The Big Sky Country no. 1
On our way to the border town of Erenhot, we hitch a ride with a driver who quickly becomes the Chinese champion in pantomime for us: unlike almost any other Chinese people before, he gestures a lot while he talks and is able to tell us a lot of things just by moving his hands. He also smiles a lot and uses facial expression. Communication with him is almost easy.
In Erenhot, I get a stomach bug. For the first time on this trip, on our last day in China. So I eat a plenty of activated charcoal for dinner, and we go to sleep early in a meticulously maintained city park. Even though we are hidden pretty well and don’t even use the tent, a gardener rats us out to cops early in the morning, and they throw us out – for the first time in China. They try asking us questions but I keep saying ‟Munguo!” and point towards Mongolia. I’m not sure it works – nobody has ever understood anything I’ve tried saying in Chinese yet. The cops give up quite quickly, though. We catch up on lost sleep (and I complete the healing of my stomach) in another park so that we are fit when we get to the border.
Getting out of China here is far less tedious than getting in from Kazakhstan, though. There still is a compulsory bus that we partially hitch a ride with, and partially pay with the last of our Chinese cash (not enough), but there are just two or three security checks instead of five or six, and way fewer cops, scanners and electrical fences. There also seem to be zero bathrooms on the Mongolian side of the customs. When I ask an officer where to find one, she points me to a place that seems to be back in the area before the passport counters. (I might have crossed illegally back to China for toilet and then back to Mongolia by some kind of a service corridor, but I’m not sure about that.)
Outside the customs house, there is just a vast, completely flat, empty field, and the border town of Zamiin-Uud in the distance. We have to go back on the bus again to get there, and we end up on a dusty market place – the only square there is. We manage to get some Mongolian cash, buy some supplies, refill water and charge our phones in a local diner. For untrained European minds, getting around seems easier than in China. Even though we don’t understand the language either, the unknown words are at least written in Cyrillic, and places and shops are easier to identify by how they look. We are back in the ancient Soviet part of the world, and it shows.
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| The city of Zamiin-Uud |
We also transcribe the Mongolian translation of our hitchhiking letter for drivers on a piece of paper. We had it translated by Vojta’s Mongolian friend Ari who does her studies in Czechia. When Vojta had told her he wanted to go to Mongolia, she was genuinely surprised. Why would anyone want to go there? Why by hitchhiking? Nobody does that in Mongolia. She translated the letter for us, though. She changed the wording because she found the original one impolite and deleted the last sentence saying ‟if giving us a ride does not suit you, don’t worry, we will find another car”. I had added this sentence for Iran because I was afraid people would think we were in trouble and would want to save us. For Mongolia, Ari found the sentence even more impolite than the rest. Her version of the letter goes like this: ‟Hello, we are traveling from Europe to Mongolia by hitchhiking only. Our mission is to do this for free, without the use of any paid transport. Would you please help us reaching our goal by giving us a ride a part of the way you are going, even though we cannot pay you?”
Getting to the outskirts of the town takes just several minutes. The town consists of a few dozens of paved and dirt streets. Finding the road to Ulaanbaatar, the country’s capital, is also easy – it is the only paved one; also the only one in the vast, dry emptiness all around the town that seems to actually be going somewhere.
Our plan for now is to try hitchhiking to a Buddhist monastery near the road to Ulaanbaatar, some 200 km north, not far from the town of Sainshand. I actually have no plan at all except for going to Ulaanbaatar to get Russian visa at some point, but Vojta wants to see some culture sites, just like in China. I like the idea because it always gives us an excuse to go to a destination, and on the way we meet people. On the map, there seems to be a small road directly to the site, and that’s encouraging. In general, the map doesn’t show any roads whatsoever to smaller towns.
Vojta has been to Mongolia before and says that to most of the towns, there actually are no roads at all. People just drive through the steppe and don’t care about roads. I wonder how they can make several hundred kilometers like this, but it seems they can. We are afraid we would get lost in the steppe so we prefer sticking to roads, though.
Fortunately for us, there indeed are some cars on the road we chose. We stop a bit behind the boundary between the town and the sheer nothingness, and we start hitchhiking.
We just wait a couple of minutes. The third or fourth car stops, and the driver agrees to give us a ride. We don’t even need the hitchhiking letter because the crew speak a bit of English. I’m wondering whether this is usual, or whether our first English speaker will also end up being almost the only one, like in China. Just like Ari, the people in the car are surprised we decided to come to Mongolia. They tell us they are students and are going to Ulaanbaatar. At first, I find it surprising that we already found a car going to the capital on the border. But it actually isn’t surprising at all because there just are 2 or 3 towns and some villages between this place and Ulaanbaatar, even though the distance is over 700 km.
