An aerial view of Olgii, the provincial capital of Bayan Olgii, Mongolia.
Considering how the day began, it is pretty miraculous that I find myself sitting in a Turkish restaurant in Mongolia. Our flight was originally scheduled to leave yesterday but was rescheduled for today because of a persistent drizzle. It took them several hours to finally decide to cancel the flight and we just sat in the lobby listening to Joan Osbourne’s “What if God Was One of Us” playing on repeat. It was cute for the first few hours yesterday but this morning I found it taunting.
A little past 8 am they finally opened the doors to let us enter the security inspection. For the first time in our trip, I felt like we were actually in Asia rather than a former Soviet republic because everyone crammed themselves towards the door rather than forming a queue. If there was a small gap between our bags on the floor then two people would amazingly squeeze in somehow. Regardless of how we pushed our bags through or how long we waited, we were perpetually at the end of the line. Finally, we made it through the doors and were able to get our bags inspected and bring them to the “check in” which was nothing more than an office desk by a door leading outside. Two men were waiting, one to fill in our tags and tickets by hand and the other to pass our bags through a small swing door and we then advanced to immigration.
I typically am in charge of our documents so I had all of our tickets, documents, and passports in hand and for some reason they wouldn’t let Bobby go with me and briskly escorted him to another cubby. I kept telling the officers that I have his passport but ignored me and finally realized and then another office rushed to my cubby to demand his documents. The officer who held my passport kept flipping through and asking “Mongolia Visa”. I tried to explain that Americans don’t need visas for Mongolia. This officer called her superior who then asked the same question and got the same response. They then got another superior who spoke some English. Again; same question, same response. This time I took out the Lonely Planet book and showed her the visa section which clearly stated that Americans do not need visas to enter Mongolia. Apparently, what caused all of the trouble was that last week an “American” had been turned away on the Mongolian side for not having a visa. I didn’t really believe this because they think that all Caucasian non-Russian speaking foreigners are American.
She left us to investigate and left us standing in our segregated cubicles while the plane finished boarding. I tried to keep my cool and made sure to smile at every officer that passed. I figured that there wasn’t really anything more that I could do then reiterate that we don’t need visas and everything is in order. The officer came back after a while and said that she called the Kazakh embassy in Mongolia and they didn’t know. I explained to her that every country has different rules for people of different nations; Kazakhs may need a visa to enter but Americans do not and suggested that she call the American embassy. She left us again for a while and then returned asking me for the contact number for the U.S. embassy but curiously didn’t bother to write the number down. At that point we took it upon ourselves and Bobby called a contact that we have at the embassy to let him know the situation and to find out if there is any staff there since it is Saturday. HE was going to look in to it and allegedly so were the immigration officers and the entire time while we were standing waiting, Joan Osbourne crooned, “if God had a name, what would it be?” Thought provoking lyrics for a long wait.
Bobby got tired of standing in isolation and scandalously crossed the yellow line to sit down on the other side in the waiting area. They were going to stop him and then I suppose realized that they can still see us and that we can’t really go anywhere. They then gave me permission to sit as well. Once I sat down, a different officer rushed towards me asking to see our tickets and then there was all sorts of shouting back and forth dva billet, two tickets; of course there are two tickets! That was established an hour ago when we checked in and they took our names and gave us the tickets; you need to sort out our VISAS, not tickets! More than an hour had passed and nearly simultaneously we got a text message from the embassy stating that we do not need a visa and the officer running over to us with our passports. Bobby showed her the text, she nodded and handed us back our passports, fully stamped. I grabbed our things and ran towards the door. I felt terrible for holding up the flight for more than an hour for people who have been waiting since yesterday for this flight. But I was just thankful that they weren’t going to force us to fly back to Astana to go to the Mongolian embassy to purchase a visa that we don’t even require simply to board a plane.
We boarded the plane to find it completely full, expect for two seats in the second row that were saved for us, even the front row was filled with luggage. I actually saw my huge bag lying there in the pile just like a carry on. The pilots were also the stewards and came over to us to give us some candy and gestured to throw my actual carry on anywhere. I do believe the word he used was the Russian equivalent to “no problem”. Even more surprising to me was that nobody seemed to care that we were the ones responsible for the big delay. Everyone smiled at us as we passed and I beamed back; I was so thankful to have such patient and understanding people. If this happened in the states I would be scared of the reception I would get in a similar situation. The stewards then became pilots again and went into the cockpit. I slept for most of the short flight and we quickly arrived to Western Mongolia. The plane landed, our pilot/stewards said goodbye and Mongolian immigration officials boarded the plane with big smiles and in English welcomed us to Mongolia.
We were quickly stamped in, retrieved our bags, and cleared customs to find our guides, Nurbol and Bogy, from Blue Wolf Travel waiting for us. First we went to meet Canat, who I had been making all of our arrangements with and after Nurbol took us to get set up in Mongolia; get our phone sim, ATM, hotel, and internet. Olgii is a small town considering it is a provincial capital and easy to get around walking. Everyone here has been exceptionally friendly greeting us with “Hello” in English. While we were strolling along the streets, we stopped to look up at some birds flying overhead. A police officer came running over; my first instinct was to cringe since normally police officers approach us if they want something. He reached us and asked in English “What are you doing? Are you ok?” We explained that we were just looking at the birds. He thought this strange because to them, these huge soaring birds were their equivalent to our pigeons and laughingly shared this with a man sitting nearby.
Nurbol is also friends with some of the local Peace Corps Volunteers and invited us to come along with him to a dinner they are having tonight. It is such a pleasant shock to have successfully made it to Mongolia. We started the morning off in a tense situation but will end it relaxing and chatting with some friendly PCVs. Just from the few hours we have spent it Mongolia thus far, I can already tell we are really going to enjoy our time here.
