One of the pleasures of Mongolia is escaping the post soviet crumble of Ulaanbaatar for the endless steppe of the countryside. Mongolians hold "going to the countryside" as a national passion, and I often find students scribbling its imagos (gers, horses, rolling hills) into the sides of their notebooks as one would scribble the logo of the favourite boyhood professional sports franchise. The countryside itself is concurrently stark, beautiful and dismal with its never ending hills, empty expanses and the pure whiteness of its landscape during winter. You can drive for hours after leaving Ulaanbaatar and see very little signs of habitation. The country's vast size and tiny population mean that there isn't that much in whole swaths of the country.
I haven't gone to the countryside enough during my time in Mongolia due to Tess' fly in fly out schedule (she usually flies to Beijing on the weekend), winter weather and my need to lay low on weekends and recover for another week at school. But every time that I have left UB, I have come back refreshed, full of clean air and good spirits, and wishing to get out more. Many expats say that Mongolia's only tolerable when you leave UB: I don't completely agree but the countryside definitely adds to the experience here.
There are many things to do but most countryside visits from UB seem to combine a trip to "Mr. Chinggis" and to Terelj National Park. "Mr. Chinggis" is an enormous, stainless steel statue of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan mounted on a horse. It's huge (30 metres or so tall) and it stands basically in the middle of nowhere. On the drive in, which always lasts longer than you think it will, you don't really see that statue at all until you're just outside its gates. It just emerges out of the ether as if it's a mirage. Chinggis is also positioned in direct opposition to the Chinese border, as a provocation to invade at Chinese peril. Inside the statue is a gigantic boot, 2 very good museums with a private collection on Mongol artefacts, and, best of all, a staircase and elevator up to an observation platform on top of the head of Chinggis' horse. After making your way up the small and dangerously dark staircase, you emerge out of Chinggis' crotch onto the viewing platform. Aspiring Freudians can make of that whatever you will. Terelj is a gorgeous national park, largely untouched by poorly thought out development (there's some of course, it's Mongolia), where we've typically had lunch at a ger camp and walked around a large rock that it vaguely shaped like a turtle, before heading back to the smog and chaos of UB.
A couple weekends ago, my friend Lena asked if I'd like to go out on a day trip to the countryside. Tess had been in Australia and Beijing for work for a while, and I was tiring of the city, so I said yes. We gathered on a Sunday morning in front of the State Department Store and headed off in 2 cars. I shared car space with an enterprising and energetic boy named Buya (see above), a Greek banker who worked for the Mongolian Stock Exchange, and a couple Mongolian friends of Lena's. As you leave UB, you drive from a central area of crumbling but basically functional neighbourhoods to the unfinished/never finished outer areas to the ger districts that are the relatively unplanned, chaotic areas of mostly gers (yurts), temporary structures, and some completed houses. Ger districts house perhaps half of the city's population (maybe 600,000 people), most of whom have emigrated into the capital city looking for opportunities promised but rarely delivered for the ger district residents by the mining and resources boom. Eventually, you emerge out of the smoke cloud that hangs in UB and find yourself if the clear, clean air and emptiness of the countryside.
Because it's Mongolia, when you see a nomad family with a huge vulture, an eagle and a couple camels hanging out by the side of the highway, you must stop. You can pay to ride the camels (4000 tugs or $2.50) or to have an eagle perch on your shoulder (3000 tugs) or just to take pictures of them (maybe a thousand). We took the pictures, Buya rode a camel, Steve took a photo with an eagle on his shoulder, and we paid our money as a platoon from the Mongolian military absurdly jogged past. After Chinggis, we found a spot in Terelj for our "picnic" which mostly entailed standing in snow and eating cold pizza, bread, and, again this being Mongolia, so many sweets. We played a bit of a volleyball related game, before heading back to see Turtle Rock and eventually back to UB.
You see the smoke before you see the city. After driving through the clear, and blazing blue skies of the countryside, about half an hour before you hit UB, the smokey haze of the city hangs in the air ahead of you, as if suspended in a solution. In the city itself, you run into Sunday afternoon traffic jams , which are basically the same as any other day's traffic chaos. Dropped off near the State Department Store, the city seems dirtier, more underdeveloped, and haphazardly thrown together than in the morning.
Prolonged time in UB has a way of numbing your expectations of a city.
