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.
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