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| Unending Steppes |
The train rounds a hill and we
catch our first glimpse of Ulan Bator from a slight vantage - a sprawling
cluster of low buildings, a great deal of it tin and asbestos and rust. What we
see is unremarkable, neither particularly disappointing nor exhilarating. The
city lies there modestly and without pretension, like a great many cities that
lack unique character or iconic structures do. Nevertheless, the sight lifts
our spirits up considerably since, for many hours and miles all we have seen
are panoramas of empty desert and steppes, jaw dropping for a long time until
they have become something close to mundane.
By the time the train reaches the
Ulan Bator railway station, it is past ten in the morning. The sun is already
high up and it is warm and bright and will remain so for many hours. It is July
and summer, and the days never end.
It is not often that one spends a
week exploring a foreign land without it being central to one’s itinerary. But
that is how it is with Ulan Bator on this trip; our expectation from it, at
best, is that of a side attraction in a larger, grander scheme – the
Trans-Manchurian rail trip from Beijing to Moscow. There is something
wonderfully liberating with traveling to places without preconceptions; the
disappointments are muted and the joys, unexpected and intense.
Before the trip, I have, of
course, spent time reading on the internet about the city of Ulan Bator and
Mongolia in general, to learn of the country beyond the embarrassingly little
that we already know – the Gobi Desert and Genghis Khan. Ulan Bator, I learn,
has moved - physically moved - a number of times since it came to be in the
1600s. For a long time, it remained a monastery on wheels and its accompanying
ecosystem and moved to wherever the land was more fertile and the fauna
abundant. The Ulan Bator of today, in its present location, was established in
the late 1700s and remained there.
The impression I get, from
reading, is of a city and a country that have remained, until recently, cocooned
in age old customs and traditions and a way of life that is still sparse and
self contained. Mongolia is half the size of India and still remains mostly uninhabited.
It’s entire population is a fraction that of Mumbai and Ulan Bator, its capital
and largest city, accounts for 1/3rd the entire country’s population,
and yet, is about as populated as, say, Jabalpur, but only half as densely.
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| Blue Sky Tower and other impending constructions |
I read of life on the unending
slopes, of living inside portable tent-like structures called ‘ger’ - a nomadic
existence, harsh and unforgiving and only occasionally romantic. I imagine men
with hard weather-beaten faces on horses, tearing after their prey - sometimes
animals and sometimes other men. Men with double barreled rifles and enormous
knives and immovable moralities.
A country lost in time.
And yet, inevitably, in the past
few years, I read of slowly stirring ambition. Of minerals and mining and
exports and industry and forecasts of economic analysts. Of traffic congestion
and pollution. Of social unrest and crime. Of a developing Ulan Bator skyline,
tall glass buildings, sometimes casting shadows over and sometimes
illuminating, ancient monasteries.
And so it is that when I reach
Ulan Bator, I am still unsure what my expectations from it are. How much of it will
still be austere old world charm and how much, fast cars and supermarkets?
We find a cab that agrees to take
us to the hostel we have booked, near Sukhbaatar Square – the centre of town. The
cabbie quotes us a rate that sounds absurdly high until we calculate it in
Indian Rupees and decide there isn’t a point in quibbling. One of the great
joys of traveling to Mongolia is that the Indian Rupee buys nearly 30 Mongolian
tögrög (pronounced as Tugrik) and one is able to experience a sense of wealth a
bit like what the Europeans and Americans must feel when they travel the world.
From the cab, in fact even before
we get into it, we observe amusing contradictions – the signage on the railway
station, in the shops and on advertising hoardings are a quirky mix of the
Roman and Mongolian-Cyrillic alphabets - ‘Restaurant’ written in the Roman and
then below it, the restaurant’s name in Mongolian-Cyrillic. Advertising
hoardings with English punch-lines but unreadable product names.
The logic, names in the native script
and the nature of the utility in English, is obvious and sensible for a city
that is gearing up for international relevance.
There is no particular
architectural style we can discern, the buildings are haphazard, multi coloured
and of wildly varying sizes. For much of the way, we travel through what
appears to be the main avenue of the city, and supermarkets and restaurants and
fashion stores and tattoo parlours dot both sides of the street. The women are
dressed in modern attire and have legs to die for.
The monasteries, wherever they
are, are well hidden.
When we have the chance, we ask
some locals about this and they explain to us how, in recent times, with
increasing affluence, a growing number of cars are imported from Japan, instead
of from China or Russia, and since Japan is unlikely to customize its vehicles
for quantities as low as what Mongolia requires, the Japanese cars come as is,
with the steering wheels on the right.
One of the stray bits of
information I have come across from reading of the country is that injuries and
casualties from collisions and road accidents in Ulan Bator have gone up
substantially over the past decade.
Now I know.
