Around the World in 50 Years

by Albert Podell

  Many Mongolians earn their livelihood from domesticated animals: 20 percent of its export income derives from them, and they produce 21 percent of the world’s cashmere. But a drought the winter before I visited had turned seven million livestock into deadstock whose bleached bones littered the terrain.

  The national diet has changed little over the centuries, with a dominant emphasis on meat and dairy. The Big Five here are cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and (less frequently) camels or reindeer, and the locals refer to themselves as “The People of the Five Snouts,” all of which they boil, steam, roast, fry, grill, heat under pressure, or cook from the inside by filling the animal’s stomach cavity with large hot rocks. They use this high-fat, high-protein regimen to stave off the cold in a climate where winter temperatures reach minus 40 degrees. The Mongolian vocabulary has no words for either “cholesterol” or “arteriosclerosis,” and their fatty cuisine is so bland and boring on the Western palate—nomads have no time to grow herbs or spices—it makes Wales seem like a culinary center.

  Vegetables are scarce for three reasons: The growing season is too short for most produce; nomads do not remain in one place long enough to till, plant, and harvest crops; and they do not like or respect vegetables because they view all green edibles as fodder fit only for animals. No fruits, either. In our 1,200-kilometer circuit, I saw only one vegetable garden, one field of wheat, and not a single fruit tree. It’s no country for old vegetarians.

  Since I like to eat strange stuff, I enjoyed a superb horse steak on my first night (although the locals tend to overcook their meat); tried the staple of fermented mare’s milk at a monastery (yuk!); loved a bowl of fresh goat yogurt topped with tart wild currants served by a comely milkmaid at a parking lot beside a volcano; ate my first roach (no, it’s just an indigenous freshwater fish); drank a pot of milk tea seasoned with salt and butter (an indiscretion not to be repeated); and savored a platter of fresh yak butter, cheese, and yogurt with a dairy family, although that was imprudent since none of it was pasteurized and brucellosis (aka undulant fever) is common there.

  For those who like less exotic fare, or some vegetables, UB has a host of “ethnic” restaurants, including Kenny Rogers Roasters, El Latina, the Detroit American Bar (what were they thinking?), Los Banditos, Planet Pizza, the Brau Haus, five eateries that begin with the name “Broadway,” and The Original Irish Pub (which, to Dennis’s consternation, didn’t serve Guinness). Those tourists wanting to dip a finger into the local food can dine at the fashionable “First Mongolian Restaurant Established 1602,” but, alas, that’s a fake, since it serves “Mongolian hot pot” and “Mongolian barbecue,” neither of which is indigenous, having arrived in UB from Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. Outside UB it’s pretty much potluck.

  My main gastronomic complaint was that Mongolians, who traditionally eat for survival rather than pleasure, have no familiarity with the concept of dessert, my rectification of which necessitated several nocturnal treks to a new UB supermarket for boxes of Choco Pies.

  Although I survived the food, I almost didn’t survive the UB traffic, which was the least pedestrian-friendly I’d ever encountered (until I got to Hanoi)—far worse than Paris, Tehran, or even Albania. The drivers ignore the yield signs, stop signs, pedestrian walkways, the rare red lights, and, when they can, the few traffic cops. They’re more aggressive than a New York cabbie, zooming around corners at high speed from hiding places on tree-shrouded boulevards. I thought I was becoming paranoid because I believed that the cars heading my way speeded up whenever I tried to cross a street. But Lonely Planet confirmed it: The drivers are not actually aiming to hit you, but they are speeding up to warn you that they rule the road, you have no rights of way, and that you’d better be very careful, or very quick.

  A word about the climate: Mongolia is blessed with 260 sunny days a year, and though I visited in its wet season, six of our eight days passed without a cloud. The sky was an intensely rich shade of blue, attributable to the country’s average elevation of 5,000 feet. Mongolians call theirs “the land of the blue sky” and worship it in a shamanistic way, the most visible evidence of which are the thousands of deep blue haday (scarves) they insert in the hundreds of ovoos (stone cairns) or tie to the wood teepee constructions that dot the terrain.

