Across the Steppe, Part 4
The "Department of Ruining Everything" does its best to destroy a Mongolian gem
Whatever his excesses in the day, there is no argument that Chinggis Khaan is Mongolia’s undisputed national hero. He is everywhere. I’ve never been to a country where one single human holds such a grip on the national consciousness, centuries after his life.
The only parallels that come to mind are Buddah, Jesus, and Mohammed, but unlike these philosopher-prophets, Chinggis Khaan wasn’t selling religion. He made no claims of some special connection to the divine, but was rather a simple warrior and—most importantly—a uniter, eventually piecing together one of the largest, wealthiest empires the world has ever known. And despite the butchery and rivers of blood shed to conquer anyone who resisted, his rule was surprisingly egalitarian: it rejected nepotism and corruption, while also embracing full freedom of worship as one of its core values.
On the steppe, near the rocky hills of Gorkhi Terelj National Park, is a statue of Chinngis Khaan—a shimmering monument depicting the great leader on horseback. This gargantuan metal sculpture stands at 40 meters (130 feet) and has become one of the biggest tourist attractions in the country. Completed in 2008, it’s a relatively new structure, but since then, anyone who visits Mongolia feels compelled to pay their respects, even if—like me—giant statues to dead emperors aren’t really your thing.
We were on our way to Gorkhi Terelj anyway, so the statue was only a short side trip, and soon the three of us climbed its steps and joined the throngs of other visitors—Mongolians, Russians, as well as some Koreans—milling out on the platform built on the neck of the horse.
After taking a flurry of selfies, we looked across the open fields toward the striking stone formations that make up Gorkhi Terelj. A wind whipped up from the plain delivering sweet air that smelled of grass and soil, and a few fat clouds sulked across the broad, intoxicating sky.
We were elated to have finally escaped the city, and as I gazed toward the park, I could see the sun shimmering on the surface of the winding Tuul River, where Scott and I hoped to wet our fly lines in the upcoming days. Scott was especially taken with the sight, having poured over maps and websites in anticipation of getting into fish on this trip. The river, however, didn’t look quite right. Rather than a serpentine flow, the water more resembled a small lake. All of the rain from the past few days had surely blown it out, which was just about the worst news a fisherman could receive.
Our suspicions were confirmed after piling back into the car and heading into the park. Just before the entrance, a small bridge spanned the Tuul, which we saw wasn’t just running high, but near flood stage. The river had just recently jumped its banks, inundating groves of trees, open fields, and even a few ger camps set up along the edge of the big stream.
The river itself ran fat and fast, a gurgling highway of chocolate-brown water. In this condition it was simply unfishable and would be for some days, perhaps even weeks. If more rain came, it could mean that these waters (and others) would be out-of-bounds for the duration of our trip. The elation that we’d felt just thirty minutes before suddenly left us like air escaping from a hole in a rubber tire. However, once we entered the striking, otherworldly surroundings of Gorkhi Terelj, we realized that the pleasures and diversions that awaited us would quickly take our minds off the fact that fishing was currently not on the menu.
*
Like Ulaanbaator, Gorkhi Terelj National Park had a large Korean presence, only this time in the form of actual people. We ran into Koreans everywhere (our ger camp was almost exclusively patronized by them), leading me to believe that South Korea must have been responsible for about eighty percent of Mongolia’s current tourism revenue.
I was told this was due to the country being featured on a very popular Korean TV program featuring comedians traveling abroad, but it’s also close and relatively cheap, and there’s a cultural connection at play: Koreans and Mongolians are ethnically almost identical; they share much of the same DNA, due to the fact that the original people who settled the Korean peninsula came from present-day Mongolia and Russia.
Gorkhi Terelj is incredibly picturesque, like the best parts of eastern Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming all concentrated in one magical spot. You could surely film a Western there and no one would blink an eye when taking it in on the big screen. The scenery was dramatic and soothing and hit me straight in the sweet spot. It was obvious why this patch of real estate warranted national protection: it was just one of those places so gorgeous that snapping a bad photo was an impossibility.
On our first day we joined the tour bus packs (mostly Koreans) in hiking into the woods and then up a steep set of stone stairs to Aryabal Temple. This Buddhist meditation center is nestled on the sheer granite mountainside at the top of the valley our ger camp called home. The Mongolian strain of Buddhism mirrors that found in Tibet, and the temple is painted in bright orange and aquamarine, complete with prayer wheels and a thangka (painting on silk) representing Shambhala, a mythical Buddhist kingdom said to exist somewhere between the Himalaya and the Gobi Desert.
