Mongolia part 7--Final reflections

Mongolia- Part 7

So, now that you have read this blog should you go to Mongolia?
Would I recommend that you go to visit? I think that entirely depends on what you are like. Can you live without a flush toilet, running water and instant electricity for a few weeks? Can you survive on a wholesome but boring diet? Are you reasonably able-bodied and adaptable? Can you travel large distances over bumpy roads for the pay-off of beautiful scenery, no crowds and an insight into a fascinating life-style?

If yes, then you should definitely go –and soon--and do contact Jessica Brooks of Eternal Landscapes to arrange your trip. http://www.eternal-landscapes.co.uk/ or contact Jess direct jess@eternal-landscapes.co.uk

It will take you a while to adjust to the Mongolia so I suggest you spend at least 10 days there and preferably 3 weeks as we did. And do travel overland for at least part of your visit—if you just fly in and out to the various “sights” will entirely miss the point and quite likely be disappointed in Mongolia as a result.

And do avoid the corporately owned “tourist ger camps” which is where most tour groups end up. They are ghettos with rigid rules, poor quality or phoney ger accommodation, and where you will end up listening to fellow westerners talking about their mortgages or about how they are going to “do” Bhutan next. 

Try to stay in the family run gers— that is the best way to understand the country and its people. But pay fairly for your accommodation and do not expect room service; this is not free; this is not a hotel; some freeloading backpackers take advantage of the well-known hospitality of the Mongolians.

You will quickly realise that you do not really need a lot of the things you take for granted in your everyday western life. You will also come to savour the small pleasures: an outhouse with a western style toilet instead of an Asian squat; a hot solar-heated shower in the town shower house every two or three days; a chair with a back rather than a low stool; a change from the diet of mutton; a mattress without lumps; an electric light in your ger; butter, bread that isn’t stale. You will surprise yourself at how well you manage.

But you certainly do not need to worry about health. The air is fresh and unpolluted. The water is totally pure, there are very few flies or mosquitoes, and although the food is bland it is freshly cooked and healthy.

You will not be cheated or treated like a “tourist” whose only function is to be milked and ripped off. You will be met with personal respect and dignity and you will not be surrounded by sycophants who see you as a “mark”.


Memorable moments

When you are visiting such a fascinating and unusual place as Mongolia picking out specific memorable moments is bound to be unsatisfactory. But here are a few ones which stuck with me in particular. Refer back to the other parts of this blog post for photos:

• Coming out of our isolated ger at night (to go to the outhouse!) and seeing above me trillions of stars in the velvet sky and in front of me in the light of my headlamp hundreds of bright eyes of the herd of goats and sheep that had decided to spend the night keeping watch over us

• Herds of gazelles bounding lightly over the spring-green slopes of the northern Gobi

• Climbing down the walls of the Flaming Cliffs into the baking valley with it the strange sandstone pillars where the skeletons and eggs of previously unknown species of dinosaurs were found in 1920 

• Helping to prepare and eat a khorhog feast with the family we stayed with on the shores of White Lake, accompanied with much vodka and laughter. 

• Driving through the high passes and over the vast volcanic fields of the Juniper Mountains as the thunder crashed, the lightning lit the sky and the heavens opened with rain, making treacherous muddy slopes and rivers where there had been tracks 

• Stopping for a picnic lunch in a wide valley where a group of local horsemen and trainers were trying out their best horses for the upcoming Naadam races(see earlier explanation of Naadam)

• Listening to a group of school-age children at a music summer school in Bulgan learning to play the traditional horse-head fiddle led by two enthusiastic teachers

• Horseback riding through the flower-filled meadows on the slopes beside White Lake

• Listening to the local holiday-makers singing around their bonfire on the shores of Lake Khovsgol

• Sitting on a fallen tree amongst the wildflowers in a clearing in the larch forest watching a pair of demoiselle cranes pick their way like ballet dancers through the grasses beside a mountain stream

• Sitting in the courtyard of a Buddhist monastery quietly observing the monks and local people going about their religious observances in a quiet, relaxed and unselfconscious way

• Stopping at an isolated ger corral to watch the entire family shearing their sheep, the woman covered from head to toe to preserve her complexion but doing a far better job at shearing than her husband!

