Luxury ? Opposites – Survival

There are countless little things that make life easier for people in western industrialized nations. Just because we have these conveniences around us all the time, we no longer appreciate their enormous value. We perceive our high standard of living as completely normal. But most people in the world live differently. Millions of our citizens live in miserable conditions. A bowl of rice to satisfy their everlasting hunger is an absolute luxury for them. After every trip we realize again and again how spoiled we are and how grateful we should be for what we have. So the apartment in Ulan Bator is a little paradise for us. After the hardships of the last few weeks and months, we enjoy the luxury of hot water from the tap. A full bath in the bathtub is a pleasure and for the majority of the Siberian and Mongolian population it is unthinkable and unattainable. Many of the people living here do not even have enough clean water to drink. Even if the water leaves the tap slightly cloudy, we appreciate its neutral odor. Even that is not necessarily common due to old and sometimes dilapidated pipes and poor sewage treatment plants, etc. I’m pleased that the life-giving water doesn’t leave the tap as a small trickle, but comes out in a powerful stream and doesn’t get cold after two minutes. Even when I pull the plug after my bath and the now dirty water disappears down the drain and doesn’t flood the floor of the bathroom, it’s a cause for celebration. “It’s incredible what little things can make a person happy,” it goes through my brain. At last we are allowed to use a European toilet and don’t have to crouch over a stinking hole outside the house. Even toilet paper has no relation to sandpaper. Tanja is relieved not to have to kneel on the floor to scrub her clothes in our small Ortlieb basin with cold water. Here she simply throws everything into the washing machine. We are happy not to have to live in damp, mold-infested rooms, but in dry, heated and clean rooms. It’s wonderful that the wallpaper here doesn’t peel off the walls like an overcooked potato, that the ceiling lighting works, the light bulbs do their job, the sockets are in working order and there are no uninsulated live cables lying around to send people to nirvana prematurely. Cleanliness is no ordinary luxury either. There is no chewing gum under the chairs or next to the bed on the radiator in this accommodation. There is no moldy fruit or vegetables rotting under the cupboard. Simply fantastic. Even the basic need for security is not guaranteed in many a home. It’s a dream to simply put your passport on the bedside table, leave the camera in the living room and the computer on the table, without having to worry that everything will be stolen if you leave your home for a short time. Rest also contributes to well-being and recharging your batteries. Some accommodations are located next to discotheques, above restaurants where jukeboxes pound until four in the morning, next to busy main roads, railroad lines, at the airport, next to construction sites, etc. The list of accumulating inconveniences that a traveler encounters over time is almost infinite and yet it is almost a little decadent to talk about it, because the World Food Program (WEP) reports in its World Hunger Map. The Mongolian population has a chronic and alarming malnutrition rate of 43% on average and a very high infant mortality rate. Out of 1000 newborns, 58 die in infancy. I always thought that such conditions prevailed mainly in Africa, Asia and some countries in the Caribbean, so we are surprised to learn that since 2001 the people of this wonderful country have been among the most permanently and severely malnourished people on our entire planet. The reasons include extreme cold, catastrophic droughts and locust invasions, which in some years have cost the lives of tens of millions of farm animals.

We sit at the breakfast table and enjoy fresh fruit, muesli, toast and tea. “Take a look. They’re building yurts down there between the houses,” I say, looking out of the window with interest. “Are they nomads fleeing the approaching winter to the city?” wonders Tanja. “Probably,” I reply and let my gaze glide over the city to the neighboring mountains, on whose slopes thousands of yurts are sprouting up like mushrooms. Around 30% of the city’s population has only been living here for a few years. In fact, they have fled from the steppes to Ulan Bator to seek protection from natural disasters and hunger, which they hardly get here. Finding work is apparently extremely difficult. Around 40% of the population lives below the poverty line. Most of them have no more than 22,000 tugrik (10.55 euros) a month at their disposal. According to the government, however, a person needs at least 30,000 tugrik (14.38 euros) to survive. A poisonous-looking smoky blanket wafts over the yurt town, fed by the countless fires of the nomads’ many dwellings, among other things. As there is often no fuel available, people are forced to burn whatever they can find. Plastic, old car tires and other garbage are part of it. In winter, we were told, the air pollution is so dramatic that you can hardly see the other side of the street for all the smoke. Scientific studies have long been alarming, as they show that the bones of modern city dwellers contain forty to a hundred times more lead than those of the mummified Egyptian pharaohs. It is assumed that the heavy metals circulating in the bloodstream of people living today are often a hidden cause of physical and mental illnesses.

Gambold picks us up at 10:00 a.m. to go to the ticket office. Because Aeroflot charges 11 euros (a month’s income for the poor in this country) per kilogram of excess baggage for our bikes and the excess baggage price has to be paid a second time after the stopover in Moscow, we want to fly with Mongolia Airline. “I’m sorry, but all flights are fully booked for the next two weeks,” we hear. “But Korean Airline still has seats available and their bikes only cost 70 euros each. But you would have to fly via Seoul.” “Seoul? That’s 2,000 kilometers southeast of here, isn’t it?” I ask. “Yes, the flight to Seoul takes just under three hours. They have a two-hour layover there and then it’s back to Germany. That means the journey takes eight hours longer than with the Mongolian airline,” explains the travel agent. “But MIAT ‘s flights are all fully booked?” “That’s right,” we hear. “Let’s go to Korea then. Compared to cycling, flying is a piece of cake,” says Tanja.

