2012 was a year which saw me preparing medieval French manuscripts for sale at Sotheby’s, assisting a Knight of the Realm with a busy diary, and improving the UK’s circus animal legislation following the scandal of Annie the Elephant. In the midst of it all came the highlight – two months wandering Mongolia and central Russia. I became acquainted with vast landscapes that change with epic slowness, that were punctuated by wonderful, and contrasting, displays of hospitality. This is the first of two travelogues written at the time.
“I made it over to Mongolia by train in what I think was a fairly brief six and a half days, via Brussels, Amsterdam, and Moscow. In Amsterdam, I had three hours to kill and decided to spend them in the public library, a hip and architecturally impressive building, full of beautiful young Amsterdammers being cool and intellectual. I did my best by reading El País and Spiegel while sipping a macchiato and overlooking the train tracks through a giant window.
Getting onto the Moscow train back at Amsterdam Centraal I got a fair shock, as I was straightaway stopped by my carriage’s conductor, speaking Russian and nothing else. The train to Moscow is formed of carriages which come together from all over Europe, and the one I was in felt like ta creepy Russian mini-state. Walking up and down the train felt like a quick tour of Europe – the next carriage was Polish, and beyond that there were small bits of the Czech Republic and Belarus, and of course plenty of Germany. As well as the conductor (gruff but not really unfriendly) there was a female guard, absolutely conforming to type – stout, scowling, with dubious haircut, and making me feel certain I was the one being guarded – especially as I was alone in the carriage for a good few hours… until I was joined in Berlin by a Russian overseas worker and a Norwegian visiting an online lady-friend in Minsk. (Comfort, by the way, appears in unexpected places, as my couchette had real crystal toothbrush-glasses in its wash-cabinet.) The Poland-Russia journey contains every train enthusiast’s dream, as the bogies have to be changed at the Belorussian border, and there’s no issue with jumping off to take photos or peer under the carriage – too bad that Western European train companies don’t trust us not to kill ourselves.
The next morning I arrived in Moscow Belarusskaja (it turns there’s no border check between Belarus and Moscow: ‘eez one country’, the train guard told me). After a day running around on the metro and visiting synagogues, with a lovely friend of a friend called Dina (it turns out Moscow’s metro has had wifi for five years), I caught the Beijing train from Yaroslavsky staion, to take me all the way to Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. I found myself in what was essentially a segregated carriage for foreigners, nearly all backpackers, although it was second class (out of two), and there were hardly any Russians or Mongolians on the train at all. And on boarding the train, I once more found myself stepping into a different country – the train was Chinese-run, with Chinese guards cooking themselves delicious-smelling stir-fries twice a day.
The Trans-Siberian journey from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar is uneventful, very long, and scenically unvaried, but for all this remains hugely enjoyable. I fell asleep and woke to forests of birch and silver birch for three days; it truly has epic scale. The main event was stopping every five hours or so, for about 20 minutes. It was then a lottery as to whether the platform would be deserted, or buzzing with old babushki selling all kinds of food – from piroshki filled with cabbage or meat, through cabbage salad, bread, cheese, dried fish (consideration for the rest of the carriage meant I resisted), huge pickled gherkins, vodka, fresh jam, beer, and – sold separately – half-melted ice. As exciting for me was the sight of the babushki themselves; they are incredibly characterful, with headscarves, wrinkled faces, covered with moles, moles on the moles, hairy chins, limps, grimaces and stern expressions, but also some very sweet smiles.
The final day of the train-ride brought us over the Mongolian border and into markedly differently scenery: yellow lunar landscapes, undulating and always vast, with white gers (yurts) constantly visible in the distance. After a 6.30am arrival at Ulaanbaatar I walked from the station into town, to the flat of my host Meg. I met Meg through the Couchsurfing website, of which I’m a big fan – it essentially creates a kind of online community (I don’t always trust the words ‘online’ and ‘community’, but in this case it works) of people willing to host other people in their homes. I therefore got a wonderful welcome to the country and was able to stay with a real-life modern-day Mongolian in the city – and Meg was entirely relaxed and a great host.
