In Which I Spend All Day on a Train: Croatia to Bosnia

After our time in Ulaan Baatar, we were eager to get out in the countryside and desert, because everyone said the best part of Mongolia was outside the city. Not hard to believe! Our 7-day trip seemed to cover a good mix of the country, not just lake like some did, not just Gobi desert like most others did. I knew it would be roughing it, but I was okay with that, because I figured it’s still a tourist company and they’ll make sure we at least have our basic needs covered. Also, I went to overnight camp for 9 years, so I’m a champ at roughing it.

Turns out going to one of the most established Jewish overnight camps with a bunch of JAPs, pretty good plumbing, and private tennis instruction is not the same as ‘roughing it’.

We booked a weeklong tour with Sunpath, one of the most popular tour arrangers, run by a small Mongolian lady named Doljma whom we referred to as Grape Leaves for obvious reasons. Since our friend Sivani could no longer join us, it would just be the two of us unless Grape Leaves could find a solo traveler to take the third spot. We would have an English speaking guide and a driver, and would see a huge amount of the country. We were eager to have a week being super active – hiking, climbing, horseback riding, walking a lot. I was excited. I was naive. 

To cope, I wrote diary entries every day of the trip. These are their stories. 

A car picked us up at our hostel and drove us to the Sunpath hostel and office for checking in. The parking lot in the back of the hostel was overflowing with tourists, Mongolian drivers, those Soviet-style awful gray vans, and a bunch of Mongolian near-teenagers who were the English-speaking guides. Chaos abounded, with people just sitting on the ground awaiting instruction. After like 30 minutes of talking to the other tourists and hearing 80 different people say some version of “I think we just wait here?”, Doljma finally came outside and assigned guides and drivers to various vehicles and then moved in the correct tourists depending on the tour they booked. It took forever, and everything kept changing so I just gave up trying to follow the disorganization. I went inside the hostel to use the bathroom, and the state of that hostel should have alerted me to the state of the week to come. Confused-looking tourists were pouring out of it, shoes covered the entire hallway (I had to just step on shoes, there was no other floor), and there was one single tiny bathroom – toilet and shower and sink, all in there with no others – for everyone staying there to share. I was so happy that they hadn’t had room for us to stay here. I would have freaked out if every time I had to pee I had to wait for the shower line to finish. 

Finally, we got our driver and our guide and our car – luckily, we had the one black SUV in the lot full of Russian vans, so we were excited. Seatbelts! Airbags! Our guide introduced himself (to protect his identity I’ll call him…Guido, get it because guide) and was wearing a Temple University hat! I was like whaaat that’s where I’m from! He got it as a gift from a supervisor, he said. I thought it was a good sign. I guess I used to be an optimist. 

So, this is the point in the story where I warn you that if you want to turn back, if you don’t have the stomach for it, you should go now. No hard feelings. 

Otherwise, the rest of you are going to hear about my diarrhea. 

Of course my body decided early on that it hated Mongolia and figured, “hey, THIS is the right place to get a strong case of Travelers’” Yes, the time leading up to a week of camping and long car rides is EXACTLY the right time to go absolutely berserk, body, good job! Thanks for that! You’re not a total shitbag at all! Both figuratively and literally! 

I was nervous, but I was feeling relatively okay that morning and figured I could hold it together by sheer strength of will. I’ve been doing without television for a month now; I could use that same mentality to CONTROL MY INSIDES, RIGHT? No you idiot you can’t. Luckily for the few hours outside the city, we saw enough gas stations with outhouses that I was okay. But they quickly became, like, REAL country living outhouses, like not actually worthy of a title using the word ‘house’. These were delicately balanced planks of wood, with doors that didn’t close. Soon, at another gas station, I used my first toilet hole with no door. It faced away from the road, thankfully, and faced into an endless field…of goats. My insides exploded while approximately 150 goats stared and bahhed at me. Do goats bah? I can’t even remember the sound a goat makes. I think those moments, when I was sick while making eye contact with a wild goat, will prove pivotal in my life. 

After maybe four or five hours of driving and a line of toilet pits ever decreasing in safety and cleanliness, we stopped for lunch. I was actually hungry – I hadn’t eaten and my body was apparently shedding itself from the inside out since it had no food to shed – and eager to stop for a decent amount of time. 

The restaurant Guido had planned to go to was closed. For Naadam, probably. His failure to check in advance that a place we just drove five hours to would be open for us was the first sign that he was a total diddadoof. 

He decided we would eat at a khuushuur shack on the same bit of expanse, and asked if I had snacks since he knew I didn’t eat meat. Great first showing at what kind of guide you’ll be! I had a bag of really weird breadsticks we found in UB that somehow tasted like the fried noodle things that American Chinese restaurants will put on your table before you order. I ate some of those. It wasn’t a smart move. I used the nearby toilet shack hell hole while holding the door closed with one hand and trying to get my toilet paper out of my purse with the other hand. A small girl peed outside the crack in the door while I was in there. 

You’d think maybe the worst was over, at least for the day, but you would be wrong. The horrible feeling of my entire body was no match for the aural onslaught the driver caused with his horrible music. He listened to CDs of I THINK songs written to help people learn English, like ESL music edition. The lyrics were very simple sentences, the musical equivalent of See Spot Run or donde esta la biblioteca, and Guido and driver were alllll about them, singing along kind of proud that they knew the words. It was kind of nice to see that, but the music was still bad. It got worse – they started playing famous songs that I knew the words to like Abba’s greatest hits, Hotel California, and an impressively annoying song called Hands Up that I remember playing at my brother’s Bar Mitzvah. The kind of songs that you suffer through without too much actual suffering because they’ll be over soon, but knowing the words makes it worse. But Driver played each CD three times in a row. I was screaming inside. Every time Hotel California came on (6 times that ride), they would both sing along with slightly incorrect words and looked like they were having the goddamn time of their lives. I was full on batty by the end, singing along to Abba’s ‘Mamma Mia’ with the obvious lyrics change – “Diarrhea! Here we go again!”

