Ulan Baatar

How to sum up two hectic days in Mongolia's big city?  I'm drinking my Zhalam Khar beer, it is getting late, and I am strung out on a city full of temples and rubble, surrounded by mountains but harsh with fumes of pollution, friendly but mostly incomprehensible.  Of note:

-Gandan Khiid Monastery: spiritual center of the city, we walked up on Saturday for the morning rituals and went into several temples where red and orange robed monks chanted and blew horns and bashed cymbols together in celebration.  In one temple, it seemed like the baby brigade of young monks in training, 7-14 yr olds that seemed too young for the serious faces - yet once we looked closer, they were just like any other normal boys, fidgeting and poking each other and one with the cymbols caught our eye and hammed it up a bit when we smiled.  In another temple, there were much older monks, and as we made the clockwise circle around the perimeter, I could see a few of them reading sutras (?) off of scripted text - old Mongolian or Tibetan I don't know.  One had been creating a small drawing out of tiny pebbles, a stylized scorpion.  Many Mongolians were there to turn prayer wheels and bathe their hands in the incense that poured out of ornate pots in the courtyard.  Small boys sold bags of seed to feed the congregation of pigeons, old men in traditional costume sat in the shade of the temples and smoked pipes.  After the cultural strictness of Russia, the first thing we noticed was a plethora of smiles.

-Strangely, the westernization of this city - supermarkets that are more similar to an Alaskan bush AC store instead of the kiosk arrangement of many Russian shops, restaurants and pubs everywhere, most of them advertising free wi-fi.  The sheer number of "Mongolian Irish Pub" joints in the downtown sector is unbelievable.  While the Mongolian language uses the Russian cyrillic letters, there are more bilingual signs here than I saw in Moscow.  Some of the translations give me a giggle, I should have taken more pictures...

I spent a lot of time on Saturday and Sunday morning trying to make arrangements for a trip to the countryside.  Mongolia is a very difficult place for an independent traveler - beyond major cities, good roads and public transportation just do not exist.  Standard practice is to get enough people together and rent a jeep or minivan (with driver) and then explore from there.  Places to stay are also limited, especially after the peak summer season.  Several of the guesthouses have connections set up in various spots and will work with people to plan an itinerary with transport, but you definitely have to "shop around" and as a solo traveler, find at least 3 or 4 other people to split the costs.  I was lucky to meet a couple from Spain last night who had a similar time span and seem like really great folks.  We waited until this morning to find another 2 people to join in, and now have a plan to leave tomorrow (Monday) morning and head into west central Mongolia for 5 days.  We will stay in the extra gers of nomadic families and pay them directly for accomodation and food, which I think is the best arrangement.  Our itinerary will be: a night in a place that is a smaller version of the Gobi desert, then out further west to a national park for 2 days, where there is a famous waterfall on the Orkhon river, and the potential to attempt riding Mongolian horses and visiting hot springs. On our way back to UB we will visit Karakorum, which is one of the ancient capitals of Mongolia (in 1220, Chinggis Khaan moved it here and then 40 years later his son moved the capital to what is now Beijing, then the remains of Karakorum were used in the construction of Erdene Zuu Monastery in the 16th century.  The Monastery still stands, but mostly was destroyed during Stalin's religious purges.  We will get a chance to visit, and see what is left!)

Ok, of course there is so much left to write, but I am fading out and this is already so long.  So, I will be out until Friday night, and then take the Saturday morning train from UB to Beijing, arriving on Sunday morning for the last leg of my trip.  Nohkoi Khorio! (standard greeting when approaching a ger, meaning "please tether your dogs")