Lee and Clare, The road home

Gobi Desert - Life as a Mongolian nomad

25^th October 2003

We've just spent today hanging out in Ulaan Baatar. We're stuffed now and looking forward to just chilling tomorrow before we head off to Beijing on Sunday morning.

Today we saw the most amazing collection of dinosaur bones and fossils that there must be in the world, and they were all found in Mongolia, some of them in places that we visited in the past week. They weren't behind any glass or anything, nothing like in the Natural History Museum in London.

Also visited the Black Market where Lee got a leather wallet for 3000 tog rog - less than $3US, good work. He liked looking at the meat part of the market where they had whole sheep out on display for about $10 or $12US each.

This time last week we were enjoying our first night of our trip out into the countryside in Mongolia. We hired ourselves a Russian jeep, a driver and a cook/translator for 7 days. About 10kms out of Ulaan Baatar, the capital the road turned into a dirt track and we didn't see tar seal again for 5 days. The roads are all just like dirt tracks - not really a road at all but some rut marks in the ground that successive cars had driven over and huge holes and bumps. We managed to get air-borne a few times. It was like a week's off-roading adventure especially when we got into deep snow and had to dig ourselves out! No seat belts of course! There are no road signs whatsoever and we couldn't understand how our driver knew the way as there were so many dirt roads crossing and running parallel to each other. He said he just knew from the mountains and the sun!

We went through so many amazing landscapes. It's really hard to explain! We started by driving through, around and over rolling hills (on dirt tracks remember). By the second day we came across snow. This is when we got stuck and the spade had to come out. Bear in mind that you never see another car on these roads. You are all by yourself in the middle of nowhere. The second day we were started driving across the steppe. The ground was completely flat to the horizon all around us, for hundreds of kilometres. The ground was sandy and gravelly with lots of tufts of grasses. We hear that this is beautiful and green in the summer, for us it was more of browny, grey hues, perhaps just as beautiful we think, and certainly more interesting. There were no trees.

Then we entered what they call the desert steppe of the Gobi Desert, more sandy ground. That evening we encountered huge sand dunes half covered in snow. You don't see that every day! We stayed in a ger nearby (more on that later).

On some days we could be driving over steppe for hours and hours, on others the landscape could be changing before our eyes every ten minutes as we drove through hills, mountains, desert, rocks or sand dunes.

We spent a day driving through snow covered, rocky, hilly terrain. Each time we drove over the top of the hill there was a huge expectation of what would be on the other side and a new breathtaking vista would emerge of beautiful snow covered landscape as far as the eye could see. We felt so isolated, (which we were!). Such a beautiful part of the world that so few see. We also felt so lucky to see it as winter comes on as most (intelligent) tourists visit in the summer time.

Of the 2.5m people who live in Mongolia 1m are nomads and live in gers (big round tents) scattered all over the country. They all have farm livestock and everywhere we went, even places that felt like the most isolated place in the world, we would see a lone ger in the distance and scattered herds of animals - 1 or more of the following - horses, goats, camels (2 humps!!), sheep, cows and yaks. No-one owns the land in Mongolia - we never saw a fence. The nomads pack up their tents and families about 4 times a year and move to where there is better grass for their animals. Although the landscape is quite sandy and rocky, especially in the Gobi Desert, there are enough tufts of grass on the ground for animals to survive. Things do however get pretty dire in the wintertime, and we heard some sad stories about half of a family's herd succumbing to the cold. We saw lots of bones as we drove around. They use the animals for everything - milk, skins, furs, food, transport.

We feel especially privileged as on our journey we spent a lot of time in gers with nomad families, eating their food, witnessing their traditions and getting an idea about their daily lives. This would not have been so had we visited in the summer. When tourists go out into the countryside in the summer they generally take their own tent or stay in expensive tourist camps with gers put up especially for them. Too cold for camping for us, and most of the ger camps were closed up for the winter. Instead we were invited into gers as we went along, be it just for lunch, to share some camel milk (GROSE!), or to stay the night. An absolutely fantastic experience. Just about everyone in the countryside wears traditional dress, which is a long coat type thing buttoned at the side and the collar with a brightly coloured sash around the middle. The guys' one is quite plain, the girls' one was sometimes of a more fancy material. Both have animal fur on the inside for the winter.

