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Route in China (MONGOLIA)

Bec
2004-09-19 16:43:48

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during the purges in '37.

There is no Russian city without a Circus so, here is yet another trace of past soviet influence. Physical markings such as these look out of place because the people don't look Russian at all and because the traditional mongol dress is quite common on city streets.

Traditional dress is quite common on the streets of Ulaan Baatar. I could not resist when I saw this group posing in front of Ganden for a family picture being taken by one of them.

Ganden Hiid
Kublai Khan made political alliances with the Yellow Sect against the Sakya Sect (Red hat) in the course of establishing Mongol hegemony over Tibet in the 13th century but Shamanism remained the popular religion until Altan Khan made Tibetan Buddhism the state religion in the 16th century and declared himself a "living Buddha" by the same occasion.

This large Gandantegchin monastery, built in 1840, was kept open by the communists during the religious persecutions of the 1930's as a showcase of liberalism very much in the same way that the Orthodox Zagorsk Monastery near Moscow was maintained.

Mongolia
One of my internet contacts was a student. I visited the museum with him but we didn't strike it off so we said bye and that was that. I was pretty lucky because out of the forty or so internet contacts I met on this trip, there were only two that I couldn't get along with.

Batbold, another one of my contacts, was very busy with a delegation of Ukrainian businessmen. We met only briefly but he asked his accountant Dandin Suren Otgo and his driver Chluum Baatar to show me the countryside. I am very glad they did for that is where to find the real Mongolia.

This pile of rocks with a few prayer flags is called an Ovoo. Walking around the Ovoo in a clockwise direction an adding a stone to the pile will bring you good fortune according to an ancient shamanist belief introduced from the Bon religion into Tibetan Buddhism in the 7th century and brought here in the 16th. The weather was not clement but the Mongol steppe showed all its wild beauty in the high wind south of the city.

The Mongolian steppe south of Ulaan Baatar. If I believed in re-incarnation I might think that I have learned to love scenery like this in an anterior life but then I would have to have also had anterior lives as a Bedouin and as an Inuit for I equally love the vast expanses of the Sahara and of the high Canadian Arctic. As I don't believe in anything I can afford to just love this kind of scenery without having to understand why...

This tourist oriented Genghis Khan camp shows how the noble's gers could be moved without dismantling them. It is a pity that Mongolia's tourist potential stagnates because the bureaucratic controls of soviet times have not yet been removed. Mongolia is not the only country to labour under the delusion that tourists will cope with two tier pricing and with visas that are needlessly hard to get. Tourism is one industry where optimization of revenues by volume has been proved to work better than optimization by price.

In all seriousness, it is of historical record that the gers of Mongol Khans and nobles were incredibly luxurious when the Mongol empire extended from the Pacific Ocean to the Black Sea and from the Himalayas to Baikal Lake.

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