Enduring the Tour Experience in Mongolia

Mongolia is doing its own thing.  And neither the country, nor anyone in it, gives a rat’s patootie why you’ve come here, or what you might want to see or do – least of all the tourism industry.

Which sounds a bit like the romantic ideal of the independent traveler (never a tourist), at least until your second or third week bouncing around in the back of a 1960’s Russian van, whizzing past the guidebook-recommended sites in the dark.

And so I’ve decided to split my first couple of posts about our time in Mongolia into two chapters.  In this post I’ll describe the harsh reality.  The memories that will last – the beauty of the country and our experiences with the people, animals, and landscape – will then remain untainted.

[NB: Though much of this account is written in a generalized abstract, that’s just a smokescreen – take it as first person.]

On our initial arrival from Tokyo, I felt an immediate comfort while looking at the signs while riding into the city from the airport: Mongolian is written in Cyrillic, so unlike in Japan I could easily read all of the signs.  Never mind what they say, just being able to puzzle out the sounds was like getting glasses for the first time.  Phrasebook in hand, I was emboldened, at least until I tried to speak.  Mongolian pronunciation seemed insanely difficult; even in obvious contexts no one could understand anything I tried to say.  At first I attributed this to never having heard the spoken language.  Kids can imitate a German, French, or Chinese accent, and I hadn’t quite appreciated the importance of that familiarity with the cadence of a language.  By now I realize the problem is actually much worse.  Reading Mongolian Cyrillic pronouncing the letters as though they are Russian is like reading French pronouncing the letters like they are in English, except that French and English are much closer and share cognates.  It was a week before I found out that the last vowel in Mongolian words is always silent, which helps explain why everything sounds like a string of consonants.   The sound is closest to a German speaking Arabic with extreme impatience.

So we opted to start with a tour, rather than strike out independently right from the start.  Especially because on this kind of trip, even trying to embrace the “slow travel” ethos, there really isn’t time to plan before you show up somewhere.  And tours here aren’t the guide-with-a-flag leading the busload of cruise ship passengers around St Marks; you basically get a car-and-driver, a guide/cook, and an itinerary.  Not so different from what we’d experienced in Ethiopia, or Kenya, or even trekking in Peru.  Each of those experiences had their disappointments, so Suzie and I talked a lot about the need to be more proactive, a bit forceful, and to try to discuss everything beforehand.

Pickles and Nutella, the culinary highlights of our tour

But it turns out that the guide situation in Mongolia is simply irredeemable.  I can’t really say we weren’t warned: looking back at the LP (Lonely Planet guidebook), it’s full of ominous descriptions of tours, but also emphasizes the near impossibility of independent travel.  (We’ll see that side when we head out west in a few days.)

Essentially, the problem is that the drivers and guides are traveling for their own purposes, and you are just there to inconvenience them.   If you are lucky (and we were), they will actually drive the prescribed route, or at least pass by the agreed destinations.  If you are not lucky, they will just drive around visiting friends and running errands.  It’s rare to stay where you are supposed to.  On the days when there’s no friend to visit nearby, there’s some sort of angle they play to line their pockets, though the details are opaque.

The guides themselves are urban college kids on summer break guiding tours of the desert and countryside.  Since we’ve had a couple of weeks to analyze that, let me summarize the consequences for you:

• They will cook like a college kid
• They will do dishes like a college kid
• They will keep the hours of a college kid
• Think of a 20 year old from Queens giving a tour of Amish farms
• …And choosing campsites. And managing logistics (as in, “we are going into the Gobi Desert, do we have water?”)

And all the while, giving the hard sell for cutting the boss out of the picture, and doing your next tour for you for much cheaper.

I’ve never been big on the fad of corporate efficiency initiatives, but there’s something that gets drilled in to kids in industrialized countries that just doesn’t exist here. [An aside: I used to wonder what on earth an upper middle class suburban 22 year old could possibly do for an impoverished African village (a la peace corps).  I learned in Kenya, it’s basically an intrinsic understanding of functioning bureaucracies.]   A vignette of a typical morning for a guide/cook:

1. Wake up around 9:30, address personal needs.
2. Start cutting sausages.
3. Find whatever pan wasn’t used to cook last night’s dinner.
4. Fry sausages, leaving about half of the mass stuck to the pan.
5. Scrape the pan, then fry eggs. Give up when they get stuck, scrape up what you can.
6. Look around for a clean bowl or plate to hold the food while it cools completely
7. Start doing the previous night’s dishes, so there’s something to serve the food on.
8. Plate the cold food, and hand it out.
9. Wonder why no one is eating, then look hurt when someone dares to ask for a fork or spoon.
10. Reluctantly half-wash 2 fewer utensils than there are people.
11. Boil water for instant coffee (Average time of 1^st cup: 10:30 AM…)
12. Tell everybody we have to hurry today, because there is a lot of driving to do.
13. Try to serve last night’s dinner, still sitting in the pot on the ground, as more breakfast.
14. Repeat each day, in this exact order, for 15 days.

