Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
it appeared, and one of the men spoke a little Russian. 'The chief lady will be here
soon!' he informed us brightly.
We went through the standard routine of answering questions about our trip.
One man asked our Russian-speaking friend to get us to translate some ridiculous
techno-babble written in English on the back of a Chinese paint tin. The misspelt,
ungrammatical English was challenge enough on its own and what we did manage
to translate into Russian, our Russian-speaking friend could not understand well
enough to translate into Mongolian. In the end, after ten minutes of heated dis-
cussions, we settled on an approximate, one-word summary that survived the trip
through all three languages: 'Paint.'
The paint tin owner stared at us in stunned silence, then walked away looking
distinctly dissatisfied.
An hour and a half after we'd arrived we finally met the 'chief lady'. She
marched up to the door with another woman in tow - the assistant chief lady, I
assumed - and cut a path through the crowd and up the steps. The crowd melted
away. It seemed that they hadn't been waiting for opening time after all.
Once inside, we sat down ravenous and ready to order but, to our dismay, we
had to wait another half hour while they scrubbed the pots from the previous night.
By the time our meal finally arrived, my head was resting on the table and Tim had
slipped from his chair, a slowly dying pile on the floor.
The food was worth waiting for, though. Hot noodle soup! Afterwards, Tim
stripped the baggage from his bike and headed into town to find someone to add
yet another layer of welding to his cracked bike frame. Meanwhile, I sortied down
to the small but bustling market to restock our food supplies.
On the way back, I was startled almost out of my skin by the unexpected sound
of a Scottish voice calling out from behind. 'Oi! Hallo there. You must be a foreign-
er then. Where are you from?' A lightly built, orange-haired man wearing jeans
and sneakers and carrying a briefcase was angling across the road towards me.
'I'm an Australian,' I answered, curious. 'There's two of us, actually. We're just
passing through. How about you? Do you live here or something?' Sainshand was
a town of no more than a few thousand people. It was hard to imagine what this
man could be doing there.
'I've only been here in Sainshand for about a year now, but I've been in Mon-
golia itself for over five years. Officially, I work for the Mongolian government
teaching English to a few paying students. But really, I'm actually working here as
a missionary.'
