My favourite city

My favorite city is Ulaanbaatar. It is Mongolia’s capital city. There are three million  people. Mongolia is country between Russia and China. Easiest way to Mongolia is by airplane from China, Russia and Korea. The tourist need to visit Ulaanbaatar because it is Chinghis Khan’s birth place.

They will like the beautiful nature around the city. There is the Mongolia last king’s museum, a Chinghis Khan’s monument, a monument to world war II soliiers, and the Sukhbaatar Square.

 During one four-month stay in Ulaan Baatar I almost without fail had taken a daily constitutional to the war memorial located on the top of a small hill on the southern edge of town, a popular viewing point which presents a splendid panorama of Ulaan Baatar, the valley of the Tuul River, and the surrounding mountains. Being to some degree a creature of habit I decide to visit the war memorial again on my first free morning. In the milky-gray predawn I leave my hotel and walk south on Baga Toiruu (Little Circle Road) to the Ulaan Baatar Hotel, then turn right and debouche onto now-deserted Sukhebaatar Square. Located at the cener of the city the eight hundred feet long, six hundred wide square is bounded on the north by the huge gray hulk of the four-story Parliament Buildingl and on the east by west by ponderous Soviet-style buildings of the Stalinist era, including the wedding cake-like Opera Hall. In the middle of the square, on an immense stone plinth, is a statue of Sukhebaatar, one of the founders of the Mongolian communist party and a hero of the Mongolian Revolution. The huge banners draped across the front several of the buildings which he appears to be staring do not proclaim socialism slogans, however, but instead advertise internet and cell-phones services.

At the far corner of the square I follow Chingis Khan Avenue, formerly Lenin Street, south across the Peace and Friendship Bridge which straddles the Dund Gol, a tributary of the Tuul River, and the main line of the Mongolian Railroad. Just past the bridge Chingis Khan Avenue veers west, eventually turning into the road that leads to the airport. I continue south on Zaisan Street. On the right is the Winter Palace of the eighth and last Bogdo Gegen of Mongolia, the former head of the Buddhist religion in Mongolia who died in 1924. His two-story palace, a wooden structure not much bigger than the house of a prosperous American farmer, and a complex of attendant temples are now a museum.

Not far past the palace is the bridge over the Tuul River. About a hundred feet wide, the river is now completely frozen over. The Tuul, one of Mongolia's five longest rivers, measuring 508 miles in length, begins in the Khentii Mountains about 95 miles north of Ulaan Baatar as the crow flies. It eventually joins the Orkhon River, which itself flows into the Selenge (Selenga in Russian) River just north of the Russian border. The Selenga continues on another 267 miles through the Autonomous Republic of Buryatia (part of the Russian Republic) before flowing into Lake Baikal, the deepest and most voluminous lake on earth. Baikal drains northward via the Angara and 

The upper basins of these three rivers-the Tuul, the Onon, and Kherlen-located at the navel of northern Asia, at the headwaters of two of the world's greatest river systems, are known collectively as the "Three Rivers Region," an area believed to be the homeland of the Mongol People. In the twelfth century the middle Tuul, here in the vicinity of Ulaan Baatar, was also the headquarters of the Kerait tribe, whose chieftain, Tooril, was the original patron of Chingis Khan.

I stop on the middle of the bridge over the Tuul and stare upstream along its banks as I have done so many times before while walking this way. On the north side of the river is a broad strip of gravelly ground sparsely vegetated with ten-to-twenty foot high willows and other brush. For me it is the landscape of a dream. The very first time I walked across this bridge and viewed this scene I had an uncannily intimation that I, or more properly speaking, someone whose actions I remember, had once, long ago, camped on the banks of this river, at this very spot. I can still picture the campfire of glowing embers surrounded by river cobbles, smell the sheep skin sleeping cloaks, and hear the snorting of camels standing just beyond the light of the fire. Traveling, it occurs to me, is not only a process of moving forward through time, but also moving backwards. Not for the first time do I have the feeling that I am merely retracing a path already traveled.

Straight ahead is a short valley leading into Bogd Khan Uul, the huge massif which dominates the skyline to the south of the city. Just in front of the mouth of the valley is a three hundred foot-high conical hill surmounted by the War Memorial. The hill itself and the village just behind, in the mouth of the small valley, are both called Zaisan. A road goes from the backside of the hill to a parking lot about halfway up. On the front side a long concrete stairway leads to the parking lot and on to the summit. I take the stairway, now treacherously slick with ice. The parking lot in summertime is a extremely popular place for Ulaan Baatarians. In the evenings there may be several dozen people here, school kids with boom boxes, adults drinking beer and vodka, and others simply taking in the view. I continue on through the now deserted parking lot.