Wild East (eBook)

STRANGER THAN PARADISE I first glimpsed Mongolia in summer, from the air. The overwhelmingimpression was of space, beauty - and a deceptive serenity. I flew to Ulaanbaatar from Beijing. We climbed through smog and over a landscape of black and brown but began our descent toward a green and inviting world: a gently undulating sea of rich grass, flecked with white dots, like aspirin scattered over a green bedspread. These white dots - the round, canvas-covered, felt tents called gers that have been home to Mongolia's nomadic herders since time immemorial - were almost the only signs of human life. I couldn't see the city we were approaching. I made out one thin stretch of paved road, entirely free of cars. The view fit perfectly with my half-formed impressions of this wild and open country. Naturally, I was thrilled. On the ground, I discovered, things are a lot rougher. This realization came to me four days later, when I foundmyself sitting by the side of a broken-down Russian van in the middle of the Gobi desert, huddled beside a flaming pile of camel dung, singing Finnish campfire songs and chewing on tinned smelts. My Lost Horizon, I mused bitterly, had turned into a Jim Jarmusch film that went on forever. (Arguably, that's every Jarmusch film, but you get my point.) Until that moment, every discomfort, rough edge, and outcrop of ugliness - the hideous power plant and flaking concrete apartment blocks, the billowing soot and exposed asbestos, the ratty ger suburbs with their absence of planning or plumbing - had seemed to confirm the country's rugged glamour. Ulaanbaatar was a scruffy and pitted city with a raffish Eastern European centre of blocky government edifices, treelinedstreets, and pastel-painted apartment houses, ringed by asprawling periphery of dusty ger districts that straggled into the surrounding hills. And beyond that, visible from every corner, the hills and grasslands. It all enhanced my two preconceived notions of Mongolia:a land of horse-riding nomads with an occasional penchantfor bloody world domination, and a secretive communist state whose time had run out. There were the rattletrap Ladas and the statue of a lecturing Lenin in front of the Ulaanbaatar Hotel, and there were the horsemen in traditional robes trotting across Sukhbaatar Square and the portraits of Genghis Khan, whom I soon learned to call Chinggis Khan, as the Mongols did. Both aspects seemed equally exotic. Then I went on the road with the Finns. There were three of them: two middle-aged women, friends, and one teenage daughter. All were blonde, and at least a couple were called Paivi. Veterans of remote and exotic destinations (in that Nordic way), they'd decided the Gobi desert in summertime was the ultimate in adventure travel. They were hardy and resourceful. When I met them one night at the Caf de France,Ulaanbaatar's premier expat hangout (chewy steak, spotty service, lovely pastries), they had already arranged a vehicle and driver to take them the 550 kilometres to Dalanzadgad - Seventy Springs, the first in a long series of cruelly disappointing Mongolian place names - the capital of South Gobi province. A day and a half 's drive each way, four days of exploring the cliffs, dunes, mountains, and fossil sites of the Gobi. They had room for another passenger, I invited myself along. The next morning, we met up outside their guest house, a flat in a pockmarked apartment block behind the Central Post Office. I was introduced to our driver, Batbold, a wiry, taciturn man with a drooping moustache, muscular forearms, and a bullet-grey Russian van.