Home, Home on the Range

Where the yaks and the Bactrians play 
Where one's always assured
Of a big friendly herd
And baby goats scamper all day

One thing you can't help noticing while travelling in Mongolia is all of the animals. We saw over 10,000 yaks during the course of our tour (and if anything that's an understatement, it may well have been more like 20,000).

Overall there are about 60 million domesticated animals in Mongolia as compared to 4 million people. So about the same as NZ. But somehow they seemed to be more densely packed, despite Mongolia's considerably larger land area.  Even in the seemingly wildest areas one couldn't drive for more than five or ten minutes without seeing a ger.

And after a couple of hours of off-road driving, suddenly a town of 10,000 people would appear out of the grasslands, seemingly from nowhere.

Visiting in early-mid May meant that it could get pretty cold in northern Mongolia. Indeed, one night near Lake Khovsgl, we went to bed only to discover almost 10cm of snow on the ground the following morning.

Chilly nights (and the fact that we had only managed one shower at a clean but utilitarian public bath so far) made a visit to some hot springs in the middle of a grassy valley on our second last night especially welcome.

Not too far away from the hot springs was a smallish volcanic cone and a medium sized lava flow next to a large lake.  While there we had a Mongolian cooking lesson (how to make Husshur, large deep fried dumplings) and a genuine Mongolian barbeque (glowing  hot stones placed in a pot [traditionally a sheep's stomach] with meat, onions, carrots and potatoes).

Before our final night on the tour we visited Kharkorin (Karakorum in English), the capital of the Mongolian Empire founded by Ghengis Khan that was, in the 1220s, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the world. This further illustrated that rural Mongolia isn't really a place one goes for cultural history.  Despite the fact that the region is packed with archaeological sites ranging from the paleolithic to the present, the only real signs of its historical significance are a small (but good) museum and a 16th century Monastery that like many of the others was still slowly recovering from the communist era purges, with only about four of its former fifty-ish temples still remaining. (Though it was pretty neat that it had been built with bricks from Kharkorin.)

And of course there were still more animals.

We took a camel ride.  Riding a camel for the sake of riding a camel struck me as a bit silly and touristy.  But the arid, sandy edge of the Gobi desert is probably the best possible location to do so.  And it was actually a lot of fun.  As usual we went against Mongolian custom and named our mounts. Mine was Woolly Snacks (sounds kind of like a blues musician... like my horse, my camel seemed to always want to pause for a bite to eat).  Sarah's was named Burp Bacharach.  Though even without the burps, camels have pretty smelly breath.

Somewhere in the last few days, we'd passed south of the yak line, so while they were all gone, the nomad family we stayed with on our final night still lots of sheep and goats (including heaps of babies).

Sarah had a grand time playing with and playing with the babies and even milking one of their moms. She was more successful with this than she'd been with milking a yak earlier in the trip but apparently getting anything at all out of the yak was a big deal as its owners seemed pretty impressed with her efforts.

The final night we opened a bottle of (surprisingly good for a semi-sweet) Georgian wine that Vampi had procured for us. (This was actually quite an exercise, given that it was a very full bottle and we didn't have a corkscrew.)
Vampi also taught us a few Mongolian games that used the ankle bones of sheep and goats. There are four different ways they can sit, which makes them kind of like four sided dice. One game was kind of like jacks, while another involved flicking matching pairs of bones at eachother.  I was terrible at this one, but rather better at the Mongolian card game we learned. The father of the family cheered me on, happy about the fact that he and I were the same age.

Our final morning we took a photo of the whole crew, Ben, Kathryn, Vampi, Baata, Sarah, myself and the mom of the family we were staying with.  One final pause for mom to reassure Sarah that the tiny, days old goat she'd been playing with the night before had just overeaten and would really be fine in a few hours, and we were on our way back to the city.

On arriving back at the Sunpath hostel, I have Vampi a hug, and Baata a handshake (I would've hugged him too, but I wasn't sure, between his quiet friendly smiles and general shyness, whether it was appropriate.)

