Don't work. Be hated. Love someone.

Enjoyed this very much.

The Reason We're Here

Blue rocks and big trucks. ..

On the road from Dalanzadgad to Khanbogd

Firsts, this week: • Drinking camel milk • Eating dried camel curds • Drinking salted tea • Hearing the horse-head fiddle accompany the Mongolian long song • Driving across the Gobi desert, from Dalanzadgad to Khandbogd Australians could be forgiven for thinking that the Gobi looks like a slightly less red version of the outback. My intrepid driver, Tsevenbaatar, who has a rather eclectic taste in pop music.  I should correct that: He was not my driver; I was his passenger. Camels grazing in the Gobi. ..

Ulaanbaatar: Deel Or No Deel

You could describe Ulaanbaatar as a polluted post-Soviet mining boomtown in the middle of a desert.  And you’d be pretty right.  You could also call it the capital of one of the most historically successful people in the world and the centre of what is currently the hottest economy on the planet. I’ve been living and working here for just a fortnight.  Last week, the ex-President of the country was arrested on corruption charges and neo-Nazis showed up at my office, while Lady Gaga and Jessie J thumped from the open windows of massive SUVs.  There is no way of describing this town in terms that make sense to those of us who’ve always neatly presumed that nations are either “developed” or “developing”.  This week, I have crunched on dried camel curds with a man wearing a traditional deel (pronounced "dell"), and also dined on fresh-off-the-plane Australian seafood with a woman wearing an Alexander McQueen dress. There was also an unexpected dinner with a former finance minister: a man whom the Soviets threw in prison for distributing hand-typed copies of Solzhenitsyn, who has since published the Encyclopedia Britannica in Mongolian and is now personally translating Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. He pointed out that Mongolia only has about 400 laws. His point was that that’s a whole lot more than the United States had when it was only 20 years old. It’s a country in the midst of defining its modern self, and idiosyncratically making it up as it goes along.  How history fits with modernity is in flux.  It turns out, for example, that the neo-Nazis who dropped by my office are an officially registered NGO, albeit a heartily tattooed and leather-clad NGO.  The xenophobic politics are familiar, but the swastika is culturally nuanced in a place that was never touched by the Third Reich.  The only historic anti-Semitism in this country occurred when Russians were killing other (Jewish) Russians in the pogroms.  And then you have to go through the looking glass: The swastika is, of course, a revered Buddhist symbol when you turn the pinwheel the other way, and the oppressed minority in Mongolia were the Buddhists, whom the Soviets killed by the thousands. So the same symbol that makes us queasy in the west is a symbol of an oppressed minority, here.  And, um, also the symbol of the neo-Nazis. As a result of this real-time sense-making – or, in some cases, nonsense-making – it’s a place of fast-forward cultural appropriation.  The signs are all in Cyrillic – so look Russian to ignorant foreigners like me -- Chinese goods dominate, French luxury products confer status, American and British culture are everywhere, and the most numerous restaurants are Korean. But not everything is shifting.  If American identity harkens back to individualistic cowboys, and all Australians are, deep down, the Man From Snowy River, then this country isn’t that far distant from us.  It’s a vast, unfenced wilderness whose people, no matter how city-bound, all have nomadic hearts on horseback.  Just what that means I don’t yet know.

A day in Terelj, outside Ulaanbaatar

In transit to a chosen unknown

I am in Seoul, Korea. But, really, I am in that nether-world so familiar to international transit passengers, and so incomprehensible to anyone else. My body, my mind, my heart are all unsure of themselves. They seem grumpy with each other, not to mention the human condition. Everything enervates them. Me. I am traveling from London to Ulaanbaatar. Seoul is my way-point. Chasing the clock and hurrying the sun, I am in Seoul in the mid-afternoon, having left London last evening. Fortunately, the day is bright, blue and, as far as I can tell from inside the hermetically sealed chamber that is Incheon Airport, warm. So, while my eyes protest the assault of the sun streaming through the glass walls, my mind is grateful for the jolt. My body isn’t trusting anyone: not about the time, not about anything. Seoul was, the first time I came, the most foreign place I had ever been. I found the smells, the food, the habits and the regard for me as a foreigner all more alienating than the unknown people, language, culture and history. My first thought on emerging from the plane, today, perhaps 17 years later, was simply, “It smells the same.” I wonder if, visiting Mongolia when I am in my 60s, I will step off the plane and think the same thought.