This Side of the Fence Line
Breaking Into Mongolia’s Camp David
NOTE: I am currently on a trek through Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. I wrote this travel anecdote before departing.
When Kent and I traveled to Mongolia back in 2006, we did a multi-day hike just outside of Ulaanbaatar. Our stash of food consisted of some dry noodles, a half loaf of stale bread, and a few generic candy bars. We brought a few liters of water, too. By day two we were already regretting our meager rations and dreaming of where we’d eat upon our return to the capital.
After spending a couple nights near a makeshift shrine shelter adorned with animal bones and colorful flags, I did my best to dead reckon us back to our starting point. Wasn’t long before things stopped looking familiar.
We happened on a fence line and figured following it would take us somewhere. Its placement on the landscape forced us to bushwhack, but we felt confident we were heading in the right direction. Its mere existence kept us from feeling lost.
The fence line soon turned to a proper trail, and at some point my pace picked up and I left Kent behind. At the top of a climb I stopped to wait for him to catch up. I ate a snack, drank a slug of water, and mindlessly tossed a few rocks into the brush. But Kent didn’t show. And since he hadn’t been that far back—or so I thought—I started backtracking to make sure he was OK.
Less than a quarter mile down the trail, I found Kent curled into a ball on the hard ground. He was conscious, but in a panicked voice told me he’d passed out and awakened to severe cramping in his limbs. His hands were contorted like lobster claws.
He sat up, and I gave him the last of my water and an extra candy bar I had stashed in my pocket. Wasn’t long before he was back to normal, reliving the scare that threw us both off guard. The weather was fine, the conditions benign, and yet the trip, and his life potentially, had suddenly been compromised. We reminded ourselves not to relax too hard on comfort because, shit, anything can happen. And if things go south in Nowhere, Mongolia, we are likely to never be found.
We got back on the trail and continued along the fence. Soon a road came into view, and we decided to join it. We were surely far off our intended course, and a road had far more potential for rescue than the Mongolian backwoods.
After joining the road, we marched comfortably on asphalt, keeping our eyes ahead and behind for a kind stranger who might be willing to give us a lift. When we saw a couple vehicles approach from both directions, we high fived. “Pizza and beer, here we come,” I said.
The vehicles were all military vehicles. They came to a skidding stop on our sides, surrounding us. Uniformed men with scowls trained their AK-47s on our chests and used aggressive hand gestures and loud voices as orders to take off our packs. “Passports!” one shouted. We handed over our gear and wallets, then we were shoved into separate vehicles and promptly sped away.
The men transported us to a guard shack and made us sit on the floor together beneath a wall-mounted television while they sat watching it, transfixed. Only after various glimpses of the screen and from the set’s increased volume did we surmise that the men watched some sort of sporting event. Sumo wrestling, perhaps. We figured we had interrupted something important to these men, and trusted that we’d be released, but not before the game had concluded.
The men mostly ignored us—didn’t offer us food or water or use of a bathroom. We were too tired, too afraid, and too dehydrated to argue, so we just sat and waited. Occasionally they’d engage, and at some point I gave them a tattered paper from my pocket with a previous homestay phone number on it. “Call Serge,” I tried to communicate. “He’s our friend.
But Serge wasn’t our friend. Just some creepy guy who corralled us at the airport and convinced us to stay in his “guesthouse”—which was actually just his actual house. The price was right, so we got in his dirty car. Once in his apartment, we helped him remove the contents of his kid’s bedroom into the master to make room for us. I don’t doubt he had fine intentions, but the whole ordeal was awkward and weird. Not to mention the fact that he tried to rip us off as we left the next day. The price is never the same the next day.
A soldier took the number and dialed it on the desktop phone. No answer. He passed it to another guy who then left the building. All eyes retuned to wrestling and we were again forgotten.
More than 3 hours elapsed before we were again the subject of the men’s attention. The TV went off, and a large man with fat hands casually approached with our passports. He handed them over then pointed to the door. “We can go?” Kent said. The man just pointed, so we did as we were told. As we walked past the other men, now playing cards, they paid us no mind. We exited the shack and found our backpacks in a heap just outside.
I wanted to thank them for letting us go. I also wanted to ask them questions. Where are we? Why did they take our stuff? What just happened? But as soon as we stepped out, the man used his fat hand to shoo us towards the main gate, now open, and the rickety door slammed behind us.
We donned our gear, stepped onto the barren highway, and by some stroke of luck landed a quick hitch back into town, nearly an hour away. The driver in Mongolian spoke non-stop, and we picked up enough bits and pieces to conclude that the national sumo wrestling championships had just ended and his hopeful athlete was not the victor. He dropped us at a pizza joint where we ate 2 large pies and a few beers. We wanted more of both, but we’d already turned into a gluttonous spectacle and were ready to be away from locals’ scrutinous eyes. There was a hotel across the street, so we gave it a look.
The man who checked us in spoke pretty good English, so we told him as best we could about our ordeal. Turns out we’d somehow crossed into Mongolia’s version of Camp David, the Mongolian president’s get-away. The Prime Minister of Japan was visiting, and the place was supposedly on high alert. The man said security is tight and there’s no way to get in.
I tried to tell him about the fence, the trail, the thick foliage and even Kent’s lobster hands. But all that translating got too arduous and he interrupted my feeble effort with a grunt and gruff dismissal. “Your room is that way,” he said, flicking the back of his hand. We took the hint and excused ourselves. Happy to finally have some privacy.
