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.

Bracing ourselves for a windstorm.  These are all bark and no bite - you can see them coming from miles away, menacing and dark, the wind 

Ger life, day three, family two

Badzar's family was wonderful - his brothers were as patient as could be with my terrible horse and camel skills and his parents were generous and patient (a recurring theme) with my incipient curiosity.  It must get old after a while, having visitor after visitor poke his nose around in your home.  If it bothered them, they certainly didn't show it.

But, all good things come to an end.  After a second night of fitful sleep - the dogs bark and howl all night - it was time to move on and see a different side of Mongolian life.

My knees and rear end still hadn't recovered from the past few days of riding - especially the trip to the watering hole that was a good three hours round-trip.  You see, Mongolian horses are pint-size - they're really more like ponies - and fitting in the stirrups means you have to bend your knee at an awkward angle.  The saddles are traditionally made of wood with silver decorations, and even with the pillow they provide tourists they're still pretty tough.  If you want your knees to relax... well there goes your rear end.  And if you try to save your behind from too much punishment your knees give out.  For the first few days out on horses I played this game over again and again, to the amusement of my Mongolian hosts.  

Most Mongolian learn to ride before they learn how to walk, and the sight of Westerners learning how to handle a horse for the first time must have been pretty funny.  I guess it would like us watching someone learn how to ride a bike for the first time, or learn to swim.  It feels so natural that you wonder how someone else could be having so much trouble!  

It was another 2 hour camel ride to our next stop, a couple with seven daughters and a son near the main road.   

One of the great things about staying with a couple of different families is that you can see all the different flavors of family life.  As it turned out, each of the four families I stayed with was very different.  Comparing across all those different families gave me a little bit of sense for what was "Mongolian" and what was more an idiosyncratic part of family life.   

Again, it was the kids in the family that helped me integrate for the one night I was there.  This time it wasn't chess, or TV... it was volleyball!  It wasn't the last time spontaneous volleyball would happen in the middle of the steppe, and I wonder if my experience was unique or if volleyball really is the quasi-national sport of Mongolia?  I could never really figure it out.

Mongolian's name their children very literally; the guys are named after macho things like thunderbolts, axes, rocks and predatory animals, and the girls are named after beautiful, feminine things like chrysanthemums, peace, flowers and jewels.  Altantsetseg ("golden flower") succeeded "thunderbolt" in taking me under her wing at my second homestay.

What happened that day?  Well, we took another horseback ride out to some abandoned stone monuments, Indiana Jones style.  Scattered all over Mongolia are these little stone statues - no one really knows who created them, or why.  Locals still think they have supernatural powers, and its not hard to see why when you're standing in the middle of the steppe with a mysterious, ancient stone statue in front of you.  We made the most of the opportunity by taking some silly pictures.

We passed a couple of hours with some volleyball, occasionally wiping off the volleyball when it got sent into the goat pen.

Then were was a lot of hanging out as visitors passed through - friends and family who just wanted to say hello.  Since everyone has so much free time on their hands, it's fair game to swing by a buddy's ger and just say hello.  No need to call ahead, no need to make plans - I bet the whole idea of fixed social plans would strike people as a bit strange, actually.  It reminded me a little bit of college, actually, and of my time in Morocco during college.  Or maybe the office on a really slow day?

Letting the horses drink and my legs recover.

More space and sky.

Everyone loves tourist photos.

Ger living, day 2

How did the day go by?  Awfully relaxing, with a little bit of latent anxiety in the background, given the remoteness.

Turned out Badzar was quite the chess player, so we played a few rounds.  He beat me and got bored.  So he rounded up his brother and I and my Dutch companion went with his brother Sukh ("axe" - great names) on a camel ride to a local shrine. Sukh seemed pretty bored too, luckily for all of us, he had a smartphone and could play some beats while we rode out for well over an hour.  I guess the impulse to listen to pop music is pretty universal, whether you are commuting on the interstate or riding your camel in rural Mongolia.

Mongolia's defining characteristic?  Space.  Wherever you go, you can see to the horizon and usually there's not much between you and the edge of the world.  A recurring theme from all my pictures, and, well, most of my thoughts was how much damn space there was around me.

