Moron to Moron: Two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MÖRÖN TO MÖRÖN

‘Don’t read this book with a broken rib—you’ll ache from cover to cover. Should become a classic of Mongolian cycling literature.’

—Tim Krabbé, author of The Rider

‘Tom Doig is not your average traveller and Mörön to Mörön is not like any other travel book. Bowel-splittingly hilarious and irresistibly absurd, this book is for everyone who’s ever asked themselves the golden question of travel: Why the f**k not?’

—Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law

‘Funnier than Bill Bryson ... Doig is Hemingway in a unitard.’

—Chris Flynn, author of A Tiger in Eden

moron2moron.com

Two men, two bikes,

one Mongolian misadventure

TOM DOIG

First published in 2013

Copyright © Tom Doig 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

The author gratefully acknowledges the use of excerpts from the following books:

Mongolia: Travels in the Untamed Land, Jasper Becker (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 1992)

Wild East: Travels in the New Mongolia, Jill Lawless (ECW Press, 2000)

Mongolia, ed Michael Kohn (Lonely Planet, 2008) (fifth edition)

Mongolian Phrasebook, Alan J K Sanders, J Bat-Ireedui, Tsogt Gombosuren (Lonely Planet, 2008)

(second edition)

Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray (Picador, 1985)

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2003)

The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century,

Anonymous (trans Igor de Rachewiltz, Leiden, 2006)

Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited, Owen Lattimore (Oxford University Press, 1962)

Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse (Penguin, 1927)

Allen & Unwin

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:  (61 2) 8425 0100

Email: [email protected]

Web:  www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 126 4

EISBN 978 1 74343 439 0

Internal design by Squirt Creative

Insert photographs © Tama Pugsley 2010

Map by Darian Causby

Set in 12/15 pt Dante by Midland Typesetters, Australia

To Tama Pugsley—number one moron!

The QR codes throughout the book and on the back cover

bring videos taken during the morons’ time in Mongolia

directly to your phone.

Scan the QR code images and you’ll be taken

straight to the action.

QR code readers can be downloaded free from the web for

your smartphone.

Scan the QR code on the back cover to watch the

Mörön to Mörön trailer.

CONTENTS

Map

Prologue: Horde

PART ONE: ON THE MISSION

2000–10: Getting my shit together

Day minus 4: Beijing, bicycles, Trans-Mongolian

Day 0: The worst bus ride of my life

Day 1: The first Mörön

PART TWO: THE ROCKY, SANDY, MUDDY, FLOODED TRACK

LESS TRAVELLED

Day 2: Manly sports

Naadam

Days 4–5: Where are all the other tourists?

Day 6: Lost in a forest, lost in a bog

Day 7: Tiger Mountain

Days 8–9: No country for fat men

Day 10: A flash flood of hailstones

Day 11: Goats on a boat

Day 12: The lake on top of the hill

PART THREE: NOT MUCH OF A HOLIDAY

Rest day in Erdenet

Day 14: An uneventful day

Day 15: A Kiwi shortcut

Days 16–17: Some garden-variety suffering

Rest day in Ulaanbaatar

Day 19: Hard rubbish

Day 20: Almost like a holiday

Day 21: Dried fermented milk of a horse

Day 22: Running on empty

Day 23: The final Mörön

Acknowledgements

Beyond the rivers

You will perhaps lose courage,

But continue to advance

In the same way;

Beyond the mountains

You will perhaps lose heart,

But think of nothing else apart from your mission.

—ANONYMOUS, The Secret History of the Mongols

(13th century)

Human beings must have dreams or they will go nowhere.

—DAVID HASSELHOFF, Don’t Hassel the Hoff

(21st century)

PROLOGUE: HORDE

First, a rumbling.

You can sense it before you can feel it: a sick sweetness in the air, a metal tingle in your mouth. Put your ear to the ground. How many? How far? You can’t tell.

On the horizon: dust clouds. A gale blowing in across the plains. Drop your hoe, leave the turnips in the fields. Hitch up your pants and run! Sound the alarm—then cross yourself. Brace yourself.

