Ulan Ude

I woke up the next morning exhausted, and we had to unload quickly in Ulan Ude. Ulan Ude is the capital city of the Russian province of Buryatia, a mountainous Buddhist enclave that shares a border with Mongolia. The town isn’t very big, so the stop wasn’t very long. My imitation Adidas bag showed its true colors by ripping in several places as I was pulling it out from under one of the lower bunks. I bungee-corded it together and dragged it and myself and my backpack off the train, and we were deposited in the middle of Buryatia in the pre-dawn twilight.

As we stepped off the stairs into the train station, from all four corners of my field of vision came four Buryats in fur hoods who seized upon our luggage. A moment of fear passed as I realized they weren’t stealing our luggage, they were just taking it to the baggage storage place so they could extort a little money from us. Two of them cornered me and demanded payment after the luggage was taken care of, and I probably gave them more than they deserved. I went quickly to Liz, only to find that the other two were trying to get her to pay also. “Liz, I already paid! Come on!”

We had one day and four hours to explore the city, and first order of business was to find a place to stay the night. We settled on the Hotel Odon, the cheapest beds in town at around $6. Our room had two hard little beds, patterned orange wallpaper, shiny orange and gold drapes, and a big iron bath tub with running water that wasn’t quite freezing. It seemed to be a gathering place for poorer travelling kinds. As we walked down our hall, we saw a woman squatting on the floor scaling an enormous fish into a metal bowl. Some rooms were filled with laughing Chinese men probably doing business of some kind.

By this time, Liz and I were starting to feel symptoms of approaching illness. I started taking the antibiotics I had brought in case my wisdom teeth got infected, and I offered Liz some. She declined, saying she would see if she got better first.

We napped for a while, then got up to find some food and go exploring. The café on our floor had an extensive menu, which the lady behind the counter presented to us. She pointed at the pelmeni (meat dumplings), which we took as a suggestion, but we were a little sick of pelmeni by now. We read over the menu and each decided on a dish. She shook her head when we ordered. “Nyetto.” We each picked something else, and again she shook her head. We asked what she did have, and she pointed to the pelmeni again. So… we got pelmeni. It was excellent pelmeni, though, spicy and piping hot.

After we ate, we caught a cab to the Town Square. Our driver was very nice and chatted with us the whole way there. He said he had studied psychology in St. Petersburg, but he made ten times more as a cabdriver than he would as a teacher or professor. He only charged us 20 rubles for the ride, less than a dollar.

Our guidebook had said there was a surreally large bust of Lenin in the Town Square of Ulan Ude. I figured it must be five feet high or so, which I thought was pretty big for a head. But nothing could prepare me for what I saw when I got out of the cab. It wasn’t a bust; it was the Wizard of Oz meets Big Brother. The giant disembodied head leering out over the square had to be at least 25 or 30 feet tall. The snow that had settled on his chin and cheeks made him look bottom-lit and eerie. I half-expected green flames to shoot out of its neck.

When we finally picked our jaws up off the floor, we went up to inspect it. Rob had had about four hours here between trains and had promised to leave us a note somewhere on the Lenin Head. We found his Colorado postcard and a nice note stuck between some slats of the wood around the base. We wandered around the square and saw the multi-colored ice sculptures of columns and castles and exquisite Buddhist carvings and animal figures. I think they were getting ready for a sculpture festival, and I wished I could have stuck around to see it.

We walked along the streets and looked at the wooden cabins, some of which were kind of disheveled and leaning over. Most had intricate carvings around their awnings and windows and doors.

We wandered around until we found the main bus station. It was a parking lot full of ancient vans and buses with numbers crudely painted or taped onto them. I wanted to visit the Ivolginsk Datsan, a Buddhist monastery 30 kilometers from Ulan Ude at the foot of the Kamar-Daban Mountains. It sounded mystical and exotic to me, and it was the main reason I had wanted to stop in Ulan Ude. We talked to a driver who said he was going to the Datsan, and we hopped in the back of his van.

The van was full of people who looked Mongolian, so they were probably Buryat, the indigenous people of the region. One woman spoke to us in friendly Russian and said she had a daughter at school in Moscow close to the Finance Academy where we had studied.

We had to keep scraping the ice off the window in order to see out, and the scenery looked like a frozen Arizona with scrubby snow-covered desert and mountains in the distance.

We got to the monastery around sunset, and the dusky purple and pink and blue of the sky reflected prettily off the snow. I walked around and looked at the colorful, intricate, Asian-looking buildings and saw some children playing with a giant prayer wheel. We went into the main temple, and it was a kaleidoscope of colors. All the surfaces were covered in cheerful, colorful painting, and there were multicolored silk pillows and blankets all around. A portrait of the Dalai Lama was displayed on the main altar, and innumerable Buddhist statues were perched behind it all along the back wall. There were literally scores of them, perhaps hundreds, saved from other temples or donated from around the world. This temple had held out as the center of Buddhism during the atheistic reign of the Soviets, and today it houses about 30 lamas mostly trained in Mongolia. I bought a little bracelet that looked like it was made of carved bone, and then we had to leave because it was time for them to prepare for services.

Now it came time to find out how we were going to get back into town. It was dark by now and there was no sign of a motor vehicle. We went into the little cafeteria to think. As we were ordering our tea and soup and bread, the radio was picking up a random station that happened to be playing the song, “You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Weird. Finally Liz went outside again and spotted a van, and we ran out and hopped into it. Luckily it was heading our way.

Day 8--A Brush with the Mafia on Train No. 8

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