The Land of Blue Sky, Part 1: Ulaanbaatar

We’re finally ready to start trying to describe our amazing two-week trip to Mongolia.

Some of you may be asking, "Why Mongolia?" In fact, some of you did ask. Our Mongolia obsession started with our trip to Beijing in August-September 2001. There was a Mongolian restaurant in our hotel. One night we went there for dinner and were the only customers, so our waiter -- a Mongol who had moved to Beijing -- gave us lots of attention. We got to talking (as best you can when neither of you speaks the other's language) and slowly became fascinated with the idea of visiting Mongolia.

The next summer we watched a BBC series called Edge of Blue Heaven in which explorer Benedict Allen crossed the length and breadth of Mongolia by horse, camel and his own two feet. That sealed the deal. Every once in a while we'd refresh our Mongolia obsession with documentaries about the Mongol horde or movies like The Story of the Weeping Camel. Now all we had to do was figure out how to get there.

Last fall we saw a program that featured Julia Roberts living with a nomadic family in Mongolia for two weeks. It was a great program, and we watched the credits carefully to note down the companies that helped her organize the trip. The most prominent name was Nomads Tours and Expeditions. We contacted Nomads last April to inquire about tours, looked at our household budget, and booked our trip.

So, almost eight years after that dinner in the Sino-Swiss Hotel, we made it.

On 3 July we flew from Bangkok to Ulaanbaatar through Beijing. The Chinese authorities are taking every possible precaution against people bringing H1N1 influenza into China. We were individually scanned with forehead heat sensors while still on the plane, then walked through a quarantine line and full-body scanned before we could finally pass through to our transit terminal. While on the airport shuttle bus to the next terminal for our flight to Mongolia, we were surprised to see the Sino-Swiss Hotel and the little grassy area where we jogged in the last few days before our half-marathon on the Great Wall in 2001! A nice omen to start our trip.

After that five-hour layover, a three-hour flight on Mongolian Airlines got us into Ulaanbaatar around midnight. We grabbed our backpacks -- each carefully loaded to weigh less than 20 kilos (44 pounds), as instructed by Nomads -- and met our tour guide, Ariuntsetseg. She was charming from the start: "Oh, you are young and energetic, so I think we will be able to complete our trip successfully!"

The next morning, we stepped out of the Bayangol Hotel, an old Communist-era hotel with clean sheets and friendly service, and began our explorations of Ulaanbaatar. Our tour with Nomads didn’t start until the next day, so we were on our own. The day was cool (around 15C/60F), windy and overcast -- a definite change from heat and humidity of Bangkok! Ulaanbaatar is also about 1,310 meters (4,300 feet) above sea level, which makes it one of the highest capital cities in the world.

This is Sükhbaatar Square, the heart of Ulaanbaatar. At the center is a statue of Damdin Sükhbaatar, a serf-turned-military hero who helped liberate Mongolia from Chinese domination and Buddhist theocracy, with Soviet help. In 1921, Mongolia became the world’s second Communist country.



Like Tienanmen Square in Beijing or Red Square in Moscow, Sükhbaatar Square is great for families, amateur artists trying to sell their wares, and young couples out to enjoy the day.


The other dominant feature of the square is the Government Palace, where the Mongolian parliament -- the State Great Khural -- sits. Also sitting there, in case you haven't noticed, is the Great Khaan himself, Chinggis.


This statue, as well as the statues of Khubilai Khaan, Ogedei Khaan, and two of Chinggis's generals, was added to Government Palace during a renovation in 2005-2006.


After roaming around this part of the city for a while, we went to the State Department Store. Before Mongolia's democratic revolution in 1990, the State Department Store was Mongolia's equivalent of Beijing's Friendship Store -- a state-owned and -run enterprise. It’s now in private hands and serves as one of the main department stores for the people of Ulaanbaatar. The fifth floor specializes in Mongolian handicrafts and souvenirs, so we spent some time checking those out.


Mongolia is famous for its cashmere, wool, fur and felt products. The capital is full of interesting shops with all manner of sweaters, jackets, hats, slippers ... if you can make it from hair that used to be on a sheep, goat, camel or yak (or fox, or wolf, or sable, or ...), they've done it.

Mongolia also has a great art scene (more on this later), so we browsed through a few art galleries. At the Xanadu Art Café we saw several large-format paintings by an artist we particularly liked. We got his name -- E. Naidandorj -- and telephone number from the gallery and promised ourselves that we’d give him a call when we came back to the capital the next weekend.


