|
||||
|
| Support Mongolian people by using services provided by the Mongols themselves!!!"-Now, most foreign tourists enter and leave Mongolia with foreign-owned airlines or trains, stay at foreign accommodations, eat at foreign restaurants in Ulaanbaatar and travel in the country with foreign tour companies"/admitted Davaadorj Ts, the Minister of Infrastructure and Trade. 02.10.2007/. |
|
Mongolia travel companions wanted: 31. A New Zealander is going on a short trip out of Ulaanbaatar for 2 or 3 days that starts September 10th or 11th. 30. Looking for people to travel by bike. Ideally following a river, from Ulaanbaatar/let's plan it together/. I'm flexible. A hiking tour would be great too. saraniort@yahoo.fr Tel: 95001082.;Read more... |
Welcome to Mongolia! |
|
Dear Guest, 
It's me, Bolod, a Mongol man who runs a tour operator-the Bolod's Tours and Guesthouse in Mongolia. We, the Mongols are even more separated than the ill-fated Kurdish people. Do we know any person, any family or any nation who is happy for being separated ?! We invite you to visit the country and its people. You will be visiting a people with centuries-old nomadic lifestyle, listening to the absolute silence and breathing the purest ever air and seeing the eternal blue sky dominating over this beautiful land on Central Asian plateau: Discover Mongolia with Bolod's Tours which operates since 1991! Stay comfortably in Bolod's guesthouses operate since 2000! It's a truly experienced native tour operator and guesthouse reccommended by Lonely Planet's "Mongolia" guidebook of 2001/page 139/ and 2005/pages 69, 72/ and its "Trans Siberian Railway" of 2006/p. 263/, "Mongoru"/in Japanese/ by Globe-Trotter/ of 2007-2008/page 56/, "Mongolie" by Petit Fute of 2008-2009/page 86/and on the www.mongoliatourism.gov.mn- the official tourism website of Mongolia. What's now the situation with Mongolia's tourism like? As Mr. Davaadorj Ts, the Minister of the Manufacturing and Trade admitted on October 2nd, 2007, on TV, "-Now, most foreign tourists enter and leave Mongolia by foreign-owned airlines or trains, stay at foreign-owned accommodations, eat at foreign restaurants and travel with foreign tour companies". It's true, indeed, nowdays. I'm almost one of patriots who want to remain in this last homeland instead of emigrating abroad as too many Mongols do so. Exodus of its young population and export of Mongol women are the greatest threats to the further existense of Mongols as a nation... Thank you for taking your time visiting my modest website. I will keep my website live and constantly updated. Bolod
Some of Mongol-owned restaurants and canteens in Ulaanbaatar: 4. "Modern Nomads" restaurant. www.modernnomads.mn Web: 3. "Mill House" LLC, the newest flour making factory: www.millhouse.mn |
| Articles |
Drs. William Karesh and Sharon Deem  Dr. Sharon Deem, another field vet from the Wildlife Conservation Society, and I arrived yesterday afternoon in Ulaan Baator, the capital of Mongolia, after a 17-hour flight from New York to Seoul, Korea, and a quick 3-hour connecting flight. The second flight carried us across the Great Gobi Desert where turbulence over the desert jarred the emergency exit door, causing the alarm to sound and the emergency lights to flash. A flight attendant pounded on the door handle until the alarm quieted down, but I requested that he stop doing that at 30,000 feet. We continued the flight with the annoying alarm as background noise. Finally, the vast plains dotted with an occasional ger (traditional round white felt tent) and clusters of livestock provided an exciting enough distraction for us to forget about the noise.Luck must have been with us yesterday and just as it got dark, we made it to camp. Things got a little tense at the airport this morning, when the airline staff said they could not fly with liquid nitrogen on a passenger plane. Someone suggested that we check with air cargo and since we had thirty minutes before boarding, we jumped in the jeep and drove to air cargo. They said they would be happy to send it on the next plane, which turned out to be our plane. When Sharon and I boarded the old twin engine prop plane, the tank was sitting in the back of the passenger section. Gazelles are popping out all over the place. For the first two days, we'd drive up to ten miles from camp looking for small groups of adult females. Most are still pregnant, but nearby we could find small patches of calves hiding in the grass. They had been born during the previous night or two. Their mothers feed them during the night and early morning and then wander off to graze for the day. This morning finally, we found huge groups of females. One numbered over a thousand. They were grazing in an area that had burned since last winter and had grown back with short grasses and forbes. Babies were hiding everywhere. I may have exaggerated a bit when I described our site as the "perfect place" the other day. In fact, entropy appears to be setting in. In three days, we've had four flat tires. Fittingly, one tire had a broken off gazelle horn driven through it. Fixing a flat in the field of course means removing the tire from the rim by using a wedge and the back of an ax to beat it. Inner tubes are essential, as are old pieces of rubber for patching. The brakes on our old Russian jeep