Across the Globe without a Plane
Buddhist Prayer Flag flaps in the wind atop hill in Ger District, Ulan Bator, Mongolia
The only thing tougher than the Mongolian people is the land. Finally arriving in Ulan Bator after the thirty hour overnight train from Beijing one quickly sees just how rugged the country still is: littered with the carcasses of all kinds of livestock from the harshest winter in ten years, the sere high-desert landscape (over 1500 meters) is southern California brown well into late May. Forget the slow trudging through Inner Mongolia (technically China) and the imperceptibly changing terrain slowly arcing along the western edge of the Gobi desert – ostensibly a wasteland for ruined Chinese settlements and the government subsidized farmers vainly trying to assuage the pounding winds carrying sand westward by planting trees – U.B. (as it’s known around town) is the wild American west of the 19th century transplanted 10,000 kilometers away in 21st century central Asia.
No signs nor announcements signal the capital to the expectant passengers. If it weren’t for the mass exodus I likely would’ve gone on to Ulan Ude, Irkustk and the Siberian frontier – still well frozen – a month early. Stepping off the train into the chaos of the platform is reminiscent of the bedlam of Morocco, the lawlessness of eastern Europe, the anarchy of Thailand and Indonesia in Asia, because well, Americans have no point of reference for this peripheral train culture, as we no longer have an efficient intra-national train system, nor a culture that actually espouses actually talking to strangers. Though more than just talk, it’s a kind of hard Brokeback Mountain-style frisk you would do well to accustom yourself to early on the steppe, as you are immediately pushed by the exiting Chinese day-laborers behind you into the crowd of vendors, hawkers, money-changers, taxi-drivers, hostel-owners, pickpocketers, hands hands hands everywhere and all of them screaming at you in Chinese, Russian, Mongolian and surprisingly competent English. This is the first test of the itinerant independent journalist: get through the scrum alive, with all your cash and maybe a ride somewhere with Wi-fi and a cool beer, and you can handle anything.
Or so you think.
It’s clear after a few minutes that walking from the train station into town is a bad idea. In no particular order, for several reasons:
Luckily the beard seems to be the solution to all of them, keeping both the dogs and men at bay (for now), providing the impetus to push on, while driving me like a divining rod, toward beer rather than water. Twenty minutes and a sandstorm later, I find the Great Khan Irish Pub just east of the Mongolian Circus in the center of town, pull up a chair, order a Genghis Khan draft, noting that the market for contact lenses must be infinitesimally small, though it strikes me that almost no one is wearing anything other than sunglasses, even inside. Could it be that in one of the last outposts of selective modernization that western problems like myopia and lactose-intolerance have not penetrated this far? Something to mull over as I wait for Selenge, the daughter of the family in whose house in the Ger district I had arranged to stay in for the next week.
She showed up promptly at six and after drinking my last beer of the month (though I didn’t know it then) we left to catch a bus to the other side of the Tuul river where her family lived.
“You should watch your pockets. So many poor people, so many pickpockets here, especially on bus. Like him.” She pointed down at the old man sitting slumped over in the raised chair above the rear wheel well, his weathered hand rock steady at purse level, his face, old and innocent, a perfect combination to catch unsuspecting riders crammed in the hot, overcrowded bus. Alerted to the danger, I steeled myself best as I could, but was still shocked and absorbed by the scenes of urban decay passing before me as we crawled through the maddeningly slow traffic: crumbling Soviet-era apartment buildings lined the broken sidewalks, roads with potholes the size of the occasional wandering cow drivers would have to impatiently wait for or go around, the blaring cacophony of cars honking at the slightest annoyance, which were manifold. The city seemed like a slowly recovering war zone. But what enemy had wreaked such destruction? And from what war?
Mongolia, a country of roughly three million, half of whom live in the the capital, has nearly one million herders. Which is to say that-much like their ancestors- one third of the population are nomads. According to recent United Nations disaster relief effort reports, approximately 17-20 percent, that is about eight million cows, yaks, camels, horses, goats and sheep, died this year due to unusually heavy snows. This, coupled with last summer’s drought, has brought on what is known as Zud, a natural disaster of huge proportions for the Mongolians, more and more of whom are moving into the city’s ever-extending “suburbs” of the Ger District.
Ger District, Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia
Made up of wooden latticework endo-skeleton and wrapped in several layers of felt, these portable white tents -the traditional abode of the Mongolian nomad known as Ger- make up the majority of the neighborhoods lining the fringes of Ulan Bator. Beside the ubiquitous white domes, the district is a massive patchwork of homemade houses, each of which sits on a foundation of hard-packed mud and is fenced in with any number of materials, often using the dismantled walls of intermodal cargo containers, scrap metal and random pieces of wood to keep locals, and the many packs of wild dogs, out. Selenge’s immediate family of five lived in one of these houses about midway through the ward, which stretched on for miles into the distant hillsides.
