A Nomad Among Nomads In Mongolia

MONGOLIA is a boundless wilderness of rugged mountains, vast deserts and expansive steppes. Twelve times the size of New York State, it is home to just 2.6 million — fewer than reside in Brooklyn and Staten Island. With no terrorist factions and a highway system made up mainly of dirt tracks, it was a perfect place for me to travel in my favorite manner — hiking through remote areas untouched by tourism.

I was drawn to the Altai Nuruu, Mongolia’s highest and farthest-flung mountain range, which forms the western border with China. A burly, snow-capped rampart topping 14,000 feet, it is laced with streams along which thousands of nomads herd camels, yaks, goats, horses and cows in summer. I planned, then pioneered, a 250-mile solo trek through this region last summer.

Since little written information exists about the Altai, my primary logistical resources were aeronautical charts — the most detailed maps of Mongolia obtainable in the United States. Seeking an old-school adventure, I shunned devices like a satellite phone or G.P.S., relying instead on my skills as a veteran wilderness guide. After completing my three-week tramp, I spent another three weeks touring Mongolia’s more popular sites, sharing privately hired vans with other travelers.

I arrived in Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital, on an overnight flight from Los Angeles via Seoul. I took a battered cab to the U.B. Guesthouse, in the city’s center, which I had read about in a guidebook. It’s the kind of place where $4 (at 1,142 tugrik to the dollar) buys a bunk in a clean dorm room with Continental breakfast and reliably hot showers. The atmosphere is congenial, communal and crowded, as an international blend of tourists, early-20’s to mid-60’s, sit in the living room, swapping stories and meeting temporary traveling companions. Kim Chong Su, the guesthouse owner, showed me to a room where I claimed one of four beds.

Soon after, I walked across the street to the Mongolian Airlines office and bought a one-way ticket for $147 to Khovd, a town some 850 miles west of Ulan Bator, on the Altai Nuruu’s eastern flank.

With a full day before my flight, I had time to buy maps and visit the Buddhist monasteries where Ulan Bator’s spiritual heart beats, including the Gandan Khiid, where people spin prayer wheels outside a temple that houses an 80-foot-tall statue of a golden bodhisattva, swathed in silk. At the nearby sanctuary, Bakula Rinpoche, distressed-looking locals consulted with red-robed lamas, who recited prayers from strips of paper. The air resonated with the rhythm of chants and drums and gongs.

Secular Ulan Bator was more mundane. Eroded apartment complexes enclosed sad little squares with shabby jungle gyms as centerpieces. Most locals wore knock-off Western fashions, and many carried cellphones on their hips.

Ever budget-conscious, I usually ate in any of Ulan Bator’s nearly identical canteens, called guanz, stuffing myself on buuz (mutton dumplings), khuushuur (deep-fried dough stuffed with mutton) or mutton soup for under a dollar. Though the city’s water is rumored to be potable, I stuck to bottled.

A three-and-a-half-hour flight on a creaky Russian A-24 propeller plane carried me to Khovd. Upon arrival, a Mongolian passenger, whose bag reeked from a bottle of vodka broken in transit, offered me a lift to the Hotel Khovd. I took a cleanish two-room suite with a sink and toilet for $4.50, showering for 50 cents at the nearby public bathhouse. The hotel restaurant served the best mutton in town for about a dollar.

The center of Khovd, whose uninspired architecture betrays Mongolia’s past as a Soviet satellite, was surrounded by a pastoral paradise, revealing the country’s deeper nomadic roots. Hundreds of gers — the round, white felt-and-canvas yurts in which many Mongolians dwell — stretched across a flood plain ringed by rose-colored crags. Women scrubbed laundry on the riverbanks. Children frolicked in the water. Boys galloped bareback on colts. Eagles cruised overhead.

Shopping at the outdoor market, where packaged goods and a slim variety of vegetables are sold from truck containers, I bought $3 worth of noodles, rice, cheese, bread and chocolate, which I hoped would last the five days I thought it would take to reach the first of two mountain villages.