Are there really just Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Looks like ... more than four. A horde. Barbarians. Huns. Mongols. Heathens, fanatical heathens, heeding no rules or customs of civilised man, their horses snorting and frothing at the mouth, crazed, toothpaste rabid. Their entire language one unending obscenity.

Where do they come from—the ends of the earth? The delirium of our worst fever-dreams? The depths of Lake Baikal, its bottomless black crevices leading straight to the underworld—to Hell itself?

The steppes!

The unharvested wastelands, home of serpent, buzzard, wolf—and death. Think of your children. Your women. Think of heads on sticks, intestines in the trees—this is the bubonic plague come uninvited, the Black Death in human form, a disease-ridden, flea-bitten foreign nightmare rampaging for no earthly reason except victory and carnage. These beasts don’t bargain. They don’t haggle. They storm in out of nowhere, out of the sky, reeking of unwashed stables, rancid tents, abominations on goatskin rugs. All they want is spoils. Loot. Vodka and cheese. Their unwashed hair and bloodshot blue eyes, their cracked lips, noses flaking and pink.

Tork. Tchtooork! Blye-ait-shlerg!

What are they saying? Pointing at a book. Tossing their money around. Rubbing our flag in the dirt. A peasant with gold is still a peasant. They want to guzzle devil-water and disgrace themselves in the fields of our ancestors. Steal our women. Enslave our children. Wrestle our drunkards. Shit on our country. Piss on our history—and laugh about it.

The morons are here.

PART ONE

ON THE MISSION

2000–10: GETTING MY SHIT TOGETHER

In July 2010, me and my best mate Tama Pugsley cycled 1487 kilometres across northern Mongolia from a small town called Mörön to a smaller town also called Mörön. Our motivation was brutally simple: there were two towns called Mörön, and we were two morons. It had to be done.

Even if it didn’t, we were going to do it anyway.

I first noticed this moronic coincidence back in the year 2000. At the time I was an unemployed 21-year-old English Lit graduate, surprised and disappointed that Y2K had failed to cause the world’s financial markets to collapse like everyone had predicted. I was living in Wellington with my parents and like most young Kiwis I spent a lot of time reading atlases and plotting my escape. One blustery winter’s day I was daydreaming somewhere north of Southeast Asia when I saw the two Möröns. They were pretty close together—it was a pretty small atlas—and suddenly everything came into focus.

Some people went to Mongolia seeking the true resting place of Genghis Khan, or Chinggis Khaan, as we would come to know him. Some went to help the thousands of nomads displaced by the killer dzuds—literally ‘white death’, a winter thaw followed by a cold snap and snowfall, where the ground refreezes and prevents animals from feeding, or living. Some went to expose the awful secrets of Mongolia’s commie-era purges under the dread Choibalsan. Some went to discover the truth, or lack thereof, about the fabled Mongolian death worm. But I wasn’t really interested in Mongolian culture or history or geography or politics. If both Möröns had been in Kazakhstan, I would’ve wanted to go to Kazakhstan. If one Mörön was in Uruguay and the other in Paraguay, so be it. Like Sir Edmund Hillary’s ambition to conquer Mount Everest, like Chinggis Khaan’s desire to conquer the entire globe, like the guy in the song who walked 500 miles and then walked 500 more, I wanted to travel from Mörön to Mörön . . . because they were there.

It would be wrong to call it a dream, but it definitely became an obsession. The next time me and Tama went mountain-biking together I told him about the Möröns and it became an obsession of his too. Most people we mentioned it to thought it was a joke, a pretty dumb one, but we didn’t care because it was our dumb joke. Even after I moved to Melbourne to pursue the romantic life of a struggling arts administrator and tried to forget about those Möröns, Tama kept hassling me about it.

Tama bloody Pugsley. ‘Tama’ means ‘boy’ in Maori, and he was definitely one of those, but Tama was also as pakeha (white, foreign) as they come. With his frosty blue eyes, blond curls and six-feet-something of tanned muscle, plus a bit of protective burger layer, he was an amiable Aryan wet dream. A mutual female friend once described Tama as a ‘big, horny teddy bear’ and meant it as a compliment.