• Drawing water from a well in the Gobi to fill the water troughs as the baby goats and sheep exuberantly jostled and baa’d and butted each other and us in an excited effort to be first at the trough 

• Watching ibex silhouetted against the evening sky on top of the cliffs surrounding the Yolyn Am canyon in the Three Beauties Mountains in the Gobi

• Climbing a hill in the Orkon Valley at dawn to find the large stone turtle sculpture that used to guard the gates of ancient Karakorum, the royal city of Ghengis Khan’s clan

• Planting an Asian elm tree at a small tree farm on the edge of the Gobi, which has been lovingly nurtured for over 30 years by a local family 

• Washing my clothes in a tin bowl beside White Lake in a hailstorm

• Stopping in on isolated high plain at the intersection of two wide valleys, reached only by a faint unmarked track and with no habitation for miles, and finding bronze age deerstones, exquisitely carved with enigmatic stylized figures of reindeer 

• Stopping beside a large pond to watch the brightly coloured shelducks, when a herd of horses with their small foals came galloping over the hill with their manes flying and into the pond to drink, followed shortly afterwards from a different direction by a ponderous herd of cattle with their calves

Mongolia part 6--Language, transport, food

Mongolia- Part 6

The language

The Mongolian language is spoken by only about 5 million people, primarily in Mongolia and in Inner Mongolia in China, but it does have links to some other Asian languages like Korean and Japanese and even Turkish, and some even say that there are ancient links to the Finno-Ugric languages of Finland and Hungary—although you’d need to be a linguist to join that debate.

Its written form is not nearly so ancient. In Ghengis Khan’s time in the 1200s there was no written script but the Uighur (pronounced “weeger”) script (very beautiful calligraphy still used in western China) was adapted and was used until the 1940s when the Russian Cyrillic script was foisted on the country as part of Stalin’s “remodelling” of Mongolia. 

The Cyrillic script does not work very well to convey the pronunciation of Mongolian and there is some move (not sure how successful that would be) to revert to the Uighur script. I do read the Cyrillic script –the only thing I learned in my one year studying Russian--which was a bit of help to me in deciphering the words and being able to read imported words like “Mini-Market” but just being able to read the letters does not of course enable you to understand the Mongolian words.

Transport—the lovable Furgon

Because of the support that China and Japan have showered on Mongolia (see earlier in this blog for the reasons) you see plenty of imported Japanese and Korean second-hand cars and buses. Mongolia has no domestic car manufacturing facility (although it is now making a few city buses which proudly display the banner “Made in Mongolia”). There are still a fair number of Russian vehicles too.

Because Japan drives on the left like the UK and South Korea drive on the right like the US and Russia –and because the Mongolians regard the rules of the road as a foreign irritation to be ignored whenever possible--you see a mix of left and right-hand drive cars in Mongolia. Out in the country this doesn’t matter since the vehicular traffic is sparse and you can go for hours without seeing another vehicle on the dirt roads. But in Ulan Bator and the towns in the countryside the traffic is chaos.

Out in the countryside and for tourist travel the lovable Russian Furgon still dominates. A beauty it ain’t, but it is a reliable workhorse—our trip was 3300 km and the tourist season was just starting! It is remarkably roomy and has a high wheel base and four-wheel drive. It looks a little like an old Volkswagen van on an elevated chassis which is essential on the rutted dirt roads, across the massive potholes in the asphalt and for fording the many streams and rivers in the northern part of the country. See the pictures.

The Furgons used for tourists like us are owned by their drivers and so often have highly individual features. Our driver Turuu’s Furgon was a palace. Turuu has completely redone the interior configuration to form a sociable seating arrangement with fitted drawers and cupboards to store things. 

We all got very attached to our Furgon with its colourful red and yellow fake Louis Vuitton upholstery, its green silk curtains with yellow tassels its shiny blue floor mats covering a yellow and red floral carpet. I understand that the “must-have” fashion is now for the Toyota Landcruiser but give me the Furgon any day.

