On An Authentic Mongolian Ger Camp, And Also Hating Paul Theroux
We're(1) packed tight in the back of a white Hyundai with no discernible seat belts, heading southwest from Ulanbaatar to the first of the 3 yurt(2) tourist camps that will be our home for much of our six day break from the Trans-Siberian Railway(2.5). Just before our guide Khongai says(2.65), "In Mongolia there are no laws, only rights", our driver Denbe - who sort of looks like a Mongolian version of the Michelin man - hits the brakes and the Hyundai goes from one hundred kph to fifty kph in about fourteen feet and we hit a low dip in the highway and Brandon and I are flung against the ceiling of the Hyundai and Denbe chuckles a little like, "Americans..." and our guide Khangai says the thing about laws(2.75) and I check my head for blood. We've been in the car for about half an hour, we have another four hours until we arrive at our first ger camp, and this is only the first of a few hundred times that this exact process will be repeated until I develop a kind of Pavlovian thing where every time Dende hits the breaks I grab the handle on the door and think of all the things I will miss and brace for Terminal Impact(2.80). As we pick our way across Mongolia it becomes clear that Mongolians have a relationship with their highways(2.85) that can best described as casual -- we motor along at speeds varying between seven kph and 140 kph and the highway is crossed by goats and cattle and horses and packs of wild dogs and slow-moving-families and for each Dende slows down just a little bit and hits his horn a few times and fatal contact is avoided but only just so and we continue on. The highway itself is an archipelago of lane-wide faults and sink-holes and knee-deep-potholes and stone/tarmac cairns and at each obstacle Dende either heads further out into the oncoming lane than you'd hope he would or just wheels the Hyundai off the road onto whatever gutted brown strip of dirt road runs parallel to the highway because just like Dende all the other drivers in Mongolia have only a passing interest in driving on the actual road and it's in that abusive and skull-crushing fashion that we make the +/-400km drive from Ulanbataar to our ger camp in Khogno Khaan National Park.
When we finally arrive at the ger I'm arthritic and debilitated and before I can even open my door a friendly looking woman knocks on my window and asks if she can carry my bags the approximately forty feet from the car to our ger and even in my state I'm surprised by the hospitality. So, this: when I was ten years old I went to a camp in Reading, Pennsylvania that was into "Indians". At that camp we were all, like, scouts or squaws(3), our age-appropriate-villages were named Cherokee or Iroquois or whatever, we took courses like "'Indian' Archery" and "'Warrior Canoeing" and "'Indian' Dancing" and "'Indian' Bracelet Making" and "'Indian' Scat ID" and as part of the Final Night Of Camp I got to play the "dead scout" in a kind of tribute to Really Vague "Indian" Rituals wherein my throat was ceremonially slit by a ceremonial rival "Indian" after I had walked around the Fire of the Great Spirit heel-toe for awhile miming shooting my bow/arrow, and then my bereft father swung me around and made moaning "Indian" noises that taught us something about how even really simple people can feel sadness and afterward we all ate s'mores in the Camp Teepee. I don't want to say here that staying in a Mongolian tourist ger camp is quite the same thing, but the Authentic Mongolian Gers at Khogno Khaan National Park are all set on a concrete slab, and have electricity, and interior lighting, and faux wood vinyl flooring, and electric tea kettles, and the showers next door are pretty great as was my Special Vegan Dinner(4.75) served by the Authentic Ger Staff, and were Brandon or I willing we could pay a few extra Tugriks(4) to dress up in a Mongolian Warrior Outfit and take pictures of each other pretending to spear each other while making The Kinds of Noises Mongols Make(5). Verisimilitude in tourism is a tricky thing, but when we signed up for this we imagined an icy Mongolan night beneath the stars -- after we get out of the car and our bags have been dropped in our ger, Brandon says, "This is the Amish homestead" and to the extent that you can imagine the Amish Homestead in the edge of the Gobi Desert, he's right.
An aside as way of obfuscation. Paul Theroux's recent publication, "The Tao of Traveling" is in all reality one of the worst books I've ever read(6). It's hard to imagine a more self-involved and self-congratulatory book than this incomprehensibly organized collection of -- no joke -- Paul Theroux's Favorite Paul Theroux Passages Re: The Nature of Travel, intertwined with Paul Theroux's Favorite Non-Paul Theroux Passages Re: The Nature of Travel. In it, Theroux writes inane sentences like, "Travel is a vanishing act, a solitary trip down a pinched line of geography to oblivion"; ranks 5 Poorly Written Epiphanies Paul Theroux Had While Traveling (wherein in miraculous Paul Theroux fashion he turns the birth of a child on a boat he happens to be on into An Important Thing That Is More About Paul Theroux Than About The Thing Itself); and includes a ten-point list titled "The Essential Tao of Travel" whose first point is - incredibly - "Leave Home". But all that aside - and sure, let's also table Theroux's lazy sentences and myopic moral schema - what is being argued throughout is that there is a Good Way to Travel and a Poor Way to Travel and right or wrong it's hard to feel great about the way you are traveling when you are one of several tour groups holing up for the night in Authentic Ger Camp Simulacra, fifteen steps way from the Ger Massage tent and the Ger Souvenir shop. But a few hours later - after we'd eaten and showered and laughed at the hokiness of the place for awhile - the sky turned green and then black and as we sat on the stoop of our ger a thunderstorm broke out across the Gobi desert and everyone in the camp -- the Americans and British, the group from Israel(6.50), the Japanese exchange students, even the native Mongols -- sat outside together and watched in silence. Thunder shook us until dawn and the packs of wild dogs to the south howled all night and in the morning we woke cold and joyful and grateful just to be there(7).
