Wandering Around Looking Up Cameron Hummels' Notes on Science and Travel

Regarding Mongolia and Long-Distance Trains

I promised a decent update with pictures, but I can only live up to part of that promise. It seems everywhere we go has some Internet connection problems, whether it be censorship in China, or lack of infrastructure and power in Mongolia and Irkutsk. Unfortunately, I am still having problems uploading pictures because of slow speeds, but I’ll get more up as I can.

We left China several days ago on a 31-hour train bound for Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. We were riding 2nd class, which meant that we were in a small cabin with 2 fold-out beds on each side of the room, one set at eye-level and one set at knee-level. Fortunately, there were no other people booked in our cabin, so we got to rampage about the place without having to worry about other passengers.

Riding on trains like this is a nice way to relax and recuperate in between locations, since you’re forced to just sit around, eat, sleep, read and the like for an extended amount of time. Somehow, it doesn’t get boring, at least not for us so far. The time goes by rather quickly conversing with other passengers, reading, or planning our next destination. Food isn’t generally provided, so you need to bring your own or purchase it from the vendors on the platforms at the stops the train makes every couple of hours. Some of the train stops have really tasty grub too, like smoked fish or fresh strawberries. Yum.

The only major hurdle to our first long-distance train was the border crossing. When we reached the Chinese-Mongolian border, it was about 9PM and everyone on the train was pretty tired after such an early morning (7AM train departure). No one was allowed much sleep though due to the barrage of activity for 6 or so hours of passing the border. First of all, you must deal with all of the rigamarole of passport control as you exit China, which is always a pain in the butt. Next, the Chinese make sure you’re not stealing any treasured goods from the Ming Dynasty by demanding that you open all of your luggage and show them all of your belongings (you really want to see my earplugs?!).

Then comes the changing of the bogeys… “What are bogeys?” you may ask. Well, it is an interesting story, and it starts out with the fact that Russians are paranoid. They are so paranoid, in fact, that when they created their railroad system over a hundred years ago, they intentionally made their railroad track widths a little bit differen than the standard railroad track widths used everywhere else (Europe, China, etc.) They figured that invading armies wouldn’t be able to use the Russian railroad tracks to carry their trains because of the difference in widths, which of course is true, but it also makes it a big pain in the butt when you want to travel between Russia and any other country by train.

So now you’re saying: “OK OK Cameron, enough with this pedantry, what does this have to do with Mongolia and China and Bogeys?” Yes, yes, I’m getting there. Mongolia adopted the same width railroad tracks as Russia (Mongolia was dependent on Russia for the last couple of hundred years), and China has the normal-width railroad tracks that are a few inches different than Mongolia’s. So when a Chinese train crosses the border to go into Mongolia, the bottom level of the train, the part that connects the train to the tracks called the Bogey, has to be replaced to fit the new track width. It takes about 2 hours, but it is really amazing to see an entire train lifted up off the track using massive hydraulic lifts, and then have these different bogeys shifted and locked back into place. Wow. You have to see it to believe it.

Anyway, after the bogeys had been switched, and passport control and customs had done their little routines, we finally got moving into Mongolia. But of course, then we had to do the whole passport control and customs thing again on the Mongolian side (along with a temperature gun shot at our foreheads to determine if we had swine flu!). The point is that it took forever and we were tired, but we got through safe and sound.

We arrived into Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia in the early afternoon. We found a cheap hostel, bought our exit train ticket for a few days later and immediately explored the city. It’s a pretty broken down place, with half-built sidewalks here and there, overgrown grass and weeds in the various parks, and the public buses looking like they were taken from The Bronx in the 1980s. Mongolia as a whole is not a very wealthy place. Their currency is the Tögrög, with about 1500 Tögrögs = $1 USD, so we were immediately thousandaires and almost millionaires! Of course, things aren’t that cheap, as one generally pays for things in hundreds or thousands of Tögrögs, but meals were usually only be $1-5, if that gives you some sort of meterstick for costs there.

The main City-Hall-type building has a huge statue of Genghis Kahn in front of it (they call him Chinggis Kahn), since he’s the most notable Mongolian in history. At the height of his reign in the 13th century, Chinggis’s empire controlled nearly all of Asia, from Shanghai and Beijing all the way west to the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Wow.

Anyway, Erika and I ended up spending three days of our time in Mongolia out in the countryside living with nomadic Mongolian families in a region northeast of Ulaanbaator called Terelj. A full thirty percent of the people living in Mongolia are nomadic, typically living in yurts or gers, these really cool tent/teepee like structures. The nomads herd animals: cows, yaks, sheep, goats, camels, horses, etc, and live off of the land. Our three days gave us a taste of their lifestyle. We got chances to milk cows, practice archery and wrestling, cut logs, sew clothing, horseback riding, shovel poop, swat flies, etc. It was pretty laid back, but interesting.

The nomads with whom we stayed were all very kind, and hardly spoke a lick of English, which meant us trying to learn Mongolian–man that was a challenge. But now we can say some basic things in Mongolian like “How was your Summer?”, and “Where is your toilet?” (a question you hopefully don’t have to ask because the toilets are all Slumdog Millionaire style toilets.)

The interior of a ger is generally very brightly decorated (almost always in orange), with only a few places for belongings (they are nomads you know…). There is a stove in the middle of the ger for cooking and keeping the ger warm in the winter, a couple of beds, and a chest or two for the belongings of the family. It’s pretty minimal.

I even had the opportunity to spread astronomy education a bit, by giving one of the families our small telescope that we had brought along for the eclipse. They were really enthralled by it, as one clear night I gave them close-up views of Jupiter, The Moon and Albireo with it. In the end, though, I think they were potentially more excited to be able to spy on their distant neighbors…

Oh, the other interesting people about Mongolians is their traditional diet. With their selection of livestock, they get a lot of milk to produce a huge variety of dairy products: milk, butter, yogurt, cheese, fermented milk, cheese curds, sour cream, plus lots of other things we just don’t have in the west. A vegan would not be able to survive here because of all of the dairy. The yogurt (called tarek) was amazing, putting my homemade yogurt to shame. Another interesting dairy product was fermented mare’s milk (called airag), a kind of cross between yogurt and beer. It has the potency of wine, the thickness of yogurt and the refreshing quality of beer–I thoroughly enjoyed it. The butter they use isn’t butter that westerners are accustomed to, it is the solid layer of cream the forms on milk after it has been heated for a while. I had no idea that there was any culture in the world that was so dependent on dairy, but it seems to work well for them, even if it did mess with my intestines after a few days.

Erika and I returned to civilization and explored Ulaanbaatar a bit more. We had a negative experience with a hostel called Golden Gobi, who stole our $20 key deposit for no legitimate reason, and were very mean to us. If you’re traveling to Mongolia, I recommend against staying there.

Anyway, there are more adventures to tell, but it is late tonight, and we’re heading to Lake Baikal tomorrow for a 10-mile hike along the lakeside. Our plan is to take a bus to Listvyanka, a town on the Southwest corner of Lake Baikal, hike along the lake north until we reach a small Siberian fishing village called Bolshe Koty, where we’ll hopefully watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. Exciting! I’ll be sure to take pictures and hopefully get them uploaded soon. I’ve added a few more to previous posts, so check those out too.