Ulaanbaatar

Everyone who arrives in Ulaanbaatar is slightly surprised, and the surprise runs in every direction. The city is not what you expected from the gateway to the great steppe — it is dense, it is loud, it clogs with traffic that would be unremarkable in Warsaw or Almaty, and the sky above the Soviet apartment blocks turns grey with coal smoke in winter in a way that makes your throat tighten by mid-morning. But then you turn a corner and find a young woman in a gallery discussing Mongolian contemporary sculpture in three languages, or you walk into a renovated café where the barista grew up in a ger camp ninety kilometres north and came to the city to study design. Ulaanbaatar does not resolve its contradictions. It just keeps moving.

I arrived on the Trans-Mongolian train from Beijing, which deposits you at a station whose grandiosity feels borrowed from somewhere much bigger. The city centre spreads around Sukhbaatar Square — a vast plaza named after the revolutionary hero whose statue was eventually joined by a seated Chinggis Khaan on a massive throne at the parliament steps. The two figures make an uneasy pair: a communist revolutionary and the man whose empire predated Marx by seven centuries, sharing a square in an ex-Soviet republic that has spent thirty years figuring out what it actually believes. I sat on the steps and ate a khuushuur from a paper bag while pigeons negotiated the wind. Nobody seemed troubled by the historical complexity.

The Naran Tuul market — the “Black Market,” though nothing particularly illicit happens there — occupies a neighbourhood southeast of the centre and operates on a scale that initially defeats the mind. Hundreds of stalls sell saddles, bridles, and felt, alongside Chinese electronics, Soviet-era tools, and quantities of dried dairy products stacked in configurations I had not seen before. I spent an afternoon there negotiating, mostly by pointing and shrugging, for a small carved wooden box. I paid what I later understood was three times the correct price. The woman who sold it to me seemed neither pleased nor displeased; the transaction was simply complete.

The Mongolian National Museum on the north side of the square is worth a half day that will stretch into a full one. The ethnographic collections — ger components, festival costumes, nomadic tools organized by region — do more to explain the country you are about to cross than anything you will read in advance. The shamanic artifacts room is dim and particular, and the scale model of a complete ger interior made me feel oddly homesick for a life I had never lived. Gandan Monastery, in the west of the centre, is the largest functioning Buddhist monastery in Mongolia and still draws worshippers at dawn, the smell of juniper incense mixing with the cold air off the hills. Go early, before the tourist groups.

When to go: May and September offer mild temperatures and manageable crowds. July brings Naadam celebrations that fill the city but also strain accommodation. January and February exist — they are just very, very cold, and the air quality from coal heating is genuinely difficult to breathe.