Soon, I really had to find a toilet hell hole and asked Guido if we could stop as soon as we see one just like in the next hour. Not an unreasonable request right? We were still sort of near stuff. His response was “Or we can find somewhere for you to hide?” No dude we are in the open hilly countryside we haven’t seen a tree in a week let alone bush enough to hide in.

The super long day of driving finally ended at Karakorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia that is now just ancient city walls enclosing a monastery and some dry grass.  It was cool to see, considering the history, but I could not enjoy it when I felt so awful. And we’ve seen so many darn temples. 

Luckily, our ger camp for the night was just a few minutes away. Gers are the Mongolian version of yurts, round tent-like structures with beds around the sides and poles in the middle holding everything up. Usually there is a stove in the center and a chimney pipe, for heat. This first ger camp is actually nice – there are showers, sinks, and wifi in the main house, where the kitchen was. After the kitchen staff made me an omelet for dinner (no thanks), they then cooked my cabbage which Guido had already given them so like what were they gonna do with it, keep it for themselves? It’s my cabbage! Along with way too much white rice (but I guess that was good for me to have in my condition), it was a decent dinner. 

There were lots of other travelers, and one told me it was her ninth night out in the country. She said this was the nicest ger camp yet, and I agreed without too much thought – it has wifi! I don’t expect that at the others! But I didn’t guess just how different the rest would be. 

DAY 2
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We drove the few minutes to the Karakorum museum, which is a UNESCO site (or the whole thing is) and had a few cool things, like a heavy passport thing like Marco Polo would have used, and so much information about Chinggis Khan and various Mongolian tribes. It was short and we followed another group’s English speaking guide around, so it was my kind of museum. And they had a decent toilet, which I used many times. We drove a few hours to another deserted and desert-looking monastery (COOL THESE AREN’T GETTING SUPER BORING) before we met a Russian van on the side of a random road. We were picking up our third group member to take Sivani’s place. Can you even believe, the door opened and out came the Chilean from the Ulan Ude to Ulaan Baatar train! The one who was sleeping on my bed when I came in but turned out to be nice! So that is super lucky, at least he’s friendly and we know him and despite his saying he came from the Gobi and hadn’t showered in five days, he didn’t smell that bad. And he wears tank tops everyday so that really is something. Everyone in tank tops smells bad! What’s his secret?

Next stop was the incredibly important sacred monument called THE PENIS STONE. Not kidding, the sign even said that in English. People were praying to it, for fertility. I can’t make this shit up. 

We then drove another hour or five to lunch, to this restaurant where we were the only people and it took an hour to make food. Why did we come so far for this particular place? I was given rice and potatoes and carrots and a few pieces of pickle. I literally count zero of that as vegetable. Then, after lunch, we drove for more than four hours to a waterfall. When I say drove, I’m using the word loosely. Now that we were well into the outback, the roads disappeared. We were maneuvering the car over legit rocks, hills, mud, and PONDS. Remember the Olkhon Island minibus drive? Those roads were better than these. These were not roads. This was just off-roading on rocky untouched landscape, going down one way and finding it was unpassable and having to backtrack and forge another path. Holy crap, I’m sure some of you (SIVANI) think this sounds fun, but imagine it for 8 hours daily. I have never been tossed around a car so much for so long. Wanna hear the funniest thing? This whole region we are driving through is called Orkhon Valley. Literally one letter off from the previous hellscape. Is there an Onkhon or an Odkhon located somewhere because if so make sure I don’t go there. 

Guido kept saying we’re almost there, we’re almost there. We were never almost there. In fact, we didn’t arrive there at all. We arrived first at the shittiest ger camp I could have imagined in my nightmares. It’s not even that there was no bathroom. It’s that there was just one hole in the ground outhouse except it was tarp on the sides with no roof. What happens if it’s raining. And this one hole was for a camp of like 10 gers, with 4-8 people in each. That’s a lot of people. The tarped up hole was swarming with more flies than I’ve ever seen in my life. The hellhole was far from our ger and in the worst condition I’ve seen yet. There were no showers and, worse, no sinks. I was supposed to wash my hands to take my contacts out…how? Oh with bottled water, precious bottled water. 

I couldn’t handle all that at once so I focused on the fact that we didn’t actually go to the sight we were supposed to see. I found Guido and was like wait I thought we were going to a waterfall. Guido said well first we can try mare’s milk and relax in the ger and ride horses. Um. F that. I said dude no let’s do the only f-ing thing we were supposed to do today! But after we unloaded I couldn’t find him. At 6:30 pm, we were still supposed to be seeing the waterfall before dinner but he was supposed to be making dinner himself (from now on he is our cook). But he is hanging with his friend in another yurt. This is my nightmare. There are ants all over my bag. Hell there are ants all over me. I care more about my stuff though. Fing hell. It’s so hot I can’t keep my eyes open. My skin burning from close-feeling sun. And the dust is what they foretold in Interstellar, the Casey Affleck dust lung disease. Tube snot is nothing, Londoners. Since arriving in Mongolia I’ve had black soot and blood coming out my nose all day and night. It’s so dry. Tomorrow Guido said the drive to the hot springs is 300 kilometers. 300. It took all day to go 70 on these roads. He said the roads tomorrow will be better, but that’s not exactly hard to achieve. Anything is moving in the right direction; it’s just a matter of how much of a change we’re talking about. I think I’m gonna spend all of the fall in NYC to make up for this. 

