Ulaanbaatar

So, the slow blog to China, unlike the train, creeps on, and we are now up to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. I'm blaming 'leaves on the line.' Anyway, the city was a very interesting place; the heir to the ancient nomadic culture of the steppes, it’s also at a crossroads between Russia and Asia, and – increasingly - between traditional culture and modernity. The place is at the moment a curious hybrid, with felt gers nestling between half-finished skyscrapers, and an in-progress Hilton Hotel perched on the edge of your typical industrial wasteland. On one corner you see monumental Soviet-inspired statement architecture, on another the gleaming towers of an Asian megacity, and on yet another, perhaps on a back street, a community of traditional gers encamped behind a small Buddhist temple. Add in some wonderful monasteries and neglected old palaces, a good few cosmopolitan touches such as the existence of a Czech restaurant, and a backdrop of magnificent mountains almost within walking distance, and you’ve got UB. Oh and yes, everything really is named after Chinggis Khan, as he is known here.





During our stay in UB, we visited some really interesting places, but unfortunately for various reasons I am underserved with photos of them. The first was the Gandan Monastery, which is the home of a 32 metre tall statue of the Buddha. Unfortunately, taking photos of temple interiors is frowned upon, so you’ll have to content yourselves with the following pictures. The temple was quite majestic, and was clearly still active as a religious site: monks and nuns were everywhere, and we even saw a group of small trainee monk boys standing outside a school. Unfortunately they were engaing in rather un-monklike behaviour by kicking each other and a small dog, but hey, even little monklet kids will be kids. The place was also filled with enormously fat pigeons (Buddhist monks' and nuns' generosity to them being, from what we could see, considerable), as you can see in the following:









We also visited the Bogd Khan Palace, a wonderful old complex a couple of miles out of town that felt as if it had been in a state of benign neglect for the last seventy years. It was the home of the last Bogd Khan – the Buddhist spiritual leader of the Mongol people - who in 1911 also declared himself Emperor of Mongolia when the country became independent from China. Because it is a little out of the way, the palace seems to be seldom visited, and so we were able to poke around the fascinating complex of temples completely undisturbed. There was also a museum – again, completely deserted excluding a couple of pleasantly bookish-looking staff - housing some amazing artefacts that the Bogd Khan and his wife had ordered from around the globe for their pleasure. These included beautiful four-poster beds, the most blinged-up ger I’ve ever seen, and a whole menagerie of stuffed exotic animals prepared for and shipped to the Khan by a company in Hamburg. The couple clearly had interesting tastes.





Another exciting place was UB ‘black market’ – named, of course, in the country’s Communist days – a sprawling free-for-all quite a way out of town. They stocked vast quantities of everything your visiting Mongolian semi-nomad or hip UB-dweller alike could ever need; fur hats, leather boots, silver daggers, fake Adidas trainers, reams of cloth, mobile phone charms; all, of course, at knock-down prices. It was almost endless, and amidst the large swathes of junk there were some really interesting finds, including the cutest children’s boots. If anyone fancies importing Mongolian leather children’s shoes, believe me, they would go down a storm in Crouch End. Unfortunately I have absolutely no photos of this market, as getting one’s camera out in the middle of this place would have been tantamount to writing ‘rob me, I’m a complete twat’ on my head in Mongolian Cyrillic.

Oh, but before I forget, there is also one feature of which UB should be less than proud. After considering this matter carefully - for, like the award for terrible policing, there are a plethora of contenders for this crown – I have decided that UB is home to the most aggressive and downright maniacal drivers that I have seen in any world city. Yep, ever. Unlike other places, the problem doesn’t appear to be caused by faulty vehicles or a general lack of roads: UB has traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, basically everything that you would expect of a sizeable city in terms of basic road infrastructure. The problem, however, is that all these accoutrements are completely disregarded by the road users themselves, who seem to believe, to a driver, that they are competitors in a computer game where one gets points for every item you crash into or small child that you mercilessly plough over. Red lights are routinely ignored, and cars will happily charge at pedestrians as they cross the street. It is basically complete anarchy, set to a noxious cacophony of honking, and each crossing the road inspired terror in our hearts. At the biggest junction, the situation is so bad that they have resorted to employing a ‘traffic director,’ who basically stands on a box in the middle of a six lanes of traffic and by means of a loud horn attempts to strike fear into the hearts of UB’s drivers. It didn’t appear to be having much effect.