29.05.2011 – 29.05.2011  11 °C

Nice leasurely start for our last day in UB. Today Tracey dubbed as our “cultural day” of Mongolia so we started out the cultural day hunting a decent cup of coffee. Using Tracey’s trusty Lonely Planet guide we went hunting for the Stuupa Cafe.. We went up and down streets looking for this coffee shop to eventually find it inside a buddhist temple (go figure).. We also discovered that Stuupa means the pagoda-ery thing that they had built out the front to indicate yellow hat buddhism. (Mongolian’s practice yellow hat buddhism the same as the Tibetan people– we’re not sure if that means that the Dalai Lama is the head of the church in Mongolia or..)

Anyway after our cuppa (which wasn’t that much chop) we headed for the Mongolian National Museum. It was surprisingly good! (If you saw the outside of the building you would understand why I was surprised that it was good– walls falling down, holes in pavement, paint peeling off etc) The musuem showed the Mongolian history from prehistoric times right through to the 90s when Mongolia became a republic.

Chenggis Khan (Genghis) exhibition was probably the most interesting. Chenggis unified the Mongolian clans and started the expansion of the Mongolian empire. Surprisingly, it was his third son who actually grew the empire and Koblah (Kublai) Khan solidified the empire. Khan means King so actually it was King Chenggis in English.

The other interesting data point from the musuem was the fact that Mongolia was actually the second communist state after the USSR.. For some reason I always thought that Mongolia was part of the USSR but no.. it was its own communist state. This state held strong (and did similar activities like collectivising the nomads– not sure how successful that was– and introducing universal health care and literacy) until 1990 when the USSR fell so did the Mongolian communist party. Mongolia is now a democratic state although the Communist party is still in power and holds the majority of the seats. From what I heard from our local guide the other day Mongolia is quite a corrupt state with most of the vast mining wealth being held by a small few. Unbelievably, Mongolia currently has a deisel shortage. Deisel fuel has not been available in Mongolia for the past 20 days. This is because Russia has stopped delivering. My tour guide the other day believed it was because Mongolia refused to sell uranium to Russia so Russia is refusing to sell diesel to Mongolia……

After the museum the rest our cultural day was taken up with trying to avoid the freezing wind. Top temp in UB today was only 11 degrees with a really strong cold wind blowing.. Not a pleasant way to spend the day.

We board the train tonight to go over the Russian border to Ulan Ude