Well, if the plane left Ulaan Baator (UB) for Dalanzagdag (DZ), the access point to the Gobi, 8 hours and 20 min late on Wednesday, it was hardly a surprise when we were informed Saturday morning that it would leave at 9:20 pm that evening rather than the scheduled 12:30 pm. I had counted on getting back to UB in time to visit two or three museums, but now this was not possible, and we were stuck in this provincial city, whose main claim to fame was as an international mining center due to its access to the Gobi.
The hotel manager, Uuganbaatar by name, and the only one there who spoke a comprehensible English, recommended the local museum up the block, so I betook myself there, walking along the park that divided the central part of the city, and whose gates, every 100 yards or so, were adorned with plaster polychrome dinosaurs. I photographed every one, on both sides.
Even a mastodon--why not?
I arrived at the museum in 25 minutes, only to find that it was closed on weekends! So I came back to the hotel and asked this same manager if he could call the museum management and ask if they could open the museum for me. He called and found that this seemed impossible, since the operative person had headed out of town for the weekend, so he took me up to the rooftop and pointed out some local sites, including the Buddhist monastary. I could also see the extent of the yurt settlements on several sides of the city, areas where people could live like nomads in their yurts, their property demarcated by a wooden wall.
When we returned to the lobby about 20 minutes later word came through that someone would open the museum in about half an hour. I was overjoyed. I thanked him heartily for working his magic.
I took off for the museum and once I was standing in front of the locked gate, a young mother, the museum manager, emerged from a parked car with her perky daughter of about five and proceeded to climb over the fence, both of them. So I did the same. Inside the gate we waited for a man to come by with a key. I offered them some dried fruit and coconut snacks I had since Nepal, which turned out to be a big hit.
The museum manager and her 5-year-old daughter, who seemed like she had the run of the place.
The manager's other daughter and her mother.
Soon the place was opened, and the woman gave me a private tour. Frankly, the museum was not spectacular, but there was some paleontology, archaeology, and local history in it, the best things being the Buddhist 2-D art and sculpture.
Their prehistoric diorama, with plaster figures
Bronze age arrowheads. The Bronze age came late to Mongolia, around the 3rd century BCE. I bought an arrowhead similar to the ones in the upper right from a young vendor at the Flaming Cliffs. He claimed it dated from the Mongol Empire, but judging from these, it could have been older.
They also had a tarbosaurus femur that suggested the size of the beast--I understand there's a complete skeleton in the natural history museum of UB.
She also had a collection of photos from Roy Chapman Andrews' legendary 1922 expedition, and she referred to "Andrews" as a venerated figure. I was glad to know that he was not thought of as the thief of the national patrimony, but rather as someone who put Mongolia on the map, drawing world attention to it with his finds that ended up in the American Museum of Natural History.
In the cultural department the museum she showed me the display on famous Mongolian wrestlers (wrestling is very big there), an array of famous Mongolian generals, who I assumed were active during Communist times, including the medal collection of one of them, and a sample 1/3 size yurt without the covering, so you could see into it. She opened the door and had me get in and took a picture of me in it. I really got the royal tour on this day it was supposed to be closed. At the end I took a good photo of her and her baby daughter.
Snuff bottles.
The originals of the famous style of Mongolian hats you can now buy at souvenir shops.
The museum entrance.
At the end she asked me for the entry fee of 2000 MNT and the photo fee of 5000, but I gave her 10,000 and told her to keep the change as a contribution for opening on their closed day. She then insisted on giving me several brochures with photos of the museum contents, some of which had some English.
I left the museum and had a bite at a local restaurant then proceeded to look for the Buddhist monastary my hotel host had pointed out from his rooftop. Then who should come along, but my museum director, her daughter and mother. I replenished their supply of Nepalese dried fruit and coconut, and soon I was at the monastary gate.
It had all the elements of the big ones in Tibet, including several modest stupas, prayer wheels everywhere, and a main sanctuary that was heavy on color and statuary, and which I managed to fire off a few photos of before a monk told me it was forbidden (I confess to fausse naivete).
