Spent the first week of August in Mongolia with a brief stopover for dinner in Hong Kong on the way back. I had a cold on return and didn’t have the energy to get together a trip report. I’ve got a longer actual story about the trip underway, but I’ve also been hot on Atmospheres 2 which needs to get done pronto.
Anyway, before this totally gets away from here, here’s a quick bulleted list on the trip. Also, some photos are on Flickr.
- Yes, Mongolia. It’s the giant country between Russia and China. Not to be confused with Inner Mongolia, the big chunk at the top of China. Not a former Soviet republic either, although they were obviously tight back then.
- Everyone asks “why Mongolia” and the only real answer I have is I haven’t been there, it was not terribly expensive, I didn’t need a visa, and I knew everyone would ask “why Mongolia.”
- Left at midnight after being awake since 4am. 14 hour flight to Hong Kong and I slept maybe 4 or 5 fitful hours in a premium economy exit row. Had a seven hour layover in HK where I wandered the airport at 5 in the morning in a state of delirium.
- MIAT, the flag carrier of Mongolia, has a fleet of nine threadbare Boeings. I’ve never been in a more minimalist 737; I sat down and my knees were against the seat in front of me. At least they stopped flying the secondhand Antonov turboprops they kept crashing.
- Landed and completed my longest multi-segment trip ever: 1d 1h 40m.
- Had a driver who immediately asked me if I liked metal, even though we could only communicate with each other through translator apps. He then put on some Mongolian folk metal, which was a new one for me. (Throw “The Hu” in YouTube if you’re into that sort of thing.)
- The airport is about 50km south of Ulaanbaatar. That will take you either an hour or five to drive, depending on the number of yaks crossing the highway.
- Cars drive on the right side like the US, but they’re all right-hand drive, from Japan or Korea. Almost everything is a Prius with off-road tires and a three-inch lift. Imagine being awake for 40 hours and sitting in the driver’s seat of your last car, but then you realize you don’t have controls in front of you.
- The area between the airport looked a lot like the area outside Denver: giant grass-covered plains, with mountains in the distance. I also didn’t realize we’d be at altitude – maybe 4400 feet – so it had that big sky look with giant clouds seemingly five feet above.
- Stayed at a five-star that was a Best Western. Not a bad setup, actually. No complaints except the whole room had a single outlet, and I couldn’t get a straight answer on what power or plugs they use there. Everything online says “well, whatever.”
- I had a rough time with food. I brought a case of Clif bars and a bunch of protein gel, expecting to be unable to eat. I could not parse any of the food options and there’s very little American chain food, so I couldn’t just go to a TGI Friday. I ate a lot of junk from a convenience store next to the hotel, which wasn’t good.
- Mongolia has its own language, but uses the Cyrillic alphabet for the most part. Old people know Russian, and Chinese and Korean are sort of prevalent. This is probably the lowest amount of English comprehension of any country I’ve visited. This freaks some people the fuck out when I mention it, but it’s their country, and I can deal with being in a place and not knowing the language. I know probably ten words of Mongolian and could fake the rest.
- The city looks like if Anchorage was built by the Soviets in 1961. Lots and lots of poured concrete and Khrushchevkas. Every sign on top of a building was in Cyrillic. I was across the street from a central square and a parliament that looked like it probably had a gigantic bust of Leonid Brezhnev in it until the mid-90s when it was melted down for scrap or sold to some hipster in Seattle for an art project. The city is powered by a gigantic coal plant that’s right on the edge of downtown, and the air quality is not great from that.
- Poured rain the first day and I had no rain gear, just a down jacket that immediately absorbed five gallons of water and never dried again. I went to a Chinese tower mall, found a Sports Annex-like place and bought a far too elaborate rain jacket. I could not figure out the exchange rate and had this inch-thick fist of bills from pulling 80 USD from an ATM. I gave them a credit card and said “whatever” and I think it was like a million MNT. Got home and realized I spent like $250, which means every time you see me in the next ten years, I’ll be wearing a Mongolian raincoat.
- I’ve said this before, but these communists love their malls. I mean, communism ended a bit ago, but if you want to see a high-end mall with zero vacancies and completely full shelves, go to a place that’s still got Stalin on the money. I grew up with these horror stories about almost empty communist stores where you have to pay a week of salary to get almost nothing, and it turns out that describes a Target in 2025.
- Day two, I went on a big van trip with six or eight other people, like a twelve-hour junket through the Gorkhi Terelj national park. Highlights of this included a ten-story statue of Ghengis Khan on a horse where you climbed up into his head, holding an eagle, shooting a bow and arrow, camel rides (which I did not do, I’ve broken my arm enough times), visiting a nomad and drinking fermented camel milk (once again, nope), and eating lunch in a Ger (aka a yurt.)
- Once again, I did not eat much because – well, they love horses in Mongolia, and not just riding and racing them. I absolutely did not eat any meat that wasn’t chicken on this trip. Nice people at the restaurant, but no.
