Worth a thousand words

The three musketeers got up to mischief on Christmas Eve and memorialized the day by having our pictures taken while dressed as Mongolian queens.  Naturally. 

And yes, I am wearing the same headdress as Natalie Portman in the Phantom Menace.  Their costume designer totally cribbed her style from Mongolian dress. 

Disposable Nature

One of the things that drives me absolutely crazy here is that the Mongolians have such an incredibly beautiful country - and they treat it like it's disposable.  I know that's the common "first world" lament about how a less developed country is destroying their heritage in the rush to modernize, etc, etc....  But that doesn't mean it's not true.  This is a country where within my lifetime, the majority of the population was still nomadic herders.  Now, the majority of the population lives in the impressively dysfunctional, congested, and polluted city of Ulaanbaatar.  A country with no need for a sanitation system, because nothing came packaged and everything was used, is now dealing with a thirst for bottled drinks, imported candies, and a wrapper on everything.  And this brings me to the pine nuts, which is what started this whole thought.

This has been a bumper year for pine nuts.  The pine trees are in great shape and cranking out pine cones.  (Some say this portends an especially severe winter, but I prefer not to think about that.)  When you drive anywhere here now there are people selling bags of pine nuts, kids eating them on the bus, etc.  All well and good, right?  Everything seems fine until you're hiking in the woods and start seeing odd contraptions that look like battering rams up against the trees.  The pine nut collectors travel from tree to tree, battering the trunks with a ram to shake down the pine cones.  And then they move on, leaving hundreds - if not thousands - of trees with huge oozing wounds.  I was actually starting to feel a little sick on some sections of our hike on Sunday, seeing the painful, gaping wounds on tree after tree.  And to make it worse, we came upon a grove of trees late in the hike that were smoldering.  It appears the nut collectors had been setting fires at the roots to loosen the trees and make them easier to shake.  And then left the forest burning and walked away.  It is this kind of short-sighted attitude that makes me crazy.  Do you have no interest in the survival of the forest?  In your children knowing what a tree even looks like, after you've spent your time destroying and burning them?  Or even, if you need a more selfish motive, what about next year's crop?

Fall Fix

How many blog posts about hiking are too many?  In all fairness, this may be the very last of such posts while we're in Mongolia.  So I'm going with it. We actually inaugurated this blog last year when Andy wrote our first post about this hike:  Andy's tale of last year's hike.  We've been wanting to do the hike again ever since last July.  But it takes the right set of factors - organization to arrange a driver and transport to the start, a good crew of people up for a challenging hike, and good weather.  We had all of that in spades yesterday. 

 As for me, a 16k hike on a cracked leg is certainly not the brightest idea, but I figured it couldn't get more broken, and I was not going to miss my last chance to do this hike before leaving Mongolia.   Our crew of 10 got to the destroyed monastery of Mandshir Khiid around 9:30 and headed into the Bogd Khan protected area.  From that point, we just had to keep moving forward until we reached home.  Gotta love point-to-point hikes.  We had absolutely perfect weather, and the fall color was amazing - like nothing I saw here last year. 

I spent the whole hike just trying to soak in the colors and the scent of dried pine and store it away carefully in my memory for winter.  The hike felt easier than last year, though it's due mainly to two things.  One, we knew the route better and thus avoided getting mired in the bog, and two, I knew about the monster hill 2/3 of the way into the hike.  I was mentally prepared for it, and just kept grinding uphill, knowing that it was all flat and downhill to the finish from there!

Monster Hill

It doesn't get much better than this.

I think this is the end...

I especially like how you can see out the hole in the front side.  Extra ventilation!

I was hoping my trusty hiking pants would survive the summer.  Just one last hike, and I was going to retire them to a good home as dusting cloths.    In true Murphy's Law fashion, they decided instead to go spectacularly when I was only about 2 hours into that last 7 hour hike...with my coworkers. I guess the pants had had enough.  I got the message now. 

Prayer Wheel Workout

Do you ever get the feeling that your life is utterly unique, and that at a given moment, of the billions of people on the globe, there is no one who is doing exactly what you are up to?
To give an example, on September 17, how many people were spending their sixth anniversary visiting the largest Buddhist monastery in Mongolia and seeing dinosaurs in the Natural History museum, all of this while hobbling around with a broken leg?  Though, I exaggerate.  I wasn't hobbling then - that came after I spent 4 hours on my feet on Saturday.  Stress fracture = no fun .  But I'm sure I'll be writing more about that later, since there's no running for me for at least the next 6 weeks, and not much walking either based on Saturday.  So, stay tuned for that sure-to-be-scintillating post.

