Frozen: Six Days in Mongolia
Getting ready for our fast sleigh ride pulled by 10 gorgeous huskies (Photo by Bella Bonner)
The 6-day, 4-night tour would depart late Christmas Day and return early New Year’s Eve. Perfect. Except it would be around -26 degrees Celsius in Mongolia in the depths of winter and can go down to -40 without trying. No, I’ve never been anywhere that cold and no, I don’t want to experience hypothermia. Hmm.
I declared: “I’m in!”
I called my adventure travel buddy Malu Reyes who had gone with me on other exotic trips (Machu Picchu, African safari, Mt. Everest, etc.) and there was no hesitation on her part either. Now it was just a matter of money.
The Philippine Rakso Travel’s ad stated $1,899 tour cost but come billing time, the amount came to a little over $2,000. It included direct flights on chartered airline Hunnu Air and would be a mere six hours from Manila to Ulanbataar, Mongolia’s capital city. All accommodations, meals, and activities were included. The only add-ons would be the P1,620 travel tax if you’re Filipino and a $7 tip for the dog sled musher and $3 for the horse trainer. Tipping the tour guide, driver, coordinator for exceptional service was optional.
This tour’s travel coordinator was Jona. She said we should have at least 30 people in the group or it’s a no-go. Fair enough. But by the end of November, some 70 just-as-crazy Filipinos with visions of self-destruction had signed up for this tour. Haha!
It was time to check my winter wardrobe. I opened my closet for clothes, coats, and jackets and found I had nothing to endure a harsh winter except for a pair of old snow boots and cute pair of frou-frou gloves I needed in Canada one Christmas. I also had a tut or beanie my niece crocheted for me last year. Hmm. Would these be enough to save me from hypothermia and frostbite? No. Luckily, I went on a trip to Japan in November and found a goose down jacket that covered my rear end, another beanie, a pack of heated socks and a pair of waterproof ski gloves that had those fingertips you could pull down to text and take pictures.
I was more excited than a kid on Christmas morning.
We took off from Manila six hours late but never mind. The ride was smooth and I took pictures of the Siberian steppes below us from my window seat on Hunnu Air. It was a wide-open field of ice; snow packed one on top of another from frozen vapors that had started bearing down on this part of the world since October.
We landed and the plane door opened. We stepped out to the gangplank and Holy God Almighty; it was cold as f**k! It was just a few meters to the heated airport building but the cold was enough to say Welcome to Mongolia!
The airport was nice, spacious and modern and the systems were seamless. The restrooms were good and clean although like in most countries with plumbing challenges, toilet paper was to be thrown in the bins, not in the commodes.
Outside the airport was a country blanketed by ice and snow. Because it was so white and pristine, almost holy, it felt weird to talk in a loud voice and break the natives’ communion with nature.
We were a group of 30 herded to Bus #1. The other 40 were assigned buses #2 and #3. A pretty young Mongolian with killer perfect skin stood behind our bus driver and introduced herself as Amina or Mina, our guide for the next six days. She apologized for her English which I thought was good, clear, and articulate, but she felt the need to explain that Mongolians only start learning English in secondary school, replacing Russian as a compulsory subject.
Dream fulfilled. From the airport we headed straight to a camp of gers, the Mongolian name for portable round homes with wooden frame and layers of felt covering. The Russian or Turkic term for ger is yurt. Same thing.
Gers on a beautiful day in a wide open steppe (Photo by Bella Bonner)
I had seen Facebook pictures of friends inside gers and told myself I couldn’t spend my whole life having not gone inside one of those. I have quirky dreams.
Forty percent of Mongolians, I learned, live in the capital city of Ulanbataar and the remaining 60 percent are nomads. They and their gers move two or more times a year for better weather or to find better grazing grounds and water source for their herds of sheep, goat, camels, or horses.
I got to go inside a ger within hours of our arrival. Turns out there are over 400,000 gers in this country of 2.6 million people. Although most city folks reside in modern homes, apartments, and condominiums, the majority still reside in homes that are deemed exotic by the uninitiated. Even in Ulanbataar there are ger districts for those entrenched in tradition.
