into the valleys

It was a Sunday morning when Ganbaatar and Alta came to see me again. ‘Would you like to come with us to visit my parents?’ Alta asked. I was thrilled. What can be a better way of spending a Sunday in Mongolia than with a Mongolian family?

We went by bus to the Darieh district where they live on the outskirt. I followed Ganbaatar and Alta into their local shop to buy some food for their parents. I also bought some chocolates and cold drinks as presents.

Their granddaughter Baika was wrapped up in thick traditional jacket, sleeping deep and sound when we got in. She looked so adorable yet so vulnerable at the same time. Rarely visited by her working parents, this one-year-old always looked slightly uncared for and withdrawn.

Ganbaatar and Alta prepared some mutton dumplings for lunch. ‘Please have some food,’ urged Ganbaatar, pushing a few gherkins in front of me, to go with the heavy dumplings. I was starving. The dumplings tasted particularly oily, which was fine with me – I had a feeling that I’d need these to keep me going for the day.

The couple asked their son Muugii and their seven-year-old, youngest daughter to come along to visit their grandparents. Muugii had to go into the city with his friends. So only the little girl joined us. We walked towards the back of the district. Sunshine glittered in the stream that ran through the rear of the shanty town. We crossed a small bridge to the other side. Three cars were parked right on the edge of the stream – they caught my eyes because cars are a rarity in this place.

We finally got on a minibus after half an hour’s waiting and bargaining for the ticket price. There were about twelve people, including three kids, crammed against each other in this van.

‘This reminds me of my minibus trip to Kharkhorin (also known as Karakorum, the ancient capital of the 12th-century Mongol Empire),’ I said to Ganbaatar and Alta.

‘Kharkhorin? Beautiful!’ Ganbaatar replied. ‘Beautiful place.’

Yes, beautiful, with a magnificent past. There is the 416-year-old Erdene Zuu Monastry as Mongolia’s first Buddhist centre. There is the grandeur of the longest river in Mongolia, i.e., the fish-rich Orkhon River, that rises in the Khangai Mountains of Arkhangai Aimag and flows northwards for 698 miles before joining the Selenge River, which flows north into Russia and Lake Baikal. And there are the Hunnic imperial tombs to be seen in the Orkhon river valley.

And sure, Kharkhorin was also the centre from where Chinggis Khan ruled.

But life is tough there, not only for us budget travellers but the local people.

Back in 2002, even getting a ticket to places like Kharkhorin wasn’t all that easy for international travelers. It wasn’t something that you could just book up from your guesthouse. For our tickets, I mistook a MOT centre for a travel agent. Luckily we met a kindhearted teacher Orgil, who volunteered to take us to the west side of town where the privately-run minibuses gathered.

‘Back then, it was a seven-hour minibus trip taking us 370 kilometers away from Ulaanbaatar to Kharkhorin. There was no public transport – no trains. No buses. And yet at that time the government was considering moving the capital back to Kharkhorin! Can you imagine that?’ I said, recalling that journey bumping speedily across the steppes in central Mongolia, on a van that was supposed to take only seven people but in fact took 16.

I remember the windy dust blowing in my face all the way as I glimpsed the breast-like mountain peaks in the distance. They’ve got pointed nipples with blue ribbons around them…(This is a shamanist practice, popular in the countryside. It’s called ovoos, or offerings, which are sacred piles of stones or wood, decorated with animal skulls, blue ribbons, coins, engravings and broken glass. If an ovoo is near a road, it has a jeep track encircling it, for those drivers who drive round it three times in preference to walking.)

I remember one of our co-travellers was a photographer, Daschka, originally from Kharkhorin. He was returning to his hometown to work there. He was unhappy with the disparity of living standards between town and country. He knew both Ulaanbaatar and Kharkhorin so well. I remember him saying: ‘A tiny two-bedroom flat in Ulaanbaatar can cost you $20,000. Yet in Kharkhorin you can’t even secure the most basic facilities like water and electricity!’

And indeed, we had experienced the lack of basic living necessities in Kharkhorin. Not only there were numerous power cuts, we were also charged extra money for having a hot shower. I was greeted by the guesthouse manager with this question everyday: ‘Would you like a hot shower?’

Back then in 2002, people talked constantly about poverty and unemployment. In the years after the end of the Russian dominance in 1990, the annual GDP was around $300 and there were mass laid-offs in Ulaanbaatar. Urban jobs were scarce and many young people moved back to their homes in the countryside and the problem of over-using the land (livestock exhausting the land) emerged as a result.

The electing of the first non-communist government in 1996 did not seem to bring results in economic betterment. This was the background in which the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) was voted back into office in 2000. Those were Mongolian people’s initial responses to the market economy which was seen to deepen the unevenness of development between town and country. (However, MPRP had a Stalinist origin and wasn’t going to discard market economy but to manage and control it.)

Six years on, poverty and unemployment is still on working people’s lips. Although foreign investment has boosted the private sector and the youth are once again moving into the city and see urban life as the way forward, private-sector jobs are low-paid and far from secure.

Decent pay and job security run against the interests of the international investors. In October 2008, the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation listed Mongolia as “the tenth freest economy out of 30 countries in the Asia-Pacific Region”. The UB Post, one of Mongolia’s largest English-language newspaper, reported that Mongolia received a score of 62.8 in the 2008 Index of Economic Freedom. Mongolia’s “labour freedom” scored 62.4%. It said: ‘Restrictive regulations impede employment opportunities and productivity growth. The non-salary cost of employing a worker can be high, but dismissing a redundant employee is costless. Relations related to the number of work hours are not flexible.’

Being “the tenth freest economy in the Asia-Pacific Region” means a lower living standard and higher unemployment.

One after another, our co-travellers got off the minibus in villages along the journey. Forty minutes later, we reached a village with a Liberty statue. ‘It’s here!’ Ganbaatar urged me to get off the van.

I have to say this is the prettiest village I’ve ever seen in Mongolia. Many houses, with such a variety of colours, have porches outside. Some are tiny and cute – like candy-houses in the fairy tale. There are also a few gers around, like the one Alta’s parents are living in.