Okay, so the books all say “no one comes to Mongolia for the food.”  In reality there are some very tasty specialties here.  But not on a tour.  Aside from breakfast, the other 30 meals were nearly identical to one another: potatoes – carrots – cabbage – canned beef, boiled together.  Variations were the amount of water used (soup, almost-soup, or stew), and whether this was mixed with overcooked rice or overcooked pasta.  There was a slight improvement near the end when a packet of universal seasoning appeared.

But the monotony wasn’t really the problem (at least not until the 10^th day or so).  The real problem was that each of these meals took at least 2 hours to prepare.  With the guide waking up at nearly 10, and stopping a few hours later for a 3 hour lunch that we didn’t want in the first place, we’d arrive at each destination at 7 PM or so.

The worst of it was the places the guide would choose to stop, both for lunch and to camp.  I’m not sure if it was from a complete lack of camping experience or because he was sleeping in the back of the van and didn’t care, but he would invariably choose the most rocky, sloped, and unscenic spots.  A running joke in the family was guessing the next campsite as we drove through the countryside: boulder piles, trash heaps, thorn and nettle brambles.  Often we’d have to set up tents right next to a yurt camp, where beds go for $2 a person.  Lunches were even worse.  We’d stop half an hour from a town or scenic spot to cook and eat in some barren wasteland, choosing either the windiest plane or, if it was a hot day, a shadeless spot at a time when the van didn’t have a shadow for us to hide in.  Each of these gems took at least half an hour of searching to find, with the van driving back and forth, then in circles, then in reverse, then racing off to repeat the pattern, finally stopping suddenly, when the guide would leap out like he was stung by a bee to start randomly pulling everything out of the back and tossing it around on the ground to get to the stoves.

Hiding from the sun while eating lunch at the edge of the desert

But the best site of all was lunch in the dusty, barren, 3-block wide town of Bayandalai, where we stopped outside the town center (two forlorn mini-marts) for 90 minutes for no discernible reason.  Then were hurried into the van which took off like a bat out of hell and drove around town a couple of times, finally stopping along the fence of the town cesspool to hear the now-familiar “ok, we gonna cook here.”  Three hours later, after watching other tourists come and go at the cantina a block away, we were shepherded back into the van to go a block away for gas.  Then back to the same town center, so the guide and driver could get themselves some cold drinks for the evening’s drive toward the scenic canyon.

Lunch behind the literal cesspool

The frustration, other than spending our days driving (or cooking food we didn’t want) and our nights at the sites (when we were lucky), is that the guide and tour we were paying for was much worse than nothing.  The overall feeling was one of captivity.  The phrase that kept repeating in my mind was “who’s working for who?”  With the same ingredients I could easily have cooked a variety of tasty meals – and only when we were hungry and had the time.  Coffee would have been available 10 minutes after we woke up each morning.  We would have visited – or at least looked for – more of the sites listed in the guidebook, and there was more background and cultural information in the book than the guide knew about the sites we did visit.  The one area a guide should have been an asset was as a translator, but even for that he was useless: when giving a gift to a local family, Suzie kept trying to ask him how to say “gift” or “for you;” he would only respond with “just give it to her.”  And when we needed to charge the camera battery, there was no help in finding a place to plug in, yet his battery was topped off at several stops while we were without camera.  I honestly can’t tell how much of the frustration was due to the daily schedule compared to the fact that we were paying 50% more than our daily budget for no added value.

Beautiful downtown Bayandalai

So why didn’t I do more, push harder?  Insist that we camp, eat elsewhere, wake up earlier?  In part, I did.  We had a few small victories – a couple of skipped breakfasts, camping by a scenic river instead of a barren wasteland, and, crucially, spending the last night in a yurt instead of a tent in the rain.  But the reality is that we really weren’t free.  We had no leverage.  Our only real option would have been to get mad and demanding or threatening, with uncertain consequences.  Each day, bumping along in the car for hours, I’d plan the showdown, compose the script explaining to the guide that we would be deciding where to camp from now on; that we would dictate the schedule.  And each day, we were closer to the end of the trip, with less to gain from trying to change the dynamic, and no less to lose from a strike, or food poisoning, or being abandoned.

Ultimately, I decided that the gulf in understanding and expectations was just too big to be overcome.  Regardless of what conversation we had, there was no way that I was going to be able to explain that we were on vacation and had a desire to see the country; Mongolians simply do not have the cultural concept of tourism or sightseeing; a “good” driver believes that his job is to get to the destination as quickly as possible; a “good” guide will check off all the sights (even if they are in the dark).  People (and guidebooks) typically refer to a lack of customer service, but I think it’s deeper and more innocent: the synapses for “scenic route” just never form in a country where the major highways are just tire marks in the grass.  And, in truth, we were actually seeing the area, and having a Mongolian experience.  There wasn’t much real harm.  (This can’t quite be said for some of the other tourists we encountered along the way.)

My recurring thought throughout the two weeks was that this trip is an endurance test – except that there’s no option to fail the test – you just have to endure.  At the same time, in the back of my head is the description of the bus ride to our next destination in the far west: “The good part is, that if you survive this bus ride, you’ll basically be invincible.”  So we’re taking a few days in Ulaanbaatar to rest and recover, enjoy indoor living and internet, and plan the next phase… independently(?).