Our beloved Furgon which took us 3300 km in safety and (relative!) comfort

Sorry this is such a mess but I forgot to take a photo when it was empty. This was our home for 3 to 8 hours a day. Check out the "LouisVuitton " seat covers, the padding, the hidden storage drawers, the gold fringed curtains, the elegant carpet. This is all Turuu's cutomising work. It was a palace compared to the other Furgons we saw along the way.

Given the state of the roads every man has to be a handyman able to fix any fault miles from anywhere, with minimal tools and spare parts 

..and so this is a common sight.

And sometimes this is necessary

Someone's two-wheeled pride and joy

 A cargo of sheep's wool on this Furgon

If you can figure what this is trying to say you win all the prizes.

Transport—the roads!

Signage is definitely an alien concept in Mongolia. Roads have no numbers or directional or destination signs, even the shops in the villages and towns are modestly marked—no neon and no billboards. 

So without a fantastic driver like our driver (and part owner of Eternal Landscapes) Turuu and a knowledgeable guide like Jessica Brooks you would be completely stuck. When faced with a maze of dirt tracks criss-crossing a wide plain, Turuu seemed to know instinctively which one to take, even if he had not driven the route for years.

But travelling overland in Mongolia is not an easy option. Distances are vast—our trip was 3300 km and we only travelled in the central third of the country. Facilities are limited and the roads!! The roads are unbelievably awful. (This is a vast country with a small population and limited spare cash with a mountainous terrain and vicious winters which destroy asphalt in a year or two.) Bridges over streams and rivers are so decrepit as to be lethal and so most of the time Turuu just drove the Furgon straight through the stream.

These terrible roads and lack of signage have a distinct benefit, though, in that it restricts the number of tourists! The country is so attractive that if it were easier to get around I suspect immigrants and tourists would soon overrun the place. And travelling overland is really the only way to actually experience and understand (a little) the country.

It is a firm belief of Jessica Brooks, the tour leader who runs Eternal Landscapes, that flying from place to place for a day or two (as many tour companies promote) gives you no context, no real experience of the country. 

And she is right. We did hit all the guide-book high spots for tourists but frankly compared to what we saw and experienced on the road getting to and from them, these tourist must-sees sometimes seemed a bit “flat”. 

After being immersed in the Mongolian countryside and lifestyle, we found ourselves feeling irritated when we ran across other tourists. Reverse culture shock I suppose. And we even came to prefer travelling at 15 or 20 kph on the meandering dirt roads to “speeding” at 50 kph on the rare asphalt roads with their axle-breaking potholes.

yes we drove through this

...and this....

...and this....

...and this...

....and this...

Sports

A highlight of the year for Mongolians and for tourists is the Naadam festival held in July. The most famous one is held in Ulan Bator but each regional town will have one too. It features three sports: horse racing, archery and wrestling, but the most well known and keenly followed is the horse racing. 

In the spring the most promising horses from the herds will be selected for special training. These are not specially bred horses (at least outside of Ulan Bator) but are selected from the ordinary herds. Men who specialise in training can become quite wealthy.

The training regime for the horses is arduous, consisting of a rigid diet and progressively longer and more arduous gallops. The jockeys are children between 5 and 12 years old, mostly boys but girls too. Their job is just to stay on the horse and make sure it does not veer off the race course, which is run across country not on a purpose built race track. 

The main race is 30km long! Think of that! The Grand National is only 7 km. As you drive through the countryside before Nadaam you will sometimes run across a training session for a local Nadaam which gives you a fascinating insight into this sport.

Speaking of sport, the Mongolians are very good. They don’t go in for team sports so much (although we watched some enthusiastic pick-up games of volleyball and basketball). Presumably when your nearest neighbours are miles away and all you have is a horse it is difficult to put together a team, much less organise practices.

Individual sports are their thing. Little Mongolia with its less-than-three million populationa won 5 medals at the 2012 Olympics--boxing, judo and wrestling are their sports. 

Interestingly, although it is not a “sport”, the Mongolians excel at solving puzzles. Apparently this is a skill that is part of the “home schooling” of the Mongolian nomad child. They can figure out a Rubik’s cube in no time flat. I suppose solving and inventing puzzles is great way to pass those long winter nights in the ger. 

