Date: 29/7/04
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 westernmost 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 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 the 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.
The road is to start in the baking plains of the east, home to thundering herds of Mongolian gazelles. The two-lane asphalt runs west over the steppe to snow-capped mountains, home to the famed Kazakh eagle hunters on the Russian border and skirts the Gobi desert. "Mongolians say that someone who lifts a stone from a road collects good karma," said Enkhbaatar Dorjkhuu, an engineer on the road, which will bind a far-flung population that largely follows Tibetan Buddhism.
He added: "We are doing virtues here. A road is like an artery for human beings. This road we're building will play an important role in transportation, tourism, advancement of our economy."
After four years, a quarter of its planned 2,655-kilometer, or 1,650-mile, length is paved. "It will open up new destinations and decrease the amount of time for people to get to faraway destinations," said Lee Cashell, an American businessman in Ulan Bator who in the last six months has bought a guesthouse, opened a resort and started a restaurant, the UB Deli.
In the steppe, one lone strip of asphalt can help the environment. "People already drive across Mongolia," said Darius Teeter, deputy representative for the Asian Development Bank. "But you can have a valley with 14 parallel dirt tracks, each one becoming rutted in the mud. After the paved road comes through, you can see the dirt tracks start to disappear under the grass."
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. 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 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."
"Instead of paving roads in deserted places, they should pave streets in U.B., where half of the population lives," said Munkhtsetseg, who works for a foreign foundation. "Instead of building roads across the country, it is much better economically for Mongolia to build roads in the cities."
It would be more sensible, many Mongolians say, to build north-south roads to link with China. "Politically the Millennium Road is beneficial for the government," said Michael Kohn, an American travel writer who has visited most of this vast nation. "Economically they would be better off building roads to China."
Some say airplanes are better suited to handling the feeble east-west demand. But for years travelers have referred to the initials on the side of the bulky Soviet Antonov planes of state-owned Mongolian Airlines, M.I.A.T., as "May I Arrive Today?" The Antonovs are being retired and a new, more reliable, privately owned airline, Air Mongolia, is gradually taking over domestic routes. This way, Mongolia could leap over building a national road.
The project's boosters say paved roads bring prosperity. "You can see it in the countryside: the motorcycles, jeeps, satellite antennas, solar collectors," said John Karlsen, who sells mining and road equipment here. "The people in the countryside are getting to markets. They are hauling their cashmere. The path to economic salvation in Mongolia is in building roads."
His colleague Bob Barrows added: "Look at what the interstate highway system did in the '50s for the U.S., what the autobahns did for Germany. Bottom line is that the Millennium Road, or any road, is good for this country." On a newly paved 80-kilometer stretch of road between the capital and Baganuur there was a steady flow of trucks loaded down with mounds of wool from the countryside. In the year since this section was paved, traffic has jumped from 800 vehicles a day to 3,000, said Manduul of the transportation department. In a sign that roads spread development in Mongolia, he added, "Baganuur real estate prices are now on a level with the capital." |
