Essay

Mongolia: weird but wonderful

By Steve Ford

The Earth is full of strange and wonderful places to visit and perhaps no place is stranger or more wonderful than Mongolia. I'm talking about Mongolia the country formerly known as Outer Mongolia, not to be confused with Inner Mongolia, which is a part of China.

Mongolia is an enormous country, about 4 times as large as Japan, but with a population of only 2.7 million people. That makes for a lot of wide-open space, especially when you consider that more than 1 million Mongolians live in the capital, Ulan Bator (Ulaanbaatar).

Genghis Khan, the great leader who united the Mongols by 1206, is known as Chinggis Khaan in the land of his birth. He conquered the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known. That was quite a while ago but the people of Mongolia still bask in his glory.

Mongolians are immensely proud of Chinggis Khaan, who was a forbidden figure during the 70 years of Communist rule, and have erected a huge seated statue of him in front of the parliament building in Ulan Bator.

The capital looks rather like a provincial Russian town with wide avenues and apartment blocks that look straight out of the former Soviet Union. There is one crucial difference: Ulan Bator is the only city I know where a sizeable portion of the populace lives in tents.

They are not just any tent, but the traditional circular tent of the Mongolian nomad known as a ger, better known to the rest of the world as a yurt.

While summer is the best time to visit, I've made a couple of trips there in the winter. It gets seriously cold, like minus 35 or lower. Add a north wind howling out of Siberia and you will truly understand what cold is about. Inside our ger it was pretty toasty though, heated by a fire made of wood scraps and dried sheep dung.

In summer it is much warmer, and a trip to the countryside can be a calming salve for the soul, with endless vistas and the silence of the rolling steppe broken only by the sounds of the wind, the beat of horses' hooves, and even a plaintive Mongolian song.

It's not hard to imagine oneself in the Wild West before the plains were fenced in. But in place of bison, or herds of longhorn cattle, we see two-humped Bactrian camels lounging on hillsides, and herds of yaks, goats, and sheep grazing placidly.

Anyone wondering what life was like a hundred years ago could get a good idea from a visit to the Mongolian countryside.

If you can't go there soon you can have a look at some photos of Mongolia both modern and timeless at this website:

http://flickr.com/photos/esteamer/sets/72157600512454918/show/

Shukan ST: Nov. 28, 2008

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