From Strangers’ Vans to Sand Dunes: Snapshots of Mongolia

May 17-29, 2008

We arrived in Mongolia in a stranger’s van. This was not our plan—when we reached the Russian border town of Naushki, there were not tickets left for the border-crossing leg of our journey. We luckily saw a rusty old bus out the station window, jumped on in faith of the driver who told us he was going “closer” to the border, and were then corralled from his bus into a stranger’s van, standing in line at the border gates. This van was one of many in a caravan crossing the border—carrying foreigners, cigarettes, and other such small-profit goods. After a good 2-3 hour wait, we made it out of Russia (the hard part) and into Mongolia. Here we transferred to another stranger’s car, who drove us to Sukh Baatar, where we got on the same train we’d been on earlier. After a short night’s sleep, we arrived in Ulaanbaatar.

We didn’t plan to come to Mongolia in a stranger’s van, though both the van and the unexpectedness of this border crossing were indicative of what was to come of our time in Mongolia more generally. We came to Mongolia to get to China—in order to get visas, and as the most direct route from Irkutsk to Beijing. After a morning running between ticket booths and consulates, however, we have unexpectedly found ourselves in a stranger’s van once again, on a roadtrip of sorts through the Gobi. Our van mates are also an unexpectedly mixed crew: our Mongolian guide and driver, a 31-year old American teacher from Colorado, a 36-year old tour guide/kickbox/belly-dancing instructor from New Jersey, and a 35-year old German pilot. And it is with this group of people that this unexpected travel turned into a week of wonderful memories, and the van transformed from that of a stranger’s to that of a friend.

In the few hours that remain before we board a train to Beijing, I don’t have time to even scratch the surface of the adventures of the past week. Instead, I offer a potpourri of unexpected Mongolian discoveries, images, and memories, and will let the pictures speak for themselves.

* While “Gobi” simply means “desert” in Mongolian, Mongolians differentiate between 33 types of desert. Indeed, we have never spent more than 3 hours driving before the landscape changes—from green mountains to wind blown rocks, to sand dunes, gravel fields, purple-flower spotted hills, to wide open plains, the Gobi is anything but uniform.

* A ger, the traditional transportable Mongolian dwelling, can be constructed in about an hour, and makes for quite a cozy, homey place to live

* It is possible that modern technology has reached every possible place on earth.

* For a nation that once controlled a significant portion of the planet, Mongolians today number very few—there are only 6 million Mongols worldwide, and only 2.5 million living in Mongolia. Their nomadic lifestyle, however, requires vast, seemingly uninhabited stretches of land in which to roam as herds graze and move from place to place.

* The camel is a truly practical, if quirky, means of transit, especially in a country of almost no paved roads.

* Sand dunes are simply a miracle.

* Vegetarianism is even more of a foregone impossibility in Mongolia than it is in Russia. Horse and camel are among the favourite foods of Mongols, as well as airag (fermented mare’s milk). Contrary to certain vegetarian sentiments, however, Mongols probably respect animals more than any other people I know—from cashmere and camel-hair sweaters and the felt that lines
their gers, to meat, dairy products and transportation, as herders, the livelihood of many Mongols cannot be separated from the lives of their animals

* 5 foreigners + 2 Mongolians + a couple of bottles of Chinggis vodka + a plastic bag + a night on the flour of a canteen-ger = hours of endless entertainment

* From moonrises to sunsets, ice gorges to sand dunes, strangers’ vans and back again, Mongolia is one beautiful place.

Farewell to Russia from the Circum-Baikal

May 10, 2008

The mind has more space to breathe.

I was reading over Mark’s shoulder the other day and read the above line, written by a friend of his who’s currently living in the Yukon. I suppose there are many similarities between here and there—isolation, snow, highly variable hours of daylight—but most striking perhaps of all is the elicitation of this sentiment, born of space, pace, stunning landscapes, and the clearer experience of one’s own breath.

And it is fitting to be in one of such places now, a week before leaving this country, before ending this Russian odyssey and beginning our wandering journey home. The sun disappeared behind the mountains awhile ago, though the sky has just begun to change, turning the water a soft pink with striking pockets of aqua-turquoise that follow the remaining pieces of ice on their last journey to water. A colony of nesting gulls provides the soundtrack to an otherwise still evening, silent save for the crackling of campfire burning and the soothing lapping of water on shoreline and ice. This is Lake Baikal at dusk. The pearl of Sibera. And she is even more beautiful, more humbling and comforting after a day’s labour.

