Elsen Tasarhia

 A Mongolian Costco.

 A religious marker.

 The outside and inside of our ger.

A herd of horses having a drink.

 Locals putting up their ger (or yurt).

 Bactrian camels, mine was the evil smiling one.

 A family ger.

 Away we go.

 Gotta love the hairstyle.

 The dunes of the Little Gobi.

 The wind kicked up causing the jaunty angle of the hat.

Saturday, June 30^th.

We had breakfast at the hotel and loaded up the 4x4’s for our 8:30 departure. We have four vehicles, with four travellers per truck and a driver. Two have the steering wheel on the right side and the other two have it on the left side, which indicates that they import cars from countries that drive on the opposite side of the road than Mongolia, who drive on the right.

It took us a long time to clear the city limits as the traffic was chaotic and at intersections there were cars coming at us from all directions. I saw a motorcyclist who had a passenger pass by, come back without the passenger and then pass us again with a policeman on the back and when we finally got to the next intersection the policeman was standing in the middle of the road directing traffic.

We set off in sunshine, but it clouded over during the day. We stopped just outside the city at a Costco-like facility where we could buy drinks and snacks and anything else we needed. I bought toothpaste too. Then we continued on. I was sitting in a vehicle with three American women, Anne from Alabama and her travel companion Dale from Washington state, and Letitia from New York. Three passengers in the back, which means someone has to sit in the middle and because of the close quarters it kind of forces people to talk and it would be pretty rude to listen to the iPod instead, just saying. However, we had some good discussions because we are all travellers and a couple of us were teachers.

We stopped at a Buddhist marker on the side of the road where there was a circular pile of rocks and some of those prayer flags tied to the pole. The faithful walk around the structure three times and leave offerings. Lunch was at a roadside restaurant which was pretty modern and served a good buffet. And then we were off again.

The drive was through pretty desolate, treeless plains where we saw a few gers here and there and a lot of domestic animals, sheep, goats, horses and cows. There are 3 million people in the country and 66 million animals! The country side is quite attractive with its wide open spaces, small mountains and pastel colours, the polar opposite from the lush rainforest of Borneo.

We arrived at our campsite at Elsen Tasarhai, for the night about 3 pm. It was on a dirt road a few miles off the main paved road. It was a complex of about 20 circular white gers, a main eating area and a couple of buildings with modern, clean toilet and shower facilities. We had a little time to move into our ger and get settled.

At 5:15 we met up again for a camel ride. Although I have done a few of these before I decided to go, because these camels were of the two-hump variety and I had yet to ride one of them. A couple of the group opted out but 9 of us went. We were driven to the ger where the family had about 20 camels. We loaded up and went for a walk for about 25 minutes to the nearby sand dunes of the little Gobi Desert. It was quite comfortable sitting between the two humps of the camel, it was like a built-in saddle. We stopped about half way up a dune for a group photo op and then dismounted and climbed the rest of the dune for the view at the top. These were pretty big dunes, but it was a fairly small area. Then the wind picked up and sand was blowing everywhere. We got back on the camels and rode back down.

When we got back to the camp we went for dinner. It was again a buffet with good food. It rained a little bit during dinner. This is an interesting group and I talked to Frederic from Dallas. Then it was off to the tent for the night. The temperature is very pleasant and the smells from the countryside is wonderful. Unfortunately, it was cloudy, so we could not see the full moon or the stars, but I am sure we will in the next day or two.

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia

 The modern city out side my hotel window.

 One historical figure.

Chinggis Khaan (or Genghis Khan) Square.

 The opposite side where they are setting for the Nadaam Festival.

 A third side of the square.

I watched as several wedding parties had their photos taken in front of the statute. 

 The whole square.

People from different wedding parties in traditional dress.

The local high rise complexes behind my hotel.

Friday, June 29^th.

I woke up early with the sun shining in the room. I went and had the included breakfast in the hotel lobby restaurant and met a couple of woman who are on my tour. Then I spent most of the morning talking to family and trying to organize getting a car key to my mechanic so that he can get my car up and running before I get home. Then I spent a couple of hours updating the Korean part of the blog. At noon I had to change rooms because I have a room mate for the tour. Why they didn’t put me in a room with twin beds instead of a king last night I don’t know. That way he could have just joined me.

