Nadaam 2008 - and some other stuff

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Hi Again,

We had a couple of days post trip to relax before the National State Nadaam Festival, a three day extravaganza of the three national sports of Mongolia, Wrestling, Horse Riding and Archery. This essentially meant do our washing and have a shower, although on our first day back the centrally supplied hot water for our region of UB was broken so we had to wait an extra day!

We also discovered that, in our abscence, there had been some kind of political demonstration following accusations of election fraud where they burnt some govermnent buildings on the main square! This resulted in the President announcing a 4 day national state of emergency and curfews across parts of the city! Fortunately, it was all over by the time we arrived and the people we met in the country were more bothered about 'goat rigging' than 'vote rigging'! So we escaped unscathed!

We managed to fit some sightseeing in before the festival and saw lots of the city we did not have the chance to see whilst organising the trip. The Natural history museum was really interesting with some great dinosaur skeletons and eggs although when it came to more recent alive exhibits the level of taxidermy yet again astounded with its lack of attention to basic physiological detail, just about the only thing right was the number of limbs! We did see a fine stuffed Marmot being eaten by an Eagle though (sorry Iain, no live one I'm afraid).

We also ended up, after some encouragement from the owner of our hostel, to go to a book opening at the Bogd Khan Palace, promising the possibilty of winning prizes just for turning up. Duly encouraged we began our walk for the 11 o/c start and within 5 minutes the rain started and continued and continued for the whole half hour walk until we reached the Palace where, soaking wet, we were informed that nobody had any ide there was a book ope ning there at all! We stood around chatting with the other people who were arriving for the same thing for a while until we were kicked out of the temple by security and there we found some people putting out some chairs! In a fine, and fairly typical, example of Mongolian time keeping, they didn't start setting up until 11:30 and eventually started at around 1ish! When it did, it was great, there were throat singers, contortionists and dancers from the national song and dance ensemble who all put on a full costume display of some traditional singing, contortionism (we did feel a bit sorry for the 8 year old contortionists in their tiny outfits in the rain) and dancing. We waited patiently through the rain for the prize draw, the first 2 tickets out went to some people who had left, an inauspicious start, and as the tickets of all those around us were called we were anticipating a possible big prize win, as the end approached (I am making this sound far more exciting than it was) my name was called and I had won......... a map (hooray) of..... one of the eastern provinces of Mongolia, a province with nothing in, no town, barely a couple of roads and places you can't even get tours to!!! Doh! and poor Claire was the only person from our group to win nothing at all! In a desperate bid to make the map more valuable, I found the throat singer and the Horse head fiddle player smoking furiously in a van around the back and got them to autograph it (an idea I stole from Frances, thanks Frances) but it was still raining soo much they smudged! Double doh!

3 hours later than planned and with no prizes (or dry bits) we headed on to the Intellectual museum, an amazing place created by a guy who invents those wooden puzzle things you get at christmas that nobody can do. After a tour, meeting the man himself who did some magic tricks for us (think Paul Daniels with a sincere smile) we got to play with loads of them, hours of fun, if not for the fact we were 3 hours late and it shut just as we were starting to enjoy ourselves!

Another must-see in UB was the Black Market - a huge, manic, noisy, dusty market selling everything from bath plugs to gers! It was fascinating wandering around and watching the locals go about their business. Although there wasn't much in the way of 'souvenirs', we had our first successful go at haggling and bought a few bits and bobs. After we had managed to find the exit (a mean feat, I can tell you!) we were boarding the bus back to the city centre, when we were targeted by a gang of pickpockets. Two of them blocked our path as we got on the bus and one of the behind us slipped his hand in my pocket - Claire saw what he was doing and they scarpered - thankfully the 'travel trousers' with their secrect pockets saved the day and nothing was stolen. It was quite a shock though and when we discussed it with fellow travellers, we found out that several people had experienced the same thing. I guess as Westerners in this city, we are an obvious target.

That evening, we treated ourselves to the National Song and Dance Ensemble performance - more throat singing, folk dance, contortionists and orchestra (all traditional instruments) - the highlight of the show was that the throat singer whose autograph I had got the previous day was the star performer! The whole show was amazing - the costumes (beautiful bright colours) and particularly the orchestra. Well worth it!

Anyhoo, this blog is supposed to be about Nadaam!

So, Day one and we joined a group organised by the hostel which began with a spectacular Opening Ceremony (more dancing and throat singing!) at the main stadium. Lots of bright colours, flamboyant dancing and lots of little contortionists who emerged from five large lotus flowers in the colours of the Olympic rings (nice tie-in) followed by the entrance of a portion of the 512 wrestlers who were taking part in the 9-round competition, doing their 'sky eagle' dance which was really funny - big burly wrestlers in tiny pants and bolero jackets dancing around in slow motion! Apparently, the men fight in tiny chestless jackets because a lady once won the competition having concealed her sex until the end when she bared her chest!!!

We watched the first few fights and then moved on to the archery. Again, a display of vivid tradtional costumes and decorated bows made for a spectacular display. The targets are 75m away for the men (65 for the women who stand in front of the men while they are shooting - very brave!) and consist of small 'cups' stacked up 2 high to form a wall, with a red one in the centre. The accuracy was amazing as was the atmosphere, with people cheering every successful strike.

From the archery we were hastily driven to the finish line of one of the horse races, some 35km out of the city centre. We arrived at a collection of gers surrounded by hundreds of men and boys (some more drunk than others) on horseback, just charging around the crowd milling at the finish line. It was pretty crazy as everyone was staring into the distance to try and catch a glimpse of the first of the 250 horses to arrive back from their 80km race (we think it was 80km, although each guide seemed to have a different opinion!). The horses are ridden by little boys from the age of 6 to 10 and seemed to be fairly superfluous in the whole competition as it was the horses who won the prizes, even if they came back without their tiny riders! After much whooping and excitement and gathering of dust (dust from the horse race landing on you gives you good luck for the year, sweat from the horses gives you luck for a lifetime! We think if you are close enough to a race horse for it to drop sweat on you as it flies past and you remain uninjured, then maybe you've used up a lifetimes worth of luck!).

