Mongolia in the World
Mongolia is sandwiched between the behemoth countries of China and Russia, with a population less than one percent of either neighbor. To the northwest and the southwest, the borders are relatively logical, divided along a combination of mountains and deserts. To the east, the borders are wherever the latest treaty set them to be. As such, there are Mongolian people both in Russia and China with nothing but a political boundary to separate them.
The City and Everything Else
There are really two different Mongolias inside these borders.
There is Ulaanbaatar, and there is everything else. The capital city of Ulaanbaatar (“UB” to the initiated) boasts a wealth of monuments, museums, playgrounds, cappuccino machines, a wide array of culinary choices, and several languages. Many signs and products are listed in Russian, Mongolian, Chinese, English, and Korean just for good measure. Every year, more and more Mongolians leave their family’s traditional lifestyle to seek new opportunities in UB. At the time of this article, fully half of the country’s population lived in this one city.
The countryside, in striking contrast to this dense city, is so sparsely populated and so vast that it offers a profound sense of tranquility. The monuments are canyons cut by ancient rivers; the museums are ruins of Buddhist temples, the playgrounds are vast open plains inhabited by grasshoppers, lizards, and grazing herds. It is open, seemingly never-ending wilderness against an always blue sky. The stars at night are like something you remember from your childhood.
Where to Sleep
Staying in a ger is a quintessential Mongolian experience. While most of the housing in Ulaanbaatar consists of tall apartment buildings, you’ll notice that in the countryside, and even in the smaller cities, people live in gers—almost exclusively in the countryside, and perhaps as much as 50% in the towns. Read more about the gers that we visited here.
While UB is replete with hotels, restaurants, stores, and all modern conveniences, the countryside is not. Finding places to stay and sources of food would be challenging (but possible) without a guide. We chose to work with Vast Mongolia Guest House and Tours for our time in both the city and the countryside, traveling with a guide who took us from place to place and relying heavily on his local knowledge. However, we also met young (more adventurous) people who strapped tents to horses they bought at a local market and rode off into the desert alone.
Getting Around
Riding horses is a classic Mongolian experience, and we understand that it is possible to travel from ger to ger in the saddle. Others are doing so on bicycles, motorcycles, and their own cars. We went in an 8-passenger bus that we lovingly nicknamed “tank.” There are lots of ways of going about it, and not a lot of rules on the steppe.
In fact, the countryside is so little developed that to get from one place to another in many cases, you simply drive in a roughly straight line in whichever direction you choose. If you have four-wheel drive—a sensible measure—and a good compass, you can go just about anywhere. You’ll go faster, of course, on the main highway, but not tons faster, as it tends to want for repairs.
Environmental Concerns
In Ulaanbaatar, meanwhile, the traffic is obscene. We literally traveled one block in 30 minutes while trying to leave town. The resulting air quality is depressingly low. That said, they have a higher concentration of Toyota Priuses than we’ve ever seen anywhere outside of a Toyota sales lot. Plus, the day we arrived was one of the strictly enforced “pedestrian days,” during which no cars were allowed in the central city—a wonderful experience.
Pedestrian days, hybrid cars, and what we heard talking with the young people indicates a keen interest in facing these problems head-on and finding long term solutions. They’re confronting environmental realities just like the rest of us. Every year people consume more and more plastic items here, just as in the rest of the world. But, in the Mongolian countryside, there’s no regular trash collection–it is hard to emphasize enough just how sparsely populated this land is, even by standards of the great plains of the US. So, do you leave this trash to scatter? Or burn it? We hope that they will find a more permanent solution; piles of debris and plumes of burning plastic make us very sad.
Food and Drink
On the upside, food production in the desert is beautifully simple and delectably organic. On seemingly barren land, goats, sheep, and camels continue to turn scrubby plant life into milk and meat. The Mongolian people then transform this milk and meat into a wide variety of shapes and flavors, and all without refrigeration. Vegetables, however, are harder to come by….
Our favorite dish was khorkhog, which is the familiar mutton stewed with potatoes, carrots, garlic, and onion—all cooked by hot river stones, placed right in the stew pot! Before you eat you pass the hot stones from hand to hand for good luck and perhaps to moisturize your hands with mutton grease!
Water is scarce, another reason for trekking in Mongolia with a guide. While we drank the water in the city and the countryside without getting sick, we were happiest using a filter, as some of the water had a strong salinity and unfamiliar odor.
A beverage everyone should try is milk tea—fresh-from-the-goat milk, tea, and sometimes salt/sugar. Even the babies drink it! It’s the perfect way to warm up on a frosty morning.
We are still amazed at the way Mongolians relish their airag—fermented mare’s milk. They drink it by the pail full! Truly, an acquired taste.
Go To Mongolia!
Should you come to Mongolia? Absolutely! Lamentably it’s not a direct flight from any place at all. But the vastness, the beauty, and pristine air a million miles from everyone else can’t be beat. If you come, spend a couple of days Ulaanbataar to get over your jet lag and see the museums and squares. And then head to the countryside with a guide and don’t come back until you smell terrible and feel terribly alive.
Feel free to contact us for more specific recommendations, including an introduction to our coordinator, guide, and hostess.