After we have booked the flight, we look for boxes in which we can pack our riese und müller. “It’s best if we go to a bike store. I’m sure they have boxes,” I say. “We don’t have any bike stores here in Ulan Bator. And when bicycles are imported, they come unpackaged from China. But we can try the biggest department store in the city. They have almost everything there,” replies Gambold.

We actually find a bike department on the fourth floor of the department store where the cheap goods from China are on display. But as Gambold already predicted, there are no boxes. In the clothing department, however, we make a find and discover a few large boxes filled with building rubble in a corner. After we have picked out the rubble, it doesn’t take long for two workers to carry the boxes to the street for 2,000 tugrik (1 euro). There, Gambold organizes a small truck to transport the 2.30-metre-long packages to our accommodation for 6,000 tugrik (2.87 euros).

I spend two days building a suitable dwelling for our riese und müller from the destroyed cardboard boxes. “Now nothing should happen to them on the long flight,” I say proudly of my work. Although we take a few days to complete the fourth stage of our Trans-East expedition, it is barely enough time to do everything we have planned. The inquiries for our visa alone, which we will need next year for our horse expedition and wintering with the Zaatans, turn out to be more extensive than expected. We visit the head of the German Development Service(DED), phone the German embassy, talk to an employee of the American embassy who wants to help us, contact a tour operator and meet with Togtoch. “We’ll think of something. I’m quite sure that you’ll be able to carry out your expedition next year,” she says with great confidence.

The city center of Ulan Bator is generously laid out and partly interesting. On our daily excursions to the post office, airline office, the DEDthe embassy, etc., we cross the imposing Sukhbaatar Square where the impressive parliament building and the opera house are located. The stark contrast between wealth and poverty can be seen here, among other things, when you walk past the partly open sewage shafts. As is soon the case in all Eastern countries, there are no manhole covers. Every pedestrian is forced to pay attention. Dreaming can indeed be fatal here. We peer curiously into one or two manholes. They are filled with garbage. “Yesterday I saw a man sleeping down there. He was lying on all the bottles and garbage and only had a torn coat as a blanket,” says Tanja. Again and again we see children in ragged clothes collecting something. Many of the poor only have broken slippers with their bare feet in them. In the cold season, 4,000 to 10,000 children live in the heating tunnels of Ulan Bator. According to some, however, there should be another zero behind these figures. The unimaginable thing is that these poor human beings have to share the dark habitat with millions of rats and the floor of these tunnels is covered with excrement. Now that we know that there is an underground city beneath the sidewalks, inhabited by countless suffering young people, we are constantly haunted by a guilty conscience when we go to a restaurant to satisfy our hunger with good food. Tanja soon hangs a bag of food in front of one of the shafts every day and it doesn’t take long for it to disappear underground.

Of course, I have no intention of making the end of our fantastic, eventful and wonderful trip negative. On the contrary, we are in very good spirits. We are proud to have made it and happy to be healthy. We were able to learn, observe and understand a tremendous amount. We were able to empathize and rejoice with them. Nevertheless, we don’t just want to travel on the surface of a country and Mother Earth, but go deeper. We want to be a part of everything that is. We want to understand, inhale and grasp the country and its people. And that is precisely why there are a few facts that are not always pleasing. As ambassadors and documentarists of Mother Earth, we have the obligation to write down an objective, non-judgmental travel documentary. So our experiences, our stories and our experiences have not only sunny but also shady sides. But we don’t want to overdramatize anything either. We live on a wonderful planet worth protecting, inhabited by people, animals and plants that all have a right to survive. We were born on a planet that Tanja and I call Mother Earth or is named by earth scientists after the ancient Greek mother goddess Gaia. Gaia can be seen as a superorganism that functions in a similar way to our bodies. A superorganism whose heart beats. A superorganism that is far from dead. Our Mother Earth is a living creature whose delicate skin is covered with forests, meadows and flowers, whose veins are the rivers, whose breathing is the drifting apart and contraction of the land masses. This phase lasts one hundred and twenty million years, but time is relative, because what is a tiny fraction of a second for us is a whole lifetime for an atomic particle, just as the existence of the earth is only a fraction of a second in the life of the stars and galaxies. As we witness nature dying around us, we should all realize that Mother Earth is alive, because what is not alive cannot die. We should once again honor Mother Earth as the source of creative and spiritual energies. Similar to what the Australian Aborigines did before the white man killed them. We humans, nature and Mother Earth are one entity. Something inseparable as a whole. “When the earth is sick and polluted, health becomes impossible for us humans. To heal ourselves, we must heal our planet,” said an Aborigine.

By polluting the environment, we are influencing the atmosphere and the Earth’s magnetic fields and thus disrupting Gaia’s metabolism. The effects are incalculable, but what we have seen in the world so far terrifies us to the core. Tanja and I are realizing more and more how inseparable our soul, our spirit and our body are from Mother Earth. More and more we are realizing that everything we do to our superorganism ultimately and directly does to ourselves. Initially, only a few of us are affected, but the number of people suffering is growing enormously. They have become part of the population, even if they disappear into tunnels at night.

Our travel documentaries are designed to give pleasure. Should be a mixture of real adventures, stories, lust for life and facts. But they should also draw attention to how fragile our life platform is and that each of us can contribute to alleviating the negative effects. So that our children can still see trees and hear birds chirping tomorrow.

We look forward to your comments!