Highlights of a Travel Year
It was a year to the day that I took off for South East Asia to do some research on another manuscript that is almost complete. This year I went through South Korea, Mongolia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Now I find myself back in the U.S. in San Francisco and back to Alaska. I see before me that the travels are not over - this is just a stop and go in America. I sit at my desk and my mind flies over all the beautiful things I’ve seen in the past year and have loosely organized a country-by-country collection of photos with brief histories or memories depending.
My first stop was South Korea around mid-night where I got a chance to go back to the KGB Bar and see the ladies that look Korean but speak with a Russian accent. It is situated next door to the Best Western Hotel in Incheon where I stay before stepping into Seoul and it’s ancient granite mountains and sky reaching buildings. I taught English in Seoul for a few years way back when and I based two books partially in Korea. The second book, The Woman of Cho, still to come, is based in Seoul for the most part but a lot of the history in the book comes from China and Mongolia.
I’ll get to Korea in the next high light. Right now I’m really interested in my time in Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. It was the highlight of all my travels on this trip. Nothing compares - it is number one. I could do this in reverse order but I’m not that guy trying to stagger you with BS. My time in South Korea is extensive and most likely takes a little wind out of its sails instead of a perfectly new country that has a lot to offer if the big companies don’t destroy it before we can get back there. Mongolia is the most diverse country I’ve been in a long time.
I flew from South Korea to Ulaanbaatar. It was not a cheap place but once you are out of the capitol, things economically lighten up considerably. I hired a car and driver and a guide and we left the power reactors and pollution of Ulaanbaatar and headed south east into the vast desert called the Gobi.
One of the highlights is that there is no real solid information source for Mongolia usually just fishing guided tours and not a lot else. So flying by the seat of my pants became the norm. After some time the road just evaporates into the sand with old tires as markers for when to turn east or west. The original horse.
Of course our path is known to the driver who had been driving this area for a decade but that doesn’t stop him from getting lost from time to time, wrong barren ridge, wrong drainage, possibly even wrong ger (yurt) camp.
We spent our days driving 200 kilometers plus or minus and our evenings were relaxing watching the moon or hearing stories of the ancestors in the area. Some nights we would stay with herdsman and their families and drink fermented mare’s milk and listen to the wind. Obviously it’s a place of free range everything, goats, camels, domesticated horses, cattle, yak, and we drove free range following winter mud tracks overgrown with grasses and herbs. The scent of wild onions was thick for the first few days.
Watering holes for the herdsmen are hard to find and the water is usually too salty for human consumption but the animals can drink it. And when we got to the sand dunes my whole image of the Gobi desert changed and is imprinted on my memory forever.
Mongolians don’t eat a lot of fish they are more bent on beef and camel. Both are good but the fishing was excellent. I’m not sure if my choice of Mongolia being my highlight or maybe I’ve just spent a lot more time in the other places I visited, but none the less I’m going back to explore the fishing and the western side of Mongolia in further detail. There are influences from all sides of Mongolia, Chinese, Russian, Kazakhstan, and many others.
As history recalls the Russians tore down the religious element from Mongolia for communism, the Chinese took away the Mongolian’s arrows so they would no longer be a threat and now Mongolia is free to fend for itself. But beware of the major mining corporations; for they have paid off those in power to the point that no complaints reach the surface, even though the Mongolian government is aware of it, other countries largest companies are taking advantage of Mongolia’s governing adolescence and not many people are there to help or make them aware. They are mining for Uranium and gold primarily and there are few environmentalists around and if they are they get arrested and sometimes deported.
These are not in any particular order just highlights; Korea is next.
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