Hitchhiking in the Mongolian countryside: a sacred penis, Karakorum, Terkhiin Tsagan lake, and a contest for the weirdest ride

We are determined to finally leave Ulaanbaatar and start hitchhiking to the countryside. We still don’t dare venturing on the empty steppe without roads, so we pick one of the few paved roads on the map. We want to go west to the ruins of an ancient city called Karakorum, and if we are lucky enough, we may also reach the Terkhiin Tsagaan Lake with an old volcano. Then we will have to turn around and go back do Ulaanbaatar as Lukáš needs to fly home from there.

We are wondering how hitchhiking will work for a group of three people. Our young Mongolian friends were not familiar with the concept of hitchhiking at all, Budee is not confident about our plan either and is making fun of us. But Vojta and I hitched our way through Mongolia from China to Ulaanbaatar after all, even though there were just two of us, so we believe it is going to work out in the end.

A fortune-telling session: unsuccessful, uncertain, no chance 

We buy some supplies. I get a lot of fruits and veggies; Vojta has been in Mongolia before and warned me there were almost none in local country shops. We also get a lot of canned horse meat because it’s the easiest and cheapest thing to buy. Before we go, Budee invites us for a lunch to a restaurant with his friends. On the table there is a set of horse bones traditionally used for fortune-telling. There also is a guide to fortune-telling in English – you need to roll four bones and evaluate your result based on the sides the bones landed on. We need to try that, so we ask how hitchhiking will go: I get “unsuccessful”, Vojta gets “no chance” and Lukáš gets “uncertain”.  

Fortune-telling gone wrong

Budee and a friend of his drive us through the city and buy some KFC food for us. They joke we will surely end up starving. They can’t stop laughing at us; they bring us to the suburb, tell us to call them at night if we are still stuck, take some pictures of us on the roadside, and leave. We finish the fried chicken in no hurry and pick Lukáš as our hitchhiking champion as his result in fortune telling was by far the most positive.

Goodbye to the city life

“Uncertain” soon turns into “just fine”: we get a ride from a fancy-looking lady in an SUV. She speaks English, is suspicious about the concept of hitchhiking and is surprised we don’t have a car and are not looking for a taxi. She drives us several dozen kilometers anyway. I realize she was the first solo female driver after a really long time to give us a ride. (In Mongolia, this will happen a few more times.)

Traffic on a Mongolian highway

Special bathroom issues

In stark contrast to Ulaanbaatar, there are not many cars on the road. But just like in Ulaanbaatar, almost all of them are new, fancy looking off-road vehicles. I expected to see a lot of old Soviet trucks, but there is not a single one. I realize Mongolia has probably the best cars compared to any other country we’ve crossed. As people don’t use roads much, they probably need their cars to be very tough.

Even though we are on one of the busiest roads in the country, we sometimes wait several minutes for a car to appear. Sometimes we watch a car approaching for a long time, and then it steers into the steppe and disappears. After the hustle and bustle of Ulaanbaatar, we don’t mind some staring into the green ocean of grass around us, though. Usually, we don’t wait too long anyway. I use my free time to try and learn how to say hello and thanks in Mongolian. Even though we’ve been here for more than a week, I still haven’t managed to remember that. It’s mainly because both words are almost the same and just differ by a flapping sound I can’t make.

The land around us still is completely flat. This poses a very specific difficulty when you need to relieve yourself. If there are people near you, you would normally hide behind a tree, shrubs or a small hill. But what if the only thing you can hide behind is the horizon? I end up just going on the other side of the car than the one other people are, or a bit further to the steppe. It seems, though, that locals don’t really think about this as much as I do. They just do whatever they have to. I’m wondering if Mongolia is the only country in the world where you can see a stranger shitting from 2 miles away.

Village on an intersection

The ancient town of Karakorum and a holy penis

It seems the bones lied: in the afternoon, we arrive to the town of Kharkhorin. The ancient city of Karakorum we are looking for is at the very outskirt, next to the road. In the 13^th century, it used to be the capital of the Mongol empire. It was quickly destroyed, though. Now there is nothing left but the ancient Buddhist monastery of Erdene Zuu, built of the stones from the city ruins. The monastery was almost razed to ground too, as the socialist regime was trying to destroy religion in the 20^th century, but some buildings and walls still remain. The walls are massive, made of dozens of white stupas with gilded tops. We arrive at the sunset and the huge Mongolian sky is burning gold. In Ulaanbaatar, I almost forgot how big Mongolian sky was. The stupas with their unfamiliar shape are shining with all the orange light, and it looks magical.

Karakorum

We camp nearby on the steppe. As usual, Vojta prefers sleeping outside and wants to make a shelter out of his raincoat and pieces of wood instead of staying in the tent, but there is no wood. Actually, there is literally nothing to tie his raincoat to, so he uses an electricity pole. Fortunately, there is no thunderstorm at night.

There is one more important site for us to see in Kharkorin. It is a stone statue of a penis in the middle of nowhere. The legend says it was built near the monastery in order to remind young monks to stay celibate. But it also is a shrine and people come here to celebrate fertility, and they put blue ribbons on it. There also is a stone dish for offerings, now full of a kind of white mud.

Like the Swastika, this lonely statue in the field makes me think of the meaning of symbols. In the west, a picture or a statue of genitals in the public is mostly meant to be vulgar, shocking, or funny. Here, it’s just normal – or sacred. Even though some facets of Mongolia feel very familiar – like the recent history or the practice of spending free time in cottages outside the city – this statue reminds me that our cultures still are radically different in some way.

