Mongolia: Cracks in the Eternal Blue Sky: A Journey

By Erik Versavel

Mongolia: Cracks in the Eternal Blue Sky" is the first book in the series "Life is Good, Potentially." Versavel takes us on a journey starting in 2016 when he arrives in Mongolia and ends in 2020 after abruptly being locked out of the country because of the Covid-19 pandemic. With deep emotional engagement, he writes about the state of the country with painful accuracy why presidents and politicians are the reason why Mongolia is not the rich country it could – and should – be.

He describes in painful accuracy how chicanery in the banking sector destroyed what little international credibility the country had, and why the number of people living below the poverty line does not reduce when the economy booms. He paints a picture of political, financial economic crises with devastating detail and a cool sense of humor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098398163

Book preview

cover.jpg

An eyewitness tale of how we explored and loved Mongolia and its people, and how the leaders of the country damaged their economy, socially excluded its citizens, and prevented the prosperity of a generation.

All they do is chase each other, Chuka said.

Erik Versavel

First Edition September 2021

© 2021 Erik Versavel

All Rights Reserved

You need permission to reproduce this book, or portions thereof,

via www.erikversavel.com

***

This book, the related website and content is intended for education, entertainment and information. I sincerely hope that my readers will not take offence for none is intended. It includes generalisations and my impressions, and my sole aim in sharing them is to enhance and promote a mutual understanding of a vibrant Mongolia. Every effort has been made to ensure that the book, as well as the website, is accurate. I am sincerely grateful for the opportunity Mongolia and its citizens afforded me.

ISBN: 978-1-09839-815-6 (printed)

ISBN: 978-1-09839-816-3 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

My New Job

Moving to the Red Hero City

Daily Life in Mongolia

What is the Meaning of Your Name?

Horses With No Name

Terelj, Mongolia for Beginners

Exploring Mongolia

Khuvsgul Lake and Murun

Tourists

From Empire to Independence

From Ger to Concrete Skeleton

Property Projects, Mongolian Style

Shangri-La

Open Steppes, Closed Skies

An Unwanted New Airport

Babies and Land Cruisers

The Bust-Boom-Bust Cycle

We Are Great at Mining, We Think

Potentially Rich

A Five Hills Jewel

A Turquoise Hill

Darkhan Metallurgical Plant

The Jewel of Mongolia

Three Baffled Presidential Candidates

Genco President

Genco’s Projects

Arresting Development

Foreign Investment Climate

Dalai Lama

More Conferences

Negative Energy

Unwelcome Foreign Banks

The Bumpy Road to IMF Support

Fishy Banking Sector

Developing Friends and Family

Joyful Money Laundering

End of the IMF Programme

Chickens Coming Home

It Takes Two to Tango

Social Distress and Mongolisation

The Veloo Foundation

Good Entrepreneurs, Local Style

Blue Sky and Shamans

The Nomadic Soul

My Own Distress

It Gets Better

Epilogue

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

Thank You, first of all, to my wife, Brigitte, and our daughters, Charlotte and Nathalie. Without you, the journey of our lives would not have happened and there would have been no story to tell at all.

Brigitte supported, encouraged, challenged and reviewed from the beginning to the end. She kept me healthy physically and emotionally. She would prevent me from sitting behind my computer for too long, provide home-made meals, and give me countless ideas and anecdotes about Mongolia and the Mongolian people, which I would absorb and about which I would write. Very occasionally, my writing would conflict with mealtimes and thus result in overcooked salmon. At times she may have thought that I was not listening, but I was. She was mostly concerned about how I would write about her and more importantly, any potential negativity towards the Mongolian people. I took it all on board.

We lived in Mongolia without our children as, by that time, they were grown up and lived in London or Istanbul, but we were as close emotionally as we had ever been. Our small family was and remains filled with love, encouragement and an indescribable closeness resulting from having explored the most extraordinary countries together, missed friends and family at home, and gone through exceptional challenges together. ‘Home is not a place; it is where we are all together,’ our daughters would say. ‘Home is where our large Indonesian dining table stands,’ Brigitte would say because we have had all our meals together at that table since 1995 when we bought it from a tukang kayu¹ on the outskirts of Jakarta.