The next morning I embarked on my trek, carrying in my 50-pound backpack everything I needed to survive. The initial leg of my route followed the Buyant Gol (gol means river) upstream from Khovd some 60 miles, through a break in the mountains to the interior of the Altai range. After I had hiked for four strenuous days, fording the river countless times, the canyon opened into a breathtaking amphitheater of sweeping green slopes pierced by rusty scarps, flecked by light and shadow. A thunderhead rumbled across the far side of the basin, trailing rain like a mourning veil between pillars of sunlight that punctured the clouds My blisters had conclusively not been in vain.

Over the next 14 days, I hiked another 190 miles, mostly south through a network of valleys. I discovered in the Altai a diverse amalgam of environments; I walked below massive glaciers, through rolling, grassy highlands, and between parched desert cliffs. The two hamlets in which I restocked — Rashaant and Jargalant — had little more to offer than noodles, rice and chocolate bars whose wrappers bore pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio and the word ”Titanic” in Cyrillic. Since no land in Mongolia is privately owned, I pitched my tent wherever I pleased. Though I never saw another foreigner, I often spent time with the Altai’s nomads, few of whom had ever met a Westerner and many of whom belonged to Mongolia’s ethnic minority of Kazakh Muslims. I could not pass a ger without being invited in.

Without fail, bowls of salty, milky tea were poured even before I sat down on the felt carpets laid over bare dirt. Plates of food like goat cheese, dried sour curd, fried dough and homemade butter were spread on low tables. Multicolored tapestries hung on lattice walls. Dung-fired wood stoves blazed. My hosts were always curious and open-hearted. Photos from home, along with my phrase book, helped bridge the language gap, as we chatted in tents bigger than some Manhattan apartments.

I watched women spin raw wool into yarn, smudge-faced children wrestle with one another and young men return from a horseback hunt with their quarry — marmots. While all nomads ride horses, some have adopted more modern, less reliable mounts. Once, I ”helped” herd yaks while riding on the back of a Russian-made motorcycle, chasing the shaggy beasts over rutted fields and shallow creeks to their evening pasture.

My trek ended at the village of Bulgan Sum. From there, I hired a jeep and driver for the 11-hour bounce ($40) back to Khovd, then flew to Ulan Bator.

My next destination was the Gobi Desert, which engulfs the southern third of Mongolia. I organized the trip the way most budget travelers do — by hiring a driver and a Russian four-wheel-drive van (called a furgon) through a guesthouse for $35 a day and stocking up on food from Ulan Bator’s markets. I split the costs with five Israelis I met at the U.B. Guesthouse who joined me. But our tour ended abruptly on Day 1 after our driver sank our furgon into a bog, then had a heart attack. He survived, and our money was refunded back at the hotel.

One of the Israelis, Natan Melamed, and I then took public furgons to the outpost of Bayangobi, 500 miles southwest of Ulan Bator on the desert’s edge; the estimated 16-hour trip became a grueling 30 because of a cracked brake drum, a broken accelerator and frequent overheating.

In Bayangovi, we haggled with a local driver for a vehicle to take us southeast through the desert to Dalanzadgad for $135 each, stopping at the major attractions along the way. His furgon looked sickly, but we were glad to finally head into the Gobi.

Our driver, a 22-year-old named Saikhan, masterly maneuvered cratered roads as we crossed the arid expanse. Bony pinnacles punctuated the infinite flats, looking like islands rising from a mirage-created sea, as temperatures surpassed 100 degrees, both outside and inside the van.

Our six-day tour included the little-visited oasis of Burkhant, where coal-black hills speckled with green brush meet peach-colored granite domes; and Bayanzag, a sandstone bluff where where the Central Asiatic Expedition of 1922, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, became the first team to unearth dinosaur eggs; the cliffs eventually yielded fossils of more than 100 prehistoric species.

We moved on to Yolyn Am, a bird sanctuary in a rugged canyon, and to Khongoryn Els, a 60-mile crescent of pale, serpentine dunes, some of them 2,600 feet high. Natan and I climbed a whale fin of sand, sat atop a wind-carved cornice and watched the sunset drape the land in lavender.

