The Path of Blood – Trans-Mongolian Express
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Chasing The Great Khan – Epilogue
I’ve been asked countless times about Mongolia, “How was it?” and “What’s it like?” and beyond the overly-generic “great”, to be honest, there is no one-word, easy answer. Did I find the Great Khan? Was I even chasing “him” or was it rather the seeds of my own enigmatic roots that I was after? Who [...]
Chasing the Great Khan Pt. 3 – Magical Mongolia Tour
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Chasing the Great Khan Pt. 2 – the Ger District
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.
Chasing the Great Khan Pt. 1
In a multi-part report on his latest quest for knowledge of the Great Khan, Manny Santiago finds that Asia is big, beautiful and mysterious, though not necessarily forthcoming, honest or correct on information about the Mongolian who would lead them all. That and why goat balls are really so very tasty.