Mongolia part 3 and what happened next
The winter palace of the Bogd Khan looks most impressive from the outside.
A typical Mongolian feast with tea, fermented mare’s milk and a whole tray of sheep parts.
It’s been three months since I returned from Mongolia and I think of it often, especially since I’ve been working on articles about the place since I got back. Sometimes I break open a bag of salted herbal milk tea that I bought in an Ulaanbaatar supermarket and enjoy my memories. I’m going to re-cap my third and last week there, then add a few updates on my life since then.
Ever since climate change has brought terrible winter storms to the steppes, killing millions of livestock in recent decades, the nomads have been moving into the cities to try to eek out a living. Ulaanbaatar wasn’t built for such an influx, so I’m guessing a million or so newcomers now live in the “ger” district; essentially shanty towns with yurts everywhere.
On my second Sunday in country, I attended a ‘ger church’ southwest of town; actually a brick building with a killer view of the city. It’s called Source of Blessing Church. Unfortunately, the former pastor had left for a Korean cult, leaving a handful of female elders to run the place. Worse, he had the title deed in his name and he wasn’t about to give it up. These elders were learning ruefully that churches need to be set up like corporations with the title in the name of the church, not the individual pastor. Institutionalized Christianity is so new to this country, no one knows how to set up legal church structures with boards and constitutions and property titles.
Standing partly to the left in an apricot top, I’m introducing myself to members of the ger church while Yanjmaa (to my left) translates.
I then visited the Winter Palace of Bogd Khan, which isn’t far from the stadium. It was a huge wood palace containing Buddhist art, embroidery, paintings and costumes. The architecture was a wonder of Chinese/Buddhist design. The woodwork was pretty stunning, but the property wasn’t kept up well. The grass had not been mowed in ages and was full of weeds. There were signs up in English that barely sufficed to explain what I was looking at and many times the explanations were several feet away behind a rope and therefore unreadable. The gift shop was extremely sparse. I paid about $3 to get in, but I had no idea what I was looking at half the time. There were no English-language guides and big restrictions on photography.
That and a visit to the Gandantegchinlen Monastery, a few blocks from my apartment, were my sole encounters with Buddhism in the country. I stopped into numerous chapels where the monks (Buddhism in Mongolia is Tibetan) were chanting from a prepared script. Then I went to a larger white building where there was this 26-meter-high statue of Avalokiteśvara, a Buddhist deity. I wished there’d been a guide to explain things, as I had little idea what I was looking at.
Then on July 15, we headed maybe 50 miles out of town for a night in the country. We drove 40 miles down a highway east of the city past the huge Genghis Khan statute, then veered off onto a dirt road for about 10 miles through gorgeous green landscapes where there were groups of gers every half mile or so. Finally we turned left and pulled up to a group of 4 gers (one with an antenna sticking out) by what once was a stream. There was a corral for the goats (at night), a large flock of sheep and 20-30 horses.
Two of the kids at the rural ger camp we stayed at. The boy is Momo, Yanjmaa and Khudree’s youngest son. The girl is holding a baby lamb found abandoned by the nomads.
I meet a profusion of relatives related to Yanjmaa’s stepfather, introduced to the very primitive outdoor bathroom and then Yanjmaa and I and Enkhjin, 19, a girl who is studying counseling at a Korean Christian university in town, took a walk up a nearby slope. She is here doing what Yanjmaa also did during her college summers there: milk the mares several times a day, milk the cows, clean out the goat pen and generally work as a farm hand, which included some early morning risings. Mare’s milk is their major moneymaker here and they have all sorts of uses for milk products, including a hardened white bar made from leftover yogurt that works as hardtack, a food that keeps forever. I observe how the mare only gives out milk if her foal is allowed to stand by her, so there is a lot of moving of foals about as the girls walk about with their milking pails.
The steppe smelled of some herb that I couldn’t place. It wasn’t juniper or sage but the fragrance was everywhere. So was the smell of manure. Tons of little holes leading to mice burrows were everywhere and at one point while I was laying down for a nap, I was shaken awake by the presence of a mouse running near my pallet. A bunch of cats are needed here. Apparently their natural predators (eagles, foxes) have been eradicated.