Practising for the Nadaam races (see blog)

Because of the importance of Nadaam and because each district holds a local Nadaam festival the local markets stock all the necessary riding tackle and gear

This young lad won hands down in the practice session we saw

More Nadaam gear

UB was staging it marathon when we were there and had cleared the central area of traffic (what a treat!). I can't say I saw any London  or New York Marathon contenders there.

Food

I do not see Mongolia winning any culinary awards anytime soon. It has a meat-based diet and that meat is usually mutton. Not lamb—mutton. Mutton with onions, mutton with peppers, mutton with Kimchee, mutton with rice, mutton with mutton. 

Seasoning is hardly used at all, despite the fact that wonderful wild herbs grow in the meadows and scent the air. Despite its long period of domination by the Chinese, Mongolia does not seem to have adopted any of the wonderfully varied Chinese culinary traditions.

There is a traditional hierarchy of foods. White foods (dairy products) are regarded as the highest and so as a guest in a ger you will be offered cheeses and yoghurt. This is all very healthy but dairy products are by their nature bland in taste.

Another favourite is the “fat tail” of the Mongolian sheep. These are a special breed of sheep which have, literally, a fat tail, weighing up to ten pounds of solid fat. This is much sought after for cooking and most dishes will include chunks of fat since it is considered a delicacy. Of course when you think of it in a climate like Mongolia’s eating fat provides the fuel to see you through the harsh winter. And for the sheep itself—those that have not been eaten by the humans—the fat tail provides a source of energy to sustain the sheep through the long harsh winter.

In the food market you can buy goat or mutton and maybe beef cut into big slabs and layed out on the counter –none of your namby pamby refrigerated units and plastic gloved white-coated staff. There are rolls of processed meat, salami style, which look unappealing but are surprisingly good and wholesome. (see the nest part of this blog for pictures of the food markets)

Vegetables are mostly of the root variety—beetroot, carrots, potatoes, onions. Very flavourful because they have not been grown for “looks” as so many of our western vegetables are. Cucumbers and cabbage are the main green vegetables. Some mushrooms. There are small sweet tomatoes (probably imported from China). Fruit is a bit of a luxury—apples are reasonably plentiful, bananas from time to time and in summer watermelon.

A curious thing that I was never able to figure out was what happens to the chickens. Eggs are quite plentiful and good, but you never see a chicken for sale in the markets. So which came first, the chicken or the......

But the thing you notice most in the markets and in the “supermarkets” (all shops seem to be called that) are the candies and cookies. The Mongolians have a very very sweet tooth! I’d estimate that about 40 to 50% of the stock in any small shop will be an array of sweets and biscuits that would gladden the eye of any small child. So if you can resist the sweets you will eat healthily but not particularly excitingly.

You can get some good food in restaurants in Ulan Bator of course since it aspires to be a cosmopolitan city. In one restaurant we watched a party of young Mongolian women having an after-work feast of pizza after pizza after pizza. (At the next table a group of Mongolian men downed bottle after bottle of vodka!) But food in the restaurants in the small towns is also quite limited, although the mutton pancakes are quite nice and there is a reasonably palatable noodle dish which is on most menus.

Outside of the towns you are limited to the guanz. Guanzes are makeshift cafes in the front rooms of local people’s houses. Often these are also the local shop with a small selection of necessaries like salt and sugar. These guanzes are not a full time operation and if the lady of the house has no food available to prepare then you are out of luck. 

So the first thing you ask when you go to the door is “do you have any food?” We did have an excellent mutton and rice stew in one guanz (having been turned away at two others) which the lady cooked from scratch while we waited. Another interesting experience, but I wouldn’t recommend travelling in Mongolia depending on the guanzes for your meals! In fact if you can stay away from the sweets Mongolia is quite a good place for a westerner to lose weight.

But the undisputable culinary highlight of Mongolia is the khorhog. This is the real “Mongolian barbeque” not the foreign invention that you may have heard about which bears not the slightest resemblance to the khorhog—just like chop suey is not a Chinese dish.

Khorhog is a party meal, to prepare and eat with friends and to be accompanied by much beer, vodka, laughter and jokes. Pieces of goat meat and bones (seasoned with salt and pepper) are put into a covered “Dutch oven” sort of cooking pan. Specially selected mooth volcanic rocks that have been heated in the fire to a high temperature are placed amongst the pieces of meat. The layer of meat and hot rocks is topped with potatoes and carrots and a little boiling water. The lid is put on and the whole thing cooked on top of the ger stove for an hour. 

