Intelligent Travel

Next Great Travel Writer: The Real Mongolia, Part Two

Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows, and Suzanne Roberts, winner of the "Next Great Travel Writer" essay contest, have been exploring Mongolia and sending IT dispatches along the way. In her last dispatch, Suzanne continues her quest for the "Real Mongolia," this time finding it in the Gobi desert.

Legend has it that the Gobi was created by the stampede of Genghis Khan’s horses, flattening the scrubby desert. In the distance, outcrops of rocky, black hills bubble from the plains, reminding me of a desert not far from where I live, the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, home of the famous, or infamous depending on whom you talk to, Burning Man Festival. But here, meager grasslands cover the sand, providing food for the Bactrain camel, wild horse, and wild ass. This ancient inland sea is also home to the endangered wild camel and Gobi bear, the only desert-dwelling bear in the world (and there are only about 30 left). The Gobi occupies about a third of Mongolia, but it is one of the most sparsely populated area in the world, with only one person per square kilometer. The area is rich in coal, copper, and gold, and China, Japan, and Canada are all getting involved in mining. This will create jobs and revenue, but I can’t help but wonder about the environmental implications upon this amazing ecosystem.

We drive into the “city” of Dalanzadgad, and warped wooden fences enclose small parcels of land that contain gers, motorcycles, and cars in various stages of disrepair. We stop at a convenience store for batteries and water. A khadag, a piece of blue silk hangs from the ceiling, a welcoming sign. The store carries various sundries—sodas, snacks, beer, vodka and more vodka.

We load back into the all-terrain vehicles and bump along the roadless desert to the Three Camel Lodge, an eco-lodge that practices responsible and sustainable tourism. They take advantage of wind and solar power and use both local products and people. The roof of the main building was built by local artisans in accordance with traditional Mongolian Buddhist architecture, without using nails. The tourist gers here are luxurious with in-suite bathrooms, queen beds, robes, and slippers—a nomadic Four Seasons.

Before lunch, I set off for a hike across the plains to, well, nowhere. Crickets and geckos scurry out of my way as I cross the desert. A shepherd on a motorcycle herds sheep, waves as he zooms past. A couple of gers dot the otherwise empty landscape. Sadly, I collect a couple of plastic water bottles next to the dirt “road” we came in on. Although the plastic bottles are few and far between, they are an ominous reminder of what may be in the future as the Gobi becomes a more popular travel destination.

Next Great Travel Writer: Experiencing Naadam

Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows and Suzanne Roberts, winner of the "Next Great Travel Writer" essay contest, have been exploring Mongolia and sending IT dispatches along the way. Today, Suzanne gets a hefty dose of local wrestling and horse racing culture.

The hotel phone rings at 8:30, waking me from a short albeit dead sleep. “You want to come to Naadam?” Keith asks. “We’re leaving right now.”  After my adventures at the Mongolian disco, I hadn’t managed to properly set my alarm. But, I wasn’t about to miss Naadam, so I flew out of bed, threw clothes on, and was on the bus within five minutes. Eriin Gurvan Naadam (Naadam for short), means “Three Manly Games” and is the most anticipated and important festival in Mongolia. Naadam consists of the nomadic sports that date back to the days of Genghis Khan—horseracing, wrestling, and archery, and although they are considered “manly games,” girls and women participate in all but the wrestling.

The horse riding is a long-distance event, taking place on the open steppes, but the wrestling and archery happen in the stadium in Ulaanbaatar. We arrive and walk around the grounds, which are bustling with activity—vendors set up little shops, selling everything from children’s toys, traditional hats and dels (the long Mongolia robes), sunglasses, and all kids of food and drink. Because I missed breakfast, I choose what I think is a pizza. As it turns out, the “cheese” is really carrots and the “pizza sauce” is ketchup. When I ask our guide Oyunaa what it is I am eating, she says, “It’s pizza.” I was right after all—Mongolian pizza.

