Mongolia and Beijing

Traveling Mongolia was, in every sense of the word, a tremendously intense experience. Even the most profane activities like walking the streets of the cities and villages, consuming the local food, sleeping in nomadic gers, going to the, well, let's call them toilets, keeping ourselves and our stuff at least some kind of clean and discovering the emptiness and breathtaking beauty of Mongolia's countryside turned into either the roughest or the most amazing adventures.

Since we had first embarked upon our year-long journey to the Middle and Far East the larger part of our travels had gone quite smoothly. Those of you who followed our stories on a regular basis probably felt like we were having the time of our lives. And while we certainly did indulge in a number of amazing activities while being surrounded by the unique emptiness and mesmerizing beauty of the Mongolian landscape, the country made us experience some of the inconvenient and unpleasant sides of being a traveler, too.

Any visit to Mongolia starts in Ulaanbaatar, the country's capital and only metropolis. In contrast to the many cities we had visited on our travels through Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey and Russia, Ulaanbaatar was not the place to see sights or anything interesting for that matter. It was a big and grey and dirty city with modern metal-and-glass facades standing right next to decaying housing blocks and nomadic gers put up in muddy backyards. We spent 4 nights there and it rained the entire time. On the second day the water stood in the streets and on the sidewalks, making them close to impassable. Walking in the rain in Mongolia feels like walking through a waterfall: you will not only get wet; you will will get soaked along with your cloths and everything you own. Its outward appearance would probably have sufficed to establish Ulaanbaatar as a rough and unfriendly place. Unfortunately, the city decided that this wasn't enough and made us experience its harshness first hand. Consequently, Ulaanbaatar will always be remembered as the first city on our route where we witnessed and experienced physical violence.

It started out with a taxi driver pushing Lea back into his car and locking the door when we refused to pay twice as much as we had agreed upon beforehand. In the end we gave him a highly undeserved tip to avoid an actual physical confrontation and to get our stuff back while it was still intact. Still, we couldn't help but to feel sorry for the driver. He must have been pretty desperate to treat other people like that over an amount as little as $2.

Over the next few days we heard stories of other travelers getting into fist fights with amateur pickpockets. And we witnessed two groups of five to six shirtless Mongolian men clashing into each other throwing stones and beating each other with sticks. In Ulaanbaatar, things like these apparently happen in the middle of the touristic districts and in broad daylight. On the other hand, in a society that still glorifies the stereotype of a strong man on a horse taming all natural forces with his bear hands, this doesn't come as a big surprise.

What we didn't know at the time was that we were about to feel the same uneasiness in any of the places we would visit in Mongolia. The atmosphere in the presence of the Mongolian men, many of whom made a wild, disheveled and intoxicated impression, was loaded with a creepy and thoroughly aggressive undertone. This led to every walk in the streets of any Mongolian city turning into a full-body exercise: our minds were on constant alert and our muscles were permanently flexed.

Looking back I wish we had had the same caution when on the second day we walked the dark streets of Ulaanbaatar in the very early morning. We were on our way to the Chinese embassy when suddenly we came across a group of four or five Mongolian men who stumbled out of a night club and right into our way. They were obviously drunk and in the mood for a confrontation. When they passed us one of them danced around me doing some weird Kung-Fu moves. I was lucky that he didn't freak out when I gave him a mild shove to make him move out of the way. Simultaneously, one of the other guys reached out and groped Lea on her butt and in between her legs. The incident itself was over in a second or two; still, the repercussions, namely the humiliation and the anger, stuck with us for the next few days.

In the aftermath of this harassment we eventually came to realize that we had gotten lucky in a way. After all these guys could have done a whole bunch of things to us that would have been way worse. To this day it is the strangest feeling to be thankful for that tiny hint of human decency left in the bodies of some aggressive, sexist assholes.

Obviously, walking the dark streets of an unknown city at night hardly seems like a good idea. Please be assured that we would never have committed such a rookie mistake if it hadn't been absolutely necessary. As stated before, we were on our way to the Chinese embassy to apply for a visa. The story on why we didn't get it deserves its own headline in this blog post.

