Yurt living….

Mongolia has been interesting. It’s a small country, of about 3 million people, with nearly half of them living in Ulan Baator, which by the way is apparently the world’s coldest capital city. We were surprised by the Buddhist influence, there are several prominent temples in UB,with monks studying and chanting, and shrines/prayer wheels, similar to what we had seen some years ago in Tibet, with one striking difference being no prayer flags here.

I’ve learned a lot about Ghenghis Khan, whose military skills were  impressive — he brought together tribes of nomads from a pretty small area to conquer an enormous chunk of Asia and part of Europe. If you have been to Cracow, Poland, you may remember the trumpeter who plays each day at a certain time, and the song is cut off suddenly., to commemorate the brave trumpeter who was killed by an arrow there trying to warn the town of an invasion.  Well, I did remember the trumpeter, but didn’t realize he was warning about (and was shot by) the army of Ghenghis Khan! Here is a photo of Ghenghis’s memorial, where we stopped en route from Ulan Baator to the Gorkhi Terelj National Park.

The nomadic way of life is alive and well here, with families continuing to move around with their animals. Our guide spoke of the difficulty of trying to find your friends and relatives when they have no fixed address — apparently it is generally a matter of asking nomad families as you go along, as they have an informal information network that tries to keep track of who is where, or who else might know something. And I gather they are starting to use GPS, which our guide jokes is the acronym for a Ger Positioning System.  We see quite a few cars driving off-road over the hills and valleys here, and not SUVs but just family sedans going to and from places that, well, aren’t actually on a road. Yurts/gers are also used by city dwellers as holiday homes, in the Mongolian version of cottaging. We ourselves spent the last two nights in yurts in the Gorkhi Terelj national park, although I do wonder if ours are a bit more luxurious than the nomadic standard version — does this look like glamping to you?

Heading out on the train again this afternoon — Russia, here we come!