Possibly even better, I also met through Meg a group of three friends travelling from Iceland to Australia, Lovisa, Cooper, and Salome, a Swede, Australian and an Icelander, who I spent the next week with. I’m not sure I’ve ever clicked with a group of people so quickly, and am looking forward to various combinations of return visits. [Update: I caught up Salome in London last autumn when she played a lead role in ‘F*** the Polar Bears’ at the Bush Theatre.] Together we spent an excellent five days in the northern part of the Gobi Desert, on a trip with an eco-tourism company called Ger to Ger. After some basic language and ger-etiquette training (for example: eat with your right hand, don’t point your feet towards the altar), we walked between various semi-nomadic families. We camped with them, and also ate with them, played some volleyball, and some only slightly bewildering ankle-bone games. Mongolian hospitality is remarkable absolute: on turning up at any ger you’re invited in for tea, food, conversation, perhaps snuff, and a bed if you really need it. As I understand, this emerged in some part from the need for a way for Mongolians to cross their enormous country. In a way, it did in fact feel more of a practical hospitality than I have experienced before, and not at all a gushing, fussing welcome – although I’m wary of taking anything away from the brilliant reception that met me everywhere. We spent midsummer in the Gobi, and some huge lightning storms produced amazing, purple skies, over the illuminated yellows of the desert scrub.
I travelled north back from the Gobi and said farewell as Lovisa, Cooper and Salome travelled on to Beijing. For the past few days now I’ve been in Kharkhorin, visiting a friend. Shine was a monk in the Tibetan monastery in India where I taught English during my gap year (way back in 2006), and is now back in his home town, working in the brand new Kharkorin Museum. It’s been great to see him again, on his home turf, and certainly one of the most remarkable reunions I’ve had – seeing Shine, besuited and on a chrome motorbike, cresting a small hill to pick me up, was a far contrast to the lanky monk playing basketball in crimson robes that I remembered. It’s also lovely to meet his family, who are very kindly hosting me, and get an insight into another Mongolian lifestyle. For the past few days I’ve spent a while around the Museum – this is the site of ancient Karakorum, Genghis Khan’s capital – and helping out with a fair bit of English translation. I think it’s certainly a lot more use than some other, more ‘structured’ volunteering I’ve done in the past.
A few miscellaneous observations on Mongolia:
The roads. The road network is quite a bit worse than I expected – outside the cities, most roads are unpaved, and beyond the main routes, most are really rough jeep tracks. Yet Mongolia apparently has the fastest-growing economy in the world just now (thanks to a low starting point and huge mineral resources).
The Korean connection. Since there are only three countries which aren’t a huge distance away (Russia, China, and Kazakhstan), it shouldn’t be so surprising that there are strong economic and cultural ties with South Korea – both countries do after all speak Turkic-Altaic langauges! That said, the Korean restaurants, minimarkets, and overseas volunteers (speaking Mongolian) are a little bit unexpected.
The meat. Mongolia is really crazy for meat. It is pretty common to have it for three meals a day. This makes sense, because agriculture in Mongolia is new and hardly widespread (so that vegetables beyond cabbages, potatoes, and carrots are imported) while husbandry has been going for millennia. I’ve put my vegetarianism to the side for the duration of my stay, (since it’s for environmental reasons, and local conditions are clearly very different here to at home), and if I hadn’t, I would be having a pretty hungry time.”
As a post-script, I added, I had been listening to:
“Beethoven, Sonata no. 9 for violin and piano, ‘Kreutzer’. Especially the last movement, which always cheers me up, even when I’m already cheerful.
Sibelius, Symphony no. 2. Again the last movement, which has a couple of ecstasy moments. If I ever invite you to hear it, it’s probably a date.”
A fortnight into 2016 and I am still keeping the Sibelius treatment up my sleeve. For now, further exploits from the Kazakh mountains of western Mongolia and Russia’s Altai region will follow, in my next post.