Anyway, where I went down I met other people on the tour and our guide Bukhbht, who seems like a really nice. He talked to me about completing an application for a visa to Canada as he is going to the GAdventure conference in Toronto in September. That is a good sign, because you have to be selected for that based on feedback from travellers.

I met my new roommate, Anthony from Alaska (he doesn’t say the US anymore because of Trump).

Then I went for a walk to find an ATM and to see Chinggis Khaan (or Genghis Khan) Square. I got the money no problem and spent an hour or so wandering around the square. There is a large statute of him seated in front of a building and I watched as several wedding parties went up to have their photos in front of it and then the whole party would pose on the stairs. Many of the people were wearing traditional colourful clothing.

Then I returned to the room to type of more of the blog and talk to Anthony. The group met up at 6:00 for our group meeting where we met everyone, except two people who have failed to show up yet. One woman is still waiting for her luggage. We are an older group, probably age 55+. We have one Kiwi, one Aussie, one Canadian, a couple of Brits and a bunch of Americans. We’ll see how it goes. The guide, Buhuu, is a wonderful 26-year old man. Then we went to dinner at a really nice Mongolian restaurant. The diet here is mostly meat, and they offered, sheep, goat, beef, horse and fish. There was a meal that came with the sheep head on the plate and another where the food was served in a sheep skull. I had a meatball dish with potatoes, carrots and glass noodles and a really look local dark beer. It is always interesting at these first dinners as people trying to get to know each other.

Update: It looks like I will not have wi-fi starting tomorrow and for most of the two-week trip. We are staying in remote locations. I learned that there are 1.4 million people in Ulaanbaatar, but only 3 million in the whole country. We will be staying in  the countryside or near small local villages in ger campsites. Gers are traditional Mongolian nomadic tents. Westerners call them yurts. I will continue to type up the trip and post it when I get a chance. So enjoy a couple of weeks of radio silence.

DMZ

The De Militarized Zone.

 Part of the barbed wire and ribbons of hope and peace.

 The last train that tried to enter North Korea a the beginning of the war and what happened to it.

 Really interesting concept.

 The information about tunnel number 3.

 And the entrance to it.

 Symbolic statute. 

 The entrance to the Dora Hill Observatory.

 From Dora Hill, North Korea 4 kilometres across the DMZ.

Dorasan Station.

Inside the station, already to go, if only.

Chloe was my tour leader again and a big help to me.

Thursday, June 28^th.

This morning, they did not forget me, and picked me up at 7 for the DMZ tour. The driver picked up several other guests from other hotels and then drove us to the assembly place where we loaded up in a coach for the tour. Turned out I happily had Chloe again as my guide. I sat beside a young Russian woman and talked to her for the duration of the drive. Her name is Ksenis and she is married to an American oil engineer who is currently working on the Russian island of Sakhalin. We were talking about the problems of the world and she said that their conversations were always interesting because of the things that Trump and Putin do. She also told me that her father was a nuclear physicist and her mother a chemist. She said that her father can’t ever get a passport or travel abroad because of the sensitive nature of his work. 

(As an aside, yesterday I sat beside a woman and her female cousin. Their mothers were Vietnamese sisters. The first one was the child of an American soldier, who disappeared and the other was the child of a Vietnamese soldier who was killed in the war. Both families were lucky enough to be part of the refugee evacuees at the end of the war. The first one has been teaching in Japan on an American military base with her husband for the last two years.)

It is really amazing the people you meet and the things you find out they do. However, I digress.

On the way Chloe told us lots of information about the area we were going to see and the reason for the separation. She told us that the people in the North are undernourished and the average height of the people is actually in decline and in the South the reverse is true as they are getting healthier and eating better than ever before. She said the only fat person in the North is the leader.

The tour of the DMZ, Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea was really interesting. The actual view from the top of Dora hill towards the north over the 4-kilometre wide neutral zone was really nothing special, but Chloe told us that the two countries were for a while involved in a flag pole raising competition. The South stopped at 99-metres, but the north now has the largest flag pole in the world at 160 metres and flying a flag that is 270 kilograms. However, both poles were very small from where we were and the flags were not fluttering. Chloe had been here on the day that they forgot me, and it was raining and she said it was horrible and visibility here was zero, so in that regard it was good they forgot me.