In December 2005 Tama came over to Melbourne and we caught a bus to Adelaide with three of my shonky Melbourne mates, then a train across the Nullarbor to Perth, then we cycled 800-odd kilometres around the southwest tip of Western Australia to Albany. Apart from the night I got really drunk and cycled into a fence, buckling my back tyre and nearly breaking my hand, it was a bracing, picturesque and healthful fortnight. When we finished the ride I felt better than I had in years. Then me and Tama undid all that good work on New Year’s Eve by taking ecstasy and going out dancing at Albany’s Insomniaxx nightclub. Insomniaxx favoured reflective metal walls, flatulent smoke machines and a variety of techno remixes of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. We rocked out, hard. The bouncers kept telling us to put our shirts back on. Tama met some saucy blonde jailbait and pashed on in an alley. I spent a couple of hours trying to chat up a 21-year-old trainee teacher from Perth who told me I looked ‘like a skinny David Hasselhoff ’. When the lights came on she let me have a bit of a kiss then laughed in my face and left.

On our way back to the campsite Tama and I went skinny-dipping in Albany Harbour while unappreciative men in utes beeped and screamed abuse; we met a drunk girl in a carpark who told us Insomniaxx had been voted ‘Worst Nightclub in Australia’ on Triple J the year before and wouldn’t take either of us home with her; and we promised each other, just before we passed out in the tent, that yes, we would mission from Mörön to Mörön—soon.

Four and a half years later, it was finally happening. I was camped out in my bombsite of a Brunswick share house bedroom with the heater cranked, surrounded by bike gear, video equipment and thermal underwear, cramming way too many books into a couple of Ortlieb panniers while Tama fed me duty-free whisky and tried not to stand on things. I was freshly unemployed, again, only this time I had a couple of thousand dollars saved. Tama had just flown into town and he regaled me with tales of his new life in New York, his recent documentary-making trip to the bat caves of Borneo, his hot new Kiwi-in-Vancouver girlfriend Ami, and his latest drinking-and-jumping accident—a broken collarbone sustained a couple of months ago on his thirtieth birthday and ‘pretty much healed’ except for a prominent alien-head lump of extra bone near his neck, which threatened to burst through his T-shirt.

‘The doctor said not to do any heavy lifting for three months, and no cycling for, like, six months,’ Tama said, knocking back his whisky and pouring another. ‘I told him I was going to mountain-bike across Mongolia, and he said it was the worst idea he’d ever heard—but I reckon I’ll be sweet.’

Four hours before our plane left, my new girlfriend Laura cycled over to my place through some particularly miserable Melbourne rain with a spandex leopard-print unitard for Tama (I’d already packed my skeleton suit). In true straight-to-DVD romantic-comedy style, Laura and I had denied our true feelings for each other for close to a decade until things came to a head on New Year’s 2009/10. We were performing at the Falls Festival, on the tiniest stage there, playing a pair of incestuous hermaphroditic twins in spandex onesies. The increasingly grotesque ritual climaxed with Laura squatting over my head and spraying explosive diarrhoea—600 millilitres of chocolate milk—into my open mouth while a couple of dozen big-eyed teens gazed on, tripping balls, horrified by our overacting. After our final show Laura and I got munted and made sweet, sticky, mutant-clown love in my tent until the sun came up. Tama let us tell him the whole shonky story, laughing and cringing in the right places even though he’d heard it all before.

‘So I washed the leopard suit,’ Laura told Tama. ‘It was pretty filthy—’ ‘But bro, you should’ve seen the tent!’ I interrupted.

Tama stopped sniggering and looked at me.

‘Doig! Did you . . . you didn’t, did you?’

‘Did I what?’

‘Did you clean the tent out after you filled it with chocolate milk and jizz?’

‘Good question. I did . . .’ I rustled through the scraps of paper on my desk, looking for my To-Do List. ‘. . . not. Yet.