The waterfall, called the Ulaan Tsutgalan, was pretty at least, with a rocky as hell path to get down to the water’s edge that I didn’t bother trying because I didn’t have the mindset of dealing with that after this day. I put my feet in the top section though. Hope I don’t contract more disease. Maybe they will fight each other and cancel out. 

Dinner was another plate of rice with some of my canned beans and canned vegetables. It was fine. Guido knows how to work a camping stove (secret: onions and garlic). At least they are able to feed me. They used the rest of that canned stuff and mixed it with mutton for the boys. They are already sick of mutton. I saw that Guido had some of his raw meat stored in an old 2 liter water bottle. Have fun joining me tomorrow, boys. 

At night, when I had to pee my usual every-90-minutes, it was so dark and I was so broken. It was so far to our shitshack that I just peed right outside the ger, out in the open. I’m sorry to the two cows who were watching. But I don’t care anymore. You hear that? I DON’T CARE ANYMORE. 

Tonight marks the first night in years that I didn’t floss. 

DAY 3

Well maybe I care a little. 

We left at 9am to get to the Tsenkher hot springs by afternoon. Remember how Guido promised that the roads would be better? LOLLL. They were the same, except this time there were more little ponds and lakes to ford! Is it bad to ford in a Toyota? Thank goodness my stomach has decided to stay in one piece since yesterday morning, so praise to the Mongolian god of intestinal tracts for at least removing that challenge from this experience. 

But the drive was insane horrible. And so flipping long. So far, it’s just like 8 hours of driving per day. We thought we were going to be physically active this week, HA. We are sitting in the car all day just to get to some crap camp, then waking up to get back in the car for the same. The drive is just constant tumbling over rocks and plowing through water. I was so upset but you know it’s bad when Z is also upset about it and talking about scrapping the next four days and just going back to UB. It’s a tempting thought but I don’t know if two more days of driving to get back to city and missing anything worthwhile along the way is worth it. Also we’d have to find lodging and we’d lose money so we are stuck. 

For the past two days, driver has been listening to a CD of Russian pop songs, which we liked at first but the 7th go round was absolute torture. I know all the words now and can’t get them out of my head! So I put my headphones in and blasted some angsty Tori Amos. Of course after a listen to The Great Comet’s best song, “Dust and Ashes”, singing my version: “Is this how I die…carsick and filthy, wanting salad . Is this how I die…nauseous and dehydrated, sick with poo.” If you knew the song you’d laugh because I barely changed what the real lyrics sound like. Ugh my shoes smell so bad! But I must say testing various hiking shoes was the smartest thing I’ve ever done. Last time I did a big active hiking trip I borrowed a friend’s boots. NEVER DO THAT! They didn’t have room for my bunions and I lost a toenail. Having proper shoes is so important. It’s a miracle my feet my poor poor feet are still functioning after all these miles. And precarious outhouse perching. 

Anyway after an hour and half of being thrown from one side of the car to the other, I had to pee. I asked if we could keep a look out for a toilet. Toilet now means hole outhouse, of course Bathroom now does have is own definition. Oh how I miss a bathroom. Anyway there was nothing for miles and Guido said there wouldn’t be and he was right so they brought me to an abandoned dilapidated deserted and dying wooden building and I trekked through the unmown weeds and peed behind it. Just behind some decaying old shack. Oh how far I’ve fallen.

Two more hours of dehydration, nausea, and back pain (two vertebrae are extremely bruised from being tossed and thrown into the seat repeatedly it’s not fun) and I had to pee again. Guido said what about hiding in those trees? They were seedlings. The thinnest shortest little plants passing for trees you’ve ever seen literally the width of my finger and he wants me to “hide” behind it? LOLLL. I was like I’m not sure they can actually hide me but ummm and delayed the ms until we passed into a clearing with lots of ger camps that I was SURE would have an outhouse! They had to! Where were all those people going? Oh right in the open like I do now. The first thing we found was…I can’t even talk about it. Omg. Wait getting a cookie first. Ok it was a hole in the ground surrounded by a two foot high piece of fabric attached at a few two foot poles. On three sides. So it was pretty much peeing inside an outstretched hand towel. For all the world to see. The wooden planks to stand on were thin branches that creaked and moved. It was probably the worst ever. Worse than just being out in the open. So gross. 
So, I am sure some people are like ‘but how wonderful is it to see another culture and how they live!’ And I’m sure people are thinking I’m being rude to them and disrespectful of their way of life. Maybe I am. But I am unwavering in my belief that would be better for most Mongol people and for the public health if their toilets were cleaner or existed at all and if hygiene was promoted and oh yeah sewage disposed of more appropriately. And it would be better for the people if roads were paved, and people’s cars didn’t break down or pop tires when they tried to drive to the next village. So many cars we saw were a mess or more often were stuck in the rock piles passing for roads. It’s treacherous. They have to pay for repairs and they lose time, which is usually losing money. A road, just one paved road in this valley, would boost tourism and save time so people actually want to be there and see things. It’s a mess and I’m not afraid to say that out of some way-too-common liberal traveler tendency to over-extol the virtues of every shithole they go to. It’s a real common annoying problem, ignorant in the other direction, for travelers to rain praise on a place for no reason other than that they’ve been there and think that exaggeratingly exalting the exotic makes them seem worldly. It just makes you a jerk. I’m being a jerk too but at least I’m honest. 

