Last weekend I hit the road with my host family (and their closest relatives) to camp in Eastern Mongolia, about 260 km from UB. It was near the town of Delgerkhaan, next to the Avarga Toson lake. Now, I know what you might be thinking when I say �lake.� Maybe an alpine setting with lush forests and speedboats. Well, that�s Oregon, not Mongolia. Here, a lake is where you go on vacation, and it amounts to a spring-fed puddle in the middle of the high desert. No trees as far as the eye can see. Only untainted expanses of grassland, rolling hills, a few mountain ranges in the very far distance. Nothing to get worked up about.
Well, let me talk a little bit about the ride TO the lake from UB. We had about 16 people inside a mini-bus that could comfortably fit eight. That�s the Mongol-style. No bus and no car should move unless it�s filled to the brim with people. On top of that, everyone packed as much junk as they could bring with them. I counted about 50 blankets rolled up in the back. We sat on 10 of them in the minibus. Blankets made up both the sleeping pads and the sleeping bags for these Mongols. I brought along my blanket from my bed and a rolled up towel for a pillow. My padding amounted to three blankets stacked on top of each other. I think my back finally has some iron in it after these past 5 days.
Another thing about driving conditions. The paved and pockmarked road lasts for about � of the route to Avarga Toson. The rest is pure Russian Ruts. American logging roads are better maintained than these for one reason. Mongolian roads were created by simply blazing a trail using jeeps and service trucks. American logging roads are carefully planned and built. But either way you cut it, the last half of the ride was, at best, a theme park safari ride of bumps, dips, descents, ascents, washboards, and flat tires.
And to top it off, Mongolian drivers still drive agressively. Out in the middle of the steppe, uninhabited as far as the eye can see, with only two cars on the lonely and desolate stretch of ruts, Mongols still tail-gate. That�s right, the tail car speeds up (risking a flat tire or worse) until it is riding the ass of the front car, eventually overtaking it. Then it is just more endless, desolate roads.
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Avarga Toson is the where Mongols believe the first Mongolian city was established. It is also, coincidentally, where an intelligent young man named Temujin was crowned Chinggis Khaan (Ghengis Khan), ruler of the Eastern world around 1250 AD. Nearby there is a huge statue of Chinggis, but we didn�t go there. Instead, we mostly were either at the lake or in the ger (yurt). Each day was a repetition of the last: wake up, walk to the local herding family where we drank a glass of fresh horse milk (which would thankfully cure my constipation), ate some breakfast (usually something milky and mushy), go to the lake for a swim, sunbathe and get a sunburn, circle the lake on foot (stopping at a mineral spring to splash our eyes and cure any eye ailments), go back to the ger, sit around in the ger and be lazy, eat some dinner (involving mostly soups), walk to the local herding family for our evening glass of horse milk (play with their cute toddlers), sit around some more, go to sleep at dusk.
The exceptions to this rule: on Sunday my host parents and a local family boarded into a small bus to attend the Naadam festivities in a local sum (a fancy way of saying �a village and its environs�). Naadam is the National Holiday of Mongolia, and tourist agencies make a killing during this time. In UB, the three events (20 km horse racing, archery, and wrestling) have been commercialized so much that most Mongolians stay at home and watch the events on their TV. Even so, UB during Naadam is like Mecca during the Hajj pilgrimage. Thousands upon thousands of country Mongols flood UB (along with thousands of tourists) and its enough to make one say �Screw Naadam, I�m hitting the road outta UB.� Which is what me and my host family did.
The small Naadam I saw was small and cute. They were all about their horses, thus horse racing was the main attraction. Only 30 minutes of wrestling figured into the festivities, and no archery was staged. We arrived in the late afternoon, and I was immediately greeted by the Mongol stare. I�ve come to the realization that most non-Mongolians don�t come to this part of Mongolia (since it is serviced neither by public transportation nor main roads). Besides, all the foreigners were crammed into a stadium in UB, why was I poking my neck around and butting in? I figured I wasn�t the first �white man� they had seen, but I might�ve been their sixth. But no worries, I played it cool.
We cheered on some kid named Seggi, who was the grandson of the herding family who provided us with horse milk. He got fifth, which is good. Only first through fifth get prizes. The rest go home with a popsicle.
Another break from the rule was when I asked if there was a horse I could rent for an hour to ride into the countryside. Davaa (host dad) asked around and I went with. Don�t let anyone tell you Mongols are stoic, quiet people. They like to talk, and they use twice as much breath to say the same things we do. It took about ten minutes of beating around the bush before Davaa would ask �And by the way, could we rent one of your horses for an hour?� The usual answer was that the husband wasn�t home, and we would have to ask him.
But my lucky strike came on Wednesday morning, when the horse milk family asked me to do some herding for them. They wanted a group of fluffy, white sheep (a splotch of white on the horizon) to move over and mingle with the dark brown goats (a splotch of black on the horizon). I had no confidence I could accomplish this in any reasonable amount of time, but I couldn�t pass up the opportunity.
I mounted a horse and tried my best to trot. The horse sensed my inexperience, and merely trudged. I had only gone 100 meters before the herding family told their son to accompany me. The 6-year old grabbed my ropes and basically towed me out to the sheep. After that, the horse was on autopilot. We shooed and whipped at the sheep, and they got a move on. The trick is to get a group of them running. There are hardly any stragglers. Sheep have that group mentality.
Unfortunately, I was wearing shorts and my sandals. I rubbed the inside of my ankle raw and bloody by the end of the ride. When I returned to the family�s ger, they asked if I would be their herder. I told them to give me 10 years to practice herding. They said I would be too old by then. I said Thank You and Goodbye.
As I was saying, this family had the cutest toddlers. One we nicknamed Black Sumo because she walked with a bow-legged sumo gait. She was also very dark, even for a Mongolian. Black Sumo liked to stick her head in horse manure. These kids were allowed to freely roam around. Most Mongolian toddlers don�t wear diapers (too expensive and wasteful), so they walk around without pants on. I remember one evening going to drink milk and asking �Where�s Black Sumo?� The grandma pointed in the far distance, and there she was, crying for a few seconds, then watching a pack of cows go by, then bending over, then falling over, then falling asleep. We ran over and picked her up into our arms. Her father is in prison. Her mother is away indefinitely. But I�d hate to see her adopted and raised in some city.
Black Sumo has the grasslands written in her blood.
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