A TALE OF THREE CITIES

(photography from Christos Kanatas)

A Tale of three cities. (Ulaan Batar, Mongolia, 16.09.08)



Ulgii, Bayan-Ulgii aimag, North-Western Mongolia.

Ulgii was our first taste of city life after entering Mongolia.

We did not know it at the time, but Ulgii is very different from other Mongolian towns.

Ulgii is the fief of the Kazakh, which is the reason why when strolling the busy streets one almost feels as if being a few thousand kilometres east, somewhere between Asia and the Middle East, rather than in the geographical heart of Asia.
Muslim Kazakhs are here representing almost 80% of the local population, whereas in the rest of Mongolia they are an ethnic minority. (6% of the general Mongolian population is Kazakh).

Ulgii resembles a big bazaar. It is disorderly, dirty, noisy and full of activity. The bustling market takes over a quarter of the town, with the animal, fur and meat market spreading all the way to the suburbs. Only four of the town’s streets are paved, the rest is dirt. Rain only falls for 60 days a year in this region and every movement stirs clouds of dust into the air. Most people walk around their face covered with a surgical mask. Still, Ulgii has an air of ongoing festival. Cows wander the street freely, provoking storms of impatient blaring of car horns, stopping here and there to feed on piles of rubbish. Goats are running across the main square, chased by children, while an aloof-looking statue of Lenin stares patronizingly ahead, frozen in time. Girls stroll arm in arms, talking on their mobile phones and boys queue at the local ‘Internet and PC games’ parlour. Hardly anyone is dressed in traditional Mongolian clothes.
There are thousands of shops, selling anything from shampoo to musical instruments, horse saddles, fake Gucci sunglasses; samovars, disco biscuits and Mongolian pop music.
There are wedding corteges everywhere, coloured light-bulbs in the few rare trees, music pouring out of scratchy loudspeakers and at the local disco one can dance to the sound of heavy-duty European techno interspersed with mewling Kazakh pop music as bad as the sound of nails on a board. Never has anyone heard such a bad sound system.

It seems that the whole town is resolutely turned to the west, where many are already preparing to emigrate. There is an en masse migration of Kazakhs back to Kazakhstan, where they see better opportunities for themselves and their children. Many families send their older children to study in Almaty instead of Ulaan Batar.
Kazakhs are proud and industrious people, often very successful even in Mongolia.
Where alcoholism decimates many a struggling Mongolian family, Kazakhs will rally around the Mosque and help each other, their religious belief keeping them safe from the ravages of vodka. Mongolian authorities try to persuade Kazakh families to stay in the country by setting up special Kazakh schools and teaching even non-Kazakh children the Kazakh language as early as kindergarten.

Our guide and translator, Juka, a young Kazakh woman recently married and pregnant with her first child is excitedly describing what her new life will be like in Kazakhstan.
‘My husband and I will live in the city’, she says. ‘I am a teacher and over there I will have a lot of money. We will not have animals of our own anymore, which is a lot easier. My husband has family over there already who have many animals. They live in the countryside. But we don’t want to live like this anymore. We will have a car and visit them sometimes.’
‘Are you not sad to be leaving your own family behind?’ I ask.
Juka doesn’t reply. She smiles a little sadly, but she smiles.
‘Sometimes we will come back to visit them’ she says finally. We will have money to travel, in Kazakhstan’.
Juka already lives in the city. She lives in the suburbs of Ulgii in her husband’s family compound. As newly married couple without children they do not have their own ger yet and instead share a large Kazakh ger with the groom’s elderly mother and his two younger, unmarried sisters. In the same compound, organized at each cardinal point are four small and badly built wooden huts which they prefer to living in a traditional ger and in which the other married members of the family live with their children, a step away from a typical nuclear family. The rest of the compound is exactly identical as its neighbours, surrounded by high palisade, dusty, barren, with a small shack built over a hole for toilet. The family is relatively well off to Mongolian standards but this is the way everyone live. Water is fetched by the older children at a well just a few meters away from the gate, which alone is already a sign of luxury, as most other families have to often travel a few kilometres for water.
Juka and her husband left for Kazakhstan a few days after we left Ulgii.








Ulaangom, Uuvs aimag, Northern Mongolia.