Anyway, so we are driving all f-ing day on these terrible rocks and mudslides and lakes, and we finally stop at an area with a lot of cars and tourists on some hill. This was about the time Guido said we should have arrived at the hot springs camp. A man came over and driver and he yell at each other for a while before we left and kept driving for like 30 mins. That’s when I said “Oh hey I thought we were almost there?” And he said yes but we have to go to a different camp with different hot springs because a Russian couple took our ger. We freaked out and were like first of all you weren’t going to tell us? And second are we not going where we signed up to go? He said no it’s the same place we were heading to the wrong camp. I mean jfc, is it that someone took our place or that you were going in the wrong direction? He said it was just the wrong direction and denied saying anything about another couple. Okay, so you guys don’t know where you’re going?? So who knows if we are in the right springs but whatever. We got here and we don’t have to get in the car until tomorrow. I can drink all the water (though we don’t have much left ugh) and eat food and best of all SHOWER! There’s a shower using hot spring water and it smells like eggs because it is, indeed, hot spring water but I don’t care I’m cleeeeean now. And that same building with the shower has three REAL toilets and SINKS! SINKS!!!! I wish we could stay here every night but I know tomorrow is back to a shithole shack. For now though, I’m clean and I got my bathing suit on and I’m gonna go springing. Then I’m gonna shower AGAIN and wash my disgusting hair! And then in the morning I’m gonna shower again! 

(I forgot to take pictures of the hot springs)

Guido made us lunch at 3pm of vegetable soup with potatoes and carrots and noodles. And seaweed. At least I’m getting iodine. 

The hot springs were indeed incredibly hot but so enjoyable. They are just little jacuzzi-looking jawns just behind the bathroom building – which is, I am sad to report, a full 250 paces from our ger. I count every time. The first night was about 80, the second (awful) one was about 150. This is 250!! That is too far for middle of the night peeing! I guess that means we’re going right outside the door again. 

It started raining, really heavily raining, that night, and the top part of our ger was open. Guido and a guide friend had to climb up on top of the ger to secure a tarp. Guido popped his head in and asked Z if he had any rope for tying it down. No we don’t have rope. 

Dinner was finally my tofu cutlets that we found at a grocery store when we all went food shopping a few days ago to stock up on everything! They were good! With more potatoes and carrots, of course. And bread. Guido likes to give each of us at least like 8 slices of bread throughout the day. It’s ridiculous.

After dinner in a bit of silence, Z looked up at me and said “Why would I have any rope?” We died. 

That night the people in the next ger were SO loud until about 3am, and they were outside talking (even though it was raining, beach umbrella sort of thing) so I had to keep trekking to the bathroom, back and forth, back and forth. If I wore one of those dumb watches I’d have hit my steps just from peeing. 

DAY 4

After not much sleep but lots and lots of 250-step walks in the pouring rain (I pretty much just kept my anorak and boots on all night), I took my fourth shower in this place (one at arrival, a rinse after the hot springs, a full evening shower where I washed my hair, and the morning one. All smelled strongly of eggs, and I fear I will forever as well), ate a lot of peanut butter (we bought a jar the first day in the grocery store that I am on schedule to completely finish) and left for another day of driving. All day driving, this time to Great White Lake and Khorgo Crater. We would literally be driving all day, yet again, on crappy roads. Our lofty goals of this week being even more physically active than our city touring have proved laughable. 

But this time was different because it started to storm! We had to drive these rocky hills in a freaking thunderstorm. Luckily we made it to the city of Tsetserleg and stocked up on the rest of the week’s food necessities. The produce section had 3 heads of sad cabbage and a box of kiwis. The parking lot of the market was the most chaotic mess of law-ignoring drivers and bikers going wherever they wanted, plus a whole string of cars with their trunks open and set up for BUTCHERY. There were 30 or so cars in a row with trunks all covered in dead bodies and blood, which I saw too much of before realizing what it was and looking away. And people were lining up to buy from them! That’s where they get their meat, instead of inside the shop! Sea Bass and Z were like…jfc is that where Guido is getting our meat???!!! #govegan

We stopped soon at another giant but empty restaurant for lunch where they take literally an hour to fry noodles. Why do we keep coming to these whack places?? We should go where other people actually eat! I wanna go where the people are! Also how do these giant places not have toilets? Every time, they point me to a toilet hole around the block. Get your shit together. 

After lunch, my god, it was actually a paved road to White Lake! Cannot believe! 

My kidneys actually hurt from holding my pee for weeks now, it seems. On the way, we stopped at a camp so I could pee in a hole where the planks were literally covered with caked human feces, at least six months worth of buildup. And this was in a ger camp. I hope ours would be better that night. 

Haha the paved roads didn’t last very long. In fact, the roads got so bad that we had to get out of the car and walk up a mountain while the driver went crazy trying to get up this. 

Finally, we got to our next camp. It was a beautiful location, right on the lake, so that was lucky. But it was yet again a shitty place with one far toilet hole, no sink, just one hole for everyone in the 10 or so gers to share. That’s a lot of people in one shithouse. 

The only difference was, we would stay here for two nights. Cool. Cool cool cool cool. 

The boys swam while I went in the lake up to my knees. It sucks to not fully participate but if I am not able to shower again for four more days there’s no way I’m putting on a still-wet bathing suit and going into a dirty lake and then just being gross for four days. I am not voluntarily adding ‘yeast infection’ to my list of troubles. 

Guido is talking about his crush and when he first saw her and it is SO cute. I almost forgive him for being a diddadoof after this conversation. In what is probably my favorite translated phrase mix-up in the history of language, he said he saw her from across the room “and then I crushed it.” I almost threw up from trying not to laugh. I’m sure he heard the phrase ‘crushed it’ in recent slang but also knew the word ‘crush’ in the romantic context and just cleverly but incorrectly assumed they were related and that to crush it was the verb form like instead of ‘to develop a crush’. I’m obsessed. 

He also is in the lake screaming about how he can’t see without his ‘googles’ and I am cackling at that too. Both things are too cute to correct.