Every night, we cooked simple dinners of noodles and rice, then unrolled our sleeping bags under warm, clear skies. We drew water from wells with buckets made from old tires, while swarmed by thirsty Gobi grazing goats.

We arrived in Dalanzadgad dusty and weary but satisfied, carrying something of the immense vistas away with us. With no time to rest, we boarded a public furgon for a 16-hour overnight ride to Ulan Bator.

Once back at the U.B. Guesthouse, which by now felt like home, I was promptly invited to join two French business students and three young Belgian doctors (four women and one man) on a six-day furgon excursion to north-central Mongolia, which cost $75 each, including food and a driver.

We drove north a day to the centuries-old Amarbayasgalant Monastery, tucked in a lush mountain valley, where prepubescent monks in saffron headdresses announced prayers by blowing into conch shells. Then we turned west toward Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur, a secluded finger-shaped lake that fills an ancient crater approximately 10 miles long. We rented horses ($4.50 each) for an afternoon from a nomadic family camped along its shores, then rode alongside crumpled lava fields eerily forested with skeletal fir trees and raced one another over grassy slopes, whooping with delight.

We shared chores, cooking and doing dishes in high spirits, and conversed in a combination of English and French around our campfire, retiring to our tents well after midnight.

Our collective bliss peaked at Tsenkheriin Hot Springs, a day’s drive south of the lake, where the soothing waters of a rock-lined pool soaked away the dirt and aches of the road. The following morning, we headed to the Orkhon Waterfall for our final night together. Camped in a sensuous cleft in the Khangai Mountains, beside a river that plunged over a volcanic precipice, we toasted our friendship with Genghis Khan vodka. After a few hours’ sleep it was back to Ulan Bator to catch a plane home.

For $20 a day over six weeks, I had one of the great adventures of my life. The possibilities of traveling in Mongolia, even on a budget, are as vast as the land itself.

A remote corner of the world

Getting There and Around

I flew Korean Air from Los Angeles to Ulan Bator. A ticket cost about $1,300; I used frequent-flier miles. I flew within the country on Mongolian Airlines. My flights between Ulan Bator and Khovd were about $150 each way. Most of my travel within Mongolia was on shared jeeps or minivans. It is a good idea to carry extra food and water and to plan on extra time for such trips, as breakdowns and long delays are common. Altogether, I spent an average of $20 a day on food, lodging and transportation.

Preparation

No visas are required for American citizens for stays of up to 90 days. Visitors planning to stay in Mongolia for more than 30 days are required to register with the Immigration, Naturalization and Foreign Citizens Agency in Ulan Bator during their first week of arrival and must sign out before leaving the country. No vaccinations are required, but travel medicine specialists may recommend some.

Many Mongolians speak Russian but very few speak English. A Mongolian phrase book (Lonely Planet publishes one) is useful.

Accommodation and Food

The cheapest places to stay in Ulan Bator are called guesthouses, about $4 a night. Reservations at U.B. Guesthouse, where I stayed in Ulan Bator, can be made by e-mail: [email protected]. Outside Ulan Bator, hotels generally cost $2.50 to $5 a night. Mutton and dough products like noodles and dumplings are dining staples; you can easily be filled for $1. Nomads never charge for their hospitality.

Navigating and the Outdoors

When packing clothing, prepare for wide temperature fluctuations; it may be 100 degrees in the Gobi and snowing in the mountains. In the countryside, shorts are considered inappropriate. For those who will be camping, U.B. Guesthouse supplies tents, sleeping bags and stoves for trips it organizes, but you have more freedom if you take your own.

A wide variety of maps can be purchased at the State Department Store or the Map Shop, both in Ulan Bator. Buy one in Cyrillic, so Mongolians will be able to read it. The International Travel Maps map of Mongolia, sold through many sources on the Internet, can be confusing, since the place names are outdated. MICHAEL BENANAV

Source: The New York Times, Travel, Wednesday, December 17, 2008