TRAVEL Trevor Todd
T
he passengers on the 5½ hour flight on Mongolian Air from Tokyo to Ulaanbaatar were noticeably different in appearance from the Japanese whose country we had just visited for 2 weeks. They were bigger-boned, heavier set, rugged, and dressed much more individually than the Japanese. They were Mongols en route to the “Land of the Eternal Blue Sky”—so called due to its 250 sunny days per year. Never mind that the capital city Ulaanbaatar is the coldest capital in the world with temperatures in Winter of minus 40 C°, making Ottawa seem almost balmy. Mongolia is one of the few places on earth where nomadic life is still a living tradition amid a vast emptiness of extremely harsh seasons. In 2009 almost 10 million range animals
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Photo credit: Matthew Chen
Stepping Out in Mongolia
©iStockphoto.com/Muha04
Mongolia is one of the few places on earth where nomadic life is still a living tradition amid a vast emptiness of extremely harsh seasons. (one sixth of the country’s sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and camels) froze to death that Winter. The nomads move their house and herds four times per year with each season change.
and dairy products with little or no fruits or vegetables. Forty percent of the country’s 3 million citizens live in the capital and 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30. Ulaanbaatar feels like a collage of Soviet-style architecture with its Cyrillic lettering, grand monuments, and city square, mixed with modern towers such as our five-star hotel next to a community of gers—the traditional homes also known by the Russian name yurt.
Mongolia is approximately twice the size of Texas but is almost entirely void of people among its vast emptiness. The harsh lands are comprised of the Gobi desert in the south, vast grassy steppes in the middle, and mountains to the north just below Siberia. There is almost no arable soil and the country is completely land-locked. Thus the diet of the nomadic people consists primarily of mutton and sheep The Society of Notaries Public of British Columbia
Downtown Ulaanbaatar. Note the Cyrillic script. Volume 26 Number 1 Spring 2017