“We moved here nine years ago. At that time there was no one behind us. My uncles built the house as a gift for my father.” The house, three rooms separated by two walls, one of which is connected to the wood-burning stove and acts as central heater / chimney, has no running water, toilet and gets its electricity from a wire spliced to one of the utility poles- basically a creatively engineered branchless tree trunk supported by wooden pylons- lining the rutted mud roads. From the skylights and smokestacks of the gers a mixture of light and smoke surged toward the dusk-lit sky as the sound of televisions and radios poured like the aromas of meat cooking in the kitchens of each house we passed. The small general stores teemed with customers stocking up on milk, yogurt and supplies for the evening meal, while hundreds of locals made their way here and their with their weekly barrels of water, bundles of coal and wood, and bottles of cheap vodka for the chilly May night ahead. This ramshackle, refugee-style ghetto is home to hundreds of thousands and is getting bigger by the day.
Much like the “bust” of the boom and bust global economy of the past century, the zud seems to happen about once a decade. That’s all well and good if it can be depended on and prepared for, but they’re gradually getting worse and taking unpredictable shapes. Mongolian steppes are firsthand evidence that there is much more to climate change than the misnomer of “global warming”. As Thomas Friedman stated in Hot, Flat & Crowded, “Global Weirding” is much closer to the reality of the situation. More than mere inhospitable weather to be shrugged off with hopes of a green spring, winters here are getting longer and colder, the winds blow stronger and the drier summers don’t necessarily bring the rain like they once did.
Space--even in the flood plain--is a commdity in the Ger District
Selenge, a teacher at the local international school, is brutally honest in her description of the harshness of city life. “It’s bad. There used to no one behind us. Now we’re surrounded. It’s crowded and so much traffic. Everyone comes from the countryside. They’re all herdsmen, but now they don’t herd and they don’t know anything else to do. So they drink. Even young people now. I see so many children drunk. It’s very very bad.”
Despite the ominous signs pointing at an emerging region of the city making up more than half of the population that is neglected by a government which cannot necessarily do anything to provide drinkable water, sanitary sewage treatment, and drivable roads, there is an overwhelming glow of warmth and happiness emanating from Selenge’s home and her family within: her father and mother, the aged and weathered patriarchs of the three young sisters who giggle and talk incessantly while cleaning and getting dinner ready for the five of them, plus their uncle, his wife and thirteen-month old baby and one more teenage cousin who live in the ger in the front yard. Nine people, plus me, all revolving like celestial bodies in proper time and space around a kitchen table made to seat three at best. A table which is full of homemade Mongolian fixtures: Buuz, a steamed dumpling of minced beef and oxtail meat, onions and fat, Khuushur, a fried dumpling similar to a pirogi or borek, Boortsog, fried lumps of dough, and Süütei Tsai, the ever-present milt tea, which is often combined with rice or noodles, meat and fat to make stews like Tsuivan and Budaatai huurga. The table is the center of the familial solar system and the fuel with with their sun burns is a combination of dairy and meat from any of their six main animals: sheep, goat, cows, yaks, horses, and camels. What may sound overly focused on dairy and meat is an artful blending of the limited options the harsh climate and hard steppe- which doesn’t yield many vegetables- has offered these sturdy people for more than a millennium, and needs to be tasted firsthand to be appreciated.
After urging more milk tea on me (I haven’t drank cow’s milk in more than five years but they insist it’s “good for cleaning my stomach”), the family soon settled in to their various after-dinner activities while I popped outside to visit the outhouse. As there are no streets so there are no street lights the night is pitch black, except for the twinkling of the brightest stars I have seen in years. So dark out that I could barely see my hands before me and reminded of all that I had just witnessed- the impoverished and out of place herdsmen, the eroding buildings and sidewalks, the derelict ger district- had been obscured by the inky darkness and now seemed like a faraway dream. It wasn’t until the next day at dawn when I followed the father up to the peak of the local hill- probably 2000 meters above sea level- that the district spread out like a blanket unfolding in the rising sunlight. Though the far off city center showed some old Russian-built ten to twenty story apartment complexes, the vast majority of Mongolians still build in the manner of their forebears: flat and outward. As the prayer flags flapped in the breezy stillness of the early morning there was a pristine peace which would not hold: there is much work to do. I knew that to understand what has worked in the vast open grasslands of the country’s largely unpopulated interior, though is clearly not sustainable as the capital beefs and swells with refugees from an unforgiving yet beloved country, I would need to venture out onto the steppe.
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