Mongolia Travel Quotes

In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers in the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat of fat is cut off and placed in his mouth to sustain his soul for its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like. I learned that from a program on the National Geographic Channel, so I believe it is true. Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.

It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.

Walk your own path and be yourself

In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers into the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat or fat is placed in his mouth to sustain his soul on its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like. I learned that from a program on the National Geographic Channel, so I believe it is true. Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.

Try the following experiment. Go to the airport and ask travelers en route to some remote destination how much they would pay for an insurance policy paying, say, a million tugrits (the currency of Mongolia) if they died during the trip (for any reason).Then ask another collection of travelers how much they would pay for insurance that pays the same in the event of death from a terrorist act (and only a terrorist act). Guess which one would command a higher price? Odds are that people would rather pay for the second policy (although the former includes death from terrorism). The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky figured this out several decades ago.

There is someone special for everyone. Often there are two or three or even four. They come from different generations. They travel across oceans of time and the depths of heavenly dimensions to be with you again. They come from the other side, from heaven. They look different, but your heart knows them. Your heart has held them in arms like yours in the moon-filled deserts of Egypt and the ancient plains of Mongolia. You have ridden together in the armies of forgotten warrior-generals, and you have lived together in the sand-covered caves of the Ancient Ones. You are bonded together throughout eternity, and you will never be alone.

Russians live in a country that has borders with Europe at one end of their map and with Mongolia, China, Japan, and America at the other. Travel to the Inuit community living on Little Diomede Island in the Bering Strait and you can see Russia’s Great Diomede Island just two and a half miles away. Russians still dream of an undersea rail tunnel linking the two continents.

In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers into the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat or fat is placed in his mouth to sustain his soul on its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like.

Mongolia is a fascinating country; visit if you can. It is one of the world's last frontiers with space and landscape that defies definition.

I have been lucky to see many parts of the world denied to others. A special trip was one I made to Mongolia. It is a remarkable and unusual country. Do get there before it changes.

On this Mongolian adventure, I am alone in a double tent, which I thought would be a glorious luxury, but I am just messy.

Mongolia, I have never been anywhere quite like it. The people are wild, and the animals are tame. The whole country is fuelled by passion.

Mongolia, we set up camp in the fading light and the extraordinary beauty of this lake and this country.

We see the Tsaatan encampment of tepees in the far distance, sitting in a vast treeless plain surrounded by rolling hills and backdropped by high snow-capped mountains. We pause for a while to take in this spectacle. It took my breath away, and for a moment, everything was gone except the here and now.

Imagine that such a flood could emerge from a socialist revolution, my dear comrades. However, to Imagine that these unkempt, uncivilized types arriving from Mongolia, the plateaus of tibet or the depths of Siberia, could bring us any culture, civilization, or revival is pure madness! For if the Soviets break through Europe, the capital class is fucked! but you too, labor is fucked! I have decided to travel to all the factories today because it is not possible that capitalism wins! That the un-noble capital class remains united! For by the end of the war, we must be united! For united, we are strong and will destroy them!

In summer, crossing northern Mongolia on horseback is mesmerizing. The land is so open that a day's travel appears not to change one's place in it at all, while underfoot an apparently infinite number of tiny gerbils scramble into their holes at the sound of a horse's hooves, making the ground tremble and seethe at the periphery of one's vision. The skies on this high plateau are a deep midnight blue; they seem as big as the world. In midwinter, these steppes are an endless, featureless desert of snow.

As for restaurants, one of our favorites is the Silk Road next door to the Tibetan Choijin Lama Museum. It's a very exotic setting. The western food there is pretty good. We also liked the Hazara Restaurant for its Indian food, and the Mongolian Barbecue restaurant. All are downtown.

Coe has always claimed he’s not a nationalist, and it’s true—unlike immigrant Abram, who cared most for America, Coe, Oregon-born, cares most for the American Christ, His power spread throughout the world even as the homeland is denied Him in the secular folly of church/state separation. One day, Coe believes—not yet—America (and Old Europe, too, the Germans and French and Italians who drifted from Christ once their prosperity was assured) will wake up and find itself surrounded by a hundred tiny God-led governments: Fiji, a “model for the nations” under a theocratic regime after 2001, a Family organizer boasted to me; and Uganda, made over as an experiment in faith-based initiatives by the Family’s favorite African brother, the dictator Yoweri Museveni; and Mongolia, where Coe traveled in the late 1980s to plant the seeds for that country’s post-communist laissez-faire regime.

