Around the World in 50 Years (38 page)

Mongolia, with its boundless steppes, high mountains, inhospitable desert, poor infrastructure, and small population, is (along with Dominica) the most unspoiled nation on earth. A typical nomad family lives in a portable
ger
heated by dried animal dung as they seasonally move their herds to greener pastures. But a huge new copper mine and the first paved nation may soon change that way of life.

The population had risen, but only to 2.9 million, a third of whom lived in the capital of Ulan Bator (UB). A quarter were still nomadic shepherds, moving to greener pastures at least four times a year; another quarter were seminomadic, roving during the warmer months, settling into their base
ger
for the punishing winters. But their days as a peripatetic people may be numbered because of impending disruptions, both meteorological and mineralogical. Climate change may cause such deadly winters and parched summers that itinerant animal husbandry will no longer be viable, while the recent development of the earth's largest copper mine in the south Gobi Desert, which will eventually account for 30 percent of Mongolia's GDP, will entice nomads to settle in mining and smelting jobs providing secure wages.

Of all 196 countries, Mongolia appeared to me the least spoiled (with the possible exception of Dominica), 80 percent untouched by man, like taking a time machine across centuries. The endless clear blue sky and lush wide valleys were similar to the Montana of 1840. I felt as if I were riding through an old Western, and expected to see the Lone Ranger galloping across the unbroken plains shouting a hearty “Hi-yo, Silver, away.” With fewer than three million people in a land as large as Britain, France, and Germany
combined
—giving it the lowest population density of any country—and with 34 million head of livestock, it's a sublime pastoral experience, unlike any elsewhere. (Other parts of the country, while also mostly unspoiled, are topographically different, with the giant Gobi Desert in the southeast, forests and taiga in the north, and large, rocky mountain ranges in the far west, including at least 20 eternally snow-capped peaks.)

Because the Mongolians have been dependent on nature for their personal survival and the nation's advancement, they seek to live in harmony with the land and not defile the environment. When they moved a camp, I saw them even fill in the holes they'd dug for tent poles. They showed a reverence for nature that derived from shamanism, a spiritual practice whose believers seek to reach altered states of consciousness to interact with the spirit world and channel its transcendental energies to this world. Some of this will change as they shift into the modern era, burning wood in their stoves instead of dried cow patties, soon completing an east-to-west artery across the nation that will triple its miles of paved roads, ramping up the gargantuan Oyu Tolgoi copper mine, and increasingly moving from the wide open spaces to UB in search of the good life. But, for the time being, earth has no unsullied place like it.

Many Mongolians earn their livelihood from domesticated animals: 20 percent of its export income derives from them, and they produce 21 percent of the world's cashmere. But a drought the winter before I visited had turned seven million livestock into deadstock whose bleached bones littered the terrain.

The national diet has changed little over the centuries, with a dominant emphasis on meat and dairy. The Big Five here are cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and (less frequently) camels or reindeer, and the locals refer to themselves as “The People of the Five Snouts,” all of which they boil, steam, roast, fry, grill, heat under pressure, or cook from the inside by filling the animal's stomach cavity with large hot rocks. They use this high-fat, high-protein regimen to stave off the cold in a climate where winter temperatures reach minus 40 degrees. The Mongolian vocabulary has no words for either “cholesterol” or “arteriosclerosis,” and their fatty cuisine is so bland and boring on the Western palate—nomads have no time to grow herbs or spices—it makes Wales seem like a culinary center.

Vegetables are scarce for three reasons: The growing season is too short for most produce; nomads do not remain in one place long enough to till, plant, and harvest crops; and they do not like or respect vegetables because they view all green edibles as fodder fit only for animals. No fruits, either. In our 1,200-kilometer circuit, I saw only one vegetable garden, one field of wheat, and not a single fruit tree. It's no country for old vegetarians.

Since I like to eat strange stuff, I enjoyed a superb horse steak on my first night (although the locals tend to overcook their meat); tried the staple of fermented mare's milk at a monastery (yuk!); loved a bowl of fresh goat yogurt topped with tart wild currants served by a comely milkmaid at a parking lot beside a volcano; ate my first roach (no, it's just an indigenous freshwater fish); drank a pot of milk tea seasoned with salt and butter (an indiscretion not to be repeated); and savored a platter of fresh yak butter, cheese, and yogurt with a dairy family, although that was imprudent since none of it was pasteurized and brucellosis (aka undulant fever) is common there.