  Because Mongolia is far from any ocean that could exert a moderating effect on its temperature, and because the cloudless skies let the land cool quickly at night, it’s common for the mercury to plunge more than 50 degrees from noon to midnight, with the consequence that on three August nights we needed to light the stoves in our gers.

  I was able to visit four sublime monasteries: a large one in UB that had avoided destruction by converting to a museum, an expansive one that has been rebuilt in Karakorum using the stones from the ruins of the ancient capital’s former palaces, and two that were hidden so high in the hills and so far off the beaten tracks they were overlooked by the Communists. Since Buddhism came to Mongolia from Tibet, the temples in the monasteries have a Tibetan look, from the bunting to the prayer wheels to the embroidered hangings to the brightly painted Buddhas. Mongolia once had 100,000 monks, and one monastery for every 2,000 inhabitants—to the credit of a wise Chinese diplomat who centuries ago concluded that, because his country had been ravaged so many times by Mongol armies, it would be wise for China to build temples there to turn the young men into peaceful monks rather than ferocious warriors.

  When I’d reached Mongolia, I still lacked the visa I needed to return to China to reclaim my luggage and catch my flight to Bangkok. I was down to Plan D, after failing with:

  Plan A. Before leaving New York, obtain the triple-entry visa I needed to land in Beijing on my flights from, respectively, the Pacific, North Korea, and Mongolia. But the Chinese consulate only gave me a double-entry visa;

  Plan B. Secure the third visa in Beijing. After spending a full day to find the visa office and fill out the application, they informed me that, to process it, they needed ten working days, which I did not have, and required a Beijing bank account with $3,000 in it, which I also did not have.

  Plan C. Acquire the visa at the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang. Fuggedaboutit!

  And so I tried Plan D. Get the visa from the Chinese Embassy in UB, which my Mongolian guide had, months before, assured me would work. But she’d forgotten that August was when hundreds of Mongolian students who attend college in China applied to renew their visas. Since the Chinese Embassy only granted 40 a day, this was problematic. We hired the guide’s sister to save me a place outside the Chinese Embassy by getting there at 4:00 a.m. She somehow lost her place, and when I arrived at 8:00 a.m., 70 kids were ahead of her, none willing to defer to a tourist.

  On to Plan E. I’d forgo the return to China and fly directly to Bangkok, while Dennis and Andrew, who’d been issued multiple-entry visas in New York before the policy changed, retrieved my big bag in Beijing and brought it when they met me in Bangkok. I purchased a ticket for a flight out of UB on Monday with MIAT, a notoriously unreliable airline whose initials, veteran travelers claim, stand for, “Maybe I’ll Arrive Thursday.”

  I’d successfully gotten past check-in, weigh-in, immigration, and security at the Genghis Khan International Airport, and was urgently searching for a bathroom and beginning to believe that Murphy had finally cut me some slack, when an airport policewoman tapped me on the shoulder, shoved a copy of my boarding pass under my nose, and pointed downstairs.

  I asked her, in my best Monglish, if she knew where the toilet was.

  She barked, “Poowdle—Custum!”

  I explained that when you gotta go, ya gotta go.

  She countered that when Customs calls, that is where ya gotta go. So we went.

  In the dreary basement baggage room, three customs officers were gathered around my duffel bag, which they gestured for me to open. They pointed to a white object nestled in worn T-shirts. It was the complete skull of a young horse that I’d found on the prairie, a casualty o
f the drought the previous winter.

  I gesticulated that this was much ado about nothing, that I had not killed it, nor stolen it, and that I had washed it, and even toothbrushed it, so that it was sterile. But that didn’t satisfy them. The troika held a loud, argumentative conference about whether my possession or exportation of the skull was illegal, immoral, inadvisable, or just stupid, as the clock ticked toward takeoff time and the call of nature remained unanswered.

  I finally noodled it out: These guys believed I was trying to abscond with part of their national heritage, one of the precious dinosaur fossils strewn about the Gobi Desert, like those I’d seen in their national museum.

