Holy Mountain 1: Chingeltei Uul

Ulaanbaatar is surrounded by 4 holy mountains, roughly in the compass directions (Mongolia's big on holy mountains, if you haven't noticed). So my goal is to hike them all. This weekend I hiked the first one, Chingeltei Uul, which lies to the north of the city. I found an intrepid hiking buddy, Kathryn, who's Canadian and is also working at an investment company and also likes to get out of the city whenever she can. And despite the mediocre weather on Sunday, we headed up to the mountains. We caught a cab and told the cabbie the name of the mountain and pointed north. He called up his buddy as we were driving and asked him where Chingeltei was, and every so often along the road would stop someone and say "Chingeltei?" And they'd say "Aah, Chingeltei," and kind of wave in its direction. So after about 10 minutes of winding through the ger districts, we ended up on this little mud road at the edge of the ger districts surrounded by ridges. Our cabbie didn't overcharge us too much, so we thanked him and wondered which one of the peaks on the ridge surrounding us was Chingeltei Uul. We weren't really sure where we were, so we figured if we just hiked along the ridge and hit every peak, we'd be sure to hit the holy one, even if we didn't know it at the time. So we just hiked up and started walking along the ridge. It was cold and windy at the top, and we figured the one peak that was higher than the others and surrounded by clouds was the one we were after.

There was a nice path through the woods that we followed and then a bunch of rocks to climb up, but when we reached the top, it was clear that this was the holy one because there were a ton of large ovoos. Ovoos are a Mongolian tradition. They're basically just piles of rocks, though the bigger and more important ones will have prayer flags and blue cloth too (blue is an important shamanistic color because of the sky). You find them on top of every mountain, no matter how small, on passes, and generally everywhere. When you come across them, the proper ritual is to place a rock on top and walk around it clockwise three times. Chingeltei Uul had about 10 large ovoos all with blue cloth streaming from them. In the fog it was really eerie. We performed the ovoo ritual and thanked the sky gods for letting us get there.

Then we decided we might as well hike the rest of the ridge so we did, encountering all sorts of livestock along the way. There were about a million ovoos and it got way too ridiculous to circle them all, so we skipped most of them. We reached a stupa at about the same time as a herd of goats. They all were grazing, but when they reached the stupa, they all went up to it and surrounded it. I was reminded of a Buddhism class I went to last week, where the monk said that the purpose of physical images and icons in the B

uddhist tradition, including stupas and images of Buddha, is not to worship something physical, but to have an image that other creatures can experience and have some cognizance of in other lives. These goats must have all been Buddhists in a previous life, because they all went up to this stupa and honored it.

We made our way back down and caught the bus back to town. On the ride back, something perfectly Mongolian happened. A set of traffic lights stopped working, so this intersection became the most convoluted mess in the world, with our bus caught right in the middle of it. Nobody could go anywhere because everyone was in everyone else's way. But everyone still kept trying to squeeze their way through. People were making left turns and right turns and it kept getting more and more tangled as they tried to slip by. There was a fire truck stuck in it with its sirens blaring away, but nothing could be done. We were stuck there for a good ten minutes before this one guy finally got out and started pushing cars out of the way to sort it out. When someone tried to rush into the space he cleared, he literally threw himself in front of their car and pushed them away. He deserves a medal. Our bus finally got through, and so did that guy's car, so he hopped in and drove away. Cars were backed up for about a quarter mile, so I'd hate to see what happened after we left.

Summer Reading

One of my goals in coming to Mongolia was to read a lot because I haven't read a book for fun in forever. I just finished War and Peace and it chaged my life. Everyone should read that book. Here is a list of books that were recommended to me by some of my esteemed colleagues at school. If you're looking for something to read, these might be some good ones. I would love it if you added any recommendations of your own to the list and I'll see if I can find them at the library here.

Once I can upload pictures again, I'll write some more posts. Get pumped for the homophone post.

The Inauguration

I saw a cool sight yesterday. We went up to check out the progress on a new luxury apartment that the company is building. And we climbed up to the 15th floor penthouse, which has balconies with 360 degree views of the city. It's really stunning. We reached the top at noon, and it so happened that the new president of Mongolia was being sworn in at 12:06 that day (1206 being the year Chinggis Khan was crowned, and so naturally a very lucky number in Mongolia).

We could see the crowd gathered on Sukhbaatar Square, in front of the new Parliament building built in 2006 (the 800th anniversary of 1206) and paid for by some Kuwaiti emir. They were flanked by two brand new office buildings, and behind them were the ger districts, slums which extend for miles up the valleys north of the city where the majority of the city's population lives. It was a perfectly symbolic image of modern Mongolia.