For those who like less exotic fare, or some vegetables, UB has a host of “ethnic” restaurants, including Kenny Rogers Roasters, El Latina, the Detroit American Bar (what were they thinking?), Los Banditos, Planet Pizza, the Brau Haus, five eateries that begin with the name “Broadway,” and The Original Irish Pub (which, to Dennis's consternation, didn't serve Guinness). Those tourists wanting to dip a finger into the local food can dine at the fashionable “First Mongolian Restaurant Established 1602,” but, alas, that's a fake, since it serves “Mongolian hot pot” and “Mongolian barbecue,” neither of which is indigenous, having arrived in UB from Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. Outside UB it's pretty much potluck.

My main gastronomic complaint was that Mongolians, who traditionally eat for survival rather than pleasure, have no familiarity with the concept of dessert, my rectification of which necessitated several nocturnal treks to a new UB supermarket for boxes of Choco Pies.

Although I survived the food, I almost didn't survive the UB traffic, which was the least pedestrian-friendly I'd ever encountered (until I got to Hanoi)—far worse than Paris, Tehran, or even Albania. The drivers ignore the yield signs, stop signs, pedestrian walkways, the rare red lights, and, when they can, the few traffic cops. They're more aggressive than a New York cabbie, zooming around corners at high speed from hiding places on tree-shrouded boulevards. I thought I was becoming paranoid because I believed that the cars heading my way speeded up whenever I tried to cross a street. But
Lonely Planet
confirmed it: The drivers are not actually aiming to hit you, but they are speeding up to warn you that they rule the road, you have no rights of way, and that you'd better be very careful, or very quick.

A word about the climate: Mongolia is blessed with 260 sunny days a year, and though I visited in its wet season, six of our eight days passed without a cloud. The sky was an intensely rich shade of blue, attributable to the country's average elevation of 5,000 feet. Mongolians call theirs “the land of the blue sky” and worship it in a shamanistic way, the most visible evidence of which are the thousands of deep blue
haday
(scarves) they insert in the hundreds of
ovoos
(stone cairns) or tie to the wood teepee constructions that dot the terrain.

Because Mongolia is far from any ocean that could exert a moderating effect on its temperature, and because the cloudless skies let the land cool quickly at night, it's common for the mercury to plunge more than 50 degrees from noon to midnight, with the consequence that on three August nights we needed to light the stoves in our
gers.

I was able to visit four sublime monasteries: a large one in UB that had avoided destruction by converting to a museum, an expansive one that has been rebuilt in Karakorum using the stones from the ruins of the ancient capital's former palaces, and two that were hidden so high in the hills and so far off the beaten tracks they were overlooked by the Communists. Since Buddhism came to Mongolia from Tibet, the temples in the monasteries have a Tibetan look, from the bunting to the prayer wheels to the embroidered hangings to the brightly painted Buddhas. Mongolia once had 100,000 monks, and one monastery for every 2,000 inhabitants—to the credit of a wise Chinese diplomat who centuries ago concluded that, because his country had been ravaged so many times by Mongol armies, it would be wise for China to build temples there to turn the young men into peaceful monks rather than ferocious warriors.

When I'd reached Mongolia, I still lacked the visa I needed to return to China to reclaim my luggage and catch my flight to Bangkok. I was down to Plan D, after failing with:

Plan A. Before leaving New York, obtain the triple-entry visa I needed to land in Beijing on my flights from, respectively, the Pacific, North Korea, and Mongolia. But the Chinese consulate only gave me a double-entry visa;

Plan B. Secure the third visa in Beijing. After spending a full day to find the visa office and fill out the application, they informed me that, to process it, they needed ten working days, which I did not have, and required a Beijing bank account with $3,000 in it, which I also did not have.

Plan C. Acquire the visa at the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang. Fuggedaboutit!

And so I tried Plan D. Get the visa from the Chinese Embassy in UB, which my Mongolian guide had, months before, assured me would work. But she'd forgotten that August was when hundreds of Mongolian students who attend college in China applied to renew their visas. Since the Chinese Embassy only granted 40 a day, this was problematic. We hired the guide's sister to save me a place outside the Chinese Embassy by getting there at 4:00 a.m. She somehow lost her place, and when I arrived at 8:00 a.m., 70 kids were ahead of her, none willing to defer to a tourist.