When we came to Ulaanbaatar we learned that the embassy was only open on three days per week for not more than two-and-a-half hours. That meant that we only had one day to prepare the application and only one shot at getting it approved. We asked the Internet and a bunch of other travelers at our hostel for advise. After one day we had put together the same information that another couple had received their visa with just the day before. Needless to say, we were feeling pretty good about our chances.

The next morning we got up at 5am to reach the embassy at 6am. When we came there there were already 80 (!) Mongolian students standing in line to get their student visas for the next semester. This number grew to about 300 until the embassy opened its doors at 9:30. The subsequent chaos was so massive that it took five police men with (schlagstöcke) to push the people into a cue. Luckily, the foreigners were allowed to form their own cue and Lea and I were number two and three on the list. After completing an intense one-hour run to find a shop were we could print our visa applications (the printer at our guest house had stopped working just the night before), we were among the first applicants to enter the building.

As soon as we stepped through the door the orderly cues dissolved. From that moment on it was every applicant for himself. We found ourselves drowning in a sea of people who, waving their applications, pushed towards the one woman (!) sitting behind the one counter (!). We were almost amazed by how much the embassy's staff had not prepared for handling the amount of applicants pushing through their doors.

When we made it to the glass front using our elbows and knees closing time was only 20 minutes away. The woman behind the counter had already checked about 100 applications and gotten into multiple intense arguments with various applicants. It was easy to tell that she was in no mood for good deeds. She looked at our papers and started asking for a bunch of documents that we didn't have and surely didn't need. This included a full travel itinerary laying out how we would get to and leave China, were we would stay during every of the 29 nights, and, most ridiculously, how we would travel from one place to another. We tried to explain that we wouldn't be able to provide at least half of these items as we weren't part of a travel group and thus hadn't pre-booked every single detail of our trip.

Somehow my answer seemed to make her even more angry. She started asking for a copy of our Mongolian visa - the ultimate farce as German citizens don't need a visa to enter the country. I showed her the border control's stamp in my passport but shesaid that it wouldn't be enough. She shoved our documents through the little window and before I realized what was happening I was pushed aside by another applicant. It took me a few minutes to grasp the situation: we had just been denied a visa for China although we had provided the exact same information a bunch of other travelers had gotten their applications approved with just two days ago. Apparently the success of an application was subject to that one woman's ability to deal with the riot in front of her counter.

At first we were angry and devastated. Then we realized that not getting a Chinese visa may have been a sign: perhaps it was time to change our initial route and finally slow down a little. After four months of intense travel experiences we felt like we deserved some warmth and peace, some sun and some sea and some decent food. We decided to skip China for the time being and take the easy route to Southeast Asia instead. When we found the confirmation of our flight from Ulaanbaatar to Indonesia (via Beijing) in our inbox, things finally looked up again.

At this point it might seem that we spent most of our time in Ulaanbaatar getting wet, feeling uneasy and planning ahead. And while all of this is certainly true, we also stayed there to find out about the best way to discover Mongolia's countryside. Because of its function as a starting and ending point for guided tours, Ulaanbaatar was crowded with foreign tourists. It was easy to distinguish those who had just come to the city trying to find the right tour (they were the clean ones) from those who had just come back from their trip (they were the dirty and tired ones with those big smiles on their faces). Among the clean people we discovered Claire and Ulysses, an adorable French couple who seemed to be looking for the same thing in a tour as we were. Namely, to get out of the city as fast as possible and into the country's wilderness. We ended up going on an 18-day trip together which took us to the 15 most impressive natural beauties and the three most important Buddhist monasteries.

At first we wanted to only hire a car and a driver. You know, to retain as much freedom in scheduling our tour's activities as possible. However, five minutes after getting started on planing we realized that this task would take a hell of a lot more than spending a few hours in a café with an eight-year-old Lonely Planet. Looking at the size of the country, the quality of its non-roads, the fact that sometimes we wouldn't come by a gas station or grocery shop for several days and the severe language gap (no one, and I mean no one, in Mongolia seemed to speak halfway decent English), we decided to turn to one of the many travel agencies. We booked something they called a tailor made tour. This meant that we could discuss some of the activities and take a few decisions on where to stop and spend the night. As the cornerstones of the route were non-negotiable, we still ended up with a rather rigid schedule for a round-trip through the entire country.