I returned to the hotel and camped out in the lobby, at which point it started to pour. I visited Uuganbaatar in his office, and he was looking at my blog! It had become a very warm connection, and he invited me to contact him ahead of time the next time I was coming that way.
But the rain was giving both Barbara and me a sense of foreboding: we had visions of more flight delays--and we were due to fly out to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow morning at 6:30.
Finally the rain let up. There was even a rainbow, which at one point was a full 180 degrees--very briefly before a cloud covered the sun. The situation looked promising. I gave Uuganbaatar one of the two elaborate folding knives I had brought to give to my hosts in the yurts, but found myself giving fewer gifts, since those stopovers turned out to be established commercial operations, and the yurt owners I did give gifts to weren't particularly impressed, unlike the little girls I met in much more fleeting contexts.
Ohchkee showed up at 7:40 to take us to the airport, and I gave him the last folding knife, and he seemed to appreciated it. We had a warm farewell at the airport, including photos.
It was a little after 8 pm. The plane from UB wasn't due to arrive until 9:39, but it did come in on time. My tablet was out of power, but an English-speaking Mongolian, who had spent 15 years working in Minnesota, befriended me and made the time pass quickly. He traveled frequently between UB and DZ working for a mining company, and he invited me to contact him as well the next time I came Mongolia, promising to take me around during one of his 15-day off-work periods.
The plane from UB arrived as promised at 9:39, and we crossed the wet tarmack to climb its fold-out stair entry. I thought of Sky King, which Barbara said she loved (note to youth: this was an adventure TV program of the 50s featuring a heroic private pilot and his niece Penny, who caught criminals using the air power of his propellor-driven plane). That two-prop Fokker 50 must have been the only plane this airline used on this route, and it wasn't a quarter filled. We took off at 10, and they served us a boxed snack of thick cold cuts--very welcome.
We arrived back at our hotel in UB where our major luggage was waiting for us, in time for a scant four hours sleep before awakening at 4 am to get back to the airport by 5 and fly off by 6:25. It all happened as planned under a clear sky, and we were in the air, headed to Hong Kong--our stopover--by 6:45. The view of the river system of Ulaan Baatar at 7 am from the air was breathtaking, and I managed to capture it.
When we arrived in Hong Kong at 11 am, after circling around the mountains, clouds and grandiose bay with its islands, the first thing that hit me getting off the plane was the heat. We had dropped from 47 degrees North lattitude at an elevation of 4400 feet, to 22 degrees North lattitude at sea level. We had to collect our luggage and go through immigration, but our plane didn't leave until 3:20 pm, so we had plenty of time. So I did something that felt like a liberation: I stuffed my very advanced but bulky coat into the back compartment of my very advanced duffle bag suitcase. I was now in the land of summer. Vietnam was in the tropics at 16 degrees North lattitude. The coat, which had preserved me from the wind, rain and cold of the Gobi, was now just dead weight.
The Vietnam Airlines plane finally got into the air at 4:15, after waiting in line at the huge Hong Kong airport. As we flew over the South China Sea with the sun ever lower in the sky and 90 degrees to our right, it threw a broad bright beam across the water, casting shadows of the troop of sheeplike cumulus clouds. It was a dance, a parade, a brilliant show. Finally the clouds got bigger as we approached land, and then the sun turned the river systems golden. There was one that looked like a dragon (what else?)--a golden dragon, like the name of a takeout Chinese restaurant, but it was real. It continued to be one of the most photogenic approaches to a city that I've experienced, and luckily there were empty seats from which to take photos.
The "dragon" river.
Ho Chi Minh City from about 1000 feet up.
By the time we retrieved our luggage and took a taxi to the Lan Lan 1 hotel in town, it was 7 pm and completely dark, though we had gained an hour since Mongolia. The streets belonged to the motor-scooters--as they had during the war--and the lights of the city looked like a cleaned-up, modernized New York (no seediness in evidence, though I'm sure it was there).
