Arriving in Ulaanbaatar
We touched down in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia just before midnight. Given the late night and reports I’d read about taxis trying to charge crazy fares from the airport, I’d arranged for the guesthouse where we were staying to pick us up. I’d later learn that this as free (score!).
I’d booked with the Adventure Rider guesthouse based on the review on TripAdvisor about the place and the tours they organize across Mongolia. In the spirit of paying local prices, we arrived with only 2 nights of accommodation booked with a plan to arrange the rest while there.
The guest house was basic and backpacker oriented. It had what you needed to sleep and a continental type breakfast. It probably could accommodate up to 12 people, and while there we ran into families, couples, and a solo traveler. Virtually all were booking off road tour through Mongolia. We stayed in a room with 6 bunk beds, shared bathroom, and a key to lock the door.
Over breakfast, we sat down with Soyolo, the owner, evaluated different travel options from self-drive (uncertain of costs, wasn’t going to try this) to paying $90 per day for a driver exclusive of all additional costs (e.g., lodging, gas, food), and the most common “everything included” option. The everything included option ran $240 per day for the 4 of us (Vicente was free) so we elected that.
What I knew of Mongolia came from NetFlix’s “Marco Polo”, my dreams as a child of riding a horse across the steppes while reading National Geographic, and some last minute advice from a Yale classmate Lucas Barton who’d been on several archeology excavations. That said, it was all still just a mishmash in my brain about what to do. I told Soyolo that we wanted to “see Mongolia for 11 days, ride horses, and ride camels” and would go with his recommendations. He recommended a circuit through Central Mongolia and we would leave the next morning. We had an option to go out in a 4x4 Russian UAZ van (more built for the off road, but with no AC nor cigarette lighter/USB) or a 2 WD Hyundai Starex light-commercial van with AC and a cigarette lighter to charge our cell phones (which were our cameras). Soyolo felt that the rains and roads during our trip wouldn’t be bad so we could get away with the 2 WD so that’s what we chose. With our decision made by 8am we had plenty of time to venture out in Mongolia’s capital city.
Our guesthouse was in the downtown area, so we headed out on foot. In addition to catching the sites, we needed to withdraw the equivalent of U$2,640 in Mongolian Tugrik if we wanted to save the 3% credit card processing fee for Adventure Mongolia. That meant we’d need to withdraw a cool 7.1 million tugrik.
While it might sound odd, the top purchasing place in town was the State Department store, a 6 floor building with a grocery store, camping store, souvenir store, clothing stores, eyeglasses store, souvenir store, a cinema, a mini Pizza Hut, other restaurants, a bank, and several ATMs. My strategy of multiple no-fee ATM cards across banks for Soledad and me came in very handy here. We took out the maximum that each ATM would permit per transaction across each of our 4 cards. I’d been warned by Lucas that a friend/colleague of his had his ATM card taken at an ATM so I was pretty careful with how many times I’d attempt a withdrawal at an ATM if I got an error for asking for too much money. Net-net, we emptied out the first ATM (yes, we took all the money it had and it went out of service) and then we headed to three other ATMs to get the rest. It took four ATMs total because if I requested an amount too high for the ATM (in the process of working my way down) I would only try again with that card once given my paranoia at potentially losing an ATM card early in our trip.
After getting the cash, we headed back to the guest house to drop it off. It wasn’t a small quantity of bills. I believe the phrase Soyolo used when I pulled out the money to pay was “it looks like you robbed an ATM.'' Seven point one million baby!
We then headed to the Dinosaur Museum. On the way, we ran into a small plaza in front were parents and kids were playing with a bunch of different semi-life sized/kid sized toys like cars and rolling buggies. It’s hard to explain, but it was fun. Check the photos and videos below. I’ve not seen this elsewhere and there were several people hocking the services.
We then walked down to the main government plaza - Sukhbaatar Square. From 1924 to 1992 Mongolia was a socialist/communist country strongly aligned with Russia. As you walk around town you definitely feel the prior Soviet architecture - square, angular, simple, small windows. However, Mongolia’s economy has been chugging along since it opened up so you see these Soviet-style buildings juxtaposed with modern skyscrapers. Mongolians also seem to like to drink. Check out the size of my beer further down. We saw a few drunks in the sidewalks trying to keep their balance and in super slow motion fights.
Sukhbaatar Square is cool. It’s very open. On one side is parliament. In front of it sit large statues of Chinggis (Genghis) Uguudeai (Ogedei), and Khublai (Kublai) Khaan presiding over the land. The square just felt very Mongolian - at least urban Mongolian. The design was there but it was also simplistic so as to handle the long winters. For example, no trees, bushes, or flowers around.
At the square we met a German/Russian couple with a child Vicente’s age that lived in Ulaanbaatar. While traveling, kids are magnets for other parents of kids and a good way to meet new people. They let us know that Pizza Hut (where we had eaten lunch) was expensive by Mongolian standards (it was $2.50 per slice) but Burger King was much cheaper than in the US. We would not meet another non-Mongolian child for the rest of our time in the country.
Knowing that we’d be eating Mongolian for the next 11 days, we criss-crossed our way over to Burger King before heading back to our guest house to rest up for our journey the next morning. Thinking it would be too cumbersome for our “non-cities trip” we left Vicente’s stroller in Bali. We really could have used it today. He was a trooper though and walked about 2⁄3 of the day. The rest of the day he spent on my shoulders or in piggy back behind Soledad.
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