The World's Wilderness Park

SUKHBAATAR, MONGOLIA—It was raining that night. A few flashes of lighting were followed by a steady shower. The droplets scintillated as they passed by the high intensity arc lights. It was a late summer night in a railyard in Sukhbaatar—or Sukhe Batora as the Russians would have it—and it was a lonely, remote place. Nestled delicately somewhere between Siberia and the middle of nowhere, it is a desolate border town astride the Russian-Mongolian frontier and is the main point of crossing for all trains travelling on this particular branch of the sprawling Trans-Siberian network. It is the first, or last (or, in my case, both) place land travelers encounter when passing to or through Mongolia.

It is a place time forgot. The train yards, the vintage Soviet equipment, the windswept platform and the concrete stationhouse slowly crumble to dust. The physical plant is a throwback. So too is the human element. There are interminable delays for border formalities, with uniformed troops surrounding the train and sealing it off, big shot officers with visored caps and polished boots tramping from compartment to compartment, demanding visas, passports, papers, documents. They are stamping, stamping, stamping with boots and rubber stamps. Then there is the waiting while the official party repeats this process in each and every compartment in each and every wagon for fifteen cars down the line. And the train then lurches forward a few kilometers, and then there is another stop when the officers from the nation just across the border from the first stop repeat the process. To smooth things over, it generally pays to have a bottle of vodka on board for the Russian officers and some Marlboros for the Mongolians.

Time has forgotten the rest of Mongolia, too—though different regions have been left behind at different rates. In the capital city of Ulaan Baatar it is even possible to surf the internet and talk on cell phones. Wads of Korean investment and Japanese aid have seen to that. Though the aging buses, crumbling buildings, potholed streets and vintage power plants set the real tenor of the city.

Friday afternoons at the British embassy are a sort of happy hour, where the on-site pub—the Steppe Inne (pun intended, obviously)—opens for its weekly get-together. The local anglophones and anglophiles gather for some shared company. Western diplomats, expatriate businessmen, students, travelers and even a few Commonwealth types put in a showing. The American ambassador was complaining recently about the local labor market and the bureaucracy at the Russian embassy. The British ambassador was putting in his usual two hours a week behind the bar, pulling pints in person. It was the sort of gathering that went out of style a half-century ago along with colonialism. But time, as you know, forgot Mongolia.

Time forgot the countryside even more. In a country twice the size of Texas, there are two and a half million residents—nearly a third of them huddled together in the capital city. To this day, nearly half the population consists of nomadic herders who keep goats, sheep, horses, yaks and camels for a living, and dwell in portable felt yurts, (ger in the local language) and move about the open range in search of pasture for their livestock. Infrastructure is simply nonexistent, with no paved roads, little in the way of electrification and old, unreliable phones only in the few village centers and gasoline rated all the way up to 76 octane.

Now, though, the present reaches towards the past and sometimes tells it to hold still. The American ambassador has opined on the subject of poor infrastructure and international development aid: “A bit of pop-psychology, if you would call it that,” he said that Friday afternoon in the British embassy, “but one possible reason the Mongolians don’t maintain their paved roads, or build new ones, is that they still hold onto the steppe-nomad mentality. Getting from place to place is a matter of getting on your horse and setting out across the grassland. It’s a free good, and who would ever think to pay money for it?”

Perhaps mentality has something to do with it, but I think the reasons are far more pedestrian. The country is huge, the climate fierce (Ulaan Baatar is reputedly the capital city with the coldest average annual temperature, with ninety-degree summer days countered by epic winter nights), the people poor, the provinces remote and the trails rather lightly traveled.

But in the end, the present gestures towards the past and even tells time to slow down a bit. Ten percent of the country’s land is now protected in an extensive system of national parks and preserves, and there are plans afoot to increase that to 30 percent. The wildlife is justifiably famous, the countryside fairly pristine, the native cultures strong and varied, especially in the mountainous and heterogenous western provinces. Tourism, of the adventurous and hardy type is not insubstantial and the Mongolians are eyeing it as a potential major source of revenue. A few improvements have even been made to try to encourage this industry, and a main international airport just outside the capital has finally entered the modern age. Mining and minerals too are a potential source of hard currency.

But perhaps that land has its own role to play. With vast protected lands and limited existing human impact, this country is in a sense the world’s wilderness park. Having set aside large tracts of land and opening the borders to visitors, Mongolia preserves its natural treasures for its own good as well as for the good of all of us willing to benefit from this land.

That night on the train in Sukhbaatar I wondered if such concepts as eco-tourism and international development aid seemed distant for Mongolians. The experience of Mongolians has a way of showing that life is more complex than such theories, though life usually centers on very basic and ordinary needs. Even, or especially, in Mongolia.

Noam B. Katz ’04, a Crimson editor, is a history and science concentrator in Eliot House.