I just flew in from Mongolia and boy, are my arms tired! Hahaha… no, but seriously, my arms are really tired.
After a week cycling the wild Mongolian steppes with my son, the old legs are also tired, and the back, neck, wrists … really, all the bits are writing metaphorical complaint letters to the editor in my brain, which is in need of coffee but wants scotch. OK, so the brain is also tired.
But not nearly as tired as my son’s brain, which now needs an extra helping of rest after a catastrophic cycling accident hundreds of kilometres from what passes for civilization in that part of the world.
One moment we laughed and zoomed in parallel down a lovely grass-covered hillside, the next brought a soundless explosion of dirt and sand and James was down. He wasn’t moving.
I remember thinking, “Oh no,” but felt nothing at all in that awful moment, a consequence of the angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor drugs I take every day to keep my heart in line. I braked hard and rushed to him.
He still wasn’t moving. Or breathing.
This is one of the dreadful moments that all parents fear. My big, strong son, laid out face-down in faraway soil, as though already in a coffin. Terrible, terrible.
Suddenly he blew air into the dirt and groaned, and my heart leapt up like Wordsworth’s whatchamacallit, beholding a rainbow in the sky. Thank Christ, he was alive! I mean that literally.
Mongolia is not blessed with anything resembling British Columbia’s health-care system. We may complain about busy hospitals and long wait times for hip replacement surgery, but even complaining about these things now strikes me as a kind of luxury.
Yes, there are doctors and nurses here and there in Mongolia, and the nation’s capital has a hospital operating under a 50-year-old Russian model. But believe me, you don’t want to go there. Or rather, you don’t want to have to go there.
Thankfully, we didn’t have to. With the help of a satellite phone and a willingness to yell at the poor man who answered the phone at our insurance provider’s phone farm, we made intermittent contact with SOS Medica Mongolia, a private hospital in Ulaanbaatar that exists to provide logistics and some health-care to corporations like Western mining companies, and hapless adventure tourists with expensive travel insurance.
“Logistics” mostly means “evacuation,” which is what eventually happened to my son and I.
After six-and-a-half hours of James lying in the dirt, a private helicopter arrived to whisk us and our gear above the steppes in a two-hour rush to land in Ulaanbaatar before the sun set.
In Mongolia, helicopters fly by sight, meaning only during the day. Time was tight. We landed with just 10 minutes to spare before the sun set, along with any hope of medical help before the next sunrise.
The accident happened on a treeless hillside maybe 200 kilometres northwest of Erdenet, the second-largest city in Mongolia. Five days earlier, we arrived at Erdenet via the overnight train, part of the old — but still running — Trans-Siberian Railway.
Erdenet, population 98,057, is a no-frills support town for the Erdenet Mining Corporation, a joint Mongolian-Russian venture that accounts for most of Mongolia’s hard currency income.
Erdenet mines 22.23 million tons of ore per year, producing 126,700 tons of copper and 1,954 tons of molybdenum. It looks like the surface of the moon. It smells like coal fires, which is how the city and the mine are powered, and how all Mongolia heats homes during the freezing winter months.
The most interesting thing to see in Erdenet is the huge, angry-looking Cyrillic letters mounted on the roof of the railway station, a Soviet design common to any building taller than three storeys.
That, and the railway logo on the overnight train pillowcase, which I stole because the roof letters were too big to fit in my pack.
Fortunately, we left Erdenet within 10 minutes of arriving, driven to our waiting bicycles by a trio of grey, indestructible Russian-made all-terrain vehicles. After a quick welcome from our guide and translator, Bata, we jumped on the bikes and headed … outwards.
This is big sky country. Any every direction is outwards … and over a vast, sweeping roll of thin grass, closely cropped from shallow, sandy soil by millions upon millions of horses, cows, goats, sheep, yaks and camels.
An hour or so before our helicopter evacuation from that hillside, James had not yet opened his eyes or his mouth, but he would respond to my voice.
He had no idea where he was, nor what had happened to him. Periodically he would point to his ring finger, and then mime making a phone call.
His meaning was clear: The very first thing on his reawakening mind was to tell his wife that he was OK, even though we had no idea if that was true.
He did this every two minutes or so, not remembering the time before. Each time, I reassured him I would call her as soon as we landed, surprised that my voice at least sounded steady.
The helicopter crew asked me questions about my son’s health, but the noise of the engine and the thick accents and, I suppose, my own shock at this unexpected end to our cycling adventure made communication difficult.
We all did our best, and then shrugged and relied on the beeping machines plugged into James.
I remember sitting back to watch the scenery through the helicopter window. Big steppe eagles soared over the endless grasslands below.
From up high the steppes appeared exactly the same as they did on the ground: deceptively gentle-looking slopes of grass and grasshoppers that rise to a pass, then descend to a wide valley with more grass and grasshoppers.
Each valley has at least one set of what we might call Jeep tracks worn into the thin turf and animal dung.
Surprisingly, we saw no Jeeps on our week-long cycle along those tracks. What we did see was a great many second-hand Toyota Prius hybrids, imports from Japan with steering wheels on the right-hand side. I have no idea how they managed to navigate the rough terrain that we struggled with on mountain bikes.
About 30 per cent of Mongolia’s 3.3 million people are nomadic, or semi-nomadic, moving their white gers (traditional family tents) around the steppes to find good grazing land for their horses.
