Journey Into Heathen Parts

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And now I'm in Mongolia! It is quite exciting. Some places in the world I've always wanted to go because just their names make me salivate. Borneo and Sulawesi I have got to already. Tierra del Fuego I haven't. Mongolia I think might be the most exotic-sounding of the lot and I'm finally here. I took a bus from Ulan Ude for twelve hours to get to Mongolia's capital city Ulan Baatar (it's had all sorts of variations in its spelling over the years, but Ulan Baatar seems to be the current one). Russian customs were pretty straightforward, if overly long because they had to process the entire bus. Oddly enough all luggage was x-rayed which is a bit weird when leaving a country by a land border. Presumably they were checking to make sure nobody was smuggling out orphans. Mongolian customs was super-easy and quick. As a bonus, all the lady border officers were really hot, and all of them were smiling!!! I knew immediately that I was going to like Mongolia. In fact they should just put up a big sign at the border-point saying “Welcome To Mongolia: Better Than Russia”.





The countryside on the six hour Mongolian part of the bus ride was exactly how I'd pictured Mongolia, all rolling browny-greeny hills, mountains in the back, barely a tree in sight. Domestic animals were everywhere which was a noticeable difference from Russia. Herds of cows, horses, sheep and goats (the latter two always in mixed herds) constantly held up traffic as they wandered about. I even saw a group of yaks. Birds were abundant, even if I couldn't identify most of them from the bus. The very first bird across the Mongolian border was a black kite, and I also saw common magpie, raven, carrion (Oriental) crow, feral pigeon and white wagtail (you know, all the easy ones to ID). Excitingly I also several times saw soaring cranes and eagles of indeterminate species.





Ulan Baatar has the distinction of being the world's coldest capital city, with an average yearly temperature of minus 1.3 degrees Celsius. It also has a very high crime rate with rampant pickpockets and violent muggings commonplace. Even the tourist brochures don't downplay this too much, saying to always be alert, travel in groups if you can, absolutely never go anywhere alone at night, and never ever walk anywhere after midnight even in groups. When I arrived the temperature was slightly higher than minus 1.3, more like plus 20 or 25, and I was not violently assaulted on the half-hour walk to my guesthouse. Maybe today. The place I'm staying is called Oyuna Guesthouse; the less said about it the better. I was only there for the night though – this afternoon I am (hopefully) on a bus to Hustai National Park for at least five nights.





The star attraction of Hustai is the Przewalski's horse, the last true wild horse in the world (as opposed to domestic horses gone feral). When I was growing up there was literally no hope of seeing one in the wild, because there were none left in the wild -- the entire species existed only in captivity.





Perhaps the first European to see the wild horses was a Bavarian nobleman called Hans Schiltberger who was taken into slavery by Turkish captors at the start of the 15th century. He was sold to Central Asian warlord Tamerlane of the Golden Horde (which you must admit is a pretty cool name for a warlord!), and then given to a Mongol khan called Egedi. In 1427 Schiltberger wrote a manuscript called “Journey Into Heathen Parts” about his captivity in the Tien Shan mountains which then lay within Mongol rule (now mostly within China), and where he saw wild horses. The horses aren’t called Schiltberger’s horses though, despite that being an easier name to pronounce, instead they are named after a rabidly-racist Russian colonel, explorer and geographer, Nikolai Przhevalsky (Przewalski in Polish), who discovered them for western science when he found herds of them in 1880 in the Dzungarian Gobi.




Now I’m sure you’ve all heard of Carl Hagenbeck. Naturally he wanted to capture some Przewalski’s horses for the world’s zoos. The first attempts at capture hadn’t exactly gone spectacularly, but in 1901 twenty-eight foals reached Hamburg along with foster-mother domestic mares (the foals were captured by pursuing wild horses until the foals dropped behind and could be noosed, and then they were mothered to domestic mares to keep them alive on the long trip to Europe). Twelve of the foals were sold to Woburn, and the rest to various zoos around Europe and America. More were captured over the next few years and some of these went to Askania Nova in Russia. Numbers built up over the following decades but World War Two was a tad rough – the prolific Askania Nova herd, for example, was entirely slaughtered by German soldiers – and by 1945 only the zoos in Munich and Prague retained breeding stock; the total captive population was only thirty-one animals. The wild situation wasn’t any better, with the Chinese hunting the species for food (nothing new there then). By the end of the 1960s the Przewalski’s horse was extinct in the wild but the captive population had picked up again and there were a couple of hundred horses in zoos worldwide. Concerted efforts raised this number significantly (currently there are some thousand or so in zoos), and in the 1980s some horses were sent to China to establish what would eventually become a wild population again in Xinjiang. Mongolia had been interested in getting the horses back into the wild in their country for some time, but things moved slower and it wasn’t until 1992 that horses were released there. The first release site in Mongolia was what was one year later (1993) to be designated as the Khustain Nuruu National Park, which is more popularly known as Hustai National Park. It is only 100km outside Ulan Bataar, and there are now well over two hundred wild Przewalski’s horses there. In theory, seeing them should be easy.........ha.

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