I just got back from a 6 day trek through central Mongolia. What a different place than China! Click here to see pics. Mongolia’s population density is only 3 people per square mile! It’s practically all country and no people. Asphalt roads are almost non existent, so getting around was awfully bumpy, but the upshot of course is that bad roads disincentivize economic development and all the junk that comes with it. I saw tons of wild animals including horses, a fox, and even eagles! China ate all their wild animals long ago.

I went on the trip with an high school buddy, Brockett, and two other friends from Hangzhou. We stayed in yurts, which are kind of like tepees but they are bigger and round, with a metal stove in the middle for cooking and heating. Every day we’d drive a few hundred kilometers, and then settle at a new site. We saw some historic sites and did a bunch of hiking, horseback riding, and even camel riding.

One night we played a popular Mongolian game that is kind of like jacks. The pieces are made out of the ankle bones of sheep. Each bone has four sides that look sort of like a goat, a lamb, a horse, or a camel. You roll the bones and then try to flick the ones that match at each other. If you flick successfully, then you get to pick up those bones and keep going until you miss or there are no more matches. The rest gets picked up by the next player, who rolls the bones again. There are a bunch of other rules I don’t know.

The highlight of the trip was our last night on the trek. We’d been driving all day and pulled into our camp as the sun was setting. We soon discovered that the nomads we were planning to stay with had already left. Previously nights we’d had our own yurt to ourselves, provided by friends of our tour guide, but this time we were going to have to crash at a stranger’s yurt; it was too cold to simply sleep outside.

A woman and her 1 year old baby popped out of the nearest yurt and our guide quickly convinced her to let us stay. The four of us, along with another Argentinean guy that joined our tour, lined up like sausages on her floor to sleep, but not before being “forced” to drink copious amounts of vodka. 10 shots in, as we were dozing off, I decided to turn my body 180 degrees so I wouldn’t feel so cramped, but all the Mongolians immediately berated me for pointing my feet at the sacred back side of the yurt, smiled real big, and then proceeded to give me 3 penalty vodka shots. I slept like a log that night.

As we headed back to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, we saw a big asphalt road being built. We were told the Chinese are “helping” the Mongolians to build a central, north-south road all the way through Mongolia from China to Russia. Our tour guide, at least, wasn’t too happy about it. He’s worried about China’s tightening economic control over Mongolia and thinks that continued economic development will destroy Mongolia’s rural communities. Half the population already lives in Ulaanbaatar, and the city has doubled in size in the last ten years. Urbanization is in full swing.