DAY 0: THE WORST BUS RIDE OF MY LIFE

It was the middle of the night, or maybe 5 am. The scenery was still amazing, no doubt, but there wasn’t a shred of moon to see it by. We’d been rattling northwest-ish out of Ulaanbaatar since the previous afternoon in a big old bus with about forty stoic locals and four tourists: Tama, me and Maya and Sharon, a couple of Israeli girls from the LG Guesthouse. We were up the very back of the bus on the right, directly above the wheel—the worst seats in the house. Our heads were about thirty centimetres below the bus’s curved ceiling. As the shorter moron, I sat in the corner.

The road was bumpy, ludicrously bumpy. Theme-park bumpy. A small bump would propel us out of our seats by about ten centimetres; a medium bump, twenty to thirty centimetres. The large bumps attempted to launch us between fifty and seventy centimetres into the air. The roof prevented this.

For the first couple of hours the road was sealed and the bumps small to medium, occurring about once a minute.

A few kilometres past a town called Hadasan the highway became a mess of roadworks. The driver veered sharply left, lurching us into a series of puddles, potholes and rocks that generated small, medium and large bumps, at a rate of All. The. Time. At first we thought this was a diversion around the roadworks, but after half an hour it became clear that this sodden minefield was the main road. The manager at the guesthouse in Ulaanbaatar had told us the bus would drive ‘like a crazy mouse’—we were starting to understand what she meant.

We made the most of it, popping a couple of ‘Relaxnol’—the not-quite-Valium I’d picked up in Phnom Penh—and washing it down with slugs of Chinggis Khaan brand vodka, which was smoother than any vodka I’d had in my life and, at five dollars a bottle, infinitely cheaper. Sharing a single pair of headphones, we rocked out to Tama’s ‘Big Apple Mix’: Daft Punk live in New York; Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Juicy’ mashed with Frank Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York’; Jay-Z’s ‘Empire State of Mind’. I told Tama he was a teneg—moron—for making himself a New York playlist. He nodded his head in time with the music.

For the first couple of hours we admired the jolting view, and the whole thing was amusing, even mash sain (very good). Having grown up in New Zealand I wasn’t easily impressed by scenery, but Mongolia was like New Zealand on steroids, like someone had stretched the South Island out and shaken all the people off. Half a sleepless night later, my head was sore. My neck was sore. Hips, sore. Bum, sore. I was in a state of dazed, glazed disbelief.

This is the closest we could get to sleep: 1) use both arms as braces against the ceiling, to stop your head from pile-driving the vinyl; then 2) pass out as quickly as possible without your brace-arms slipping down. This was easier said than done. The Relaxnol and Chinggis helped with the passing out part but made the bracing much harder. I tried wrapping my thermal top around my head in a degenerate turban, but after fifty or sixty roof-kisses it would invariably fall apart. I considered getting my bike helmet out of my bag, but by the time we made it to Mörön it would be reduced to polystyrene confetti, no good for the ride. I considered getting out and walking. I considered flying there next time. When I looked over at Tama he was miraculously asleep, arms still pressed into the roof, like a somnambulist bank teller being held up at gunpoint. Then we went over a monster bump, his elbows buckled and he headbutted the ceiling. I couldn’t help laughing.

‘Damn,’ he said, ‘I was dreaming that I was back in New York at this crazy Manhattan penthouse party with Flight of the Conchords . . . Bret and Jemaine were getting mobbed by all these screaming girls with titties for Africa, they were fending them off like judo masters and I was catching all the rebounds and pashing them and ramming them into my pannier bags for later . . .’

‘That was no dream,’ I said.

As we high-fived, the bus plunged into a pothole. Our heads pashed the roof.