Ulaangom on a summer Sunday afternoon. The town is wrapped in an air of sleepy, timeless serenity. The streets are wide, Soviet style. The few people around move slowly, stunned by sunshine. Two old women dressed in traditional dels are riding their ponies side-by-side, boots touching, cheerfully chatting to one another.
A jeep crammed full of goats drives past at a crawl, zigzagging on the rutted street. Near the deserted market three men in dusty dels and wide-brimmed cowboy hats sit on their haunches next to their sleepy horses, nonchalantly hobnobbing in the acrid smoke of their newspaper-skinned cigarettes. In a shady courtyard off the main street some old men in threadbare, colourless dels are playing pool under the intent eyes of a group of bedraggled children of all ages, their cheeks smeared with dirt and snot, their clothes in tatters. All of the men are playing for money. Whoever wins buys vodka for the others. It is a very democratic game. By the side of the road rusting cargo containers have been reconverted into street stalls where one can have his shoes mended or his tyres patched up. Between them the bare earth smells of urine. Packs of dogs roam the streets, often twenty of them chasing an unfortunate bitch already covered in bite wounds. In an alleyway a drunken man, almost comatose in his intoxication is on all four in the dirt, lost between one world and the next. Behind each building dusty no-man’s land display their equally rickety collections of pit-toilets shacks, their putrid smell stirred by the hot breeze. Near the end of the main street children are queuing for water at the communal well. They wait patiently under the baking sun before slowly making their way back home, staggering under the weight of their jerry cans. Only 10% of Ulaangom homes have running water and wells are few and far apart. Then just when I think I have some kind of understanding of this place, a brand new Hummer drives past, its windows blackened, leaving a trail of high-pitch Mongolian pop. Two girls walk out of an Internet cafe arm-in-arm, Asian Barbie dolls tottering on stiletto boots and skin-tight jeans. Their cheap imported Chinese t-shirts proclaim strangely misspelled pseudo-American slogans, such as ‘D-treme babe’ and ‘fashion-sweats’, at their arm swing fake, oversized Vuitton bags. A heavily pregnant woman climbs out of a taxi, wearing an elaborate sailor outfit. ‘Generation Fuk’ is boldly stitched in gold letter over her round belly. I cannot believe my eyes.

Still, in spite of the pervading poverty Ulaangom seems vacant and orderly, sitting in stiff comfort on the crumbling ruins of it communist past. An outsized square marks its centre, soviet style, fashioned in cracked concrete slabs lifted here and there by the stubborn roots of shrubs. A solitary cow wanders slowly past the bronze statue of the old communist dictator Jumjaagiin Tsedenbal. Every second door opens onto a gloomy shop strictly identical to one another, where behind rickety counters dusty shelves display rows upon rows of imported biscuits and baskets of boiled lollies in garish wrappers. The streets are wide and bare under the sun, each a gateway to the open valley of red sand undulating in soft wrinkles. To the west the sun is setting in unearthly orange between purple peaks.
A small group of Buddhist monks pass me by on their way home to the Dechinraavjalin Khiid, the pallid resurrection of the ancient monastery, which before its pillage and destruction in 1938 contained seven temples and two thousand monks. Timidly rebuilt a few years ago, the temple is now no more than a concrete ger filled with plastic Buddha. Of the two thousand monks persecuted and deported to labour camps seventy years ago nothing remains but a few yellowing photographs hanging askew into the temple’s office.
Ulaangom is a place in limbo.
One upon a time it a was a busy trading place where caravans brought goods and merchants from the whole of Asia trading gold, spices and furs. With communism the merchants disappeared, but schools and factories were built, infrastructures developed.
Young couples getting married were given livestock, which although didn’t technically belong to them was enough to feed their growing family. When catastrophic weather destroyed herds the State helped with acquiring new herds. In Mongolia many people, especially those who struggle with poverty, remember fondly the time of Soviet protection, when it seemed everyone willing to work had a job and there was always food on the table. Almost invariably, those who now are doing well are very satisfied with the free market and proud to be the real owners of their animals. When the Communist abandoned Mongolia a few well placed and well informed people quickly privatise everything they could put their hands on and became almost instantly immensely rich, entering the global market their pockets stuffed with money that wasn’t theirs and quickly growing from there. In the meantime, anti-communist militants destroyed many of the buildings and infrastructure built during Soviet times, regardless of what use could be made of them. Every Mongolian town and village is eerie with the crumbling wrecks of never-finished or half-destroyed buildings. ‘Why breaking everything?’ mourns an old man before the bleak skeleton of a ruined apartment building. ‘These were fine buildings, stronger than anything we are building now. Why take revenge on buildings?’
‘Remember how they (the communists) destroyed our temples!’ retorts another man.
‘We do not want their things!’
The old man shakes his head. ‘These were fine buildings’, he keeps saying. ‘Fine buildings’.
The statue of Lenin, one hand in his pocket and the other raised to mark his point spreads a long shadow across the mangy square in the late afternoon light.
‘What to make of all this..?’ mumbles the old man.