During a corporate training in a beautiful Dutch castle in 2015, Ian McMonagle and Addy Graham, two leadership development partners and coaches, unexpectedly gave me the opportunity to formulate my challenging dream before a group of colleagues. When I offered an extensive proposition of my dream to write books about my lifelong experiences, they simply said: ‘You know Erik, it can be done’. That is when I decided to launch my own project and take a little more than a day to build Rome, so to speak. When I found the Scrivener software, I was really getting started.

Friends and family who visited us in Mongolia would be on the receiving end of my intense briefings on the structure and concept of my books. I came up with the idea not to write one book but a series of books on the occasion of the visit to Mongolia in July 2017 of Julia and Lucille, friends we knew well when we lived in Kyiv. They were still suffering from jetlag, but they listened to my monologue enthusiastically I believe.

This propelled me into the project, which I started calling Life is Good, Potentially. This title was a reference to my previous life in South Korea, when the Lucky Goldstar Group became LG and promoted itself with the slogan Life is Good. It is also a reference to Alexander P, the regional head when I worked in Ukraine, who used the slogan to tell our Ukrainian colleagues, during the war with Russia, that life was good. ‘Potentially,’ I added in silent riposte because at that very moment, and for quite a few years more, it definitely was not.

Charlotte and Nathalie introduced me to the concept of self-publishing, which boosted my self-confidence tremendously. They then provided me with the supporting books to do exactly that - self-publish - and avoid the agony of publishing houses rejecting my writings.

My childhood friend Pol Arnouts bombarded me with enthusiasm and countless books, which inspired me one way or another. Occasionally, a book would discourage me when it was overly academic or researched. I had one such moment on a romantic anniversary trip to Bali in 2018 when we stayed in a private villa of the Suarga Padang Padang Hotel, developed and owned by our friend Frederik, whom we had known closely when we lived in Jakarta. I had partially buried my project while reading Korea, the Impossible Country by Daniel Tudor. So well-researched, I thought, I can never do that. I would then need to step back and focus on what I call my journey.

For this book about Mongolia, I had innumerable sources of local information, but most people preferred that I do not disclose their identity. In addition, I could not disclose, often quite damaging, information in my possession about public persons, businessmen and companies. If I did, I would not be able to stand up and provide unequivocal evidence of my statements without disclosing facts obtained in my professional capacity or in private conversations. That is a limitation of this book, but even without this I trust most readers will find the stories unbelievable.

My ex-colleague and friend Erik Famaey reviewed some of the very early drafts of my books and luckily, he was always very critical. The idea that he would be looking at every economic, financial or cultural comment impacted my writing and made it more balanced.

Baterdene Bayar reviewed and commented on the stories about horses, so important because of the central place horses have in Mongolia and for Mongolians. Oyu Ochirbal, a historian, provided invaluable input and corrections about Mongolia’s history and the current socio-political situation. Tomas Bravenec reviewed the chapters on the banking industry and made many corrections. Aart Jongejans reviewed my manuscript as only a seasoned risk manager could. Dries Kestemont, a Boeing 747 pilot, provided input on the chapters about airlines and airports. Everyone’s input was based on deep insight and helped me tremendously. I am grateful for all the support I received.

The cover of this book and the logo were developed by Anouk Somogyi www.anouksworld.be. Editing was performed by Manikya Kodithuwakku of PawPrint Publishing in Sri Lanka. I am very grateful for their support and for catching the essence of what I wanted to tell my readers.

***

I have used the names of public figures as they are and consider the information they provided via media, including social media and at events, to be in the public domain. Unless it was explicitly mentioned in meetings that Chatham House rules applied, for example and most often at events at the Chamber of Commerce, I consider the information provided during these meetings to be publicly available. Information I obtained during professional meetings is confidential and was only used insofar as it is also available from public sources. For people who are not public figures, I use a pseudonym. If you are a famous person and think I have misquoted you, please write to me. If you wish to be famous and I have not quoted you often enough, please also contact me. I will then see what I can do.

I have tried to use the terms Mongolian and Mongol in the appropriate manner, whereby Mongolian refers to the nationality and Mongol to the race.

When I say, ‘My Company’ I am referring exclusively to the bank at which I worked. I do not mention the name of the company as it is not the subject of this book.

All Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data come from the World Bank website. Unless otherwise indicated, I use Power Purchasing Parity numbers (PPP).

All currency exchange rate data come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) website.

