Great Mongolian Adventure 2007 Part 1

On Sunday after church I rushed home and threw a few items of warm clothing in a backpack and headed to a bus station about 15 minutes from my apartment to start my Great Mongolian Adventure 2007. To commemorate the one-week May holiday 4 friends and I decided to brave the deserts of Outer Mongolia. I met up with my friend Faye and we climbed onto a tall red bus. Inside there were three rows of bunk beds that stretched from the front of the bus to the end. The bus started heading north out of Beijing at 5 pm and we rode, talked and slept in our bunk beds until 5 am when we reached the border town between Inner Mongolia (part of China) and Outer Mongolia (not part of China). We took our time getting off the bus (it was 5 am and cold) so by the time we got out we were the only bus passengers who hadn’t been swooped away by the over eager cab drivers. The 20 cab drivers who were left without passengers attacked and were trying to physically drag us into their cars using rather unconvincing coaxing in a mixture of Chinese, Mongolian and English. According to Faye one guy even grabbed her bum! Since when will that convince a girl to get in your car? There was one HUGE Mongolian man with long dirty hair and wild eyes. He looked to me like what I imagine Ghenghis Khan looked like. We decided that the Genghis look alike was a good omen for our trek into Mongolia so we jumped in his car and he took us to a little hotel where we could nap until the border opened at 9. We slept and then after haggling for a price for the ride that would take us through the border we got in a dirty old van and the driver drove us around town for three hours looking for more passengers.
We left China and got Mongolian stamps in our passports and were dropped off at the train station in Outer Mongolia. On the wall at the entrance someone had spray painted in English “Death is comino” we assumed they meant Death is coming but were undeterred. We got to the train station at 1 pm only to find that all the train tickets had been sold out for the day. Our friends were waiting for us in UlaanBataar and that 17-hour train ride was the only way to get there. We tried everything to get on that train. Even all the scalper’s tickets were sold out. We had asked and begged everyone but were finding no solutions.
This is the lovely border town that we almost got stuck in.

Then Baikel found us (she is the one in gray). She spoke some English and is the kindest warmest person I think I have ever met. She made us her project for the day and dragged us around town trying to use every connection she could find to get us on that train. Finally she hooked us up with a train smuggler who spoke no English, we paid the woman 20,000 Togrot (about 20 dollars). At 4:30 as all the ticketed passengers were charging the guards at the doors to the train cars our smuggler took me and yelled at the guards to lay off as she pushed me on board. Baikel yelled, “you will have to find Faye in one of the other cars when the train starts moving!” Once on board I was alone in a crowded sweaty train car with lots of boxes and tons of people who spoke no English and looked at me as though I were definitely lost. I sat down near a family and prayed that Faye had made it on board, I had no way of knowing since our phones didn’t work and I couldn’t go looking for her until the train started moving…when it would be to late to do anything about it if she hadn’t.

The train started moving and after about twenty minutes I started to walk through the crowded cars looking for Faye. I found her 6 cars up sitting in a sweaty heap with a large group of Mongolians.
This begins the portion of the trip that we loving call Tangled and Sweaty Mongolian Adventure 2007. We were so excited that we both made it. I joined the sweaty heap and we made a bunch of friends although nobody spoke any English. Fortunately, through my experience living alone in a country where I can’t communicate and teaching children who don’t understand me, I have become quite proficient at communicating without words and well, Faye is a phenomenal artist. Her drawing of a toilet wowed them all. Mongolian culture is unlike any other I have seen. Everything is communal and everyone is family right from the start. There are no formalities, (well other than if you step on someone’s foot you have to shake their hand). I figure this culture must come from the fact that Mongolians are traditionally people who live a very hard nomadic desert life in tents. They MUST help each other to survive so their charity is not so much a gift like it is with Latin Americans as much as it is a way of life. It seemed to me that the way they look at life is, if you are in their presence you are family. No questions asked, you are treated like family and they expect to be treated like your family. They get close very fast and they don’t expect gratitude for the kind things they do for you, they do them because that is who they are, not because they are looking for a reaction from you. We hung out all night until our smuggler, who found us later and brought us back to her car, and her people got off. Then we slept until about 9:30 am when we pulled into Ulaanbaatar after a 17 hour train ride across the Gobi Desert.

Here is a picture of a traditionally dressed Mongolian man who cuddled with our sweaty heap for a few hours.

My wordiness should come as no surprise to anyone reading this, but if you would like the condensed version for the next few days of the trek, let me know.