The People’s Republic of Mongolia

Current population of 2.8 million people92.9% Khalk Mongolian

5% Kazakh

4.8 million ethnic Mongolians estimated in the People’s Republic of China province

of Inner Mongolia

Size of the country: Just a little over 600,000 square miles

One fifth the size of the contiguous United StatesSlightly smaller than Alaska

Border of about 3,000 miles with ChinaBorder of about 2,200 miles with Russia

(mostly with Siberia and Tuva)

Arable Land: 0.77%

Most of the population’s economy is based on herding and skin trading (sheep, camel)

Mining deposits of copper, coal and molybdenum. Uranium is rumored in the northwest

Mongolia

21 districts or aimags

Five national parks

One railroad line

Zero paved roads east-west

One semi-paved road north-south

Lower one-third of the country is the Gobi Desert

98% literacy rateMongolian language, Cyrillic alphabetMinority languages : Kazakh, Russian

(about half of all Mongolians are fluent in Russian)

Religion:50% are Buddhist

40% are none5% are Shamanist or Christian

5% are Muslim

Mongolian History

Chinggis Khan and later Kubla Khan controlled the world’s largest land

empire ever in the 13th Century.

The country came under control of China from the 16th Century until 1921.

Officially Mongolia became a republic in 1924, and that same year declared itself communist. Mongolia was the second

declared communist country in the world, after Soviet Russia.

The great liberator of Mongolia was named Sukhbaatar.

His statue pictured here in Sukhbaatar Square in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar.

МОНГОЛ УЛСЫН

The traditional Mongolian script was centuries old, but was banned during the Soviet era in favor of Cyrillic and now is used only in very formal or traditional settings.

Mongolian History

During the 1930’s, the country became Stalinist and repressive under

Choibalsan, among other things destroying all but two of its Buddhist monasteries and killing an estimated

17,000 monks.

Up until 1990, almost one-third of GDP was direct aid from the Soviet Union.

This aid disappeared virtually overnight, and the country now has poverty in

ways that it never experienced during the years between 1924 and 1990.

Erdene-Zuu monastery, Xharhorin, site of Karakorum. The monastery was built in 1586 using the materials of the old city of Karakourm, Chinggis Khan’s capital.

Erdene-Zuu was one of two monasteries to survive the Soviet purges of the 1930’s.

Gandan Hiid was the other surviving monastery, in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. The building on the left houses a 60-foot gold-plated statue of Buddha, built in 1995.

Russians call them “yurts,” Mongolians call them “gers.” About half of all Mongolians, including those living in urban areas, live in gers. Stove fuel is usually dried sheep dung and not coal or wood, since forests are few and far between and coal costs money.

The four basic food groups of Mongolia are mutton, mutton, mutton and mutton.

Buuz – mutton dumplings

Hoshuur – mutton pies

Tsoivan – noodles with mutton

The part most loved by Mongolians is the fat of the hindquarters.

Food is fuel in Mongolia, and the most common chef’s technique is to boil the mutton, throw some salt on it and dinner is served.

Next time you see a Mongolian restaurant, be aware that you’re having Chinese food by another name.

Naadam – the national holiday of Mongolia in July (sort of like July 4th in the U.S.)

One of the three “manly” sports of Naadam is Mongolian wrestling.

Men and women both compete in the second “manly” sport of Naadam, which is archery, but they compete separately.

By far the most important of the three “manly” sports is horse racing.

All horse racing competitors in the “manly” sport of horse racing are under twelve years old, and both boys and girls can compete.

My first Peace Corps site was in the city of Sukhbaatar, in the aimag (district, state) of Selenge, two miles from the border with Russia and the last train stop in Mongolia before entering Siberia.

Ovos are atop any sizable hill in Mongolia. The tradition is to walk around them three times clockwise and make an offering (money, vodka bottle, cow head, whatever is handy).

Almost all agriculture in Mongolia takes place in the Selenge River Valley, near where the Selenge and Orkhon Rivers meet. These two rivers flow north into Lake Baikal in Siberia, the world’s largest freshwater lake.

My second site as a Peace Corps Volunteer was in a city called Muren, located in the aimag of Huvsgul

The city of Muren, Mongolia

Muren is heavily forested, so most stoves use wood instead of coal and dung, which is more common in the rest of Mongolia. There is also commercial logging in this area, mostly by U.S.-based companies.

