My arrival in Ulaanbaatar went pretty much without a hitch.  While it’s a fairly long and grueling flight from New York to Seoul and then three hours onto Mongolia, all the connections were on time and my luggage arrived with me. Enkhbaatar Demchig,, from the American Center for Mongolia Studies, picked me up at the airport, brought me to the apartment that he had arranged for me, a nice place with lots of sun in the morning.  You can see the mountains on the edge of town. The second night, however, tired and jetlagged, I bought a few things at the market and did something very stupid when I entered the apartment. I didn’t completely realize how stupid until 5 am the next morning.  At that time, I was awakened by someone in the apartment who was there to burglarize it.  I had fallen asleep on the couch, and he woke me up as he scavenged his way through the living room.  I jumped up, began screaming at him, and then a struggle ensued. (I’m not making this up.)  He wanted something behind me, but I couldn’t’ tell what, and he kept pushing me away in order to get at it.  Then he slowly backed his way out of the apartment with me pushing him as he went.  Once he was gone,  I latched the door, and felt as though I had dodged a bullet. For a split second, I’d thought that he had a knife, but he didn’t. 

I almost went back to sleep, crisis averted, when I spotted the battery to my cell phone-- given to me on arrival by Enkh--lying on the floor.  He had wanted the cell phone, and he got it.  I also noticed a missing camera, one that had been lying on the arm of a chair in the living room.  That seemed to be the total loss, both items of value, but each replaceable. Nothing as serious as a bank card was missing, that would have to be canceled, or, even worse, my passport. That’s when I went in search of the key, and realized that that was gone as well.  Eventually, it dawned on me that I had left the key in the latch when I came into the apartment, and this guy had taken advantage of it.  Here we had the proverbial crime of opportunity. This was both comforting and disconcerting.: Comforting because it was clear that I had not somehow been targeted.  Disconcerting because it was such a stupid thing to do on my part.  It also began to dawn on me that he had my key, and I was still in the apartment.  Not good.   It was starting to feel like some noir drama, where the protagonist is trapped in a logically impossible situation, quite literally a prisoner’s dilemma of his own making. If I left the apartment, he would be able to get into it. He might even be hiding out front watching for me to leave.  But if I stayed, then he presumably might come back with friends to finish the job.  Damn. What to do? Needless to say, I didn’t go back to sleep.

I’m off to Mongolia in at the end of August to spend my sabbatical year from Ithaca College teaching American studies, American politics, and international environmental film.  If you are interested in Mongolian spaces, then, perhaps you might want to return here occasionally (or more often).

“Why Mongolia?”  you might ask.  That’s the question that I get asked most often. One answer is that Mongolia is a very special and particular kind of space.  Mongolian spaces intersect sky and steppe, Russia and China, Muslim, Buddhist, and Shamanist beliefs and practices, deserts in the south (the Gobi) and arboreal forests in the north (Siberia).  For Americans--at least the ones that I talk to--Mongolia seems to epitomize remoteness.  At this point, three different friends generously offered me parting gifts of the Lonely Planet Guide to Mongolia.  Counting the copy that I bought for myself, that makes four.  My guess it that you don’t end up with four copies of a Lonely Planet guidebook if you take a Fulbright in Prague.

Mongolia is one of those places that has a cultural claim on the concept of remoteness, not unlike Alaska, northern Siberia, the Australian outback, Patagonia, or even Antarctica.  Mongolia is, in fact, the least densely populated country in the world. Mongolian remoteness conjures images of large landscapes and small horses, double-humped camels and yaks, a once-massive empire, fermented mare’s milk, and nomads living in felt gers.

One of the first things to know about Mongolia is that it is disrespectful to refer to nomadic dwellings as “yurts,” a term that Americans might associate with California communes, geodesic domes, and other artifacts of 1960s style counterculture.  Yurt is a Russian word for “tent” that historically implied a certain level of disdain.  The Mongolian term ger translates simply to “home.”

I offer these few tidbits about Mongolia without having been there.  My  Mongolian spaces are, at this point, entirely imaginary, gleaned from literary and cinematic landscapes, landscapes that seem to populate my own psychic terrain with increasing intensity, while, in turn, displacing the comfortable and familiar worlds of work, family, friends, and home in upstate New York. 

I began my own literary excursions to Mongolia with the Lonely Planet Guide itself, which I read nearly cover to cover.  This was not an especially satisfying experience, as you might expect.  The guides offer entry points, aimed at familiarizing Americans and Europeans with a previously unfamiliar terrain. City maps with hostels, hotels, campsites, and restaurants clearly marked can be indispensable to a budget traveler with limited time and a determination to visit the most prized tourist destinations. On the other hand, the literary skills of Lonely Planet authors are often lacking, or perhaps they are somewhat constrained by the genre. Whatever the case, reading Lonely Planet in preparation for a trip is a little like reading the dictionary.  It holds lots of useful information, but without context, it is virtually impossible to glean actual meaning.

More compelling, in fact much more compelling, is Louisa Waugh’s When Birds Fly: A Nomadic Year in Mongolia. Waugh spent a year teaching English in the western Mongolian village of Tsengel, a place populated by Tuvans and Kazakhs, the latter a Mongolian ethnic minority who are distinguished by a separate language and their Muslim faith.  Waugh is a wonderfully descriptive writer, who manages to avoid romanticization, while documenting with the utmost respect and admiration the lives and culture of  nomadic people who survive, sometimes tenuously, in one of the world’s most volatile and extreme, but still habitable, climates.  At the fringes of global commerce and removed from the influences of digital culture, the village of Tsengel is a place so quiet that Waugh claims to hear the wings of birds flapping as they hover over her her at night.  This is a place that many American readers would consider to be the very epitome of the remote and, as such, a space with remarkable appeal, an appeal that sheds light on the question: why Mongolia?