Murun, Khovsgol aimag, Northern Mongolia.

After months in the wilderness, Murun is a shock to the system.
In Murun one cannot help but being reminded at every street corner of the nitro-glycerine atmosphere of ‘El mariachi’ or any such neo-western cult movie crammed full of dust, yellow sunlight, shady characters and gallons of tomato sauce.
In Murun one never knows whether to laugh or cry. There are so many fights erupting at every drop of a hat that I have often wondered in consternation if perhaps there was something in the water.
Well more than the water, the problem seems more likely to be related to vodka. Never in our lives have we seen so many drunks, even in the dankest, most wretchedly depressing industrial areas of Siberia. And Mongolians do not make graceful drunks. They become completely preposterous at the smallest drop, will reel and roll around swinging a vengeful fist at anyone after one glass and be lying face-down in the muck after two, yet when a Mongolian drinks he seldom stops until he passes out. The streets are littered with grown men lying sometimes halfway across the street or between the feet of their horses. People do not seem to be either upset or reproachful. Mongolians are very open-minded people and if I have widely heard that vodka is a bad thing, never have I heard that as a matter of fact if Vodka is a bad thing then people who drink vodka are bad people. I often wondered how can a man have such little pride that he would not think twice about drinking himself to the point of spending twenty-four hours lying in the dirt and his own excrements in the middle of a busy market-place, in front of thousands of people including his own family and children. But in Mongolia people are not spiteful. Derision and mockery are European traits. Mongolians are not like this. They may be, like in Murun, quick to pick a fight and swing their fists around but they are not malicious. The drunks we see in the street have good reasons to drink, or none, but the result is the same. It is a disturbing, saddening sight, a problem that has its roots somewhere too far enough underground to be easily cured, so what is the point in criticising?

Murun is the second largest town in Mongolia after Ulaan Batar and it is bustling to say the least. There are cars, horse-carts, trucks, bicycles, motorbikes, mounted horsemen and pedestrians stuck at every street corner into explosive-looking traffic-jams. The inevitable cows, goats and packs of dogs add to the mayhem, along with about a million children.
The first time we saw Murun, however, there were no children. It was still school holidays and most families, even if they do work or trade in the city, have sent their children in the countryside to help their grandparents or family members with the herds. The town then was grey, ominous, depressing. Walking through the market to provision for our trip to the Tsataans I narrowly avoided being struck by a stray slap destined to the woman standing behind me. Three middle-aged yoghurt-sellers were having a heated argument about God-knows-what and slaps were flying around. Incidentally, when I walk past the same point an hour later the three woman were once again sitting side-by-side, passably friendly to one another this time but united in a volatile looking squabble with another three street-sellers sitting a few feet away across the alley.
Needless to say I sped off.
Meanwhile Ramsay, while sitting on the driver seat of the truck waiting for a mechanic suddenly saw a drunk open the door and with no warnings at all drag him outside to attempt to punch him. Luckily the man was too unsteady on his legs to fight and was carried off by the momentum of his own punch, falling headlong in the dirt.
The list of incidents of this type could fill pages of absurd and near-comic descriptions.

However, when we returned to Murun three weeks later, bracing ourselves for another forced stay in this world capital of far-east burlesque, things had change completely. Well, the drunks and louts were still there, of course but almost completely buried in a sea of fluffy pony-tails, squeaky new school shoes and garish uniforms. Literally thousands of children had invaded the town, most of them down from the high country where their families had remained, having to send their children sometimes as young as seven years old to live at the school’s dormitory for the whole of the school year, often not seeing them again until the next holiday three months away, in the dead of winter. Some children do not see their families again until the following summer. The children we saw, however, seemed happy, confident and content, running across the busy traffic with their brand new school bags bouncing on their backs, an ice cream in hand.

