Story: Where The Pavement Never Begins

Our van is faltering again.

It’s too much to ask of this heaving, Russian breadbox, another steep climb on the ruts of rocky dirt roads. When we shudder to a stop at the top of this hill, which looks down on an endless vista of identical hills, the driver swings his door open.

“Bad,” he grunts back at us. Calmly, my guide translates this as, “just some problems with the transmissions. Maybe twenty minutes for fixing.”

The driver, Balaara, is a bear of a man from Western Mongolia, near the Kazakhstan border. He has driven people and things nearly all of his life. Transporting people and oil in Siberia, trucks full of food and electronics in Korea, and now tourists in Mongolia. I know now that he has an almost preternatural connection with this rugged land, with how to navigate it in a twenty-year-old car. But in the beginning, before I began this two-week exploration of the unsympathetic wilderness of Central and Northern Mongolia, I didn’t understand why I was advised to hire a driver and a guide.

The fourth time the van succumbs to the violently rugged roads, this country’s only kind of road, there is a tremendous sound. This sound, like metal across bicycle spokes, is followed by a short burst of gushing water somewhere below us. The cooling fan has broken loose, spinning around the radiator and puncturing it in several places. The van whines as the radiator evacuates hot, brown water into the earth. When it hisses to a stop, we are nowhere. Balaara immediately begins to remove the radiator to assess the damage. Otgo, the guide, sets off on foot in the direction of the nearest nomadic camp, where he will barter for one small tube of industrial putty, for patching the radiator, and a jerry can of fresh water. We’re moving again within the hour. I no longer wonder why I need a driver and a guide.

For the first few days, the landscape of Mongolia looks so familiar, like the American West romanticized in Remington paintings and episodes of Little House on The Prairie. But the deeper we rattle into the country, without a cellular tower, Waffle House or shopping mall in sight, I begin to appreciate that this place is nothing like the American West. Visiting Mongolia is in fact like visiting the moon, central Asia and some alternate reality wherein white settlers never take an interest in Colorado.

But my God, how it goes on and on forever all around me, scenery so pristine that it cannot be real. I have traveled for seven slow days on these dirt roads and find myself wanting to move even slower. I get my wish when the road eventually ends and we opt to take horses across the ranges that surround Lake Khovsgul. Green and gold plains, thick pine forests, windswept deserts and mountains linger all around, land sparsely populated by indigenous nomadic families living the lives of their thousand-year old relatives. These days there are a few more satellite dishes and televisions rigged to car batteries, but the round, felt covered houses (called gers), the demanding herds of horses, goats, and yaks, and the lack of nearly every modern convenience are all as they have always been.

And if the Mongolian countryside is wild, then its towns are an unkempt effort to tame it. While the national capitol stumbles earnestly into the twin tempests of new capitalism and democracy, every other settlement still feels like an outpost on the edge of civilization. Pine log houses, vodka bars and trading posts line the dusty lanes of the Mongolian city. Families on horseback commute between townships gathering supplies in advance of one of the harshest winters on the planet.

I’ll be long gone when the first snow begins to fall, less than a month from now. At least I hope I will, because Balaara’s under the van again, clanging, ratcheting and beginning the process of what will eventually become a complete, roadside rebuilding of the transmission. He’s speaking quickly to Otgo, who is handing him tools. Twenty minutes becomes three hours. No one has driven past us. There is no sound but our own. I can see a horseman driving sheep and goats across distant slopes but there is no other evidence of civilization. Under the rare shade of a lone grassland pine, I’m surrounded by nothing that’s modern but everything that is important. This is Mongolia.

And the guttural swearing coming from beneath the van makes it clear that I’m not going anywhere soon.