Mongolia.  Its name is synonymous with yaks, global conquest, and totally sweet hats.  It is also, serendipitously enough, where my sister is spending most of this summer whilst she furthers her jedi-like mastery of journalism.  Now, were I the cautious sort, always taking care to painstakingly document my sources and get all my journalist ducks in a row, I might find it difficult to write an entire blog about a country with a very different culture from our own (except concerning table manners and the awesomeness of Genghis Khan, not to mention the mutual appreciation for Dick Cheney) to which, I have never, in fact, even been.  Fortunately though, I’m more like Newsweek, and I’ll just make any old thing up if I think it’ll be funny.  Therefore, based upon eyewitness accounts and firsthand experience from my sister in the Orient, I give you this brief description on all the ways to get around in Mongolia (lest when you yourself travel there, you find yourself like Aquaman, who, not knowing that Mongolia is a landlocked nation, was unable to secure any fish to ride around on and had to take a unicycle everywhere):

            First and most important, we have the noble yak.  Nearer and dearer to my heart than most other Mongolian beasts of transport (owing, in no small part, to its close kinship with the wooly mammoth), the yak is, foremost, totally friggin’ awesome.  How, you ask?  First, they don’t have ‘em here in Virginia (an acute shortage of yaks is really the only thing that keeps us from being the all-around most awesome place on Earth), and since anything you have to import from far away is magically and automatically better, yaks are epically keen.  The very work “yak” lends itself to verbification marvelously (“Sorry, your Holiness, I fear I have yakked in thy sock drawer”).  Try doing that with “horse” or “Hubert Humphrey”, or some other form of transportation, it’s just not the same.  Finally, they’re edible, so if your yak breaks down out on a steppe somewhere, miles from the nearest Coldstone Creamery (of which there are many in Mongolia) you can just eat it while you wait for AAA to get there and give you a ride.

            Next we have Mongolian Battle Ponies.  It is both bone-chillingly fearsome, and cuter sack full of baby koalas (or ought that be koali?), rather like a kitten with a flamethrower.  They’re really good at climbing mountains (at least the one my sister rode on didn’t fall off a cliff…much), and like yaks, they make a delicious side dish to any Mongol meal.  Also, unlike our big sport utility ponies over here, Mongolian ones are compact and environmentally friendly, running as they do solely of bio-diesel, and being made entirely from recycled soybeans.

            Then we come to the camel.  While most of us here in the states are probably used to riding those uncomfortable, precarious one hump camels, in Mongolia, they have the kind with a bonus hump.  This, of course, gives them twice the range, for those long road trips and beer runs across the Gobi Desert.  Also with the whole two hump setup, you get a much lower ride, with far superior high-speed cornering.  Really, the only reason not to go with the camel option is if you’re trying to quit smoking, in which case spending all day riding around on a ubiquitous reminder of cigarettes mightn’t be the best of ideas.

            Getting away from the animal kingdom for a while, Mongolians also have the perennially awesome Crazy Bus.  If you’re not familiar with this particular fixture of transit in developing nations and school systems, the Crazy Bus is a big ol’ bus with a dubious repair record, about twice as many passengers as it has seats, and a clientele that sees nothing wrong with bringing goats as carry-on luggage (to be fair though, the goat is not without reason often called “The Palm Pilot of the East”).  Also, owing to their chronic shortage of guys in orange vests, Mongolia really doesn’t have particularly good highway coverage, meaning that if your bus is going from say, Ulan Bator to Genghisburg, the bus driver just follows the nearest old timey big pointing hand sign and takes off over across the wasteland towards wherever it is you’re going.  Thisd sounds kind of dangerous at first, but if you just make sure to bring a leather jacket and a kid with a boomerang, you can pretend that you’re Mad Max (though really, you should probably pretend you’re Mad Max more often even if you’re not going to Mongolia).

            Finally, they’ve got sand worms.  Now I know you’ve probably heard that sand worms are just made up, even though Patrick Stewart rode one in Dune, but in the magical kingdom of Mongolia, anything is possible.  They mostly live in the desert (duh) and taking them into the city is generally frowned upon owing to the damage they do to the sidewalks, but assuming you’re planning on putting a lot of highway miles on one, they’re really a pretty good way of getting around.  Also, they always make a totally awesome entrance, like, if you’re going to a block party, and you take a sand worm, you don’t just pull up to the curb and park the thing.  No, you dramatically and awesomtastically burst out from beneath the very earth itself, causing all sorts of destruction and probably eating any yippy little dogs or fat kids who were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time (though if you already filled up on Pork Cracklins™, you might want to just let your sand worm eat them instead).  According to my sister, she hasn’t ridden one of these yet, but I’m hoping that when she finally does, she’ll bring me a picture or a coffee mug with a humorous message referring to like, sand worms, and maybe, uh, bad traffic or something.  Meanwhile though, here’s a computer-generated artist's conception of what one of them looks like (the sand worm, not the coffee mug):