RANSVESTIA

selves back into a plane and took off for Mongolia. The border is only a few miles from Irkutsk and so most of our flying was over Mongolian territory. It was surely an interesting contrast first from the hot, dry, barren mountains and deserts of Iran, Afghanistan and Kazakistan and secondly from the heavily forested tundra spreading as far as you could see in Siberia. For we passed over miles of low rolling roun- ded hills covered with just enough grass and low growing vegetation to give the appearance of a great green velvet carpet from the air. I really didn't know what to expect in Mongolia and that was just what I found, the unexpected. Ulan Bator is a reasonably modern city with wide streets, auto traffic, large squares, 4-6 story buildings etc. The hotel we stayed at had been built by the Chinese some years before during a period of Mongolian-Chinese friendship. It was better than many of the hotels we had stayed in in many Russian cities, large rooms, good plumbing and fixtures in the bathroom and a lounge with chairs and couches you could sit in notoriously absent from most Russian hotels.

We took a very bumpy ride in small busses out to a horse raising settlement in the country where we watched some of the younger boys ride the feisty little mongolian ponies -the kind that Genghis Khan rode all the way to Vienna. We also sampled Kumiss the national drink made out of fermented mare's milk. Now, mares or cows, I don't think too much of fermented milk. This came out as fairly effective imitation of a mixture of yogurt and vinegar. Would you like some more? It was truly a flavor that you either had to grow up with or cultivate diligently. It didn't really do anything for you on a sample basis.

The little 16-18 passenger buses we rode in weren't too bad but the roads were. They were nothing but trails worn by trucks and buses in the grasses of the hills and valleys. These trails fan out in all direc- tions from Ulan Bator. When somebody got tired of following the established path they just took off on their own going more or less parallel to it. Thus there would be five or six "roads" all going up the same valley and turning at the same point. We made several ex- cursions outward from Ulan Bator to various points. But the most in- teresting one was a flight via Mongolian Airlines to an encampment in the Gobi Desert. The very name suggests sand dunes, isolation, great heat and hardly a living thing around, right? Well, we flew over some more rolling velvet hills which gradually gave way to a very large relatively flat area with sparse but real ground cover. Then we