There was another storm tonight, this one absolutely insane. The shithole is 140 steps from our ger, which isn’t as bad as others but it’s up a steep hill. And in this storm? Nah I peed outside the door again and still got soaked. Also, we had to fish out our mosquito-net head covers to sleep with, because the gers are swarming with mosquitoes. So fun. 

DAY 5

Since it was still raining, and since we didn’t have to drive to our next awful camp, we had a lazy rainy morning. I tried to reread Walden for the first time in like 15 years, to try to relate to my surroundings more, but it just made me angry. 

Guido brought us breakfast (fruit! canned but still! and 5 pieces of bread.) at 10am, and when he came to collect our plates (oh, after that first night’s dinner in a kitchen, all of our meals have just been on our beds. I hate nothing more than food in the bedroom soooo), he said lunch would be at 1pm. JFC we were like no that’s not necessary! Can we just go on the hike to the Khorgo Crater finally? But he does not do well with plans changing and begrudgingly pushed lunch back to 1:30pm. Lunch was actually good, rice of course and a succotash type thing, but like give us time to actually work up an appetite dude!

Finally we went on the hike up the crater, which was the best thing about the whole week. I hate sitting in a car, so sitting in a car for eight hours every day without doing any physical activity has been hell. Doing a decently challenging hike feels amazing. There were some scary bits around the lip of the crater at the top where we had to scramble but it was great. 

I actually enjoyed myself for the first time in days. 

The only super awful annoying thing was that a group of white men (the hippie dirty traveler type) were sitting on the lip of the crater and making paper airplanes and throwing them into the crater. Like, littering on one of the country’s most important sites. I don’t like this country but I’m not going to contribute to making it worse! Guido went up to them and asked them to please stop as this was a state monument. Repeat, a Mongolian citizen went up to a group of white tourists and asked them to stop littering in his country, please. The white douchehats replied, “it’s just like trees, man, it’s fine.” God grant me the confidence of mediocre white men, amiright? What a bag o’dicks. I said to Guido loud enough that the men knew I was talking to them, “god, white men really think they can do whatever the f they want anywhere in the world, huh?” I like to think that got to them but we know it didn’t. F-ing white men. 

Back at the camp, we had more vegetable soup (mostly noodles oof) and saw to our delight that our Dutch friends from the long train journey in Siberia were now in the ger behind us! How crazy is that! The Mongolian traveler scene is pretty small, I guess! It was like pure joy to see familiar and kind faces. 

Ugh my belly hurts so much. I can’t use the bathroom with all these people watching the path to the latrine pit from the chairs and tables they have set up outside their ger. And Guido and the other guides literally just set up an archery target 5 feet from the toilet hole. I mean. WTF. Now not only do I have to deal with every watching me try to make it up that hill, but I have to also dodge arrows from these idiotic other travelers and the group of 20 guys just standing around watching. Ughhh. 

However, my unwillingness to trek to the outhouse 5x during the night paid off in one way, because when I was outside the door peeing at 12:30am, I looked up and saw the universe. I’m not kidding. Guys, I didn’t know there were that many stars. I’ve seen the usual suspects, but this night looked like a planetarium. I woke Z up and we both just stood there like, holy shit, is this what is out there? The sky was like a dome that was COVERED with billions and billions of lights that we could actually see. We clearly saw the Milky Way galaxy. If you had told me before that the Milky Way would be visible, I would have said ‘but how do you know which thingy it is?’ There was no questioning it here though – you could clearly see the swoosh plain as day. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I really didn’t know that the naked eye and just plain open sky could lead to such a sight. I did not know there were that many stars. IN THEIR MULTITUUUUDE. 

It almost makes this whole week worth it.

DAY 6

Today is another 8 hour drive to the Semi-Gobi, a section of desert that looks more like what we imagine the Gobi to look like (sand dunes) than the actual Gobi does (it’s only 3% desert-y!). Guido and driver sang along to the worst music you could imagine. Sea Bass, trying to get them to turn it down, asked Guido what his favorite song was. Guido answered, I shit you not, with the following:
Guido: “My favorite song? Cash me outside.” 
Sea Bass: “I don’t know that, how does it go?”
Guido: “Mm, mm, cash me outside” — JUST SPOKEN

Again, nausea from trying not to laugh-cry. 

But jesus christ, things got really unfunny soon. After four hours of driving (it was almost 1:30pm and we still hadn’t stopped for lunch), Guido and driver started yelling a lot in Mongolian and were yelling on the phone a lot to someone who I soon realized was Grape Leaves. Turns out, Doljma booked Sea Bass, who was leaving us to return to UB today, a bus ticket back at 2pm. A bus ticket. He had NO idea he was getting on a bus at 2pm, and Guido and driver had no idea that the bus was even at 2pm UNTIL IT WAS 1:30PM. Doljma just hadn’t told them the details, and NO one told Sea Bass. We were livid on his behalf but also – what kind of professional company operates like this? Driver started speeding beyond all belief because we had to go an hour’s distance in less than 30 minutes. It was so dangerous, and to know that the owner of the company who we paid a lot of money to kept calling and yelling at them to drive faster made me want to sue the pants off her if this country had laws. I was furious. And this is why I implore those of you going to Mongolia ever (why) to never use Sunpath. 

After Sea Bass was pushed onto a five-hour bus that he didn’t sign up for, we told Guido that it was unacceptable to do that to him and to us, considering how dangerous it was to speed like that. It’s okay, he said. Um, no, we are telling you it’s not okay. The language barrier here really posed a problem. It’s a shame that they clearly cannot talk back to or disagree with their employer, because she is super wrong here. 