Before we enter the stadium, I decide to get some pictures. First, I offer a man in traditional dress some money for a picture of him with his horse. We negotiate the price with hand gestures, and once we have settled on 1100 tugriks (about one US dollar), he tries to get Keith up onto the horse. Apparently, the negotiation charades had not gone as well as I had thought, and we had just paid for a horse ride. Somehow, we get the horse man to understand that we wanted him on his horse, and I get my pictures. Then, I see a group of military men whose commander is wearing a black silky LAPD (Yes, Los Angeles Police Department) warm-up jacket, and I follow the soldiers behind a cement building, ready with the camera. I quickly learn the reason for their retreat behind the building—the ladies room is in the building; the men’s, behind it—enough with the camera.

The stadium is full of tourists and locals, and the ceremony begins with a welcome from the president, followed by a colorful procession of soldiers, horse riders, archers, Olympic athletes, dancers, and singers. There is much song and dance, traditional costumes, and five giant mechanical flowers open up their petals to reveal brightly-dressed contortionists, making up the acrobatic stamens and pistols of the flowers. Around the contortionist flowers circle Buddhist monks, shaman, and gods, as well as leaping Russian dancers. All the while, soldiers in Khan-era uniforms pose in warrior stance.

After the impressive opening ceremony, the wrestling begins. The wrestlers wear tightly-fitting speedo-like pants called shuudag and an open-fronted jacket called a zodog. Legend has it that after a woman (dressed as a man) won the wrestling competition, they designed open-fronted jackets so this embarrassing episode would never happen again.

The crowd begins to leave the stadium even though there will be anywhere from six to eight more hours of wrestling. According to Oyunaa, “Mongolia is a big country with lots of space, so we do not have time limits. No space limits. No time limits.” This means that if a pair of wrestlers are well-matched (which usually means about the same size—there are no weight categories either), a single match can take hours. We don’t stay that long; instead, we wander over to the archery. The archers are traditionally-dressed, but modernize their outfits with sunglasses and high heels for the ladies. The women of Mongolia love their high heels—even some of the policewomen wear stilettos with their conservative uniforms.

After the jump, Suzanne describes the mini-Naadaam in the Gobi Desert

The Next Great Travel Writer: Genghis Khan at the Disco

Earlier this month, Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows and Suzanne Roberts, winner of the Next Great Travel Writer contest, traveled through Mongolia together and sent us dispatches from their trip. Over the next few days we'll be publishing the last few recollections from their journey. Today Suzanne describes a night out at the Mongolian disco.

One evening during our trip, we are asked to attend a special dinner to celebrate the beginning of Naadam, the national festival celebrated annually in Ulaanbaatar. The event featured the centuries-old tradition of Mongolian throat singing, dancing, and an amazing little girl who ties her body in knots. Girls in Mongolia start training for contortion at the age of five and are ready to compete in international competitions by the age of 12. This little girl could not have been more than about eight or nine years old, and she did things with her body that I would not have thought possible, including supporting herself on a skinny pole by her teeth.

After dinner, I recruit a fellow traveler, Rucker, a wide-eyed 24-year-old aspiring photographer, to check out a disco in Ulaanbaatar. Although Mongolia was Rucker’s first trip outside of the United States, he is game for anything and happy to be dragged off to a disco. But first we have a beer at an Irish pub, a smoky venue full of locals, expats, and foreigners. A Mongolian singer with a sequined top hat sings “Killing Me Softly” in perfect English. The pub closes early for Naadam, so we head off to Metropolis, a super chic discotheque near the Chinggis Khaan Hotel.

This swanky disco is known for attracting the “children of diplomats.” A round bar occupies the center of the first room. Past the bar, a larger space with leather couches, a glowing neon bar, a dance floor, and a “VIP only” upstairs balcony full of scantily-clad women in stilettos glitters with strobe lights and vibrates with the beat of “trance” music. The space-aged theme reminds me of the queue area of Disneyland’s Space Mountain roller coaster. After being told to move from a couch that was reserved for “one man,” we find another couch, and strike up a conversation with a Mongolian man called Ivan.