But it is on the list?’ I grinned as innocently as possible.

‘You’re such a scabdog!’ Tama punched me in the shoulder. I punched him back. We started play-fighting on my bed.

‘Uh, boys,’ Laura said, ‘do you want me to leave you to it?’ She dropped the unitard on the floor.

We needed the ’tards for Naadam, Mongolia’s two-day national holiday of ‘the three manly sports’: archery, horseriding and bökh. Bökh was traditional Mongolian wrestling, a cross between between sumo and prison sex. The plan was to make it to the photogenic lakeside town of Khatgal, about 100 kilometres north of Mörön, by 11 July, where we would compete in the Khatgal Naadam bökh dressed up WWF style. We figured we could just rock up on the day and try our luck—it seemed like that kind of country. I was actually more excited about wrestling Mongols in spandex than riding 1500 kilometres across a blasted heath on bikes we were yet to purchase, but with a bit of luck we could have our cake and stomp on it too.

I said goodbye to Laura, then looked hopelessly around the chaos of my room until I found it: the list.

Third and final rabies vaccination—that was worth remembering. I needed to sort that out in Beijing, or Ulaanbaatar at a pinch.

Length of hose pipe filled with ball bearings—for beating off wild dogs. Laura’s stepdad’s suggestion from his time in the Rhodesian armed forces. Sort out in Beijing?

Other than setting fire to a forest, flying is the worst single thing an ordinary individual can do to cause climate change—no, wait, that was just a disturbing quote I copied out from The Age of Stupid, a doco I watched the other night. Um, cross out?

Tama threw a mini-soccer ball at my head. ‘Get your shit together, bro—taxi’s here in five minutes.’

We finished our whiskies. I stopped trying to jam more stuff into my panniers and stowed my rusty old single-speed racer and my conscience away in the back shed. Then a taxi arrived and took us to the airport.

Before we made it anywhere near Mongolia, Tama and I crammed in a ten-day debauch with our girlfriends in Cambodia—or Rambodia, as Tama was calling it, since he hadn’t seen Ami for a month. Laura flew to Phnom Penh a couple of days after us, Ami came over from Vancouver the day after that, and we all went on a mini-mission. Strapped for time, we had to choose between Angkor Wat or some obscure tropical island in the south. The consensus was that Angkor Wat would still be there in a decade, but how often did we get to go swimming and eat coconuts? So we spent five days on Koh Tonsay (Rabbit Island), where we ‘trained’ by watching the 2010 World Cup soccer quarterfinals, choking back Mekong ‘whisky’ and fucking like rabbits in adjacent hutches. I sort of started smoking again. I was ready for Mörön.

On our last day in Cambodia Laura and I went to the Killing Fields while Tama and Ami stayed in their private pool, then we all got pissy on pina coladas at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Five hours later we staggered back to the Pavilion Hotel and decided to go for a skinny-dip in the pool. This quickly degenerated into me and Laura having a surreptitious bang in the darkened deep end. After a minute or so we got self-conscious and decoupled, but when I turned around I could see our friends conjoined in the far corner of the pool, Tama’s buttocks clenched and humping doggedly away.

Tama and I flew out early the next morning. Laura was too sad for morning sex.

‘Goodbye babetown, I’ll see you in month,’ I said, trying not to sound too sad—or excited.

MONGOLIA (1) In stark geographic terms, northern Mongolia overlaps with Siberia’s conifer forests, while southern Mongolia is a snaggle-toothed bite taken out of China. But in the brainpans of restless antipodeans like me and Tama, Mongolia (2) is off the charts. The precise location of Mongolia is notoriously difficult to pin down (eastern Central Asia? Northwestern East Asia? Southern North Asia?). Instead, ‘Mongolia’ is exotic polysyllabic gibberish for ‘middle of nowhere’, to be filed next to Galápagos, Patagonia, Madagascar. Mongolia: equidistant from Coventry and Purgatory; past Timbuktu but before Moo-Moo Land. Mongolia is the Wild West of the East, a no-man’s-land of throat-singing, stallions and ruined empires, where your heart is as free as the open steppe and your mind is just as empty.