Ulaanbaatar had been all right, for a post-Soviet urban hellhole with the second-worst air pollution of any capital city in the world. After eighteen hours on the Trans-Mongolian staring at blank Gobi Desert, the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar—UB to locals and wannabe locals—were a sensory overload: a demented patchwork of shabby wooden fences, technicolour log cabins and gers, thousands of gers, round white mushroomy things that made me think of corrupt hippies selling watery chai. One third of Mongolia’s three million citizens were crowded into and around the capital, and the overall impression was of arriving at a monster music festival held in a refugee camp. As we got closer to town, the nine-and twelve-storey apartment towers and potholed basketball courts with uprooted hoops reminded me of the concrete wastelands of America’s less glamorous cities, as seen in The Wire: Ulaanbaltimore.

Then the billboards started. After decades of Soviet influence, Ulaanbaatar’s signs were all in Cyrillic, which I couldn’t read except by transliterating it—incorrectly—into English. Some words I could decode—xaan bahk was Khan Bank; cynep mapket was Super Market—but overall I had the giddy sensation that a dyslexic megalomaniac sign-writer had painted the town weird.

Getting off at the train station, I didn’t feel like I was in Asia anymore. There was none of Cambodia’s tropical mugginess and little of Beijing’s bustle. It was probably like Russia, although I hadn’t been there so I couldn’t be sure, but the Soviets had definitely left the ugly stamp of their architecture everywhere. Mongolian men, I thought, generalising grossly, looked kind of like the Maori and Pacific Islander dudes I went to school with: tall, stocky, round-faced, bad haircuts.

After struggling our stuff to the nearest backpackers, me and Tama skipped the sightseeing and caught a taxi straight to the Dragon Centre bus station in the west of UB, hoping to buy tickets to mopoh (Mörön) for the following day from the xobcron (Khövsgöl) counter. But that bus was full; the best they could do was the day after. This was pretty tight—after twenty or thirty hours the bus would arrive in Mörön in the morning or maybe night of 10 July, and there was still 100 kilometres of cycling before we made it to Khatgal for Naadam, which began on the 11th and finished on the 12th. But we didn’t have a choice. We bought a couple of tickets and hopped a taxi back to LG Guesthouse. On the way, we freaked out about getting all our luggage onto the bus, so we told our driver to go back to Dragon Centre. He cackled and pulled a wild U-turn into oncoming traffic. Back at the bus station we bought the last two tickets for Mörön. They were only 25,000 tugrugs—about A$25—and we figured that this way, if our voluminous cargo became an issue, we could brandish the extra tickets and demand that our bikes sit next to us on their own paid-for seats.

Which is pretty much what happened two days later. The bus driver, Bat, blocked our way, gesturing that it was impossible to take the boxes onboard. When Tama pointed to the bottom of the bus, the luggage packer, Batbold (pronounced ‘Batbot’), shook his head vigorously: too long, his hands told us, much too long.

‘Ugui, ugui,’ he said, then in English, ‘No.’

I flicked through the phrasebook for ‘please’ but I couldn’t find it. The bus driver raised an eyebrow and rubbed his thumb and forefingers together.

I looked at Tama; he nodded. I took the third and fourth bus tickets out of my wallet and Bat and Batbold both smiled wide. Then Tama gave Bat a packet of Marlboros and he was our dear friend.

‘Za, za, za (Yeah, yeah, yeah), sain, sain,’ he said. ‘We find way!’

Their way differed slightly from our way. Our bike boxes, half-dissolved by UB acid rain and gaffer taped up with scraps of whiffy cardboard scavenged from the local markets, were crammed into an already full baggage compartment with brute force, the kicks of army boots and repeated slammings of baggage compartment door onto box end. Tama couldn’t bear to watch, since he wasn’t the one doing the kicking. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. Those double-butted steel frames were already paying for themselves—aluminium wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Just before the bus was scheduled to leave, the Israeli girls turned up. We had met Maya and Sharon at our guesthouse the day before. Both in their early twenties, Maya was cute and elfin and took an instant interest in Tama; Sharon was sullen and vaguely anaemic. The girls were hoping to make it to Khatgal for Naadam as well, and the only way there was via Mörön. They were running out of days. Tama had told Maya that our bus was sold out but suggested they come down on the day and try their luck. The driver sold them our bribe-tickets for the quite reasonable price of 30,000 tugrugs. Maya and Sharon hadn’t packed, so they caught a taxi back to LG to sort their shit out while the whole bus, by now full, waited. I felt generally disgruntled. I started on the Chinggis vodka and stomped on and off the bus to piss in a ditch in full view of dozens of bemused locals, some who took photos.

