maoism to mongolia

before eli and i left beijing we met up with the city's ultimate frisbee team, which hosts pickup games open to the public two days a week. it was a blast, we were sore for days. i am very proud of eli - as little as he's played before, he managed to catch an impossible one diving heroically.

there are some goofy scams in beijing. young women kept coming up to us, telling us that they were students of art or calligraphy. then they tried to take us up to a studio or office, where they would try to sell us expensive art. not a scam really, but it was pretty clear that the skill these young women had was to speak english and fish for tourists, not make art themselves. eli ended up with some very nice paintings of cranes. the other one, which we were warned about by little notes on the walls of our hostel, was also based on young english-speaking women fishing for tourists. in this one they would try to lure us to teahouses, where they would secretly order us the most expensive teas possible, and present us with the bill. i'm sure they either worked for the teahouses or got kickbacks. a pair of women in tiennamin square weren't very good at it- after making small talk for a while, one said, out of the blue, "my friend is very a-thirsy, she would like some delicious chinese tea". it sounded so contrived and awkward, and illogical as they had not consulted before dropping this line, we just laughed and walked away.

on tuesday we caught the train from beijing to ulaan-bator ("UB"), the capitol of mongolia. it was about 30 hours, so all passengers had varying types of beds. we got the cheapest, the "platzkart", hard-sleeper, which we shared with a chinese man and mongolian woman. we read a lot and watched out the window as we passed through the gobi desert. it was beautiful, especially at dawn. besides the flat hard sands of the desert, the landscape could almost pass for eastern washington, idaho or parts of utah. brown rolling hills, little rocky outcroppings, bland little valleys. everything brown. there's a short growing season out here, and we are definitely too early to see it.

we arrived in UB wednesday afternoon and found a hostel. since then we've been exploring the city, butting heads with russian bureaucrats and travel agents, hanging out in markets, and eating food from all over the world (UB is shockingly cosmopolitan, far more so than beijing, or at least the parts of beijing we explored). mongolian food is difficult, partly because it is about as greasy as chinese, and partly because there are almost zero vegetarian options for eli. this is traditionally a nomadic herder society (these are the folks that domesticated the horse) and about 30% of the population still lives in gers (like yurts) that they pack up and move around with their herds. almost no arable land, the grasslands easily destroyed by overgrazing, so almost no veggies, all meat dishes.

there are brutally skillful pickpockets here. eli got his camara stolen our first night. we'd been warned, but we just weren't vigilant enough. all the foreigners here have stories about it. eli is sad. we have to find him a new one. by the way, he's posted lots of pictures on his facebook profile, so if you have an account and want to see them just request him as a friend (just search for eli hartman).

we've been hanging out with a couchsurfer named otgonbataar, or otgi for short. he went out to dinner with us (mongolian bbq - don't we have those in the states?) and took me to play ping pong. there are pong places all over, its as common as billiards. all cities should have such. it was a blast to play here - otgi set me up to play against a superhuman player. i couldn't return his serves if he didn't want me to...

so yes, we are going to abandon the russian part of the trip. visas will take far to long to acquire, three weeks when anyone else besides americans can get them in one week. also russia is extremely expensive. after all the trouble we've been through with these embassy bureaucrats and forms and travel agents, we are happy to boycott the country. if they make it this hard to get in, they don't really deserve our support of the tourist industry.

its actually a shame, and quite a disappointment. eli's been studying russian language, geography, history and politics for years now. i was very much looking forward to having him as my guide and interpreter. we were of course also looking forward to all the historical museums and statues of our heros... at least we made it into the lenin-statue range, there are a few here in UB (mongolia was a soviet satellite, which explains the bland, utilitarian architecture here).

today we took a mini-bus ride about an hour out of UB to a little town called Zuun Mog. we hiked up into the hills, explored cairns covered in prayer flags and offerings, wound our way through sparse little patches of conifer forest (what a relief to see a bit of green) and ended up at an old monastery, only partially rebuilt after the soviets destroyed it in the '20s. it was beautiful country, far more so than i expected. as soon as you are out on foot, the brown blandness gives way to millions of patches of brilliant lichens, dormant grasses and mushrooms and shrubs, birds, foxholes everywhere, feces everywhere from cows, goats, sheep and big elkish critters. tons of evidence of a vibrant summer - this place must simply explode in a couple months. looks like we came here at the wrong time, whups, oh well, we'll just have to come back.