Inside our modern ger with electric heating, ensuite toilet with hot water and bidet. (Photo by Bella Bonner)
A ger is one big circular room with a metal stove and chimney in the middle. There are no windows except for an opening on top for smoke and light. There is an entrance door and directly across from it is a family altar or Buddhist shrine. To the right side of the door is traditionally the men’s side where saddles, tools and hunting gear are kept while the left is the women’s side with cooking and kitchen utensils. Inhabitants sleep on raised beds or the floor.
Toilets can be iffy for westerners. Since gers are temporary, so are toilets that are makeshift outhouses with deep holes and maybe a wooden plank to stand on or squat. The great outdoors also serves as toilets.
We were treated to a traditional Mongolian show of dance and music using instruments of horsehair fiddles and a wooden xylophone. The sound was pitchy high Chinese, but when the men sang with the instruments, they voiced out deep guttural sounds that seemed almost scary. For a nice surprise, the band played “Sarung Banggi,” a sweet Filipino song meaning “One Evening.”
We had our first meal together after the show. Oh, Mongolia! You pack on proteins like the keto diet is going out of style! Haha. It was the start of our daily meals of lamb, beef, porkor chicken. Mongolian barbecue! Lamb stew! Korean hotpot! All meals were meat, potatoes, rice, and a few vegetables. I’m a meat eater so that was great, but two pescatarians in our group were accommodated with special meals. We learned that because Mongolia is a landlocked country (bordered by Russia in the north and China in the south), fish and seafood are scarce. There are over 3,000 lakes, but fish catch is limited and not enough to feed the population.
On our first night we stayed in a Holiday Inn and that was good. We had a big room with modern comforts, but like Filipinos who freeze their guests by turning air conditioners on too low, here in Mongolian they burn us to death with heaters running close to hell. No problem. It was simple enough to crack a window open for the night.
Our second day was my favorite!
We were on our bus on a steppe excitedly enjoying winter wonderland when it dawned on us that we were not driving on any road or trail. We were just on open ice land following a Lexus SUV. It was like doing an off-road drive on an ATV. It took a while for us to get to where we apparently wanted to go. We got off the bus and from a distance we saw dogs. Lots of husky, healthy-looking dogs standing at attention like soldiers ready for the day’s work.
I was in such awe admiring the powerful looking dogs when just then a pack of them pulling a sleigh rapidly swooshed past us and were making a beeline for the finish line and then whoa! The dogs came to a stop and their sleigh toppled to its side, throwing its front passenger off to the padded snow.
I reached for the rosary in my pocket.
A young chubby boy with the roundest face and pinkest cheeks came up to me and asked, “Where’s your partner? Where’s your partner? Let’s go!”
Ha! He did his homework and knew that I, the lady with white hair, would be one of his two passengers. I turned around and found Malu and off we went to his dog sledding team. Ten beautiful Siberian Huskies were tied to a sleigh with a passenger seat in front. In the back was a wide handle, foot boards and a claw brake.
I got in the sleigh first and Malu sat between my legs. “Ready?” our cute boy musher asked and after giving him the thumbs up, he called something out to the dogs and then Whee! Off the dogs went running as fast as they could, in sync, traversing through their trail, barking and howling, making sure we didn’t clash with any team that might be overtaking. It was such an excitement-packed ride through snowbanks and trees that I did not feel the cold or think about any danger the sport presented. For two short kilometers it was just pure adrenalin running in Mongolia.
Oh boy, the experience would be a hard one to beat.
The same day in the afternoon we went to a hillside where lots of Mongolian horses waited. The horses were small and hardy, built for extreme survival and endurance in harsh climates. We were already assigned our horses on arrival, so we suspect Malu’s horse was the shortest in the lot, appropriately matched to her height.
Our team of horseriders in a Mongolian steppe outside of Ulanbataar. (Photo by Mina)
Before getting on, we were taught to get on and off the horse on its left side. Never on its right. Raise your left foot to the stirrup and raise your right leg over the saddle. Second, never walk behind any horse. Thirdly, we were told to refrain from talking and to have nothing with us on the ride because horses are animals that can easily be startled, annoyed or outraged. Cell phones might ring; loud voices might throw them into a fit. We didn’t want those to happen.
