This is the first of many blog posts chronicling my time in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It is also my first ever blog post. Drop a comment below letting me know how I did and what topics you’d like to see in future.
It’s a terrible cliché—and an ancient Simpsons joke—to call a country “A Land of Contrasts”, or Extremes, or Superlatives. But there are no better phrases to describe Mongolia and its capital, Ulaanbaatar. By almost any conceivable measure it is a far-from-average place. This theme of contrasts and extremes will flow through many of my future blog posts, but to avoid making this post too long, here are just my initial observations.
The “Land of Contrasts” notion hit me even before the plane touched down. Flying over the Gobi Desert, I found myself gobsmacked at the scale and emptiness of the countryside. Australia is often described as a wide, brown, empty land, but Mongolia has us beaten. With only 3.1 million people spread across a whopping 1.6 million square kilometres, Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country on Earth. But that sense of space evaporated as the plane approached the capital, Ulaanbaatar. In stark contrast (see, there’s that word) to the emptiness of the countryside, Ulaanbaatar is a sprawling metropolis, home to over 1.3 million people, or almost half the population of the entire country. Continue reading Mongolia: First Impressions
