Trip to Choibalsan

Choibalsan. From Ulaanbaatar, go east until you almost hit China or Russia and you'll be in Mongolia's fourth largest town at around forty thousand people and twenty thousand dogs. Aaron was asked to visit the town's hospital and dispense advice on their IT infrastructure. I went with him. We spent five days in Choibalsan last week.

It's very flat out there, much like the Canadian Prairies. The sky just keeps going and going.

The first sign that we were no longer in a big centre was the drive from the airport to town. We got into the hospital's ambulance (a normal mode of transportation in Mongolia) and drove off the paved parking lot onto a dirt road. The dirt road is the main road that connects the airport to the town.

There are a few VSO volunteers in Choibalsan. They and the PeaceCorps volunteers entertained us on a few nights. They gave a glimpse of volunteer life outside the capital. A life where you don't ever order the chicken in a restaurant because it's "all knuckles and bones". A life where DVDs are more precious than gold and are passed around because there is no DVD shop in town.

The Dogs

There are many stray dogs in Mongolia and Choibalsan seemed to have been blessed with even more stray dogs than the rest of the country. Big dogs, little dogs, fluffy ones, ones you'd rather not touch, frozen ones, limping ones, pocketable ones. They feed on garbage and on the scraps that residents surreptitiously give them. They try to keep the dog population in check with periodic dog culls. By dog cull, I mean that the residents are encouraged by the local government to kill stray dogs. Spaying and neutering would be a better solution but there are other more pressing problems that need addressing first (like poverty and tuberculosis and unemployment). When we went the dog cull had just recently happened. Nevertheless, they were still hundreds of dogs milling about. One dog was a small white fluffy thing. Not gray, white. I was amazed, how can a stray be so white?

The Russians

Choibalsan was once buzzing with Russians. In the 1980s, as many as one hundred thousand Russians were based in Choibalsan. They were army, factory managers and workers. In 1989, everyone left. The Russians had built little towns around and in Choibalsan where they lived. They left big apartment blocks and other buildings behind that now just stand abandoned. Choibalsan went through a rough patch in the early 1990s and many of the abandoned buildings were gutted of anything salvageable. It's impressive to see these huge structures half demolished but still very much a part of the landscape.

Choibalsan has space. Lots of it. So if they get bored of the town centre in one spot, they just move it down a little further. There's no demolishing and rebuilding on top, it's more of a drop everything and move on. Many people live in big apartment blocks like in UB. The town doesn't really sprawl out. There's a definite line between countryside and town. Our favourite activity while there was to walk out into the countryside and see how far we could get from the town. We were like the Saskatchewan joke of the dog that runs away and you can see it run away for days. We tried to reach some abandoned Russian buildings on the horizon but never made it. They just kept on being further and further away.

It was a fun trip.