It happened to be Scott’s birthday, so that night we celebrated in the ger camp with plenty of cold beer (they sold it on site) and a big, dangerous bottle of Chinggis Khaan vodka, which, of course kicked everything up into high gear. We also drank some wine with a woman from Hong Kong and her husband—an incredibly rude and catastrophically hammered Austrian guy. They were both ultramarathoners celebrating finishing a recent big run, meaning that the husband was boozing so hard that he was surely seeing in quadruplicate by 7pm.
He also took an immediate and vocal dislike to me.
“Who is zees guy?” he spat, waving me away like a fly. “I do not like zee vay he talks…”
His surliness hit home, needling my touchy, vodka-primed nerves. His affable, smiling wife kept looking at us with apologetic eyes, obviously a woman well accustomed to dealing with such a messy, obnoxious spouse who couldn’t hold his liquor. With each drink he sunk further into his seat to the point where he began to resemble the late Dr. Stephen Hawking, twitching slurring while still flashing his bizarre contempt for me behind wild, half-opened eyes.
“Oh of course… you are American. So fucking loud…. I like how your friend talks more…” he moaned, gesturing to Will (who, to be fair, is soft-spoken). “I only want to listen to him!”
His wife soon realized that he had fallen into the black hole of a deep ass-out, and luckily led him staggering and weaving back to their ger before I acted on my impulse to repeatedly punch him in the neck.
Scott, Will, and I spent the rest of the night drinking around the raging campfire with a group of beefy Korean guys and the HK/Austrian couple’s Mongolian tour guide, an odd, elfin woman who had lived for many years with her family in California before getting busted—and subsequently deported—for dealing meth. Her parents and brother were still in LA, while she languished as a perma-exile on the steppe. It was a sad, bizarre story, though we were fascinated by her descriptions of American prison, where she said the Mexicans had her back.
*
We slept off our birthday booze-up the next day and set out after lunch on an all-afternoon, improvised trek that took us through coniferous forest, columnar rocky ridges, wide open grassland, horse tracks, and delivered a series of views that ripped the air from our lungs. The landscape featured massive, psychedelic rock formations, reminiscent of those found in Chihuahua in northern Mexico. It was rugged and alien territory that also delivered a kind of pastoral, Tolkienesque coziness.
Despite our hangovers, the day reached points of perfection, with clouds wisping overhead and blanketing the rolling grounnd with their shifting shadows, while shafts of sunlight blasted hillsides in the distance, creating a brilliant, honeyed contrast that dazzled our retinas and quieted the soul.
The raw beauty of Gorkhi Terelj was staggering, but the park sadly suffered from a far-too-common malady found throughout East Asia, something I call “Cable Car Syndrome,” a phenomenom always overseen by the ubiqitous “Department of Ruining Everything.” This refers to the almost pathological impulse to construct monetizable tourist schlock and contraptions in otherwise beautiful locations, as if nature itself isn’t enough of a draw.
While lacking an actual cable car, the park’s valleys were clearly overdeveloped—full of ger camps and countless other structures—along with monstrous, gaudy resort buildings. There seemed to be little regulation as to what could be built, resulting in the far-too-common phenomenon of large scale construction projects that ran out of money and stopped altogether, leaving us with the skeleton of some oversized, hideous building that will neither be finished nor used.
Korea’s mountains and countryside are full of such aborted projects that sit there, rotting over the years as a testament to greed, corruption, and the short-sightedness that comes with it. Gorkhi Terelj was home to a few as well, including an eyesore of an unfinished megaresort that destroyed the view of a mountain just down the road from our camp. Whoever is responsible for the project should, in my view, at the very least, be thrown to a starving polar bear.
Still, despite their best efforts, Gorkhi Terelj has yet to be ruined, and we only visited a small corner of the park. It’s a massive place, most of which is untouched wilderness, so perhaps a convention center or two isn’t the cardinal sin I paint it as. Still, you’ll know it’s all over the day they build a casino (with cable car).
Brings back a lot of memories for me. Did you take the bus into the National Park? I rode it till the end, to the last village and hiked above the mountains there. Was really nice. This was a few years ago, but I do remember seeing the beginnings of more construction for tourists. It'd be a shame for some of these places to become overrun with people....you make me want to go back before that happens! Thanks for the read.