And that was about that. Back in the hostel we were still with Ben and Kathryn, but it seemed a bit weird seeing them sitting on a couch, rather than the bench seat of a Russian 4WD van or in a ger.

Our sojourn in the wilds of Mongolia was clearly at an end.

To the Reindeer!

On the morning of May 5, as we prepared to leave Ulanbataar for our tour of central and northern Mongolia, it snowed in the capital.

Sarah, Kathryn, Ben and I met our guide Vampi and our driver Tall Baata and our old Russian 4WD van Lumpy (my name for it) packed up our stuff and hit the road.

I won't go through every detail about the trip, because it really was more about the journey as a whole than specific details. Several of the sights we stopped at were really only moderately interesting, and were more significant in the way that they gave us a route to follow while cruising around the huge countryside of Mongolia.

The days on tour typically went something like this:
1. Wake up, often to the wood stove in our ger being thoughtfully re-lighted by one of our hosts.  Even though it was early to mid May, it still got cooooolld in northern Mongolia.  Even with our own warm sleeping bags and the ones provided with the tour it could still be pretty chilly in a ger after the fire had gone out.

2. Breakfast prepared by Vampi. Usually my favourite meal of the day as it often included fresh fruit. We started making toast by laying slices of bread directly on the top of the iron wood stoves.

3. Pack up Lumpy and go for a drive. Driving was a big part of the trip. Sometimes (rarely) it was on nice paved roads. Beyond that it was quite variable. Sometimes it was a few sets of mostly flat parallel tire tracks running through the grassland. Sometimes it was well and truly off road, juddering along the grassland, fording rivers wherever looked good, bouncing up and down with the rarer punctuation of a real earth shattering bump.
But driving was one of the highlights of the trip.  Though not much of the scenery was obviously spectacular, driving through it allowed you to see just how big everything in Mongolia is. We'd crest a broad, grassy hill to see a 15km wide green-brown valley dotted with livestock. Then climb up the far side and see another one. And another one. And another one. The land and the skies were huge and they just went on and on and on.

3. Stop somewhere (town, village, tiny guesthouse in the middle of nowhere) for lunch.  Lunch was hit and miss. Typical Mongolian restaurant food, which, as observed last entry means heavy on the starch, meat and salt. Vegetables usually limited to potatoes, cabbage and carrots. Though they usually managed to produce something vaguely vegetarian for Sarah (though often with a few stray bits of meat thrown in too.) I eventually took to just ordering whatever Vampi did, which seemed to work pretty well. Though the fact that I had a stuffy nose for the first week or so made the food seem even blander than it already was, which made it tough to swallow sometimes.

4. Stop and visit a sight of some sort. Climb up a volcanic cone. A monastery rebuilding itself after being purged almost out of existence during the communist era. Mongolia's largest lake by volume (kind of a scaled down Baikal). These sorts of things.

5. Arrive at accommodation for the night. This could take one of a few forms: Formal guesthouses (usually the fanciest facilities, but often a bit weird, featuring ceramic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or WiFi but pit squat toilets only.
Formal ger camps. Maybe not quite as fancy as the guesthouses, but if there's one thing the Mongols know it's how to make a ger, so these were usually pretty comfortable.
Spare space in a nomad family's ger.  These were the best. Come on in to meet the family and have a cup of milk tea (some kind of mammal milk (cow, goat, yak), hot water, salt and tea leaves). Be offered a snack too (fried bread, dried yogurt, clotted cream). With Vampi's help, ask a bit about the family and their life/and animals and answer questions about ourselves and our homes.  Be shown to a spare ger and usually have the fire built up til it's sweltering and you have to go outside or open the door for a while. While pretty much all of these families counted on tourism for some of their livelihood, they were also all genuinely nomadic and focussed primarily on taking care of their livestock. We'd have more interaction with them than at the formal accommodation, and usually left gifts of things like instant coffee, soap, superglue, razors, biscuits, etc.