The Korean war came about because after the Second War II Korea was divided into two countries by foreign powers. The leader of the North wanted to reunite the country under communism. When the government of the South was occupied by other interests the North invaded and took Seoul in three days and most of the country shortly after that. The world was afraid of communism and 20 Allied countries, including Canada, sent thousands of troops over. They managed to push the communists back north of Seoul, but not without the loss of hundreds of thousands of people on both sides. They eventually signed an armistice at Panmunjom that kept the two countries dividing and separated by the DMZ. The war never really ended and has been simmering ever since.

We saw several monuments about the separation of the two countries. There was a monument to peace that had rocks from battlefields all over the world. One of the things they took us to was a tunnel from the North to the South. I assumed that it was an escape tunnel built by people. Not so, it was one of at least four tunnels, probably more that the North Koreans built in the 70’s in preparation for an invasion of the South. Chloe told us a defector told the South about it, but they couldn’t find it, so he showed them where it was and then tripped a landmine blowing off both his legs. It was 1635 metres long and 73 metres below the surface and blasted through granite. It was sloped towards the North so that the water that trickled through the rock would not drain towards the South and alert them. The South has built a 358-metre sloping tunnel down to connect with the other one and turned it into a tourist attraction. We all walked down the very steep slope and through the North Korean tunnel as far as we could and then had to climb back up, that was our exercise for the day.

The last thing we were taken to was a very modern train station that the two countries built in 2002 in the hopes that one day the two countries would be reunified, but that hope dimmed when Kim Jun Un became leader. The station is ready and the rail lines have been reconnected so that if it ever happens they will be ready.

Then we drove back to Seoul, stopping at another ginseng shop and finally in a restaurant for another good local lunch. After that Chloe showed me were I could catch the shuttle bus to the Encheon International Airport for my flight to Mongolia. She was a lovely young lady with lots of great information and a lovely accent. She was a big help to me. She also deducted the price of the taxi the other day from the price of this tour, so I did get reimbursed.

The shuttle took over an hour to get to the airport and the weather deteriorated badly and was pouring by the time we got there. The airport is very modern, and they proudly proclaim it is the newest and most modern in the world. My only disappointment was that they don’t stamp your passport. I asked and the lady said not anymore.

I arrived at Chinngis Khaan International Airport (their spelling not mine) in Ulaanbaatar at 11:00 to a full moon. Customs was easy, although like Seoul they too had a thermal heat reader checking people’s temperatures as they came in. My pick up was there and he drove me for about a half hour to the J Tower Office Hotel. I am always slightly nervous coming into a new place and keen to see what is like. First impressions: we drove along a couple of roads past all sorts of businesses, car dealerships, office buildings, shopping complexes and numerous high rises. Many neon signs in the strange alphabet of Mongolia, but some in English too. Many unknown names but some familiar too, Volkswagen, Canon, KFC, Coca Cola, Starbucks, the Hardrock Cafe… Seems like a big, modern place. We’ll see what the light brings in the morning and the tour brings over the next two weeks.

I was not in Seoul long enough or to see enough of the country to do a summary, but I did make some observations. Seoul is the most modern and cleanest city I have seen in Asia. They say Singapore is better, but I have not been there. There were no feral dogs, no cows, no piles of garbage and litter, no people relieving themselves by the road or in vacant lots. It was modern, clean and very well organized. The infrastructure is well developed and modern. The city was destroyed by the Japanese, and bombed into oblivion in the wars, so I think they had a chance to rebuild the city new from the ground up. They have an incredibly modern and complex subway system that will take you anywhere in the city for very little. There are also hundreds of surface buses. The roads are well maintained, and they have several highways or freeways in and around the city and I drove through an enormous tunnel that took me from one area of the city to another, but not sure where.

The people are hard-working, polite and respectful, bow to each other and remove their shoes when entering houses and other buildings. The population is not nearly as religious as the rest of the Asia and there are several large universities here and thousands of young students. I think it is not coincidental that the lack of religion and more emphasis on education has resulted in a more modern and progressive country. After all the countries I have visited in Asia where the women are dressed so conservatively, it was obviously different here with all the young women wearing short skirts and shorts, or tight clothes and more revealing tops.

