Mongolia, the land sings

Every other train has struck straight across the emptiness of Siberia. Today it is different, we need to get around Lake Baikal, so the train curves around the lake which makes for an especially beautiful trip today. We have the mountains that ring Lake Baikal on one side of us and the lake with its small towns and beaches on the other. Jes theorises we'll go halfway up the side of the lake and then follow the river. So Mongolia is not as far as it appears, we just wind our way there. And I am lucky that this is my only morning train, so I can watch it more.

Ulan-Bator 18 days in Mongolia

We are on the first day of our tour, riding in a budget land cruiser over the steppes, when it occurs to me, I have come far enough. I have come to the ends of the earth, like the voyage of Prince Caspian I am looking over the edge, and now I am ready for the long journey home.

It is a cool moment to have this feeling because I am almost exactly at the halfway point of my trip. (December 15 to February 15 pretty much so July 15 when I got on the transsiberian would be the halfway point). It is a good time for a turning the bark back to shore kind of feeling.

For though from out this bourne of time and place, the flood may bear me far, I hope to meet my pilot face to face when I have crossd the bar.

Jes asks me what I mean: it's not the strangest or the furthest or the most intense place we have been. I think it's the emptiness. You can look out from any point and there's infinity in green fields and purpling hills. Tiny fragile gers dot the landscape, a family in a temporary home made of sticks and braided manes. The wind never stops, cresting up the mountains, sweeping the plains.

But time stops. People live on these plains- half of mongolia still lives in traditional gers- in the same way they have since the domestication of animals. For a country of only three million, population density is at hunter gatherer levels. You are looking back and forward in time across a landscape unchanged by the depredations of the human settlement cancer that grows everywhere. It is the edge of the world, the edges of human settlement, insofar as it can be found in 2016.

Mongolia is a land designed to write your own way. There are hills, even mountains, craggy and bare with windswept rocks. And of course the famous grasslands sweeps of plains with hills rising onto hills beyond.

Most of the hills though are shallow enough to climb, with grass reaching up them, to their peaks. Because of the cold, and the lack of water, the grass is short like ankle height, so you don't need trails, because except for the rising pine, there is not a lot of trees and the grass and tundra flowers are low enough to walk on.

This means that people, cars, horses, herds of goats can just strike out in any direction. They do so, and that makes paths, roads, trails which the next comer can follow, or branch off from.

We stayed three days in Ulaan Bataar, working out our budget, what we were going to do, finding activities we could afford, doing our laundry and also seeing the national museum and finding an IMAX theatre where we could watch american films.

After that we struck out to a ger camp just outside of town, though because of the hills, it could be miles and miles.

Gers, or yurts are a cylinder topped with a dome. They are special because they can be packed down and loaded onto a horse. The walls are made like climbing trellises, four sections that collapse. Then there is a central wheel at the top of the dome, (and you think, the gypsy wheel like in the banners but it's real, it's a real thing part of the house the keystone when you raise your nomadic home each new place). Between the wheel and the walls, there are a bunch of little spokes that make the dome, by angling up from the cylinder to the top of the roof. Each spoke goes into a slot at the top of the central roof and is tied to the trellis through a thong. In the rural or more authentic ger camps, the trellises are attached with bits of knotted goat hide and the thongs are done with braided horse hair. The walls of this construction are layers of fabric, canvas and felt. The felt some of the more authentic places smells like goat and sheep, because it is made by them, untreated and undyed.

Our first ger camp was very polished and pro, decorated. The hills around it were easy. We relaxed the first day and the second day we climbed up the biggest hill, the one with stands of birches halfway up. It was a couple hours to the top, and got steep, walking up animal tracks that were really just a way someone had broken the trail in before. And then from the crest of the hill you could see more ger camps and trees and grasses, and velvety purple hills in the distance and the city in another distance.

The next day I went walking on my own, for a bit longer, I took an easy way up on a road.

