WAITING IN ULAAN BAATAR
Foreign travelers biding time in Mongolia

WAITING IN ULAAN BAATAR

Ulaan Baatar (also spelled Ulanbator, Ulan Bator, Ulaan Batar, etc), the capital of Mongolia, is not a city with bright lights and great nightlife. In the last years of the 1980s I have been there several times, always with the single-minded purpose of getting on the train to go to China or to get off the train and get on the plane to fly to Europe via Moscow. Each time I spent a few days waiting for my connection. Now, years later, reading Roy Chapman Andrews's (the person who inspired the the character of Indiana Jones) recollections of Ulaan Baatar, I suddenly came across something similar from the 1920s. Andrews says about Ulaan Baatar which was called Urga at the time, "All foreigners in Urga are simply waiting. They go about from one house to another & talk to pass away the time. Everyone is waiting for official permission to do something or other. It would be comic if it were not so annoying." This is exactly what we were doing 65 years later in Ulaan Baatar -- waiting to get a train or place ticket. There were only 2-3 trains a week to Beijing and they were always hopelessly booked. You had to go around beginning people with gifts and cash to sell you a ticket. If you failed to get on the train, you had to wait for another couple of days.

Kukhbaatar Square in Ulaan Baatar In the meantime, foreigners were walking around the city doing nothing. There was simply nothing to do if you were a foreigner in Ulaan Baatar. The only hotel in the city had good lamb kebabs and yogurt, that's what we ate for the whole week. The shop on the street sold raisons and withered watermelons the size of a large apple. Since then Ulaan Baatar has been liberated and perhaps now it is a city with prosperous economy and booming nightlife. I am not sure, I should go and see it again. Stephen Bekes Mongolian prisons Prejevalsky's Exploration in Mongolia Ghengis Khan The Third Asiatic Expedition in Mongolia Foreign retirees in Manchuria My first trip to Tibet Mongolia A Culture Under Threat Funds to Improve Mongolian Prison Conditions Degrading Conditions at Inner Mongolia’s Prison An American in Turkistan