I alluded to the fact that Korea has been occupied by the Japanese, Australians, British, and Chinese. The people have suffered for years and only got there freedom fairly recently. It is interesting that a country that was destroyed so badly by wars has risen to being one of the major economies of the world. Maybe there is something good about being defeated and having a chance to rebuilt with the money the victors send you, look at Germany and Japan. But another thing I learned from the Russian woman, was that many Koreans were taken from their country to parts of Russia and China as forced labour and now there are large communities of Koreans there. They would like to immigrate back but the Russians have told them that they would have to go to North Korea as that is the part of the country they support. The Koreans don’t want to go there, so they stay in Russia as non-citizens with no rights.

It truly is a messed up world and sometimes I think the more you learn the more depressing it gets.

Seoul City Tour

Jogyesa Temple.

The inside and the outside.

Female nuns bringing incense.

My guide Chloe.

A funeral cart from the Folk Museum.

Gyeonbokgung Palace.

Changing of the guard.

Drummers.

An interesting lovely sounding instrument.

Changdeok-gung Palace.

The king's throne room.

Market street.

Wednesday, June 27^th.

After eating my grapefruit and cereal in my room I was in the lobby by eight and the Seoul City Tours company remembered to pick me up this time. The guide was a lovely young lady named Chloe and I talked to her about yesterday as we drove in the big bus to pick up some other people. She told me that Seoul is home to ten million people, twenty percent of the country’s total population.

Our first stop was at the Jogyesa Temple, the main temple of Zen Buddhism in Korea. Most of the other temples are located deep in the mountains and are more ‘solemn and traditional’, but it has the advantage of being in the city where the transportation is very convenient, and it is well connected to the surrounding city area. The temple is complete with numerous large golden Buddha statues. Chloe told us that 50% of Koreans have no religion, 20% are Buddhists, 20% are Protestants and 10% are Catholic.

Then we visited the National Folk Museum which is located on the compound of the Gyeongbok palace. It illustrates the traditional life of both the ordinary people and the aristocracy. It has exhibits from all parts of Korea. There are displays of traditional farming methods, hunting, weaving, cooking and other ‘housekeeping chores’.

Next was a stop at Gyeonbokgung Palace. This is one of five major palaces and was constructed during the reign of king Taejo, founder of the Joseon Dynasty(1392-1910) which was the final kingdom in Korea. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in the Japanese invasion of 1592. It was reconstructed in 1868. Here we watched the changing of the palace gate guards, not quite like Buckingham Palace, but colourful anyway.

Then we went to the Insadong neighbourhood with its authentically decorated tea houses, high-end antique galleries and many restaurants. We had lunch here in a local restaurant serving traditional Korean food. Then we had time to browse and look through the shops. I sat and watched and listened to a street musician playing a very interesting spaceship shaped drum that produced lovely lite metal sounds.

Next we visited Changdeok-gung Palace, the best preserved of the five palaces of the Joseon Dyansty. The compound has been designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO. Originally an auxiliary palace, but since Songjon (1470-1494), it became virtually the main palace as kings came to live there.

We did a drive by of the ‘Blue House’ which is the official residence of the president. We were not allowed to stop by it for security reasons. It is named the Blue House because of the colour of its roof tiles. ‘The blue tiles and the smooth roof are in beautiful harmony with Mt. Bugaksan behind it.’

Finally, we had some time to explore Namdaemun Market which is the largest in Seoul and where shoppers can get any product in Korea at the cheapest price.

Then Chloe arranged for a van to drive me the one hour back to my hotel. It was not a bad tour. I enjoyed it, but it is a shame that most of the major things in Korea are rebuilt replicas of the originals that have been destroyed by the Japanese in the 17^th century, and the Allies during the Second World War and the Korean War. The whole city looks new, including the temples, palaces and the city wall. But, ironically that probably allowed Korea to build a new city pretty much from scratch complete with new modern highways and a very complex subway system.

The one draw back of the tour was they took us to two shops. One was for Korean 60-year-old ginseng and the other was for red pine oil. Both shops gave a demonstration and information about their products which apparently will make you live a longer and healthier life, and they had shops where you could buy the expensive products. I am sure that Seoul City Tours gets a kickback for bringing tourists in and that helps them fund the tours. I resent it because I have no interest, but obviously other people, particularly Asians, do.