Seeing as how it would indeed be a terrible thing to come all the way to Mongolia and not spend a night in a yurt, my sister, a couple of her friends here and I travelled out of the city yesterday to pass the night in true Mongolian style at the Mongolian National Park and Xtreme Offroad Thunderdome of Terelj. So we packed up some overnight things (including a decent quantity of Mongolian beer and long underwear; both of which are absolutely essential for passing a night in relative comfort) and, before you can say Bogd Khan, we were on our way out of the city in a thoroughly Road Warrior Japanese SUV with the steering wheel on the wrong side, about a half dozen little mirrors around the front to compensate for said steering wheel anomaly, no functioning seatbelts, and an excellent onboard cassette collection featuring the greatest hits of the 80s.

Now, it happens to be the case that while the city streets of Mongolia are far from the best graded and surfaced in the civilized world, once you get to the countryside you soon realize that the Mongolian definition of "flat" is more along the lines of the American definition of "pock-marked cratery wasteland of death and devastation", because honestly the whole thing is so full of moon craters, nooks, crannies, gaping abysses, and a healthy sprinkling of good old-fashioned potholes large enough to lose a yak in that the only way to stay anywhere close to upright is to simply drive in the least devastated part of the road, which is of course, always in the oncoming lane, the sidewalk, or occasionally the fifty feet of open desert on either side of what, strictly speaking, is actually the road.

Which brings me next to the observation that while it is the case that back in the States, a road is generally considered to be a sort of a long, straight, asphalty kind of a thing with a nice little line down the middle and a good distribution of dead possums on it, in Mongolia a road is more rightly designated as whatever piece of real estate (or, in some not uncommon cases, whatever inland sea or frozen river) happens to be beneath your car at this particular instant. Out on the steppes in fact, the roads are often the worst of possible driving surfaces, and many wisely elect therefore to just go traipsing off across the open fields.

So anyway, there we were, cruising along at some speed which sounds absolutely fantastic because its in kilometers and I never could figure out what those are, small boulders merrily hurling themselves at our transmission case, avoiding perhaps an even half of the innumerable yawning fissures in the road and occasionally slipping, for but a moment, the surly bonds of Earth and soaring a bit skyward. Really, it was almost like driving on the Boulevard back in Richmond. Once we finally made out way into the park, we successfully negotiated a number of bridges which had more waves to them than the rivers they spanned.

Finally, we made it to the hotel (such as it was) checked in to our yurts, and went to find the horse-riding guy that we might rent ourselves some acceptably noble steeds. Five minutes later, there I was, astride my +60% Mongolian War Pony kind of bouncing along in the most biting extremity of cold and wondering why God saw fit to design horses without suitable handles, or at least making out of something compatible with Velcro. All of a sudden, with a great and lusty shout, two crazy drunk pony-wielding madmen hove from out the darkness and charged up to me, rammed into my pony, shouting and carrying on all the while, and generally making navigation (which was already far from a certain business for me) altogether worrisome. I (who haven’t been on a horse that wasn’t made of plastic with a pole through it for over twenty years) finally manage to get my pony into something vaguely resembling an equine holding pattern until our two drunken commando pony-master wannabe crackhead guys are properly shooed away, at which point I can safely resume my previous activity of looking uncomfortable and trying to avoid fatal thigh chafage (at which I was moderately successful).

It was now, the Sun having long since passed o’er the horizon, very cold indeed, and it is likely that it would have been very unpleasant were it not the case that apparently all the horses in Mongolia are kept to a strict diet of tacos and petrochemicals and are more or less jet-propelled. So, by the time we made it back about an hour later, we were all nearly frozen to death, the ride in the land rover seemed upon reflection to have been the very pink of comfort and security by comparison, and our horses had caused something like a 20% increase in the methane levels over Outer Mongolia (indeed, it is a good thing that we didn’t get our campfires going until a good bit later on or all the horses would likely have gone up in a massive fireball visible from Borneo).

The yurts were really very comfortable after they got comfortably warmed up (though all the coal we burned left me smelling quite bituminous the next morning) and after a supper of deep-fried Mongolian hot pockets and 14 proof philosophical discussion, it turned out to be a most comfortable night after all.

The next morning we struck out for town again, stopped by Turtle Rock (thus proving once and for all the ages yet to come that Legend of Zelda did indeed take place in Mongolia), all froze half to death one more time for good measure, and drove past one of those shamany totem thingies that you walk around three times and throw rocks and empty beer bottle at to appease the local spirits, who all seemed like nice enough ethereal beings since they had seen fit to not let my horse burst into flame while I was riding it the day before. And so, without further incident or accident, we returned home aside from the occasional brief episode of being airborne.