I do not reference all the books that I have read about Mongolia and topics about which I write: the purpose of this book is not to showcase my physical and digital libraries, nor to be a collection of quotes from other books. Occasionally, I reference a quote from a book allowing the reader to research more about that particular topic.

References to articles in the UB Post are not accompanied by a footnote, as this newspaper’s website is not up to date. All references are from hardcopies, which I have kept in my personal archive and can be viewed upon request.

Websites are changeable and content can vary depending upon the date the site was accessed, but I did not include ‘accessed date’ information as I accessed the referenced sites very regularly.

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1. Carpenter

Introduction

At the time of writing Mongolia: Cracks in the Eternal Blue Sky, I was living with my wife, Brigitte, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. It was my eighth international assignment and our sixth country of domicile.

Before moving to Ulaanbaatar, we lived in Ukraine, which because of the EuroMaidan revolution featured in the international news on a daily basis from just a few months after my arrival. Mongolia was not, and is not, in the news but it would go through a similar lengthy period of economic, financial and political distress, requiring the support of the IMF.

Before Ukraine, we had lived in Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai, China; Jakarta, Indonesia and Seoul again. We had originally left Belgium to work and live in London, England in 1989.

Mongolia scored much better on the tourist front than Ukraine. During our time in Mongolia, we received more visitors than we ever did in Ukraine – perhaps reflecting its more exotic and mysterious reputation. This may also be due to the many television programmes about Mongolian wildlife and the steppe, as well as about Chinggis Khaan (aka Ghenghis Khan). And there is the Marco Polo series on Netflix, which I will admit I had originally enjoyed watching, though it was, according to a Mongolian friend, ‘a terrible depiction of the country and its culture, no wonder given that it was produced by Harvey Weinstein’.

As with all the countries in which we lived, we developed a deep and enduring sentiment that our lives would not have been complete if we had not lived there. Mongolia, so exceptional and so unique, became close to our hearts. England (or should I say, London) does not readily proffer deeply empathic relationships and neither does China. South Korea, Indonesia, Ukraine and Mongolia, on the other hand, most certainly do. We would learn to thoroughly enjoy Mongolia and love the Mongolian people.

Journalists from all over the world are invited to visit and create lyrical tributes about the eternal blue sky, the endless steppes and the beautiful character of the nomads. But they do not get to see the real Mongolia. Long-term foreign residents are usually apprehensive about criticising or challenging what is going on in the country because of economic dependencies and the fear of becoming persona non grata. Without losing sight of the beauty of the country and the people, or forgetting our own exceptional experiences, I wanted to focus on the realities of the functioning of the country.

One of the slightly provocative premises of my books is that economies do not bust because of global market forces or cyclical commodity prices. They may boom because of a sometimes-long period of high oil prices, iron ore or copper (after all, a rising tide lifts all ships). But they bust because of mismanagement, an absence of institutions, faulty financing, people pretending that all is good, false optimism and misrepresentation. This book builds on that premise and illustrates that apart from the initial external shock of the collapse of the Soviet model, Mongolia’s bust-boom-bust cycle and therefore the recurring economic, financial and social distress is man-made. Mongolian man, that is. Mongolian politician, mostly.

That is why this book is critical of what is going on in the country, its politicians and those who do not care about the wellbeing and inclusiveness of the Mongolian people. I just do not accept that you can blame the outside world for your own very obvious failings.

I do not cover what happened after I left Mongolia in early 2020. A lot happened, such as President Battulga trying to eliminate the ruling party by declaring it a military organisation. Though this book is critical of this president and many others, this criticism is in fact not personal but generic. Trying to destroy enemies was a dominant political and economic preoccupation when I was in Mongolia. It was the case before I arrived and did not change after I left. In June 2021 President Khurelsukh was elected for what was now a six-year term; his first promise was to distribute Mongolia’s putative wealth to the Mongolian people. Similarly, I describe the chicanery in the banking sector which I witnessed close-up in my four-year period. Take the previous or next four years and the names will have changed, but you will still see the same chicanery. Mongolia will remain potentially rich for a long time.

***

I have written this book while bearing in mind, at all times, how difficult it is to avoid misunderstandings and feel complacent as to what normalcy means. Every foreign resident in Mongolia - and I know many of them - struggles with the question of what should be considered normal. Mongolian people sometimes talk about ‘Clown Town’ when discussing their country, indicating their own struggle with normality.

