So you wanna come to Mongolia, eh? Well I certainly can't blame you. This country is among the most unique and rewarding in the world. With a culture that defies classification and bears commonalities with others as diverse as Chinese, Kazakh, Russian, Tibetan, and Turkish while remaining totally its own, with gorgeous natural landscapes ranging from high desert to grassland steppe to alpine meadow to ice-capped glacier-ridden mountains, with one of the last largely nomadic populations left in the world, with almost no concept of land ownership and consequently the largest, cheapest campground in the world, with one of the most successful democracies as well as one of the fastest growing economies in Asia, with some of the friendliest people you're ever liable to meet on this planet, Mongolia has a hell of a lot to offer. Plus I'm here!
All that being said, Mongolia isn't some sort of candy-coated paradise. It's a third-world country, and a lot about being here may seem very difficult to someone accustomed to life in the developed world. So before you decide to come, make sure you think about the following.
The Food
Mongolia is not exactly known for it's cuisine, at least not in any positive sense. In Ulaanbaatar, there's access to all sorts of delicious items, to the degree that you might feel like you never left home, but as soon as you venture beyond the capital city, you come face to face with a stark reality: Mongolians eat nothing but meat and starch, with some vegetables thrown in on occasion. The three dishes you're most likely to see on a Mongolian family's table are khuushuur, buuz, and tsuivan, and they're all some combination of the aforementioned ingredients. If you're a vegetarian, life will be difficult for you while you're here. If you're a vegan*, it will be nigh on impossible. Because, oh yeah, when they're not eating meat and starch, they're ingesting one of a great many dairy products, especially in the summer. However, while those dishes get might repetitive if you've been here as long as I have, I quite enjoyed most of them for the first few weeks, and I still crave them from time to time (especially khuushuur... mmm fried meat dumplings). Most places, both restaurants and households, have a constant supply of soy sauce and Mongolian spicy chili ketchup (soooo good), some combination of which can render any dish at least tolerable. So if you can put up with a lot of meat and are willing to visit a country for reasons other than mouth-watering cuisine, none of this should be much of an issue. And if it is, you could always stay in UB the whole time or, if you come visit me at my site, we could eat in a lot, or at one of the several good Chinese restaurants in Choibalsan. There is a chance if we visit the countryside that you'll wind up with a plate of sheep intestines in front of you, or maybe a freshly boiled goat's head, or perhaps even some blowtorched marmot (see below), but that's part of the fun, right?
Illness
As third world countries go, Mongolia is pretty easy in this regard. There's no ebola or malaria or dengue fever to worry about. However, I'd say that, unless you really watch what you eat, there's a good chance you're gonna wind up with the runs at some point. It's almost never serious, really about the same as food poisoning back home, but it is unpleasant (especially if you're in the countryside when it happens... squatting in a dirty, stinky outhouse on a hot summer day with a bad case of diarrhea will really make you appreciate a flush toilet the next time you see one), and it's something you should be aware of. The major cause of this sort of thing is different definitions of what clean is. While in America we wash dishes under hot, clean, soapy water, here they rinse the stuff off by hand, usually without any cleaning agent other than lukewarm well water. Don't let this worry you too much. In the time I've been here, I've only gotten real bad diarrhea once.
The Weather
Compared to just about every part of the world I've ever been to, Mongolia has an extremely difficult climate. The summers are scorchingly hot, with temperatures often hitting the 90s (and if you're in the Gobi, climbing into triple digits with exhausting regularity). The autumns are pleasant but exceedingly brief. The winters, as you probably know, are long, dark, and unbelievably cold. Most parts of this country record temps of -40 and worse, and in many areas snow will come as late as May or even June. That bodes ill for the remaining season, spring. It's odd coming from a culture where this season is perceived so optimistically, as a new beginning, with flowers and fresh grass and baseball. Mongolians almost universally view it as the worst time of year. It's still cold, the ground is still frozen, nothing is growing, and many animals die. Obviously, however, you don't have to come visit during winter or spring (in fact, as you'll discover if you read on, it would be pretty inconvenient for you to come any time but summer).
