Mongolia, July 2024

Sunday, July 14 Hustai National Park   Our city time being over, this morning we had waiting for us five Lexus GX470 V8 SUVs.   A little research reveals that these were made between 1998 and 2007, so the youngest they can be is 17 years old.   They all have very big, knobby tires for the off-road we will be doing.   We drove out of the city, and soon were in the steppe with occasional small collections of gers (yurts), used by the nomadic families:   We passed some vast fields of canola, being grown for the oil which comes from the seed.   This part of the steppe receives enough rain that irrigation is unnecessary:  Periodically we would pass rock cairns, decorated with multicolored strips of cloth.   From a Perplexity search, “Cairns in the Mongolian steppe and desert, known locally as "ovoo," serve primarily religious and cultural purposes. These stone heaps are integral to both Tengriist and Buddhist ceremonies in Mongolia. Traditi...

 Saturday, July 13, 2024 Touring Ulaanbaatar   Today was our last city day, and we saw the highlights.   We began at the Gandantegchinlen Monastery, commonly called the Gandan Monastery.   Buddhism in Mongolia began with the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) emperors' conversion to Tibetan Buddhism. The Mongols returned to shamanic traditions after the collapse of the Mongol Empire, but Buddhism reemerged in the 16th and 17th centuries.   This monastery was founded in 1809 as a center for Tibetan Buddhism, but its story is hard to hear.   Under Stalinist repression from 1937 to 1942, all monasteries in Mongolia were closed except this one, and more than 10,000 monks were killed.   Negotiations after the death of Stalin allowed the reopening of monasteries, but only for the monks, and it was only in 1990, after the fall of the Soviet Union and complete Mongolian independence, that they opened to everyone.   The complex has many temples; the largest open...

 July 12, 2024 Naadam Festival   What a remarkable couple of days!   Yesterday we went to the opening ceremony of the Festival, held at a large stadium.   The weather was hot and sunny; fortunately, our seats were in the shade.   Prior to the opening ceremony was a shorter ceremony held in front of the Government Building with Genghis Khan looking on.   Called the White Banner (or Peace Banner) ceremony, it entailed lots of pomp and a speech by the president.   There was a brass band, military marchers, horses, and the like:   Lots of local people came dressed in traditional clothing:   We then left for the stadium:   There was a long procession to start the proceedings; here’s a part:   The National Anthem:   And then more horse riders with flags:   There were multiple kinds of music with associated dancers; here’s an example of dancing to throat singing:   There are three national sports ...

 July 10, 2024, part two We go to the Opera We met up with our group at 6:00, and had introductions.   We are diverse—a Swiss man, a German man, a man from New Zealand, a British/Australian woman, a British man, and the remainder, seven Americans.   We got the organizational details done during dinner, and those with the energy (four of us, including me but not Leah) went to the main square to experience Mongolian opera.  The square is enormous.  At one end is the government/parliament building, with Genghis Khan sitting in command:  At the other end an opera stage was set up.    Playing was Three Sad Hills composed by Bilegiin Damdinsüren in 1950.  “It was the first opera performed in Mongolia, debuting on December 30, 1950 at the opening of the country's first music theatre.  The opera is set in the Gobi Desert region of Mongolia. It tells the story of three young herders who get lost in a sandstorm and die of thirst...

Wednesday, July 10, 2024 Ulaanbaatar   The population of this vast country is 3 million, and half live in Ulaanbaatar.  The air quality in Ulaanbaatar is good in the summer, now, but is among the worst cities in the world in the winter.  Part of that is due to coal-fired power plants.  On the way in from the airport we passed a massive building with the name, in English, “Power Plant # 3” on the side.  There was a giant belt conveyor running from an enormous coal pile into the plant.    I assume numbers 1 and 2 exist, and who knows how many more?  We passed a number of large cooling towers resembling those seen at nuclear plants, but a search reveals that Mongolia has no nuclear powerplants. The Mongolian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, and adds a couple of unique letters.  It is, thus, completely unintelligible to an English-speaker.  The name of the capital city (Улаанбаатар) used to be Anglicized as Ulan Bator but a shift...

  July 9, 2024 Ulaanbaatar We’re in Mongolia!   The trip was long but uneventful, and Turkish Air was wonderful.   We drove to Toronto, flew Toronto-Istanbul-Ulaanbaatar.   The Istanbul airport is enormous and beautiful, and there are flights literally to everywhere from Istanbul.   It’s remarkable. Geopolitics affects air routes!   A direct line from Istanbul to Ulaanbaatar goes northeast over the Black Sea and across southern Russia.   The map on the plane shows the direct route in green as we start out, but we didn’t go that way.   We hugged the north coast of Turkey, and after an hour or so, the green line followed us, but still showed the direct route from where we were, which crossed southern Russia:   We never entered Russian airspace.   We flew across northern Turkey to Armenia and Azerbaijan, across the Caspian Sea to Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, and into China, flying over Urumqi and then   north to Mong...

  July 1, 2024 Anticipation   On Sunday, July 7, my granddaughter Leah, and I will leave for Mongolia.  We’ll drive to Toronto, fly overnight Sunday night to Istanbul, Turkey, arriving in the mid-afternoon on Monday, July 8.  After a 3 ½ hour layover in Istanbul we’ll fly overnight again to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, arriving at 7:15 AM on Tuesday, July 9.  The getting there is problematic.   The first couple of days we’ll spend at the Naadam Festival, watching archery, wrestling and horse racing.  More here:  https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/naadam-mongolian-traditional-festival-00395   Following that we’ll travel across Mongolia, and once we leave the city, we’ll travel by 4-wheel drive vehicles and spend all of our nights in yurts on the steppe or in the Gobi Desert.  We come home on Thursday, July 27.   I should be able to send notes from the city, but many, if not most, of the yurt villages have no electricity nor an internet con...