Mongolian Travel and all its Glory

Apologies for the inconsistent posting! I  just returned from a 10-day business trip (sans internet) around various parts of Mongolia, and the experiences I had made me realize that it was about time to discuss the challenging world of travel in this fascinating country. Prepare for a wildly anecdotal and generally all-over-the-place post.

Giving an accurate account of the intensities of travel here in Mongolia would take a lot more time and consideration than I’m able to offer, but I can at least try. The reason for this explanatory difficulty, as with so many other aspects of communicating the nature of this lifestyle, lies in the incredible contrasts between Mongolian life and the lifestyles of my readership. To say that travel is a challenge here, then, might not mean as much to someone reading this post from the comfort of a computer desk in America as it would to a fellow volunteer living in Mongolia. (No judgment there–I promise–just bear with me!)

I suppose the first thing one should know about the nature of travel in Mongolia is the unfortunate fact that, with a few route exceptions, virtually all inter-city travel must go through the capital city, Ulaanbaatar. Even if a desired destination is between my hometown, Arvaikheer, and the capital, I have no choice but to go straight to UB past my destination and find a means of transportation that backtracks to where I want to go. Direct transport is an option for some people if they have their own vehicles and are willing to do off-road driving, but this works out to be a tremendous, and often dangerous, inconvenience.

This is due in part to the fact that Mongolia has only two adequately paved roads that stretch over one or more aimags (provinces), only one north-to-south railway that runs from the Russian border in Selenge Aimag to the Chinese border, and scattered (rarely used, expensive, often runway-less) airports in several cities. This lack of a transportation infrastructure, combined with Mongolia’s status as the second largest landlocked country on Earth, makes travel a huge undertaking.

Part of these challenges, at least from a foreign perspective, is the wide range of alternative driving techniques and risks that Mongolian drivers (Jolooch) are willing (or compelled) to take in order to get from place to place. In the case of my particular town, superstition often plays a large role in such driving decisions. There is a brand new, almost fully-completed paved road extending the majority of the 300-kilometer trek from Arvaikheer to Ulaanbaatar, and yet some drivers consider this road to be bad luck. Bus or van drivers who fear the pavement feel more comfortable adding as many as 11 hours to the trip if it means sticking to familiar sand and dirt paths, which can be extremely bumpy and nauseating for some passengers.

I once crammed myself into a van with 21 other people and rode through the open all-terrain desert–parallel to, and within eyeshot of, the paved road–for 17 hours to the city, when it could have taken a mere 6. At the time I was livid…But as frustrating as it can be to experience discomfort and delay at the hands of a superstitious driver, one still has to respect the cultural significance of such ideas. It requires a lot of effort, but I try to take pleasure in the notion that adherence to traditional cultural trends in transportation is evidence of aspects of Mongolian culture surviving in an increasingly complicated and externally-influenced modern era.

Check out this video of the ride from Battsengel Soum to Tsetserleg, Arkhangai Aimag:

^^The blue/red/white plastic cover over the bed of the truck in this video was used to secure a pile of dead sheep in place. Slaughtered livestock are usually transported in the beds of trucks, on the tops of vans and cars, and even alongside passengers and personal belongings on the insides of vehicles.

On the way to Battsengel Soum. There were seven people (including me) in the back seat of this four-seater jeep, and three in the front. A complete stranger was sitting on my lap (not pictured).

In addition to acting on customs governing the safety of particular travel routes, many Mongolians also tend to avoid travel on certain designated “unlucky” days of the week. In my village in Selenge last summer, for example, it was impossible to find cars into the closest city on Saturdays or Wednesdays due to their perceived inauspicious qualities.  As increasing foreign investment, urban relocation, and the post-Soviet climb of  social mobility continue to fuel the values and agendas of a less traditional lifestyle, though, finding travel options on these “unlucky” days is getting easier.

To compound the travel difficulties that stem from overcrowding, sharing space with dead animals, and uncomfortable off-roading, nausea is a common side effect for many Mongolians during long rides. Buses, in particular, seem to draw out the worst symptoms, and passengers whose rural lifestyles have scarcely exposed them to rapid (i.e. non-horse) transport have the most intense reactions.

