Live From Mongolia

by Patricia Sexton

  “Ovoo,” he said, pointing.

  Off in the distance, on the peak of a nearby hillside, a pile of stones was stacked into a pyramid. At its base were discarded mementos: a wheelchair, a pair of crutches, even a burned-out car. At its top, a flagpole had been fashioned out of a tree branch and stuck into a mound of rocks. Rippling in the wind from the flagpole’s top was a tattered blue cloth, a pendant to the offerings beneath it.

  Ovoos pay homage to the spirits, and by now we already knew what to do when we saw one. Each of us, including Dergui, collected three stones. Circling the makeshift pyramid slowly, three times, we tossed our stones on top of the pile, paying our respects to those who had come before us. Mindful of the resident spirits, and of Dergui making his own offering, we did so somberly. Visiting an ovoo on an epic adventure into the heart of the Gobi, it was almost impossible to imagine returning to New York City, but that’s just where I’d soon be. Silently, I offered a prayer up to the heavens that my journey wouldn’t end here, that this wasn’t the last of it.

  Piling back into the van, we made our way deeper into desolation, toward one of the most spectacular sites Mongolia has to offer. We were headed for the famous Flaming Cliffs of Bayanzag, a town nicknamed by none other than one of history’s most famous explorers. More than anything else, this was what we’d come to see. Little did we know that this was just the beginning, and that we’d experience far more than we’d ever bargained for.

  In the 1920s, American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews paid a visit to Mongolia in search of nothing short of the origin of man. Into the Gobi he and his party traveled, stopping awestruck at a town featuring something of an inside-out, upside-down Grand Canyon. Aptly named the “Flaming Cliffs,” the town’s massive curtains of bright red bluffs cut into the desert landscape with such authority, it appeared as if a roaring fire had overtaken stage curtains but left the stage intact.

  For Bayanzag, this nickname was something of an improvement; the word bayanzag is simply a description for the bush that populates the region. With tiny, dusty leaves of a gray pallor, the bayanzag looks as if it died of thirst a long time ago, and it might as well have done so—it’s actually facing extinction because it’s been overused as a fuel source.

  Anyway, after Andrews and his team stopped, they dug. Although they didn’t stumble upon the origin of man, they did stumble upon the world’s first modern-day discovery of dinosaur eggs. And they didn’t stop at just petrified eggs. Andrews, who is rumored to be the inspiration for the Indiana Jones character, discovered the fossilized remains of an actual dinosaur. This was not just any dinosaur, but the infamous Velociraptor, a sort of savage, feathered kangaroo that used its fingernails to dig its enemies to pieces. Of course, this was quite a find for the fossil world, and the Velociraptor ended up on none other than the silver screen—playing a leading role in Jurassic Park. Interestingly, the renown for the town of Bayanzag wouldn’t stop at Hollywood.

  Some fifty years later, in 1971, a team of Polish and Mongolian archaeologists returned to Bayanzag and unearthed a fossil so spectacular that it’s a national treasure of Mongolia and has been on loan to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Beneath the sand, the scientists found two dinosaurs—right in the middle of a fight to the death. Their match ended prematurely when a sand dune suddenly collapsed on top of both of them, preserving the moment and capturing an actual snapshot of what had happened some eighty million years ago.

  Now, standing in the still air facing these historic flaming red cliffs, I absorbed the oncoming dusk. Silence radiated in my ears like a synthesizer droning on one note in perpetuity. I could hardly believe I was in this place, where so few had gone before, where explorers and adventurers had journeyed to fulfill their own dreams and had walked away with much more than they’d ever even thought to ask for. Behind me, a couple of weathered old locals stood beside a lunch table of fossils, calling out into the quiet, inserting commas of noise into the tranquility, offering us the chance to buy supposedly authentic dinosaur eggs.

  Signaling that it was time to go, Dergui collected us and drove off, looking for a place to set up camp for the night. Without any fanfare other than sticking his head out the window to check if we were on someone’s property, he pulled over to the side of the road, opened the hatch, and pointed at our camping gear. After spending a lot of time negotiating poles, sheets of nylon, little metal parts, and stubborn zippers, we erected our home and set about igniting a gas fire to boil a dinner of ramen noodles.