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(1) A familiar note on format: I'm writing this on an iPad in the Notes app in Mongolia where Internet access can get a little goofy. Apologies for: brevity, lack of clarity, and extreme sloppiness in presentation/typography).
(2) Yurt = Russian; Ger = Mongolian, so ger from now on.
(2.5) A note on itinerary: we arrived in Ulanbataar via the TSR on 7.23 at 6:30am ULAT. We spent 7.23 in Ulanbataar, then met up with Khangai and Dende at the Cafe Amsterdam on Peace Avenue at 10:00am ULAT 7.24. From there we proceeded directly to Khogno Khaan National Park by Hyundai and arrived +/-2:30pm ULAT.
(2.65) Khongai turns out to be kind and really funny and a little psychotic about things like snakes, but when she said this we had known her for about forty minutes and she sounded very aphoristic and Mongolian. 24 hours later we went to the Phallic Rock (real name) and any final mystic qualities in her possession were destroyed as we made her explain to us "Vagina Valley" (real name, real place. See here - http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Asia/Mongolia/Ovorhangay_Aymag/Erdene_Dzuu-1298059/Things_To_Do-Erdene_Dzuu-TG-C-1.html for additional information).
(2.75) What she means specifically is that Mongolian roads are terrible and Dende is going to "do some things that may surprise you"; what she means generally is that Mongolia is pretty casual about just about everything in a way that is ultimately very charming but nonetheless a little problematic. See: Ulanbaatar, whose medians and grassy spaces go entirely unmowed and as such are overrun with knee-high thistle; see: the gers, which are sort of dropped all over the Mongolian countryside at the sheer whim of its owner; see: the often beautiful and moving roadside stupas which are erected pretty well wherever the stupa's owner wants to erect it; see: Khangai telling us that if you get pulled over for DUI it will cost you +/- 4000 tugriks (+/- $4 USD) to get out of it.
(2.80). In writing that, I can't remember if there's a Terminal Impact movie or not, but if there isn't I'm writing it this weekend. The basic story - Sort of Sad Kind of Retired Ex Soldier once lost his entire squadron because he was too reckless and took them all to the point of Terminal Impact. But dammit - there's a little girl/some POW's/Nuns trapped in That One Place That Only SOSKORES has the specific skillset -- he was the best! -- to penetrate, and now it's up to him and his wild-in-the-heart new sidekick to face Terminal Impact one more time.
(2.85) Here when I say "highway" I mean two lanes in oppositional directions, no speed limit, and a pass-at-will-zone that runs the +/-1500 mile length of the country.
(3) Not a joke.
(4) Trading currently at +/-1160MNT per 1USD
(4.75) This term is an awful one and I know it and I know that when you read it -- "vegan" -- you almost immediately go from, "Okay - maybe I'm with this guy?" to "I hate this guy.". I don't use it here to say, "Hey - I'm vegan!" but, "Hey - I made a reasonably irritating dietary request" and the kind folks at the Authentic Ger Camp met it with at the very least aplomb(4.85).
(4.85). Perhaps though it's worth saying here that Denbe was noticeably unimpressed with me and pretty well straight away pegged me as soft in all directions and rolled his eyes every time I had for dinner like an entire plate for cucumbers. Denbe spoke almost no English, so he and Khangai talked in front of us in a way that made me go several times, "Ha ha he hates me, right?" and Khangai would sort of go, "Ha ha".
(5) I say this only because a group of hungover Japanese businessmen did exactly that one day later. But more on that to come! Spoiler alert! LOLZ!
(6). I'm currently reading a self-published book about A Girl Who Discovers She's a Troll. In the space of one week the girl: 1. Learns she's a troll (thus the thick hair! Duh!); 2. Leaves home to live in TrollTown(sic) which is actually a magical town behind a gate in Minnesota; 3. Discovers she is the Trollville(sic) Princess; 4. Falls in love with a brooding-but-omnipresent Troll Boy who is off-limits for her because, you know, Trollville(sic) is really into class; 5. Gets attacked by Trolls from OtherTrollville(sic) but is ultimately saved by Brooding Troll Boy who is then banned from The Palace for letting his emotions "get in the way". In no way am I exaggerating when I say Paul Theroux's book is significantly worse.
(6.50). A brief catalogue of Tee-Shirts On Israelis: 1. "I Love NY"; 2. "New York Big Apple!"; 3. "Captain America"; 4. "Leave Me Alone".
(7) if you've been following along so far it's possible you've grown tired of the familiar format thus far: the Vaguely Postmodern Run-up To A Surprisingly Saccharine End. Who didn't love you?