Travel
Simply put, it sucks. Mongolia has some of the worst roads in the world. Outside of Ulaanbaatar, there are paved roads for maybe one or two hundred miles in any given direction. For the rest of this enormous country, you have to deal with bumpy, narrow, often frigtening dirt roads that stretch on and on and on. Plus, many of the drivers are pretty damned reckless, and it's not uncommon, or particularly frowned upon, to be drunk behind the wheel. That said, the landscape is so beautiful and Mongolians are so friendly that, as long as you have a resilient butt, the trips normally aren't so bad. It's not too tough to find reliable drivers who don't go so fast and never drink and drive. Additionally, there is a rail line connecting a few parts of the country, and most aimag centers are served by regular flights from UB which, while significantly more expensive than travel overland, aren't so bad by American standards. So you have a few options there.
Price
Actually this one's a bit misleading. While the plane tickets are quite expensive (I've seen round trip prices ranging from $1200 to $3000 depending on where you're flying out of, what time of year you're coming, and how far in advance you're booking), once you get here, you'll find that Mongolia is a remarkably cheap place. Meals at local restaurants will almost never cost you more than the equivalent of two dollars, you can travel six hundred kilometers on a bus for about twenty bucks, and many hostels book beds for less than five dollars a night (not that you'll even need them if you're staying with me in Choibalsan, or if we stay with other Peace Corps friends at various places around the nation). Of course, choosing to live in a little more comfort will cost more money, but even life in the lap of luxury in this place will feel like pinching pennies by American or European standards. You could easily travel in this country on ten or twenty bucks a day. Oh, and let's not forget that you don't have to fly here. A more interesting way to enter this country would be on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, which connects Moscow to Beijing via Ulaanbaatar. Obviously you'd have to get to one of those two places, which might not be all that cheap, but after that, coming from Russia takes five days and costs around $300 (I believe), and coming from China takes one day and costs a third of that. You should probably double-check those prices, as well as figure out how to book a ticket. I've heard it can be a little complicated from out of the country unless you go through a travel agency.
Passports & Visas
Obviously you'll need the former. But as long as you're a US citizen and don't plan to stay more than ninety days, you won't need a visa. If you plan to stay longer than thirty, however, you'll have to register with the police or something like that. Probably not that difficult to do. We'll cross that bridge if and when we get to it.
So hopefully all that didn't scare you off. Personally, I think Mongolia is a pretty easy place to be, especially once a lot of the initial culture shock begins to wear off. However, if you still want to come (and you should!), there's one other important detail. I would assume if you're reading this blog and thinking about traveling to Mongolia, you probably want to visit me. You shold know, then, that as a full-time employee of a school out here in Choibalsan, I have a bit of a schedule to work around. First off, visiting me between September 1 and May 31 is probably more trouble than it's worth. The weather will suck for most of that time, and I'm only allowed to take a total of five days off from work during each school year. There are some vacations given to me by the school, but administrations out here are notoriously slow in releasing the exact dates of those. If for some reason it's just way easier for you to come during this period, let me know and we can try to work it around one of those breaks. Hopefully I'll be able to take some vacation days too. If none of that works out, you are of course still welcome to visit, but I won't be able to leave Choibalsan, and while you are here, I'll be working during the week.
So yeah, the summer is definitely the time to come. However, even the three months of June, July, and August aren't a free-for-all. Us TEFLers are required to do some sort of a project over the summer. For many people these are pretty minor and they rarely take up the whole summer, or even more than three or four weeks, but nevertheless, it would suck if you visited during one. Also, since the summer is our only real opportunity to travel ourselves, I'll probably be planning some trips of my own. But that's adjustable (and you could probably join me!). Obviously if you're seriously thinking about coming, you should pop me an email anyway, and we'll try to hammer out all these fun details.
Well I hope this was helpful. If you have any other questions, let me know. Hope to see you soon!
*N.B. If you're a vegetarian or vegan solely because of the unethical ways meat and other animal products are processed in America, you have no reason to be one here. A few days in this country will put anything Americans refer to as "organic" to shame.
