Month: June 2026

We have a good week exploring Ulaanbaatar before flying home. Ulaanbaatar isn’t everyone’s idea of a beautiful city, but we find a lot to keep us busy.

(One of the first things we notice: there are a LOT of Koreans here. Korean restaurants, karaoke bars, and businesses are everywhere. They also make up the largest group of foreign visitors.)

Sükhbaatar Square is the undisputed centre of the city. A government building facing the square has a mammoth colonnade monument featuring – of course – Genghis Khan.

Speaking of the man, we hire a car and driver for an excursion out of town to the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex. The star attraction is the 40-metre tall stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan on horseback.

You can climb up flights of stairs for a panoramic view of the surrounding countryside.

The Genghis-mania continues. Back in UB, we visit the new-ish Genghis Khan Museum. This explains everything you might want to know about the Mongol Empire and its founder.

At the top is a palatial yurt-like structure with a golden statue.

There’s an almost religious veneration for the man. Visitors are advised to remove their shoes before entering, pay their respects, and exit slowly without turning their back on him.

One day we visit the Narantuul market. Some so-called ‘influencers’ like to boast about daring to enter ‘the most dangerous market in Mongolia’. What a load of old codswallop. YouTubers will say anything for clicks. Narantuul is about as dangerous as Disneyland.

(Incidentally, the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex has, for some unknown reason, a gigantic Mongolian boot on display.)

Narantuul is a good place to pick up a morin khuur, the two-stringed national instrument. These produce the main sound in the traditional music of Mongolia. Note the decorative horse-heads.

Of course, there’s lots of horse tackle for sale. You can watch people making it.

There are aisles and aisles of brightly-coloured traditional clothing, too, called deels. Men and women wear similar robe-like clothing.

Also lots of items of interest to practising shamans, such as animal parts and bird heads.

You can’t visit Mongolia without indulging in a Mongolian Hot Pot meal. We find a great place and go there twice.

Next day, we visit the Gandantegchinlen Monastery.

One of the few Buddhist monasteries that avoided complete destruction during the Communist purge of the 1930s.

Inside is a statue of Avalokiteśvara, 26 metres tall, we’re told. He’s a bodhisattva.

There are lots of prayer wheels around to spin, and the locals do just that.

According to Wikipedia: ‘As of 2004, Gandan is Mongolia’s largest active monastery, with 100 monks. ‘

And so we bid a fond adieu to Central Asia, after four months of travel. We’d like to give a big shout-out to the hundreds of people here who have treated us with kindness and a welcoming attitude. (Also, heartfelt thanks to our sure-footed automotive companions, Sergei, Vin, and Khan, for transporting us in safety in all conditions.)

Time to be headin’ home. Tomorrow, we depart from Ulaanbaatar to Tokyo, Tokyo to Vancouver, Vancouver to Ottawa.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Housing in the Soviet world seems to have been a problem that eventually got solved.

These are the same apartment blocks we’ve seen all over the ex-USSR territory, including the Caucasus countries we visited a few years ago. They’re known as ‘Khrushchevka‘ or ‘Brezhnevka‘, depending on under whose regime they were constructed.

North America is currently undergoing a catastrophic lack of affordable housing, and promises to build even a fraction of needed shelter seems to be so much political hot air. We have seen no homeless people in our four months in Central Asia. (Well, one or two people sleeping on grates here in UB.) Everyone has a roof over their head.

Even today, these countries are raising housing complexes of ten, fifteen, twenty flatblocks, all being built simultaneously. Maybe we should ask how they do it?

We continue driving ‘Khan’ – our third rented Toyota Land Cruiser of this trip – around the country. (Mongolia has had many noble Khans in its history.)

Next stop is the ruins of the Ongi Monastery.

This was an extensive monastery that came to its end when the communists destroyed all of the buildings and executed 200 monks, scattering the survivors to the four winds. So it goes.

We pitch our tent by the Ongi River near the posh ‘Secrets of Ongi’ yurt camp. For a nominal fee, we can use their facilities. Maria comes back in a state of bliss after getting a massage there.

Several reasons why finding your way in Mongolia is such a challenge: it’s impossible for us to keep in mind the multisyllabic placenames of such entities as ‘Amarbayasgalant‘, or ‘Dalanzadgad‘, or’Övörkhangai‘.

Not to mention these places can be transliterated in several different ways in English (Mongolian uses Cyrillic characters). When you attempt to load a destination into Maps.Me, it as often as not doesn’t recognize it.

Speaking of placenames, we find this signpost in Kharkhorin/Kharakorum/Harharin. Ottawa lies almost 10,000 KMs due East.