We began today by taking a winding 2.5 hour electrichka ride through the mountains to Temnaya Pad. At first overwhelmed by the crowd of other campers with similar ideas on a long weekend, the pack soon thinned out and we found ourselves hiking alone, the lake on our right, cliffs to our left, and rail beneath our feet; rails that are no long really functional however, as after the Angara was flooded in the 1950s, this stretch of the trans-Siberian—the Circum-Baikal Railway—was unconnected from Irkutsk and the main line. How did we end up here? After plotting for some time about how to take a train through the route—85km from Bort Baikal to Kultuk—we finally ended up deciding it would be cheaper, not to mention more interesting, to rent a tent and walk this stretch of architectural marvel. And so we are here, one day, 20km departed, soaking in the sounds and smells and stillness of this lake one last time. And it is, I think, exactly what I needed—time and space to breathe, to reflect, to take stock of where we’ve been, what we’ve seen and learned, to let it all wink in before a winding adventure home.

May 12, 2008

Words usually come more easily to me in settings like this, spurred on by the higher awareness of both my physical and mental being, encouraged by the gentle lapping of waves on rock and the fluttering of campfire smoke to the heavens. So too, in these settings, is strengthened an impulse towards romance—strangely so, as there’s little romantic about the blisters on my feet, the soot and dirt coating my hands, the rips in my pants and the aching of my back and feet. Indeed, it is a test o will to sit up long enough to write these words. But they are words that must be written.

We’ve walked close to 50km since yesterday, confirming in my a long expected hunch—I am a canoeist at heart, who will venture of land with a canoe overhead when portages so require, but will never enjoy backpacking in quite the same way. I’ve found myself too lost watching my next step—over railway tie and gravel—to enjoy the stunning scenery, whereas in a canoe one is required to look far ahead to guide the boat in the appropriate direction. Nevertheless, I will try and soak in as much of this place before the day slips into night. Indeed, I just read a passage of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, when the main character, Prince Myshkin, is recounting the description of a man sentenced to be killed, only to be pardoned a minute before the guillotine dropped. In the 5 minutes before his death, the man sets aside 2 for thinking, and his thoughts lead back to fantasizing about life, about how he would count every minute, appreciate every moment, if only he were spared. It was this very passage that motivated me to move my aching body from the campfire to the shore of the lake, to put into words a few final meandering thoughts.

Yet still I know not where or how to begin—or end. This year has been, I suppose, a lot like the last three days trekking along the railway. It has, in many ways, revolved around train travel, and everything that such travel in Russia brings with it—snowy landscapes, heavy drinking, an unspoken camaraderie with fellow passengers, connected to each other in their transience. As my constant concentration on my next step, the year has also involved a lot of similar getting on, moving along one day at a time, at what sometimes felt like a snail’s pace, yet nevertheless one step ahead. There have ben many a long, dark, cold tunnel, as in this journey, though each with a light of sorts at the end. And then there have been the moments where my breath is caught in the back of my throat at the stunning landscapes and beauty in which I find myself—standing a top a mounting in the Caucuses, or the bell tower of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, watching the sun set behind shamanka on Olkhon Island, trekking along a mountain stream in the Sayan, stumbling across Buryatian lamas making a mandala, watching the sunset (even if at 4pm) in downtown Yekaterinburg, sitting atop a snowy hill with Mark and Guzial, taking in the monstrosity that is MMK on the eve of the New Year. These images, like that o the water of Lake Baikal—the heart of Siberia—are the ones that will stick for a lifetime, while the darkness of the tunnels will slowly fade from view. And, in the romance of such times and places, I think they will be enough—enough to sustain an infatuation with this enormous, mysterious country,a country that Churchill once described as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” a love for exploring the unknown, for wandering just for the sake of doing so, and, above all, and immaculate sense of this wonder for this fragile, wondrous earth which we call home.

Thoughts on the (De)Feats of Soviet Architecture

May 8, 2008

To give credit where credit is due, the Soviets were good at something: building things quickly. Well, maybe not so much quickly as cheaply. Actually, I don’t really know about their time or cost efficiency, but at least they were good at building things uniformly. True, it is possible to distinguish the imposing, gargantuan neo-classical buildings built by Stalin from the 5-storey apartments built by Khrushchev and the 8+-storey ones built by Brezhnev (who sprung for elevators). But, for the most part, apartment buildings, much like street names—from Petersburg to Vladivostok—left to us by the Soviets look the same.

