life, upside down: Mongolia

Morning in the Orkhon Valley

The last stop on our Mongolia trip was the ruins of the ancient city of Kharkhorum (also called Karakorum) which is part of the World Heritage Site Orkhon Valley Cultural Landscape. It was a beautiful drive (as always) to get there, through wide open valleys, past rivers and over the rolling hills of the steppe. We stopped first in the nearby town of Kharkhorin for lunch (which I find interesting even though I do not understand the meaning behind the distinction of the town Хархорин (Kharkhorin) and the ancient capital Хархорум (Kharkhorum)).

Kharkhorum was the capital of the Mongol Empire under Ogedei Khan, the second Great Khan and son of Genghis Khan. We first visited the Erdene Zuu monastery, which not only one of the only surviving Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia but also the oldest. The temple was founded in 1585 using stones from the ruins of the city of Kharkhorum in its construction. The temple is surrounded by a wall with 108 stupas resembling a Buddhist rosary. The temple was ordered to be destroyed in the 1939 Communist revolution, and even though it was not completely demolished it did not pass through the period unscathed. It was only because of pressure from Stalin to maintain the monastery to display Communism's freedom of religion to international visitors that three small temples and the external wall survived. The surviving buildings were opened as museums in the 1960s and only in 1990 did it return to its original purpose and become a monastery again.

The temples which have been converted into museums hold Buddhist statues, art and tapestries, and the monastery is open to the public to visit. Unfortunately we could not linger too long as a big storm was imminent, and we had to race back to the van to wait for it to pass over.

Our last stop in Kharkhorum was the museum, which had artefacts that had been uncovered in the excavations of the ancient city along with models and so much information and history. It was impossible to take it all in, and even though we had read up on the history of Mongolia it was still difficult to comprehend it all. In its height, Kharkhorum was an international, cosmopolitan city of religious tolerance with multiple mosques, temples, and churches.

We left Kharkhorum and drove toward Ulaanbaatar, stopping very briefly at the Elsen Sand Dunes (another large dune system - 80 kilometres long and 5 kilometres wide - but not quite as big as Khonghor Els) and stopped at a ger camp for our last night on the steppe.

It was a clear night after a few cloudy and rainy nights, so after watching the sun go down we did some stargazing and were able to see the Milky Way and our favorite Northern Hemisphere constellations. It was a good way to finish our trip. The next day we would drive back to Ulaanbaatar, try to fit as much sightseeing in the city in the afternoon and then it was back on a plane to Australia! Two and a half weeks had really flown by!