  While we ate, it grew dark, as if someone had been slowly stretching a film of black elastic from the indigo eastern horizon to the rusted western horizon. Once the last slivered edge of light had been sealed off, we sat underneath the expanse of sky, studded with white pinpricks. No one said a word.

  As expansive as the Gobi night is dark, so is the dawn of the Gobi morning. There is no middle ground between night and day; it’s as if a main light switch somewhere in the heavens has been turned on, illuminating everything at once.

  Amid the clamor of pots and pans early the next morning, Dergui began to make breakfast. Meg and I crawled out of our tent to see Tobie sleeping half-inside, half-outside his own tent. He was so tall that he didn’t quite fit, his legs dangling outside the door flap like the wicked witch under Dorothy’s tornado-flung house in the Wizard of Oz.

  “Eat big!” Dergui instructed, using his hands to mime. The water on the makeshift gas stove hissed and boiled, and we made instant coffee and reheated leftover ramen noodles from dinner the night before. We had a long drive ahead of us and made sure to follow Dergui’s orders to “eat big.” Later that afternoon, we’d get a chance to see something that no one should ever have to personally witness but everyone ought to see. After breakfast, we set off once more, deeper south still, for the haunting emptiness of Barlim Khiid monastery, now a monument to that terrible epoch last century when the world seemed intent on destroying itself.

  Like most of the rest of the world in the 1930s, Mongolia was in bad shape. A power struggle a decade earlier had resulted in the formation of a Communist government that would closely align itself with the leadership of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hardly an ideal role model, Stalin made it clear who was boss by eliminating pretty much anyone who disagreed with him. Referred to as the Great Purge, this official policy of mass elimination began in the Soviet Union and eventually made its way south to Mongolia. Topping the list of enemies were none other than the country’s monks.

  To get the purge under way in Mongolia, Stalin met with Prime Minister Genden and pressured him to begin eliminating these enemies. Genden wanted no part of this, so he refused. Legend has it that this Mongolian prime minister had a set of balls, but we’re talking about facing down Stalin. Stalin could, say, order Genden’s execution if he didn’t do as he was told—which is exactly what would happen—but not just yet.

  One evening in 1935, at a particularly liquid function at the Mongolian embassy in Moscow, “the two men clashed, literally,” as Michael Kohn writes in the Lonely Planet. “Stalin kicked Genden’s walking stick; Genden slapped Stalin and broke Stalin’s trademark pipe.” If you’re wondering if you read that right, I wondered the very same thing. A drunk prime minister gets into a girl-fight with his boss, who happens to be the world’s most feared despot?

  The obvious happened next. Prime Minister Genden was put under house arrest back in Ulaanbaatar and eventually ordered to return to Moscow, where he was executed in November 1937. But the madness doesn’t quite stop there. To add insult to injury, Genden was posthumously declared a “nonperson” by the government. What this means in theory is unclear; what it meant in practice was that no good would come of anyone who even so much as mentioned this nonperson’s name. In fact, this lasted decades after Genden’s death—until the 1990s, when his daughter established a museum in his honor in Ulaanbaatar after the Soviets left.

  Genden’s successor was eager to begin where his predecessor had left off. New Prime Minister Ch
oibalsan hoped to climb the career ladder and readily agreed to begin the purges that Stalin had ordered. A “more willing puppet,” as Lonely Planet’s Kohn describes him, Choibalsan was both ambitious and ruthless, the most effective kind of sycophant. Incredibly, this former monk ordered the execution deaths of tens of thousands of monks, all in the name of Mongolian independence, which is terribly ironic when you consider that this independence itself was based on Mongolia’s leader taking orders from another nation.

  In fact, Choibalsan got so worked up over any threat to Mongolian independence that he actually slapped a fellow regional leader for suggesting Mongolia team up with the Soviet Union. Anyway, playing the country’s hand with the dexterity of a poker champion, Prime Minister Choibalsan used the purge of the monks to keep the Soviets on Mongolia’s side but at a comfortable distance, which would turn out to be crucial.

