The Long Way Down, Up and Around: An afternoon in Mongolia

My experience out here in Mongolia gave me a healthy sense of respect for anthropologist... those field academics who leave their ivory tower in the states to head to a remote part of the world and live with a tribe, or a village, for years without much contact from home. Field biologists too, actually.

I was always surrounded by people, but at the same time I was intensely alone that day. Language turned out to be an issue. No one in the family spoke more than a few words of English and my Mongolian was coming along too slowly. What it would be like to do this as part of a field study, being out in the field for months at a time, without contact with home, hoping that your community would accept you and that at the end of a few months you'd have enough material to create what you need to back home? Of course the first days are the hardest... everyone's guard is up and the language barrier is at its peak. I knew that after another ten days or so I could head back to my Western oasis in UB with wi-fi and Westerners to swap stories with.

The time went by slowly... I sat outside and watched the sky for a while that day. It's an enormous sky - when it's clear the sun beats down hard, and when the weather is in flux, which is true most days, its a huge theatre full of clouds, shadows and different shades of blue, white and grey.

There were occasional trucks and buses that sped down the main road, a few hundred yards away. Who knows where they were headed.

At some point a windstorm came through, with the wind beating down the the sky turning menacing shades of grey, but it passed, and other than the lightning, which makes everyone a little nervous out here, it was just a great show.

We played a game that roughly resembled dice - except the dice were actually ankle bones from horses. It doubles as a drinking game, although we didn't go there at 3 in the afternoon.

Then there was dinner - potato noodles with mutton jerky, onions, and my special addition of hot sauce. Everything goes down better with hot sauce. Mongolian's don't really do dessert, but I had a couple of Snickers stashed away which I shared with everyone.

The more I travel the more it turns out two things are universally true: everyone loves TV, and everyone loves cell phones. The family spent most of the evening glued to the TV, watching Mongolian music videos, or game shows, or old Westerns. If there's one genre that your average Mongolian family can relate to, it's cowboy movies, with the cattle rustlers, good guys, bad guys, horsemanship and bandits. Everyone once in a while someone's phone would ring and they'd run out of the ger.

And then, once the sun set, and people collectively thought they had had enough TV for the day, everyone sort of went to bed in a different corner. There were 2 beds in my ger - I got one and the two eldest daughters got the other - a few people piled on the floor by stove, and presumably everyone else slept in the other ger.

I've gotta say, that was one of the more exotic experiences I've had over the years... sleeping in a tent on the steppe of Mongolia, with five strangers.