Cooking a sheep in the outback, as it were, takes patience and the placing of hot black rocks among the meat and potatoes, then covering it all with a lid and letting it stew for several hours.
I loved the shifting of the light, how the sky was a tableau of ice-greys and silvers as it prepared to rain. In the evening, the sun gleamed on the hills in flashes of bright yellow over all the green. We arrived for a repast of various parts of sheep. I tried stomach lining, lung, heart, kidney and an intestine stuff with sausage meats. Everything was very fatty and washed down with vodka. Surrounding us were graceful slopes of old volcanoes covered in bright green. The shades of green, the rock outcroppings; in certain light, the range appeared green and silver.
This gives you some idea of the remoteness of these nomad settlements. Families will group their yurts together to care for large herds and flocks.
As the evening fell, more horses and goats and sheep come in. The shepherds were youths in T-shirts, baseball caps and sweatpants. All gers had a central low-squatting table with foot-high stools we all sat on, next to a stove with a stove pipe and flat surface for cooking. Eventually a near-full moon rose over olive-green hills. The following day, I got to see how they cooked the mutton over a slow fire with black stones thrown into the pot to ensure the meat got evenly cooked. It was beyond fascinating to see how people out on the range actually live.
Returning to UB, I spent much of my last week there interviewing folks for various articles and working on the book about Yanjmaa’s life. One trip I did make was to Desert Rose, a safe house for abused girls that was east of town. It was quite nice, especially their new library, which was paid for by a Swiss foundation. It was a modern room with wooden floors, cushions on window seats and books in English, Mongolian and just one in Russian. That shows you what direction kids are heading in terms of language. The two directors were super helpful and we got to eat lunch with them. I also met with a woman who works in a local orphanage for her take on abused kids.
Avalokiteśvara, a Buddhist diety, was a gigantic statue at the Gandantegchinlen Monastery.
My last Sunday there, I went with Yanjmaa’s family to the 5th floor of the Corporate Hotel building in the newer section of town near the stadium. This was City Vision Church, a more Americanized service than what I saw at the ger church.
By this time, I had gotten quite used to getting around parts of UB on the bus. I realized how I’d gotten to know the downtown core in these 3 weeks and was comfortable navigating the area. My first day there, just walking onto Sukhbaatar Square was overwhelming. Now I could recognize portions of the city and have a pretty good idea of the main arteries and neighborhoods.
I thought my last day there would be all wrap-up and packing until Yanjmaa had snagged me an interview with Ariunzaya Ayush, the chair of the National Statistics Office and the woman who could tell me more about the U.N. findings about sexual abuse that were released a year ago. I had to dress up in the best clothes I had and enter a government building that was much more modern and clean than most of the places I’d been in. I got an hour’s interview with her, which was incredibly fortunate for me as no magazine was going to accept any article without a quote from a government official. She downplayed how bad the situation was; said that Mongolia wasn’t as bad as other countries and that small improvements were being made. Her quotes were exactly what I needed to complete my story.
Then, on my way back to Yanjmaa’s, I wandered into the National Art Gallery. I desperately needed a professional to give me a quote for my story on evangelical Mongolian artists (that hopefully will come out this fall). One of the workers told me the curator was on the 2nd floor and sure enough, I peeked into an office and saw two well-dressed women there. I almost chickened out but the Lord told me He’d arranged this and to step right in. So…I announced I was a writer and asked if I could show them the paintings by the evangelicals (on my iPhone) for a reaction. They summoned someone to help translate, offered me coffee and actually got into a nice conversation about getting a Mongolian art exhibition in Seattle someday. The director, Sarantuya Byambajav, was as helpful as she could be and the translator was a young woman who’d studied in Tacoma for a year. Small world.