Virtually every Ulaanbaatar-bound bus ride I have ever been on has featured a seven-hour chorus of vomiting. Headphones have proven to be quite useful in my carry-on.

the partially-nauseated bus to UB

I’ve noticed that when female passengers get motion sickness, the drivers often let them sit or recline in the cushioned chair adjacent to the console at the front of the bus while they vomit into the on-board trashcan. Sick men tend to just stay in their seats and vomit into plastic bags that they have prepared especially in the event of nausea.

I know this sounds like a load of complaints, and I know all of these personal anecdotes may seem too subjective to be representative of the foreigner experience in Mongolia, but I stand by their accuracy. In the interest of not sounding like a total softy, though, I’ll combine my last two general issues into one worst-case scenario (with which I have quite a bit of experience already): winter breakdowns.

Traveling in the summertime yields all of the same frustrations for me that traveling in the winter does–crowded buses and vans, bumpy rides that leave the coccyx shattered and the skull migrained, timing issues, peripheral peanut gallery nausea–with one exception:

In the summer, one doesn’t run the risk of freezing to death if one’s van breaks down.

Winter is a different story. After mid october, exhalation condenses and freezes on insides of the windows in all vehicles, and visibility is therefore limited to small portions of the front windshield. The floors of vans and buses are usually the same temperature as the outside air, which creates tremendous discomfort in the lower extremities. And this is all while the vehicles are running smoothly! The instant the vehicles break down, the front doors go open while the driver is alternating between tweaking whatever it is that broke in the undercarriage and returning to his seat to check on engine performance. The frigid air whistles its way in through the open doors until the vehicle is fixed.

an etched out vista in the frozen window of the bus on the way back to UB

If one is traveling by van and the van breaks down, everyone has to get out while maintenance is being carried out. If this should happen at night, under-prepared passengers have to figure out how to survive in unspeakably horrendous conditions.

That said, I do not know of a single Mongolian who would ever set foot outside his or her own home without enough clothing to stay warm for a while. I have, however, broken down in a van during a freezing cold night, and I witnessed a young mother barrage the driver with indescribable rage until he figured out a way to make the van sputter along for at least 5 kilometers at a time until he could find an automechanic shop. Everyone was a little frightened that we would be stranded.

I had been in the country long enough at that point to know that when Mongolian passengers  express discontent at the inconvenience of mechanical mishaps, something is seriously wrong. And this brings me to a trait that never ceases to both impress and infuriate me–the ability of the average Mongolian to regard such adversity as just another part of the adventure. In my first 8 months here, I have been on perhaps 10 trips in vans or buses. I am not exaggerating when I say that not a single one of those excursions began or ended on time, nine of them them had me positioned in a space too small for my body, and eight of them were  marked by at least one break down that lasted more then forty minutes in the cold. And yet, somehow, the aforementioned experience with the young mother was the only instance in which I observed even the mildest of frustrations in the responses of my Mongolian co-passengers.

At first glance, this seems like an absolutely lovely way to travel. What better company with whom to share your travel experience than someone who never, not once, complains?  Step back, though, and imagine the lone foreigner straddling the lap of an elderly Mongolian stranger in the back of a frozen van with a busted timing belt in the middle of the Gobi Desert, at night, in late October. He will most assuredly miss his morning business meeting in the city, and he’s frustrated–huffing and puffing, kneeding his face, sighing loudly, shaking his head. In the cultural context of Mongolian travel, his behavior–which would be deemed perfectly normal for such an inconvenience in America– is unacceptable. He–(or “I”, if you haven’t figured that out)–is made to look like a complete and total misanthropic ass by his calm surroundings.

This is the source of the admiration-frustration combo that summarizes my regard for the Mongolian travel disposition. Once again, though, we arrive at the same conclusion–that the contrasts between my personal/national cultural background and the structural and cultural trends inherent to my new life in Mongolia have put me in a position to reexamine and reevaluate my own perspectives. In this way, it is absolutely crucial to recognize the circumstances that give rise to Mongolia’s contentment with the state of things as they are; Mongolians are not frustrated by the same concepts and trends that might frustrate me, as a foreigner, because our respective vistas are informed by vastly different experiential sources. That the American life I’ve lived before was so different than the life I have here, in an altogether different context, is not a reason for me to take a judgmental stance.

And I’ll do my best to try to remember it the next time my bus breaks down.