The crowd doesn't quite compare to January 20th on the National Mall, but oh well. Note the ger districts on the hills above.

As for Elbegdorj, the new president, people are pretty excited. He's part of the Democratic Party and is the first ever non-socialist president. Apparently the last guy was corrupt as can be, so people are glad to see him gone, but many are skeptical that this guy will be any different. Corruption is a huge problem, and most politicians are just in the game to make as much money as possible.

By the time we got down to the square, the important people were filing out, but we could see the statue of Chinggis looking down at his newest successor.

ps. If you or anyone you know is looking to make a profitable investment in a developing country, or just want a vacation spot on the other side of the world, try an apartment in the luxurious Regency Residence, conveniently located in downtown Ulaanbaatar! Buy one from me and I can make a juicy commission.

Appeasing the Mountain God

---Updated with pictures---

So I went to the steppes for the first time this weekend. It was pretty incredible. I'll try to get some pictures up but they certainly won't do it justice.

As we were sitting around, a van pulled up and out pops this investor, an eccentric millionaire from Kentucky living in Singapore. He had something in his hand and was waving it excitedly, and as he walked up, we saw that it was a thighbone of a horse. Everyone jumped up and yelled "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?" and so on. Turns out he was hiking around a sacred mountain, found this bone under a sacred thousand-limbed tree, and thought it was cool so he took it. But the last guy they knew who took a bone from a sacred mountain (a horse skull) was bucked off his horse fifteen minutes later, and on the way to the hospital, his ambulance got hit by a car. So you don't want to mess with the mountain gods. Everyone in Mongolia knows that.

So they gave him an endless amount of grief, avoided him for most of the day, and made him return this bone to the mountain god on the way back, and in my luck I had to ride in the car back with him. Having spun the prayer wheels the day before, I figured I had enough good karma to get me through the trip. We bumped and lurched down these dirt roads in a van packed with this guy's entourage of Mongolians, until we finally reached the sacred mountain. You could tell it was angry. We hurried up the mountain and he performed the bone-returning ritual, which involves putting back the bone, apologizing, and flicking three spoonfuls of vodka and three spoonfuls of milk onto the mountain, which represent your past bad actions and your future good actions. The mountain looked appeased as we piled back in the van, and a guy in the back seat started throat singing as we pulled away and bumped back to the city.

Apparently this is a typical day in the countryside.

Gandan Khiid

---Updated with Pictures---

I put the picture up on this blog before I got here, and it is so far a completely inaccurate depiction of my life in Mongolia. Hopefully I will go out into the countryside tomorrow, but so far I have only been in the city. Ulaanbaatar is dirty and busy. It feels very much like a Russian provincial city, due to the 70 years of Soviet influence. The architecture is all Soviet, and Mongolian uses the Cyrillic alphabet which enforces that feeling.

But the city is very cool. I wandered around today, up to the Gandan Khiid monastery, which is the largest remaining in the city. Nearly all the Buddhist monasteries were destroyed in the 30's by the communists, and tens of thousands of monks were murdered. Which is very sad, and as a result the country today has few of its Buddhist roots remaining. But this monastery was saved as a showpiece for foreign dignitaries, and became active again once democracy took over. 

The monastery is a complex of temples, and there were monks in many of them singing, praying, or texting on their cell phones. The largest temple is about 5 stories tall and is filled from ceiling to floor with a giant standing Buddha statue surrounded by prayer wheels. It was really an impressive sight. The faithful were doing the prayer wheel circuit, so I followed along, and definitely felt something special and magical.

Whoa Snap I'm in Mongolia

I got in after 23 hours of flying and promptly went to network with some bigwig millionaire European investors who are the Council of Advisors or something for the company which I'm working for, Asia Pacific Investment Partners, which is a non-banking financial institution. I don't know what that means, but they apparently do a lot of stuff. Non-banking finance is just as foreign to me as Mongolia itself, so this will be quite an adventure.

I'm settled in now, I have a nice Soviet-style apartment. There's no hot water, very few lightbulbs, and it smells kind of funny, but I got sheets today so that's a plus. I'm downtown, right between the circus building and the state department store. Traffic here is crazy. The number of cars in the city has tripled with no improvements made to roads. The drivers don't stop ever, they drive all over the road, and if they hit you, it's your fault. To cross the street, you have to play a game of Frogger. Apparently the best strategy is to shadow old ladies, because drivers usually avoid them.

Things I've learned so far: If you step on someone's foot, you must immediately shake their hand or they will beat you up. Genghis Khan is actually a Persian bastardization of the name: it's pronounced Chinggis Khan. Mutton dumplings are very greasy. More to come.