After several kilometers, our drivers stop for a picture at a massive gate in the form of two camels marking the entrance to Zamiin-Uud. There is one more tin statue of a camel, and that’s all there is. All around us up to the round horizon, there is vast, flat, empty land covered by nothing but sand and grass. When I was in the US state of Montana, I found out its nickname was The Big Sky Country. I bet the person who came up with this nickname had never been to Mongolia because I’ve never seen a sky as big as now.
Only now, I realize we really are in Mongolia. For years, I’ve been planing to hitchhike to Mongolia, and now we’ve reached it. It hasn’t been the only goal of this trip – not even the most important one as we’ve mainly wanted to travel and to meet people on the way. And the trip is far from over – but as I’m staring at the huge emptiness I still can’t help feeling a deep sense of accomplishment.
Unexpected camping issues
We keep going for several hours – and all the time, there is nothing around us. After maybe 100 kilometers, there is a small rise in the landscape and the grass looks a bit greener; then there is more of nothing.
At evening, we arrive to Sainshand, the town not far from the Buddhist monastery. Our drivers ask us if we really are sure we want to get out here and if we really don’t want to go to continue to Ulaanbaatar with them. That sounds scary but Sainshand looks like an island of civilization in this middle of nowhere – there are buildings and people and all.
The town would be easy to cross by walking but the driver drives us through and drops us just on the outskirts, at the beginning of the road to the monastery.
Finding a camping place poses a completely different difficulty than in China: in China, we had to hide because not staying in hotels was illegal. Here, nobody really cares and there is no place to hide on the steppe anyway; but as there are not many roads, pretty much all of the steppe can be used as a road. So we need to find a spot with no car tracks, where we are unlikely to be hit by a lonely car in our sleep. Eventually, we put up the tent next to an oboo: a sacred pile of stones with an animal skull on the top of a small hill. This place feels safe and it also looks badass.
At night, the vast sky looks almost disturbing. It has billions of stars as there is almost no light pollution. The presence of some kind of a city next to us feels almost reassuring.
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| An oboo next to our camping site |
The power of swastika
In the morning, it’s the asphalt on our road to nowhere that feels reassuring. A clear line that marks the way to a specific spot on the globe seems almost cozy here. A car comes after a while, and we soon get to the Khamar Monastery. It is a completely isolated place in the desert, even though there are quite a few cars parked nearby, and it looks like nothing I have seen before.
The monastery consists of several buildings – one of them is a round shrine with a kind of a strangely shaped colorful tower. There also are golden statues, prayer flags fluttering in the wind and prayer mills of various sizes. Everything is colorful, which strongly contrasts with the gray color of the desert all around. Such a decorated place in the middle of nowhere feels very surreal. As usual, I don’t understand the meaning and symbolism of anything, but the atmosphere of the place still has effect on me. I enter one of the buildings, and there are many people doing some kind of a prayer or ritual. I feel like an intruder, but even though I have no idea what they are doing, it is peaceful and relaxing and I don’t feel like leaving. Then they start distributing some ribbons to each other, and I don’t know what the ribbons serve for and what to do with them, so I sneak out.
The main building is decorated with a line of swastikas all around the outer wall. I am not sure what exactly this symbolizes here, I only know for sure it does not mean the same thing as in Europe. Despite that, it is quite strange to see a sanctuary covered by something I know as a Nazi sign.
On our way back to civilization, the first driver leaves us somewhere on the road and steers to the empty steppe. We then wait for quite some time because there is nobody passing by, but then a car comes from an unexpected direction – from the steppe again. We can see it approaching for ages – first as a hardly visible cloud of dust, and then we realize that is going very fast given that it is just driving on uneven dirt with grass. Then it stops for us as if it was a completely natural thing to do.
Back in Sainshand, we try to refill our water supply for the journey to Ulaanbaatar. It is hard. It’s not only difficult to find drinking water – it’s actually hard to find any water whatsoever. There are no public bathrooms, equipped gas stations, public taps or restaurants anywhere. The tap water in the only restaurant we find is not potable. Eventually, we have to buy a big bottle and use it to refill the bottles we carry.
As we are roaming through the city, a young lady addresses us in English. She asks why we are here, and is wondering whether we are lost. She is our second English-speaking person in two days, which is quite impressive given that there are not many people here in general.
In the evening, a driver leaves us near a checkpoint on the road to Ulaanbaatar. We start looking for an oboo to camp next to, and we are stopped by an officer from the checkpoint. He wants to know where we are going (at least we think so).
“To Ulaanbaatar,“ we say.
“But do you have a GPS?“
We say we do, and he lets us go. No questions about passports – not getting lost in the steppe seems to be what matters. His question makes me wonder how many people like us have gotten lost in the steppe, and it’s a bit disturbing.
