(for you especially, Alex!)
This weekend, we went on a 3-night excursion to Eastern Gobi province involving baby camels, holding hands and running blindly under the stars in the dark desert, a mountain whose spirit you made wishes to by writing your heart's desire on a piece of paper and burning it in a special stove, and a taste of sea buck thorn wine (Product of Mongolia. I am not sure what sea buck thorn berries really are, but they are Mongolian apparently). But I mostly just want to tell you about the 10-hour train ride there. It was fantastic. The following is dishearteningly long, but you can always just go to the bottom and look at the pictures, which are unrelated but hopefully still interesting.
9:50 Train departs from
11:00 Language class on the train. It takes the eleven of us students at least 10 minutes to figure out who is in which compartment. Baganaa, our teacher, tells Julie and I to take 15 minutes and find somebody (a real live Mongolian!) on the train, introduce ourselves, and learn what we can about them, then report back to him.
11:15-12:15 Here are the people we meet:
1. Serbian geologist:
"Are you a geologist?" the slightly greasy-haired but very affable looking man asks Julie, pointing at her super hardcore hiking boots. She looks down, and says, "No, I am studying crop and soil sciences. Are you a geologist?" she asks, pointing at his super hardcore hiking boots. He is. Just arrived from
2. Three old Mongolian businessmen:
They're gambling, so we don't join in, but they have us sit and we say we will just watch. Only one of the three talks to us, explaining energetically that he has been to Miami, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and a whole handful of other American cities once we introduce ourselves as American students. This guy is wearing gray sunglasses, a fedora, a brown tweed jacket and is fantastically friendly. The three of them are having a grand old time throwing cards down and yelling when they lose, keeping score in indecipherable lists of numbers on a sheet of newspaper. Suddenly, they all get up to smoke a cigarette and so we follow them out of the car, coming across
3. A whole bunch of men smoking between cars very amicably. But curiously enough there is one man handcuffed to the door. Though intrigued, Julie and I keep walking. The next car is second-class - not divided 4-bed compartments like we've been in the whole time, but an open car with beds and seats. Here it's noisier and more exciting. We chance upon
4. A man in a nice blue suit:
He is quite young and shyly asks us if we speak English. So we have a brief conversation about where he is from (
Next we decide to head back and figure out why the man is handcuffed. But clearly the ticket to hanging out between cars is a cigarette to smoke. We buy two from the food cart lady (It is very easy to buy individual cigarettes and pieces of gum in
5. About twenty college students, mostly girls:
And they are having the most fun ever. Really. Everybody is laughing like it is what they were born to do. A boy and girl are sitting across from each other, playing this game involving tracing hands and then guessing numbers or something and with each move they burst into giggles. So we ask how to play, and someone gets the best English speaker, a very nice girl in a yellow silk shirt, to talk to us. I didn't get the game at all, but sat and watched the card game and chatted a bit with her. They're juniors at the teacher's school in UB, going on a weekend trip together to the monastary's energy center (This is what it is famous for- having good energy that heals the spirit and body) just like we are. They share a bowl of candy and aaral (dried curd, if it's not too hard it is quite good) with Julie and I, and then we continue on our merry way.
We run into the Serbian geologist again, and talk to him some more, and he decides to smoke a cigarette with us. So the three of us go between cars where it's noisy and breezy, and sadly all the other men have left - including the mystery handcuffed man (Much later we find out that he got in a fight on the train and was thrown off at one of the many stops). The geologist finds it hilarious that we were going to pose with our cigarettes, and we explain our program and discuss mining with him as Julie and I try to smoke our cigarettes, failing pretty miserably. Lots of coughing, giggling, and dramatic tapping of ash into the cunning metal box on the window. The geologist makes several jokes that we completely don't get, including, when I tell him my name is Di, "Tea? Okay, can I meet you at five?" I looked hesitantly at my watch, not understanding. Eventually he explains "You see, the British. They like to drink tea, usually at five PM." (I told him it was really four o'clock. I hope I was right) And we laugh as we return to our language lesson, where Baganaa is hanging out with other students, having given up on our return.
13:00 Language teachers have hung a piece of butcher paper in the hallway and are writing the lyrics to a Mongolian song. A small woman is helping them with a line they're forgetting. The friendly old businessman who was playing cards in the next car stops by and corrects a few words. A few minutes later, there's music playing down in another compartment in the car . . . turns out the woman is a musician with a famous folk ensemble, traveling with the general director of the Philharmonic Orchestra (a very well-known composer, Boloroo explains to me) and she's playing the Mongolian dulcimer and he's singing and it's amazing. The friendly businessman is somehow now in that compartment, too, singing along. They go through five or six songs, all belting out and harmonizing and us students and teachers crowd in the hall, enthralled. A woman who had been sleeping in the neighboring compartment pokes her head out and I worry for a moment she's going to complain and the music will stop. But she just asks one of us who the musician is and then nods approvingly when somebody tells her the answer.
13:30 "Di, we need your help!" our field coordinator calls, drawing me away from the music and into the next car. He's standing with a young man in a crisp white shirt, and I get all excited when I realize that this man must speak Chinese! He does. Ulzii-aah thought he looked bored, and struck up a conversation with him, but this man did not understand Mongolian. So I sat and talked to him for a while, learning that his job was to get visas for Chinese oil pipeline workers in Eastern Gobi reapproved in
14:30 Learning the song that the language teachers had written out for us. Six of us students were crowded in a car with 3 language teachers, and we sing terribly and loudly and it's great fun. Nobody really learns the song (this becomes evident the next day when we go to this special ovoo where you drink vodka and then hold your hands up in the sky and sing this song, in honor of Danzan Rabjaa, a very interesting lama (Buddhist monk) who used to sit at the spot that the ovoo is now at. The language teachers sang as we all kind of hummed along, arms up towards the setting sun). Afterwards, I ask Ulzii-aah if he had heard us from the next compartment. Yes, he had. "Was it beautiful?" I ask him jokingly. He responds slowly and deliberately, "Yes, it was beautiful. Beautiful like a crocodile. . . . screaming. . . . in the jungle. I wanted to strangle."
17:00-19:30 Standing in the hall as a dust storm envelops the train, making the light all golden and the air in the train slightly difficult to breathe. I talk to the Chinese man (I don't remember his name) about all sorts of things, like how he went to a martial arts high school that Bruce Lee attended. He's just two years older than me, but joined the army instead of going to university. My Chinese vocabulary is kind of atrocious, but he tells me that my pronunciation makes me sound like a Cantonese native speaker talking in Mandarin - in other words, better than a foreigner's. This is somewhat comforting. I give him Julie’s mobile number so we can try to meet in UB and I can go eat real Chinese food at his company’s cafeteria.
20:00 Arrival in Sanshand.
My bedroom in my UB homestay.
Really nice ger in Khustai National Park ger camp: Lily cut my hair by the light of a headlamp the night we stayed here.
Wild, wild horses. Reintroduced to Mongolia at Khustai National Park.
Khustai National Park , about a 3 hour drive from UB
Bell at Khamryn Khiid
All but one of the ladies on my trip, on Wish Mountain (women were not allowed to go to the summit so we just took pictures and laid around in the sun instead)
Bell on corner of shrine and ovoo, Wish Mountain (later there were goats climbing on the ovoo enjoying the offerings of rice and barley)
Me and a skittish botok.
