Are We There Yet?

For  those of you who know our trip started on August 29, no, we are not lost, dead or physically disabled. (The jury’s out on mentally.) I’m just dead tired. Neither time nor energy have been sufficient to keep a realtime blog. Hence, I’ll be doling out a well-after-the-fact set of notes and pictures as I am able. Today is a sea day aboard the Yi Dun and there are only five lectures, ten musical events, a dozen special activities, and, of course, three meals scheduled, so I should have plenty of time to start the trip’s first post.

First, some advice. Unless you enjoy my blow-by-blow tedium of the trials and tribulations of getting from A to a distant B, skip down to the second set of pictures to begin reading. I just dumped a weeks worth of notes into the following.

Here are the beginning of my notes, some in the present tense and some using the past:

Getting to Mongolia

We’re really not ready for this trip. I question myself as to why I scheduled two trips to the other side of the earth so closely together. We both have struggled to recover from our return from Australia two weeks ago and facing a grueling 33 hour door-to-ger (Mongolian yurt) transit hasn’t lightened the mood.

I exaggerate. It’ll be 33 hours home to Ulaanbaatar hotel door, if all goes well. (It didn’t. Make that 38 hours, but more on that below.) We’ll be traveling to the ger the next morning. We have scheduled an uber for our trip to the airport on Friday. Our 15-year old Genesis remains reliable, wonderfully so, but one should ease up on pushing the elderly too fast or too far. Advice we perhaps should be listening to ourselves. But not yet!

So why this trip now? Because there were several special attractions that drew us to it. One was the offered pre-trip extension to visit Mongolia. The second is a scheduled journey to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. A third positive, at least for us, is that thirteen days of the China visit will be on a cruise ship that will travel up the coast from Hong Kong to Tianjin, the closest port to Beijing. The tradeoff will be a shorter time in the interior of China. 

The itinerary is courtesy of Viking Cruises. We traveled on several Viking River cruises, but this will be our first on one of their ocean-going ships, the Yi Dun. We generally like Viking but not as much as a few others, such as Scenic, Regent, Silversea and Seabourn. While we are hoping this trip will up that assessment, as I write this, our assessment of Viking has gone in the other direction. More, too, on this later.

We’ll be gone a full month, roughly parsed into four experiences: five days in Mongolia, nearly two weeks on board the Yi Dun, a week inland (including Tibet), and four days in Beijing. A few of these days plus the trip over and back will be consumed with the transits. Oddly, one had to select the Beijing extension to visit the iconic sights of the Forbidden Palace and the Great Wall. 

Preparation for this trip started with obtaining visas. The application is long and detailed and, unless one wants to go to Washington D.C. or San Francisco for an interview at the Chinese embassy, paying a third party is standard to help in the process. You can pay a big fee to get this help or pay an even greater fee to shepherd you through the full process. We (nervously) went the cheaper route, but all ended well. All of those we have spoken to so far chose the more expensive service, awed that we took such a risk. Perhaps ignorance as to the risk was bliss. We now both have ten-year, multiple-entry visas for China—not that we will ever need them again.

There is also a special visa for Tibet, but we’ve submitted the required photos and other information to Viking, who, hopefully, will take care of that hurdle. Mongolia has no visa requirement for U.S. citizens

After some agonizing, we’ve decided to pack using carry-on luggage, not an easy task for me, at least, especially as we will be experiencing weather that will vary from as low as the high 30’s to the high 80’s. Why do I have the problem? Shoes. A second set of shoes, for me, occupies a third of a carry-on. I’ll go without the backup and for both Gobi Desert treks and fine-dining on the Li Dun, I’ll will be wearing my Skecher slip-ins. Tacky, tacky. Let’s just hope the hikes in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia don’t destroy the shoes.

I rather blew the Uber ride to the airport. When the credit card I use with Uber was compromised while we were in Australia, I thought I had changed to a new card for all those vendors for which this compromised card was the primary payment method. But, alas, I must have fumbled the fix for Uber. Hence, the great rate I had obtained when I made a reservation for the trip to the airport was lost when Uber canceled the reservation the morning of our departure. I wish they had informed me earlier, grumble, grumble. The new reservation cost $25 more—but we got to the airport.

Our flight out of Austin, the first of the three legs to get to Ulaanbaatar was 45 minutes late getting airborne. Once again, we stopped on the tarmac while a maintenance issue was addressed. Thoughts of our horrendous travel to Australia in July came to mind (where the troubles begin with a similar delay on the tarmac), but we finally got aloft. I won’t even complain (well, yes, I will) about the man in front of me slamming his seat fully back for the whole flight. Jerk. I was fully prepared to regress into my four-year-old mode and start kicking his seat back, but common sense prevailed. He looked a lot stronger than me.