Gers are all set out in the same general way. It is round with a wooden trellis wall and wood (batons) going from the tops of the walls almost to the centre of the roof like the spokes of a wheel. The top circle of the roof is used for light and there is a hole for the chimney. All the sides and top of the ger are made of thick felt made from wool. The door is small and brightly coloured and always faces south. Inside the ger, in the centre is a fire for cooking and heating. At the back is a Buddhist altar. There is generally a bed on each side, and sometimes one at the back. There are wooden cabinets, usually painted orange with distinctive Mongolian designs. Some of the gers we visited (the warmest ones!) had thick wool carpets on the wall. There was also carpets and lino on the floor. That's about all we can do in describing it!! Sure you can see a picture on the Internet somewhere!

And the food! We reckon we've eaten more red meat in the past week than in the whole time we lived in Ireland! You would die if you were vegetarian. Most of our meals included chunks of meat (mutton or beef) complete with LOTS of fat (sometimes the chunks of fat were as big as a good sized steak!), with potatoes or some kind of stuff made out of flour that looked like pasta made into some kind of soup. Let's just say that a week of this type of food does not do wonders for the digestion. 4 days!! Probably a good thing too as apart from one night of our trip when we stayed at some hot springs there was either no toilet to speak of or a couple of teetering planks over a big two metre deep hole of your worst nightmare. The latter was found in the towns (if you can call them that!) that we stayed in for a couple of nights. In one of the towns one of the holes must've been full, so they dug another hole next to it and didn't cover the other one up. Also no street lights, your own problem if you fell in in the middle of the night. These toilets were the worst we've encountered in all our travels (and we've seen some stinkers), and they are what all the people in these towns use. A lot of people don't even have their own hole, but share a communal one in the street. We have yet to work out how they cope in the winter. We much preferred the open-air variety of toilet, although when you are driving through or staying on completely flat steppe, there ain't much opportunity for privacy! No trees or bushes! By the way, don't know how we started that paragraph on food, and ended it on toilets, but never mind.

We decided that we'd much rather live as a nomad than in one of the towns. It is a simple life, though not easy by any means, especially in the winter. In the gers where we stayed we witnessed family life, little children growing up, cooking, herding animals. Nice existence, but not in minus 40. Was cold enough for us, even now!

On our first night we stayed in a small town and went to the local bar, very small with everyone in traditional dress and a few young guys singing Mongolian Karaoke. We sampled airag, which is fermented horse milk and is very popular in Mongolia. Lee liked it and drunk a whole pint and a half, not me, the fact that it was stored in a huge hanging horse skin didn't help. It could hold over a hundred litres. On another day when we stopped at a ger to ask directions we were asked inside to have some warm camel milk. Lucky us. Except that it was completely foul - warm, frothy, smelt a bit like camel mixed with off yoghurt, fizzy and had big lumps in it so you had to sort of chew it on the way down. Of course you had to be polite and say you loved it. On another night the hostess bought out a sheep's head complete with eyeballs and blackened skin where the fur had been burnt off. Our driver loved it. We tried a bit to be polite. Tasted like offal. Grose.

Another huge novel here. We could write forever, this place is sooo fascinating. But we better head off. We'll finish off with some overall views.

Mongolia is a poor country. We've seen some things that could make your heart break, like the street children in Ulaan Baatar. We've been out of our comfort zone with regard to toilets and plumbing but a large percentage of the population here live without running water every day of their lives. (They get it from wells or rivers). At first I thought it was a sad country, and in many ways it is and there certainly many problems that need to be overcome (like poverty and dire infrastructure). However our time staying with nomads in the countryside in places that seem like the most isolated on earth have allowed us to meet some of the most hospitable people on our travels. They live a very simple life and really go to show us all that a lot of the trappings of our lives are perhaps unnecessary?? Well maybe, we'll stick with our flush toilet for now, and really could do with some fruit and vegetables. But you know what we're trying to say.....

Next stop Beijing. We leave Sunday morning. We've got the Mandarin phrasebook ready!

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