THE WILD

THE WILD (Tsagaan Uul, Khovsgod, Northern Mongolia)

For three months, we trudged eastwards, deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
We long ago left paved roads behind, then trails written in dust and rocks, until even the trails had thinned to a single track, barely etched in the furrowed earth by the hooves of horses, until we reached the end of the world we knew.

From where we stood was the beginning of time itself, where the world had remained unchanged, untouched, protected by its own inaccessibility behind a rampart of mountains, a harsh and mystical world of prairies, forests and hundreds of scattered glacial lakes. Before us lay a wall of mountains behind which lay a maze of peaks and valleys: the Darkhad Depression is the ancient site of a glacial lake formed during the world’s first land formations, millions of years ago. It spreads over 100 000sq km of true wilderness, with the nearest jeep trail almost a hundred kilometres away. It is a world that can only be reached into by horses or foot. So that one crisp autumn morning we strapped our bedrolls onto the back of our saddles and set off towards the rolling hills.

As we forded the first river, our shoeless horses belly-deep in the icy whirlpool, carefully threading over slippery boulders and here and there carried several metres downstream by the current, it downed to us that this was the very point we had sought from the beginning of the voyage. For the past two years, and for some of us over half a lifetime, we had journeyed toward this very moment. We had dwelled deeper and deeper into the last few places miraculously overlooked by the rest of the world.
It was a long process, an initiation, as if the moment we had timidly stepped into this tumultuous river of life that is our endless journeying was the only time we had in fact acted deliberately. Then the current had carried us away, stripping us little by little of all that remained of our previous lives, of our past, of our attachments, of whatever knowledge we thought we had, until even our words left us before this world which beauty can never be fully described, which harsh environment quickly stripped us of thousands of years of evolution and turned us back into primeval beings climbing pines for food and rubbing muddy rocks on wasps bites, our faces cacked in dirt and horses’ sweat. We rode on and on, pelted by rain and sleet, galloping across high plateaux before storm clouds bruised green with hail. We struggled across mosquitos-ridden swamps, our horses wild with fear as they sank to their knees in the swallowing black mud. We slowly inched up to the 3035m Uuren Uul, climbing on cold-numbed feet over rocks and fallen trees, pulling our panting horses behind us. Round us the Ulaan Taiga wore the colours that gave her her name, ablaze with crimson larch and yellow pines. Violet cowbells specked the golden grass, or indigo forget-me-nots which here flower well after the first snows. Tiny streams trickled in the rich earth. Here and there the mountain exploded in granite blocks split in mock smiles by the pressure of ice, spilling mouthfuls of semi-crystallised snow quartz blinding white in the sunlight. Squeezed between the high peaks, the sky seemed a fight between sun and clouds, washing one mountain flank in slanted black rain and the other in molten light. At sundown, we dismounted in soggy clearings and set about making camp on stiff legs, laughing at each other’s gait. Water was abundant, and moss made a soft bed. Soon a fire blazed, and steam rose off our clothes, while in our blackened pot our dinner simmered and our stomachs rumbled in anticipation.
We nursed our frozen feet on warm stones and hanged our socks on sticks to dry them over the flames. By the end of the third day none of us had a single piece of clothing that wasn’t cacked in mud, a sleeping bag that wasn’t damp, or a pair of socks that hadn’t at least partially burnt. Our hands were covered in sticky black sap from climbing pines in search of nuts. We were covered in raw spots by the gruelling ride. Our noses dripped from the cold and water froze in the jerry can.
We ate together from our single pot, and never had bland rice or noodles tasted so good. We rationed our meagre supply of tea to one tea-bag per saucepan and drank it out of empty cans, for our plastic cups had been shattered by a bucking horse.
Never had we been so happy. We looked at each other grinning over the fire, joking at the events of the day. Ramsay had almost fallen off his horse when the latter trotted under a branch high enough for him but not for poor Ramsay who got flattened backward over the horse’s rump, almost toppling over in a roll spectacular enough for a circus clown-act. Ramsay’s pack horse had lost his load twice in the midst of a hail-storm right up the top of a pass and in full wind, while the rest of us galloped madly ahead, hooting with joy, unaware of Ramsay’s battle with his own horse, the pack horse, and the struggle to tie everything back on in the midst of the storm. Or Ramsay’s horse had jumped over a ditch, taking Ramsay by surprise, which landed him halfway off the back of his saddle right onto the metal piece used to tie bedrolls to, seriously denting poor Ramsay’s bottom and leaving him with bloodstains on his pants for days afterward. Or Ramsay had boldly stepped into a stream, assured that his ‘Robocop’ looking Mongolian boots were impermeable, only to discover that off course there weren’t, a mistake that he paid for dearly. Not only his feet froze to death and he burnt his socks one by one over the fire trying to dry them over the next few days, but for almost the entire rest of the trip his approach was heralded by the squashed frogs sound his feet made, which invariably sent us into gales of laughter.
Does it seem that most misadventures happened to Ramsay? Well yes, for the greatest part, which made them even the funnier. But if this sound cruel it can here be mentioned that those who laughed the loudest were not left unscathed. Mark’s cocci-bone was also bleeding by the end of the trip (somehow Mongolian saddles do not conform with European men’s bottom shape) and for my part I was attacked by marsh-flies and bitten on the lip, which thanks to some allergic reaction quickly turned my face into a gruesome lump, making me resemble elephant-man for days afterwards. There is a democracy in the right to laugh at each other’s misadventures. We are all equal in suffering, except perhaps for lucky Inge who somehow remained unscathed. So we forbade her the right to laugh, although we did make fun of her for spreading torn bin-liners over her legs when it rained in an attempt to stay dry, which we found hilarious. But she had no bruises and a perfect horse, so we had a debt to settle.

