On a Floating Bridge

more photos…

Provodnista woke me up an hour before arrival in Ulan Bataar. The landscape that we’d left behind in Russia was green and arable with rivers crossing under the train frequently. The new landscape of Mongolia was more arid and very empty. I stepped off the train where lots of tour operators were waiting to collect the new arrivals. After finding a hotel with a shower (my only requirement at that moment in time) I did a little exploring in UB, to discover it is a truly ugly city, as every guidebook had promised. The city of felt was now the city of concrete, dust and heinous traffic that were anarchic and lethal. The main road, ironically named “peace” avenue had 6 lanes of traffic on each side on certain stretches. The buses that passed were tatty, very old and bursting at each window with many squished and unhappy Mongols.
Since Berlin, the number of cyclists has dropped off almost totally, Belarus had a fair few that I spied from the train, St. Petersburg had only a tiny handful that I saw over both days and three quarters of this tiny number were kids on BMXs surfing the pavement. Moscow had none that I could see in the short time I was there, and Mongolia has zero as far as I can tell. It hardly seems surprising as a venture out on the roads on your bike would be an activity to get your life insurance policy cancelled, no matter how expensive or comprehensive!
Transportation seems to be a big problem for modern Mongolia with the only national infrastructure being the railway I’m using, built for Russian convenience and prestige to reach China. As I learnt from a chap I met in a restaurant from the Asian development bank called Barry Hitchcock a few days later, who’d lived in Mongolia for 5 years, the problem is extensive with the road to China being built only now.
Moreover, the migration from subsistence farming to urban life has been massive, with some 50% of the population of Mongolia living in Ulan Bataar, and other towns and cities holding further numbers of non-agricultural producers or just non-producers.
When I asked Barry whether the herders/farmers in the countryside were producing enough to support the people in Ulan Bataar, he said that Mongolia is self-sufficient in traditional produce in theory, with much meat and milk still being produced. Those in the countryside were still self-sufficient, as they ever had been – because they had to be, but, it was very difficult to export such produce to the cities as there was no infrastructure to do so. Some of the towns planned in the Soviet era were appalling for transport links because the towns had no logical reason for being there, having only been built on the whim of a general’s wandering finger above the map as a place to house heavy industry. Now that Mongolia was not competitive in heavy industry, these towns were struggling because they were neither trade centres, or high in mineral wealth leaving them very vulnerable. The lack of infrastructure, Barry explained, meant the milk in my after-dinner coffee was likely powdered milk from New Zealand, transported to Ulan Bataar via China on the Trans-Mongolian rail-route. It would then be reconstituted here to be consumed instead of brought in from local sources within the T�v and surrounding regions.
Petrol here costs around 70c a litre, which is a fair whack for the average Mongolian (my guidebook says GDP per capita is $1840) who, if they drive, drive older fairly big cars or huge SUVs, Jeeps or vans with low mpg.
Since communism ended, public transport has evaporated from a service with a limited number of routes but frequently operating and massively used means of moving around to what looks like a hellish and terribly inconvenient way to travel.
Using a much preferred method of transportation – my 2 feet, I explored the monastery at the north-west end of town, one of the few traditional buildings in Ulan Bataar not destroyed by the Russians under communism.