Musings on Mongolia

Mongolia was definitely different than what I expected and defies description in some ways, but I'll try... It was not galloping horses across wide open plains, the wind in your hair (though likely for some travelers it could have been). It wasn't a series of cultural treasures from glorious times. It wasn't mind blowingly beautiful monasteries preserved for thousands of years. What it was for me was a feeling, once which had to grow over time with experience rather than being handed to me in a forbidden temple or summer palace.

Three weeks was the perfect amount of time there because it took at least a week for the experience to reveal itself. I'm more used to the sensory overload of travel - trying to communicate when you don't speak the language, bombarded with cultural sites and somewhat immediately thrown off the dock and forced to swim. This was a slow creep, nearly imperceptible. At first it barely felt different at all. Then as we checked out some sites it felt disappointing. They were small or in disrepair or were grossly exaggerated in the book. Then you start to realize Mongolia isn't about moving from site to site, it's about getting a glimpse of how people live in the country side, which likewise is not about visiting one or two family gers and then just "getting it". It's about exploring the vast expanses and slowly the feeling grows from seeing only steppe or desert day after day after day after day. You can't force or get spoon fed a substitute for being in and seeing vast, vast vistas of green with rolling hills of various height day after day and week after week. It puts you in a different mindset entirely. I was waiting for Mongolia to "click" for me for lack of a better term and then realized it had already - so subtly that I hadn't even noticed. We spent nearly a week driving around ostensibly to check out this temple and that waterfall but it quickly became obvious it was not the destination rather the journey that was the important part. Some days, particularly when we drove across the Gobi, we'd see maybe five gers all day and the requisite herds of sheep, goats and some horses, usually herded by the iron horse (aka motorcycle). The gers nearly always had a solar panel and TV and cell phones which at first was disappointing. How unauthentic! But then you realize what an extremely tough existence they live and why not have a TV? Should they live in the technological dark ages just because they live on the steppe in a ger?

There's something special that happens to your mindset, to your brain after being in a vast expanse for that long that I didn't anticipate but feel extremely lucky to have experienced. There are few places left with that much open space.