‘Tama, dude, those girls are pretty lame,’ I said.

‘I know,’ he replied, ‘but the cute one’s pretty cute.’

An hour and a half later, Maya squeezed herself into the middle of the back seat next to Tama. Sharon ended up wedged between Maya’s knees, sitting in the aisle on a sack of coal.

When the bus stopped for dinner at Hadasan, we headed into a diner with Sharon, Maya and a studious, bespectacled young man called Jamsuren who was trying to practise his English on Sharon. Jamsuren ordered us something that sounded like ‘hodamic horik’, a thick, muttony soup with wheat noodles that looked wrong but tasted right. I tried to memorise the name so we could order it in future, and got Jamsuren to write it in my notebook; it came out as auttau xommor xyypra.

I asked Jamsuren to help me with my pronunciation in general since I was finding it harder than playing Scrabble without any vowels. Even basic phrases like ‘Sorry, I don’t understand’—‘Uuchlaarai, bi oilgokhgui bain’—made me feel like I was a sedated dental patient coughing up half-chewed camel tongue. At least ‘New Zealand’ was easier: Shin Zeland. It would be hard even for us to stuff that up.

The girls picked at their soups, looking stricken. Sharon was a strict vegetarian. Being vegetarian in Mongolia was almost as much fun as being diabetic at Disneyland. We were all given complimentary cups of süütei tsai, the traditional, salty Mongol tea, but the girls refused to try it.

‘What’s the point in coming halfway round the world if you’re not going to even try the local stuff?’ I said to Tama, then struggled to gulp the lukewarm briny goop down.

‘I know, lame,’ he said. ‘But this tea—it’s scabby as.’

As we lined up to get back on the bus, Tama hissed, ‘Bro, check out that boy’s head.’ He pointed to a little Mongol punk rocker of thirteen or fourteen dressed in double denim with a silver earring, short hair and a crude swastika shaved into his right temple.

Tama took a sneaky photo of him; in the background you can see Maya and Sharon, laughing at something. Had they seen the swastika? What would they think? What did I think? Was the kid some kind of neo-Nazi, or did he just like the symbol? Maybe he thought it was a car brand, like the Mercedes peace sign, or something to do with the Sex Pistols.

At the next rest stop we met the kid’s dad, a self-declared Tsaatan shaman from the western shores of Lake Khövsgöl. He invited us to spend Naadam with them, although unfortunately he didn’t live on the way to the other Mörön. Maybe the swastika was a traditional Tsaatan symbol, and the Sanskrit crew stole it off them before Hitler stole it off everyone? How confusing.

I recalled the grumpy old Israeli retiree at LG guesthouse who had monopolised the internet and told me I acted ‘like a German’ after I demanded a go on the communal computer. When I told the old man where I was from he informed me that ‘New Zealand is lucky—you have much less trouble with your natives than in Australia, because you killed them all’.

I sighed and asked him for a cigarette.

The bus shuddered onwards through the night. In my weakened state, it felt like this trip had been going on for many years; it was entirely reasonable to suppose it would never end. I wanted to take my shoes off, but in UB I had stashed half a million tugrugs—about A$500—under the inner sole of my left shoe, and now I was paranoid I’d lose it. To simplify expenditure when we were on the road, Tama had suggested we get out the same amount of cash and pool it, then just spend the money, like a joint bank account.

Now Tama put his backpack on his lap to make a lumpy pillow for Maya. He used his right arm to fend the roof off and his left to hold Maya’s head down on his bag. She giggled, then snored. I watched this little scene for a few minutes, slightly jealous, until Tama noticed.

‘You can lie down too, bro,’ he said.

