View of the Mongolian landscape from the Trans Mongolian Train.

There are many stories to Mongolia and I am curious to learn more, but am already leaving for Beijing in the morning. The last part of the Trans Mongolian Rail journey begins tomorrow and it will be with mixed feelings that I leave this part of the journey behind.

I have found Mongolia to be particularly curious and intriguing. A city that has sprung up over night seems so disjointed from its landscape. It leaves me feeling uncomfortable that so much construction and ‘development’ is happening at such a pace. Pavements are being laid to connect one high rise block after another.

The landscape outside of the city remains beautiful and a day trekking through the mountains yesterday ended with a night spent at a Ger camp in one of the National Parks. It is perhaps my own wish for the landscape not to be sullied by pylons and generators, to feel you are in the wilderness, not some created sense of that, which leaves me with such discomfort. I noticed that all of my photographs were carefully taken to cut out any evidence of diesel vans and road construction.

I am left though with a sadness, the discovery that the largest psychiatric hospital in Asia is in Ulan Bataar, with the greatest prevalence of diagnosis relating to alcohol and over the counter medication misuse, with limited treatments available. A little information is often misleading so I’m cautious to make any assumptions, but I am left wondering how far the two are connected, the context of the fast paced growth of the city midst the mountains and nomadic culture of rural Mongolia. The influence of communism and Mongolia’s soviet neighbours seemingly giving with one hand and taking away with the other. The rapidly growing mining industry provides foreign investment but at a cost to the countryside and the nomads who have lived there for many centuries. Land is increasingly ‘owned’ and rocks and tyres surround areas of ground marking the spot of one persons land over another, while litter is strewn across the landscape.