Next Great Travel Writer: The Steppes of Mongolia

Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows and Suzanne Roberts, the winner of the Next Great Travel Writer contest, are blogging this week from Mongolia. Keith sends us this dispatch from the steppes of Gorkhi-Terelj National Park.

On our way out of town we stop at the Gandantegchilen Monastery—the biggest in Mongolia and a survivor of the 1930s Stalinist purges, during which hundreds of monasteries were razed and countless monks executed—and which Suzanne blogged about yesterday.

We head out 70 miles north toward Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, a 2006 location for The Amazing Race. It is in the steppes, which are uncharacteristically green due to this summer's above-average rains. We drive 90 minutes or so, stopping briefly as the rain drives down in sheets at an ovoo, a sacred mound of stones crowned with a tangle of blue flags.

Thought to be an ancient tombstone or shamanist altar where horses once were sacrificed to the gods, ovoos guard hills and passes. We follow tradition and, for good luck, circle the cairn clockwise three times, tossing on stones as we go. We pass fields of yaks and sheep and cows—Mongolia supports 30 million livestock (a sheep goes for $100, a cow is worth $400). An old graveyard spills down a hill. We pass dilapidated buildings, gers singly or clustered in tiny encampments, and a dreary army barracks abandoned by the Russian army in 1990 and now occupied by Mongolian forces.

The gracefully hillocky country is ribboned with spiny ridges and palisades of granite that look like piled cannon balls and billowy clouds—you can read faces and creatures in the deeply weathered rock. Moose, weasel, wolves, and brown bear roam forests of cedar, pine, aspen, and larch. We rumble down a dirt track pooled with water to Melkhi Khad (Turtle Rock), one of the park landmarks—the jumbled granite outcrop that indeed looks turtle-ish, but there's little else to see except the insides of a gift shop in a ger. Inside are pointy-toed sheepskin slippers, soft jackets, leather and fox fur hats, Genghis Khan T-shirts, postcards, leather wallets and boxes, horsewhips, jewelry, and prayer beads. Ten minutes more and we are at our ger camp—Guru.

Next Great Travel Writer: Gandan Monastery

This week, Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows and Suzanne Roberts, winner of the "Next Great Travel Writer" contest, are blogging during their trip through Mongolia. Today Suzanne writes of her visit to the Gandan Monastery.

At the gate of the monastery, a woman crouches into the street, scooping rain water from the gutter with a paper cup into a thermos. Street children wearing plastic sandals and wet socks sell bird seed, and three old women sell small bottles of ablution, so visitors may cleanse their faces in preparation for prayer. Pigeons rise with a flutter into the gray sky. We’ve come to the Gandantegchinlen (Gandan) Khiid Monastery to hear the morning chants. One of the few remaining monasteries after the communist destruction in 1938, Gandan is the largest in Mongolia with hundreds of monks. 

We enter the temple and and see monks sitting cross-legged on wooden benches, reciting the Tibetan chants from yellowed parchment paper. Colorful prayer flags hang from the ceiling—each color a symbol: red, prosperity; green, fertility; white, purity; yellow, eternity; and of course blue is most important to the Mongolian people because it represents the blue sky, and Mongolia is known as “the land of the blue sky.” 

Although the younger generation is not as religious, a majority of Mongolians are Buddhist, and the monks play an important role in their lives. If a mother would like a husband for her daughter, she goes to see a monk, who will read her sutras and pray for her daughter. Some even come to find out which day would be most auspicious for a haircut. I am hoping to go back and have my sutras read. In the countryside, I had my fortune told with the ankle bones of sheep (they roll them like dice and then “read” the bones). My fortune was “He can tell you but you must go after your work to had more attention.”  Though I am not sure exactly what that means, I am a little worried about the verb tense—hopefully a translation error.

Next Great Travel Writer: Dating in Mongolia

Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows, and Suzanne Roberts, winner of the "Next Great Travel Writer" essay contest, are currently exploring Mongolia. Today, Suzanne takes a moment to suss out the intricacies of the Mongolian dating scene.