The highlight of this trip was, without the shadow of a doubt, the setting in which it took place. Mongolia's countryside was marvelous, breathtaking, gorgeous, [add additional adjectives to express a person's amazement here]. We had never been to a place this open and wide, this empty and and silent, this untouched by humanity. From the stone cliffs and the sand dunes in the Gobi Desert to the vast green steppes in central Mongolia and the lavishly green mountains and crystal-clear lakes in the north - we could have stopped the car and taken a picture in any random spot at any random time and the photo would have resembled a glossy desktop wallpaper. Writing about it doesn't seem appropriate though; I strongly urge you to visit our photo blog on VSCO and check out our pictures. Or better yet, book a flight and see it for yourselves.

Next to experiencing Mongolia's breathtaking nature there was a whole second side to our tour. It consisted of the life on the move and in the nomadic ger camps, of countless hours on the worst roads we had ever seen and of not having access to any infrastructure in the remotest of areas. By saying this I am not talking about the (obviously expected) lack of paved roads, electricity and running water. When I say remote I mean pure and mostly untouched nature. What the Mongolians called "roads" ranged from a plain field of grass, stones and bushes with the imprinted and barely visible tracks of another car, to a bumpy dirt road that came to be for no reason other than the majority of the locals driving there instead of a few meters to the left or right.

After a rain these roads turned into a mud-fest and became close to impassable. Even the most experienced drivers got stuck or slid down the hills. Tiny streams suddenly turned into full-grown rivers which our driver Dashka crossed at walking speed and with the lower half of our 4WD-Van under water. He was a real daredevil and from the looks of it the best driver in the country. Unfortunately he was also quite crude and boorish: he burped and farted without blinking an eye and he enjoyed lying on our backpacks with all of our stuff in them to take a nap.

Our guide Eghi on the other hand turned out to be quite replaceable by the eight-year-old Lonely Planet we had bought. She didn't seem to know anything about the tour, neither about the places and sights, nor about the route. Her English was so bad that we had to translate everything to Kindergarten English and repeat even the simplest sentences and questions four or five times. She seemed to be more concerned about putting on 124 layers make-up every morning (124 being an educated guess) than to talk to her travel group. And she couldn't walk for more than ten minutes, either because of a birth defect or because a horse had fallen on her leg the year before. Thus she didn't accompany us on any hike or to visit any of the actual places.

Even though she seemed quite useless during the bigger part of our tour, Eghi did a very good job in saving the trip when the rear axis of our car broke in the middle of nowhere. It was only the fourth day and already we were forced to leave the tour's rigid schedule for almost two days. With just a few phone calls she put us up at a nomadic family's camp just a few hundred meters off the road. Thanks to her we will remember these two days as the most exciting time on that 18-day trip. We stayed with the family and a bunch of their friends in their two gers while the agency sent a new rear axis from Ulaanbaatar. While the locals slept in the bed- and living room gear with about 15 people, the six of us got cozy in the smaller kitchen gear. The two days that followed put us right in the middle of the nomadic lifestyle that many Mongolians still live today.

This included consuming all sorts of weird dairy products that they made out of cow-, goat-, sheep- and horse milk and that were, let's be honest here, brakish, at least for our Western European tastebuds; it included eating overcooked mutton, blood sausage and various other animal parts that were even more unbearable to put in our mouths; it included playing Mongolian games with the family's children; it included witnessing how their older boys rounded up an immense herd of about a thousand sheep and goats for the night and milking them in the morning; and, most remarkably, it included driving out into the desert and getting insanely drunk with the family's dad and his friend. It started out with sharing stories and music in the limelight of the jeep's headlights, with having a few beers and a few vodka shots. Then we realized that Mongolians drink beer like lemonade and vodka like beer. To cut a long story short: that night we slept in the car out in the open desert as nobody was fit to drive, not even on an empty field.