Our hostel room, crammed with
several two-storey beds, has a small balcony that opens out on to the street
and offers a partial view of the Sukhbaatar square. There is room for two
people on the balcony at a time – the rest of it is occupied by clotheslines
and empty beer bottles – and early in the mornings and late in the evenings
when the room is full, there are forever two people on it, smoking, while
several others wait expectantly for them to finish. During the day, however,
when everybody is out in the city, one can lean on the parapet and watch the
world go by, undisturbed. In addition to the Sukhbaatar square, the balcony
also offers an uninterrupted view of the Blue Sky Tower, one of Ulan Bator’s
famous new high rises. It does tower over Ulan Bator’s skyline at the moment,
but in truth isn’t particularly high, and with its odd shape, resembles a
shorter, better fed, Burj Al Arab. The brilliant blue of a cloudless sky,
uninterrupted by the presence of other tall buildings, reflects off its glass
exterior, but I suspect, as the city grows and other intimidating structures
grow around it, the tower’s resplendence will wear off in more ways than one.
By happy chance, we find out that
our presence coincides with Mongolia’s national festival of Naadam - a week of
obscure sports competitions (wrestling, horse-racing and archery) and general
revelry. Competitors from across Mongolia turn up for the event. Most of the
action takes place inside the National Sports Stadium, a large circular ground
with spectator stands around it, very much like a cricket stadium. We are not
sure how tickets to the event are to be procured but a helpful lady at the
hostel assures us that, once there, entry into the stadium will not be a
problem.
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| Naadam: The Stadium |
We walk to the stadium, which is
only a few kilometers away, and on the way, we see lines of makeshift stalls
and bicycles on which meat is being barbequed and sold. We ask if it is horse
meat – one of our primary motivations during the trip is to try as many
varieties of meat as we find – and are told that it is the meat from Mongolian
wild asses. It is thick and chewy and, with a smattering of salt, pepper and
lemon, tastes delicious. Later in the evening, we will eventually also find horse
meat and ox tongue at a restaurant, and taste both, but by the end of it, the
street side wild ass meat will remain my pick.
When we reach the stadium, like
the good lady from the hostel foretold, a number of men crowd around us, asking
if we’d like to buy tickets. They obviously quote rates well above those mentioned
on the tickets and explain to us that the seats they have to sell have the best
views, but we desist and locate the official ticket counter instead. Tickets to
the most expensive stands are indeed sold out, we are informed. We consult
amongst ourselves and decide that we are unlikely to be able to make sense of
the games and their rules anyway and the importance of a better view will
likely be lost on us. We buy tickets to the cheapest available stand.
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| Wrestling at Naadam |
We reach after the Archery event
is already completed and the wrestling competition is underway. Several rounds
occur simultaneously, all over the ground – sets of two wrestlers, enormous but
not too flabby, dressed in sumo-like attire and a fully clothed referee
overseeing the action. The objective, from what we can see, is to force the
opponent down on the ground. The rounds last for very little time, less than a
minute; how long can two similar sized people go at each other without one of
them losing balance? After a wrestler defeats his opponent, he does a ritual
dance, a small lap around his fallen opponent, arms raised, with large lumbering
steps in slow motion and ends it with a pat on the loser’s backside. It is a
unique sight, grown men such as these prancing around like this and I wonder if
some of them turn up in formal attire at the Blue Sky Tower on weekdays.
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| Sukhbaatar Square: The Black Statue in the centre is Genghis Khan |
The Sukhbaatar square is a large
open space, tiled and predominantly white, surrounded by busy streets on three
sides and the Saaral Ordon (Government Palace) on the fourth. Throughout the
day, it remains crowded with tourists, the elderly and the noise of traffic.
Right at the centre is a statue of a man on a horse, pointing at something in
the distance. On the side of the Saaral Ordon, under an archway with huge
columns, is another statue, that of a portly man on a throne, staring
benevolently at the world. Genghis Khan.
I recall a conversation with a
friend, while we wandered around the Prince of Wales museum in Mumbai, some
months ago. After we had walked past a line of statues and busts of important
figures in our history, my friend remarked how, sculptors in our part of the
world, almost always chose to sculpt their subjects, kings and Gods, in
imperfect shapes, pot bellies, sagging cheeks and an overall lack of
muscularity, an approach markedly different from their counterparts in Europe,
where every sculpture looked like it had just stepped out of the gym. We
wondered why that is. With Kings, one could perhaps make a case for them
preferring realistic reproductions to the Europeans’ preference for ideal
bodies, but what about Gods?