Is it a cool feeling?  Yeah, for a bit.  But honestly, being so absurdly alone is a new feeling for most people, and it can be a little unsettling.  Maybe that's why the Mongol's are so close - even with the whole world as their backyard, they spend most of their time almost on top of each other in their gers.  I certainly felt that impulse.  I could go anywhere I wanted, but most of the time I stuck to the people next to me and we moved in groups.  Do we humans have some impulse to huddle for protection?  It certainly felt that way out there.

Mongols practice a Tibetan version of Buddhism, part of a historical accident where they conquered Tibet and adopted the religion.  Here is the Dalai Lama - sadly, you'd never find these kids of shrines in the religion's heartland, Tibet.

It's a long walk, well, anywhere.  

Lots of parking.

Lazy camels... everyone is just hanging out and passing the time.

Cool shadows from the setting sun.

The long walk home... luckily we were just taking a walk around the religious landmark, which isn't much more than a pile of rocks with lots of blue prayer flags.

Sunset over the Mongolian Steppe.

Detail on the airag bowl... this one was handmade out of silver, with leather and wood finishes.  It might run you as much as $500 back in town.

A good way to pass the time.  They are going to love the iPad once it makes its way to Mongolia.

A bucket of milky moonshine and the communal chalice.

Here's the whole family, father, mother, three sons and a daughter.  One of the sons is a singer in town, the other is a teacher, the daughter is in university and the little guy is still hanging out on the ranch.

Kids everywhere are the same.

Ceremonial saddle.

Cheerful touch.

Looking rugged.

Getting ready to saddle up and take us on to our next stop.

Ger living, day 1

The fantasy of living with nomads starts with a single step... and a bumpy jeep ride to the middle of nowhere.

Home for the next two nights.

And the horses... the sheep and goats are out to pasture.

The first night I had the company of a Dutch guy who was doing a similar circuit... he was leaving after only a couple of nights though, while I was in for the long haul.

I have a theory that to really experience something you almost have to do it long enough for it to be familiar, and for you to get sick of it.  After two or three nights, who knows, maybe I would still be hungry for more.  But I was pretty sure that after 2 weeks in the boonies I was either going to really, really love Mongolia, or, more likely, be about ready to come home.

So this was day one of twelve.

As would happen over and over again during the trip, it was the kids that really brought the experience together.  As adults we get more reserved, more shy, and more afraid of breaking social taboos.  Kids don't care about any of that stuff, and they also tend to be really good at reading subtle clues, like body language or hand gestures, to figure out what's going on.

Our little guide this time around was Badzar ("thunderbolt").  He was probably about 10 years old.  In the States, we'd also probably say the kid has ADD, but out here it seemed like he was just an energetic kid out in the countryside.  He was obviously pretty proud of his zombie impression (see below), which he used to pretty good effect with every group of tourists, I'm guessing.

Getting settled included a little airag, which is fermented mares milk.  If it sounds like an acquired taste, well, it is, but if you insist and work at it, it can actually be pretty good.  The alcohol, about 1-2% by volume, keeps it from spoiling and helps napping during the hot afternoons.

Unfortunately for the authenticity of our trip, most of the families, including this one, had substituted the pure meat and dairy diet for some Western imports, including noodles, potatoes and rice.  I guess past groups had complained, but those additions aren't supposed to be part of the culture.  And the food was... basic, I guess, but nothing a little hot sauce couldn't handle (luckily I found a huge bottle at a grocery store in UB!).

The first thing I noticed about nomad / herder lifestyle was just how slow the days go by.  There's an early morning push to get the sheep, goats and cattle out to pasture, but then there's just a long, hot day of hanging out waiting, waiting and waiting.  People keep busy mashing the airag, or maybe doing laundry, but it's a lot of sitting around, staring at the sky, and now with solar panels - watching TV.  So much for the aggressive imagery of people on horses looking like heroes - well, there's that too, but it's as much a part of Mongolian life as crazy fraternity parties are part of life for the average American.

I brought a couple of heavy tombs to read (prepping for China), so I was prepared... at least for a little while.