Brad:
After hurrying back from Lake Baikal with the taxi-driver from hell (130km/hr downhill on icey roads), we made it back to Irkutsk station, just in time to scoff down some microwave dumplings and beef strogganoff and board our 8pm train for Mongolia. For the first time since we joined the Trans-Siberian, we met some fellow English speaking travellers. Not one, not two, but six other Aussies, one Kiwi, and a Welshman. The train company lumped us all into the one carriage at the very rear of the train, and the poor Russians who had to share with us were noticeably surly (more so than usual) to be sharing with such a loud enthusiastic bunch of foreigners.
The ten of us had a fun 36 hours together, sharing stories of our experiences of Russia along with vegemite and Powderfinger CDs. We were stuck at the Russian - Mongolian border for 9 of those 36 hours for the regulation customs procedures, but that gave us a chance to get off the train and stretch our legs, watch a stow-away be carried off by police kicking and screaming, kick the footy and hacky-sack with local merchants and spend our remaining roubles on chocolate from a Russian man using an abacus instead of a cash register.
We eventually arrived in Ulaanbaatar at 7am, greeted at the platform by a smiley Mongolian lady called Bymba who ran the guesthouse we were staying at. She drove us back there and plonked our bleary-eyed bodies in the kitchen and served us tea and bread with cheap Mongolian imitation Nutella (or Notella as I preferred to call it ).
At this point I'm going to revert to trusty ol' bullet points to give a bit of background information on Ulaanbaatar and Mongolia:
o Ulaanbaatar means 'Red Hero' and was renamed this in honour of the communist triumph in 1924 when Mongolia was declared independent from China (although it was to now become a slave to the Soviet Union).
o The Russian influence is still present today - they rebuilt the city in typical Soviet style (lots of monstrously ugly apartment blocks), knocked down almost all of it's historic temples and monasteries, and introduced the Mongolians to vodka (and hence reducing their life expectancy by 20 years) and also the cyrallic alphabet (which we eventually got the hang of - not that hard if you can remember that 'B' is actually a 'V', 'H' is an 'N', backwards 'R' a 'Ya', the space invader alien a 'D', and the spidery thing a phlegmy 'kch').
o Mongolians consider themselves Asian by ethnicity but western by culture. Some scientists believe them to be the ancestors of the Native American Indians and this is evident not only in anatomic attributes but in their mastery of the horse and the bow and arrow.
o The most skillful (and brutal) of Mongols horsemen was Chinggis Khaan (incorrectly known to us as Ghengis Khan) who united the horseback Mongol tribes in the 13th century and went on the cause much pillage across Asia and Eastern Europe (obliterating 30% of Central Asia's population in the process) as he established the largest empire the world has ever known. The rest of Europe were packing themselves as they watched on and were spared only by luck, when both Mongol leaders were killed and custom dictated that all decendents of Chinggis return to Mongolia to elect a new leader.
o Today Mongolia is one of the world's newest democracies and a model for other developing nations. It was recently rewarded with admission to the 'Millennium Challenge Account', G.W. Bush's multi-billion foreign aid program designed to spur growth in low-income countries that display good governance and democracy (who would have thought he'd be interested in an oil-barren country?).
o The concept of surnames is a relatively new phenomenon in Mongolia, as the communist government had forbidden pre-existing clan names since the 1920's in a effort to suppress loyalties based on lineage that might supersede the state. Once free from Soviet rule and realising that suranmes might be of use (in registering taxpayers and preventing inbreeding) the government ordered that every Mongolian to start using their clan name. As most people had forgotten theirs over the generations, an identity crisis lead to a boom in amateur genealogy, as families went back to their villages to retrace their roots. Nearly a third of the population now claims to be a 'Bojigan', the clan name of Chinggis Khaan.
o Gandantegchinlen Khiid, which roughly translates as the 'Great Place of Complete Joy', is the largest monastery in Mongolia (the smallest just down the road is known as the 'Centre of Shaman Eternal Heavenly Sophistication'). Like most others, it was destroyed by in 1937, and was only restored in a hurried fashion when US Vice President Henry Wallace asked to see a monastery during his visit to Mongolia in 1944. Today it is home to around 500 monks. Most of the ones we saw were either chanting, taking payment from locals in return for blessings or cycling through the latest ringtones on their mobile phones.
o The Monastery's main attraction is the Mogjid Janraisi, a 26.5m high, 20 ton statue made from copper, guilded with gold and over 500m of silk. It also contains precious stones, 27 tonnes of medicinal herbs, 334 sutras, 2 million bundles of mantras and a complete ger tent complete with furniture. The statue dates back to 1996, when it was built to replace the original that was seized by the Soviets in 1937 and melted down to make bullets.
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