It was a modern folklorist name Adrienne Mayor who first noticed that the Ancient Greek stories of the griffin (which had the body of a lion, head and claws of an eagle, tail of a serpent) perfectly described a Protoceratops. The Greeks believed that the griffin guarded treasures of gold. Mayor discovered that fossilized skulls of Protoceratops were often found in Mongolia, where the Greeks traveled to trade for gold.

There is someone special for everyone. Often there are two or three or even four. They come from different enerations. They travel across oceans of time and the depths of heavenly dimensions to be with you again. They come from the other side, from heaven. They look different, but your heart knows them. Your heart has held them in arms like yours in the moon-filled deserts of Egypt and the ancient plains of Mongolia. You have ridden together in the armies of forgotten warrior-generals, and you have lived together in the sand-covered caves of the Ancient Ones. You are bonded together throughout eternity, and you will never be alone.

Leaving your comfort zone breaks the routine. As a result, I had gained in courage, which then manifested itself in many different ways, like going to North Korea or wearing the same socks for 15 days in Mongolia.

It was an extraordinary landscape-pale yellow, under a blue sky-extraordinary because it was not a desert, but rather the largest pasture imaginable; here and there a herd of horses, here and there a camel, or a man, or a tent. It was inhabited, but with a sparseness that was impressive.

traveling to places like China, Vietnam, and Mongolia to learn how to help the poor in countries undergoing rapid social and economic change.

Enter, therefore, a new and ingenious variant of Ultimatum, this one called Dictator. Once again, a small pool of money is divided between two people. But in this case, only one person gets to make a decision. (Thus the name: the “dictator” is the only player who matters.) The original Dictator experiment went like this. Annika was given $20 and told she could split the money with some anonymous Zelda in one of two ways: (1) right down the middle, with each person getting $10; or (2) with Annika keeping $18 and giving Zelda just $2. Dictator was brilliant in its simplicity. As a one-shot game between two anonymous parties, it seemed to strip out all the complicating factors of real-world altruism. Generosity could not be rewarded, nor could selfishness be punished, because the second player (the one who wasn’t the dictator) had no recourse to punish the dictator if the dictator acted selfishly. The anonymity, meanwhile, eliminated whatever personal feeling the donor might have for the recipient. The typical American, for instance, is bound to feel different toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina than the victims of a Chinese earthquake or an African drought. She is also likely to feel different about a hurricane victim and an AIDS victim. So the Dictator game seemed to go straight to the core of our altruistic impulse. How would you play it? Imagine that you’re the dictator, faced with the choice of giving away half of your $20 or giving just $2. The odds are you would . . . divide the money evenly. That’s what three of every four participants did in the first Dictator experiments. Amazing! Dictator and Ultimatum yielded such compelling results that the games soon caught fire in the academic community. They were conducted hundreds of times in myriad versions and settings, by economists as well as psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. In a landmark study published in book form as Foundations of Human Sociality, a group of preeminent scholars traveled the world to test altruism in fifteen small-scale societies, including Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, the Ache Indians of Paraguay, and Mongols and Kazakhs in western Mongolia. As it turns out, it didn’t matter if the experiment was run in western Mongolia or the South Side of Chicago: people gave. By now the game was usually configured so that the dictator could give any amount (from $0 to $20), rather than being limited to the original two options ($2 or $10). Under this construct, people gave on average about $4, or 20 percent of their money. The message couldn’t have been much clearer: human beings indeed seemed to be hardwired for altruism. Not only was this conclusion uplifting—at the very least, it seemed to indicate that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors were nothing but a nasty anomaly—but it rocked the very foundation of traditional economics. “Over the past decade,” Foundations of Human Sociality claimed, “research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus.

What does writing let you do that you couldn’t do otherwise?” I answered, quickly, that it let me live the life I loved and to do odd things—falconry, travel, animal keeping. And, I added, “sometimes get paid for them.

Recruitment drive, ma’am.’ ‘In Outer Mongolia, no doubt. Some place so remote and with such primitive travel links that he can’t possibly get back here in time.’ ‘Glasgow, ma’am.