MöRöN (1) Mörön is a place on Earth. But Mörön is also much more than that: it is a state of mind. Floating somewhere in the ill-defined semiotic wonderland of Mongolia, the Möröns aren’t tarnished by ideology or burdened by backstory the way places like Tiananmen Square, Berlin or Pearl Harbor are.

MORON (2) So, moron is a state of mind. But which state? In 1910 (save the date), psychologist and racist Henry H Goddard coined the term ‘moron’ from the Ancient Greek word moros, meaning ‘dull’, unlike oxy, which means ‘sharp’—hence oxymoron. According to Goddard, if an adult had a mental age of between eight and twelve on something called the Binet scale, this made them a moron. In intelligence quotient terms, moron represented ‘definite feeble-mindedness’, later rebranded ‘mild retardation’, and covered numbers 51 through 70 on the IQ charts. ‘Imbecile’ accounted for 26 to 50, and ‘idiot’ mopped up the remaining 25 points. Goddard believed that on no account should two morons be allowed to interbreed, so institutionalisation was best accompanied by sterilisation to prevent the outbreak of moronic orgies and subsequent infestations of imbecile devil-children.

In theory, if someone had called Goddard a stupid moron for coming up with such theories, he could respond with scientific accuracy: ‘Well, you’re a retarded idiot—and that makes me two intelligence categories more, uh, cleverer than you!’

Years passed. People called each other morons. The scientists decided in their hipsterish way that the word wasn’t cool any more, but it was too late.

And now, on the centenary of the birth of one of the English language’s all-time favourite insults, two morons were poised to cycle from Mörön to Mörön.

MöRöN (2b) In Mongolian, mörön—pronounced ‘muh-run’—means ‘river’. Wide, flowing river.

DAY MINUS 4: BEIJING, BICYCLES, TRANS-MONGOLIAN

Ten thousand yuan, please.’

Tama gave Heaven a thick red bundle of 100-yuan notes. It took her nearly a minute to count it. Sweat ran down my forehead into my eyes. It was just after 10 pm on 5 July 2010, six days before Naadam, a stinking hot night after an even stinkier day. Ten thousand yuan was about A$2000—one grand per bike, not much of a bargain, but it was too late to worry about that now. My credit card had glitched out when I tried to withdraw so much money so Tama spotted me 5000 yuan. We were leaning on the counter of UCC Bikes on Jiaodaokuo Dong Street, or ‘Bicycle Street’ as we called it. There were two bike shops to our left and seven to the right, including one that sold rickshaws and another that sold Hummer brand folding army bicycles with full camo paint jobs. We had decided to buy bikes in Beijing rather than Melbourne partly because we hoped they would be heaps cheaper, and also because the prospect of buying shonky Chinese bikes that fell apart on the third day would make for a hilarious Facebook status update: ‘Failed 2 ride from moron 2 moron due 2 stinginess & idiocy LULZ.’

Heaven and Rhino, the UCC store clerks, had just finished disassembling and packing two brand-new mountain bikes into cardboard boxes for us to take on the Trans-Mongolian the next morning. Neither of us had ever heard of UCC but they were the only steel frames we could find in Beijing. Rhino couldn’t speak a word of English, although he seemed to know what he was gesticulating about when he muttered ‘Mongol’ and pointed to the aluminium bike frames and flopped his wrist camply, then pointed to our bikes and flexed his arm with a fierce grin. More importantly, they looked flash as: mine was painted white with black writing (ucc mtb system—rolling steel 1.0—double butted); Tama’s was black with white. Our off-road tyres were chunky, gargantuan, ribbed for her pleasure; our handlebar pegs looked ready to impale a yak. On our test ride up and down Bicycle Street, my seat and its extra cushioning gel pack felt as soft as I could hope for.

Heaven rang for a taxi. Rhino helped us lug the boxes out onto the pavement. Then Heaven wished us good luck, Rhino grunted, and they both walked off into the sticky night.