Living and working in Mongolia means the parameters of what we think is normal or acceptable inevitably move south, or north, depending on where you think the norm should be. Readers of this book with some knowledge of the local situation may hopefully reflect that yes, this is exactly what it is and how it is. This is more or less normal in the local context. Readers with very little knowledge of Mongolia may see things differently and may say it is abnormal.

On a recent Christmas visit to our home country, during one of too many dinners discussing my project and books, it occurred to me that some friends and readers could, possibly with deliberate intention, misunderstand my stories. I realised they could, when reading my book, congratulate themselves on their superior capacity to run countries and companies. I became conscious that some could use my criticism of Mongolia, its leaders and how some people act (privately and in business) as arguments to fuel the western-centric idea that western governments and politics are best. I do not think western governments and politics are better than any other.

They should wait to form opinions until they have read my other books. They are equally critical about the political and economic development of countries at the other end of the spectrum. In some chapters, therefore, I delve into the subject in quite a lot of detail as I want to ensure that my arguments about the self-inflicted damage to Mongolia’s economy is thoroughly supported and evidenced. It is now time we got started and find out how I got my new job in Mongolia.

My New Job

‘Mongolia’, I said to Mark on the phone, ‘does not feature in any of the Economist magazines. It is never in the news. Why would I move there?’

Mark had called me in June 2016 from his office in the Republic Plaza building in Singapore’s Central Business District, where he was the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Asia. I was in Kyiv and nearing the end of my five-year tenure as the CEO of our Ukrainian bank. Mark had asked me for the role of country representative in Mongolia and he wanted me to start soon. I reflected that Mongolia is a popular metaphor for being as far from anywhere as you can be.

I understood that my company was not going to consider me for other roles. I had been told Switzerland was not on the cards and I had missed the chance to move to India. My successor had already arrived in Kyiv – it was my company’s subtle way to let you know that it was time to move on – and so I changed my mind, applied and was appointed to the position.

I was about to turn 56 and in many companies in Belgium and the Netherlands, people of my age are encouraged, gently or not so gently, to stop working to make room for members of the next generations, who (it was assumed) would be much more innovative, mobile and versatile than I had ever been. They would be more agile. Professional life can become more challenging after the age of 50 – colleagues think you are financially well-off enough to retire, your support network shrinks and people do not care as much about you anymore. A new female board member had been appointed to be responsible for our part of the bank and she was known to make statements such as: ‘Why am I surrounded by white middle-aged men?’ For me, falling squarely in the referenced category, luckily there was Mongolia.

Objectively speaking, I was an appropriate candidate. The Mongolian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet, which I read and write, although there are two additional characters to accommodate the extra vowel sounds in Mongolian.

Until 1990, Mongolia was technically an independent country, but really a Soviet satellite state that was politically and economically dependent on the Soviet Union without actually being a part of it. There was a Soviet culture of bureaucracy and corruption deeply entrenched in Mongolian society, a situation I knew very well from Ukraine, which had been part of the Soviet Union until 1991.

Mongolia is also an exceptionally potentially rich country like Ukraine and Indonesia (I worked in both countries for five years), thanks to its huge amounts of poorly managed natural resources.

There is a significant Korean business (and entertainment) community in Ulaanbaatar. Hundreds of small Korean restaurants and karaoke joints line the streets, albeit more or less in derelict condition. Having spent a total of seven years in South Korea, I read and write the Hangul alphabet and can even sing one or two songs in Korean. Mongolia’s largest trading partner and neighbour is China, where we lived for five years, and I can recognise and explain about 50-odd Chinese characters. Apparently, this made me the most suitable candidate.

After a few months, I found that some Mongolians have a tendency to walk away from what looks like a problem or personal embarrassment. I find this characteristic endearing but also hindering the healthy and constructive political, social and economic development of a country.

Even for a company like mine, my selection must have been a piece of cake as my qualifications outstripped my disqualifying advanced age. They overlooked that I do not wrestle and know very little about the two core components of Mongolian life: mining and animals.

In 2020, as I was nearing the end of my assignment in Mongolia and a lot of things had gone wrong in the country, one of my managers said: ‘We are very happy you are there to manage this difficult situation, but we must admit your appointment was not by design.’ I think he meant to say that my ability to manage distressed situations had not been taken into account when I was originally appointed.