Day two was a more relaxed affair, left to our own devices we (and a group of others we had met) wandered down to the stadium to watch some more wrestling and try to fathom out the rules! They're fairly simple - if you want to win, don't fall over! Then the winner does his eagle dance under the arm of the loser before going to the central podium where the state flags (guarded 24/7 by some burly soldiers) are erected to receive more applause and a nice hat! Fights can last for up to three hours (although thankfully none did on this occasion) and there are no weight categories, so small guys against big guys was a common occurence, with the biggest guys generally winning. If the wrestlers aren't putting enough effort in, their trainers slap them on the bottom, sometimes so hard you could hear it in the stand!

The atmosphere was fantastic - everyone having a great time (even though there was no alcohol to be found anywhere near the stadium!) and cheering on their favourites. We talked to some locals sitting near us and managed to work out who last year's champion and current favourite was, just in time for him to be knocked out! So we picked random wrestlers to support and cheered along with the rest of the crowd. We were welcomed (not just tolerated) by the locals and made to feel like part of the festival, although we obviously stood out and a little boy sitting behind Claire was fascinated by her blonde hair and kept trying to touch it!

After some tasty festival food - not your usual greasy burger, but greasy Khushuur (fried mutton pancakes) washed down with Kvas (fermented bread shandy), we popped over to the archery but had unfortunately missed the final. There was however a chap in full traditional dress letting you shoot arrows for 500 togrogs (about 20p!)
I had to stand near the target end first and compete with the locals to collect someone elses arrow once they had had their shot before taking it back to the bow man and he would let you have a go!
Claire and I were the only westerners there at that point so I stood around for a bit by the target and eventually got close enough to being skewered that I was nearest to an arrow when it landed. This seemed to please all the mongolians as they laughed a lot and looked at me a bit funny! I got back to the man with the bow who had around 10-12 people around him and there were 3 people with arrows in the queue in front of me. By the time it came to my go that number had doubled as loads of people had come to laugh at/give advice to/just poke the westener, it didn't help being left handed as well I don't think! Anyhoo, I drew the bow well enough and after a bit of chat with the crowd he let me release my shot. Fortunately all the archery practiced with my father at an early age somehow came back to me and it flew pretty cleanly very nearly hitting the target, (a bottle of water 75m away!) just a couple of meters short and fortunately better than any of the mongolian attempts we had seen at that point so I managed to walk away with head held high and recieving some nods of appreciation from some of the assembled crowd.
We returned for the last session of wrestling which started in true mongolian style (about an hour and a half late) and continued to get later all the way through. The 30,000ish crowd (my estimate, could have been less) really got behind every fight and fighter and it was a very exciting finish. Unfortunately, the final ended up a bit like the FA Cup final (a bit dull as too much at stake) perhaps the 3 hour overrun and wrestling by floodlight got to them, but it was a great day out nonetheless!

The horse racing finished on the final day but we had no transport to get out there so gave it a miss and stayed in town to catch up on admin (I hope you've all read our previous Mongolian blog!) We tried to organise another tour before we left but were unable to so we have spent the last few days seeing some more of UB and recharging our batteries before the final part of our trans-mongolian journey to Beijing.

The national museum was brilliant, possibly the best museum we've been to, displays of national costumes from all the native ethnic groups and lots of information on the more recent political history of Mongolia, Communism, end of the Khans dynasties, etc. All stuff we really wish we had seen before we'd seen anything else as it puts lots of things into context and raised so many questions, although it saved our tour guide from 12 days of questions on politics and religion! A return to the Bodh Khan Palace (this time in the sunshine!) was a fascinating insight into the life of the last Khan who only abdicated as recently as 1924 as well as being a beautiful buddhist temple and contained some amazing silk thangkas produced at the turn of the century. Naive of us possibly, but we generally imagine these things to be really old and created by people who lived in much simpler times, so were amazed to see almost new ones.
Along with the Gandan Monastery, currently home to 900 practicing yellow hat monks and a 26m high gold buddha was also an amazing experience, particularily as we stumbled across afternoon prayer and got to see a temple in action. The singing, drumming and praying really brought the whole buddist thing to life for us as we had only seen museums up to that point. It was also good to see some older monastery/temple buildings as most here were destroyed by the communists.

The last things to mention are th communist Zaisan monument south of the city. Erected to symbolise the collaboration between the soviets and the Mongolian people during the Second World War and the space race. Slightly odd things to combine but it is a striking and elegant sculpture and the views back across the city are great.

Next stop Beijing, just a 30 hour train journey away!

Hope you are all happy and well and special congratulations to Karen and Nick on their brilliant news!


Danny and Claire

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Photos

Bendy girls
Two heads are better than one

Arrival of the flags
Lots of horses, lots of flags, lots of Ming the Merciless henchman costumes

Eagle dance
Lots of fat blokes dance like birds. or something.

Archers
Somewhere out of shot a man orders a pint of mongolian strongbow

My moment of glory
So I aim where exactly?

Wrestlers
Does my bum look big in this?

Zaisan Memorial
Concrete on the outside, mural in the middle, Zaisan memorial!

Comments

[Scottie]

Just found this!!!
I just got the URL for the travel blog from Mark - read through this. Sounds amazing. I'll have to go through and read all of your previous entries now. Isa will be reading as well. Can't wait to hear what China is like. Take care guys. Luv ya's.