Alone in Ulaanbaatar

From the USSR

Ulaanbaatar Mongolia 2014

Our tour to Mongolia wasn’t long enough to suit me so I added a few extra days at the end. After seeing UB or Ulaanbaater, I got the feeling that being alone on those extra days was a big mistake. The tourist season had ended. No horseback riding into the mountains. No camel excursions into the Gobi….just me, alone in freezing, smoggy Ulaanbaatar. Every time I thought about it, I was filled with dread.

I asked everyone I met for advice on how to spend my time. Those who had an affinity for Mongolia rattled off a list for me, but I couldn’t see how their ideas would fill five long days. Luckily, I had a guide and he got some ideas of his own.

His first idea was to visit a factory where cashmere wool was woven into high end garments. The photo above is of a decades old Soviet made machine that is still in use today, still whirring and clanking, taking the dirty wool straight from the steppe and turning it into fluffy clouds of white. The factory was a grim place.  We splashed through puddles of water as we walked through the long, narrow, dimly lit  hallways. It was the epitome of a Soviet factory in my mind.

In the weaving room women and one lone man stood at old knitting machines, slinging the shuttle back and forth for hour after hour.  It can’t have taken too much strength because no one had out-sized shoulders. I don’t know how they faced that job day after day…wait a minute…I think some of them had Ipods or similar. You’d go postal if you didn’t have music.

There was one special room where modern Italian knitting machines purred silently. They produce in minutes what the other machines did in hours or was it days???

I enjoyed my visit to the factory and I wish I’d had more time to take photos, but the factory official was in a hurry to get me to the showroom where I would be tempted to shop, shop, shop. And I was.