Well, you might soon be able to drive across Mongolia:
NALAIKH, Mongolia - Canada has the Trans-Canada Highway. Brazil has the Trans-Amazon. Germany has the Autobahn, and Russia now has the Trans-Russian. This summer, from westernnmost Tsaganuur to Halhyn Gol in the east, road crews are working to add another to the list, the Mongolian Millennium Highway.
Long written off as a buffer state between China and Russia, Mongolia, twice the size of Texas but with 13 percent of the population, is embarking on a classic exercise in modern nation building.
“What I understand from reading books and surfing the Internet is that developed countries, like Canada and the United States, greatly spread development through roads,” said Manduul Baasankhuu, policy director of Mongolia’s Road, Transport and Tourism Department.
Unrolling a glossy map in his office in Ulan Bator, the capital, he traced a finger over a pink line, the east-west route that is to bind this nation together by the end of the decade.
UBers and the political opposition apparently dislike the idea, however:
Mongolia’s political opposition says the project is called the Millennium Road because it will take 1,000 years to finish. But it remains highly popular with the public. In opinion polls it trails only the decision to cancel 98 percent of the country’s Soviet-era debt.
The project does have its critics, particularly in Ulan Bator, where as many as half of the nation’s 2.5 million people now live. In a modern office building there, where air conditioners muffled the din of cars on traffic-choked streets, Chultem Munkhtsetseg spoke for many urbanites when she dismissed the highway as a road linking “nowhere to nowhere.”
Let no one forget South Korea is also getting into the Mongolian highway construction business:
SEOUL, July 12 Asia Pulse - South Korea will loan US$24 million to Mongolia to help it build a highway there, officials at the Ministry of Finance and Economy said Sunday.
The 20-year loan will carry an interest rate of 2 per cent per annum with a grace period of 10 years, the officials said.
The loan from the Economic Development Cooperation Fund (EDCF) will be used to build the road that will contribute to greater Asian trade for the land-locked country, a Finance Ministry official said.
The EDCF is designed to help foreign countries, mostly developing nations, promote their economic development.
The 176-kilometer two-lane expressway connecting two cities - Choir and Sainshand - southeast of Ulan Bator is part of the 4,000-kilometer A-3 road that will run from around Lake Baikal in Russia to northern Thailand.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is footing the bill for most of the 1,010-kilometer-long Mongolia section.
But screw the cars when you can bike across Mongolia:
Dirt roads with no signage, fierce, possibly rabid dogs, sparsely populated countryside with few amenities, and freezing nights and baking hot days are just some of the obstacles one must negotiate when traveling across Mongolia. These conditions are particularly challenging when your chosen mode of transport is … a bicycle!
It was late August when I left the comparatively civilized confines of Mongolia’s capital city, Ulaan Baatar, destined for the city of Erenhot on the Chinese/ Mongolian border. The trip would comprise of roughly 750 km through the vast Mongolian prairies and the arid wastelands of the Gobi desert.