On to Plan E. I'd forgo the return to China and fly directly to Bangkok, while Dennis and Andrew, who'd been issued multiple-entry visas in New York before the policy changed, retrieved my big bag in Beijing and brought it when they met me in Bangkok. I purchased a ticket for a flight out of UB on Monday with MIAT, a notoriously unreliable airline whose initials, veteran travelers claim, stand for, “Maybe I'll Arrive Thursday.”

I'd successfully gotten past check-in, weigh-in, immigration, and security at the Genghis Khan International Airport, and was urgently searching for a bathroom and beginning to believe that Murphy had finally cut me some slack, when an airport policewoman tapped me on the shoulder, shoved a copy of my boarding pass under my nose, and pointed downstairs.

I asked her, in my best Monglish, if she knew where the toilet was.

She barked, “Poowdle—Custum!”

I explained that when you gotta go, ya gotta go.

She countered that when Customs calls,
that
is where ya gotta go. So we went.

In the dreary basement baggage room, three customs officers were gathered around my duffel bag, which they gestured for me to open. They pointed to a white object nestled in worn T-shirts. It was the complete skull of a young horse that I'd found on the prairie, a casualty of the drought the previous winter.

I gesticulated that this was much ado about nothing, that I had not killed it, nor stolen it, and that I had washed it, and even toothbrushed it, so that it was sterile. But that didn't satisfy them. The troika held a loud, argumentative conference about whether my possession or exportation of the skull was illegal, immoral, inadvisable, or just stupid, as the clock ticked toward takeoff time and the call of nature remained unanswered.

I finally noodled it out: These guys believed I was trying to abscond with part of their national heritage, one of the precious dinosaur fossils strewn about the Gobi Desert, like those I'd seen in their national museum.

Given the language barrier, and my inability to draw, I tried a charade. I reached into my duffel bag for a blanket, folded it, got down on my hands and knees, put the blanket on my back as if it were a saddle, and then galloped around the room, hoping I emulated a horse, not a velociraptor, while doing my best to whinny and to suppress the urge to surge for the bathroom.

The customs guys either understood my message or decided that I was a dangerous wacko who should be deported as quickly as possible. They released me and put my bag on the conveyor belt for the Bangkok flight as I ran for the
MEN
's.

 

CHAPTER 24

On the Wings of the Dragon

Our visit to Bangkok began with a bang.

Andrew exited the air terminal in high dudgeon because customs agents had confiscated the three Russian military-surplus bayonets he'd purchased at a hilltop flea market in central Mongolia. To help him forget his loss, he asked that I take him for a Thai massage, one of life's most sybaritic experiences.

I drove him to one of the many large clubs in the lively red-light district of Patpong, where 60 lovely ladies, ages 18 to 28, were seated on a three-tiered stage, all provocatively dressed, each with a big numbered button on her dress for identification.

The main change over the years was that the women are no longer viewed through a one-way mirror that had enabled the patrons to inspect them without being seen. Now it's all open, and when the women see a client appraising them, they each attempt to establish eye contact and win his favor (and their rent money) with all manner of smiles, winks, nods, air-kisses, shakes, shimmies, cleavage drops, leg crossings, leg un-crossings, deep-inhalation chest enlargements, and pantomimed sex. All demurely done, of course.

Once you select the lady and pay the fee ($150 for two hours), she takes you upstairs to your own spotlessly clean, dimly lit, soundproofed suite that is half Turkish bath and half bedroom, where she gently undresses you, while gigglingly pretending to be impressed with the size of your equipment. She then joins and bathes you in a large deep tub before leading you to a comfortable, cushiony, heated plastic air mattress, where she turns you ass up and soaps you all over with buckets of warmed suds. She next climbs aboard your back and massages you with her powerful thighs, from toes to head, performing feats of contortionism with intense erotic energy. Then she turns you right side up, for an even more sensual massage. If your gun is still loaded after all this—most guys will have shot their full clip and any spare ammo belts by now—she takes you to the big, firm, freshly sheeted, perfume-scented bed and presses your trigger.