Horchog, horses and hot springs or 2 weeks in the Mongolian countryside

Do you want to pay for an overpriced package tour or hire a cheap driver that doesn’t understand a single word of English? Well, together with the two Nicos from France, that we had met on the train, we formed our own group and finally opted for the latter. Bogie (how the friendly lady from our accomodation had named herself for foreigners that can’t pronounce her Mongolian name) helped us to hire a Russian 4×4 minibus and a driver who went by the name ‚Buggy‘. On Monday morning, we stocked up on food and water for the trip and our Mongolian-French-German crew left for the desert.

The Mongolian countryside is the greatest „sight“ of the country – or as a historian wrote in the national museum ‚the Mongols don’t have any use for cities‘. While driving through the country, you find vast beautiful landscapes ranging from sand or stone deserts, steppe to lush green meadows surrounded by hills and little forests. There are horses all over, as well as sheep and goats (in mixed herds) but we also saw huge eagles, strange ducks, fast Mongolian gazelles and every now and then a yurt (a felt tent or ‚ger‘ in Mongolian). The roads we took were hardly more than animal paths, so it was quite a bumpy ride, but this indestructable Russian vehicle does get you everywhere.

On the second night of our trip we passed by Buggy’s hometown in the afternoon. Our stop was supposed to be some 20 km further, but because it looked like rain and our 10€ tent certainly wasn’t waterproof, we accepted his offer to stay for free at his uncle’s place – a ger inside one of the wooden fences that mark properties of ’settled‘ nomads. Our driver was happy to spend a (work) night with his family and invited us for Chorchog – the Mongolian national dish for special occasions (more about it in the mutton post). So we bought some vodka as a present in the village store (run by Buggy’s sister) and prepared for a great evening. The cooking took place on the oven in the center of the round tent. We were taught some ancestor worshipping rituals with the vodka – flicking some drops in the air three times with your ring finger – before downing it. By the time the mutton was cooked the whole family and friends from the village had assembled around the oven. Everybody got some bones with fatty pieces of mutton meat and we were taught that the fat makes you strong like Chengis Khan (all without a common language). Once we had chewed the meat off the first bones, Buggy’s friend introduced the tradition of ‚bone breaking‘: put a bone across two legs of a tiny chair and hit it until it breaks and you can suck out the marrow. Every successful attempt was followed by drumming one’s chest and shouting ‚Chengis Khan‘ as loud as possible. After the food was finished, the crowd moved on to some friendly wrestling (another typical male Mongolian past time) in the darkness in front of the ger. It was a great and authentic experience with some really friendly people – Mongolia is not a country of great sights, but great people.

We continued to the Gobi desert the next day, where we found ourselves a beautiful camp site. We made a fire with the ubiquitous dried camel shit and watched the nightly sky over the desert, with a gazillion of stars – so beautiful that it seemed like a waste to go to sleep. Gobi in Mongolian actually means something like ‚emptyness‘ and they use it for vast stone deserts – the occasional sand dunes are called ‚eel‘. When we left the Gobi we had almost reached Arkhangai province, a green area with lots of forest and the Khangai mountain range, where Buggy dropped us at the yurt of Bogie’s parents.

Here, we could stay with a real Mongolian nomad family – which included milking yaks and sharing our ‚bedroom‘ (the yurt) with 9 people and a newborn calf that was scared from the thunderstorm outside. Since the family also owned horses, we went for a 3 day horse trek out into the greenery. The valley from where we started could have been in Switzerland, but all signs of civilization erased – only green meadows, meandering rivers and lots of Edelweiss blossoming.

The Mongolian horses are smaller than European ones, but a bit wilder and just as fast. I had never really been on a horse before, but got along pretty well and survived the first unintended canter without bigger issues. The saddles are wooden and terribly uncomfortable. The stirrups were too short, not made for tall Europeans, and quickly caused knee pain for most of us. Besides that we had an amazing time, the feeling of freedom to command a horse through the wild countryside and we got closer to wild animals than you can with any motorized vehicle. We enjoyed the warm-hearted invitations from the few nomads into their tents for yoghurt, cheese, deer filet or just some hot milk tea. Even a few spectacular falls from the horse, occasional rain or the sometimes cold weather didn’t spoil the experience. And when we were served cold beer while hanging out in the hot sulphur water of the natural springs in the area a few days later, it seemed hard to imagine future places on our journey to be any better.