Roads in Mongolia are like paths, except instead of being a place a horse has ever gone before it's a place a car has ever gone before, but there were tire tracks in the grass. It took me up to the pass, and from there you can walk almost even, up and down along the ridge, so I went up to the crest of one peak, and then down the saddleback and back up the crest of another. And then cut down into a deep stand of pine. The hawks, golden, circled through the branches, they rode the winds along the peaks as well.

I made my way downhill with the silent breathlessness of a forest without undergrowth all around me. Walking at an angle, the easiest way, tree trunks march up, tree trunks march down. When I emerged, I was still higher than I expected, so I irresistibly turned back up to another peak. So then I descended down the rockiest part of the ridge, so I could watch both sides of the hill for the longest.

The wind never stops, coming up the mountains in gusts, whisking your clothes, your hair. It means it's never too hot, because the air always moves. And if you keep moving it's never too cold, because the sun is hot.

Ok so then back to UB, for like a day only really it was our host's family cottage. There were a bunch of little kids around there, who jes made friends with and we played the game of telling them the english names for all their toys as we brought them.

Our second week in Mongolia was the tour.

1- Our guide and our cook both had limited English but were the sweetest people. They had actually excellent mind reading capacity in doing whatever we wanted before we even said it. And the cook did a really nice job making the same 5 ingredients into a different meal every night.

So first day he took us out to a 6^th -8^th century ruin. It had this really cool sophisticated stacked rock construction. You could perceive and walk around the old city wall, and there was a watchtower out at the corner that was still standing and had an egg shaped dome. We asked if there was ever not wind, he said no. There was a little museum there that was really whatever they had dug out of the site kind of scattered on some tables. In general your ability to touch museum artifacts in Mongolia freaks me out man.

2-Kharkhorum the ancient capital of Genghis Khan is what we went to today. Of course the issue is that Kharkhorum has had some reversals. First it was rebuilt as a monastery to the Mongolian Dalai Lama in the 17^th century or something. Side note: Mongolia has its whole own buddhism and its own Dalai Lama. WTF? The level of things you can not know about the world is large yo. We learned heaps of cool things. For example, there's these gods called wrathful protectors who are blue and super violent and tread on all human sins. There is a female one and here's her story. So she had to marry a demon. She was not a fan, so after the wedding she got pregnant, but then she gave birth to her baby, and ate it, and then skinned her husband, and used his skin as a saddle blanket, and rode away on her donkey. GG. So you can recognise her super easy, because she is riding a donkey with the skin of her dead husband and picking her teeth with a baby. There's another one who steps on an elephant man, and another one who has like eight feet to smash eight dudes. It's like learning catholic saints through italian art all over again.

Then of course in the 20^th century the soviets bulldozed down kharkhorum and then in the 21^st century they tried to rebuild the monuments, but you know it's by no means original. But the stones are the same, these huge blue black stones from Ghengis' city.

And in the middle there's the foundation of where his central ger was, the ring of stones and the keystone in the centre where the wheel would have gone, all that time ago. I walked the circle around it, and it's huge you know, many steps to trace its bones.

3- We rocked out to a museum which had some of the old steles with the writing on them, a peace pact and rules for the management of the country. I think this is the night we stopped by the lake, and the clouds grew and I listened to fratellis over dawn, and the fishermen went out on their boats at dusk and there was a child dance party for sunset, and the worlds cutest family in half traditional clothing kept chasing each other around and going swimming and the boys drove in the horses and sheep in the afternoon.

4- We made it to the Orkhon waterfall. There was a delightful extra hot hot spring there. We walked over to the waterfall, and there's a trail which follows it, and you can follow almost the whole volcanic crater edge. Because that's what it is, and better than that the whole river valley that leads to this water is world heritage listed, less for its beauty than for its culture, because this river valley made I think the domestication of animals and the herding culture possible, and it's still going on to this day. The cultural heritage listing extends to the present day culture cause you know it's the same culture.