Yesterday, Keith and I came across Andy, a twenty-something redheaded American expat from Iowa who teaches English to wealthy Mongolians at the small school around the corner from the university. He claims to like living in Mongolia except for the "brutal winters" (he says he saw his breath from September to May—the average temperature in January ranges from a high of four to a low of -16 degrees Fahrenheit). Also, Andy says that when he takes a Mongolian lady out for a date, the Mongolian men become angry because they believe that "foreigners are trying to steal their women."

After speaking with Andy, I became interested in the Mongolian dating scene, and I asked our guide Oyunaa, a beautiful young Mongolian woman (one of whom, I am sure, Andy would be happy to “steal”), about it.

Oyunaa says that a couple will date for about six months and then the father of the man will go to the family of the woman to ask for her hand. In the countryside, the tradition is stronger, complete with the theatrics of the family’s refusal and the staged “kidnapping” of the bride. Over dinner at the posh Winter Palace, I ask Oyunaa about Mongolians marrying foreigners. She says, “That’s okay," but adds, “just not Chinese."

Next Great Travel Writer: The Real Mongolia

This week, Traveler editor in chief Keith Bellows and the "Next Great Travel Writer" contest winner Suzanne Roberts are visiting China and Mongolia, and they're writing about their experiences for Intelligent Travel. Today's post is the first from Suzanne, and she writes of her search for the "Real Mongolia."

I began thinking about what it means to find the 'real' Mongolia when I realized a couple of days ago in Beijing that the 'real' Beijing is both the glass windowed high-rises and stylish shops and the winding alleyways of the hutongs, where the boxer-clad denizens ride rusty bicycles past vendors displaying plastic bins of quivering prawns, green snails, and fish still flopping. Both are the 'real' Beijing and contribute to the character of the city. I arrived to Mongolia wondering: What constitutes the 'real' Mongolia?

Before leaving for Mongolia, I imagined green hills sprinkled with the traditional tent-like houses called gers and horse-riding nomads tending their flocks. From the plane, I did see herders moving sheep, green hills, and the small round gers on the hillsides. But as we approach the city of Ulaanbaatar,  a patchwork of Soviet square concrete-block buildings, glass high-rises, and construction cranes are scattered across the skyline. As it turns out, the 'real' Mongolia is both country and city, nomads and skyscrapers.

Our hotel hints at this Russian influence with its sparkling chandeliers juxtaposed against the shabby gray carpeting and concrete walls. My enormous but spartan room overlooks a statue of Lenin. Keith and I leave the hotel and wander around the city.

Next Great Travel Writer: Day Two in Beijing

Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows and the "Next Great Travel Writer" contest winner Suzanne Roberts are currently on their way to Mongolia. They'll be blogging about their experiences, and today Keith tells us a bit more about his favorite spots in Beijing...

Ninety minutes at the Great Wall of China leaves me breathless. After an up and down hike taken under unremittingly overcast skies, the smog is back after yesterday's hiatus and so is the gridlock. The Wall is engulfed in tourists, a surging, smoking, ill-mannered melee that clogs the ancient ramparts that once repulsed Mongol hordes but now, frankly, are painfully overrun. Do I regret coming? Not at all—filter out the human stampede, and the landmark remains stupefyingly impressive—and I see but a smidgen of its 4,000-plus miles.

After a stop at a jade shop that gives me sticker shock (and where I learn that I was born under the sign of the rabbit and so exhibit great wisdom) we crawl back into the city at a pace that approximates that of navigating a crowded parking lot.

Beijing is back to normal.

Before dinner, I flip through the China Daily (“I hope that isn’t the only paper you read,” a Beijinger has warned me. “It will give you only the good news).  Still, I learn that the Bible will be distributed free throughout the Games (there were rumors that China would break rank with tradition); that two women claiming the same dead husband are suing his company for death benefits; that the health of residents in Wuhan is being threatened by a surge in the yellow weasel population; that police officers in Nanning arrested a man who walked the city’s streets nude for three hours to retire a gambling debt; and that a 55-year-old Kaili farmer recently graduated from primary school after six years of study. Important stuff.

