Tripping the Snare

Whenever I sense the need for a bracing dose of cynicism, I turn to Ian Frazier’s 2019 essay, “In Billionaires Is the Preservation of the World.” Rereading these seven paragraphs is not as comforting as petting the cat, but Frazier’s sentences remain both cogent and funny about the present-day plight of international conservation organizations: “Any billionaire left untapped equals a part of the Earth that will consequently die.”

Such thoughts are a trap, of course, a diabolically human device to capture our hopes and kill them before they can be transformed into incremental gains. Which is why I am grateful for all the evidence of  good work that I witnessed in the past year—by The Nature Conservancy, the Wild Salmon Center, the Mongolia Fish Research Project, Tight Loops, and others. Cynicism can be entertaining but it’s a thin liquor compared to the real intoxicants of our natural world.

You can find the story of our visit to Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains in Current Conservation. That’s where the inspirational artist and architect Bill Bensley has created Shinta Mani Wild, a resolute anti-poaching and social welfare initiative cunningly camouflaged as a luxury resort.

Bill Bensley, The Secret Forest Keepers, 2025; acrylic on canvas, 120 × 120 cm

    

Two months after our return from Cambodia, I was honored to take the stage at The Explorers Club in New York, in conversation with Randy Cohen of the public radio program Person Place Thing. You can watch a recording by following this link (fast forward to 7:45 for the introductions), or listen to the podcast here.

The many turns of events that placed me in front of that audience are too fantastical to comprehend even now, so I’ll just note that, as a fourth-grader at Brooklyn’s Immaculate Heart of Mary School, I produced one book report after another about explorers from Ferdinand Magellan to Meriwether Lewis. I was nearsighted, asthmatic, a nonbeliever in a world where everyone else seemed certain about something. More than a half-century later, only my bronchial passages have cleared.

In April 2025, I joined Mike Fay, leader of the legendary MegaTransect, on an exploratory trip to South Sudan’s Nimule National Park and its associated buffer zone, to assess fish populations—especially Lates niloticus—in the Nile River. What we found was both heartening and frightening: it’s a profoundly fragile place, scarred by war, and yet a fount of undeniable abundance.

In August, Mike and I joined two more friends in Mongolia’s Altai Tavan Bogd National Park to collect data on two relatively little-studied fish: the Altai osman (Oreoleuciscus potanini) and the Mongolian grayling (Thymallus brevirostris). According to one recent study, vehicle entries in the park rose from 719 to 13,192 between 2018 and 2024, an astonishing increase of more than 1750 percent. While existing populations of osman and grayling now seem adequate to attract and entertain visiting anglers—the combination of scant historical data and a limited understanding of their life histories and ecology renders both species vulnerable to decline.

I’ll write more about those trips and those fish soon. (For the record, the Nile perch was so integral to ancient Egyptian culture that it had its own hieroglyph, while sight-casting to osman cruising in shallow water is equally as addictive as chasing bonefish on a tropical flat.) In the meantime, you can find my “Confessions of a Poacher” in Issue 17.2 of The Flyfish Journal.

And an account of my shambolic history as a runner in the Fall Classics 2025 issue of Sport Literate (also, by coincidence, number 17.2).

New Hope, Familiar Despair, and an Inspirational Sandwich

When I look back at the past year, I mostly see haze and fog. Which makes the memories that remain gleam like islands of hallucinatory clarity. One of these is of Sarah and I standing in a bar, drinking cold beer and eating a revelatory combination of bread, pork, wine, and garlic known on Madeira as sandwich carne vinho d'alhos. Another is of walking toward Powell's in Portland and seeing my name on the marquee.

That night included an on-stage conversation with the Wild Salmon Center's Ramona DeNies, a question-and-answer session, and many vivid reminders of why I launched the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition in the first place: for the sake of the river.

Although that event went unrecorded, you can listen now to my conversations with Aaron Millar of Armchair Explorer and Tim Harden of The Venturing Angler, with another podcast to come from Chris Mortensen of All Creatures.

Rowing to Baikal was reviewed favorably in Library Journal, Foreword Reviews, Gray's Sporting Journal, Good River Review (by old friend Greg Pape), and Harvard Magazine, among others.

Spurred by alternating bouts of hope and despair emerging from Egypt's COP27, a chapter from an early draft of the book was posted on Rivers without Boundaries.