Ok but the river valley means you have to ford little riverlets like a hundred times and sometimes there's horses and fluffy cows standing in the water. We had lunch next to a riverlet and we got to go exploring the river and little islets in between and I got my shoes wet. And then we got to the waterfall in the afternoon and got to have a massage and a hot spring and walk to the crater's edge and look at the waterfall crashing down. And then the locals were doing this thing, which our guide and Jes and this random guy helped me do too, cause I was scared but it was so cool, which is you could climb out to this island at the top of the waterfall, but you had to jump over some water, which was the scary part. So I basically jumped into their arms with them pulling me and then you were there at the top and could watch the water rush. And all the local boys were like balancing precariously and doing selfies and such.

5-The next morning we started out by climbing down to the base of the waterfall, which was a cool clambery climb where you had to seriously watch your rocks for a bit of it. And then you could enjoy looking up at the same waterfall, which was making rainbows this morning.

Then we climbed high up to Turkhun monestary, right up a mountain. We drove to the top of a high hill, and then there was a few kms of walking deeper into the woods, also mostly up and with the tracks in mud.

And then at the monestary you climb stairs and stairs like to heaven and there's a temple up there. It commands great views of the surrounding countryside. There is something different about looking at the tops of mountains from the tops of other mountains. And there were birds up there and old trees, and bells to ring. And then we climbed back down pretty quick because we blew our schedule so didn't want it to be too super late when we got down there.

But it was anywhere and remember you have to ford those million rivers. But we wound up behind this hero who was taking a shitty Toyota sedan through the riverlands fully laden with all his possessions and family. He would get out of his car and test each river for fordability with his feet, just wading into them splish splish splish until he found a spot that wasn't too deep, and then he'd drive his car through that repeat for like two hours until midnight and we followed him all the way out of there.

And now is probably a good time to mention a couple of days before when there was a massive hailstorm. We were climbing up into the hills and it started to rain and then it started to hail, big pebble sized hail, and our driver stopped on a mountain top while we waited it out, intense all around us and the wind. Then it stopped or slowed to rain again and we kept on but this was still in the riverlands and we passed so many people stuck in the mud or run off the road, and he had to skid us up this mud which seemed like a near thing for a while there.

6-We went south to this sand dune which giver you a bit of a sense of the Gobi without going to it. We stayed on a ger on a high hill which had an incredible view of the elsen tasarnai sand dune. The guy with the ger had horses and we got to ride.

Mongolian horses are different to the ones I have ridden before, short but strong shaggy mountain ponies, and their gait is different, more of a jog than a walk or a trot, a bouncy short stepped little walk that brisks up as they get faster. It was actually easier to ride, because there was never a jolt to it, and increasing their pace seemed really fluid. So it was one of the funnest rides in that way. But there was a weird thing where he kept the horses on lead ropes to him so we were all uncomfortably close together. He took us in a loop up and down the mountains and really that's the thing to do, Get a horse and a pack horse for your ger and a guide, and ride straight across. There is more world heritage listed stuff in the west of the country. And when I go back that's what I'll do, find someone who will take me and just head west, out across this ceaseless country.

We rode camels in the afternoon. Which I think is my first time, at least since like a zoo loop as a kid or something. It was decidedly less magical. First of all, deserts are sand. It's hard for me to attach to them. Secondly, camels are very bumpy. It was exciting to be so high, but the best part was it standing up and sitting back down. For most of the ride I felt like I understood how people who don't like riding horses feel when I drag them along to it. This is not fun for you or me buddy. I can see where it all went wrong here. Well it was fine, and a cool new experience. But the horse while perhaps more ordinary was a million times better. It was cool to watch the camel's strange gait and stride length and how its foot flexed against the ground though.

7- And then in the morning we went to a monastery which was the scene of the soviet massacre where they rounded up all the Buddhist monks and killed them cause you know. That's how they roll. It had lovely views of the sand and valley and hills where we had been playing. And Jes and I had a whole talk about soviet massacres and just wars. And then we drove down together to Ulaan Bataar.