  In fact, because Mongolia was able to retain some semblance of autonomy, which had been all but impossible to achieve for other nations caught in Stalin’s snare, Choibalsan’s memory is respected, if not revered, in many circles in the country today. Incredibly, a province is named after him, and statues have been erected in his honor. When questioned about their feelings for the man and his legacy of genocide in their own country, Mongolians will shake their heads, acknowledging the dark period in their history, and then shrug their shoulders, as if to say, “Everything has its price.”

  Barlim Khiid, where we were headed, is a kind of living monument to these deaths. One of those many monasteries to have been “purged” during the Soviet era, nearly all of its monks were executed or forced to flee, and the buildings were torn down or burned. Eerily, all of that destruction was left pretty much intact, as if someone had been pressing a pause button since 1938. Since then, a few monks have returned to the site of Barlim Khiid to set up a museum in the midst of its ruins, a tribute to that terrible moment in time.

  Dergui rolled to a stop in the dust, got out of the van, and motioned for us to follow him toward the entrance. Walking with his head bowed, hands clasped behind his back, he said nothing. At the entrance, while he paced, Tobie and Meg and I each paid a dollar to a lone guard sitting in a security booth perched on this edge of nowhere. Gaping at this scene of abandoned chaos, we silently dispersed to have a look around on our own.

  It was sunny, hot, and dusty, and I meandered in stifling heat through the crumbling buildings, my footsteps crunching and echoing in the booming silence. Ducking into a low stone doorway, I was surprised to find pots and pans hanging on a wall amid the rubble. It was as if those young monks had been midway through preparing a meal and would return any moment to finish what they’d started. An enormous dried bird lay on its side in the corner of the kitchen.

  I was moved by the sense of hopelessness and grief; it was overwhelming. Unlike museums with plate-glass displays and scrubbed and polished floors, the ruins at Barlim Khiid weren’t detached from someone else’s yesterday. They actually were someone else’s yesterday, the despair of their interrupted lives and hopes and dreams. In the sepulchral quiet, I’d peered into a window on someone’s very last moment.

  Off in the distance, I spotted Meg sitting alone, knees tucked up underneath her chin. Climbing a narrow staircase, I sat on what was left of a wall. Looking out over a snaking river that splices the complex into two defunct monasteries, I eventually wandered back to the van, where Dergui was still pacing. Tobie and then Meg returned. In silence, we left.

  For the next few days, we drove and camped and drove some more. Bumping along at a crawl in the oppressive heat, we were deep in the depths of the Gobi. The roads weren’t paved, but the landscape was dotted here and there with families living in gers or wood cabins, and Dergui had insisted we stop at all of them, indulging at each home in bowls of warm yogurt and plates of hard cheese. He’d even banged on the tiny door of someone’s ger until they made meat pancakes for us. There, three generations of women had welcomed all four of us inside as they pressed dough into half-moon shapes and stuffed them with coarsely chopped mutton.

  By this point, we could hardly imagine that the Gobi had more to offer. After our trip to the ruined monastery, Dergui had made a point of showing us the lighter side of Gobi life. We’d ridden cantankerous camels with humps so floppy it looked like we were straddling saggy old pairs of breasts. We’d climbed to the very top of a sixty-mile-wide length of sand dunes and used a grocery box to sled down them, skidding effortlessly on top of the punishing heat of the roasting sand. Dergui had even found a supermarket to supplement our dwindling food supplies, and Tobie and Meg and I had spent a long time gazing at the unlikely combination of live chickens, transistor radios, peanuts, and jars of Russian cherry compote. But little did we know that we were about to experience the most unusual site the Gobi has to offer. The very best was yet to come.

  “Butter,” Dergui bellowed one afternoon, squinting into the silver heat through the windshield. He pulled over to the side of the windswept road. Using his sleeve to carefully wipe the window clean, he got back in. Earlier that day, one of the rear window jambs had rattled and broken off. In order to prevent the rest from suffering the same fate, Dergui had protectively sealed shut all of the van’s windows, and it was now very, very hot.

  “Mahs-lo!” he said again, “Butter!” and we sped off in our little oven on wheels.

