I got my first feel for the hospitality and friendly nature of the people on my flight into Ulan Baatar. A person I met on the plane offered to give me a ride to my guesthouse in case I had problems with transport! He waited until my bags arrived and made sure someone from the guesthouse was there to pick me up. I had a relatively uneventul ride from the airport to the guesthouse since I was arriving late in the night at 11pm or so. Didn't get to see much either.
I spent the first couple of days seeing things around Ulan Baatar and figuring out the best way to get into the other regions of the country apart from Ulan Baatar. The capital itself is like any modern city, but with crazy crazy traffic! Visited a bunch of museums and some of the histroic temples in Ulan Baatar. I very soon realized that I had to learn atleast some minimal Mongolian to get by - people spoke mostly just Mongolian, some little Russian and almost no English.
I met 2 other guys who were interested in seing parts of central Mongolia and decided to do a trip with them. We rented a car with a driver and we were off for 4 days. We basically drove for about 5 hours or so to reach Kharkorin (the old capital of Chingis Khan) which has a decent monastery/temple - now converted into a museum of sorts basically. While driving I realized what this country is all about. Large vast open spaces not owned by anybody, meant for the nomads' cattle to graze on, and every now and then a ger (tent) where the nomads live. Its pretty amazing. The roads are all not great. Pretty much no dividing lines for 2-way traffic - which typically goes at about 50/60 Km/hr in the roads between the towns.
The monastery itself was pretty decent, not too impressive. They had an english speaking guide who described all the details about the temple and lot about the buddism practised there etc.. Drove about an hour or so from them, and took a random turn from the main road, drove around in the plains for about 20mins, reached a stream and decided to camp for the night! Thats pretty much how its done here. We got a taste of the ubiquitous mutton meal here - rice or flat noodle of sorts mixed with some mutton. Pretty monotonous. The first few times I really enjoyed the food and was wondering why everyone kept complaining the food was monotonous. But mutton dumplings, mutton with rice, mutton with flat noodles soon gets a bit monotonous. I was very intrigued by the notion of a hotel out in the roads between towns. Its basically a single house with a lady who runs the place sitting inside. You tell her you want lunch, and she'd started cooking the lunch in front of you and then serve you! In one place, they had just killed a lamb I think - so we got to taste all the internal organs that were stewed in some fashion and placed on one big plate.
Next day we visited a set of sanddunes that are bang in the middle of now-where and then visited a nomad family in their ger. We managed to communicate some-what with them using a phrase book - and exchanged info about age, who is married to whom etc! And got to visit the inside of the ger! The concept of the nomad ger is very unique. Its one single tent- in which the entire family lives (at times more than one!) And they typically move the ger once in 2 months, when the pastures get barren.
Next day we visited another minor temple (called the Khogno Khan Uul) and hiked a bit and then drove to another ger. They were actually dismantling their ger and moving, so we drove to the place they were moving to. Another ger had been assembled there. So we sacked out in that place and lolled around watching the nomadic life - which pretty much is nothing! About 3 hours or so later, the contents of the other ger arrived in a truck and they started assembling the ger. So I got a series of time-stamped photos of the ger being assembled.
The following day, we went to one of the big national parks here called the Khustai national park and got a detailed history of it from the guide, and the big attraction here are the wild horses which we managed to drive around and see and get pictures off. After this - it was a pretty un-eventful drive back to Ulan Baatar. I got some photos of the urban sprawl as we drove back.
I spent another day at Ulan Baatar before deciding to go down to the Gobi region. This was equally interesting. The Gobi region is less developed than the central parts and basically there are not asphalt roads. Mostly the road is a dirt-track and thats what we travelled on for 3 days. We saw some parts of the Gobi desert and ruins of some old temples at the southern part. It was mostly destroyed and there wasn't really much left. Spent one day - mostly doing some horse-back hiking of sorts. We really at it - and it was especially embarassing when a 12yr old Mongolian girl was riding along with us for half of the time. On the way back we kind of ran out of time during the day and had to stop because it got dark. And basically the driver just stopped at the next ger he could spot and they actually let us stay over for the night and made dinner. By far Mongolians are the most friendly and hospitable paper I have ever seen.
Before flying out I spent another day in Ulan Baatar walking around and shopping for some souvenirs and it started raining the last evening I was there and had to turned to heavy snow the morning I was leaving! Got to see the drastic weather changes too!
The herders living out in the country as nomands were the most friendly of all. They'd let any stranger into their house and let them stay for the night. The education system was pretty interesting from what I figured out. Outside of Ulan Baatar, most children living in boarding schools and visit their homes just for the summer and winter break. So I hardly saw any teens in the gers.
The way the people live in the gers, it seems like a perfectly balanced and self-consisting eco-system. Feed off what you get from the animals and live without fences and property rights. At the same time, I saw some gers with satellite dishes and TV's powered through car batteries. I am very interested in going back in another 5 years and seeing how things have changed and for how long this can be sustained.
Food: The food here is pretty un-appeatizing. Mutton cooked with flat-noodles, or made into the steam dumplings or fried dumplings. (They use literally no vegetables in the food only rarely some onions). As we were driving, many placed, we just stop and get into a restaurant ger - where the lady would start cooking in front of us after "ordered"! The food was like a pittance, about 5 to 10 USD for 4 people. I got pretty bored of the food and decided to subsist on cereal bars I brought with me, with fruit juices and decided to check out the 2 Indian restaurants. And ate cheap chinese food a few times.
But surprisingly the major shop here called the state department store - which is like a wal-mart with groceries and a souvenir section, sells vegetables and fruits and it looked like people in Ulan Baatar were actually eating some decent amount of vegetables, and drinking fruit juices.
If you are interested in astronomy, this is the place to be! Extremely clear skies every day even in Ulan Baatar and you could see the Milky way almost every day.