Staying in Outer Mongolia

If you can’t rough it in the rural areas, Mongolia is not for you! I have been asked by a few people, “what is the toilet situation like?”.

I am not going to sugar coat it for you, going to the toilet is basically squat, sh*t and go!

When I stayed in the Altai mountain, I had two nights with two different locals. An eagle hunter family and my guide’s aunt.

The hunter family lives in a wooden cabin during summertime that houses 8 people. They all share rooms to sleep in. The so-called toilet is outside in the freezing cold. It is a shallow dug hole in the ground, 150 paces to the right of the front door.

The open air squat box is as it sounds. Three pieces of wood hide your modesty with a swing door. There’s two wooden planks to straddle the drop. Careful you don’t fall in!

The human excrement is abundant and clear for you to see and inhale, because the drop does not run deep. Don’t gawp mind, because you might swallow one of the marble-sized flies that swarm around the “toilet”.

The Kazakhs don’t have a shower, they basin wash once a week and hair only gets washed once every 2 weeks. Water is precious. I was never offered water to bathe.

The other family lived in a traditional Ger. These are Mongolian tents with a wooden structure and a felt covering for insulation. These are dotted around the fields filled with animals grazing. Dried animal faeces are everywhere. And it’s collected by the women and children and burned to make fire to cook with.

Some families decorate the inside of gers with colourful materials. And there are hard wooden beds to ensure you are off the floor from bugs. There are no spongy mattresses on them. You cook, eat, sleep and socialise in the ger. The toilet is again outside and is a squat drop usually made with stones for the walls.

At night all manner of insects will find their way into the gers, so if you don’t like bugs you are not going to sleep well. They crawl out from the inside of the walls. Thankfully they are not the biting kind but they are rather large and fly.

Some tourist gers may have a lightbulb swinging from the ceiling and this attracts the bugs, as the roof is often open, while the sun sets. A head touch is best when getting ready for bed.

There are some tourist camps which are fancy and have flushing toilets and showers inside a separate building off to one side of the camp. They get booked up fast. The camps are not all of the same standard. In the desert not all will have running water. In one camp they needed an hour to order the water for the tank, which is not hot. The desert is windy and cold in the morning and at night! Sometimes you decide it’s better to skip the ice-shower.

The best bit of camping was when I actually slept in a tent by one of the lakes in a field full of yaks, cows, sheep and goats. Expect to hear munching outside when you awake. Like the livestock you go au natural, preferably away from where you sleep, and behind a rock.

Bottom line (pun intended) take wet wipes, expect to live primitively and understand that the privileges we take for granted daily are a real luxury in rural Mongolia.

I’ve already mentioned food in the mountains. It is bleak. Heavy red meat, dairy and bread, no vegetables in sight. The tourist ger camps may give you a fried egg on toast with a disgusting frankfurter sausage. Most guides brought extra food for their guests because they know the standard of food is poor. I felt like I was in a food “prison” for two weeks.

Mongolia’s landscape may be a feast for the eyes, but my god, its cuisine is far from mouthwatering.

My breakfast was hit and miss. Most days the guide cooked me fried eggs, one day I had oats with hot cow’s milk, that was heaven, but then the packet mysteriously disappeared. Fruit was a lottery, some days I got it, other days I didn’t: typically an apple, or mandarin, and one day my guide cut up a watermelon. That was like Christmas.

Despite taking miso paste and dried Shiitake mushrooms with me, I ate what I could, but was depressed like hell with the menu du jour. Everyday was a lottery.

I desperately wanted to cook my own food from the food supplies that were bought before we left, but I was not allowed to touch anything. It was my version of hell. Mongolians barbecue things, Kazakhs do not! The Kazakhs boil the joy out of anything in the cooking pot.

I brought my own seasoning to add to everything I ate (dried garlic, dried chilies, rock salt, ground black pepper and finger root powder).

I didn’t eat yak or horse while there, but these are also available as is goat. In Gobi, pork is available as only the Kazakhs are Islamic.

If you go to Mongolia after 3 days you’ll probably start to lose weight because the monotony of what you are given to eat, will kill your appetite. After a while, the grass starts to look like the best option.

Eat to survive and remember at least it’s not forever.