Let’s call it Karakorum. Genghis Khan proclaimed this as the new capital of his new empire. His successors built it into a grand walled city until eventually Kublai Khan moved the capital to what is now Beijing.

All very historic, but there’s virtually nothing left of the city. There is, however, an excellent museum with well-displayed artifacts.

We really enjoy Karakorum and spend several days there in a yurt. One night, it goes down to -6 Celsius.

You see these shrines everywhere in Mongolia, even in the least likely places. They’re called ‘ovoos‘, a holdover from traditional shamanistic practices that are still visible throughout Mongolia.

Shamanism, in case you don’t know, is an ancient, animistic belief system centered on nature reverence, ancestor worship, and healing. In the enlightened Western world, we have more up-to-date methods of healing.

Many small towns in Mongolia have an impermanent look, as if everyone’s ready to pull up stakes at the drop pf a hat.

Along the way, we spy a bunch of vultures chowing down on a sheep carcass mere metres away from the road. Fun fact: a group of vultures dining together on the ground is called a ‘wake’.

From Karakorum, we drive to Terkhiin Tsagan Lake.

The Khorgo volcano is located near the eastern end of the lake. Now dormant, around 8,000 years ago the Khorgo cinder cone erupted.

Lava flooded the valley below, forming a lava dam, which eventually created the lake.

We spend a leisurely afternoon hiking to the rim and back.

You can’t go far in Mongolia without encountering yaks. These pre-historic-looking beasts look like they just stepped out of a cave painting.

Sight or Insight of the Day

‘A Mongol without a horse is like a bird without wings’ – Mongolian proverb

In common with other Central Asia countries, Mongols love horses. They are, in fact, central to their culture.

There are more horses in Mongolia than people.

Mongolia is full of horse-y imagery, including on the gates that mark the entrance of many towns.

Just before arriving back in Ulaanbaatar, we spend our last camping night in Hustai National Park. This park is home to herds of Przewalski’s horse, a wild horse species successfully restored to its native habitat.

Or ‘Chinggis Khaan’, as he is known here. We suspect this after arriving at Chinggis Khaan International Airport, checking into the Chinggis Khaan Hotel, via Chinggis Khaan Avenue – well, you get the picture. His likeness is on every denomination of banknote. There’s even a beer named after him.

Nobody knows what the gent actually looked like in real life, because he refused to have his portrait done. The is the famous Yuan Portrait, done long after his death.

From now on, we’ll refer to him as ‘Genghis Khan‘, since that’s the name he’s known by in the West.

We’re staying at the Chinggis Khaan Hotel, a better class of hotel than we usually opt for. It’s walkable distance to most sights we’re interested in, which is important because Mongolia has no Yandex/Uber equivalent, and as far as we can see doesn’t even seem to have taxis. Besides, traffic is bad most of the time in Ulaanbaatar.

(On our return to UB, we discover UBCab – not quite Yandex, but handy for limited uses.)

We manage to put all the pieces together – renting a 4X4, renting some camping equipment, buying whatever else we need at the handy Emart superstore steps away from our hotel – and drive south. We turn off the road at a small village and go overland in search of a particular yurt camp. (They call them ‘gers‘ in Mongolia, but we’re used to the word ‘yurt’.)

This is what we’ve read about – multiple trails crisscrossing the countryside, no signs whatsoever. After 35 KMs, we get within a few KMs of our destination and give up. So we simply pull over and set up camp.

We spend a nice evening with only munching cows and a billion stars for company. Next day, we make our way down some pretty rocky trails.

We had been confronted with these stretches the day before and decided they were impassable. So we take an alternate route. On the alternate route, there is an equally challenging goatpath, but we spy a group of travelers make it down successfully. So do we. And now our confidence level is a little bit higher.

Next stop is the Tsagaan Suvarga, or White Stupa, which isn’t really a stupa at all, but a rock formation.

It’s windy and sandstorm-y, so we stay at an interesting resort, the Gobi Caravanserai.

It departs from the almost-universal idea that everything in Mongolia should be a yurt.

It’s a good place to get away from it all.

We drive to the Yolyn Am, a valley with a gorge that’s popular with hikers. We think the valley itself is scenic enough, as the hiking trail looks like it might be crowded, judging by the number of vehicles in the parking lot.

We spend the night camped near the top of a hill.

Keeping us amused are the saxaul sparrows – bold little creatures that hop around within centimeters of our feet.

We drive to Khongoryn Els, site of some of the highest dunes in the Gobi.

On our way to the Flaming Cliffs, we pass through the small village of Bulgan. Some kind of festival is going on at the edge of town, in which women dressed in traditional clothing and mounted on horses sing songs, some old, some modern.