Because of the wide diversity of health and ages among us in the group, not all joined the horse ride.
One of the most famous warriors in history, Genghis Khan, united the Mongolian tribes and founded the vast Mongol Empire. (Photo by Bella Bonner)
We, the people and our horses, rode along harmoniously and enjoyed the romance of being at one with nature. That is, until the wind came blowing. Whoa! Wait, that’s pure cold wind penetrating our tropical bodies that collapse at 10 degrees Celsius. It’s too damn cold at minus 30, dammit!
Suddenly I felt my hands losing grip. Snot was coming down from my nose, but I could not reach for Kleenex in my pocket because of my layers of insulated gloves. The cold bit every nerve in my rapidly freezing feet. Damn! Three layers of heated socks and snow boots and my feet still felt naked. I’m dying!
Ha! Ha! We turned back towards the bus that seemed too far and our horses too slow.
That night we slept in a ger. Malu and I shared one with a balcony from where we gawked at beautiful snow-covered everything around us – mountains, roads, other gers. The scene made clear why the extremely innocent or virtuous are often described as being “pure as the driven snow.”
On Day Three we visited museums and saw a man holding a huge Golden Eagle. Western nomads are skilled hunters who use trained golden eagles to hunt for food such as foxes and rabbits during harsh winters. This particular nomad we saw in a tourist spot charged US$3 to have pictures taken with his eagle. We were suckers born that minute.
Our usual fare was very meat heavy and plentiful (Photo by Bella Bonner)
It was magical seeing an ice castle surrounded by lots of huge ice sculptures in the middle of a huge square in the middle of the city! Kids ran around everywhere, unmindful of slipping or sliding. They climbed up frozen steps to slide down a frozen slide then ran back up the frozen steps to slide down again. No ice or snow bothered their young behinds. Winter is f-u-n!
I did something like that the next day. We went to Mongolia’s only ski slopes, the Sky Resort, where I tried the least risky of snow sports: snow sledding. The procedure was to get your big truck-size inflatable tube from the station and drag it up a steep slope to the top of the hill. There was a “walkalator” or a moving conveyor belt to help with the climb, but sometimes it ran; more often, it didn’t. When you get to the top you get in line for the starting point. When your turn comes up you sit on your tube and kind of lie down; hold on to straps on each side of the tube and then have someone push you down, to my estimate, a 300-meter slope of ice and snow. It was 30 seconds or so of screaming fun! [https://youtube.com/shorts/AMTQe_FENRs]
With all these action-packed activities, the rest of our tour itinerary seemed mundane.
Filipinos can’t go on any trip without shopping, so our tour agency squeezed in trips to a supermarket, a department store, and a cashmere outlet. I managed to avert most shopping temptations, succumbing only to the lure of Mongolian dark chocolate, cow milk mozzarella, and horse and lamb meat jerkies. I was reminded that I had left camel milk in our hotel refrigerator that I had so wanted to try.
We had our first meal together after the show. Oh, Mongolia! You pack on proteins like the keto diet is going out of style!
On our last day we went to a Buddhist monastery. It was an appropriate time to reflect on our blessings. We were granted excellent weather throughout our visit. It was cold, yes, but apparently not as cold as last year. We could have been given a little snowfall for added excitement, but with. Mongolia being in the northern hemisphere and Ulanbataar being on a relatively high elevation, wishing for only a little snowfall might be akin to praying for any snow in Manila.
Just for trivia, Ulanbataar is the coldest capital city in the world. If you want to know what you can possibly endure as a human, try Oymyakron in Russia, considered the coldest inhabited place on earth with recorded lows around -96°f or -71.2°c.
It was time to leave Mongolia. In the airport we started peeling off jackets and gloves. On the plane, sweaters and wool socks had to come off too. By the time we landed in Manila we were down to T-shirts and pants. Ahh, to be home!
Can you turn that air conditioner down a little bit, please?
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