Mongolia Part 1

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Two hours after we left Beijing, our plane touched down in Ulaanbaatar, a world away. Mongolians speak a guttural language that sounds closer to Russian than to Chinese and it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. Almost nothing is translated into English, and the Soviet-era architecture renders the buildings indistinguishable from each other, so our first impressions were surrealistic and disoriented. However, as time passed and we got used to their ways, we fell in love with this country.



The people we met were gentle, kind, and friendly; the landscape breathtaking. A 360-degree horizon, rolling hills and valleys, pristine mountain lakes and streams, vast prairie grasslands, and untrodden deserts reminded us most of Wyoming and Montana east of the Rockies, but without any fences or roads and even fewer inhabitants. After centuries of subjugation under the Chinese and decades under the USSR, Mongolia became a truly independent parliamentary democracy in 1990 and there is still a sense of excitement and enthusiasm and great pride in their new nation.



We left “UB”, flew northwest to Murun, and continued two hours by car through rock-studded hills, green with grass and pine trees, to our camp on the shore of Hovsgol Lake about 100 miles from the Siberian border of Russia. Our shelters were yurts (called gers in Mongolia). These round structures are portable, warm in winter, cool in summer, inexpensive, and extremely picturesque. They dot the land along with herds of yaks, horses, cows, sheep, and goats. There are more domestic animals in Mongolia than people.



After hiking in the mountains of Khovsgol Aimag (we heard cookoo birds calling from the nearby trees!), we headed south in our 4WD SUV with our guide, Duya, and our expert driver, Togtokh, into the grasslands of the Mongolian Steppe. The roads are little more than wagon wheel ruts, never graded, and when mud or boulders obstruct them, drivers just pull out onto the steppe and go around, creating a new path. The result is that as you go hurtling along (why slow down?), you are faced with a multiple-choice selection of potential roads to follow which, at least initially, all seem to go in the same general direction. Other temporary obstacles we encountered included animals resting on the road, streams traversing the road, and a flat tire (Togtokh changed it without bothering to pull off the road since no other vehicles passed by anyway).



We stopped to visit a nomadic family who proudly showed us the latest additions to their herd of goats. They were hosting a local Naadam (sort of rodeo involving cross-country horse racing, wrestling, and archery). We didn’t hang around to watch this one, but as we drove off we could see bands of groomed horses, festooned with ribbons braided in their manes and tails, arriving in flatbed trucks that converged from all directions.



Along we drove, in awe of the overwhelming grandeur of the land and sky, the profound silence of the empty spaces alternating with the pastoral sounds of bleating sheep and lowing yaks. Once, we got the opportunity to ride on the back of a yak that had been saddled up. Later, we came upon a family who were setting up a ger. We watched in fascination (and “helped” a little) as they efficiently tied the wooden lattice framework with rope made from yak hair, laid the long colorful poles between the lattice and the roof ring, rolled the felt walls and roof and tied them down with ribbons, draped a layer of canvas over this, and finally draped a white silk-like covering over the whole thing and voila! - home. As the rain began to fall, we retreated to our own cozy ger and stayed warm and dry inside.



The following day, we visited another nomadic family who fed us milk tea, fermented mare’s milk, milk curds, yak butter, and a sweetened fried curds concoction all prepared on the wood stove which also served to keep the ger warm. Afterwards, they gathered nine of the mares and milked them (which they do seven times every day in addition to milking their innumerable sheep, yaks, and goats).



To accommodate the photos, I will post the blog entry about Mongolia in two parts. Look for Part 2 coming your way soon.

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