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| Sukhbaatar |
The other statue, the man on a
horse, we learn is of one Damdin Sukhbaatar, after whom the square is clearly
named, although, at the time, we have no idea who he is. I assume that he must
belong in the same era or thereabouts as Genghis Khan, during Mongolia’s glory
days, but later learn that he was in fact at the forefront of Mongolia’s
struggle for independence as recently as the early 1900s. Wikipedia tells me he
is considered the Father of Mongolia’s revolution, clearly their most important
figure in the modern era, and yet, incredibly, I have never heard of him until
then.
It must be so with innumerable figures
in history, their statures immense and secure for all posterity in their own
countries and yet completely ignored elsewhere. And there must be countless
others, whose names even their own people no longer remember.
How does one know what will
travel through history and how far? What will be important or relevant for
generations hundreds of years later? Art, I suppose, travels through time
better than wars and conquests and revolutions and social change, for a work of
art retains its form forever while society and the lay of the land remain in
perennial flux. Any notion that an empire once established, a country that
becomes relevant for a time, will remain forever so, is laughable. And yet, in
the shaping of human history, who is to say which is more important – creating
great art or leading a revolution?
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| The Square in the Morning |
I return to the Square again
early the next morning, around seven, and find it silent and desolate. A few
stray pigeons hop about and an old couple occupies one bench. There isn’t a
vehicle on the street, not a single on. The rays of the sun fall glorious and
golden on the face of Sukhbaatar and his horse and on the buildings beyond,
which the previous evening, had remained hidden behind their own garish neon signs.
I walk a block and then a little
beyond it, until I reach the end of the city. It ends abruptly and without
fuss; a street leads to the very end, buildings still on both sides, and then
turns away, and beyond it lies the vast Mongolian landscape and nothingness.
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| Pretty Monasteries |
A little later, after everybody
else is up and we have had a dull breakfast in a fast food joint, we explore
some of the city’s monasteries. They are tucked away in various corners, away
from the main thoroughfares, and still retain something of their air of
isolation, peace and tranquility. It is a gorgeous day, the sky bluer than
ever, and the stark colour tones of these monasteries stand proudly against
this backdrop. The prayer wheels are bright and golden and we see our faces
reflected on them.
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| Prayer Wheel |
At the square, on the way back to
the hostel, we find much fanfare. There is a long procession of men and women
in outrageous costumes and they dance and make merry and pose for pictures with
tourists without asking for money. It is a ritual procession, we learn; an
integral part of Naadam. It is quite a sight.
We have booked a ‘ger’ camp
someway away from the city for the night; chosen from several such camps strewn
at intervals from Ulan Bator for many miles, because it is the farthest we can
find. It is on the banks of a
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| Naadam: Ritual Processions |
We leave the city behind in a
matter of minutes and for the next hundred kilometers, apart from a few stalls
that sell fermented horse milk (delicious) and men with enormous eagles on
their arms which they rent out to anyone wanting a picture clicked with it, encounter
no habitation. The terrain remains uniformly green; in the distance we
sometimes detect herds of sheep and wild ass. The highway is narrow but
sufficient, since there is hardly any traffic on it. I suppose, if Mongolia
succeeds in transforming itself into an industrious, prosperous nation, they
will have to do something about the width of these highways in the future.
We take several breaks along the
way, walk on the grass and have our pictures clicked from low angles -
reclining on the highway, with the road continuing on behind us and then
disappearing over a hill.
The location of the camp and the
scenery is everything we’d imagined and more. The waters of the river are a
deep, wonderful blue and there are stretches of tall yellow grass on the banks.
The green rolling steppes stretch out for as far as we can see in every
direction. I imagine characters in a Terrence Mallick film moving slowly and
nonchalantly in this landscape, with outstretched arms and enigmatic
expressions, to a Wagner and the sun’s flare on the camera lens.
It is a place for the recluse
writer to spend months in and produce a masterpiece from. We have one day and
busy ourselves with taking pictures.
The camp is spread over a large
area and contains several ‘ger’ huts and is cordoned off by knee-high wooden
fences, like ranches in Sergio Leone films. There is a shooting range even - bows
and arrows and a buffalo skin for a target. We try our hand at it for a while,
fail miserably, and spend the remaining sunshine walking and rolling on the
grass and staring into space. The sunset when it comes, is golden.
We stay awake through the night;
inside the tent, a fire burns and we sit around it and drink rum. We step
outside, every now and then, and take a look around the landscape, now moon-lit
and ethereal, and sigh deeply before returning to the tent again.
By the time it is morning and we
are done with breakfast and with the hopeless wondering about why we cannot
stay back for a few more days, it is time to return to Ulan Bator.
We reach Ulan Bator with many
hours of sunlight left. There are a few other places we have planned to see – a
museum here, another monastery there - but when we get to the city, our heart
is no longer in it. There is already an overwhelming sense of melancholy; we
will leave the next day, we know, and never return.
And even if, someday, we do, who
knows what Ulan Bator and Mongolia will have turned into.