To announce my appointment, the company issued a press release. It stated that I was specialised in rapidly emerging markets. This term had become commonplace in our company after we had acquired a British firm in the late nineties. Our corporate language had become (to many) somewhat irritating and not necessarily more truthful. We started using expressions frequently used by British bankers such as: ‘Crikey’ and, ‘I do not get out of bed for less than a million’ and, ‘John brings with him a wealth of experience’. ‘Chop-chop’ and ‘keep up the good work’ was also regularly heard.

Rapidly emerging was a form of wordplay to promote our company’s self-declared entrepreneurial spirit and our desire to be seen as innovative. In reality, however, my experience could have been tagged to fast-collapsing markets but of course, that is not something you put in a press release or indeed on a résumé.

***

Meanwhile, I found myself excited to embark on another adventurous assignment. In Kyiv, I had been CEO and Chairman of the Management Board with about 240 employees reporting to me. In Ulaanbaatar, I reverted to the title of Chief Representative, which I had 25 years earlier in South Korea, with just two employees working with me.

Our office was located in the small Naiman Zovkhis Building on Seoul Street in the centre of Ulaanbaatar. If you are having a good day and a positive mindset, you can think of Seoul Street as an attractive and lively street. It is narrow, diverse and said to house numerous entertainment places. On a bad day, you would only see the traffic jams and the Grand Khan Irish Pub.

On my second day in Ulaanbaatar, I had to find my own way in the rain on foot from the hotel to the office. I got lost, of course, in an unfamiliar city with few street names and got very wet. There was no corporate logo on the door. There was no desk, not even a chair, ready for me. It was shabby and untidy.

I decided to relocate the office to a new building. It was not particularly difficult and precisely three months after my arrival, we moved to a more-than-adequate office in the suitable Central Tower on Sukhbaatar Square next to the opera house, with a view of the Parliament building and Stock Exchange. It was an appropriate location for an international bank, made more so due to the number of pleasant restaurants, including two on the top floor of the building plus a couple of coffee shops and much more. Although it was still very far removed from the office experiences in Singapore, Hong Kong or London, it was reasonable nevertheless and much better than in Kyiv. My assistant Sangaamaa managed the layout, design and negotiations with building management and contractors. She did an outstanding job.

Frustratingly, there was actually very little work to be done. Our business model had been built almost exclusively on trying to arrange bond issuances for the government, banks and large companies in the country. However, Mongolia had managed itself into a difficult period of financial and economic distress just a few months before my arrival. That situation continued, and even worsened, for a year and a half or so before it stabilised. By the end of 2017, Mongolia was showing signs of recovery mainly due to the higher coal and copper prices on the global commodity market. But the social distress would not cease or alleviate. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Then it got worse again and about halfway through 2019, it had become clear we were once again sailing straight into the eye of a perfect storm.

The politicians had managed to increase the number of people living below the poverty line by 8% in a mere three-year period from 21.6% in 2014 to 29.6% in 2016.² By 2020, this percentage had stayed the same despite sometimes nominally strong GDP growth. We wondered why there were no mass demonstrations in Mongolia, and no revolution.

This all meant that the first two years of my time in Mongolia would not see any new business written. There were neither international companies nor foreign investment. The local banks were in survival mode, trying not to collapse. The financial system had become a purely local matter, completely separate from the outside world. The sense of isolation in the office was overwhelming. I jotted down short notes to our regional head office in Singapore about company x or bank y, about staffing changes at the Ministry of Finance or about the status of the IMF programme, but nobody replied.

We were supposed to have quarterly calls with a number of regional managers with functional responsibility for Mongolia, such as human resources, finance and operational risk management. But more often than not, these calls were cancelled because no one was available, or they thought they would not have much to add from their side. Fortunately, my reputation for having managed many a difficult issue in several problematic countries remained intact. The company knew I would not screw up.

But this book is not about my personal emotions or frustrations. It is about Mongolia. Let me start by telling you a bit about moving to and then living in Mongolia.

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2. According to a joint study of the National Statistics Office and the World Bank.

Moving to the Red Hero City

Our move from Kyiv to Ulaanbaatar in September 2016 was a significant professional and personal change, but it all went more or less smoothly. Having moved so many times before, we considered ourselves to be very experienced. And while it was smooth, it was nevertheless stressful. It is a strange but probably very human reaction that anxiety about logistics takes precedence over the issues of real concern when moving to another country.