Batbayar Dorjpalam, an evangelical Christian artist from Ulaanbaatar, holds his painting of the Lion of Judah, which took him 3 years to paint. The bank of clouds underneath the circular rainbow symbolizes eternity
The flight back was fine; Veeka was ecstatic to see me and then I came down with a really nasty cold for two weeks. Then Veeka’s caretakers announced that they wanted to discharge her in two weeks. I was beyond shocked, as were the social workers on my team. We managed to get that decision reversed but it involved weeks of calling officials around the state to weigh in plus tons of meetings and conferences and phone calls that took over most of the month for me. Things were beyond stressful.
A pretty sight along the route of the Tour de Lavender.
I did get a nice break the first weekend in August when I drove to Sequim (on the Olympic peninsula) for a lovely 33-mile bike ride that was part of the Tour de Lavender, whereby you bike to 7 or 8 lavender farms on the backroads overlooking Puget Sound. The weather that day was stunning and I was so happy to get through the entire route. Buying new bike shorts with generous butt padding a few days beforehand was a lifesaver.
During this time period, I had two short pieces in the KidsPost section of the Washington Post; one in July about the Canadian gold rush of 1859. The other, which ran in August, was about endangered orcas in Puget Sound.
Also starting in August, Veeka began spending longer and longer weekends with me. I think she was home five nights over Labor Day and then her school started back at the place where she’s staying. Knowing that once she moves back home, I’ll get very few breaks, I attended two conferences in September. One was the Pacific Northwest Writers Association conference, a large gathering near SeaTac that I’d been wanting to attend for many years. I finally invested the money to go do it this year, as it will be tougher to get to next year when Veeka is living at home.
A walk through the sagebrush at Kershaw-Ryan State Park near Caliente, NV.
The other conference was with the Religion News Association, the professional association I belong to. They were meeting in Las Vegas and, since flights are cheap from Seattle to there, I decided to go. Getting some scholarship money didn’t hurt, either. I hadn’t been there in 30 years, so decided to rent a car afterwards and explore eastern Nevada.
It was well worth the trip. I first drove by Lake Mead, which I’d never seen, then spent several hours at Valley of Fire State Park, a massive collection of huge rocks and petroglyphs and lovely vistas. Unfortunately, it was quite hot outside and one hike did me in, so I headed north on Route 93 to Kershaw-Ryan State Park, a pleasant canyon with multiple paths through the rocks and sagebrush that I walked through during dusk. I stayed the night in Caliente at a motel that came with its own hot springs. The rooms were very nice; the springs were basically glorified bathtubs that one turned a spigot on to let in the hot water. It wasn’t quite the glamorous hot tub atmosphere that you’d find in a place like Pagosa Springs, Colo.
The next day, I briefly stopped at Cathedral Gorge State Park, then drove two more hours through lovelier and lovelier vistas on highways ringed with bright yellow rabbitbrush plants. I was headed toward Great Basin National Park, supposedly the least-visited national park in the Lower 48. One can see why; perched on the Nevada-Utah border, it’s a schlep to get there from any major city. It’s known for having some of the clearest night skies in the nation.
Veeka and I in September while I was at the hairdresser.
I drove up to a campground and group of trailheads about 10,000 feet up, then hiked three miles through the woods and past two alpine lakes. It was not quite the time for the quaking golden aspens – sadly I’d missed that by about a week – but the area was still lovely. I was amazed at the botany there and grasses such as winterfat, saltbrush, Indianrice grass, shadscale (4-pronged) and halogetan. The views of the valley floor were spectacular. I stopped at about the only restaurant about 50 miles around; a gourmet outfit in the little town of Baker called Kerouac’s that had a line outside of it soon after I got in. I sat by myself but got into a good conversation with two visitors from Massachusetts next to me. I then dropped by a nearby archeological site, home of a tribe known as the Fremont that, unlike the Chaco Canyon folks in New Mexico, left no written records about their time there in the 12th and 13th centuries. Then I drove through the night to Ely, the nearest large town with lots of places to stay.
I would not rate Nevada quite as pretty as New Mexico, but that eastern section of it along Route 93 definitely had its charms. It’s drier than NM, definitely, and there’s less Spanish influence and a lot more history of Mormon settlers. And the further south you get toward Las Vegas, the uglier it gets; all barren, grey flats. I’m not sure when I’ll get back to that part of the world, so grabbed the opportunity when I could.