Mature Flâneur
Mongolia’s “Grand Canyon” in the Gobi Desert
A visit to Tsagaan Suvarga, The White Stupa
Mongolia is huge. It’s twice the size of Texas or Turkey, about 2,500 km from east to west. That means when looking around for places to visit outside Ulaan Bataar, the capital, inevitably one is looking at a long drive. I had only 4 days between intensive training programs, held near UB. So the only place that seemed both ambitious and reasonable was the famed Tsagaan Suvarga, the “White Stupa.”
Tsagaan Suvarga is an eroded cliff face on the edge of the Gobi Desert. The multicolored sandstone has worn away into sloping pyramids that resemble a row of stupas (burial monuments for enlightened Buddhist monks). Because of the stunning natural colors on the cliffside, the site is known as Mongolia’s Grand Canyon. Luckily, it is a mere eight hour drive away from our training venue.
I was able to book a car and driver, and with his help I found the only hotel near the White Stupa where we could spend the night. Teresa (my beloved wife and training partner) thought I was crazy. She demurred the invitation to join me for the jaunt. I invited the other foreign experts working with us in our training program, and surprisingly, none of them fancied a 16-hour round trip in two days. Oh well. I might never be back in Mongolia, and I was not going to miss the Gobi Desert.
And so, on June 1st my driver and I set off, never mind the intermittent rain. Now, I already mentioned that Mongolia is big. But how it looks on a map and how it feels to drive across the vast steppeland that connects the capital to the Gobi (and then to China, beyond) are two different things. So much green emptiness, stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions, with not another building, not a wire, not even a lamp post! Every now and then, we saw a herd of cattle or horses in the hills, and here and there the white dot of a distant nomad’s tent.
My driver, Miga Myagmardorj was a big, friendly man, who gripped the steering wheel of his Lexus SUV firmly, like the reins of a horse. It was all too easy to imagine his ancestors leading a caravan across the silk road. Miga spoke limited English. Enough to communicate basic information, but not enough for sustained conversation. Beyond learning that his wife was a Mongolian-language high school teacher, and he had three daughters, there was not much to chat about.
Most frustrating for me, it seemed the word “why” was not in Miga’s English vocabulary. I’d point and pose a question: “Why are nomad tents always white?” He would answer, “Yes! White.” And so we soon settled into a companionable silence. I watched the endless green steppe; Miga watched the road ahead — challenging enough because it was full of potholes, and the occasional Mongolian traffic jam:
As we approached the Gobi, the green hills of the steppe gradually turned to yellow, then to brown. Sheep and goats replaced horses and cattle, and now and then we would pass a gaggle of two-humped Bactrian camels. Eventually, there was nothing but rubble and sand stretching to the empty horizon.
“No more animals,” I said to Miga.
“No more water,” he replied.
At the town of Mandalgovi there is a gate over the road, announcing one has officially entered the Gobi desert. Miga told me we still had two and a half hours to go to reach our hotel at the White Stupa. I had actually thought from the White Stupa one could gaze out towards the desert, not that we would be some 200 kilometers inside it. An hour later, Miga turned the SUV off the road at a white stone obelisk. It was the only marker for the White Stupa….there was no road. Just the wide desert, as hard and flat as a parking lot.
As we set out I felt a surge of excitement. Travelling on pavement, there’s a sense of connection to civilization. A road goes from one place to another. But just driving into the desert, well, we could be heading anywhere, or nowhere. There were faint tire tracks on the rubble ahead. Miga told me we had 40 kilometers to go, and he seemed to know where he was heading. There was no other vehicle in sight, not a building on the horizon. Yet, I found it surprisingly easy to just relax and trust him. With Teresa, I am usually the driver. It was great for me to just lounge in the passenger seat, not a care in the world.
After half an hour or so, where the tire tracks diverged in two directions, someone had thoughtfully hammered into the hard ground a little black arrow with “Gobi Caravanserai” on it: the name of our hotel. The colors of the desert shifted again and again as we drove, from beige to brown to a rust-red that was almost pink. The sky, meanwhile, was gathering itself for a storm on the horizon. Clouds in the distance released long dark streamers of rain, like giant airborne jellyfish trailing black, translucent tentacles.
Suddenly, we arrived at Gobi Caravanserai. I say suddenly, because the resort was built of low adobe structures that blended into the desert. It was a shock to see anything human-made in this landscape, let alone something so appealing to the eye. Miga and I were each given a room, and we agreed to rest for an hour before heading out to the White Stupa, still several kilometers distant.
I had been told that from afar Tsagaan Suvarg appears like a ruined city. But as we drove right up to the little shack at the entrance to this natural wonder, I could see nothing. I was mystified. I followed Miga out of the car and onto a flat trail that just seemed heading further into the desert. Then we reached the edge. We were on top of the cliffs, looking down, way down, into the wide, dry valley beneath us.
The view, as you can tell from the photos, was stupa-pendous. There was not another soul on the top of the cliffs. All we could hear was the wind. Down below, several large black shapes were moving. Each had two humps. Bactrian camels.
As we turned around and headed back, we saw a silver minivan drive up right to the edge of the cliffs and disgorge several passengers. “Koreans,” said Miga, though how he knew their nationality from a distance baffled me. While the Koreans began to wander the cliffs, the driver/guide pulled out a little collapsable stool. He took it right to the edge of the magnificent gorge, sat down, and then began scrolling through his phone (magnify the photo below to see for yourself).
Miga led the way to a sandy path that wound down to the base of the cliffs. From there we could look up, and really see the stupa shapes that gave this formation its exotic name. Indeed, parts of the eroded cliffs looked remarkably human-made. I kept expecting a head to pop out of one of these “windows”:
Back at the camp, we shared a surprisingly good buffet dinner of Mongolian beef, lamb and potatoes. There was even fresh salad. The wine list astounded me: Amarone? St. Emilion? Where’s the Michelin Star? The hotel even offered hot showers (though not en suite). A sign on the shower door read: “This water comes from the only well within 20 kilometers. Please use it carefully.”
I woke up at 3:30 in the morning. The moon was high in the sky outside my terrace window. I opened the door took a few steps into the darkness. The weather was cool in early June — neither the minus 40 of winter nor the 100 degrees of summer. I walked across the compound to the bathroom to pee…it just didn’t feel right to do so right outside my room, under the moonlight.
I awoke again at dawn, and stepped out once more into the desert. With the sun just above the horizon, I cast a long shadow.
This was looking to be a day beneath what Mongolians call the “Eternal Blue Sky.” It would be a long drive back to Ulaan Bataar…in fact, I had no idea just how long a drive, nor that we would get lost in the desert in a search for prehistoric rock carvings, nor that Miga would take a detour through the steppes to see a ruined Buddhist temple, and we would nearly get trapped in a rainstorm as our road turned into a river… So much for the Eternal Blue Sky! (For details, stay tuned for Gobi Desert Part Two, coming soon to Mature Flânuer).
Did you miss my earlier posts about Mongolia? Here they are:
