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Destinasia, December 2003
Destinasia, December 2003 | Destinasia, December 2003 |
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Page 4 of 5 When Hintzke and I stop for lunch en route to Khentii, on a break from The Blender, the driver tucks into a mutton stew. We pick at something billed as vegetable soup, but which might more accurately be called "meat light"—less gristle and hair than usual. This paucity of vegetables is curious considering all the arable land in Mongolia, or the productive farms of China’s adjacent Inner Mongolia. A lack of agriculture defines nomadic life, of course, yet fellow nomads in Afghanistan or the African Sahara really have little option but to scratch sustenance from surroundings of considerable hardship. Mongolians may well be the world’s only people who could farm, but simply prefer not to. Old tales tell of a belief that Earth is Mother, and Mongolians refuse to cut her. Whatever, they really don’t seem comfortable around vegetables, at least not the way they do around meat. At our lunch break, I watch as a six-year-old girl is scolded by her mother to help in the kitchen, disappears inside, then promptly returns, holding a severed sheep’s head by one ear. She swings it as she strides, like a stuffed toy, and deposits it neatly in a nearby bin without any sign of distaste. Hintzke confides that the hardest part of his restoration project is the meat riots. "Every so often, someone stirs up the local staff with stories about how we are running out of mutton. Then the word goes around that I plan to poison them—meaning, serve them vegetables. "Honestly! Nothing—not talk or reason—solves the problem until we buy and slaughter a goat. Then they calm down," he says. "Mongolians really need their meat." The national mania for mutton is one of many problems facing Mongolia’s tour operators. Outside UB, roads are poor or nonexistent. Rail links connect with Russia and China, but border crossings are nightmarish, involving five- to six-hour waits on the China side, where undercarriages must be changed to suit the wider track gauge. Nor do Mongolians smooth any process. Crossing by land, on my second trip in the summer, reveals that the worst dregs of communist bureaucracy – corruption, payoffs, plain meanness – survive at the furthest outposts of the country, continuing to cripple it. I spend half a day pushing and shoving my way past roadblocks and bribe-hungry guards. Then there is the matter of accommodation. Hotels in UB are mostly substandard and overpriced. Beyond the city, there is little besides ger camps of varying quality, and not really enough of those. Touring the southeast, I sleep mainly in government offices. Had the Visit Mongolia campaign been a success, there would have been no place for visitors to stay. Not that there was ever much risk of that. The only evidence of a tourism campaign I ever see, apart from the web site, are Visit Mongolia 2003 stickers, which, I’m informed, were distributed only within Mongolia. Back in UB, Enkhbayer Monkhbaatar, the director general of the Mongolian Tourism Board, tells me that his entire promotion budget is only US$100,000. Monkhbaatar, an old-style bureaucrat, insists that the campaign will be successful in the long run. If not, SARS is to be blamed. Given that most tourists arrive by way of China, this isn’t farfetched; indeed, arrivals were off by at least 50 percent during my visit. But the worst effect of SARS may have been to provide bureaucrats with a handy excuse for the lack of visitation. "We didn’t give the campaign enough lead time," another official concedes, anonymously. "SARS was a disaster, but we also blew it." Nobody is much surprised. "Mongolians really have no idea what tourists want," says Kent Madin, an unabashed Mongolia booster. He and his wife, both Americans, were married here, and for the past decade their Boojum Expeditions has taken tourists on rugged horseback rides and fly-in fishing trips to pristine wilderness. "Tourists come here for the difference. They really don’t want to be waited on hand and foot." Boojum uses simple lodges or camps, and avoids ger villages with ethnic folk shows run by government tourist agencies. "That’s just not the Mongolia people come here to see," Madin says. To be fair, Mongolia has come a long way in the decade since Zulchin, a state-run bureau modeled on the Soviet Union’s abominable Intourist, oversaw tourism. In a nation where the average income is less than US$500, tourism now constitutes a crucial asset. It’s also one of the few domestic industries with an upside, growing 10 to 20 percent annually. And while there are plenty of natural factors working against it—the short tourist season, the high cost of maintaining facilities through the harsh winters, the mutton—the industry is bullish. Mongolian Resorts will soon open an upscale lodge an hour’s drive from UB. Already running since this past summer is Hotel Mongolia, a ger resort with flush toilets on the fringes of UB. But for real innovation, I’m told to visit Three Camels Lodge in the Gobi Desert. |
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