For the first time in a week, at lunch we were given a menu to choose from instead of being brought whatever the restaurant made for us. I was so excited when I saw fresh vegetable salad on the menu. Obviously I ordered it. And – obviously guess what it was! CUCUMBER AND TOMATO YOU GUESSED IT! I didn’t even care. 

We finally got to the Semi Gobi, and I was super conflicted. I thought I’d be okay with riding a camel (as was planned for us) because I’ve done it several times before, but this time just felt unnatural. Before, in Jordan and Israel, at least, it was like, oh we have to get around by camel, that’s what is done here. But here, it was just completely for tourists to take rides around the dunes. I felt too weird to say anything, so we took the ride (and made it half the usual length to at least do a little less damage, I hope), but I felt so bad for these poor camels. I just wonder when was the last time they got water. I wonder how well these tour operator people treat them. It sucks. 
The Semi Gobi at least was cool to see, with its typical landscapes that you’d expect of the Gobi in full. 

We finally got to OUR LAST GER CAMP! It was so exciting…until I realized it was one of the bad ones. Ughhh. So we arrived, and we figured out from observing that, they didn’t actually have a ger for us? A big tour group was coming that they wanted to keep together, and since we were only 2, they didn’t want to use a big ger on us. So…we were put in the owners’ ger. Like the people who live there yearround. They took their stuff off their beds (that they’ve been sleeping in forever…not that ANY of the bedsheets and blankets were cleaned in any of the camps but at least now we are really seeing that they definitely were not changed (we always slept in our sleeping bag liners, thank god for them) and it was so weird. You might be thinking that being in the owners’ ger means it’s a bit nicer than the others, don’t you. It doesn’t mean that. It means it smells like poop and people and the owners keep coming in every 20 minutes for a possession they need, be it toothbrush or clothes or cups and dishes. An old lady just grabbed her toothbrush from a rope in the ceiling and started brushing in here. 

The toilet is 120 steps away, so it’s closer than others have been (eyeroll) but there is NO FLOOR. Between the walls, it’s just open pit and two planks to balance on precariously. Usually it’s the two planks, yes, but usually there is some other semblance of flooring near the walls. This was just all open. And the door doesn’t shut, so you have to hold the edge with one hand the whole time. 

We went on a hike to get away from it all. The landscape nearby was nice, more deserty obviously being in the Semi Gobi. 

When we came back from the hike, we found this in our ger:

UM HELLO RANDOM MONGOLIAN CHILD. 

Just someone’s child, fast asleep. We wouldn’t wake him, so we just hung out and read and stuff. 

A little later, the old lady came in to grab a pot and didn’t mention the boy. 

About an hour or two later, Guido came in and we said, “Hey, um, do you know who this is, what he’s doing here?” He laughed and said, “Haha, I think that he is someone’s kid,” and left. YOU DON’T SAY, GLINDA. (Opening number of Wicked: “After all, she had a father! She had a mother! As so many do.”)

This is really hysterical but it’s getting late and we cannot go to sleep with a random child in here. So inappropriate! This is such a mess. Oh and I realized why it smells like poop. That huge overflowing box of wood in the middle of the room, for making a fire in the central stove? Not wood. It’s dung. 

The only good part was this HILARIOUS little girl running around the whole time and making the cutest faces. ​

The gers at this camp were super close together. I didn’t care. I peed outisde all night. I am an animal now. 

DAY 7

All Day 7 is is the drive back to UB! HUZZAH! We successfully got them to leave at 8am instead of 9am (I’M A CELEBRITY GET ME OUT OF HERE!) but even though we arrived in city at like 11:30am, it was the hardest thing yet to convince Guido that we didn’t want to stop for a ridiculously unnecessary and long lunch. They were so concerned that we wanted to deviate from the plan (just go to lunch after you drop us off!) that they got Grape Leaves on the phone because, of course, turns out SHE is the one who hates any deviating from the plan. It was so ridiculous. We had to tell her on the phone that we just wanted to get to our hotel. JFC it’s like she never wanted us to be FREE OF THIS WEEK. I just want to get to the incredibly fancy hotel we booked tonight to treat ourselves after this week and before our next sleeper train tomorrow (to China!). I was so excited to SHOWER! And eat SALAD! And pee indoors tonight in a real toilet! 

Finally, FINALLY, we got out of that car for the last time! Oh my god the joy! The joy would continue beyond belief, because we walked into the Kempinski hotel, and it was the fanciest, most incredible hotel I’ve ever seen. 

It’s where George W. Bush, renowned painter, stayed when he came to UB, so I should have guessed it would be super fancy. But I guess I forgot what clean and nice could be, so I was flipping out. But really it was nicer than I think any hotel I’ve ever seen. Just the nicest in every way. I immediately put on my gym clothes and checked out the 24-hour gym. Guys, it was the nicest gym I’ve ever seen too. 

Every machine had a towel and water bottle on it! There was so much equipment and still so much floor space! They were playing instructional videos from bodybuilding websites on a big tv! THERE WERE TWO SAUNA ROOMS! I wish my gym in London was as nice as this! 

Best of all…I’m so excited to tell you…what’s better than going from peeing in latrine pits in the woods to using a real toilet? 

PEEING IN A JAPANESE ROBOT TOILET! The best toilet in the entire world! I haven’t seen one of this beauts since Thailand. If you aren’t familiar, well, I’m sorry. They are the greatest invention since I don’t know the wheel. They have buttons that clean errthang, and at different water speeds and pressures and temperatures, plus buttons that play music for ‘modesty’, plus all the regular bidet functions, and buttons that I don’t even know what will happen if you push them, like when Jules hit the ‘no’ button on hers on “Cougar Town” (rip). It was like the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of the past week, as opposite as we could get. I wish we could stay in this hotel for longer but that would require staying in UB for longer and nah. (Also wayyy out of budget.)

