Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

My mother used to indicate the obscurity of some destination—where an uncle she didn’t much want to visit anyway was domiciled, where a college she hoped I wouldn’t attend was located—by saying, “That might as well be in Outer Mongolia.” Perhaps that is why Mongolia became for me a symbol of the remote. Often, I’ve imagined some place to be very exotic only to arrive and find it disappointingly familiar, but Mongolia was emphatically another place and seemed to have lingered in another time. The gorgeousness of Mongolia is a shimmering presence that stays with you as you traverse the country.

I came down with terrible food poisoning in the Gobi Desert. I was traveling with a colleague who decided halfway through the trip that he had had enough and headed home. By chance, I stumbled upon a college acquaintance who was living in Ulaanbaatar; after a brief conversation, I invited her to join me, and she jumped at the offer. She spoke excellent Mongolian and knew enough to contribute a steady stream of insights, but not so much as to be bored by what we saw.

We took the thirty-six-hour train ride (rather than the two-hour plane ride) from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. On the way my traveling companions and I saw much of the Great Wall and some of Hebei and Shanxi provinces in north-central China. Then we passed through the endless flat monotony of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. In the next cabin was a twenty-year-old Mongolian Buddhist monk (he joined the monastery when he was eight) who had been studying in India and was returning home for the first time in five years. He was sharing his quarters with a German management consultant, and next to them were a twenty-one-year-old graduate student of Russian from North Dakota and a retired English teacher from Cleveland. A Polish novelist who wore five wristwatches was in number 5. In the next car were an outrageously beautiful French couple who didn’t speak to anyone and some Hare Krishnas from Slovenia who were trying (unsuccessfully) to convert us all. After two days we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, capital of independent (aka “Outer”) Mongolia.

Mongolia is one-sixth the size of the United States, with a population of about 2.5 million. Most of its people are nomadic, living in wood-framed felt tents and herding sheep, goats, yaks, camels, cattle, and horses. They do not have paved roads. They do not in general use electricity or own cars. They practice Tibetan Buddhism; in fact, the Mongolian ruler Altan Khan coined the title Dalai Lama more than four hundred years ago. Many temples and monasteries, despite seventy years of Communism, are thriving.

Though Mongolia has a literacy rate of almost 90 percent and an impressively well-informed population, outside the cities the way of life is much as it was at the turn of the first millennium. The country has important copper and gold mines and is the world’s leading source of cashmere, but it remains largely immune to modernization and industrialization. After almost eighty years as an “independent” buffer state between Russia and China, Mongolia has recently established democracy, and in the last election, despite the limited number of polling stations and the vast distances between them, more than 90 percent of the eligible population voted.

From Ulaanbaatar the guides and I drove three-quarters of the way toward Kharkhorin before setting up our first night’s camp in a big field near a ger, one of the low-slung tent-like structures in which Mongolians traditionally live. In the morning, we woke to the sound of horse traffic. I sat up, pulled aside the flap of my tent, and saw a tall man wearing a long side-buttoned coat of blue velvet, tied at the waist with a yellow silk sash. I stumbled into wakefulness, half-dressed, and followed him to the ger, where he gave me cheese and butter and a slice of fresh bread. Such hospitality is automatic in this nomad country, and endlessly delightful to a Western visitor. I tried his horses, provoking amused delight from the little boys and girls, who from the age of four know how to ride and at six move more self-assuredly on their mounts than I can walk. An older child, perhaps sixteen, came to look at our car and gestured to the inside of the door with the bemused air of an action hero on an alien spacecraft. I showed him how one could rotate the handle to make the window go up (he thought this amazing); and I showed him how if you push down the lock, people can’t open the door from the outside (he thought this hilarious).