Mongol Saga Episode VIII – Meeting the Mongolians.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a repost of content I produced on the road in Europe, Russia and Mongolia for the Meridian Collective blog. I will repost one entry a day this week, leading up to new entries in my “Mongol Saga” series coming soon!

We arrived at the Mongolian border after driving all night, passing through frigid Russian mountains just before dawn. At around six in the morning, just as the first light was making a jagged outline of hills visible around us, we found a circle of Mongol Rally cars parked in a circle like Conestoga wagons, protecting a handful of tents.

We slept farther along, right next to the border gate, and though there were only a few cars besides the dozen rally teams, the border crossing was an all day affair. We passed the time during the day by wandering around no-man’s land and heading into town to patronize the local dirt-floor shops. Dinner was goat meat, potatoes, and tea in a traditional Mongolian ger (yurt).

The afternoon hours ticked away as our vehicles got processed. Eventually some local children started sneaking into the border crossing to play with us, to peer into our car windows, and to ask for candy and other trinkets. Every child, even a girl who was maybe three years old, could say ‘hello’ very well. Ask them anything else and a confused look or a thumbs-up would be perfectly acceptable replies.

The tallest of the group of boys, none of whom were older than 10, started making trouble by trying to pick fights with the fully grown ralliers and otherwise try to monopolize their attention and generousity. But almost all of the children were timid and would just smile bashfully if you talked to them.

I let the kids play with my camera while I held firmly to the strap to keep them from running off with it. They got a real kick out of taking pictures of themselves jumping and giving thumbs-up or flipping the bird.

The kids would whistle to each other or to us to get our attention – a couple hoarse notes seems to be the standard “hey.” Every time the border guards would emerge from their office to inspect a vehicle, quiet whistles would send the kids flipping back over the fence and into the safety of a nearby ditch. Eventually, an adult voice from the village sent the boys scrambling over the fence one last time, and we didn’t see them again until we were on the dusty road to Olgii, the first city on the way to Ulaanbaatar.

The road began as a rocky washboard, dotted with villagers coming to wave and say hello while we coated their gers with dust from our tires. Through one particularly thick cloud of dust came a man on horseback, loping up to our cars just to smile and shout “Hello!” before cantering back to his goats. For over an hour we bounced up and down the mountainside, dodging lethal rocks and occasional scraping the protective metal sheet under our car. Suddenly, a paved road sprang underneath us, heralding our arrival on the outskirts of Olgii. Last night’s stay in a dodgy ‘luxury’ hotel with no hot water might be our last bit of comfort over the next week, on the long, windy and unpaved road to the capital of Mongolia, over 1000km away.