The district around the hotel was teeming with open-air markets. I dropped off my luggage in the room and took off, buying cut mango and melon (both for $3), some sesame and some date-peanut-ginger candy (400 gm $3), a Vietnam T-shirt so I'd have something in short sleeves ($3, down from $6), two painted fans ($5 down from $10), and I reconnoitered a tour of the VietCong tunnels, called Cu Chi (half day: $17). I was amazed at the prices and delighted by the vitality of the place. Could it be that their recovery from the "American War," as they call it, gave them a boost in self-confidence and creativity?
The hotel manager, Uuganbaatar by name, and the only one there who spoke a comprehensible English, recommended the local museum up the block, so I betook myself there, walking along the park that divided the central part of the city, and whose gates, every 100 yards or so, were adorned with plaster polychrome dinosaurs. I photographed every one, on both sides.
I arrived at the museum in 25 minutes, only to find that it was closed on weekends! So I came back to the hotel and asked this same manager if he could call the museum management and ask if they could open the museum for me. He called and found that this seemed impossible, since the operative person had headed out of town for the weekend, so he took me up to the rooftop and pointed out some local sites, including the Buddhist monastary. I could also see the extent of the yurt settlements on several sides of the city, areas where people could live like nomads in their yurts, their property demarcated by a wooden wall.
When we returned to the lobby about 20 minutes later word came through that someone would open the museum in about half an hour. I was overjoyed. I thanked him heartily for working his magic.
I took off for the museum and once I was standing in front of the locked gate, a young mother, the museum manager, emerged from a parked car with her perky daughter of about five and proceeded to climb over the fence, both of them. So I did the same. Inside the gate we waited for a man to come by with a key. I offered them some dried fruit and coconut snacks I had since Nepal, which turned out to be a big hit.
The museum manager and her 5-year-old daughter, who seemed like she had the run of the place.
The manager's other daughter and her mother.
Soon the place was opened, and the woman gave me a private tour. Frankly, the museum was not spectacular, but there was some paleontology, archaeology, and local history in it, the best things being the Buddhist 2-D art and sculpture.
Bronze age arrowheads. The Bronze age came late to Mongolia, around the 3rd century BCE. I bought an arrowhead similar to the ones in the upper right from a young vendor at the Flaming Cliffs. He claimed it dated from the Mongol Empire, but judging from these, it could have been older.
They also had a tarbosaurus femur that suggested the size of the beast--I understand there's a complete skeleton in the natural history museum of UB.
She also had a collection of photos from Roy Chapman Andrews' legendary 1922 expedition, and she referred to "Andrews" as a venerated figure. I was glad to know that he was not thought of as the thief of the national patrimony, but rather as someone who put Mongolia on the map, drawing world attention to it with his finds that ended up in the American Museum of Natural History.
In the cultural department the museum she showed me the display on famous Mongolian wrestlers (wrestling is very big there), an array of famous Mongolian generals, who I assumed were active during Communist times, including the medal collection of one of them, and a sample 1/3 size yurt without the covering, so you could see into it. She opened the door and had me get in and took a picture of me in it. I really got the royal tour on this day it was supposed to be closed. At the end I took a good photo of her and her baby daughter.
Snuff bottles.
The originals of the famous style of Mongolian hats you can now buy at souvenir shops.
At the end she asked me for the entry fee of 2000 MNT and the photo fee of 5000, but I gave her 10,000 and told her to keep the change as a contribution for opening on their closed day. She then insisted on giving me several brochures with photos of the museum contents, some of which had some English.
I left the museum and had a bite at a local restaurant then proceeded to look for the Buddhist monastary my hotel host had pointed out from his rooftop. Then who should come along, but my museum director, her daughter and mother. I replenished their supply of Nepalese dried fruit and coconut, and soon I was at the monastary gate.
It had all the elements of the big ones in Tibet, including several modest stupas, prayer wheels everywhere, and a main sanctuary that was heavy on color and statuary, and which I managed to fire off a few photos of before a monk told me it was forbidden (I confess to fausse naivete).
I returned to the hotel and camped out in the lobby, at which point it started to pour. I visited Uuganbaatar in his office, and he was looking at my blog! It had become a very warm connection, and he invited me to contact him ahead of time the next time I was coming that way.
But the rain was giving both Barbara and me a sense of foreboding: we had visions of more flight delays--and we were due to fly out to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow morning at 6:30.