House of the 8th Dalai Lama

But, I digress.  So, since we're on our 'playing tourist' kick since winter is setting in, we headed up to Gandan Monastery.  The monastery was actually saved from destruction by a US Vice President; when Henry Wallace visited in 1944 he wanted to see a monastery.  The Mongolian Soviet authorities scrambled to re-open Gandan and staff it with fake monks.  After the visit, they thought it'd be a good idea to keep it open in case of any other visiting dignitaries.  It now has about 900 monks, and they're working to rebuild some  of the minor temples that were destroyed. It's got some old buildings, tons of pigeons, a huge Buddha statue that is stuffed with, among other things, an entire ger plus furniture, but the real fun of Gandan is the prayer wheels. 

Self-portrait in prayer wheel!

There are easily hundreds of them, of all sizes, ages, patinas, and decorations.  Some of the newer ones had plaques with information on who their were in honor of (the two I read were for a mother and father.)  It's rather similar to Catholics going to a church to light a votive in memory of someone.  But here, each time a person (or the wind) turns a prayer wheel, it goes up as a prayer to the Buddha.  Pretty cool.  We did the entire prayer circuit inside the Buddha building, and outside the monastery proper.  Plus an extra big wheel by the exit.  There something very satisfying about the whole thing, and compulsively entertaining to make sure you've set each in motion before moving on.  However, I was appalled when I got home that night and realized that my arm was actually a little sore!  Prayer wheel workout... I could make a great exercise video pitch out of that. 

.. then all the reindeer loved him..

After our canceled outing over Labor Day, we were determined to get out camping last weekend.  So what if we had seen the first snow of the season last week?  And so what if nighttime temps are pretty regularly below freezing now?   We hightailed it out of work on Friday and set up camp in Terelj, the national park that's pretty close to the city.
Contrasting with this summer, there was almost no one around, and we got a plum spot right along the river.  Craziness pays off!  

Self-portrait in tent.

After not the most uncomfortable night ever, we woke the next morning to frost on the ground and reindeer by our camp.  Do you think winter is coming soon?

The reindeer belonged to a family in a ger a little ways down and across the river.  The deer were out grazing free in the morning.  They didn't mind us when we went to visit, but then they followed us back and I think were quite disappointed we didn't invite them to join our oatmeal breakfast.  Sorry, guys.

A tourist in my own town

I'm a great tourist when I'm somewhere for a short time.  Perhaps even too good - Andy and I must have walked close to 10 miles our first day in Seoul last fall, and were wiped out - but it's easy to make an effort to dig into a place and experience it when you know your time is limited.  Not so much when I'm living somewhere.  It's so easy to put things off, since you live there, you could do that anytime... except you don't, and then you leave, never having seen half of the key sights of your own city.  Our last 7 years in DC being a case in point.  Anyway, since our grand plans for a camping adventure over Labor Day weekend were thwarted by a nice fever/general yuckiness bug, we thought a short in-town excursion would be more our speed.     We took the bus just down the road (literally - it's less than 1.5 miles from our house) to the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan. 

The Bogd Khan was both a religious and political leader in Mongolia.  I think he was the #3 position in Tibetan Buddhism.  Interestingly, for many years the new Bogd Khan reincarnation was picked from Tibet and sent to Mongolia, while the Dalai Lama came from Mongolia and was sent down to Tibet.  A bit of divide-and-conquer to make sure that religious leader could never muster up too much home-grown political support.    The temple complex dates back to the 19th century, and his palace from around the turn of the century.  The temple is pretty much like every Buddist temple I've seen in Mongolia, filled with much of the same Buddhist art.  I can appreciate the artistry, but I find it hard to warm to endless images of skull-headed demons and serene Buddhas. 

The Winter Palace itself, however, is really interesting.  It looks just like Peter the Great's Summer Palace in St. Petersburg, which makes sense since it was designed by architects from Tsarist Russia.  Apparently, the Chinese put up a fuss that this big Buddhist leader would be living in such a Western building, so they added lotus flowers and some Buddhist symbols up on the roof.  I don't think it really did much. 

Winter Palace - Ulaanbaatar

Summer Palace - St. Petersburg

The Bogd Khan spent more than 20 winters in this palace, and they have a lot of his and his wife's personal effects.  I learned that one of his ministers bought him an elephant from St. Petersburg.  They took the elephant "part of the way" to Mongolia on the train, and then "walked another 8 months to get to Ulaanbaatar."  Poor elephant.  He managed to live awhile in Mongolia, though died not long after the Bogd Khan did in 1924 from what sounds like total neglect.  He had his own set of Buddhist regalia for ceremonies.  And actually, for a Buddhist leader, there are a lot of dead animals represented in the house.  One of the most famous things inside is a ger covered in leopard skins.  That's quite the gift to give to a person who believes in reincarnation.  "Here, I bought you an entire house covered in animal skins!"    There are also two rooms full of the creepiest stuffed animals I've ever seen.  The case of shellacked fish alone could cause nightmares for days. 

A perfect tourist excursion - some culture, history, religion, art, and dead animals.  All in less than 2 hours.  We'll see if we do better this winter being tourists, since we know it's our last one here....