This is how we spend our days – we drive for hours at a time through countryside without seeing a soul, then come across villages with gas stations, mini marts, maybe a hotel of some kind. Kind of like Australia.

The area around the Flaming Cliffs is famous for its numerous important dinosaur fossil finds. Especially the work of Roy Chapman Andrews, a possible model for Indiana Jones. He also held some crackpot theory that humans originated in Central Asia.

This makes us eager to visit the Dinosaur Museum when we get back to Ulaanbaatar.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We usually don’t do things that we consider risky. A lot of people are put off self-driving in Mongolia because – well, many reasons. No roads. Bad roads. No signs. Animals everywhere. Long distances of nothing but beautiful scenery. Possible breakdown. Needless to say, at the very least, you need a dependable vehicle. (These are not cheap.)

More than once, locals have marveled at us for having neither a driver nor a guide.

BUT – we have an ace-in-the-hole: a mobile Starlink receiver.

This is an additional US$10.00 daily extra that we have with our rental vehicle. It takes care of the problem of relying on internet navigation when you have no internet. It attaches to the hood (or elsewhere) with non-marring magnets that grip even in the roughest conditions, so we always have connectivity.

(It also helps that we have an actual, old-school paper map of Mongolia.)

That doesn’t mean that we never get lost. For us, apps like Google Maps and Maps.Me behave, shall we say, imperfectly? We learn that navigating Mongolian roads is as much of an art as a science. We get better at it as we go.

Currently travelling through Mongolia in a rented 4X4, we don’t have much access to WiFi. Here’s a quick entry into our latest doings.

From Semey, we take another overnight train to Karaganda. Probably our final railway trip.

Karaganda is a coal-mining town. Even our guide’s father was employed in the mines. (We hire a guide to access places that are hard to get to on our own.) The Miner’s Glory monument takes pride of place in the city.

We visit a mining museum attached to a college that specializes in the mining sciences.

We also visit Vvedenskiy Cathedral, an Orthodox church in Karaganda. Maria needs more modest accoutrements to enter and is provided with a scarf and full-length skirt of heavy material.

The area is also infamous for its history as an enormous Gulag (one of many in the USSR) known as the Karlag. In the nearby town of Dolinka, we visit the Museum of Memory of Victims of Political Repression.

Really, to hear its own citizens speak of Canada these days as a ‘settler colony’ built on the crimes of genocidal maniacs is pretty comical when you consider the sky-high mountains of corpses – millions – left in the wake of history as unfolded in the non-Canadian rest of the world. Get a grip, people.

Finally, we fly back to Almaty for our flight to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia two days away. We take the cable car up to the Kök Töbe recreational area. It’s surprisingly modern.

So we spend our first days in UB (Ulaanbaatar) arranging the rental of a vehicle and camping equipment. We set out for a 16-day trip of wild camping and off-roading.

Sight or Insight of the Day

We wrap up our travels in Kazakhstan and head for Mongolia. It’s been a fun three months in the ‘stans.

Some final issues about Kazakhstan – first, do ‘Cossacks’ in Russia have anything in common with ‘Kazakhs’ in Kazakhstan? According to AI:

‘Cossacks and Kazakhs share an identical linguistic root word that originally meant a “free man,” “wanderer,” or “adventurer”. However, they are two completely distinct groups with different ethnicities, languages, and histories.’

‘Both words derive from the ancient Turkic word ‘kazak’. Historically, the Russian Empire used this term to describe wanderers or people who lived free from the control of any state or overlord. Eventually, the Russian convention split the term to differentiate the Kazakhs of the Central Asian steppes from the Slavic Cossacks serving in the Imperial Russian Army.‘

Second, what’s the deal with Borat and Kazakhstan? As someone who enjoys offbeat humour as much as the next person, I find the character of Borat hilarious. But really, it’s not very representative of Kazakhstan. The Borat persona is more like an exaggerated Balkan/East European satire, rather than Central Asian. Maybe Sacha Baron Cohen should have come up with an imaginary country to use as his cultural pincushion?

My goodness, how’s that for an unsettling title?

Our flight from Aktau to Semey goes via Almaty. Almaty airport is a bit of a noisy hellhole at the moment – lots of construction going on in the Domestic terminal.

What is now the city of Semey in Kazakhstan was known as Semipalatinsk when it was part of the Russian empire. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was exiled here for four years. His house is now a museum. We like visiting the houses of well-known writers.

When I was younger, I enjoyed reading the long drawn-out psychological tales that Russians were so good at writing. (Especially the Constance Garnett translations.) Less popular today because, I’ve been told, people have a hard time keeping track of the many triple-barreled names that pepper these novels by the score.