Another excerpt from the book—with several pages of photos by myself, Lanie Galland, Misha Skopets, and Guido Rahr (now of The Takes)—as well as an interview with Chris Dombrowski, author of The River You Touch, appears in the latest issue of Modern Huntsman.

I returned to the river in June, where the guides and staff of Mongolia River Outfitters continue to work against the threats posed by poaching, habitat degradation, and climate change.

Later in the summer, Sarah and I left Algeria. One of the last things we did there was to visit the cave where the creator of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, was imprisoned from 1575 to 1577 (though he would not be ransomed until 1580). One of the best things was a close encounter with the Algerian nuthatch, an endemic bird that somehow avoided the attention of European scientists until 1976.

For "What We Talk About When We Talk About Taimen," see issue 37 of In the Loop Magazine. 

For an account of my sojourn on Slovenia's River of Dreams, visit Orvis News.

Rowing to Baikal, the book

I would call myself a slow writer but that feels willfully understated. The 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition took place a scant five years ago. My first book, Principles of Navigation, was begun in 1983 and published in 2013. (I’ll trust you to do the math.) My second, The Coconut Crab, originated as a story told to my daughter in 1999—and was released in 2022. Rowing to Baikal ships on December 5. So at least I'm getting faster with age.

Though not really. It still takes a maddeningly long time to scribble out the sentences, identify their weaknesses, fix their faults, cobble their connections.

This one happened more quickly because if I’d waited twenty years to get the paragraphs right, the river might have been gone. And with it, so many things that have sustained me and countless others. Things worth loving. (For the record, 50 percent of the royalties from this book have been allocated to the International Taimen Initiative.)

Elsewhere, you can find my story about the pleasures of friendship in issue 15.1 of The Flyfish Journal, while issue 15.2 will include a brief musing on mayflies—or, in other words, youth and fragility—and the epic of Gilgamesh.

And the most recent issue of Destinations, a publication of Fly Fisherman magazine, features a description of a revelatory moment with the guides of Salvelinus in the foothills of the Pyrenees, arranged by my friends at Orvis Travel—with art by Rob Benigno—while Fly Fisherman’s annual Gear Guide closes with the origin story of my guiding career, which began way back in 1979.

But this year, the book has been the focus of most of my waking hours, even on the river in Mongolia, where I made some pre-dawn edits using my phone and then, thanks to the miracle of LTE, passed them along to the publisher before getting down to the more serious business of catching taimen on the fly. (Thanks to Matt Koerber for the pic.)

Lost and Found

In the Summer 2021 issue of Sport Literate, I wrote about a group of feral dogs in Tangier, Morocco, who had welcomed me as one of their own: “They were not really stray dogs but street dogs. Unrestrained and untended. Of all the pack members, current and former, only I am truly a stray. None of my dog friends actually wandered away from her proper home or lost himself in transit from one place to the next. But I have, over and over and over.”

At the time, I’d been living in Morocco for seven years. And now, in the winter of 2022, I find myself on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Though perhaps find is too strong a word. You can read about that transition in issue 14.2 of The FlyFish Journal.

While I was looking for a place to land, a handful of other stories also found their way into print. 

Issue 13.3 of The Flyfish Journal features my story about the most endangered species of trout on the planet: “The Ocean Under the Mountain.”

The spring 2022 issue of Guidefitter Journal offers a look back at my first visit to Mongolia. 

The March 2022 issue of High Country News published my essay, “Hard Lessons from Poker Joe.”

“The Necessity of Success,” in Strung magazine’s spring issue, once again paired my words with the images of artist Frederick Stivers.

Another excerpt from my upcoming book about the 2018 Baikal Expedition appeared in Plants & Poetry Journal. Oddly enough, it is not about a taimen but a porcupine fish. (If you click on this link, be forewarned that it takes a long time to load and you must scroll persistently to find the story.)

And the summer 2022 issue of The Montana Quarterly includes my tribute to the dog who underlies my appreciation of all dogs . . .

Trading a Pair of Oars for Pen and Keyboard

 During the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, the easiest thing for me to do on any particular morning was to get in the boat. After all, it’s what I want to do on nearly every morning, what I would choose if water, especially new water, was always and everywhere available. The relief I felt on picking up the oars some days was palpable, as if a dark sky had perceptibly brightened or the load on my shoulders had shifted to a more comfortable position.

