So remember when Chris and I
accidentally bought the wrong Trans-Siberian train tickets and ended up in the
Ohio of China rather than the beautiful Gobi desert (see blog on the Trans-Siberian) ?
We promised ourselves that one-day we’d go back to sleep in a Mongolian yurt,
but who knew that time would come so soon! This time, my travel companion was a
little more Chinese and a little less McMullen-Laird.
Our trip started like most other
trips do nowadays: with some painful dentistry in Beijing and a train. The
Mongolian approach to trains is very different from both the Russian and the
Chinese trains. The bathroom was actually better than my bathroom at home (free
soap, matches and toilet paper, our favorite!!!), but our проводница (train stewardess? compartment manager?)
was so rude she could almost pass as a Russia. 没问题, But we kept ourselves busy doing Train on the Train™ (see video below),
figuring out our futures (the main point of this trip) and not doing our
Chinese homework. By the way, many things in this blog post will make more
sense if you read the Trans-Siberian entries from September 2012.
We
arrived in Ulaanbaatar and immediate realized that we severely under packed in
the wool underwear and hats/gloves/scarves department. Ulaanbaatar is the
coldest capitol in the world and even three pair of wool socks and seven layers
of shirts/sweaters/jackets don’t stand a chance against the frigid air and
cold-hearted Mongolian ladies at the train station. After six hours of trying
to buy our tickets to Irkutsk, we still hadn’t experienced “Mongolian
Hospitality”.
Our
toes only got colder as we realized our Couchsurfing host Oolgii actually lived
in a village far outside of UB, and apparently buying a bowl of soup at a café
doesn’t give you permission to stay there for more than six hours. Cold, train
lagged and disappointed that no one would open the door at the only Hostel to
which we knew the address to, we were rescued by a British couchsurfer named
Greg generously saved from a premature death by frostbite. He explained so many
mysteries of Mongolia to us: that taxis are just a name your own price deal for
any car that’s driving by, that you can be bullied by pickpockets in broad
daylight who will just tug at your bag until you give it up, and that walking
home from the bars with a local girl can get you beaten up by a mob of
Mongolian men who are adamant about protecting their women.
The
next day, determined to sleep in a yurt and armed with a map from the nice lady
at the tourist office we headed into the grasslands. We got dropped at the
fancies hotel I’ve ever seen in a village and pretended to be very interested
in their overpriced rooms in order to snag a last deal of the day horseback
ride. By the way, filming and not falling of a Mongolian horse is a seriously
high-level balancing act—even for a dancer. We also managed to talk the hotel manager into hooking us up
with a yurt family (although this took some careful scheming in their fancy, gilded
bathroom.) Despite what you might think, yurts are incredibly warm—until
everyone goes to bed and the stove dies down. Then you better have your
Mongolian ankle-length jacket ready to go.
The
next morning we took the cheap and slow bus back to the UB and spent two hours
looking at the beautiful faces of old Mongolian villagers as we listened to
folk-pop fusion on the local radio station. Once we were back on the train, we
turned our compartment into a mini health center to try and recover from our
Mongolian colds and stomachaches from eating day old yogurt.
Russia
The
train ride to Irkutsk, one of Siberia’s largest cities was beautiful and
interesting. Siberia is largely neglected by the central government in Moscow,
and as a result, the train tracks are lined with impoverished or deserted
villages that look like they belong in 18th century Russia. But
Siberia also has incredible Northern beauty and large stretches of it are pure
and unscathed by civilization. Siberian people are warm and friendly, to the
point where it was hard for me to find a good example or the infamous Russian
rudeness I told Helen so much about. We arrived at our village by Lake Baikal
and cozied up in our warm cottage with Russian dumplings (пельмены), cookies and tea. Welcome to Russia.
I wish I could brag that I swam in Lake Baikal during the winter (it's
supposed to be good luck), but after the Canadians told us that it was so cold
it hurt their souls, I decided that I'm just too old for unnecessary suffering.
Before you judge me, just remember that Russia is REALLY cold. Also, our hostel
is a twenty minute uphill sprint from the lake. The
combination of being out of shape from too much cheap Chinese food and being
old just made that seem like a very unrelaxing activity. So instead we ate smoked omul fish, learned how
to make plof (a traditional Russian rice dish with meat and carrots) and went
on lovely hikes along the shore. We also treated ourselves and bought beautiful
wool socks and mittens at the local market (you really know you're getting old
when a pair of wool anything is your splurge). The trip ended with a lovely
night in Irkutsk at a Russian literature grad student's appartment. If any of
you reading have never couchsurfed, you should do it yesterday. Unless you are
over 40. The you should probably just call it a day and get a hotel. But
seriuosly, I have had nothing but incredible experiences couchsurfing, and our
lovely Russian host in Irkutsk was no different. Oatmeal with dried fruit and
ginger coffee for breakfast? How did she know???
It turns out that our trip
could not have come at a better time. While our friends in Harbin were being
enveloped by a smog airpocalypse, we were breathing in lovely clean Siberian
air on the shores of on of the deepest and most pristine lakes in the world. So
did we care that we were freezing most of the time and came home having used
the vast majority of our living stipind on train tickets? Not at all. Thank you
Mother Russia, я тебя люблю!
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