As days passed we noticed that our minds became less and less cluttered. It seemed that the dirtier we became the happier we were and the more serene we grew. Our intellectual beings faded away, sucked back into some astral height of which we had suddenly been completely cast off. Instead our feet were growing more firmly planted in the earth, our minds fully but peacefully engaged in the next chore, such as shaping a slither of wood to brush dirt of a horse, where it would otherwise become a hard lump which would ultimately rub itself into a wound, or tightening or loosening a saddle strap depending on the time of the day, or making a lean-to to protect ourselves from the incessant rain and try to dry our clothes, or washing our faces into an icy stream without falling in head-first, (which happened a lot, unfortunately. Mark once fell twice in a row).
We had no books, no other distraction than each other’s funny idiosyncrasies, and all our energy was taken by our endeavour anyway, leaving us completely exhausted after a full day’s rough ride and the sorting out of camp and horses. We fell asleep the minute we lay down, unaware of the rain dripping into our damaged tent and soaking us further. We woke up every morning to a frosted blanket and another miracle of simply being in the mountain. We stretched our stiff muscles and marvelled at yet another perfect day. Before us the tight gorges were shrouded in mist, a nearby spring trickled in grass beds dressed in frosty crystals. Washing yourself gave you an instant ice-cream-headache, but then filled you with strange warmth. Not feeling your feet for days on end did not matter anymore, for soon lay the promise of a fire and the pleasure of warm stones underfoot.
The journey had taken us to where we wanted to be. Somewhere along this turbulent path we had lost everything but the clothes on our back, a soggy bedroll, a toothbrush and a bar of soap.
This was all we needed. The lighter we were, the happier we grew.

Beside we had something else to keep us feeling elated. Somewhere deep inside these virgin valleys lived one of the most mysterious and remote people of the world: the Tsataans.
These were the people that we had come from so far to meet, and would have gladly travelled twice this distance if necessary. Constantly moving from one valley to the next in search of the rare moss and red larch their reindeers need, they are very hard to find. So we rode on, scrutinizing the forest for signs of recent camp.
Somewhere, nestled in the narrow valleys of the Shishigt Gol or one of its tributary, we would find a few tippees and see with our own eyes these mythical, reindeer-riding men, so remote than one can only hope to reach them during three month of the year, after which the mountain closes over them, and only after days, or even weeks of riding so deep into the wilderness that memories of any other life has sometimes almost faded away.