Travel.

It is occasionally our dubious pleasure to spend between 12 and 20 hours packed into a porragon, a Soviet-era Russian microbus with a beefed-up suspension, on spectacularly unpaved and sometimes utterly illusory “roads.” Oftentimes there are neither markers nor hints whatsoever as to which parts of the steppe/regolith do and do not constitute a viable part of the thoroughfare. It is while we are traversing these uncharted wastes (and evidently concourses) that I spend minutes and hours wondering whether my driver is engaged in some sort of solar-relative form of navigation, or whether each porragon leaves a scent trail to be followed by the next, like some sort of peon-ant posting a linear memorandum of “there’s food this way!” for the benefit of his fellow proletarian.

A porragon has either eleven or twelve actual seats in it. These seats are quite small, and nine of them are usually arrayed on three benches in the back. In spite of this, I have never undertaken the trek as part of a fellowship containing fewer than twelve members, and, just in case we should be waylaid by wandering bands of highwaymen I suppose, our numbers have at times ranged up to sixteen. I am not counting children (pupae) or, as they are termed after their metamorphosis from the larval stage, “lap banshees.” Experience has shown me that either incarnation is capable of The Exorcist-themed projectile excretions.

One might say that the road to Ulan Bator is fraught with peril. Reasons for 2-4 hours stops in the past have included snowstorms, our vehicle breaking down, a vehicle in our caravan breaking down, a vehicle NOT in our caravan breaking down, etc. ad nauseam. I admire the fact that Mongolians are a very communal society, in which spending three hours by the side of a road in temperatures below negative thirty Fahrenheit is something that is “simply done” for the benefit of those in the other vehicle who would otherwise freeze to death. This does not, however, excuse a three-hour break in a city of fifteen thousand while the passengers on our two vehicles get wasted on the vodka that Russians wouldn’t drink.

An “autos,” an actual bus that takes the same route, is exactly the same except twice as big and with twice as many people.