Freefall

The bus to Dalanzadgad drives past nothing much but plains and rocks and sheep and camels for over twelve hot bumpy cramped hours.

For nomads, Mongolians on buses do not travel lightly (in any sense; they puke at the least opportunity). Bags and boxes, bundled carpets and ger covers, plastic canisters full of – I don’t know what. A little boy perches on my rucksack, entertaining the whole bus. It’s an obstacle course to get down the aisle at each stop, and I have to slot myself back into my seat snugly as a banana into its skin. “Sadis!” – sit down! – says a toothless, deel-clad old lady, grinning and offering up what may be her only word of Russian when I get back to find even this space taken over by three boxes claiming to contain rice cookers.

Around eight p.m the lights of the town appear twinkling in the distance, twinkling, twinkling like a mirage that never gets nearer – it’s not till ten that the bus finally arrives.

Next day, the streets of this dusty little town in the Gobi desert are full of schoolgirls wearing the old soviet uniform of black dress and frilly white pinny; ridiculous white bantiky (bows) in their black pony-tails. They look like cute, slightly kinky French maids.

There are trees down the main street, and the market sells the best tomatoes and cucumbers I’ve found in Mongolia.

Riding of town, the flat desert horizon roars silently with galloping heat. There seem to be blue seas out in the pink plains, seas that never get nearer, that melt and vanish.

There are more colours out here than I could possibly find words to describe. It’s almost maddening, how the tones and the light change. A shoal of sand dunes floats gently in the plain, sides wrinkled into unmoving ripples. Their backs are perfectly knife-edge sharp, until the wind gets up and they begin to smoke and blur.

At the camel-herders’ ger where I stay the night, the little girl’s small collection of toys includes a book in English about dolphin and whale watching. There are pictures, and boxes to tick off when you see the creature in question. She will never have seen the ocean, this little girl. Only the solid waves of the sand-dunes, their shark-fin, whale-hump backs. Shining false seas made of heat and flat plains and longing.

A domestic scene in a Mongolian ger: dad sitting cross-legged, sharpening knives; toddler and kitten asleep on the floor; mum sewing teeny tiny wool saddle bags for a herd of weeny toy wool camels, to sell to tourists.

Authenticity! Authenticity!

That’s the cry from the cuckoo birds, the hungry tourist and traveller cuckoos here in the alien nest that is Mongolia, seeking to be accepted into the real experience, genuine nomad culture, this other life that is somehow more true than the one they come from.

Authenticity. I hate this word – not least because I’m a sucker myself for its meretricious promise.

After Altai and (to a lesser extent), Tuva, whose nomad-based culture has been largely destroyed by Soviet influence, Mongolia seems amazingly, er, authentic. Outside the centre of the capital, Ulan Bator, pretty much the entire population really does live in gers (yurts); they gallop around on horses or Soviet motorbikes herding shaggy yaks, silky goats, camels like miniature moving mountain ranges. They eat only meat and milk. Even young men swagger in stetsons and curl-toed boots and brown and blue deels like oriental-flavoured cowboys. It’s easy to think that this is genuine; how it has always been.

Then you visit the monasteries. At Erdene Zuu in Kharkhorin, there used to be sixty-two temples. Now there are three. That’s when you realise how much Mongolia lost in the 1930s, when the Soviet-influenced government purged 18,000 lamas. The yak butter offering cakes, the thigh-bone trumpets and masked Tsam dance were relegated to a few dusty museums.

Mongolians don’t seem to resent this loss; on the whole, they like the Russians, who at least gave them education, some roads, central heating. It’s the Chinese they resent.

What is ‘authentic’? Outside Ulan Bator, pretty much everyone lives in a ger. But up to half – it depends on whose statistics you use – the population of Mongolia now lives in Ulan Bator (admittedly, a good many of them in ger districts). Some still regularly go back to family in the countryside, proud to spend the summer herding and making airag and curd. Others have never been outside the city. It’s dangerous in the countryside, they tell you. It’s dirty and difficult.

What do they mean by authenticity, these travellers and tourists (me)? A place, a culture that is as different as possible from our own.

The city, Ulan Bator, feels familiar. It feels like a brutish modern anomaly on the timeless empty plains and mountains of Mongolia. Maybe it is the Mongolia of the future.

But for now, the definitive image of this country is still, isolated in an endless landscape, against the brightest sunset, dazzling stars – a ger, a horse, a dog (a ger, a land cruiser, a satellite dish).

…that’s why I’m in Mongolia!

Cheryl, a colleague I worked with on some HIV/AIDS projects, thought I was mad to have chosen Ukraine to live in out of all the countries of the world. She was Australian, but her country of choice was Brazil. Great music, beautiful people, beaches, sunshine… well, she had a point.

She had a game, a variation of the ‘If you were an animal, what would you be?’ type: If you were queen of the world, which country would you give to each of your friends?

Ira, another colleague, fashion lover, got France, I remember. And me? Cheryl, “because you’re clearly a masochist”, gave me Mongolia.

PS I should add that Cheryl had been to Mongolia (for project work) and loved it. Just not, you know, to live in.