across the Gobi

Three Mongolian women, with their suitcases, boarded the train in Ulaanbaatar and moved into my cabin. The daughter of one of the women was given a bed in another cabin a few doors away from them. The young girl wanted to be with her mother in the same cabin, and so asked me if I could move to her cabin.

My new cabin mates were three men, two from Spain and one from Portugal. I was in no mood to talk, but just unloaded my rucksack in the upper bunk bed and went to smoke in the corridor. The temperature was rising to around 28C.

Time was no longer the same after saying good-bye to Urnaa and Gunje. My feeling of being alone was exacerbated by the long journey through the Gobi desert, one of the harshest landscape on the planet. Not long after departing from Ulaanbaatar, the scene outside the window had changed to endless wasteland.

I looked for the occasional rocks and canyons in the desert. There were also dots of sand dunes – but they cover only 3% of the Gobi. Gers are scattered along the plains. Would I dream of an oasis now?

I felt drained out. My lips were cracked – they felt like layers of thick dead skins. When I tried to peel the skin, my lip bled. My hair felt just like an annoying, big piece of mop handing down my head. After a week on the train through Siberia, it had turned so dry and tough that it looked like worn-out dreadlocks. In fact, I couldn’t feel my hair anymore. I was just carrying it with me, like part of my belongings.

The dryness all over me reflected my emotional state – now drained out by my friends’ departure and utterly uninspired by the endless land of nothingness in front of me.

I knew the only thing that could possibly help me get back some strength was some hot soothing coffee. I desperately felt like some. But I’d run out of roubles even just to buy myself a bottle of mineral water at any of the little stations on the way.

The temperature kept rising. By the mid afternoon it had gone up to around 30C. That was called boiling hot in the middle of the desert. The wagon – now filled with passengers who boarded in Ulaanbaatar – was like an oven. People opened the windows to breathe better. But none of the windows could be fully opened. The heat was dehumanizing us.

I tried to calm myself down by reading poetry of Danzan Ravjaa (1803-1856), the Mongolian legendary poet-monk from Gobi, a man who endured the damn desert. Urnaa had recommended his works to me. She told me that his mother died when he was very young and extreme poverty drove him and his father to beg on the street. Like the romantic Chinese poet Li Bo, Danzan Ravjaa wrote poems of wine and love. But unlike Li Bo, he was inspired not by the comfort of full moon reflecting in lily ponds but the phenomenon of seeing and believing – and fundamentally the limits of human capacities – in the struggle of living in the Gobi.

In ‘The Light of the Rising Sun’, Danzan Ravjaa wrote:

It is useless to take in your hand,
The light of the rising sun.
It is useless to seek to turn around,
The things you did before.

Sitting here is like a dream,
The disintegrating body is like earth.
The wandering soul is like a worm.
Thinking like this, pay homage to the lama.

Although we get a tall ladder ready,
It is useless for reaching the sky.
Although we quickly learn difficult things,
It is useless for deceiving the Grim Reaper.

It is useless for a rich person,
To buy back their life with possessions.
The one with great wisdom,
Does not now watch for the end of days.
(Extracted from Danzan Ravjaa’s poem collection Perfect Qualities)

My body was truly disintegrating – or it felt more like it was melting. I had to return to the cabin to get some sleep. One of my new cabin-mates, Marcos, introduced himself: ‘The three of us had just left Mongolia and we’re going to Beijing to spend a few days there. We’re making a film together, about the journey. Would you like to say something to my camera?’

I’m no good with camera. But for the comradeship of travelers that I’ve learnt over years of rail travels, I must say yes. I let him ask me questions about why and how I came on this journey. But it ended up with me asking him questions about him and his journey. He said they are computer programmers and had thought about a team trip like this for some time.

Taking a nap in the heat wasn’t easy. I slept in my sweat. An hour later, I was awoken by the rising heat. Marcos was snoring away in the lower bunk bed below me. He’d kept the cabin door closed! In this heat, would you worry more about your belongings getting nicked or about a possible asthma attack as a result of the lack of ventilation? I opened the cabin door to gasp for some air.

We were now around five hundred kilometers south of Ulaanbaatar, not too far from the Chinese-Mongolian border. We were also not incredibly far – over three hundred kilometers to our east - from the well-known Oyu Tolgoi, also named Turquoise Hill, a gold and copper project. It is the largest foreign investment project ever undertaken in the history of Mongolia, requiring total capital costs of US$7.3 billion. It has been a contentious issue as to how much role the Mongolian state will play in developing its own natural resources.

We were very close to the Mongolia-China border in the early evening. Mr Zhen, from the cabin next door, looked excited. ‘I’ve been away working in Ulaanbaatar for a year. I long to return home.’ He was a builder, sent by his company from Zhenzhou city of Henan province along with hundreds of others to work in Mongolia.

‘It’s too tough there. One of the things I could never get used to was the diet – almost all meat. The country relies on China for the import of vegetables – if China ever cuts its supply for one day, food in Mongolia will be completely without green colour! And vegetables are so expensive in Mongolia. It’s a rarety in my food shopping. And I couldn’t afford to have my meals cooked for me – eating in a Chinese restaurant is just not possible for me. It’s not even expensive for the Mongolians, but also for Chinese workers there.’

Being the only Chinese-speaking traveler who can speak English, I soon became the language coaching centre. Our cabin was turned into a China advice point. My cabin-mates Vitalino, Felix and Marcos sat around me to have their first lesson in Mandarin Chinese. Like any Westerners, tones are the biggest issue for them. Vitalino, the Portuguese man who’s most keen to learn, repeated the four tones of Mandarin like a persistent three-year-old trying to utter the key words in life.

Then I taught them the pronunciation of the phonetic symbols. ‘Bo. Po. Mo. Fo…’ I have to say it was a tremendous ego boost to have three men repeating everything I said over and over again. Learning to count numbers was a big thing for Vitalino – he had problems with number four, which is pronounced as ‘si’, a very difficult sound for a Westerner. In English or Spanish, you’re used to only ‘sh’ and ‘see’, not anything in between. For the Western ears, ‘si’ sounds incomplete.

‘Now. Try again,’ I said to Vitalino, encouraging him to get it right.

‘See,’ he said.

‘No, it’s si!’ I told.

‘Seeee!’

‘No, no. OK. Try again. It’s like the noise of a snake,’ I couldn’t find another way to help him.

‘Que? How does a snake make a noise?’ he asked.

‘Si!’ I replied hopelessly.

By this time, Vitalino was blushed with both eagerness and frustration. His colleagues, Marcos and Felix, began to nickname him “Mr Four” (not that they knew how to pronounce ‘si’ themselves).

Our language training session attracted the Polish woman next door and her boyfriend from Czech Republic to come into our cabin for a “quick dip”. They also wanted to learn the basics of Mandarin Chinese. Meanwhile, we laughed our teeth out every time Vitalino, or “Mr Four”, repeated his “si” waving four fingers to help us understand him.

Having grasped a few words in Chinese, Vitalino started to show everyone in the cabin how to pronounce properly. ‘Ensena me, por favour!’ I joked with him. Marcos and Felix almost fell off the bed.