6. Dinner prepared by Vampi.  I must say, her cooking skills were pretty impressive. Twelve dinners and not one repeat.  Though the aforementioned cold and the limitations of common Mongolian ingredients did mean that I still did struggle through a few meals.

7. Bedtime.

Sometimes the order of the steps could be shuffled around a bit. And there was usually a fair bit of time for resting (laying in the ger trying to recover from my cold, which really was quite a nasty one), reading, going for short walks or visiting whatever sort of livestock our hosts might have.

So that was the general flow of the tour.  I will, however give a bit more detail about the fifth through eighth days of the trip, because they were:
A. A bit different.
B. Really really cool and
C. What gives this post its title

Day 5 was a looong day of almost entirely off road driving, which was almost entirely bumpy.  We arrived at a collection of gers where we'd be spending the night.

Next day we were introduced to the horses that we'd be riding. The fact that we did this is something of a surprise, given that I hadn't ridden a horse in something like thirty years, and that Sarah actively dislikes them (to the point of calling members of the species "stupids" instead of horses).  But with a bit of help we climbed up and soon after were off.

As the least confident rider, Sarah was given the slowest horse. Mongols have a weird practice of purposely mis-describing their horses so that evil spirits listening over their shoulders will get confused. So it was appropriate that she named it Speedy (though not appropriate that she named it at all, since Mongolians don't name their animals.)

Meanwhile I christened my horse Mr. Fatty Pants, as he seemed to stop for a snack every chance he got. But incongruously, also wanted to be the first horse in line, such that he'd speed up whenever any other tried to overtake him. It's a good thing he was good at eating while on the move.

The trail we were following would probably have been passable for a motorbike, but weaved in and out of forest too much and was too muddy for lumpy to have made it.  After two hours of this we crested a broad saddle our destination came into view.

There was no mistaking it. Three teepees on the edge of the forest surrounded by perhaps eighty sturdy, fuzzy reindeer.

On arrival we were welcomed into the main family teepee and fed lightly sweet fried bread and milk tea (made, of course, with reindeer milk!)

Like most rural Mongolians, the Dukha people herd animals. But instead of the usual cows, goats, sheep or yaks, they herd reindeer. The extended family we were staying with had nine members (four adults, three older children and two young kids) as well as about 200 reindeer.  Over the years the attractiveness of life in the city had thinned their numbers, so that only about 300 remain. However there is some hope for the future of the lifestyle, between the income boost provided by visiting tourists (at one point during our stay there were as many tourists as family members at the camp) and the fact that the government provided some of the luxuries of the city (satellite dishes, TVs, solar panels, electric lights).

I spent much of the time in the teepee, laying down and resting, as my cold was almost at its worst while we were there. This wasn't helped by the poor drafty teepee which, unlike the gers, didn't have beds.  The Dukha live in teepees (very similar to the ones used by North American plains Indians), as they move even more frequently than most Mongolian nomads, and teepees are quicker to erect and take down.

We were visiting right at the end of the winter, while the reindeer herders were as far south as they ever came, waiting for the last few babies before they headed north to spring quarters. While we were there Sarah saw a baby being born, helped along the way by the dad of the house, who had also helped at the birth of two of his four children, who had been born out in the forest.

Twice each day the reindeer would be sent out to graze and then return to feed their young and to have a rest.  The sight and sound of the herd leaving or returning was very impressive.  Indeed, the sound of reindeer was just generally interesting. The adults sounded kind of like a cross between a pig and a goose, while the babies sounded like nothing more than large croaking frogs.

Before leaving we even got to ride a reindeer. I was worried I'd be too heavy for them, but was assured that it wouldn't be a problem and that people almost as big as me rode them for hours when moving or when going out to round up the herd.

It felt a bit more precarious than riding a horse, but I managed the 200m or so loop without falling off.

After two days with the reindeer people, it was time to return. Mr. Fatty Pants made it a quick trip, as Ben and Kathryn wanted to speed up to a fast trot for much of the trip, and MFP insisted on keeping up with them, whatever I (and after a bit more trotting, my sore bum) thought of the matter.