The real shocker—in a meaty business page section on China’s emerging green initiatives—is word that Shanghai’s 80-year-old Jin Jiang Hotel is going eco (last year it claims to have saved 202.8 tons of oil, 1.54 million kwh of electricity, 25,558 tons of water, and 2.07 million Yuan with its “Green Hotel Program”). This is an example of China’s effort at eco sensitivity. It aims to decrease energy use in new buildings by 65 percent before 2020 (by 2015 half of the world’s new building construction will occur in China, according to the World Bank; over the next 20 years, say McKinsey Global Institute predictions, the country will construct up to 50,000 new skyscrapers).

Next Great Travel Writer: Arriving in Beijing

Last year, National Geographic Traveler and tour company Travcoa partnered to host the "Next Great Travel Writer" essay contest. The winner, Suzanne Roberts, won a trip to Mongolia with Traveler Editor in Chief Keith Bellows, and the two have just begun their journey. They'll be sending us dispatches from the road while they're gone, and making us jealous in the process... Today's post comes from Keith Bellows, the ultimate Traveler himself.

Full disclosure: I’m routing through Beijing and headed to Mongolia as part of a tour group. This is decidedly strange for me—as editor of National Geographic Traveler I’m used to traveling incognito, usually alone, and completely free to discover places on my own. Going in a group with much of my route preordained is not how I normally make my way around the world. But more than a year ago Traveler and Travcoa, a global travel operator, partnered on a contest to pick the next great travel writer. The winner was Suzanne Roberts, who is studying for a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Reno-Nevada. My assignment: to go into the field with her to offer support and coaching. Her assignment: to write an article about the experience that we’ll run on our website.

It’s just under a month until the Olympics. I’m riding in from the “old” airport (not T3, Beijing’s newest and the world’s largest) after a 14-hour flight from Newark. Clearing customs was easier than getting money from an ATM machine. My baggage made the carousel before I did. The airport was virtually deserted. The squeaky clean thruway from the airport seems swept of traffic and the torrential rains from day before have left the sky uncharacteristically clear blue and smog free. This is not the dingy, auto-clogged Beijing I had encountered when I was here last October.

Great Outdoors Photo Contest Winners

After considering images taken by a wealth of talented amateur photographers, our judges chose six winners in Traveler's first-ever Great Outdoors Photo Contest.


(Nikon N90x, Nikon AF 20mm lens, Aquatica Underwater Housing, Fuji Velvia film)

Grand Prize winner Hillary Atiyeh's travels have taken her from her home in, Lyon, Oregon to Holland, Lebanon, Cambodia, and beyond. While on a live-aboard diving trip in Indonesia photographing fish and coral, Atiyeh snapped photos of these local children. "The kids are always the curious ones," she says. "They were playful and I found them much more interesting to photograph than the fish. I think they thought I was interesting, too."

When photographing this scene in Indonesia, Atiyeh was on the small island of Alor. The kids there make their own goggles using coconut shells, glass bottles, and rubber bands. "Alor is a very obscure place," says Atiyeh of the Indonesian island. "Rarely do [these kids] see anyone visit the island, let alone someone who can breathe underwater." She ran out of film, but stayed as long as she could to play with the curious kids. "Even though there was a language barrier, laughter is universal," she says.

Atiyeh won a seven-day trip for two to the Big Island, Hawaii, including six nights at the Waikoloa Beach Marriott Resort & Spa on the Kohala Coast, two round-trip tickets from Honolulu to Kona on Hawaiian Airlines, a Budget rental car, and one dive with Jack's Diving Locker.

Check out the rest of the winners (and their winnings) in our Photo Gallery, and sign up for our latest contest: World in Focus. (Entries are due by September 8th.) And you can polish your photography skills at one of our photo seminars, or click here for expert photo tips.

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