Worthless Money

I've been in UB for four days now, and I'm beginning to get antsy. Unfortunately, I'll be waiting at least another day or two before I can leave for the field because there's been a delay on getting some essential paper work done. This is a tad frustrating as I've already booked my flight back to Beijing (July 23), which means that every day that I spend here, waiting for the bureaucratic engine to start moving, I'm losing time that could potentially be spent outside of UB. Sigh....I'm trying not to get frustrated, but holy smokes, if I ever become a senior official in the Mongolian government, the first thing I would do is bring in a team of efficiency experts to whip this town into shape!

Yesterday, I took a day trip out to Khustain National Park. KNP was established specifically as a sanctuary for the takhi, Mongolia's wild horse, which is apparently the only wild horse left in the world. KNP is about an hour and a half outside of UB, so it's easily done in a day. The drive out was incredibly bumpy and twisty, but the scenery was a refreshing change from UB's urban sprawl. Lots of cows, horses, sheep and goats all over the road. I kept thinking, if we hit one of them, the driver will probably just throw it in the trunk of the car and call it dinner. KNP itself is basically 50, 620 hectares of hilly grassland, with no trees, and tonnes of rock hard animal poo everywhere. It was quite a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, just walking up and down the hills.

One of the hardest things I find about traveling is keeping track of how much money I have on me. It's difficult because I'm always trying to do approximate mental conversions, which doesn't always work out. One CAD is worth just over 7RMB (Chinese yuan), and 1100 MNT (Mongolian Tugrik). This may seem straight forward enough, but Mongolian currency is all paper money, and the smallest denomination is 20 MNT, which is worth less than 2 cents CAD. My wallet, which at home is normally empty, is stuffed obese with bills right now; there must be at least 50 or 60 bills, which makes a nice wad of cash, but in reality, it's only worth about 20CAD... not even enough to effectively grease the palm of the seedy bureacrat who is responsible for holding up my paperwork.