We enjoyed a wonderful khorhog with our hosts at White Lake, overcoming the language barrier with ease after everyone’s vocal chords had been lubricated with vodka.

A fairly typical meal in a guanz(see blog) --mutton and rice in a broth

This is the guanz where we had that mutton and rice

This is a pan of salted milk tea. Because it is "white food" , which is considered the highest type of food, it is served to guests when they are welcomed into the family ger

Making pancakes. These will then be fried or steamed

Cutting the goat meat for the khorhog (see blog)

The stove is heated very hot for cooking the khorhog

Heated in the stove are smooth volcanic rocks 

The rocks are removed from the fire and put into the pan alternating with the meat

ditto

the vegetables are added 

The lid is put on and it is cooked for an hour

One hour later

The rocks are removed and saved for the next time

The khorhog is served. It is delicious!!!

Vodka is the essential accompaniment since this is a "party" meal

And everyone stuffs themselves

Meat sold from the back of a truck

Add caption

Or in the market

The food hall of a town market

Vegetables and fruit are available but anything not grown in Mongolia and in season will be expensive

ditto

Lots of eggs but no chicken!

whole  sheep carcasses will be cut into large sections

The delicacy is the fat tail

Note the shelves of sweet things

A special occasion cake to tickle the sweet tooth

Mongolia part 5-Ger life and life in the small towns and villages

Mongolia- Part 5

Ger Life

What is a ger? A ger is the Mongolian name for what we in the west usually call a yurt (yurt is a Turkish name, but it is basically the same thing). And yes Mongolians live in gers year round (even in the suburbs of Ulan Bator and in the residential areas of the towns and villages) and yes they are very practical, comfortable and ideally suited to the way Mongolians like to live.

There are some pictures here in the blog but a bit more of a description may be in order. First of all to remove a misconception, this is not “camping” in a “tent”. These are real homes. You can easily stand up in a ger almost right up close to the walls, they have beds and depending on the size---they come in 2,4,6, and 8 person sizes---they can have full suites of furniture with cupboards, chests for storage, stove for cooking and heating, TV, family altar, children’s tricycles and toys, sewing machine, maybe a generator-powered refrigerator, low tables with stools, whatever you might want. 

Gers are round, with sides sufficiently high that you can stand comfortably. The round shape is ideal since the wind sweeps harmlessly around the round walls and so gers are very stable and not susceptible to being blown away. The walls consist of a lattice-like frame (think of those extending baby gates you put at the top of the stairs) covered by layers of sheep’s wool felt covered by a breathable waterproof layer of some sort of breathable fibre or more cheaply, plastic sheeting. 

 The gently rounded roof is framed of wooden spokes fitted into a wagon wheel-like central cap which in turn is supported by two solid wooden posts which descend into the middle of the ger itself. These posts are not fixed into the ground but stand on a round wooden floor covered in felt and linoleum and carpets which reaches to the edges of the walls and so is weather-tight.

The roof is also covered in layers of felt and a waterproof layer, leaving the wagon-wheel open to let smoke out and air to circulate. Then the walls and roof are covered with white canvas which is tightly bound with cinched straps or with horse-hair ropes. This opening in the roof can be covered with a separate flap of felt and canvas which can be drawn back or closed over by pulleys when the weather demands it. 

The door frame is low –and you routinely forget to bend to enter and so bash your head several times a day—and hung with a brightly painted wooden door insulated with more felt. Doors always face south.

The interior walls are often decorated with prettily patterned cotton material. Beds are quite low single beds –and the younger members of the family often sleep on rolled out futons. Wooden tables, stools and cupboards are often decorated with bright painted floral patterns. Flooring is often linoleum (a practicality when people are tramping in and out in all weathers), with scattered rugs.

An iron stove sits in the centre of the ger with a stove pipe extending out the roof. Sometimes there are two stoves, one for heating and for boiling water and the other for cooking, depending on the purpose of the ger. And yes there are gers for different functions: there will always be a “family ger” where food is cooked and eaten and guests entertained but there will also often be one or more other gers for sleeping or for renting out to the odd tourist like us.