  Given the language barrier, and my inability to draw, I tried a charade. I reached into my duffel bag for a blanket, folded it, got down on my hands and knees, put the blanket on my back as if it were a saddle, and then galloped around the room, hoping I emulated a horse, not a velociraptor, while doing my best to whinny and to suppress the urge to surge for the bathroom.

  The customs guys either understood my message or decided that I was a dangerous wacko who should be deported as quickly as possible. They released me and put my bag on the conveyor belt for the Bangkok flight as I ran for the MEN’s.

  CHAPTER 24

  On the Wings of the Dragon

  Our visit to Bangkok began with a bang.

  Andrew exited the air terminal in high dudgeon because customs agents had confiscated the three Russian military-surplus bayonets he’d purchased at a hilltop flea market in central Mongolia. To help him forget his loss, he asked that I take him for a Thai massage, one of life’s most sybaritic experiences.

  I drove him to one of the many large clubs in the lively red-light district of Patpong, where 60 lovely ladies, ages 18 to 28, were seated on a three-tiered stage, all provocatively dressed, each with a big numbered button on her dress for identification.

  The main change over the years was that the women are no longer viewed through a one-way mirror that had enabled the patrons to inspect them without being seen. Now it’s all open, and when the women see a client appraising them, they each attempt to establish eye contact and win his favor (and their rent money) with all manner of smiles, winks, nods, air-kisses, shakes, shimmies, cleavage drops, leg crossings, leg un-crossings, deep-inhalation chest enlargements, and pantomimed sex. All demurely done, of course.

  Once you select the lady and pay the fee ($150 for two hours), she takes you upstairs to your own spotlessly clean, dimly lit, soundproofed suite that is half Turkish bath and half bedroom, where she gently undresses you, while gigglingly pretending to be impressed with the size of your equipment. She then joins and bathes you in a large deep tub before leading you to a comfortable, cushiony, heated plastic air mattress, where she turns you ass up and soaps you all over with buckets of warmed suds. She next climbs aboard your back and massages you with her powerful thighs, from toes to head, performing feats of contortionism with intense erotic energy. Then she turns you right side up, for an even more sensual massage. If your gun is still loaded after all this—most guys will have shot their full clip and any spare ammo belts by now—she takes you to the big, firm, freshly sheeted, perfume-scented bed and presses your trigger.

  Most guys stagger out in 30 to 50 minutes. But not our Andrew. Since he had never been in a place like this, and had never before paid for sexual servicing, he did not know the worldwide unwritten rule of gentlemanly bordello behavior: You quit after you come. Orgasm and out. You scored; game over.

  Andrew naïvely assumed that, since he had been quoted a price for two hours, he was entitled to continue to conjugate and copulate for the full 120 minutes, and so he did, with the result that I was kept waiting far longer than I ever anticipated until the loving couple came downstairs, and the lady had high hopes of packing her bags and moving to join our boy in Jersey City.

  The future of these emporiums, which have long thrived in parts of Southeast Asia, is problematic. As the region prospered, affluent local patrons gravitated toward long-term relationships with concubines and mistresses. Meanwhile, sexual tourism has come under fire. And reformers contend that these pleasure palaces encourage sexual servitude and the exploitation of women, and demean them as little more than sex objects. The defenders of the system argue that these establishments offer the girls, who typically come from poor rural areas where they faced hard and hopeless lives of grinding poverty, the rare opportunity to earn good money in a safe environment and climb into the middle class, sometimes even marrying their clients. The proponents further maintain that a woman should be free to do what she wants with her body, including selling it or renting it out for the evening, as long as no compulsion or abuse is involved. I was torn twixt the yin and yang of the debate. I was a devout, equal-opportunity-believing, ERA-supporting, card-carrying liberal mysteriously trapped in the body and mind-set of a horndog.

  * * *

  On none of my previous trips to Thailand had I visited the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai that WW II Japanese prison commanders had forced Allied POWs to build as part of the Death Railway. To rectify this omission, Dennis, Andrew, and I took off at dawn from Bangkok in a rented car for the long drive west to Kanchanaburi.

