The Fury and the Filth

Basically, within moments of arriving in the city we are ripped off by some weasel little shit bag taxi driver who doctors the taxi to charge us a bunch of money. we arrive at our hostel at about 430am and lo and behold the welcome party is asleep so we are stuck in what seems like a desolate wasteland/warzone in the wee hours with nothing to do. "guethouse $7" i hear from my knees. turns out the rat-man taxi driver is offering us a place to stay for the evening for a nice price of $7. OK...heres our money we say and get ourselves back into his 1974 vintage automobile. strap on our goggles and we are off into the night of Ulaan Bataar to continue our journey. we meet some rough woman at her front door in a bombshelter and we lay down for the night (well 4 hours cos rat man is coming back at 930). Wake up ready to get the hell out of this place. On using the kind ladies (sarcastic)bathroom, i notice last years fecal matter on the wall, a used tampon under the toilet, some pubes on the door handle and cigarette butts shoved into the cracks in the tiles and into the wall itself. Phew, it only cost $7 i naively think. OH NO, lady wants another $10. The taxi driver has now forgotten every word of english he used last night and looks bemused as the banshee lady screams her straggly hair off about us robbing her. We give her our last $9 to keep the peace but she demands the final $1. So for $1 that we don't have thus can't give her she threatened to call the police. Now, i almost never laugh before 10am but according to tony i laughed right into her very face. I didnt realize it was that blatent but my mind was racing with what the frig we could do to not be thrown in prison for stealing 1 of her dollars. It was a bit like victorian england where you were hung for stealing an apple...and from what i had observed, victorian era england was streets ahead of Mongolia. so i guesss laughing in her face was a nervous reaction IN the end though, the situation resolved itself after she flung a used tissue at the wall and made the rat driver pay her the full $10 fee. I'm glad the man had to part with our cash cos the other 40 bucks he got from us was gonna feed him for a month and a half at least.

So we get rid of the driver and his mentalist girlfriend and get to our equally unglamorous hostel. This is to be then whizzed off into the countryside to stay in a mongolian tent for the night. A marvelous time was had by me, just mucking around in the countryside. not being much off a nature lover i thought i would be bored but it was a nice treat to be out of the city already and just relaxing without other people. so we passed a real relaxing day in the tent. tony woke up for meals and i just read and climbed some hills and took actually quite boring pics of the scenery. At night though, i had a nice surprise being able to see stars properly. and again im not one for gazing at the sky and wondering all this stuff about the universe and how we are all part of some cosmic whatever, but the sky was alive with little silver flashes (in case you dont know what stars look like...) and i was, in a word, floored by how beautiful it looked. Stunning...

Next day we took our dangerously old minivan back into to the city.

Being from west yorkshire is preparation for the less than glamourous but i was (for the 2nd time in a day) flooored. This time in a bad way. Ulan Bator is not nice. A filthy hole not unlike chechnya or probably georgia now. full of noise, dirt, noise, shit, and noise. The only nice area turned out to be the central square with the government buildings. so the government have sorted themselves out while the rest of the country languishes in destitution. It kinda made me realize that the dump of a city is not the residents fault but the people who are allegedly responsiblee for them that are letting them down. this started to soften me to the city. Tony and I wandered around for the day, trying to find things in the guidebook that no longer existed, eating traditional mongolian thai food and drinking traditional mongolian german beer. To say we immersed ourselves in Ulan Bator culture would be a bare faced lie. Wasnt a pleasant place, to be honest. and it was with a happy heart that i got on the train to get hell out of there to move into russia...

coming soon, the trans mongolian express...

Hope someone is readin this cos otherwise its a right waste of my time! ha...maybe im talking to myself now...

written by  adamski752 on August 29, 2008 from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
from the travel blog: Adam's Leisurely Return Home
tagged MongolianCountryside
Send a Compliment

---

6 comments...