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.