Terkhiin Tsagaan Lake and the Khorgo volcano

We cross the town of Kharkhorin and buy some more supplies in a local grocery store. I try and fail to say hello to the young shopkeeper in Mongolian, but she speaks English.

"Why are you here?" she asks. It’s becoming the most typical question in this country.
"Because we want to learn more about Mongolia and meet people."
"Do you like Mongolia?"
"Yes. It’s very different from our country. Are you happy to live here?"
"No. I don’t like Mongolia. There is nothing."
"Where would you like to go instead?"
"America."

Behind the town, there is a river. It’s the first water source we’ve seen since Ulaanbaatar, so we refill our bottles. There is some grass and something that looks like cow poo floating in the river, but we trust Lukáš’s water filter.

Soon, we get a ride and continue. We are going to Tsetserleg, the only significant town on our way. Except for that, we only pass through several muddy villages, usually just two lines of houses on both sides of the rod, and sometimes we drive past yurt settlements in the distance. The land is not so flat anymore, there sometimes are some hills and cliffs to look at. There even are some trees. Some houses in Tsetserleg are wooden, which makes the city look different than the cities we’ve seen before. Then there are more trees and even a canyon with a river in it. That doesn’t impress only us, but also the young couple who drive us, so we even stop to look around. Late in the afternoon, they drop us on the road near the lake.

 

We need to cross a village – bigger than usual, but still sleepy and muddy. Unlike villages, village people in Mongolia look fancy, though. Instead of tracksuits, they wear warm traditional coats with buttons on the shoulders and a colored belt. It looks classy and makes me stare at people we pass by. We drop by a local store, and I buy a few shriveled apples. But it’s still apples. Except for that, there is mostly just meat, onion and Korean instant noodles – Vojta was right about fruits and veggies pretty much.

There are fancy and less fancy version of Mongolian coats. The work coats we saw in the countryside are warmer and way less shiny than these, but the shape is similar and they still look cool.

Behind the village, we meet some young French wanderers who are going in the opposite direction, and we enter a nice valley with trees and all. We camp on a lava field just under the extinct Khorgo volcano, and the setting sun is burnig again behind the blackish hill, and it looks like Mordor. 

The fires of Mount Doom

The perks of Geocaching

The next day, we climb up the volcano and look inside. Lukáš is running around the crater with his phone, trying to find a geocache that is supposed to be hidden under one of the rocks. (In the case you are not familiar with Geocaching, it’s a game in which you use GPS coordinates to hunt for small treasure containers hidden in the countryside by other players.) Lukáš eventually finds the cache, and finds out there are few more containers in the area. So, we have a new occupation for the day. It also helps us find nice spots because that’s where most of the caches are hidden. We find one in a lava cave, and another one in the middle of a lava field with jagged lava rocks.

Then a heavy downpour starts, the lava field is quickly filling with puddles and streams, and soon we are standing in water up to ankles. We wade through the puddles to the walking path, and go down to the Terkhiin Tsaagan lake. On the shore, there is a tourist camp with yurts and a small store with noodles and onion, so we squat on the porch under the roof, waiting for the rain to stop. It seems particularly useless. The guys don’t want to sleep in mud tonight, so Lukáš buys a tourist yurt. I find the idea way too fancy and touristy and It’s quite fancy inside, more than I imagined, and we even have a stove to cook our noodles on.

The lava field

The crater of the Khorgo volcano

A contest for the strangest car to hitch

When we are trying to hitchhike back to Ulaanbaatar, it seems the fortune-telling bones didn’t lie that much after all. We are standing on the road near the lake for hours. There are usually no cars at all, and if there is one from time to time, the drivers look at us grumpily and drive past, or just give paid rides.

After four hours, the jinx is finally lifted: a truck driver stops and agrees to take us with him. We are wondering how because there is just one seat next to the driver. But he opens the cargo box, and there is a car wreck inside. So, we put the bags in and Lukáš and I sit in the wreck while Vojta goes to the cab. But for our headlamps, we are traveling in complete darkness, the old cargo box shaking and squeaking around us.

A ride in a car in a car

The driver lets us off in a small village on the road. There are still no cars passing, just a family who is loading an open truck. We ask them if by chance they can give us a ride – they don’t. We go to the road, then, and wait for cars to come. There are still none. The family finish loading their truck and wave at us. They changed their mind: they signal us to climb on the truck. We do so – there are some things covered with a tarp, and a living sheep. The guys sit down on a pile of tires between the sheep and a bicycle, I settle myself on something that seems to be a yurt, and off we go. We can observe the scenery without anything blocking our view. The ride is quite long and as night is coming, it’s getting fresh. The guys are cold, so they find a raw sheep pelt and cover their legs with it.

The family drive us through the no-man’s-land up to the city of Tsetserleg. There is a big grocery store open, so I buy beans. After all the noodles and horse meat it’s my most favorite food in the world.

The series of fun rides is not over yet: the next morning, an ambulance stops for us. We are trying to tell the driver we don’t need to go to hospital, but he signals us it’s OK. We notice there already are some other passengers who don’t look sick either. So, we stop worrying and get in.

By next evening, after a couple of normal rides, we are in Ulaanbaatar. Now we can say Budee was wrong, fortunately: hitchhiking in Mongolia in a group of three is not only possible, but also anything but boring.

  

A ride with an ambulance