- We also went to the Aryapala temple, which involved walking up many steps and was incredibly beautiful and peaceful. Also near there, we climbed this giant granite rock formation called Turtle Rock, which I did not realize involved actual climbing climbing and going through tunnels like that one where James Franco had to cut his arm off with a pen knife.
- On the drive home, some truck hit a cow or something and the road completely shut down. When this happens, people just start driving next to the road in the dirt. When that line of traffic stops, people drive next to them, etc. So at one point, there’s like six or eight lanes of traffic crawling through the mud and dirt completely randomly. Total chaos. The 40km drive home took about five hours.
- The nomadic guy – Mongolia is about the size of Alaska, but with only three million people. Maybe half of that live in Ulaanbaatar, and about half are totally nomadic. They set up their ger in a random steppe and raise their livestock, then when the grass gets low, they move to another.
- Wednesday, I had a driver who brought me to the Mini Gobi desert, just me, him, and all my camera junk in a Land Cruiser. The drive took about 14 hours round trip. Lots of mountains in the distance. Lots of livestock on the road. Stopped at what looked like the Mongolian Costco to get supplies. Also stopped at a place that looked like the Mongolian Old Country Buffet, with three dozen steam trays where you pointed and they scooped a mystery meat onto a tray with beets and rice. I had the chicken, I think.
- Mini Gobi was cool, but honestly not 14 hours of small talk cool. We’re talking about the size of Warren Dunes on Lake Michigan, but instead of hot dog stands, there were camel rides for the kids and tourists. We also went to a small temple up in the mountains which was very quaint and also beautiful, but not like a tourist place. About half of our driving was off-road, which was pretty daunting.
- I bought a cashmere scarf for S at the temple. There’s a lot of cashmere for sale there. A lot.
- Picked up a horrible cold and I had to cancel a street photography tour. I’m glad I brought NyQuil/DayQuil because I went to a drug store and the closest I could find was a jar of some stuff with a horse on the label and it may have been made from snake venom or whale penis. Google Translate was useless for this.
- I wandered the city a few times, taking some pictures. There’s the occasional brand new Chinese or Korean high-rise, a tower mall or hotel. Infrastructure in the town is fair to poor, with lots of tore-up stuff and roads that inexplicably close for no reason. Traffic is pretty horrible, and there’s no great urban planning around this. Some of the smaller side streets with shops and open markets were pretty nice though, and they do have some parks and green spaces that they’ve been very intentional about and they look beautiful.
- I’d default to wandering around the central square, which wasn’t that heavily populated, but one day I went and there were a dozen different weddings going on. Each one had dozens of people in the party, dressed in traditional clothes, with pro photographers and selfie sticks and drones weaving everywhere chaotically. I shot some video of that and it was great fun to watch.
- The last night, I went for a long walk in the city and was sort of bummed that I didn’t get to do more and that the cold basically shut down the end of the trip. Shuffled around and ended up in a vacant Burger King where I ate a junior whopper. BK is airport-quality. No McDonald’s; no Taco Bell; no 7-Eleven. There’s a KFC/Pizza Hut but it makes it apparent this isn’t a country with many fresh vegetable choices.
- On the way back, same driver. He brought me to the airport and I realized this place was smaller than the South Bend airport, but every flight out of it was international. Saw horse jerky at the duty-free and yeah, no.
- On the way back, I stopped in Hong Kong and had eight hours, so I left the airport for the first time. My luggage was checked through, so I had nothing to carry, and I didn’t need a visa as long as I didn’t go to the mainland. I took a train to Kowloon, and the whole experience was absolutely surreal. The second I landed, my iPhone asked me if I wanted to buy a virtual Octopus card, which lets you use any transit and shop at many stores and restaurants. Five minutes after leaving customs, I was on a futuristic bullet train where one could probably perform surgery on the carpeted floor without cleaning it first. I went to Kowloon and was in the bottom floor of this gigantic mega-mall of super high end stores and it took me like 45 minutes to reach the surface. It looked like a Star Wars city, with glass towers of skyscrapers and immaculately groomed greenways and paths to fancy restaurants and coffee places. Everything was in Chinese but honestly the people in Hong Kong speak English better than Americans. I grabbed a kobe beef burger at this place and then hurried back to the airport, hoping customs would not be insane.
- Customs was completely automated, no questions, no lines. Amazing.
- 13 hour flight home. It was weird because I got to the airport on Saturday, technically left on Sunday morning, flew 13 hours, then landed Saturday night. Got my luggage, caught an uber, and actually got home on Sunday morning.
Fun stuff. I’ve still got to deal with pictures and videos, but I wasn’t terribly happy with anything I captured. There’s a lot for context, but few real bangers. Still, a very interesting trip. That’s four new countries this year for a total of 24 now. Probably no more international travel this year, but I’m already thinking about the next birthday trip.