here. There’s no wind chill, but it’s still crazy cold. Exposed fingers ache and burn within minutes, cold feet begin to hurt.
One evening we bought a few beers to keep us warm while we did Fez breaks. But every time we cracked one open it froze before we could finish it. And they were only little 330ml cans.
Frickin cold.
I watched steam rising from an open manhole like effluent ghosts escaping from the sewers. Water bottles left in the car overnight turned to solid blocks of ice.
In the mornings the cars rarely start. On day three we spent ages trying to get Ziggy going, pushing the Trabbi around the circle of the courtyard we were staying in. We gathered quite a crowd of onlookers.
An unhealthy Trabant resonates at a specific frequency that sets off every car alarm it passes, as if the other vehicles are shrieking a warning or crying out in agony. The morning was spent stopping and gasping after another failed attempt at push starting the car, surrounding by flashing lights and ringing alarms in the freezing cold.
Finally Ziggy was going and we thought we’d pull start Dante. But that didn’t work so Tony popped the hood and found some cheeky tykes had nicked the battery. Who nicks a car battery? It cost us $8. They tore the font of the bonnet up to get at it.
Wankers.
We had been warned to park near the guards hut, and we didn’t, so we probably deserved it. Carlos had heeded the advice when parking Fez and had a little game of ‘I told you so’.
Since the 17th Century, when this version of the Mongolian nation was established, its capital has always been a tent city. The highly mobile capital could migrate to seek new grazing and had a variety of uninspiring names like Camp, and Capital Camp. You can see that the Mongols weren’t really city dwellers, and even now large parts of UB is made of tents, albeit with electricity.
Driving to get the cars fixed I saw a bit more of this behind the scenes UB. The outskirts of the city is made of one storey wooden shacks punctuated by the impeccable gers (or yurts, the round tents), their chimney puffs joining in the low atmosphere to create a thick, opaque haze across the city.
The ger is still very much a part of life. The skins are a taught, creamy felt, about 15feet in diameter and tall enough to easily stand in the middle.
Inside the mechanics ger that we visited was warm, spacious and well kept, the central stove heating the place up nicely, the walls decorated with blankets showing horses playing on a baron steppe.
Most front yards seem to have a ger. I asked the owner of the mechanics, Chinzo, who lived in them.
“Families. Sometimes the family of the people in the house, sometimes just another family. It is our way of life.”
Whole suburbs of neat, round felt tents.
I thought we were only staying here for a few hours to get our visas and go. But it turned into a week. And not the ‘lets spend a week in the world’s coldest capital’ sort of a week, but a Trabant Trek week. Every day we would prepare ourselves to leave, and then something new would happen to the cars to force us to stay. Fez’s brakes were the biggest problem. The mechanics and the Mighty Tony P tried a variety of fixes, but it took days. Because we always thought we were about to leave, we didn’t really do much in the city. Sat around using internet and trying to find hamburgers. Progress was painfully slow and we watched as our China visas ticked away.
We finally left on Monday November 19th (about the time Tony thought he would be getting home), and began the journey south into the Gobi desert, and hopefully on to China.
For the hundredth time Zsofi’s parents told her she should head home. They really haven’t been supportive.
“This time I said that I would,” she told us at a meeting by the cars. She’s nearly out of cash, she explained.
She plans to fly home from Beijing.
Then there will be five.
ENDS
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org
