The Marmot’s Hole

The NYT’s James Brooks seems to be having a grand olde time in Mongolia. First he contributes a piece on Mongolia’s bustling ship registration industry. Yes, ship registry. And in case you were wondering, Mongolia does have a navy:

In the 1980’s, a Mongolian university student known only as Ganbaatar won a scholarship to study fish farming in the Soviet Union. But the state functionary filling out his application put down the course code as 1012, instead of 1013. As he later told Robert Stern, producer of a documentary on the Mongolian Navy, that bureaucratic error detoured him from fish farming to deep-sea fishing.

Upon graduation, he was sent to work with the seven-man Mongolian Navy, which patrolled the nation’s largest lake, Hovsgol. The lone ship, a tug boat, had been hauled in parts across the steppes, assembled on a beach and launched in 1938.

After the collapse of Communism here in 1990, Ganbaatar wrote Mongolia’s new maritime law, which took effect in 1999.

Back to ship registration. While it may seem a bit, well, bizarre for a completely land-locked nation to be involved in anything remotely nautical, Mongolia has apparently flagged 260 ships, and it gets about 20 to 30 news registrations a month. And there may be some shady stuff going down as well, involving none other than the North Koreans:

The Cambodia Shipping Corporation registered foreign vessels - many of them North Korean - for Cambodia, until 2002, when the French Navy seized the Winner, a Cambodia flag cargo ship, for cocaine smuggling. The seizure, the latest in a series of mishaps for Cambodian flag vessels, prompted the Cambodian government to cancel its contract with Cambodia Shipping.

Mongolia’s maritime niche may be North Korea, which has revived relations in recent months with the ruling Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, the former Communist party here. (On June 27, after a parliamentary election campaign that included corruption accusations against the government, the opposition Motherland Democratic Coalition unexpectedly won 36 of 76 seats. A final outcome is not expected until early July.)

North Korea flag vessels increasingly are watched around the world. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative, the United States and a dozen nations started to monitor North Korean vessels in 2003 for illicit cargos, like drugs, missiles or nuclear weapon fuel.

In 2003, Japan, traditionally an important trading partner of North Korea, adopted a policy of stringent safety and customs checks of North Korean flag vessels visiting Japanese ports. As a result of this enforcement, the number of port calls by North Korean flag vessels to Japan in 2003 plummeted by 29 percent, hitting 1,007.

At the same time, port calls by Mongolian flag vessels jumped in Japan. In April and May, there were 115 port calls by Mongolian flag vessels, almost five times the 24 registered in April and May of 2003.

Here at the one-room office of the Maritime Administration, the cheerful tropical fish and coral calendars were not enough to break the tension caused by a question about flagging ships from North Korea.

“Within international agreements, some countries have friendly relationships with Mongolia,” Mr. Altan-Od said. He declined to specify where most registered vessels were from, but did note that “we have one to two American ships.”

The second of Mr. Brooke’s pieces deals with a very wacky American golfing his way across the Mongolian steppes:

In a sense, he is. This summer, Mr. Tolme’, a civil engineer from New Hampshire, is golfing across Mongolia. Treating this enormous Central Asian nation as his private course, he has divided Mongolia into 18 holes. The total fairway distance is 2,322,000 yards. Par is 11,880 strokes.

“You hit the ball,” he said, explaining his technique in a land without fences, a nation that is twice the size of Texas. “Then you go and find it. Then you hit it again. And again. And again.”

Moving across the rolling steppe, he is walking a route favored almost a millennium ago by Genghis Khan. The fairway may be something less than manicured, but to the north are Siberian forests and to the south is the Gobi Desert, one of the world’s largest sand traps.

White folk are strange. Anyway, Mr. Tolme has his own website documenting his golf trek across Mongolia — check it out, because it’s got some great pics and commentary.