Back at the "horse camp" as we called it, I had yet more rest, but thankfully seemed to be turning the corner on my cold.  Which was good, as we were barely halfway through our trip!

Mongolia Pt. 1, Train Travel and Ulanbataar

When we arrived in the border town of Erlian (Chinese name)/Erenhot (Mongolian name) at 06:51, we still weren't sure whether the border would be open that day (it was a Monday before the Chinese Labour Day holiday and many Chinese had the day off to make for an extra long weekend.)

I tried to divine this by asking a number of people around the station exit, but got a rather muddled response as, at varying points in my questioning, I confused the words for "open" and "closed" as well as the words "today" and "tomorrow."

After a while we finally got the picture and arranged a ride in a minibus across the border for the exorbitant price of 80RMB (NZ$18) for a 3km journey. But no one is permitted to walk across the border, so they have a captive market.

We spent about 2.5 hours waiting around for more passengers and goods to bring with us.  We got to have a tiny explore of Erlian while waiting, but really the only  interesting things about the place were the dinosaur topiary (Erlian is China's premiere dinosaur fossil location) and signs in Chinese, traditional Mongolian script (used in Inner Mongolia) and Cyrillic Mongolian (used in Mongolia). We finally got going just after 10:00.

Crossing the border was actually quite straightforward and by 11:30 we were in Zamyn Uud, Mongolia.

Our first order of business was to buy tickets for the overnight train to Mongolia's capital Ulanbataar, which turned out to be no trouble once we'd found the ticket counter and cost a mere NZ$16 (for some reason the direct international train from Beijing costs about $300pp, while the journey the way we made it was about $100.)

We did a bit of exploration of Zamyn Uud.  We'd spotted a really odd looking section of long parallel roads in the north part of town which, on visiting, we discovered were the "ger district" where families simply set up their ger (yurt) and call it home.  We also met a very scary mother dog (thankfully tied up) and her very cute puppies during this walk.

Back in the centre of town the time eventually came for us to board the train. And what a trip it was! The carriages seemed like Soviet era ones, complete with the paisely mattresses, 1970s colour scheme and the coal-fired hot water urn at the end of the carriage. But they had been retrofitted with USB charging ports and flat screen TVs showing Mongolian programming and comfy clean sheets.  And this was in "hard sleeper" (i.e. second) class!

We had about 2.5 hours before sunset to enjoy the view out into the Gobi.  We even saw a large (18-20) herd of (domesticated) Bactrian camels!

Next morning, the terrain outside was slightly greener (really not saying much) and hillier as we'd left the Gobi and carried on through the steppes to Ulanbataar.

This was a bit of a shock. Zamyn-Üüd was a small town. The stops along the way were even smaller, with many of the towns being quite a bit shorter than the train. And aside from the occasional mine or small group of gers, that's all there was.

Ulanbataar, meanwhile, was a sprawling city of 1.4 million, with modern mirrored glass skyscrapers and even a sizeable amusement park visible from the train on our way in.

On exiting the station we had a bit of a shock when a group of people mobbed along after us clutching at, of all things, the mostly empty plastic water bottle in my hand. One old lady grabbed on tight and pulled such that my fingers were getting squashed by the handle.  I was about to give them another empty bottle, but realized that it was actually the water they wanted.  So I handed it over. If they're really that desperate for drinking water then by all means, let them have it, ai thought.

I'm still a bit confused by this, because everything else we saw in central Ulanbataar made it look like quite a prosperous and cosmopolitan city (though no doubt things are different out in the ger districts to the north and west of the city centre.)

We spent a total of four more days in UB.  During this time we wandered around the central-ish area and saw some of the city's modest but still pretty neat sights.

The historical sites, Choijin Temple and the Bogdan Khan's winter palace weren't huge, but were surprisingly engaging. 

