56 Roads Diverged on a Plain

If there were two roads that diverged in a wood, I would surely take the one less traveled. But out in the Mongolian countryside, 56 roads diverged on a plain, and I hadn't a clue.

When we first arrived in Ulaan Baatar, John asked our host Buyan from the Bold Guest House if it were possible to buy a van. "Sure," Buyan replied, "but you'll only get half the price when you try to sell it. No one will want it."

John pressed on. "How much for a new 4-wheel drive Russian van?" he asked. The answer of $5000 wasn't too bad. "And it's no problem driving around Mongolia huh?" he asked.

"Well, I wouldn't if I were you," Buyan said. "You need to be an experienced driver."

John's ego was visible dented. He frowned. I reminded John of the horror story we had already heard from the travellers staying at guest house #1. Three hours into their journey, their driver had misjudged a turn and flipped the van three times. These vans don't have seatbelts or headrests and anything not nailed down goes flying. Most of the travellers escaped with just bruises, but one young French girl suffered brain damage and after an extensive wait to be rescued, driven back to UB and admitted to a hospital, she was finally air-vacced back to France. (She's expected to fully recover).

But Buyan's warming about drving in Mongolia perhaps has less to do with possible accidents than it does with navigation. Once we left UB and passed the airport on the outskirts of town, the smooth pavement ended and all bets were off as to which way to go.

There are no road signs outside of the capital (ok, may there are two in the whole country). But there are roads, lots of them - branching and re-branching, peetering out and starting from nowhere. They are bumpy and rocky, they cross rivers, plunge down sides of dry river beds, cross enormous puddles, and wind and twist for as far as the eye can see across grassy plains.

Our driver, Butar, knew exactly which roads to take, when to leave one road and when to bounce across open tundra to another. Of the 56 roads that diverged in front of us, I am one hundred percent certain that we would have taken the wrong ones.

Although John still feels that with a GPS and Mongolia's equivalent (Ger Positioning System), we could drive through Mongolia, he was content to let Butar, our 'experienced' driver take care of all the orientation skills. Butar never looked at a map except when we inquired as to our whereabouts. Without hesitation, he plopped his chubby finger down on our map. "Ent (here)," he'd say.

At first we were a bit concerned about Butar. "He speaks no English," we were told by the owner of the van. "But he understands body language." I wondered if body language in Mongolian was the same as in English. "What if I need to stop and pee?" I asked.

"You say, 'Bee more harmar bain," the van owner said. Roughly translated that's "I have to see a horse". And thus began the very basics of my Mongolian language lesson. I jotted down the English phonetics for "Beat hoyr sagaan haul id-deg" (We are vegeterians - which translates to "We only eat white food"), "Sang-Bain-oo" (hello), "Bye-air-la-la" (Thankyou), "Bye-air-ye (goodbye), "Beat haul edimir bain" (Can we stop for lunch), and "Beat amarmar bain" (can we just plain stop). Butar grinned, showing off his silver front teeth, everytime I used one of these expressions, but I was assured that I sounded just like a Mongolian.

Butar on the other hand didn't say much at all. He was shy (as our about 90% of all Mongolians we met). He never did learn our names but he seemed to understand what we wanted and after only a day or two he was helping us find the best tent spots, set up our tent and enduring the long waits while we went off for hours on end hiking.

Butar wasn't interested in hiking with us. He wasn't interested in exercise in any form. He sat in the van, slept, smoked or squatted outside in the shade and hoisted up his shirt to expose his enormouse flabby belly. He looked a lot like an over-sized tire sitting like that; his white legs hanging out beneath him and his thick, dark shoulders, deep set eyes, and bulbous nose sinking into the shadows. At only 33-years old, he looked more like 45.

"He is one of our best drivers," Buyan had said. "He's been driving for fifteen years." So despite the language barrier, and the fact that Butar looked like he could have a heart-attack at any moment, we felt safe. We felt even better after he pulled off the road at the end of our first day of driving. "Camp ent?" he asked. It couldn't have been better. He'd found us the perfect spot butted again a granite outcropping, alongside a small lake surrounded by horses.

Over one hundred horses stood near the water. Native geese circled overhead and all of that was balanced by perfect lighting. It was spectacular. I sat on a rock to write in my journal and I heard a sound like rushing water. I looked up to see a hundred horses run in front of me toward the lake and sink up to their knees in liquid blue.