Since March 2020, however, my opportunities for rowing a boat on a Mongolian river have literally dried up. For consolation, I’ve been telling myself stories, some of which have since found themselves in print.

More than one describes the expedition itself: “Rowing to Baikal” appeared in the fall 2020 issue of The Drake, while “The Messenger from Heaven” was published in Politics/Letters in May 2021.

“The Ocelot and the Caiman,” set on Tsimane Lodge’s Sécure River, appeared in the February–March 2020 issue of Fly Fisherman. 

“On Safari, Fly Rod in Hand” ran in the summer 2020 issue of Strung and describes my stay at African Waters’ Gassa Camp in Cameroon.

Two stories can be found in Volume 12 of The Flyfish Journal: “The Word for ‘Fish’ in Speyside” in Number 2 (Winter 2021), with some fantastic art by Frederick Stivers; and “On the Way to Dragon Island,” set in Morocco’s Dakhla Bay, in Number 4 (Summer 2021). 

Moving closer to home, “Solace of the Pack”—about my friendship with an athletic gang of Tangier’s feral dogs—appears in the most recent issue of Sport Literate. 

And more work is forthcoming before the end of the year, including another story about the expedition in Litro’s nature issue, along with a novel for children and adults from Green Writers Press . . .  

 

 

 

 

Trying Not to Count the Days

This is the math I do in my head: 1,500 divided by 25 equals 60. That’s the length of the Selenge River and its uppermost tributary in kilometers, divided by an anticipated average distance per day, meaning that after 60 days, I’ll be rowing an inflatable boat atop the biggest body of fresh water on the planet: Russia’s Lake Baikal.

Because 60 days is only 2 months, which does not seem long at all, I redo the arithmetic, starting at the river’s headwaters in the Ulaan Taiga, a sparsely populated region well-known among Mongolians for its shamans and reindeer herders, then continuing downhill, to that unknown place where the initial trickle will gather first into a brook and eventually become a navigable stream. 

At this point in my calculations, the expedition should be barely a week old, though no doubt our forced reliance on horses and camels will make it feel like a much longer span. Seven days, perhaps, before we can climb into the boats, before it’s all riffles and pools and very few bridges: the floating, Russian army-surplus monstrosity below Bayanzurkh, the concrete model near Mörön, the highway span north of Bulgan that I know only by hearsay.

Here’s another bit of math: of the river’s 1,500 meandering kilometers, I am familiar only with about 10 percent, a mere 100 miles or so. By that reckoning, embarking on this expedition from Mongolia to Siberia is akin to setting out on the road from Paris to Budapest and only knowing the way to Reims.

That is, it would be like that, if we were riding bicycles instead of rowing boats, along a route liberally populated with restaurants, hotels, and other travelers’ conveniences. But we’re not—and for that I’m grateful.

 

Instead of sampling roadside cafés, we will collect data on water quality, mayfly populations, taimen genetics, and angler effort, among other things. And my obsessive calculations? A symptom, perhaps, of both anticipation and anxiety, like a rookie guard mentally rehearsing plays before tip-off, or a teacher counting heads before a field trip.

For more information on the 2018 Baikal Headwaters Expedition, visit baikalheadwaters.org. To donate, please go to fundrazr.com/baikalheadwaters.

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The Forecast for Taimen

One of the best things about taimen, the world’s largest and most idiosyncratic salmonid, is that they are related to trout. This is a bit like saying that one of the best things about tigers is their kinship with tabby cats, but the connection is undeniable.

When you see one coming full length for the fly—the green jaws, the broad shoulders, the red tail—the conflict between what you think you know about trout and what you are about to learn provides an excruciating tension.

As you might guess, taimen prefer wild rivers and wild country. One of the rivers where I work, in the valley where Genghis Khan was born, is as undomesticated as they come. By long-term agreement with local, provincial, and national governments, there are no hatcheries, no hotels, no dams, no mines, no commercial logging, and no motorized boats along its banks.

In September 2013, when Sage Flyfishing’s technical service manager visited the river, the weather was far from tame. A series of cold fronts had frog-marched across northern Mongolia, and the leaves on the currant bushes gleamed damp and red. Although the once-in-a-generation flooding had mercifully subsided, the water was still high. In fact, a resupply vehicle from the capital Ulaanbaatar had become bogged down many miles from our first camp, while attempting to ford what is usually a shallow tributary.

On the atypically muddy steppe, upland buzzards, saker falcons, and marsh harriers hunted the mice that had fled their soggy burrows. And yet, after the second day of our trip, I wrote this in my journal: “An ordinary day of fishing. Meaning fun—with lots of action.”

Our log for the day shows that eight anglers hooked twenty-seven taimen, landing eleven. (This count does not include missed strikes, which happen more often than many anglers like to admit.) Of the sixteen individuals that escaped a photograph, one extremely large fish fought downstream for at least five bends of the river before the hook pulled. Another taimen, not nearly as large, was landed after the rod exploded into three pieces on the hookset. (Yes—it was a Sage.) We also were graced with a trio of Amur trout—an endemic species with thick, coppery flanks—and a solitary Amur pike.

In the dining ger that night, Handaa, our camp manager, presided over appetizers, dinner, and dessert. Between courses, she instructed us in the ritual style of toasting, in which each invocation is punctuated with a dip of your ring finger in the vodka: one for the sky, one for the earth, one for the winds, and one for yourself.

Later, some of us sipped red wine, while others (who should not remain nameless) indulged in extravagant concoctions like apple-tinis and lemon drops. Out of the din of conversation, I heard this twosome wisely dubbed “a hangover sandwich.”

A few guests at the table had been friends for many years, while some had just met. But the world of international flyfishing is small enough for coincidences to become routine. Because the guy from Sage has worked in Chile, he and two of our Chilean guides had several acquaintances in common. And because his father had been an industry rep, it was no surprise that one of our other guests, a former New England flyshop owner who has come to the river nearly every year since 2004, recognized the family resemblance.

We have a minimum of four guides on every trip and, in the service of fun, each guide tries to fish with every angler at least once during the week. On the day that I rowed for the Sage guy, he cast a 400-plus-grain sinking head and a huge epoxy fly that, together, cut through the wind like a ballpeen hammer and crashed the water like a depth charge. That rig drew strikes from two healthy taimen and we managed to coax both into the net. His fishing partner began with a floating line then changed to an ordinary sinking tip and went without a strike. By the end of the day, the wind was strong enough to drive the boat back upstream and the current lines were filled with willow leaves.

That unpredictability is part of what makes taimen fishing addictive. Like humans, they can be close-mouthed and sulky one minute, then irrationally exuberant the next. No matter what the weather conditions.

And though weather can sometimes feel like it’s happening specifically to us, cruelly and personally, it can also remind us of our collective smallness in the larger and more mysterious world. What does it mean when, on a morning so warm that you sit as far as possible from the woodstove, someone else says that he can feel snow coming?

Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, that season’s unusual weather will be a net positive. The surge of water tumbled many willows and poplars from the banks. More wood in the water means more nursery habitat. And more nursery habit could eventually mean more trout and more taimen.

To put it in geek terms, the flood was an outlier: a stray point in an expansive data set. As the planet warms, the resulting effects on individual drainages can vary considerably; given our current failure to foresee the bigger picture, I plan to devote myself to further close observation. The river is ancient and ever-changing. All I can say after ten seasons in Mongolia is this: it never gets old.

On the final afternoon of the trip, six days and many dozens of miles downstream, a harrier stooped on a mouse pattern just as the leader unrolled on the forward cast. The bird stuttered above the river, attempting to snatch the fly from the air. The angler exclaimed with surprise and I shouted with delight. Neither of us really wanted to hook a harrier, but we needn’t have worried—the bird made one last, half-hearted stab as the mouse hit the water, then wished itself back into the sky.

The River in Books, Books on the River

Following on the spate of media coverage inspired by the 2013 Nobody’s River Project, the Amur basin and its headwaters have now found their way to National Public Radio, which reviewed Dominic Zeigler’s Black Dragon River this past weekend.

This isn’t the first book to chronicle a long journey down the Amur. I’ve read at least two others—one was published in 1860, the other in 2005.

NPR’s review was a bit garbled on the topic of fish: “The river’s waters swarm with life. The Amur is home to a hundred-twenty fish specimens, ‘a primal soup, thick with wanton life and death. Myriad fish gorge on the tapioca pears of fish eggs caught up and down by the current.’”

My guess is that they meant species, not specimens, and pearls, not pears. But who knows about “caught up and down”?

For more on Amur fish and fishing, I recommend two books available free online: Fishes of Mongolia, underwritten by the World Bank, and Amur Fish: Wealth and Crisis, published by the World Wildlife Fund.

More Things We Can Learn from the Bottle

While preparing lunch one day on the river, I couldn’t help but notice the desire of these moths for our bottle of wine. (An imported Argentinian red but, then again, all wines in Mongolia are imported.)

 

Turns out that a technique called wine-roping is well known among moth enthusiasts. If any of you are reading this, would you kindly confirm that these specimens are Red Underwings?

Why I Haven't Quit My Day Job

Whenever I’m away from my desk, it seems that the world is determined to show me strange and beautiful things. An albino sea turtle, for one, gleaming like white gold beneath the blue water. And a brown booby, who nabbed a flying fish off a wave-crest as I watched from the kayak.

When a juvenile frigate bird tried to steal the booby’s fish away, I paddled over to offer support. The frigate fled, and then the booby enjoyed its meal, as well as (apparently) my company, eventually settling on this buoy to pose and preen.

A few days later, doubting my vision of the gilded turtle in the middle of copyediting a book about J. Alden Weir, the American Impressionist, I took the time for a quick search online (our family calls it, “consulting the oracle”). As it turns out, albino turtles, while uncommon, are not unheard of, although it’s more likely that the one I saw was leucistic. That’s one of my favorite things about the Web: what you might, in some less enlightened age, have been tempted to call hallucination can now be labeled as probable sighting.

Another of the fun things about the Web is that it brings nonstop news of success: the glad tidings of friends and acquaintances, as well as the exploits of impossibly lucky or talented humans who you will never meet.

On the other hand, if you are one of the untold millions striving to find a voice (and a paycheck), the continuous awareness of other folks’ book deals and movie options might leave you feeling like a chronic underachiever. At those moments, it can help to remember that the mere attempt to create carries its own rewards (sometimes long deferred, sometimes completely unfathomable).

Though it’s scant consolation, I try to remind myself that each rejection letter means that I now have one more reader than I did a minute ago. Not a satisfied reader, but hey, you can’t please everybody. The important thing—for my own sense of being a person among other people—is to keep plugging away. I don’t insist on becoming Meb Keflezighi every time I set out on a morning run, so why feel unhappy about not being Jim Harrison whenever I sit down at the keyboard?

The fact is that only a rare few get paid to play. The rest of us, as Gillian Welch sings, “do it anyway.”  Here are links for a handful of stories that found publication this spring, none of them in print, and none for pay . . .

• a few thoughts on aspirational flyfishing photography at Tail magazine

• tips for making the most of a trip to Mongolia at On the Fly magazine

• an update on our conservation work in Orvis News

• humor for proofreaders or mathematicians (your choice) at the Science Creative Quarterly

• and a brief meditation on zen and the art of nonrefundable airfares at We Said Go Travel.

When Your Time Comes

While dragging the kayak up the sand on Sunday, I met a man who has been coming to Aruba since the mid-1970s. In those days, he used to fish in the October tournaments sponsored by the local yacht clubs. He participated every year until 1995, when one of his best friends had a heart attack on the boat and died. We agreed that there are worse ways to go; even so, he didn't have to explain why he now fishes from the beach.

In the twenty years since then, the man has caught only two fish. He sees them swim by—jacks, bonefish, snook—and he casts for them, but whether he catches them or not is unimportant to the experience.

As it turns out, he landed the second fish just last week: a snook that topped thirty pounds on the scale his wife uses to weigh their luggage. A young couple pointed the fish out to him as it cruised along the beach. "Is that the kind you're trying to catch?" they asked.

The fight took him a few hundred yards north, then south again, scattering bathers and drawing a small crowd. (Aruba being a friendly place, I actually heard about the fish on the day it was landed.) Somehow, he and the snook managed to avoid all the arms, legs, buoys, and other obstacles that might have intervened. When the leader finally snapped, the fish was too tired to swim away. "It was my time," the man said, gratefully.

Which reminds me that my own time is coming. Soon I'll be back in Mongolia for a tenth season on the river. You can spot me at the oars in this short video by filmmaker Juliaan Braatvedt, who visited us in Mongolia last season, or read about our work in this article by writer and photographer Rasmus Ovesen. (In that story, I am "the guide.")

And though it's hard for me to say if this is a sign of success or a signal of depravity, Mongolia River Outfitters was recently mentioned on TheRichest.com (number 4 on their list of "can't miss" flyfishing destinations).

While I'm gone, look for "Why I'll Hunt, Again" in the November issue of Gray's Sporting Journal, or visit Total Carp's website for the story of an unusual hatch in Tokyo.

On Flydreamers, you'll find an homage to the underappreciated lenok, and on Wattpad, a short story set in the Florida Keys that originally appeared in the fall 1994 issue of Onion River Review.

Here's to autumn . . .

Angling for an Addiction

You can read my story on the addictive nature of taimen fishing in the newest issue of Fishing Fanatics, available for iPad, iPhone, and Android.

Another Season, Another Taimen Video

The 2013 season began with rain and ended with snow. The snow lasted only a day or so, but the rain continued for weeks, creating a flood of water downstream that, by the time it hit the Russian Far East, was visible from space.  This year's notable anglers included Tasmania's Paul Anderson, Patagonia's Marcel Sijnesal, Tom Lewin of South Africa's Frontier Fly Fishing, Chris Andersen, Technical Service Manager at Sage, and Derek Hutton, WorldCast Anglers' Guide of the Year. I'll post a more detailed report soon, but in the meantime here's a video of Jaime Castillo of Mongolia River Outfitters and Chile's Estancia de los Rios releasing a fish that was exactly four feet long . . .

Conserving Taimen (and the River)

During the second-to-last week of the 2012 season, we met World Wildlife Fund program managers from Britain, China, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States. They had been camping out in somewhat less than our anglers’ accustomed style and seemed cheered to see the dining tent with wood stove, tablecloths, and wine glasses.

But what started out as an information-sharing event ended on a more celebratory note. In wildlife circles, the working partnership among Nomadic Journeys, Mongolia River Outfitters, WWF, and six local governments has become a conservation success story. Through an innovative public awareness campaign—using a little bit of everything, from bumper stickers to text messages—an environmental ethic that might have taken decades to germinate has flowered in just four years.

It’s no stretch to say that, in earlier times, taimen survived in far northern Mongolia because few people cared enough to kill them. That changed in the late 1990s, when tourists and anglers began to arrive from other countries; since the mining boom, angler numbers have further swelled with weekend warriors from Mongolia’s newly prosperous capital.

When Rare’s Pride campaign began in 2008, slightly more than a third of survey respondents in the district “strongly agreed” that taimen should always be released. By this year, that figure was more than 95 percent. Not all of these folks like to fish, of course, but those numbers are growing as well.  In 2009, members of local angling clubs caught and released 68 taimen; that number had nearly quadrupled by 2011.

Conservation efforts continue with the work of a few dedicated staff, a core of volunteers, and the support of individual and corporate donors, including a generous grant from Patagonia’s World Trout Initiative.

Just before spawning season—when large fish are particularly vulnerable—the local WWF office held anti-poaching trainings for police officers, park rangers, and angling club members. In these sessions—and in all other campaign materials—taimen are not portrayed as treasures to be hoarded. Long-lived and slow-growing, these fish are more like our honored companions (or perhaps we are theirs).

While it is true that taimen are astounding and beautiful creatures on their own, they cannot exist without a healthy river. If we were ever to lose them, it would only underscore the more painful fact that the river also had been lost.

(For more info and photos, see "Conserving Taimen," posted on July 27, 2012.)

When in Mongolia . . .

The January 11 New York Times Travel Section mentions Mongolia (and our partner, Nomadic Journeys) in The 46 Places to Go in 2013. Writer Justin Bergman observes that "the untouched countryside remains the main reason to go" and notes "there are new attractions in the capital, too: Last year, the Government Palace was opened to visitors for the first time, giving tourists a glimpse of young Mongolian democracy in action."

For a haunting look at what happened before the 1990 Democratic Revolution, I recommend a visit to Ulaanbaatar's  Memorial Museum of Victims of Political Persecution. It's an unassuming, two-story wooden structure with a collection of posters, photographs, and bullet-riddled skulls that will remind you to be grateful for the present work-in-progress, no matter what your country of origin.