The Choijin Temple, was the site wherein Mongolian Buddhism's highest Lama would channel the deities he'd chosen as his own to protect and provide for the country.  This place was memorable for two reasons:

First, the quality and detail of the artwork displayed therin.  There were dozens of intricate and lively papier mache masks. Hugely detailed bronze statues and wooden mansions that represented the Pure Land of the Buddha.  And life sized statues of the founder of the temple and his religious teacher. And this last is a nice segue into the other way in which it was memorable. The place was really very dark and grim.  E.g. the first of those two statues had the cremation ashes of the monk mixed into the clay of the figure and the second was built around the seated mummified corpse of the teacher.  

The walls were adorned with paintings of men hung upside down by their feet, having been castrated, beheaded or otherwise mutilated. Many of the statues wore strings of skills or heads. Some of the finely detailed artworks pictured people being disemboweled while burning alive or being sodomized with spears.  Some of these were due to the high Lama happening to have "wrathful" patron gods. And others were representations of Buddhist hells.  But both were much more graphic and darker than the representations I'd seen elsewhere in the Buddhist world.

The Bogd Khan's palace was the home of the spiritual (and briefly, between the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the rise of the Communists in 1924, temporal) leader of Mongolia.  The artworks there were just as beautiful as those in the temple, and the architecture probably a bit nicer in its un-(recently)-restored grandeur.  But the wildest bit was the Winter Palace.  A medium sized two story building it was gifted to the 8th Bogd Khan by Russia, so was constructed in a European style. And it contained such marvels as a waistcoat decorated with (I estimated) 30,000 micro-pearls, a ger made from 150 leopard skins (including Indian and African leopards.) And most oddly of all, a section showing off the 8th Bogd Khan's zoological collection which numbered dozens of stuffed animals including numerous sloths, a pukeko(!) and a kakapo(!!!)

(These two sites had quite reasonable $5 admission fees and not at all reasonable $30 camera fees, so the photos of them aren't mine.)

We also visited the Zaisan memorial, on a hill south of the city, which commemorated the friendship between the Mongolian and Soviet people. And where I played a baloon-popping dart game, surprising myself by  winning a prize which I then had had to give away to one of the kids hanging around there.

And we walked to the main "black" market west of town.  I love markets. Asian markets in particular. And we had a good explore of this one as we searched for a sleeping mat and mittens for Sarah and socks and pants for me. It had all of the usual market stuff, but also uniquely Mongolian sections devoted to ger building supplies, Mongolian Buddhist religious goods and saddlery (featuring brightly painted Mongolian wooden saddles.)

Let's see... We also managed to visit the museum of Mongolian contemporary art (had a great collection of works from the 1950s to the present.  The stuff from the communist era looked like they were rather more forgiving of "backward" (i.e. traditional) or bourgeois (e.g. non-representational) art than their communist neighbours to the north and south.

And we visited a Mongolian craft brewery pub (nice venue, one beer that had some unpleasant yeast issues, another that was very good if you could get over the diacetyl.)
We ate some surprisingly good vegan food (Mongolians love their meat and the climate, especially in spring, doesn't lend itself to a ready supply of domestic vegetables.)

We ate some Korean food (the Mongolians seem not just into, but obsessed by all things Korean. Such that evey fourth restaurant in a city with many is Korean and one of the main streets is called Seoul Street.

And we ate some Mongolian food. Which was... Not too bad. Think starch and meat heavy, flavoured with salt and not too much more. Lots of hand cut noodles. Soups with big chunks of meat. Steamed dumplings filled with meat. Deep fried pastries filled with meat. Indeed, I don't think I've ever been anywhere where you can get so much meat for your money. Pretty much a whole fried chicken in a restaurant cost less than a single cucumber at the supermarket (about NZ$3.50).

And finally, after a day spent in bed trying to shake a cold I acquired while on the train, we met our tour-mates in person.  We'd contacted Ben and Kathryn on a travel website and the four of us had planned to take a private tour of northern and central Mongolia together. This isn't really Sarah and I's normal style, but Mongolia is quite low on public transportation except between UB and provincial capitals, the distances are big and most of the sights are a ways out in the countryside.  

Which is where we'll be headed next!