Special Series: Farewell Trips: Mongolia

Spring 2024 was our last season in Korea. We made a number of trips, but were so busy we lacked the time to post about them. Now back permanently in the US, we post about these trips to preserve our memories of them and, we hope, for your pleasure. Written some time after the trip itself though, these posts will be more pictures, less prose (well, this one turns out to be pretty talkative after all).

For my 60th birthday, we decided to travel to Mongolia. It would be a memorable place, and also a kind of substitute for visiting China, which, by the time the covid pandemic ended, had become inhospitable for US citizens (though opinions on this question vary).

Mongolia was really interesting and completely worth seeing, but the idea that it was a substitute for visiting China was ill-informed. Mongolia may border China, but one of the most interesting things about it was how different it seemed from other Asian countries we knew. The capital city, Ulan Baataar, felt more European, a result of the Soviet influence on Mongolia from the early twentieth century.

We were also fortunate to see an exhibit in the capital square of Mongolia’s traditional architecture, which we always thought was called a yurt. However, we learned that yurt is the Turkish word for this structure.  Mongolians call them “ger,” which simply means “home.”  The ger we saw were likely more beautiful than the average nomad’s structure, as they were also meant to showcase traditional Mongolian arts and crafts.

(Click on an image for a larger photo slideshow.)

We spend one day on the Mongolian steppes, where the nomads really live. Our tour guide was the former Mongolian ambassador to the US, who is now seeking to work with Mason on educational collaborations. He is apparently a quite well known politician in Mongolia, since after we had lunch with him a stranger came up to us and asked us if we knew with whom we were eating. “He is a famous politician,” the man said. “Was he a good politician?” we asked. “Yes, he is one of the good ones,” the man said.

On the way to the “camp” (really a kind of hotel) where we had lunch, we stopped at an enormous status of Ghengis Khan, whose empire briefly extended all the way to Hungary in the west, and Vietnam in the south. The large statue had a stairway inside of it, so that one could climb to the top.

Just outside the statue grounds were men who, for a small price, would let you hold their hunting eagles. Teresa did an excellent job–those birds are heavy!

The next day in town, I tried my hand at a hunting eagle. I had considerably more trouble.

Teresa kindly offered that my bird was more skittish than hers.

We had for lunch at the camp a traditional Mongolian lamb barbecue called “khorkhog,” in which the meat is cooked by packing it with hot stones, along with some vegetables. Originally, the meat was cooked in its skin, but now a cooking pot is used. This method was efficient for nomads who could not carry a lot of cooking equipment. The presentation was impressive:

When the khorkhog is served, so are the rocks that are used to heat it. It’s customary to pass the lamb-grease-coated hot rocks around. You cannot hold them though because they are very hot. You need to pass them from hand to hand before getting burned. While just traditional in a restaurant in the spring, passing around the hot stones on the wintry steppes must have been quite welcome.

We had intended to have lunch at the camp and return with the ambassador, but the countryside was so striking that we decided to stay the night at the camp, especially in hopes of seeing the impressively starry skies we had heard about. As it happens, the night was too cloudy for many stars, but we did get to hike around the steppes and appreciate its severe beauty.

Our final night in Mongolia was my actual 60th birthday. We were looking for a really good, memorable restaurant to eat at. But we had stayed longer than we planned at the “State Department Store” (the main department store in the city, its name from the Soviet day), and by the time we started looking for restaurants, they were all closing (it wasn’t that late, but I think it was Sunday night). If we had eaten at the first restaurant we came to we would have been okay, but we were picky at first, not realizing how little time we had. Then as we went to each restaurant and heard that the kitchen was closed, it became more and more unlikely that the next one we tried would be open.

In frustration we went back to our hotel to ask for advice. The desk clerk told us that the only restaurants we would find open would be Pizza Hut and KFC. Ugh. “Nothing else?” we asked. He thought: “Do you like Mongolian food.” We brightened: “Yes! We like Mongolian food!” “Okay,” he said, “there’s a 24-hour Mongolian chain restaurant not far from here.” “Is it good,” we asked? “No, not really.”

The hotel clerk was right. It was not good (though it was not terrible). It was, however, remarkably cheap. I think the dinner for both of us was something like $7.00.

Even if dinner was not great, the trip was. And if you had told me at 50 years old that I’d be spending by 60th birthday not just in Mongolia, but at a 24-hour Mongolian fast-food restaurant, I would have been surprised and happy. In the event, I was.