Finally the rain let up. There was even a rainbow, which at one point was a full 180 degrees--very briefly before a cloud covered the sun. The situation looked promising. I gave Uuganbaatar one of the two elaborate folding knives I had brought to give to my hosts in the yurts, but found myself giving fewer gifts, since those stopovers turned out to be established commercial operations, and the yurt owners I did give gifts to weren't particularly impressed, unlike the little girls I met in much more fleeting contexts.
Ohchkee showed up at 7:40 to take us to the airport, and I gave him the last folding knife, and he seemed to appreciated it. We had a warm farewell at the airport, including photos.
It was a little after 8 pm. The plane from UB wasn't due to arrive until 9:39, but it did come in on time. My tablet was out of power, but an English-speaking Mongolian, who had spent 15 years working in Minnesota, befriended me and made the time pass quickly. He traveled frequently between UB and DZ working for a mining company, and he invited me to contact him as well the next time I came Mongolia, promising to take me around during one of his 15-day off-work periods.
The plane from UB arrived as promised at 9:39, and we crossed the wet tarmack to climb its fold-out stair entry. I thought of Sky King, which Barbara said she loved (note to youth: this was an adventure TV program of the 50s featuring a heroic private pilot and his niece Penny, who caught criminals using the air power of his propellor-driven plane). That two-prop Fokker 50 must have been the only plane this airline used on this route, and it wasn't a quarter filled. We took off at 10, and they served us a boxed snack of thick cold cuts--very welcome.
We arrived back at our hotel in UB where our major luggage was waiting for us, in time for a scant four hours sleep before awakening at 4 am to get back to the airport by 5 and fly off by 6:25. It all happened as planned under a clear sky, and we were in the air, headed to Hong Kong--our stopover--by 6:45. The view of the river system of Ulaan Baatar at 7 am from the air was breathtaking, and I managed to capture it.
When we arrived in Hong Kong at 11 am, after circling around the mountains, clouds and grandiose bay with its islands, the first thing that hit me getting off the plane was the heat. We had dropped from 47 degrees North lattitude at an elevation of 4400 feet, to 22 degrees North lattitude at sea level. We had to collect our luggage and go through immigration, but our plane didn't leave until 3:20 pm, so we had plenty of time. So I did something that felt like a liberation: I stuffed my very advanced but bulky coat into the back compartment of my very advanced duffle bag suitcase. I was now in the land of summer. Vietnam was in the tropics at 16 degrees North lattitude. The coat, which had preserved me from the wind, rain and cold of the Gobi, was now just dead weight.
The Vietnam Airlines plane finally got into the air at 4:15, after waiting in line at the huge Hong Kong airport. As we flew over the South China Sea with the sun ever lower in the sky and 90 degrees to our right, it threw a broad bright beam across the water, casting shadows of the troop of sheeplike cumulus clouds. It was a dance, a parade, a brilliant show. Finally the clouds got bigger as we approached land, and then the sun turned the river systems golden. There was one that looked like a dragon (what else?)--a golden dragon, like the name of a takeout Chinese restaurant, but it was real. It continued to be one of the most photogenic approaches to a city that I've experienced, and luckily there were empty seats from which to take photos.
The "dragon" river.
Ho Chi Minh City from about 1000 feet up.
By the time we retrieved our luggage and took a taxi to the Lan Lan 1 hotel in town, it was 7 pm and completely dark, though we had gained an hour since Mongolia. The streets belonged to the motor-scooters--as they had during the war--and the lights of the city looked like a cleaned-up, modernized New York (no seediness in evidence, though I'm sure it was there).
The district around the hotel was teeming with open-air markets. I dropped off my luggage in the room and took off, buying cut mango and melon (both for $3), some sesame and some date-peanut-ginger candy (400 gm $3), a Vietnam T-shirt so I'd have something in short sleeves ($3, down from $6), two painted fans ($5 down from $10), and I reconnoitered a tour of the VietCong tunnels, called Cu Chi (half day: $17). I was amazed at the prices and delighted by the vitality of the place. Could it be that their recovery from the "American War," as they call it, gave them a boost in self-confidence and creativity?
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