Two days out in the middle of somewhere in a traditional Mongolian ger at the wonderful Tuul Riverside Lodge. It was beautiful – isolated, incredibly quiet, beautiful in a unique way. And traditional. As long as “traditional” includes an attached western toilet and shower.

Tuul Riverside Lodge

Heavy down comforters to keep you warm in the cold Mongolian nights. An outdoor sofa/bed with great view for sitting and reading. Someone to come in at 6:00 AM to start a fire in the wood stove while you’re starting to wake up.  And a beautiful dining ger filled with heaping plates of local, traditional food (who knew that pizza was traditional Mongolian?) that you didn’t have to prepare or clean up after. You know, that kind of traditional.

Our camp host

It all started comfortably enough – a driver picked us up at the hotel for the 90-minute drive out there, wherever there was going to be.  After maybe 30 minutes, though, he turns off the main road and quickly stops at what is just two ruts where a customized truck is waiting – the kind of truck that doesn’t need fancy “roads” to get where you need to go.

Definitely flat…

Thus we started off across the fields and hills and streams to the camp, interrupted only by one little flat tire. Once the tire was replaced we were back on the road – OK, no one would call it a road, but back on the ruts – and into camp, maybe 20 almost entirely unoccupied gers along the Tuul (rhymes with Brule) River.

Then it was pretty much two days of pretty much not much. Certainly no Internet, and running water and electricity just a couple hours a day. A lot of reading – Mark’s working through a biography of Mao, while in preparation for Russia I finished Nicholas and Alexandra, Robert Massie’s great biography of the last Tsar and his wife.

Snowballs in June

We did a few hikes high up into the hills surrounding the camp where even in June there are patches of snow. When we asked the sweet and helpful camp manager Mr. Enkh-Amgalan about hiking trails he waived his arm toward the hills as if to say “Trails? What do you need trails for?” So off we went, making our way through fields and up and over hills. The flowers were amazing – just tiny, delicate little things, rarely more than an inch or at most two above ground, little miniature things that you don’t notice until you notice them.

Jim combining hiking and reading

Did I mention quiet? There was one other couple here when we arrived – a Swiss couple working with international aid agencies in UB – but they left Monday morning so we had the place to ourselves the rest of our time. When a plane went over at 30,000 feet it sounded loud.  The flapping wings of birds flying nearby were loud. Cows in the far distance were, well, not loud, but audible.  Everything else was quiet.

The highlight was riding horses on Monday after breakfast. It just seems as though that’s what you’re supposed to do in Mongolia, so out we went; the camp’s first horse excursion of the still-young spring we were told.  Beautiful, peaceful, and exciting. Mostly walking and trotting, but near the end I encouraged my horse to take off across the prairie, and off we went. How often do you get the chance to gallop across Mongolia?

Cowboy and Indian

One more time than expected, it turns out. After dinner the camp manager told Mark that the owner back in UB wanted to talk to Mark on the phone.  I didn’t even know they had a phone. Apparently the problem was that they’d had big storms in UB and she was concerned that the truck couldn’t make it through the fields and streams. Would we be willing to take horses back to where the car could pick us up?

On Monday we had to pay to go riding; on Tuesday we were doing them a favor. Sweet!

Dinner ger

Drinks at sunset

It’s Sunday morning in Ulan Bator, and we are headed offline for a couple days at least. We’re going to spend the next two days in the Terelj National Park, where we will stay in traditional Mongolian gers. I really don’t think we’ll have Internet access.

To make matters worse, when we head back in from the steppe on Tuesday, we’ll be getting back on the Trans Siberian Railway for a 30-hour trip to Irkutsk, Russia. I’m not sure whether we’ll get a chance to get online before boarding the train, so we could be offline for as much as 3 1/2 days.

If you don’t hear from us before Wednesday, we should have plenty to report back then!

Tomorrow morning we’re off to the Tuul River in the Terelj National Park for two days of whatever you do when staying in a ger in the Mongolian hinterlands. No Internet out there, so this will be it from me for a couple of days. Here are some observations about Ulan Batar, though, after three days here.

Had I done a little research before we got here, the temperature plunging to freezing on June 1 wouldn’t have surprised me. It turns out that Ulan Batar, with an average annual temperature of about 34 degrees, is the coldest national capital on earth.

While we’re discussing superlatives, UB also has the worst air pollution of any capital city, and is among the worst of any city in the world, with airborne particles 25 times the WHO recommended upper limit.

Oddly, we never saw a street sign in the city, though we walked for miles. Not a one.

Gandan Monastery

The National Museum of Mongolia was pretty interesting.  We’re not really museum people, but it was just right – enough information to learn something without being overwhelming. And most of the exhibits had good English translations.

And the Gandan Monastery was cool, too.  If we’re not museum people, we’re really not religious people.  But the Buddhist monastery was beautiful and approachable, with some great chanting and bell ringing. We even ran into old friends.  OK, friends from three days ago on the train, but Shawn & Lorri felt like old friends!

Our new friends Shawn and Lorri

And just as odd, some cars have the steering wheel on the left, some on the right. Cars all drive on the right side of the street, but steering wheels were pretty much split evenly left and right. At least we didn’t see any in the middle…

There is apparently a big Korean population here, meaning there are a lot of Korean restaurants. What’s not to like about that?

Cocktails – with ice, straws, and just the wrong color

We’ve observed many times that no one outside the US know how to make cocktails. (OK, sometimes I think no one besides Paul and Maureen at Gargoyles or Karen & Sunday at Franks knows how to make cocktails, but that’s probably too picky.) But drinks on the 17th floor of a hotel here were remarkable. Who knew that a martini was primarily lemon juice? That a manhattan had large amounts of simple syrup? Or that after you shake said martini and manhattan you pour them with the ice into the martini glass? And then you serve the drinks in the martini glass with a straw? Oh, the trials your intrepid travelers face!

Speaking of drinks, we learned from painful experience that the first day of every month is an alcohol-free day. Can’t buy it in a store, in a restaurant, or even a bar. Amusingly, though, today was the one day we saw a young guy just falling down drunk on the sidewalk. Apparently that holiday thing isn’t working so well.

I read all that and it seems kind of negative.  Maybe this is a place, though, where the sum is much greater than the parts.  We’re actually charmed by Ulan Batar.  The people are friendly and smiling, the kids are cute, prices are affordable, there are great hiking and biking opportunities in the area, and they are emerging successfully from decades of Soviet domination.  Not dying to come back, but definitely worth a few days to explore.