Mongolia 1: UlaanBaater, Murun, and the first day of the Naadam Festival

  I am writing this in my Tokyo hotel, a week after returning from Mongolia.  The structure of the Mongolian trip was a bit unique.  I flew into the main city of Ulaanbaatar on the night of July 8th.  I had one full day to rest, and then I would be using the hotel as a base.  I would fly to a location, fly back and have half a day of rest, and then fly to the next location, fly back, and then drive to the final spot, before driving back.  Since I was always returning to the same hotel, I keep excess luggage there, and adjusted my smaller bags accordingly, for each location.

  I paid for a solo tour.  I would be assigned a guide, due to stay with me for the entirety of the trip, and then a separate driver in each location.  Although it as more expensive to go solo, every group tour that I could find consisted of five to eight hours of driving, every single day.  I couldn't possibly imagine such a way of travelling to be enjoyable.  Therefore, I decided to customize my own itinerary.  I worked with the owner of a company that seemed to respond quickly to emails, and received over a hundred positive reviews on Tripadvisor.  

  The tour company seemed to like the Blue Sky Hotel, and the location seemed to be right in the middle of things, according to Google Maps, so I went ahead and added an extra night at the beginning of my trip, so I would have a full day to relax and walk around the city if I felt like it.  One of my bags was the very last one off the conveyor belt, well after everyone else had collected theirs.  A security personnel asked me to follow them to the side, so they could inspect my bag.  They did not speak English.  They were pointing at an item that showed up in a scan.  I unzipped the bag and found the item that stood out to them, my keyboard.

  Waiting to greet me was my guide, Dorj.  He seemed friendly enough, though his English was not as competent as I had expected.  I quickly noticed that he would pretend to understand my questions sometimes, before either answering something completely different, or double backing and asking me to clarify or try different words.  I tried to explain to him that I would have no problem trying to reword things if he didn't understand something.  This did not seem to change his behavior.  On that first drive, from the airport to the hotel, I learned very little.  He explained that the Mongolian language had been changed by the Soviets in the USSR era, and that this airport was newly constructed, and was farther away from the city than the previous one.  When I was back at the airport, to leave at the end of my trip, I read a plaque that explained that the loan for the airport was given by the Japanese.

  The hotel was billed as a five star hotel.  They put me on the sixteenth floor, which was not to my liking.  The room's windows were slanted.  The bathroom was terrifying.  I will let the pictures speak for themselves.  I called the front desk and asked if there were any lower floors available.  They said that they were all full.  I would later find out that the hotel's floors didn't begin until the 9th floor.  Stuck in the room, I tried to stay as far as I could from the windows.  Unfortunately, the largest window had broken blinds.  I could have asked the hotel for help, but I couldn't be bothered.

  The room layout was strange, the walls were peeling a bit, and the carpet wasn't super clean.  It had a refrigerator though, and a decent coffee maker.  

  Around the corner were the two types of convenience stores that I saw throughout Mongolia.  Nice to CU and GS25.  I preferred the CUs, however they had strange coffee.  They would always give you a flavored packet, of which I took vanilla.  The coffee makers seemed always set to Americano, which I did not like.  The packet appeared to be flavored powdered milk.  Without it, the coffee tasted horrible.  With it, the coffee tasted horrible, but sometimes drinkable.

  I decided that I was going to walk to the Gandantegchinlen Monastery.  First, directly across the street there was a small festival to visit.  I assume that it was related to Naadam, but I am not sure.  I walked through, since no performers were on the stage.

  Across the street, I walked past a Broadway restaurant.  I saw a few more of them throughout town.  On the corner was the Chinggis Khaan National Museum.  I later learned that Genghis Khan is referred to as Chinnis Khaan in Mongolia.  Their airport is named the Chinggis Khaan International Airport.  

  Parts of the city are orderly and have sidewalks.  In other spots, there are haphazard parking streets, with pedestrians weaving around the cars.  Some areas are well maintained, while others seem left in disrepair.  Traffic on the street was constant, often with very little forward movement.

  Eventually I came to a large multidirectional intersection.  There was a very tall building labelled Holiday Inn on one corner, with a number of monasteries down one street, and then up and into a section of housing in a seemingly bad state of neglect.  This was the first time that I got a closer view of the white nomad homes known as gers.

There was a neat looking building in the distance.

  

  The temples surrounding the monastery were interesting, but again, not well cared for.  I did not look at any preview for the monastery, so when I stepped inside, I was blown away.  

  It was one single room, with an incredibly large buddha statue.  Along the walls were buddhas, and on the inside border of the walkaround enclosure were cylindrical bells.  People walked around, holding their hands out, rotating the bells in order.  

  I stopped briefly at an art museum that charged extra to allow photography.  I opted not to partake.  Returning back to the festival, there were a few performances taking place.

  As I was approaching the hotel, I spotted a dog off leash, waiting at the street corner.  I couldn't figure out if someone was accompanying the dog or if it was just on its own.  I discovered that it was on its own.  Someone stopped to feed it, after it crossed the street.

  The next day was a super early flight to murun.  The flight itself was under an hour.  Inside the airport was a single room.  We stopped first at a local market, but most stalls were closed due to the Naadam holiday.  The guide decided to have us go to a store that reminded me of a smaller version of Sam's Club.  We bought food supplies for the upcoming adventure to the reindeer herders.  After, we had lunch upstairs.  I chose a noodle dish that I would end up being served repeatedly in Mongolia. 

  We drove about an hour and a half toward Hatgal, just south of Khuvsgul Lake.  The road was a paved road, which was nice.  There was untouched landscape on both sides, with no buildings and incredible views.  The view from my side of the car was spoiled only by electric poles.  At this point I was too tired and wasn't ready to ask for many stops for photos.

  Just before Hatgal, we made a left and drove on the grass toward the local Naadam Festival.  Like the celebrations in front of the Blue Sky Hotel, there were tents set up with local vendors.  We were dropped off at the archery competition, which was a small part off to the side.  There were four starting positions.  Men, women, boys, and girls.  The goal was to hit small blocks lined up along the ground on othe far end, with people there to judge if the target was hit.  

  On the other side of the main festival area, older children were being set up on their horses and then were led ten kilometers away, to then race back towards the grounds.  We went to observe wrestling while we awaited the end of the horse race.

  The men here would come out in multiple sets of two.  First they would parade themselves near the flags, spreading their arms out like birds and flapping.  Then they would pair up, and set their hands on each other.  The goal was to have someone reach the ground.  I believe that one knee down was enough to lose.  If no progress had been made, after a time they were set back up with hands in a different starting position on the opponent.  When someone won, they went over to a separate tent and were given small pieces of locally made cheese, which was then handed out by the wrestler to people in the audience with their hands out.

Basketball and volleyball are the two most popular sports that I witnessed in Mongolia.

  Once the horses were in sight, wrestling was paused and people ran across the field, in order to be close to where the horseriders would be passing.

  After some time at the festival, we spent thirty minutes driving on the first non paved road of the trip.  It was slow and incredibly bumpy.  This was how the roads would be from here on in.