Getting into the field

I spent a few days at my base camp in Ulaan Bataar trying to find a way to get out of the city and into the countryside.  Ulaan Bataar is charming in its own developing, wild-west kind of way but there's not much to do and the fact that no one speaks English, and Mongolian is a) impossible to pronounce and b) written in cyrillic makes getting around the city a huge effort.

Mongolia is a peculiar place.  First of all, it is the least densely populated country in the world, by a long shot. Roughly 2.5 million people live in a plot of area about three times the size of France.  Canada, with its huge expanses of tundra and arctic, is roughly twice as crowded.

Because of this, Mongolia never really had cities, or a permanent civilization of any sort.  To its heart, Mongolia is a culture of nomads.  Ulaan Bataar, the current capital, is home to one out of two Mongolians today, but wasn't really settled until the 19th century.  Before that it was a "movable" city, and would change location every few years.  

This culture has seeped into Mongolian's everyday lingo.  Busses are called "goat carts", beer is called "yellow airag" (fermented mares milk).  Horses used to roam the streets of Ulaan Bataar until the 90s, when the government forbade them in the city center.  New immigrants to the city simply bring their tents and pitch them in the hills around the town.  

Mongolia calls itself a "frontier economy," which sounds hokey, except the second you land you realize it really is a frontier economy.  You understand what Americans settlers meant by "frontier" and that the Wild West was, actually, pretty damn wild.  Even in Mongolia, in the 21st century, it feels like the rules, whatever they are, don't really matter.  That's true whether it comes to traffic, city planning or just about anything else.  It is chaotic, dusty, polluted and yet it is full of energy and it's all going somewhere, fast.  Mongolia's current per capita income currently hovers around $3,400 - it has grown at almost 10% per year for the past decade, and if current mining projects are ever completed, it might increase by ten times.  Mongolia is the mineral version of Kuwait, and if all those reserves of copper and coal ever make it their way to China the average Mongolian might be richer than the average America, and it all might happen in our lifetimes.

But, before all that happened, I wanted to get a glimpse of the Mongolia of legend - cowboys on horseback, people living in tents the way they had for thousands of years, drinking fermented mares milk, herding animals and singing to pass the time.  Who knows - it may not be around for too much longer.  

Luckily, there is an organization called Ger to Ger (http://www.gertoger.org/) that had exactly what I was looking for.  The Company organizes something that straddles a trek and a homestay.  The basic idea is that they organize travelers into small groups of 2-4 and then set you off into the field on a string of home stays.  It's a chance to get into the countryside, get on horseback, and see the real Mongolia.  Because of how it's organized, it's also extremely affordable.