So I did. It was great, except that any lateral bus movement brought my and Maya’s skulls together with a hollow ‘tock’. Tama did his best to hold both of us down with his forearms. This worked for a little while, as our combined mass seemed to keep us all in our seats, but when we hit a really big bump Tama had no way to stop his own head from fully slamming into the roof. After a couple of those I grudgingly sat back up. Maya snuggled into Tama’s bag. In the faint light I could see Sharon. She was pouting.

The whole scene reminded me of the ‘good’ old days, back in 2000, when I was in love with a girl called Kirsty and Tama was in love with Kirsty’s best friend Lucy. Tama and Kirsty moved into the same sharehouse, and me and Lucy were around all the time. Not a vodka-and-Red-Bull-guzzling weekend or a Wednesday went by without one of the girls, usually Kirsty, losing it at someone, usually me. Tama and I spent hundreds of hours thrashing up and down the mountain-bike trails of Wellington, counselling each other and complaining about our women, and it was during those dark days that we first fixated on the distant Möröns. Was our dream of Mongolia nothing more than a sublimated fantasy of escape from our volatile, booze-soured girlfriends? I wasn’t ruling it out.

The sun appeared mockingly in a pale blue sky. I popped another Relaxnol and pulled my turban over my head. Tama fastened me to the bus seat with an ockie strap across my chest. This was the only proper sleep I got. I woke twenty minutes later with a burning forehead and an extreme close-up of the moustachioed Mongolian cowboy sitting in front of me, who was staring at me and rubbing the back of his head. The ockie strap’s rubbery innards were strewn across my lap. Thanks for nothing, Beijing Two-Yuan Shop.

‘Easy, geezer, we need that for our bags,’ Tama said between snorts of laughter. ‘And you shouldn’t headbutt the locals—it’s not his fault the road’s so shonky.’

I apologised to the cowboy in English. He nodded sorrowfully. I made a mental note to learn the word for ‘sorry’. Tama gave him some dried apples.

As the bus rattled on, I looked out the window for lingering signs of the dzud, Mongolia’s notorious ‘white death’. When a mild winter brought temperatures of twenty degrees below, it was hard to imagine a harsh winter, but just six months earlier Mongolia had weathered its harshest dzud since records began, with temperatures nudging minus 50 degrees Celsius. Mongolia’s overall supply of the ‘five snouts’—horse, camel, yak-slash-cow, sheep and goat—plummeted from 45 million to 37 million. This would be bad news anywhere, but in a country that is still literally horse-powered, this was very bad news indeed. By April 2010, roughly 200,000 black beauties had died a white death, and thousands of nomad families were left with the grim prospect of hitching to Ulaanbaatar to become unemployed post-nomads. These dzuds used to occur about once every twenty years, but between 1999 and 2002 there was an unprecedented three dzuds in a row—and then this one, the worst ever.

A month before we left Melbourne, Tama had emailed me a dzud article peppered with lurid quotes: ‘Two small goats had crawled into the cavity of a dead cow seeking protection. Unfortunately, even they did not survive . . . A little further on, a frozen heap of six skinned horses had been dumped in a ditch, their legs and heads twisting into a macabre sculpture . . .’ The link was followed by a perky PS saying ‘Better bring some extra trail mix, bro!’

On the last ten hours of the train ride to UB, the Gobi Desert had been sprinkled with shiny white piles of bone. We had passed the time playing ‘old corpse, new corpse’ and wondering what we were going to eat for the next three weeks. Months later I would stumble upon an online UN report with a colour-coded map and realise that our dire bus ride to Mörön passed through most of the provinces not affected by the disaster, while to our west, south and east the white death had provided journalists with all the macabre sculptures they could wish for.

But that day—crossing into Khövsgöl aimag (province), pin–balling our way across what the guidebook called ‘the Switzerland of Mongolia’, in the height of summer, twenty-five perfect degrees above zero—there were no bleached skeletons to be seen in the pristine green fields. In fact, even to my aching eyes the view out the window looked suspiciously like mountain-biking paradise.