In the north of the country where wood is plentiful and the winters are even harsher, you see more wooden houses, especially in the villages and towns. These tend to be of the log-cabin sort but usually with brightly coloured roofs of shingle or tin, in the symbolic colours of Mongolia: Blue for the sky, green for the earth, yellow for the sun,

The toilet?---well that is the drawback for us westerners with our shortened calf muscles and Achilles tendons: you have a hike to the outhouse (usually very clean and non-smelly but bring your own toilet paper and flashlight/torch for night time visits) which is often an Asian-style squat and sometimes quite a hike in the middle of the night. Advance planning for a visit is necessary!

So what about the nomadic lifestyle, you ask? 

Well the whole family moves from summer to winter pastures and take their gers with them. The dismantling and re-erection of the ger is a family operation and is usually done in a matter of a few hours or half a day with everyone helping out. 

We were lucky enough to be in Mongolia at the time when people were moving from winter to summer pastures and so we were able to observe this process and even participate in putting up a ger. I say “participate” rather than “help” since I am sure we were more of a hindrance but it was a great opportunity to see the whole nomadic life-style cycle happening. 

In spring/early summer the ger is dismantled and everything loaded onto the back of a small truck (previously a yak or horse-drawn cart was used) and then moved to the summer site. The summer and winter sites for the gers can be a matter of a few hundred metres to many kilometres away. 

The choice of location is not always apparent to an outsider but I think it has to do with shelter. The winter sites have rough wooden corrals and covered stalls for the herds to shelter in the worst winter weather and are usually located in the lee of a hill or in a sheltered valley. These wooden corrals are left where they are awaiting the family’s return in autumn. Summer sites are in open plains where there is plenty of access to new grass and the breeze will keep the ger cool.

The allocation of pastureland is traditional but the Russians implemented some regulations which have remained in place and the allocation of pasture is now somewhat governed by the local municipality which deals with applications to take up another pasture site and resolves disputes. I suspect that if the country were more heavily populated this would cause major conflicts but it seems to work fine at present.

Traditionally the herds of sheep, goats, cattle, yaks, camels, horses provide almost everything that the Mongolian nomad needs. But these days consumerism has had its impact and most nomads want to have a solar panel, a satellite dish and TV, some western-style clothes, a motorbike or truck or car, education for the children. But they seem quite able to acquire these things by selling some of their livestock and maybe providing accommodation to the occasional tourist. 

(See pictures of the livestock and of the people in other parts of this blog.)

The whole ger is taken apart and loaded onto to a van (replacing the traditional yak- or horse-drawn cart) and moved from the winter to the summer pasture. Taking it down and re-assembling it can easily be done in one day and usually everyone pitches in and extended family and neighbours help out.

The van is unloaded and the various parts laid out

Everyone has their own task 

This is a washing machine hooked up to the solar panel. All the materials are washed before being rehung

The walls take shape (see blog for description of the parts and the process)

These are the all-important central posts

We "helped"

Another ger in another part of the country is packed up. This family slept in the ger the previous night and when we awoke in the morning about 7 am  this is how much they had done already

The winter pastures include a corral to provide the animals with some shelter in the long bitter winter. The winter corral is simply left where it is pending the return of the family in the autumn. No one would dream of taking it over or disturbing it

The winter corral in the eprevious picture was in the south where there are no trees so it is made mostly of stone . This one was in the north where wood is abundant and so wood is used as the building material

The guest gers vary in quality although all have the basics: beds with some sort of mattress ( often pretty lumpy!) , a small table and a stove and a linoleum floor often with rugs

This was a "luxury" ger 

Another  version. Each of them will have an individual touch since these are not commercial operations. They are just and extra ger set up by an ordinary herding family to make a little extra money on the side---like a bed and breakfast in the west.

Some of the gers lived in by the family themselves will  have full suites of furniture like this one

ditto. You are usually invited in to the family ger to have a welcoming drink of salted milk tea and biscuit or sheep's cheese. This is part of the Mongolian tradition of hospitality.

And here is the drawback to ger life! It is always a hike to the outhouse.