The solar panels we saw on every nomad ger may at least explain how they power their vehicles. It also explains how they power their cellphones and computers and internet connection to their families around the globe.
British Columbia has its own population of Mongolians, most of their 1,500 or so living in the Lower Mainland.
On the way to Ulaanbaatar, the helicopter’s rotor noise scattered many herds of horses, unused to giant metal birds overhead, carrying damaged sons and frightened fathers.
I suppose it was a lovely flight, but my son does not remember it, unconscious and strapped to a spine board in the hold. Nor does he remember the hectic, hour-long ambulance ride through the chaotic streets to the private hospital. That’s probably a good thing.
This is not a judgment, just an observation: Mongolian drivers are like children. What I mean is, imagine putting five-year-olds into cars and waving them off to do the best they can in rush-hour traffic, no seatbelts.
Very little attention is paid to the colour of traffic lights or even the general direction of traffic. Horns honk angrily and constantly, to zero effect but great amusement. All is chaos, all the time. Well, I guess maybe this is an observation and a judgment.
There are plenty of rough tracks in Mongolia, but actual roads are uncommon outside the capital. In fact, there are only 5,000 kilometres of paved road in the entire country, a landlocked mass between Russia and China almost twice as large as British Columbia (which has more than 57,000 kilometres of paved roads).
The ambulance’s siren had no impact on traffic. My ears heard only WHY?-WHY?-WHY? in the siren’s wail, as I gripped the seat and willed us past the endless jam of cars and to what I hoped would be the nearest version of Western medical assistance within two thousand kilometres.
Eventually we made it. James was rushed into the little hospital where he received very good care — including CT scans inspected over the internet by a neurologist in Hong Kong — for four days and nights at SOS Medica Mongolia.
Of course, there were the usual swings and roundabouts of unknown disaster wounds: Is the right mandible fractured? Is that a shadow visible on C2? Why doesn’t he know what day it is?
On the fifth day, we received word that the insurance provider had cleared a medical repatriation flight home.
An Argentinian doctor — I swear I am not making this up — working as an emergency room internist in Barcelona picked us up at 2 a.m. for our 6 a.m. flight to Hong Kong, later connecting to Vancouver where — after more than 30 hours of travel — his wife and mine met us at the doors of Vancouver General Hospital emergency.
I rarely say things like, “Hooray, I’m in Vancouver!” or “Wow, Vancouver traffic is so, like, easy breezy,” but I said both of those things on this surprise visit. I suppose Ulaanbaatar has that effect on its visitors: It tames the Lower Mainland.
It’s about half the size with 1.5 million people, most of whom live in the grim “Commie block” towers common to Soviet satellite states.
Mongolians shrugged off the yoke of Communism in the early 1990s, but they are still struggling with rebuilding their culture after Soviet-led religious purges and the usual crappy infrastructure and corruption that came with Josef Stalin’s violent insanity.
In truth, I sort of liked Ulaanbaatar. It requires you to keep your head on a swivel, to be sure, but not much else. It demands very little from tourists, because it offers very little.
Ulaanbaatar leans toward a low-key, low-expectation sort of tourism, offering sites like Zaisan Memorial Hill, a crumbling Communist-era monument that honours Soviet soldiers killed in the Second World War; and Sukhbaatar square, a crumbling Communist-era central plaza featuring the only statue of Chinggis Khaan seated.
What Ulaanbaatar does offer, surprisingly, is fantastic Mediterranean food. When my son found consciousness a little too taxing, I left him resting in his hospital bed to wander the cracked sidewalks in search of lunch, or dinner.
I was constantly surprised by inexpensive, delicious Italian food with a Mongolian twist. I have no idea why or how this can be so.
Will it sound petty and ungrateful when I tell you James and the Argentinian doctor flew home in business class, where they could stretch out and sleep, but I flew in coach where nobody stretches or sleeps, just farts and sneezes?
I hope not, because I am thankful.
I am so thankful to tell you that James’ many wounds are healing. The blood in his eye is mostly gone, the skin is growing back pink and healthy just like when he was a newborn in my arms, 32 years ago.
Now he is a man, taller and stronger by far than me, which brings to mind joy, and then horror at the thought of what might have been.
In the time since we returned from Mongolia, I have found that the only antidote to my terrible visions of him lying face down in the dirt, unconscious and not breathing, is thankfulness.
I am thankful for what we were spared, my wife and I, and more importantly my son’s wife and three little children. I am thankful for the doctors and nurses and administrative staff at SOS Medica Mongolia.
I am thankful for the Argentinian doctor who got a good sleep when I did not.
I am thankful for the other riders on our cycle adventure, who took turns holding up a blanket to keep the broiling sun off James’ head.
I am thankful for them sitting at my son’s side for six and a half hours, swatting flies away from his wounds, telling me that my son was going to make it. I am even thankful for the intransigent insurance provider employee who picked up the phone and took my angry demands in stride.
I find myself thankful for our health-care system and the doctors and nurses who still labour here in British Columbia. I am thankful for our paved roads and even for other drivers who all know to stop at red lights and go on green and to move over for ambulances.
Thankfulness dispels fear and carries hope. And so, I am thankful for wheelchairs and thankful for helicopter pilots and horses and eagles and newspaper readers and the million, million pieces of my little life, not ruined by our cycle adventure in Mongolia after all.
