The drive from Dadal to Choibalsan was a very long slog. The muddy conditions didn’t last too long thankfully. As I got further south the ground got a little drier and the roads got a little smoother, relatively speaking anyway.

At the risk of boring you with endless road pics, that really is what half or more of this trip is about. Seeing and experiencing the infinite expanse of grasslands that is Mongolia. I’ve been to some pretty remote out of the way places around the world, but never anything like this. It’s overwhelming! So experience it with me through lots of road pics.

After about eight hours of driving across that endless grassland I reached Kherlen Bars Temple. It’s all that remains of a 12th century Khiten fortress city. It’s been refurbished, but it really didn’t look too bad in the before pictures I saw either. Now it sits alone out here, the tallest ancient remnant still standing in Mongolia.

Another 65 miles of grassland driving and I finally made it as far east as I’m going on this trip, Choibalsan, a city much bigger than I was expecting. It’s a bit dreary and run down though. A large portion of the population was Russian who moved out after the collapse of the USSR and much of the town was looted at the time.

I got a hotel, mainly just to use the wifi to post this and the previous Khentii Province post, but I can’t help thinking I should’ve just camped. I’m a bit of a dork because I thought my phone was locked. Turns out it’s not locked at all. So now I have a Mongolian phone number and my wifi drought should be solved. The staff here at Holy Crap Adventures will not be deterred from delivering all the action directly to your screens, dear readers!

Anyway, I started exploring Choibalsan at the Dornod Aimag (province) Museum. Choibalsan was named after Marshal Khorloogiin Choibalsan. He helped liberate Mongolia from the Chinese and the Tsarist Russians along with Sukhbaatar, whom we met in an earlier post. Later he became the head of the military and Joseph Stalin’s right hand man in Mongolia. It seems he became quite the bad dude. During the communist purges roughly 3% of Mongolias population was dead or “missing”. I’m not sure exactly what modern Mongolians think of him, but the city is still named after him, there’s a huge statue of him in front of the museum and there are lots of artifacts of his inside.

Despite all the signs in the museum being in Mongolian, I really got a lot out of it. There were only two people inside, myself, and the guy sitting on a couch in a closet moving his eyes back and forth between the television and the security cams making sure I didn’t take any pictures. Haha! Right across the street from the museum sits the Mongolian Warrior Monument. A monument done up in classic communist chic. The Soviet tank on the left apparently saw a lot of action during the Khalkhiin Gol war.

I took a walk up to the Danrig Danjaalin monastery, destroyed in 1937 and reopened in 1990, but it looked more like a construction site than a monastery. On the way there I passed through the western part of town, occupied by lots and lots of old Soviet built apartment blocks. It seemed kind of stark to me.

Finally, no visit to any city would be complete without a walk around the town square. You can be sure that Choibalsan Sq is indeed… very very square. There’s another statue of Marshal Choibalsan and not much else. A big government looking building that is completely abandoned and even an old rusted jumbotron that looks like it never got wired up. Choibalsan strikes me as a city that once had very big plans and then went nowhere.

Choibalsan has been a different, but interesting stop and it was a super convenient place to stop on my route due to its location. Not to mention getting my internet problem sorted out and getting my first official Mongolian meal at Azure restaurant. I had the khuushuur, which is minced beef in fried dough. It’s basically a hot pocket, but so delicious! That’s all for this post, but I’ll be back in a few days…