Although this experience was without a doubt the closest encounter we had with the local nomads, we stayed with Mongolian families almost every night on that 18-day trip. To make some extra money over the three months of summer, many of these families had put up a few additional gers to host tourists. How the tour agencies knew about these camps and their exact locations remained a mystery to us. After all, in Mongolia, 50% of the population still live the nomadic life for at least part of the year (an estimated 25% are full-time nomads) and move with the changing of the four seasons. To make things even more complicated, there are no regulations or laws and thus these families pitch their gers anywhere in the vast and empty countryside.

Some of these families tried to improve the living conditions in their camps by fetching huge canisters of water every other day to wash themselves and their cloths, to do dishes and to cook. One family's dad had even built a shower in one of the gers. This man was the only one who had put some thought into improving his family's and his guests' hygienic situation by building an actual shed for a pit latrine that he kept spotlessly clean and surprisingly non-smelly. Most other families, however, didn't seem to care that much. Most of the time they had dug a whole in the open field that was more or less deep and thus more or less overrun with human excrements, used hygienic products for the women's time of the month, shreds of toilet paper and dirty diapers. We came to prefer those facilities that did not have a shed built around them as they didn't keep the smell inside. Some of them were so bad that we actually preferred walking into the open field until the camp was out of sight and doing our business with a 360° panoramic view of the Mongolian emptiness.

It was the most confusing thing for us: these people had been living in the steppes for thousands of years and yet they had hardly put any thought into improving their living conditions. When we headed north for the Russian border it was already end of August and temperatures fell below zero at night. Still the only way to not freeze to death in the gers was to start a fire in a little metal stove. This turned the gers into a sauna for about an hour. Once the wood burned down the temperature fell back to around zero within minutes. In many gers the temperature was even lower after the fire had burned down: in order to not suffocate, the Mongolians attached a chimney to the stove that required the ger's roof to remain partly open. It was a truly inconvenient and ridiculous appliance that spoiled the last days of our tour as Lea fell ill.

After visiting Iran and seeing how the people there had spent hundreds of years improving the architecture of their buildings, eventually making it possible to heat a Hamam up to sauna temperatures using nothing but the flame of a single candle, the Mongolian's apparent lack of interest to improve their living conditions was plainly weird. They tended to their livestock of often more than a thousand sheep, goats, horses, cows, yaks and camels by hand - a full time job of 17 hours per day, seven days a week. And even though they lived tremendously close to nature the nomadic families produced a large amount of trash that they disposed of by throwing it into the wilderness without the hint of a care.

After three weeks of experiencing the most intense conditions we had ever lived in we were glad to come back to a real bed with white clean sheets, a decent toilet and a shower with warm water in Ulaanbaatar. It was right at that moment when the true value of our travels in Mongolia revealed itself: we had never felt so thankful for and appreciative of the most basic facilities before. Hopefully we will be able to hang on to this sentiment for a while. It makes your life a whole lot easier if your mind is filled with positive thoughts about the smallest and most profane things.

Luckily this feeling not only lasted during the three days we spent in Beijing, it actually received a thorough push. We expected to fly to a huge, smoggy, overpopulated city and we were incredibly glad that none of this turned out to be true. The place we stayed at was located far away from the big streets and their skyscrapers in one of those village-like districts with narrow streets and one-storey-houses. The locals were incredibly open and polite. And the place was surprisingly peaceful and quiet due to the locals getting around on electronic scooters. The sky was clear and the food in the tiny restaurants was cheap and overall a real treat considering the Mongolian diet we had lived through in the past few weeks.

Needless to say, we really enjoyed ourselves there! We walked the streets for hours, past the area around Xihai Sea and Houhai Lake with their bars and cafés, we visited the great bell and drum towers which, back in the day, were used to measure and announce time, we discovered a surprisingly hipsteresque part of the city with its little vintage shops and craft beer bars, we went to the forbidden city and past great Tiananmen Square. And we couldn't help but to feel a little sad that we didn't have permission to stay in this country for more than three days (which we were reminded of when a police man showed up at our hostel asking us a bunch of questions about our 72-hour visa and our plans in Beijing). So we left, heavy hearted and after a non-peaceful four-hour-sleep on Beijing airport's marvel floors, to Jakarta, Indonesia.