Letters from Mongolia: Jumbled Rocks to Twist the Mind

Ulaanbaatar is a city of a thousand smokes. The clouds of coal smoke which billow from three power plants mix with the ground-hugging haze coming from the fires of the ger communities. All this coal smoke then settles as a thick smog which hugs the valley floor.
It isn't the number of fires that makes the smoke interesting though, it's the variety. True, most of the smoke comes from the power plants and cook stoves, but there is also cigarette smoke, smoke from dung fires, smoke from burning trash, incense smoke, and sometimes smoke from smoldering hair, which is burnt after the first haircut a young Buddhist boy receives.

Unfortunately, it's still smoke. There have been two days since I came here when an air mass came over the city and covered the valley like a hand, trapping the smoke. Visibility then dropped to around half a mile, which is impressive considering the fact that there's almost no humidity in the air. Because of this smoke we decided to go to the countryside for the weekend. "We" were Brandon (the other teacher), a half dozen church members, and myself. "Countryside" was supposed to be Terelj, a national park north of the city. However, as we were leaving I began to understand from their broken English (and my limited understanding of Mongolian) that they had no intention of going to Terelj at all. I wasn't too pleased about this, but since they were the ones that spoke Mongolian and could plan such a venture I grumbled a little and got in the taxi. After the taxi we took a microbus, which is essentially a minivan with hard seats and no legroom. After bouncing around in a microbus for an hour, passing barren hills and trash heaps, we arrived at a ger camp, which was only moderately touristy, and was next to a monastery. The place was situated in a stunningly beautiful valley. I shut up.

That night we sat on our beds in the ger. Brandon taught the church members to play Texas hold'em poker, and there was a great commotion as the entire group (myself excluded) headed out to collect "chothlo" or rocks, with which to bet.

We then ate. As I sat eating out of a can of Pringle's knock-offs, I began reading the ingredients (as is my custom).

Potatoes

-munch munch munch munch-

...Edible oil

-munch.. munch... munch..-

I looked warily at the can of pringle's knock-offs. There's something deeply disconcerting about being told your food is edible. It's something one generally assumes. It's like being told your washing machine won't suddenly burst into flames; the question of whether or not the washing machine could burst into flames simply doesn't normally enter into one's mind, and if it does the washing machine should probably be replaced.

The can of pringle's knock-offs noticed my concern, and hastened to explain exactly what it meant by 'edible oil'.

...(refined, bleached, deodorized palm olein)

Palm olein is essentially diesel waiting to happen, but the chips tasted good, really good in fact.

-munch munch munch-

The can continued to expound eloquently on it's contents.

...salt

-munch munch munch-

...permitted flavor enhancer 621.

I stopped chewing. This brings us back to the issue of "edible". Like 'edible', 'permitted' is not something you want to see on your food, unless you happen to be heavily into semi-legal body building drugs, and in that case no one wants to know your opinion anyway. In any case, semi-legal body building drugs are generally not regarded as food, even if they are consumed in large quantities.

Still, the chips were good.

That night there was great confusion as the beds were arranged in the middle of the ger. This act of arranging the beds in the middle of the ger struck me as odd, since I was used to the semi-traditional notion that men stayed on the left side of the ger, and women stayed on the right. I was also used to the semi traditional notion that singles on a church outing don't form a mixed gender heap in a small round tent, but hey, these are city people.

I chose to sleep on the floor, not because I have a great aversion to sleeping in a mixed gender heap, but because I like to sleep on the floor, and because I dislike heaps in general. I was glad I had made this decision, because the beds kept on collapsing at random times during the night, throwing the mixed gendered heap into a state of confusion.

A confused mixed gender heap.

The next morning I woke to find that I had been sleeping next to a half full bottle of scotch. We tried to light it on fire, and succeeded.

The rest of the day was spent in hiking, wandering around the monastery, eating, and generally participating in a wild orgy of unbridled tourism. The monastery was like most other monasteries I have been in, only more so, because it was a tourist attraction. To encourage tourism every attempt had been made to make the monastery even more like a monastery than a monastery should be. For instance, some of the remains of a deceased holy woman were on display, and there were statues with piles of money in every corner. For your viewing pleasure, here is the top of a good woman's skull:

...in addition to some of her personal belongings, and a leg bone, which I am told they made into a flute. I will tell you this much: when I die, I want my leg to be made into a flute.

There were also lots of golden statues with relatively worthless piles of money in front of them. It's interesting how the taste's of the spirits change with the times. After the fall of communism the spirits took to drinking heavily, or so one would think from the many empty vodka bottles offered to them at the hilltop ovoo (rock piles / shrines). More recently, however, they've gone on a diet, as modernism has turned the animism / Buddhism combination into more of a tourist attraction than anything else. Most of the ovoo I've visited so far were just rock piles, with no gifts left at all.

The woods reminded me of Maine, only with fewer trees. There were large black squirrels running about through the woods, which look almost exactly like the large black squirrels one sees in the ponderosa pine forests of Arizona and New Mexico.

The little buggers are almost impossible to photograph. They're always ducking and hiding: running from tree to tree and making mad dashes in random directions. This picture is the result of about ten minute's work and at least a dozen deleted attempts (mostly distant, blurry black blobs).

Towards the middle of the day we climbed the mountain, on the slopes of which the ger camp lay. It was steep and rocky, quite a nice mountain. Brandon and I did a little rock climbing, or rather Brandon did rock climbing and I got interested, so I clambered after him in whatever unconventional fashion suited my fancy.

The peak was 1,920 meters above sea level, or 6,300 feet, whichever sounds cooler. The shot at the beginning of the blog post was from the top, but I took some more so I'll post a few.