That evening we had dinner at Los Bandidos, a Mexican-Indian restaurant. Our friend Molly had eaten there several years earlier and recommended it to us as a unique experience. After all, how many people do you know who have eaten at a Mexican-Indian restaurant in Ulaanbaatar? Our chicken fajitas tasted oddly like chicken tikka, but that’s all right. Happy Fourth of July!

The next day Ariuntsetseg met us at the hotel for a day of sightseeing. Our first stop was the Gandantegchinlen Monastery, a Tibetan-style Buddhist monastery.


The Communist revolution in the early 20th century overthrew a theocratic system in which Buddhist lamas and their dependents held most of the property and political power. Once the Communists tightened their hold on Mongolia, Buddhism was harshly repressed and thousands of monks were killed. Since the 1990 democratic revolution, Buddhism has once again begun to flourish in Mongolia. Some of the lamas at Gandantegchinlen were active in the democratic movement, and Ariuntsetseg told us that the monastery itself is seen as "a symbol of freedom and democracy."


We bought some juniper incense and drank some juniper tea at the temple to serve as a blessing for our time in Mongolia.


Our next stop was the Winter and Summer Palaces of the eighth Bogd Khaan. He was the emperor of Mongolia from the early 20th century until the Communist revolution, when he became a figurehead. Once he died, the Communists had sole power over Mongolia.


We don't have our own pictures from this area because there was a $10 charge to take photos, but Wikipedia has lots of good pictures. We've borrowed a couple of them here (thanks, Brücke-Osteuropa!). The Summer Palace was full of Tibetan Buddhist iconography, and Patrick had a good time spotting similarities and differences with the Tibetan Buddhist temples he knows in Nepal. The Winter Palace was built around the same time that our house in Asheville was.


While we don’t have musical chairs from Czar Nicolas II (when you sit on them, they play music) or a ger covered in leopard skin, we still like our little place in Asheville better.



Our next stop of the morning was the Zanabazar Museum of Fine Arts, featuring Mongolian art from ancient pictograms to modern impressionists. Here we learned about Zanabazar, the ruler, holy man and artist who created the Soyombo, the national symbol that adorns the Mongolian flag.


We also saw one of Mongolia's most famous paintings, "One Day in Mongolia," painted by B. Sharav. Sharav was famous for his sense of humor -- in the painting you can see naked men chasing sheep, curious camels investigating the secrets of amorous couples, and the unfortunate aftereffects of drinking too much fermented mare's milk.

The Museum has a gallery selling modern art; we asked the curator if she'd ever heard of Naidandorj, the artist we liked at the Xanadu Art Café. She knew him, she said, and would try to give him a call on our behalf.

After lunch, Ariuntsetseg turned us loose for a free afternoon while she got things prepared for the next part of our trip. The day was much warmer and sunnier, so we had a couple of milkshakes on the terrace at the Grand Khaan Irish Pub near our hotel and did some great people-watching.



That evening we met Ariuntsetseg for dinner at the tourist-oriented Modern Nomads restaurant (motto, from a Mongol proverb: "Meat is for men, grass is for animals"). We also met Naidandorj, the artist! He was much younger than we'd expected. He brought his portfolio with him, a collection of snapshots of his paintings. His work draws on the subjects, colors and composition of Mongolian traditional art and blends it with the clean modern lines of Japanese anime. There were so many paintings we liked, and we inquired about two of them. He agreed to meet us the next weekend to show us those two in person.

After Naidandorj left, the three of us dove into our khorkhog, mutton stewed with vegetables and cooked by means of hot stones. Ariuntsetseg then told us about the next part of our journey, a five-day horse trek through the Khan Khentii mountains. Jennifer was excited, but also a bit nervous, about the prospect of riding a horse she'd never met through the Mongolian wilderness. Ariuntsetseg tried to reassure her, but didn’t quite succeed:

"The horses ... they know. They know."


* A note on names. Mongolian is written in both the Mongolian and Cyrillic alphabets. Transliterations into the Roman alphabet and into English phonetics vary. We’re using the system that most academics who specialize in Mongolia seem to prefer, and that (from our experience) more accurately reflects local speech. So, for example, "Genghis Khan" becomes "Chinggis Khaan" in this system.