Most of this stress was caused, as so many times before, by an impenetrable triangular relationship between the removal company, my employer and ourselves. Like most multinational companies, my company enters into global contracts with removal firms who compete on price to win the tender. They do not compete on a measure that ensures the satisfaction of the family that actually needs to go through the experience of moving internationally.

The removal companies who win these contracts use a lot of subcontractors, and that makes it even more complex. As a result of all this contracting and subcontracting, there are an awful lot of bogus statements, pretence and false optimism. Someone in the chain will write to say: ‘Good news, your goods have left and are on the way’. This does not mean the goods will soon arrive. It means the goods are about to leave their warehouse and no longer the responsibility of the message’s author.

A subcontractor of a globally contracted party (based in Moscow, of all places) had been appointed to assist us and show us around our new hometown. We call this an Orientation Tour. The only appointment this subcontractor set up for me was with Mongolia’s largest property company, Mongolian Properties, named appropriately enough. My appointment was with the sales director of Mongolian Properties, a nice, good-looking Mongolian lady who handed over their latest promotional material and spoke at length about the amazing attractiveness of owning property in Ulaanbaatar. She wanted me to buy something. As always, we understood that we would be on our own.

Ulaanbaatar is not an aesthetically pleasing city It is damaged, neglected and dysfunctional. Urban planning, even the most basic aspects of it, appear to have been abandoned entirely after what is sometimes called, as in the Czech Republic, the 1990 Velvet Revolution. The city is an urban area but only because people have moved to it from rural areas. It does not transform the city into what most would consider an urbanised or developed capital because there are not enough of the urban components you expect to see in an urban environment. Or, to put it the other way around, there is an abundance of elements in the city that are not particularly urban. To some, this is an attraction. You do not live in a tent in the countryside, but you also do not live in a terrifying urban environment of concrete, asphalt and shopping malls.

It is the kind of place built by humans, then rebuilt and restructured by corrupted developers and politicians who use shortcuts to cut costs and frequently disregard urban planning, laws and regulations. To expats, Ulaanbaatar looks like an out-of-whack mining town, a community loosely connected with the mining business and therefore, lawless and intensely competitive with an abundance of peripheral and low-grade entertainment options.

Originally, the city was a centre for trade and monastic life where the holy Bogd Khaan resided, an entirely different and more noble proposition. It is a history buried by corruption. The CEO of a telecom company once told me they had developed an app which told you, when you point your phone’s camera at any building in the city, what permits and licenses were missing, and who the owner was. The app was soon banned by the government, given buildings are almost always owned by politicians or their kin. They do not want the proceeds of their corruption to be on public display.

***

My first week in Ulaanbaatar was in July 2016 for a preparatory visit. I stayed in the brand-new Shangri-La Hotel. In the evening, I went for a walk, wondering where the centre of the city was. It was only the next morning that I found out that I was in fact, give or take 100 metres or so, in the centre of the city. I was just south of Sukhbaatar Square, which is home to the Parliament and government buildings, the Academic Theatre of State Opera and Ballet and the Stock Exchange. These are buildings that once must have looked beautiful. Now they are mostly in poor condition. Central Tower is nearby too. Meanwhile, over the last few years, a large number of multi-storied buildings have been erected or commenced in the city centre and almost all of them now are either a concrete frame or completely empty, failed projects.

As I needed to find somewhere to live, I viewed a large number of apartments during this visit, some of which were truly crazy. Versailles-style apartments of over 500 square metres and entirely empty compounds. One unit in the popular Regency Residences in the centre of town had an immense rooftop balcony, which was ugly and useless. Property agents would display their extraordinary global skill of saying the wrong things. For example, Orgil stated: ‘There is no dishwasher in this apartment because people who can afford to live here eat in restaurants’. Batzul’s best quote was: ‘This kitchen would really be too small for me because I am a gourmet cook’.

After my return to Kyiv, where we still lived, we carried on the negotiations by email and Skype, and eventually settled for a brand-new apartment in the residential tower of the Shangri-La complex. I write about that later.

My second visit was in September 2016, and it would be the start of my assignment and the beginning of life in Mongolia. Brigitte was to join me a few weeks later because there were things to do at home, and with our children and parents. It was the start of a life we could not have imagined. If I had retired or been made redundant at the tender age of 56, I would have been working away in our small garden in Brasschaat, in the Flemish province of Antwerp, and poring over my extensive stamp collection. I would have never launched the Life is Good, Potentially project, written my books, slept in a ger,³ relieved myself behind a tree at - 30oC or ridden a horse again in my life. I would never have discovered the highest aspirations of my darling wife as she sought to spend as much time as possible in the almost entirely unexplored countryside of Mongolia, devoid of modern bathrooms and shoe shops. Who could have imagined it!