I lived in a ger next door to this retired couple picture above.

My first Peace Corps assignment was teacher training, which meant language teaching to adult teachers as well as courses in teaching methodology.

My counterpart and best friend was Naraa, the woman in yellow. This is a Tsgaan Sar (Asian new year) party that we had with an 8th grade class that Naraa and I co-taught.

By horse into eastern Huvsgul for a cave mapping expedition…

Tea break with our guide

Dinner courtesy of the Egiin River and Mike Richmond

The entrance and the inner ovo of the most sacred cave of Huvsgul province

Climbing a mountain called

Munkh Sayrdukh

Transportation issues with the Jarren Yuus (69)

Lake Huvsgul – 80 miles long, at the widest about two miles, up to 800 feet deep

Lake

Huvsgul

Town of Xankh at the north end of Lake Huvsgul,

Munkh Sayrdukh in the background, which is on the border with Siberia

Munkh Sayrdukh

Phil on the summit ridge

Phil and Gulliver at camp

Greg, Phil & Gulliver on the summit of Munkh Sayrdukh,

with Lenin’s head

Bayan Hongor

City of Bayan Hongor

Teacher Training “Olympics” in Bayan Hongor

Matt Rees & his teachers

Bayan Hongor

Taking a walk through Central Mongolia

Skeeter, Gulliver, Roger, Matty, Greg

A little stroll of about 100 miles between Bayan Hongor on the edge of the Gobi Desert over the central mountains to the city of Tsetserleg

Turkic Stones

Mongolian grandmother with prayer beads

Cooking with sheep dung

End of the day

Roger Cohen giving a connoisseur’s approval to some arrul

Cheese in the summer is usually from mare’s milk, called arrul in Mongolian

Mongolian herder

Mongolian mountains in the Spring

A visit to the east …

Camels on the steppe

The highest point in Sukhbaatar aimag, with China in the background and our man in Sukhbaatar, Mike Amey, in the foreground

Roasting a marmot

Moving to

Bayan-Olgii aimag

My 3rd Peace Corps site within two years

The city of Olgii in Winter

Mongolia is 94% ethnic Mongolian in population

However, Bayan-Olgii aimag is almost 90% Kazakh

(about 5% of the country’s overall population)

The first language of most people here is Kazakh, although

there are also Uighars and Tuvans in the region

Almost all of the Kazakh-Mongolians are Muslim

If you’d like to read more on this region, I was the one that got my friend Louisa the teaching job in the farthest western village of the entire country, a place called Tsengel, which led to the writing of this book. I make a couple of cameo appearances.

Her book won the inaugural Royal Society of Literature

Ondaatje Prize in 2004.

My new Peace Corps job was in the Altai Tavanbogd National Park

Me in my Mongolian riding jacket, with my

Mongolian horse

The pack mule of western Mongolia

Kazakh Couple

Kazakh Rug Weaving

Couple with Kazakh Rug

Village in Olgii aimag

Altai Tavanbogd National Park

Sunset in Altai Tavanbogd Park

Turkic monument in the park

Kazakh mosque in Altai Tavanbogd Park

The Potani Glacier and three of the Tavanbogd Mountains (Five Saints). The mountain in the middle is Huiten Uul (Cold Mountain), the highest in Mongolia at 14,875 feet.

The summit of Huiten Uul is shared between Russia, China & Mongolia

Heading up the Potani Glacier

The route was twelve miles up the glacier and then a climb of an ice wall to the summit ridge

The four foreigners on the summit ridge

Rogier, Cedric, Matty & Greg

Burying the skanky Skeeter hat with a Mongolian sacred scarf

China’s Urumchi province from the summit of Huiten Uul

Russia and Siberia from the summit of Huiten Uul

My last two weeks in Mongolia I went out on two trips:

The Gobi Desert and Gurvansaikhan National Park

Then for a last two days of camping, in Terelj National Park

90% of the Gobi Desert looks like this

Gurvansaikhan National Park

The Gobi Desert

Over 500,000 square miles in area

About ½ in the Republic of Mongolia and ½ in the Inner Mongolia province

of China

Temperature extremes in one day can go from -30°F to over 100°F

Terelj National Park, two days before I left Mongolia