After we both took the longest showers known to man (the bathroom had both a separate shower cubicle AND a shower in the giant tub. I can’tttt), we went to Loving Hut and got some of the food I shared in the previous post. It was the best day. Even if we didn’t stay in the nicest hotel and find a place with salads and smoothies, it would still have been a great day because WE WERE DONE. 

EPILOGUE

This past week was truly insane. I don’t know if I’m glad I went through it or not. I can say for sure it changed me though — I went from wishing to find bathrooms on long car rides to wishing to find a toilet to wishing that the hole in ground had a door to wishing that just not too many people could see my bare butt from the road. I have come so far. What an absolutely ridiculous experience. Humans invented stuff for a reason, Mongolia. Wash your hands. 

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*This marks the last post on this Trans Mongolian Adventure page of the Travel section! On to China! 

​It’s unclear when exactly we should say we began our exploration of the ancient Silk Road, not one road so much as a cross-continental network of trade routes and passes from China, across most of central Asia, and possibly all the way to Rome. (Sea routes stretching from Indonesia to Africa were also part of it, but we didn’t do any watersports; it’s all desert from here on out.) Xi’an was considered a terminus of it, but today it’s such a modern busy city that it didn’t seem very ‘Silk Road-y’ to us when we were there; we were still in ‘China’ mindset and not ‘incredible desert history’ mindset. But there’s no question that once we landed in Dunhuang, our journey through the Silk Road had begun. Dunhuang was one of the most important historical sites of the Silk Road both then and now, and it has provided tons of insight into the dealings and relationships among people, religious groups, and states from ancient times. If you go to Dunhuang, you are unquestionably there to go back in time and learn about its role in the Silk Road. 

So, like I said, the Silk Road was not a road, and not even just because of mountains! It was formed by local traders determining which routes they could travel without dying of thirst, pretty much, and mainly went from one oasis to another. It also included the least deadly mountain passes, though you had to be careful of the season (snow!). Also, contrary to the idea that individual traders ventured from China all the way to Europe, most evidence shows that traders stuck to their local routes, like a very extended game of telephone but for trading. Or I guess a more appropriate comparison would be to the track and field race where you pass the baton. At camp we called it the…I wanna say Fenchurch Street but that’s just because I miss my tube line. Um…steeple chase! That’s it! (Those are similar phrases, right.) Is that a thing people say or is it just passing the baton? Whatever. It was like that where you go just a bit of the way yourself and then pass your crap to an associate or new trader friend. So the romantic notion of traders with endless caravans crossing the desert with innumerable treasures to bring to western Europe is not very accurate. 

​But actually, the idea of the Telephone game works too, because these traders shared information of all sorts with each other that blended into new cultures, traversing the continent and beyond along with the silk, but also with all kinds of other goods, animals, cultural and religious ideas, and Yom Kippur breath. The most important item passed throughout the lands was not silk but paper – documents, books, and even scattered personal notes are what teach us the most about this history and how people traded and what spread successfully and how far it went. And while there are many famous Silk Road sites that have provided immense knowledge through excavations, we’ve learned the most about this spread of communication and ideas (and goods) from one place – Dunhuang, and its Library Cave. 

Dunhuang is an oasis town in Gansu province, squeezed in between the Gobi Desert (yes we made our way allll the way back around) and the Taklamakan Desert (fuck it was SO DRY my eyes hurt in my head). An important early Silk Road city, it’s now known for its outstanding Mogao Caves, an extensive cave system that served as Buddhist temples and housed (and still house) incredible examples of religious Buddhist art – in fact, the largest collection of Buddhist art in the world (painted on the cave walls, mostly). Constructed for meditation spaces in the 4th century, the caves were not well preserved (and still aren’t very) so what there is to see is pretty miraculous. No pictures are allowed inside the tiny dark caves – great idea to try to preserve what’s there, although some caves were closed due to ‘excessive carbon dioxide’ (meaning they aren’t regulating the number of visitors well enough. Also, smoking is allowed. If you have a problem with air quality and too many people affecting the condition of the cave preservation, maybe don’t allow smoking in there FFS, CHINA). 

​In addition to the art, the Mogao caves gave the world its most important contribution to history with the Library Cave, a hidden room in the caves which was walled up to hide thousands and thousands of documents – in fact, over 50,000 documents, including over 15,000 books and over 1000 scrolls. Some scrolls date from as early as the 5th century and all dated from before the cave was sealed in the 11th century. The earliest complete printed book was found here, The Diamond Sutra, from 868. The documents are in at least 17 languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Uigur, Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Sogdian, proving how far peoples and ideas travelled. 

​The walled-up cave was discovered in 1900 by a monk known as Daoist Wang, at least according to the book I’m reading (Z’s book calls him something a lot less fun). Daoist Wang was self-appointed as the caretaker of Dunhuang when it had long been falling into disrepair. One day he noticed something going on with the air in them there caves and knocked an inner wall down, and found a room positively crammed with piles of documents stretching 10 feet tall. Hoo boy, this was a big deal, and he knew it. He asked the Chinese government if they wanted to pay for him to have all the documents shipped – he knew how important these were to Chinese history – and the govvies were like nah we don’t have the money to pay for that. Big mistake. Big. Huge. An explorer named Aurel Stein soon heard about the discovery and made his way to Dunhuang to charm Wang into letting him buy some of the documents and take them out of China (to Britain and India). Stein gave Wang like a Benjamin, maybe two, and took TENS of thousands of documents. He is a controversial figure, for many reasons. One, he knew they were worth more, but like, so did Wang, and Wang could have charged more. Also what was Wang gonna do with that money he lived in caves. Two, people are mad at Whitey McSteinface for taking the documents away from their home (are you too good for your HOME?), but the Chinese government wasn’t interested at first so why not bring them to a place with better preservation methods and people and universities who actually want to study them? (NB, you’d think this string of me siding with colonialist kinds of thinking would mean I side with the British Museum on the Elgin Marbles controversy but I saw IN PERSON the whole f-ing modern advanced thing that Greece has since built for them so there’s no reason now! Shaaame!) 