It took ages for a taxi to show up. It was white and battered and not very big. The driver rolled down his window and looked suspiciously at the boxes, which were nearly as long as a person, then looked at his back seat, which was not quite as long as one. He hoicked onto the pavement and drove off. We looked around for other taxis but the street was dead. Tama got that look in his eye.

‘Hey Doiggus, I reckon we should carry the boxes back to the hutongs. It’ll be a great warm-up for Naadam!’

Tama had no shortage of ‘great’ ideas—like going on a three-day hike in Wilsons Promontory with one bottle of scotch, four rockmelons, twelve cans of baked beans and no cooker. Or scaling a thirty-storey building site at 2 am during a howling Wellington gale and dropping bricks over the edge ‘to see what happens’.

‘Aren’t you warm enough already?’ I said. ‘You’re sweating like a dog.’

‘Yeah, but—go on, it’ll be an unnecessary feat of strength!

Besides, what are our options?’

I imagined cramming both boxes into a rickshaw and us running alongside the poor driver, clapping and yelling at him for encouragement—all good, except no rickshaws.

‘How much do you reckon each box weighs?’ I asked.

‘Dunno—maybe sixteen kilos? Actually, with those ridiculous pannier racks they munted together, more like twenty?’ Tama grinned. ‘C’mon bro, I’m the one with the broken collarbone and I’m not fussed.’

I sighed. ‘It’s the shonky thing to do, huh? Okay—but I go in front.’

But Tama was already lining up the boxes either side of us, in the lead, as usual.

—Paraplegic! We stopped to rest our arms every hundred metres or so, then every fifty metres. No one offered to help. We were perspiring through the tail end of a day that had peaked at 40.3 degrees Celsius, the hottest temperature ever recorded in Beijing. But we couldn’t recognise freak Chinese weather, just that it was freakin’ hot. And freakin’ awesome.

At 5.45 the next morning we found ourselves bleary-eyed and sweaty on the side of Zhangwang Street, waiting for a taxi to take us to the Beijing train station. We were standing next to a small mountain of hard rubbish: two already-haggard bike boxes, plus three extra-large red, white and blue-striped plastic smuggler bags. Each bag weighed over thirty kilograms, one had a busted zip that I had wrapped up with sellotape, and all had crappy handles that broke instantly. The smuggler bags were my idea. They allowed us to aggregate all our stuff—six Ortlieb panniers, two backpacks, one tent, and half a dozen plastic bags of random bullshit, including:

• two one-metre lengths of chain, with padlocks, for securing our bikes from marauding horsemen and/or defending ourselves against rabid dogs by swinging and whacking

• two cartons of Marlboro cigarettes as payment for Mongol families who would hopefully let us stay in their gers (the round white tent of the nomads, called a yurt in Russia) and as bribes for whoever might need bribing

• two dozen plastic koalas, made in China and exported to Australia, purchased on Brunswick’s Sydney Road and flown back to China, gifts for kids we expected to meet along the way

• two psychedelic visors and two pairs of Star Trek: The Next Generation sunglasses I’d bought at the Beijing Alien’s Street Markets to accessorise the unitards.

All this and more was crammed into the three smuggler bags, which made it much easier to keep track of and much harder to lift. Also, the ostentatiously scabby bags enabled our expensive, conspicuous and eminently stealable adventure tourism equipment to pass for worthless trash, the worldly belongings of two demented albino peasants, dissolute, down on their luck, relocating to the shantytowns of Ulaanbaatar with the rest of the unfortunates. Tama thought this second angle was a bit far-fetched, but it made me feel less paranoid about lugging 6000 bucks’ worth of gear around the capital of China and the capital of Mongolia and the 1500-kilometre train ride. Six grand was a year’s wages for the average Chinese worker, and nearly two years for the average Mongol, give or take.

Taxi after taxi stopped, considered our trash heap and sped off. I started to wonder if my cunning ruse was a little too cunning. After fifteen minutes of rejections Tama said ‘Fuck