Life in the village or town

The villages and towns are not beauty spots! This is in part because of the requirements of Mongolian land law. 

Each Mongolian is entitled to 0.7 hectares of land. But to get this he/she has to register and has to fence the land in. If you are not registered you are ineligible to send your children to school or have any of the (limited) social services. If you do not fence in your land you lose it. 

This has hit hard those nomadic families who have drifted to the city when a harsh winter like the one in 2011 has killed off their herds since they have left their land behind and so cannot get an allocation in the city.

The result is that the residential areas of towns and villages are made up of one or two dusty dirt streets lined with compounds surrounded by stockades of roughly-cut unpainted boards about 8 feet high. 

Over the top of the stockades, you can glimpse the roofs of gers or the brightly painted roofs of wooden or brick houses, but a stroll around town is hardly an illuminating experience particularly in the larger towns with their chaotic traffic. 

 We did stay one night in one of these compounds and inside it was lovely—very private with a luxury ger for guests and a separate wooden kitchen/dining cabin and storage sheds and a generator for electricity. No running water or sewage of course---only the central part of Ulan Bator has that.

The villages and towns are fascinating, though, for the insight they give you into the daily life of the people who live in the town. 

“Secular” towns are really a new concept in Mongolia and most of the infrastructure and buildings of the towns and large villages only grew up in the Soviet era, when the Russians tried to bring order and regulation to what they saw as the dangerous theocracy of the Buddhist monks and what they saw as the unproductive and chaotic Mongolian nomadic lifestyle. 

Many of the towns –Ulan Bator being one of them –had existed before the Soviet era as sites of large monasteries. The existence of these monasteries –and many were huge with hundreds or even thousands of monks --would have encouraged the growth of a settlement around the monastery providing the usual satellite services needed by the monasteries such as butcher shops, tailors, blacksmiths, masons, cooks, merchants. 

So when the monasteries were destroyed on Stalin’s orders, the settlements which had grown up around them were turned to secular use and became administrative centres.

Now the towns are home to the municipal government and the hospitals, post offices, secondary schools, etc for the region. 

They also normally have a thriving rabbit-warren of a market area, with stalls often housed in freight cars, industrial boilers, shipping containers, abandoned and decaying Soviet era concrete sheds. 

These markets sell everything: horse tack, stoves and furniture for the ger, nuts and bolts, T-shirts, fencing wire, plastic funnels, writing paper, lanterns, rope, bolts of fabric, jerry cans, mobile phones, carpets, you name it. 

In the food market you can buy goat or mutton and maybe beef cut into big slabs and layed out on the counter –none of your namby pamby refrigerated units and plastic gloved white-coated staff. There are rolls of processed meat, salami style, which look unappealing but are surprisingly good and wholesome. (see the nest part of this blog for pictures of the food markets)

As dusty street in a southern village

Satellite dishes abound---although admittedly this one is a little larger than normal!

This village is further north.Wood is much more used  for building in the north where it is abundant

And another Only the largest towns have any paved streets

A typical small town street. Note that most people are dressed in the traditional del

A small village in the central part of the country. This shows the stockades around the compounds and the coloured roofs

The houses often have colourful roofs. This one is done in the colours of the Mongolian flag

This is a small local cafe in a small town

A guanz (see next blog part on  "food"

A not unusual sight

A typical village/small town shop selling every thing from jewellery to shoes to hair dye

A small shop in the north

ditto

ditto

This was a fairly large regional capital, but the pattern is similar

Ditto

We stayed in this Soviet-era hotel in a medium sized town. It was dire Note the antlers on the pillar

We didn't stay in this "hotel"

 A "supermarket" in a medium sized district town

And inside  a general store selling blankets, clothes, jewellery,  and haberdashery

Another district town

All the towns have a market which serves their district. These are always lively places but the buildings used reflect the Mongolian commitment to thrift---always "recycle" things if you can. Shipping container make excellent market stalls

A market stall in shipping container

You can find all manner of things in the local markets such as used tyres and second hand tools 

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This cafe in an old factory boiler was closed unfortunately

New cooking and heating stoves for the gers

Cooking pots and stoves

furnishings for the ger for sale

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