The seven hours in the Delta One lounge at LAX (make that six hours thanks to the delayed flight out of Austin) went predictably slowly, but pleasantly. We’ve rarely been in such an elegant lounge. We both indulged in the mechanical massage chairs, and I don’t mean a vibrating chair, I mean one that entraps one’s hands and arms, legs and feet, as well as the body. The chair kneads about as deeply as one can stand for as long as one can stand. A minor nit is that I believe the chair is optimized for a shorter person, as it stopped short of a good massage of the neck. Frances enjoyed the experience so much she signed up for another’s round a few hours later.

Our next leg was from LAX to Inchon (Seoul) via Korean Air. When we arrived at the departure gate we found ourselves two of only a handful of occidental’s waiting to board. (Is occidental still politically acceptable? I know, or think I know, oriental isn’t.)

The trip over the pond was on a venerable 747. I haven’t flown on a 747 in decades. The business class seats (“prestige class” on Korean Air) are a bit short for me in the flat position, but otherwise are quite roomy. The seat “pods” are rectangular, now considered inefficient in use of space. We had selected two adjacent pods in the middle, which made conversation between Frances and me quite easy.

As with other non-American and European airlines, the flight attendants are trim and neatly dressed, “like back in my day!” cried Frances, remembering the weight and dress standards from her time as a stewardess/attendant. Curiously, the five attendants in our section, all women and likely Korean (presumptuous person that I am) had matching hairstyles. They were very efficient and attentive. And somehow they knew to look at Frances when talking to me, who would repeat what they were saying or asking. Likely they’ve dealt with deaf seniors before.

Another word on food.  I counted eight major meal opportunities from departure from home to arrival in Chinggis Khan airport in Ulaanbaatar. (There are several spellings of Chinggis, including Genghis and Chinghis. I’ll use all the spellings, randomly. 😏) I count our six-plus hours in the Delta One lounge as only one meal opportunity and did not include the clean-out-the-refrigerator lunch before being picked up for our uber to the airport. I took advantage of, oh, all eight of them; Frances four. Guess which one of us has the weight problem. 

Not being able to sleep midway through the twelve hour flight to Seoul, the attendant asked if I would like a snack. Snack? It was a full bowl of Korean ramen. And it was hot, very hot. Frances tried one bite (she had just awaken) and couldn’t tolerate any more. I ate the whole thing.

At this point, despite the non-problematic delay out of Austin, all had gone well, or at least as expected. In Seoul we boarded our 330 aircraft, surprised and pleased at the roomy seats. But, out on the tarmac, the dreaded “we must return to the gate” announcement was made. Return we did but, thank goodness, the apparent problem was resolved and we departed only two hours late. When we arrived at Chinghis Khan Airport, we and six others we met up with expecting to be greeted by the Viking agent, alas, were not greeted. This took an hour to resolve followed by the hour trip to our hotel in Ulaanbaatar. Hence, 38 hours from home to hotel.

A first impression as we landed in Mongolia? As treeless as we expected, but much greener. Apparently this has been a good year for rainfall in this country. The green is mostly all pasture land.

Our first night’s stay was at the Shangri-La Hotel in Ulaanbaatar. It’s an attractive hotel and our room quite adequate. What I loved most, though, was the shower. This shower must have the best water flow in a hotel room I have experienced in years.

Ulaanbaatar

A first impression of Ulaanbaatar is that its socialist roots still show. Apartment complex after apartment complex dominate the city’s fringe, many of them under construction. The older ones show the featureless concrete facades one associates with the Soviet era. Newer ones are more colorful. Half of Mongolia’s three and a half million citizens live in this city.

The first sign of the changes since Mongolia’s independence from Soviet control in 1990 is the prevalence of English signage on commercial buildings. We passed an establishment displaying the words “CAR WASH” with no Mongolian subtitle.

The second sign of change was the traffic. The school term has just started so the streets and highways are even more crowded than usual. Families are moving back into the city after a summer in the countryside.

This is not a well organized trip and our next surprise is that after checking in at the hotel, we were off to visit the Chinggis Khan Museum, an activity the original itinerary scheduled for our last day in country. (In fact, four of what would be fourteen of us on this tour extension had not yet arrived.) The museum’s nine floors of Mongolian history, with its 10,000 artifacts, and the tour duration of two hours allowed only a superficial examination of the exhibits. But despite the excellence of the museum, two factors limited our enjoyment. First, there is very little display explanation in English. Google translate would have been useful. Alma, our guide, did the lecturing during the tour. Second, most of us, certainly including us, were dead on our feet.