Aurel Stein was also the first person to describe in great detail everything he saw at the Dunhuang caves (see it’s historically necessary to describe everything you see and do in too much detail, for posterity!), and contributed most of what we know about how they were before the onslaught of other explorers, researchers, universities…and tourists. Today, foreigners can’t really book tickets. The website doesn’t have functional English, but also I think hotels and hostels and tour groups just do it for foreigners and there’s no discussion. But you do need to book tickets in advance, because they only let in 6000 tourists per day – and it REALLY should be less, considering the aforementioned CO2 problems harming various caves. We hired a guide and driver from VisitOurChina to get our tickets, pick us up and drop us off at our guesthouse, and provide a private tour of the caves. Well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad, I guess. No, they are a bad company and I strongly urge you never to use them. The local guide they hired for us was great, but what they didn’t tell us (and I don’t think she realized we had paid (through the nose) for) was that private guides cannot lead anyone through the caves – you are put into large (LARGE) groups with other (AWFUL LOUD RUDE) tourists and led around by an official site guide. So we paid all that money for nothing. We were livid, and not just because the huge Italian tour group we were put with was full of rude awful people who snuck photos in the caves despite that being prohibited. I know, Italians betraying me, my own people. 

I do not take that shit lightly and we got a partial refund of our money, but if we didn’t have to deal with the excruciatingly frustrating Chinese tendency to deny blame and never apologize and make things as hard as possible (and also, what contract law?!), I would have fought for all of it. YOU HEAR ME, SOPHY? YOU ARE A LYING LIAR WHO LIES AND YOU HAVE TAINTED THE NAME OF TOY GIRAFFES EVERYWHERE. 

​Despite my blood pressure being at red alert the whole visit, both at our being cheated and at my own people betraying me with insane rudeness, our visit to the Mogao Caves was pretty special. You start in a newly built visitor center and you watch two movies, one about the caves’ history and one about the visit. I mean at least I think that’s what they were about. It was dark and comfy and cool in there and I had a very nice nap. 

After the movies, you get on a giant bus to the actual caves. We did not know about this. It’s a 15 minute bus ride away from the visitor center to the caves, down a freaking highway! WHY NOT BUILD YOUR NEW VISITOR CENTER A TINY BIT CLOSER TO THE ACTUAL THING WE ARE VISITING? FFS CHINA. 

Then you find out your tour company is a bunch of lying liars and you fight but can’t do anything about it because the official site guides are the only ones with keys to the caves (they remain locked at all times except the few minutes you are in them) so you piss and moan like an impotent jerk and then you acquiesce and try to enjoy the damn thing. And it was indeed amazing. The paintings on the cave walls are of varying degrees of preservation, some barely visible, but some (a lot) are gorgeous and clearly visible still. It’s pretty awesome. It’s also very very hot (SANDWICHED BETWEEN TWO DESERTS I SAID) so bring water and a hat and whatever you have that might reflect the sun away from you. My hands have aged so much I can hear them saying “Muriel? Muriel hasn’t lived here for 50 yeeeeears…”

We spent probably 3 hours between both the sites of the cave complex. After we got back to our guesthouse, we wanted to go into the desert to see the enormous dunes and the famous oasis of Crescent Lake, about a 30 minute walk away. Unfortunately, my dry eye syndrome has been exacerbated, to say the least, in this climate, resulting in ocular migraines like I’ve never had before, so I had to take my contacts out and lay in the dark for a while while Z explored what he said (so meanly) was the most amazing place. He took good pictures but I’m so mad I had to miss this. Stupid dry climate.

​Once I could stand the pain, I realized it was like 9pm and I was hungry, so I went into our little fake adobe village to find food. Oh so we stayed at a place called the Silk Road Yododo Inn, a hostelish guesthouse with one nice woman and a very rude man working, nice rooms, but the common spaces were just enormous sandboxes. Not joking, the space in the middle of the guestrooms was all sandbox. Complete with little plastic shovel. It was insane. The room seemed nice but we saw later that it was dirtier than it first appeared, with sand in the sheets (blech) (but of course; it was a sandbox) and dirty walls and quilts. Outside, a bar played super loud music until midnight. And when that music finally stopped, a neighbor down the hall seemed to be hammering into the wall. I think he was moving furniture because Z saw a man carrying a vanity table or something absolutely ridiculous even disregarding the time of night. We can never get away from ridiculous. The guesthouse was on the second floor of a sandy adobe village looking place. So weird but cute. 

​ I thought I might have good luck at the Western Restaurant (full name) but no, they did not speak English or understand my phone asking for no meat (what do you mean no meat! Okay I bring you chicken). I got them to bring me a bowl of rice covered in bok choy, which is better than nothing. The next day, we went to a little food shack hole in the wall place and got delicious noodles and veggies. Shacks are always better, we are learning. 

Overall, despite my eyes and my head and my eyes in my head and the lying liars who lied to us, our short visit to Dunhuang was nice – very informative and interesting. We are lucky to have gotten to see some of the amazing caves and their art from so long ago, even if most of documents are back home in the British Museum (where we are members, lol). The history here is incredible and it was exciting to begin the real Silk Road section of our journey. Even if it mostly means dry air and burnt skin.