broke but Dundar, our driver, was able to fix them. Today, the front suspension rod on Vadim's van broke so whenever he hits a slight bump the tire rubs inside the wheel well. Vadim is a Russian scientist studying the ecology of gazelles in Mongolia for part of the year. The rest of the year he manages a wildlife reserve across the northern border in Russia. He drove his fifteen-year-old van down here for the project and will have to limp home slowly when we are finished. Well, the adventure did continue in ways we did not anticipate. On the drive back to Choibalson, the regional capital, we stopped to rest at a crest on the plains. No sign of human habitation could be seen as far as the horizon in any direction. A huge pile of rocks and empty bottles topped the hill and was marked with a stick and an old piece of cloth flapping in the wind. This monument was an Ovoo (pronounced “awa”), part of an ancient Mongolian traveler’s ritual. We all got out to add a few stones and walk around the pile three times to bring us good fortune and a safe journey before heading down the dusty dirt track again. Maybe it worked – we did arrive back in town safely. But we were greeted with the news that there was no more fuel available and it may be a month or two before the next delivery. The liquid nitrogen in our tank was also running low. Sharon and I decided not to jeopardize the fifty or so samples we had already collected and frozen. Instead we made plans to head back to the States. |
But right now, we are only halfway to our field site. After our arrival yesterday, we immediately went to work by re-packing our gear and searching the city for liquid nitrogen. We need this ultra-cold liquid (minus 270 degrees) to freeze the samples. Poor translations prior to our arrival resulted in 6 gallons of nitric acid being bought for us by mistake. Our contacts finally tracked down one of Mongolia's nuclear physicists, and he kindly loaned us one of the only liquid nitrogen tanks in the entire country. 
An hour and a half later, we landed in the provincial capital of Choibalsan. It was an important military position during Soviet times due to its proximity to the eastern border with China. Now roughly 35,000 people live in the area. Sharon and I were met by two staff members from the U.N. Development Program's Biodiversity project based here. Our gazelle health project fits in with their efforts to help develop sound wildlife management and natural resource plans. We loaded our gear into a thirty-year-old Russian jeep and set off across the plains bumping along a dirt road. Six hours later, we found our teammates-to-be just getting ready to eat dinner, a traditional Mongolian meal of mutton and potato soup. They had chosen a hillside spot with a view spanning twenty or thirty miles of open plains. The constant strong winds of the day had finally died down and as it got dark the air chilled quickly.
When all goes right, the catcher kneels down and quickly gets the little gazelle safely tucked between his or her legs. A few of the kids will bleat once or twice, but most remain silent. They are carefully placed in a cloth bag and weighed with a hanging scale. Newborns are roughly seven to ten pounds. Then Sharon or I give each one a physical exam, looking for any abnormalities such as a cleft palate or an infected navel. A blood sample is collected easily from its jugular vein, and a bright yellow, numbered tag is placed in its ear, boys on the left ear, girls on the right. Notes are made as to the character of the vegetation the baby is hiding in, the proximity of its mother and others, the time of day and the exact location. The procedure takes only a few minutes and then the youngster is quietly placed back in its original place. Some immediately resume hiding while others jump and run off. Some seem confused and stand up and wander around us as if we are possibly their mothers coming to feed them. But they figure it out quickly and trot off.
My buddy Stacey e-mailed from New York to tell me about a wine tasting she attended the night before. The event contrasted with the fact that we've only been drinking tepid water from a well that has dead, bloated mice floating on the surface. It takes an hour to get to the well just to get water to bring back to camp and then we have to boil it to make it safe (but not very tasty). No one can wait for the water to cool off so most of it is drunk while it's still warm. The bread we brought out from town dried out the first day so we've been joking about living on stale bread and water. But the views are spectacular. Sunsets fill a vast horizon and the full moon has been rising in Scorpio.
Luckily, eighty percent of the females had not calved before the fire. Ones with calves four or five days old will easily move away from the burned area with their youngsters following them. The younger ones will have a harder time. We watched some of the newborns get up and run a hundred yards or so when the flames nearly touched them. Hopefully, they can keep away from the advancing fire and their mothers will find them. The good news so far is that we searched large areas of the burned grasslands and didn't find any injured baby gazelles. Apparently, most of the gazelles have moved on to greener pastures (so to speak) and it was time for us to do the same.