Day #69: Mongolian horses

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Now we are back north of the Gobi we see wild horses, and we are also staying on a farm where horses are kept. Even the horses that belong to someone, though, retain their wild spirit: yesterday we watched as around 10 people spent around an hour lasso-ing 10 or 15 horses, most of which resisted, including one calf which bolted and bucked dramatically around the makeshift paddock. It seems like a lot of work, but once broken the horses are valuable and used for milk as well as transportation.

The horses they gave us to ride were much more biddable, although occasionally even they needed encouragement to move off, and our guide's horse refused to go near to the other horses. We did two short treks, one in the morning to a lovely small waterfall, and one in the afternoon that I especially enjoyed, across the open steppe, where you could really sense the vastness of the plains. We also saw a couple of monuments which we later discovered were to people who died in storms when the river flooded.

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