  I should have stayed with my memory of the movie, because the reality was disappointing.

  In my recollection, the gorge was so wide and deep it required a towering timber trestle. But the film, I later learned, had been shot at Kitulgala in Sri Lanka. Kanchanaburi had no yawning gorge, and the unimpressive bridge was no more than 30 feet above the muddy, sluggish water, and was further robbed of any grandeur by a bright, blue-and-yellow, toy-like tourist train that crossed it every 15 minutes. Moreover, the original wooden bridge built by the captured servicemen had been destroyed by Allied bombs. What the tourist brochures were calling the “Bridge on the River Kwai” was a steel span the Japanese had captured in Java and shipped to Kanchanaburi, believing it more likely to survive bombing.

  Notwithstanding this substitution, the adjacent area should have been treated as hallowed ground, sanctified by the 60,000 British and Dutch POWs and other slave laborers who died building the railroad that provided the Japanese with a vital supply line for their troops in Burma, who were trying to fight their way to India and bisect the British Empire. Instead, the bridge environs had become a blighted honky-tonk mishmash of shops selling junk jewelry, smuggled rubies, fake rubies, handbags, T-shirts, junk food, and tacky souvenirs. It might be tolerable if the tourist traps were set apart from the bridge and the exhibitions about it, yet they were contiguous and inextricably entwined. There’s the combined “Art Gallery and War Museum,” the conflated “Death Railroad Museum and Miss Thailand Directory,” and, high above them all, the “Best View of Bridge and Toilet.” It’s a travesty. Watch the movie, but don’t waste time visiting the scene of the crime.

  The Bridge on the River Kwai in today’s Thailand is not the tall wooden trestle built in 1942 with the blood of thousands of Allied POWs, but a steel span the Japanese captured elsewhere and installed at Kanchanaburi in 1944. The Death Railway has been replaced by a diminutive, brightly painted tourist train.

  The fallen have fared a bit better. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission created and maintains a peaceful cemetery away from the tourist area, “in honoured remembrance of the fortitude and sacrifice of that valiant company who perished while building the railway from Thailand to Burma during their long captivity.”

  The headstones are small, white, and uniform, rising only an inch above the verdant carpet of grass, aligned in precise rows too long for me to see their end, with solitary trees providing some shade and emphasis, all surrounded by a mile-long, neatly manicured hedge and bordered by flowering plants, all immaculately maintained by a dozen groundskeepers. The plaque near the gate read: “I will make you a name and a praise among all people of the earth when I turn back your captivity before your eyes, saith the Lord.”

  The inscriptions on the headstones were sentimental
, loving, and sorrowfully proud, like those I’d seen 40 years before at Sollum, relics of an era when those qualities informed and guided the Greatest Generation:

  For King and Country.

  To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.

  He lay down his life that others might live free.

  They gave their lives and all that living means, my sons.

  Heading to Brunei, we ran into massive monsoon thunderclouds and turbulence in the path of our A319 to the south, Sinabung volcano spewing ashes from Indonesia on our west, and a killer typhoon to our east that became the strongest to hit Korea in 15 years. We arrived in Brunei, shaken but safe, for several days of planned boredom and decompression in Asia’s strictest Muslim country during the final week of Ramadan.

  The Brunei Times, which I read in flight, carried an “Invitation for Expression of Interest” from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, for a position for which I was ideally qualified—“Consultancy on the research and handling of low morale activities in Brunei Darussalam.” The scope of work included: “1. Definition of Morale. 2. Database of Low Morale Activities. 3. National Plan for Low Morale Activities Reduction.”

  Some might scoff, but this task offered a worthy challenge in a country where the heat and humidity are oppressive 24/7/365, alcohol is prohibited, pornography is forbidden, gambling is outlawed, amorous couples face fines and jail for hugging and kissing in public, and adulterous lovers can get hard prison time. You can’t even hope to play footsie with your friends’ wives because, at most large dinners, the men eat at one table while the women and children eat at another. No wonder morale was low!