  None of us had any idea what Dergui meant. But by this point in our journey, we’d come to expect the unexpected. After all, Dergui certainly seemed to have a knack for finding it. He’d even managed to treat us to the Gobi’s only rainforest, a lush tropical garden labored over by an enterprising and very tanned old nomad, who’d clearly spent a fortune on a garden sprinkler and its water supply. At dusk, we stopped again to make camp. We were halfway to somewhere, but still we didn’t know where. I’d forgotten to bring a translation dictionary to the Gobi, and so had Meg and Tobie. Still though, Dergui kept reminding us about “butter.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said with emphatic urgency. “Butter!”

  Suddenly, and with a fistful of cash, he marched up a small hill to a ger not far from where we’d begun to set up for the night.

  “Call off your dogs!” we heard him shout in Mongolian as he approached the compound. Two vicious-looking dogs were loudly grumbling about his arrival, barking and snarling. At a safe distance, we watched with interest.

  An old man emerged from the ger, called off his dogs, and led Dergui down a dirt path toward a slender stream. Together, they dug into the earth. Filling a paper sack with what they’d found, Dergui offered the man his fistful of cash and then pointed at us. The man nodded, and Dergui returned to our campsite, beaming.

  “Mahs-lo?” I asked. “Butter?”

  “Bish!” Dergui laughed uproariously, “No! Butter tomorrow!” he roared, still laughing.

  “Tonight, tooms!” he declared triumphantly, hoisting the sack over his head. “Potatoes!” He and the old man had picked potatoes and beets from a tiny garden, and we were about to make a stew.

  Tobie deposited a miniature keg of beer, a gift from Guenther the German brewmaster at Chinggis Khan Brewery, into the nearby stream to chill its contents. Meg and I peeled the potatoes and beets for boiling while Dergui built a fire from pieces of bayanzag scrub. We couldn’t find any salt, but we did manage to discover leftover packets of ramen seasoning stuck in a puddle of grease in the van’s chassis. I poured the salted seasoning into a pot, and we all hunched over it and waited.

  Impatiently checking on our stew, we stirred it, waited, and stirred and waited some more. Nibbling greedily on scalding, crispy raw beets, we sampled them over and over again to see if they’d softened enough.

  Finally, dinner was ready. Watery and cloudy from starch, the stew was deep red in color and smelled of absolutely nothing. Carefully ladling the boiling mixture into metal bowls, we took turns serving ourselves the first fresh hot vegetable meal we’d eaten since our gas stove had spluttered and died a few nights earlier. For a long time
, no one spoke. When someone finally did, it was to ask for seconds.

  The next morning, Dergui greeted us early. Dawn was rising over the edge of the distant horizon. “Butter!” he reminded us as he built a fire and we rubbed our eyes. At the beet farmer’s stream, I freshened up, splashing cold water onto my face and under my arms. Pressing my fingertips along my eyebrows, I savored the last of the water’s rivulets trickling down my cheeks, thin streams of chilled tears. The old beet farmer’s unblinking guard dogs stopped by, growling a guttural warning for us to venture no farther.

  After a breakfast of leftover stew and frothy mugs of chilled beer, we all lay down for a time in the scrubby, vast expanse, staring up at the endless cobalt sky. Suddenly, with a breathy, roaring yawn, Dergui sat up and stretched. Draining the last third of his beer, he patted his paunch with his fat fingers and belched absentmindedly.

  “We go to butter!” he shouted just before he wobbled off to urinate.

  Off we went, finally, to discover whatever “butter” was. Slowly and circuitously, we’d begun to make our way north again, back to Ulaanbaatar. But that was the very last thing on our minds.

  A few hours later, at a rocky outpost in a national park, we realized that Dergui hadn’t been saying “butter” at all; he’d been saying “ice.” It was an honest mistake; in Mongolian, the two words sound alike.

  Gurvan Saikhan National Park, the most popular national park in the Gobi, is also one of the most popular in Central Asia. Nearly 15 percent of Mongolia is classified as protected by the Ministry of Nature and Environment. During independence in 1990, a proposal was floated to turn the entire country into a national park. The government, at an impasse with those in favor and those against, finally agreed to transform roughly a third of the country into protected national park regions.

  Today, however, with mining revenues whispered to make up at least a quarter of the country’s annual budget, mining company initiatives have taken precedence in recent years over environmentalism. This is especially true when mining companies are trying so hard to please the Mongolians that they pay off a fifth of the Mongolian national debt, which supposedly happened recently with a Canadian company’s gold interest in the country.