The Land of Telescopes
Trip Start
May 07, 2003
1
53
65
Trip End
Sep 05, 2005
Ulaan Bataar,
Mongolia
Saturday, July 30, 2005
China gave me the delightful parting gift of two days severe dysentry, in which I passed nothing but Chinese tea. But I survived the Transmongolian journey on train #23 which glided over the Great Wall, through Inner Mongolia and the endlessly flat, but spectacular Gobi Desert and arrived in Ulaan Bataar. Due to serious time/money restraints myself and Chris immediately embarked (after a few beers of-course) on a four day tour of the Central Mongolian Steppe with the legend of a Mongol, Mejet
01 Beijing Train station
. In his beauty of a Russian Wartz Jeep, a 69, he took us across the smooth undulating expanse of treelessness that is the Outer Mongolian Steppe; we stayed in a cosy Ger for the first night at the foot of a rare mountain, which we scaled that evening.The second day, we went to stay with a Mongolian family in the middle of a vast grassy plain. The family were horse/goat/sheep/yak/cow/yak-cow half breed herders and the main income came from the fermented mares milk, called Arak which they religiously milked from the mares every two hours and relentlessly drank at all other times. Majet said the master of the Ger drank 10-20 litres every day! They were bloody friendly anyhow and we of-course got to try the sour, vinegar like concotion of Arak, and also ate their standard fare, which was horse soup, dried yak meat and dried milk fat for breakfast - MMMMMMmmmm :p. This family move their homes (for that is what the Gers really are, with decorations and furniture, stove and all homely comforts) on horseback about 4-6 times a year, depending on the weather. They endure the extremes of summer with temperatures frm 30-40 degress C, to the winter where the bitter cold can freeze them to minus 40. The Ger stays warm in winter and cool in summer. It's quite something to be sitting in that tiny warm colourful space inside, then when you step out the door the stark difference - in all directions, as far as the eye can see is rolling steppe, distant herds of domestic beasts snorting and grazing, weather systems and violent electric storms swirling before your eyes on the horizon
02 Oor train - number 23
. Mejet has the nose to sniff out a party, and he soon discovered that the largest and the biggest Naadam festival was due to be held the next day. After we had managed to not eat the dried out milk fat for brekky, we bade our farewells to the lovely family to leave them to their business of pulling on horses breasts, and set out over the Steppe. Majet, being the Mongol equivalent of Colin Macrae, soon had us there overtaking all other cars on the "road" at great speed by bounching along anywhere he fancied, these 69 Jeeps need no roads! The Naadam festival is the Mongolian celebration of all things manly and is the biggest event of the year. The main events are wrestling, archery, horseracing and polo. The wrestlers kicked it off with a display of enormous scantily clad humans nobily throwing each other onto the ground. The archers showed amazing skill not only accurately hitting the targets but calculating distance also, as the targets were blocks on the ground. Then came the horse racing, none of yer pansy round and round a track bollox, these boys, race 25k's over the Steppe for bloody ages, and most of the riders are small children bouncing along for half an hour or so. Horses really are at the core of Mongolian society and kids learn from 2-3 years old how to handle the beasts. Some of the skills look unbeleivable, you see most kids on the horses at full gallop, and they're not even looking where they're going or having a laugh with their mates
03 Gliding past the Great Wall
. The Mongols live completely off the horses, for transport, for getting inebriated off their milk, for burning their dried out shit pats to keep warm and eating their tasty fatty meat to stave off winter hunger.In times of the old man Chingis Khan, legend has it that the fearsome warriors were such skillful horseman, they could pick a coin off the ground at full gallop or accurately shoot arrows at enemies behind them while also at full gallop. It's amazing to learn that these nomadic warriors once ruled an empire bigger even than the British empire at it's peak. They trully were unparalleled masters of strategic warfare and their empire at one time stretched from Siberia to southern China, to Egypt, Persia and up the Volga, nearly to Moscow, even what's now Ukraine, Hungary and Romania were ruled by the wrath of the Mongol Hordes who obliterated entire towns, even entire countries who didn't have the sense to surrender. Luckily, for us, they stopped at the Danube, not beacuase they were beaten, no army had a chance of matching them, but because of troubles back in the motherland. If things had been different, Europe may now have been part of Asia.
