"Gobi-ng Insane" A Tale of the Gobi, Part 2

Well, it appears I've misplaced my memory stick... :((( But I was thinking of some things I hadn't written about that are pertinent to that last post.

Tsengel joined us kind of last minute. He works normally in a mine in the south, and the deal is they work for a couple of months, basicly wayyy over time, then they have a couple/several weeks off. So he was back in Darkhan the weekend we were leaving. Friday morning, he called me to see if we could have a lesson. I told him we were heading out for our trip in a couple of hours, so it was impossible. Later, as I was writing a few last emails and talking to Jose before leaving, he texted me: "If it's alright with you and your friends, I'd like to join you on your tour. I'm ready to leave." I checked with the others, and told him it was fine, but at that point we were leaving in 1 hour, and he'd of course have to pay... He was like, oh yeah that's fine... So he joined us!

This ended up being really nice. It meant Marik wasn't the only Mongolian who spoke English that we had with us (our driver spoke only a little German). That way, he could help interpret directions... among other things.

So the complication which made everything... a little crazy and more stressful and less rewarding than we had anticipated... was this:

As I may have mentioned, Marik is one of Steven and my neighbors, and him and Steven became friends through a boxing class. We hired him because he said he could take us on the trip for less money than the tour company, and he really wanted to show us his country. We thought that if we could trust him, this would be a really cool experience to be given a tour by a friend. We kind of forgot to think of whether he actually knew about the places. We also made the explicit choice to trust him, knowing he'd never organized a trip of this type for so many people. He had done it for one or two other foreigners, but these guys had lots of money, whereas our budget was super tight. Our choice to trust him obviously had its risks, and we felt we were prepared for that risk. He was very enthusiastic about assuring us that he could stay in budget and that he'd even pick up the extra if it got above the price, because the experience would be beneficial for him as a potential future job. We tried to itemize things out with him, but he was almost equally enthusiastic about not wanting to do that. This should have been a red flag, but we decided to go for it...

One more thing: from the first moment I met Marik, it was obvious to me that he was one of the most deeply convicted male chauvinists I've ever encountered. When he cooked and one of us girls offered to help, he tutored us in a manner that made it clear he considered our abilities and comprehension inferior. He said, "Womens must learn!" When he brought his daughter around at first, he obviously left her to be cared for by us girls when we were around. If his daughter was getting into something, or if we had finished eating and the table needed to be cleaned, he would immediately, commandingly call, "Ida! Nadine!" And expect us to address the problem. Nadine and I made a point of remedying the idea that we were around to care for his child, and in other areas, we made an effort to tolerate him, partly because he was Steven's friend.

So. The first night, when we stayed in Mandalgov, he came to Steven and told him that we'd have to pay extra because of the hotel where we slept that night. This of course immediately set us worrying after his previous promises of staying in budget. We expected such set backs as longer days or full hotels, such as we had encountered that day, so we expected him to think of that as well. That night, Nadine and I tried to talk to him and tell him there was no way we were paying extra because he had promised, blah blah blah... He was obviously distressed and was obsessed with avoiding talking to us about it. Within the next couple of day, he also expected us to pay for our meals, which we had expressly said was included in our price, among other things. Finally Nadine and Steven spoke to him, and Nadine asked him to show us the receipts for the day's expenses after each day. We were concerned he was literally going to just hoard all our money and not spend it on the trip. He refused to show Nadine the receipts, saying it was impossible. After she left, completely frustrated and infuriated, he told Steven he wouldn't talk to the women about money because "Women are irrational..." among other things. In the end, he and Steven did discuss each cost at the end of the day; meticulously wrote everything down, for Steven. In this way, we did keep track of all the money that was spent.