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Destinasia, December 2003
Destinasia, December 2003 | Destinasia, December 2003 |
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Page 3 of 5 Take Bata, 27. While still in university in the mid-1990s, he sold second-hand cars from Japan. "It was good money, and perfect for a student," he says, "since the market was on weekends. I could make US$15,000 on a Saturday." This past June he opened Silk Road, one of UB’s new wave of restaurants. Diners sit on expansive terraces — refreshing to a city that spent seven decades submerged in dingy Russian vogue — and enjoy stunning views over Choijing Lama Monastery, one of the few religious structures to survive Mongolia’s terrible socialist purges. Taking shape next door is Bata’s next project: Mongolia’s first boutique inn. "I realized, it’s not how much money you make, but how you make it. I want to create a place where people can experience good service and go away happy," he says. "Mongolia has never had that." Nor has Mongolia had entrepreneurs like Bata. I meet lots of them: club and pub owners, hoteliers, tour operators, even a bank director — all in their twenties. They wear Western clothes, talk freely, and aren’t afraid to entertain outlandish ideas. The atmosphere is infectious. Expats — loads of them in a nation where one-third of the economy is oiled by aid money — recount real hardships, but still uniformly speak with affection of postings in this Last Great Place. "Mongolia is like one step out of the Stone Age in many ways, but it’s seductive, this fledgling, fresh-out-of-the-bottle economy," says John Savageau, an American who heads MagicNet, with 45,000 customers the country’s largest Internet provider. "It’s a free place now, and people have dreams." Also bitten by the Mongolia bug is Darius Teter, a deputy director with the Asian Development Bank. "The only thing predictable about Mongolia is its randomness," he says. A nature buff who leaves the office on Fridays with a jeep full of supplies and no real destination, he details frozen engine blocks and scores of life-threatening misadventures. Still, he maintains, Mongolia is "paradise. Really, it is. Just a different sort." That’s what draws most visitors to this remote land mass, as big as Europe but with fewer than three million people. And eight times that number of sheep and goats. All set in a spectacular canvas of cascading hills and endless plains, trimmed with forest and desert, everywhere looking undeveloped and pure, seemingly unchanged and untouched for eons. Except in UB. Nobody comes for the urban experience, although this is a small, beguiling capital with good museums and an alluring post-Soviet charm. UB is also a great walking city, albeit one of the few on Earth where you still need to watch out for horse poo. And friendly, too. After a few days, I’m waving to pals like a long-time resident. Still, Mongolia’s main draw is its outback, meaning anywhere outside UB. A few days after Naadam’s last horse race, I head northeast to the forested hills of Khentii, near the Russian border, in the company of another dreamer, Mark Hintzke. For most of the year, Hintzke is a building contractor in San Francisco. Summers, he’s back in Mongolia, overseeing an unusual tourism program. Visitors pay about US$1,000 per week to stay in basic gers overlooking a lake. Horse rides, a standard feature on ger holidays, aren’t on this program. Instead, guests help to restore Baldan Baraivan, one of Mongolia’s largest and most important monasteries. At least it was, centuries ago. Now, it’s mostly grass and a few sad mounds of rubble, all that remained after the anti-Buddhist purges of the 1930s, which saw thousands of monks slaughtered, exiled, or sent to labor camps. Around the country, Buddhism is experiencing its own rapid renaissance. Over 95 percent of Mongolians call themselves Buddhist. This is remarkable, considering that under the Communists that number was closer to zero — at least officially. Everywhere you go nowadays, new temples are sprouting while villages reclaim old ones. Even so, Baldan Baraivan, 300 kilometers east of UB, is exceptional. "This was like a university. It was one of the largest teaching institutions in Mongolia," says Hintzke, poking among rocks for shards of once-magnificent inscriptions. "The valley had 20 temples. It was a huge community." Now, tourists come here to chip away at stucco and hammer floorboards on work holidays organized by his non-profit Cultural Restoration Tourism Project. Simply raising money for the restoration wasn’t Hintzke’s style. "I think bringing people here, letting them see the place and interact with the locals, is a very important aspect of the project." Not that it has been easy. "Things are going much slower than expected," he concedes. "I suppose I was naïve. I thought, who wouldn’t want to go to a beautiful place and rebuild a temple? I didn’t realize that I’d actually have to convince people." Volunteers include a California lawyer (who, after logging massive overtime in a credit card lawsuit, "wanted to do something meaningful") and several other Americans who had never even bothered to get a passport. Hardly seasoned travelers. None minds the spare conditions—but they do complain about the meals. Aside from some greens from the garden, all supplies are transported, along with visitors, on weekly jeep runs from UB, a tortuous 10-hour drive that staff have dubbed "The Blender." The ride does nothing to improve digestion, or one's appetite in a land renowned for its lack of cuisine. Mongolian diet centers - fixates might be more exact - on meat, mainly mutton, supplemented with bits of bread and noodle and loads of dairy: concrete cheese balls; a kind of yogurt; and alcohol or tea made from the milk of goats, yaks, camels, or horses. Meat is everywhere—hanging in gers, stacked on shelves, piled on communal beds. Mongolians living in the steppes have no refrigerators, and hardly any vegetables either. |
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