According to AI: ‘There are seven major literary and memorial museums in the world dedicated to Fyodor Dostoevsky. Six are located in Russia, and one is located in Kazakhstan.’

This one is pretty good. It’s a nifty old wooden house, common in this frontier town.

Even the mosques are made of wood.

An excursion to the Polygon region – we arrange a tour to the formerly secret city of Kurchatov. This is where the USSR developed and tested its nuclear weapons.

The site was selected in 1947 by the infamous Lavrentiy Beria, political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project. (This was in addition to his duties as head of the NKVD, incarcerator of millions and murderer of tens of thousands. A busy man.)

The town was named after Igor Kurchatov, the ‘father of the Russian atomic bomb’.

Gulag labour was employed to build the primitive test facilities. The Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from 1949 until 1989. (The first hydrogen bomb was tested in 1953.)

The first Soviet bomb test, Operation First Lightning, was conducted in 1949, in an area that would become known as the Opytnoye Pole (experimental field).

The Opytnoye Pole test site is 45 KMs away, straight down this road.

This is a video showing some of the early nuclear tests at the Opytnoye Pole test site, from nearly the same vantage point.

You used to be able to visit more sights in the area, including the actual test sites. Since 2019, these have been closed again.

Fortunately, a Swedish engineer, Martin Trolle Mikkelsen, specializes in chronicling abandoned Cold War sites. He took hundreds of photos of the area before it was closed down, You can see them here – pretty fascinating stuff.

In Kurchatov, there is a museum of the Polygon housed inside the National Nuclear Center, but it’s also no longer open to the public. Too bad, because it has a lot of interesting exhibits, such as:

• An AP-2 control panel from 1955

• A map of the blast radius. To see the effects of the test, Ground Zero would be surrounded by buildings (including a replica Metro station), military and civilian equipment, and live animals (described on the map as a ‘Biological Reserve’.)

• A model of blast radius effects. It looks like a sort of diabolical board game.

The plaque on a memorial shows the layout of the different test sites. Maybe this is where the name ‘Polygon’ come from.

All of this had a predictably negative effect on the health of local people over time. Al Jazeera (!) made a documentary about this ongoing disaster. There’s a monument to the victims in Semey itself.

We also stop at the ruins of the (formerly secret, now abandoned) Chagan air base. This base was the home of long-range heavy bombers, ready to unleash their cargo of nukes on us bourgeois imperialists at a moment’s notice from the Kremlin.

It’s eerie to walk through these streets that once thronged with Russian servicemen and their families..

It reminds us of walking around Varosha in Cyprus.

Apparently, the near-total demolition isn’t an effort to protect state secrets – it’s due to armies of looters taking everything they can sell to ward off the economic collapse after the Soviet pullout from Kazakhstan.

The garrison town was about 10 KMs distant from the actual air base and runways. There were two runways, both 4 KMs in length, now being slowly reclaimed by nature.

Imagine these runways bristling with Tupolev Tu-95 bombers.

The hotel we book in Semey is an old Soviet pile. It has hundreds of rooms.

Ours is a spacious suite, with TWO bathrooms and a nice view of the park across the street.

Sight or Insight of the Day

Funny story – the day after our Polygon tour, we are in our hotel in Semey. Late in the morning, an air-raid siren begins to wail. (Maria doesn’t hear, she has her earbuds on.) For a brief moment, given our visitations of the previous day, the thought passes through my mind: ‘This is it – the Trump-ocalypse has begun. Donald nuked Tehran, missile silo hatches are clanging open around the world. We’re all gonna die.’ It was nothing, of course. I still don’t know why the siren went off at that time in the morning.

All these resources poured into the creation and production of nuclear weapons. There exists an illusion about the end purpose of these devices. It’s not a matter of ‘gaining a strategic advantage over an opponent’ or ‘ensuring battlefield superiority’ or ‘neutralizing the enemy’s command & control capability’. Basically the result of this technology is the potential extermination of all life on Earth. Every man, woman, and child. Every puppy and every kitten. All the fish in the sea and the birds of the air. (OK, cockroaches would probably survive.)

I read an interesting book last year, Nuclear War: A Scenario. (Warning: Not good reading for the anxiety-afflicted.) It sets out step by step how within a couple of hours in any 24-hour cycle, a chain reaction of missile exchanges could result in an unstoppable Armageddon. Thankfully, half the world would be asleep through it all.

And all this satanic power is in the hands of a few dozen men – not a single woman – most of whom are ruthless aging dictators, and at least one doddering vindictive idiot on the cusp of severe dementia. What a strange species we are.