Let me now tell you about daily life in Mongolia.

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3. A traditional round yurt-style tent covered with felt, canvas and skins.

Daily Life in Mongolia

Daily life in Mongolia is governed by winter, pollution, health and sanitation concerns, and availability of food. Let me tell you how we experienced that.

Winters are extremely cold in Mongolia and most importantly, they seem to last forever, well over six months every year at least. Mongols classify the coldest parts of winter, from 22 December to 12 March, as nine sets of nine days. When we say, ‘it is freezing’ or ‘it is really cold today,’ Mongols would reply and implicitly refer to one of the periods of deepest winter. In the second ninth, for example, vodka freezes. In the fourth ninth, the horns of a four-year old ox would freeze and fall off. In the seventh ninth, hilltops appear from beneath snow. Every set of nine days has its own characteristics. Every Mongolian will explain to you exactly which ninth is ruling the waves.

This is not too dissimilar to how weathermen describe the extraordinary range of different types of rain, which inevitably and sadly falls on every sad citizen of my home country of Belgium during winter, and indeed during autumn and spring. And usually in summer as well. In not too dissimilar an experience, when I wrote this in my fourth Mongolian winter, I would have said my unbiased preference was for the ninth ninth of winter, even though the conditions are brutal.

In 2016, Ulaanbaatar’s first snow fell on 5 October with the last snowfall on 15 April the following year. The first snow of 2018 greeted us on 22 September, while the last snow of 2019 arrived on 5 May. However, the winter of 2018 - 2019 was unusual in that there was no snow at all in many parts of Mongolia, including Ulaanbaatar.

In November 2016, just a month after Brigitte had joined me in Ulaanbaatar, we drove two hours east of Ulaanbaatar to the Terelj National Park for a weekend in a small lodge. The Land Rover’s gauge told us the temperature was - 36oC. In January 2018, we saw and felt temperatures of - 42oC. There were still horses and cows walking on the snowy fields and icy road. Perfect for pictures!

During the winter of 2020, when we were no longer living in Ulaanbaatar, temperatures dropped to - 40oC and local friends wrote to us that the wind chill factor meant it felt like - 50oC. There were many reports of policemen and even friends with frostbite. Social media were replete with pictures comparing the temperatures in UB with tropical Antarctica - winning the competition, they probably implied.

From the end of October until the end of March, temperatures typically hover around - 20oC at midday. Due to the sustained high atmospheric pressure, there is no precipitation during winter except for a small amount at the beginning and end of the season. In early 2020, the electronic circuit of my Land Rover broke down and we could not use the windscreen wipers anymore. It took the Land Rover importer six weeks to import the replacement part but not once during that period, did we actually need to use the wipers. Imagine such a scenario in one of our beloved European countries!

As the girl from Mongolian Properties told me when she was showing me apartments: ‘It is just cold’. It is as if the whole weather system comes to a deeply freezing standstill in October and does not start moving again until mid-April. Many wealthy Mongolians escape to South-East Asia – to Singapore or Bangkok – during the harsh winter months while some travel just for the New Year period.

The cold itself is harsh but manageable. We used the expression ‘there is no bad weather, only bad clothing’. However, it is not fun with babies and toddlers in Ulaanbaatar in winter, even when they are properly dressed. Mongolians would say: ‘It is much colder in a Singapore air-conditioned office at 21oC degrees than it is in the Mongolian countryside at - 35 oC’. ‘Mongolian bodies are not made for artificial cold,’ they sometimes added.

My predecessor had told me that if you drive a diesel car, such as our Land Rover, and leave the car to go wolf hunting (yes, that appears to be quite common here), the diesel fuel would freeze, and you would not be able to start the engine again. You would die. The solution, locals and visitors alike would typically say, is to always travel with two cars and have at least one of those two engines running all of the time.

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There is no other adequate word for the winter pollution in Ulaanbaatar than disastrous. The poor people who move from the countryside in search of a better life live in what are called the ger districts, which are on the outskirts of the city. A client told me: