On my last day in Mongolia, I ended up getting stuck for something like 10 hours at the tiny airport in the amusingly named town of Mörön. By the end of my stay, I had poked my way through every corner of the place in an attempt to find out what on earth had happened to Aero Mongolia's single plane (which had shown up on time, but then left again without the 40 or so passengers that were waiting for it).

Around midnight, I ended up parked on a couch in the air traffic controller's office. This guy, who spoke good English and was incredibly sweet and pleasant, told me not only where my plane had gotten to, but also explained his entire job over the course of our conversation. It turns out that there is a whole network of ATC hubs right across the continent that hand off flights from one zone to another as the planes move through the airspace. The Mörön ATC--which is really in the absolute middle of nowhere--is responsible for a lot of planes that are transiting between Europe and China/other north Asian destinations. The guy I spoke to was fairly new, and as such, had got stuck with the graveyard shift. He had done at least three months of training in Switzerland, if I remember rightly. The whole thing was really quite fascinating.