This sometimes quirky aspect of life in the USSR was perhaps best parodied by the 1970s film Ironiya Sudbi (The Irony of Fate), where an unfortunate intoxicated young man ends up in an apartment that is identical to his own in all features but one: the city in which it’s located. While he lives at dom 23, ulitsa Stroitelyey in Moscow, the fates have it that he awake in a drunken stupor in dom 23, ulitsa Stroitelyey in Leningrad. As everything about the apartment, from layout to furniture to wallpaper looks like his, he does not realize he is not at home until the pretty blonde resident of the apartment returns, a prolonged and comical argument ensues, she finally realizes what’s going on and convinces him that he is, in fact, in Leningrad.

While much could be written about the feats of Soviet architecture in general, I wish to focus on one particular type of dwelling, the one with which I am the most familiar: the obschezhitiye. While this word is most often translated as a “student residence/dormitory,” it does not really resemble in the least the residences of most North American campuses. Most basically, they are most often even located anywhere near the universities where their students study. Secondly, not only students live in these buildings; they are also home to grad students, teachers, and their families (I shared a kitchen in Yekaterinburg with 3 international students, a young couple and their baby, a middle-aged woman and son, and always-the-lady’s-man Artyom). Indeed, a recent Russki Reporter map reported that 1% of the total Russian population currently lives in an obschezhitiye. That works out to something like 1.5 million people. By the end of this reflection, perhaps you will understand why I find this a worrisome figure.

Obshchezhitiye (from the words obshche, meaning “general/common/mutual” and zhitiye “life/existence”) look pretty much like most other Russian apartment buildings. That is, they generally come in 5-story/no elevator (as here in Irktusk) or 8+ storey with elevator form (as the building I lived in in Yekaterinburg). The corridors and common rooms are most often painted white on top and green/blue on the bottom. Anyone who’s lived in one knows that leaning against such walls leaves a coat of white powder on whatever you may be wearing. (Mark and I figured out the cause for this while trying to do some painting on Olkhon Island—the basic white wash used in this country is a limestone based chalk-water substance that sticks to clothes better than walls.)

What’s wrong with a little white paint on your clothes, you may ask? If this were the worst of the structural problems of most obshags (as they are colloquially known), an entry such as this would not be warranted. You see, these buildings were never meant to be permanent. Built after the Great Patriotic War, these buildings were supposed to last twenty years until the Soviets could come up with a better solution to their housing crisis. Half a century later, these buildings are still kicking, though often crumbling, literally, beneath the feet of their occupants. In the first week after we moved to Irkutsk, we saw two segments on the news about this particular problem. The first showed the wall of an obschezhitiye that, based on outward appearance, could have been our own. There were large gaping holes in the side of the building where bricks had fallen or crumbled away. The second report showed the tragic story of an elderly woman who had fallen to her death after her balcony fell out beneath her. The next shot was off the landlord’s solution to the problem—he was shown nailing closed the balcony doors of another apartment, reprimanding the tenants for even harbouring ideas of stepping outside (why try and fix the problem when a bolt through a door will stave off certain death?).

Structural challenges aside, in Russia modern plumbing seems to have been put on the backburner in favour of launching satellites into space. While I eventually got used to the machine-gun like sound of water going through the hot water pipes in Yekaterinburg, having any water at all, let alone hot water, in our 5^th floor kitchen and bathroom in Irkutsk is no more than a weekly occurrence. We were told that this is due to the face that the water gets used up by the people on the floors below us before it can reach us way up on the 5^th floor, though I have my doubts. Our neighbour Anastasia has told us that the repair man has come on numerous occasions to assess our situation, always noting “trudno, ochen trudno” (difficult, very difficult). In other words, we’re not going to put in the time to fix this problem, it can’t be solved by nailing a bolt through a door. A Belgian student once got fed up with this answer, exclaiming “it’s not difficult in Belgium, it’s not difficult in France, in not difficult anywhere else in Europe, why is it difficult here?” The answer to this seems to lie not in a lack of technical knowledge, but in a lack of will to fix things for other people, especially in buildings whose life expectancy has long passed.

Some time has passed since I began this entry, I have survived an alternating hot-and-cold (but never at the right time) year of central heating, I am not longer phased by the mold in the stairwell, and the pieces of ceiling that fall from our recently renovated ceiling. You probably get the idea anyway. All I have left to say is this. Putin (or Medvedev), the state of housing in your country is appalling. It’s time to use some of your oil revenue, get out the wrecking ball, and build your country some new homes. If uniformity is efficient, be my guest, but quality should not be sacrificed for quantity: this time build some houses that are meant to be lived in. While you may not have created this problem, this is the country you’ve inherited, and it is your job to make it a better place for the citizens who live in it, despite your new market economy. Food, water, shelter. This is where you need to begin.