06-06-30
I signed up to do a 7-day horse trek for my second week there. Not the best type of exercise after a marathon. I was saddle-sore before I started, and we´d be doing 30-40k through Mongolian wilderness everyday. Maybe it was because the ground was so soft, but 2-3 days into the trek and my muscles felt great.
At the start of the trek the horses are nervous because some complete stranger is trying to take control of them. But after a week in the saddle they start to recognize you and relax alot. Or more precisely they start to recognize their own smell off you.
Horses generally aren´t my thing. Usually the horse I´m on always takes some mad notion to just run off for a gallop and won´t stop no matter how much I pull on the reins. So far I´ve never fallen off and I was hoping to maintain my 100% record. True to form on the first day my horse just kept taking these mad notions to go galloping on his own away off to the right. I didn´t fall off, and he did stop which was good. But he´d just stop, look back at the other horses trotting along normally, then look over to the wee house away off in the distance on the right, and burst into a gallop straight for it again. This happened 3 or 4 times and I was thinking to myself that this was going to be a tough week. Then my guide explained that the wee house in the distance was where he lived and he thought he was going home. Once we got out of sight of the house he was grand. He pretty much knew the score and my input wasn´t needed very much. About the only thing I had to do from time to time was turn him round so that he could see the other horses, then dig my heels into him, and shout "tschoo", which is the horse equivalent of "follow that cab".
As far as scenery goes Mongolia could compete with anywhere that I´ve been to. Many countries have beautiful landscapes of mountains, forests, rivers, etc, but mongolia also has lots of wildflower meadows which are in their full glory at this time of year. Right outside the tent door you have a beautiful wild flower meadow where the horses are doing their overnight grazing. Oranges, whites, yellows, and pink flowers blanket the place. Huge snowcapped mountains frame it.
Travelling by horse is a really nice way to see a place. We were fortunate enough to meet some reindeer herders. There´s only about 30 of them in an area about half the size of N´Ireland. The other day we saw some children training horses for the racing next week. They were riding round in circles singing old racing songs to the horses. The nomad children start to ride soon as they can walk. We´ve come across many sacred spots along the way, where you all have to get off your horses and walk round them 3 times, CLOCKWISE! It must be clockwise.
Another day we rode into the very remote village of Renchilumbe. It was like the Magnificent 7 riding into a small mexican village. A couple of locals peeped out at us from behind curtained windows. Some took their siesta in the shade of a wall. Cool stuff. The riding in that area wasn´t so much fun as there was alot of marsh. So it´s not to be attemptd without sunglasses.
At the end of the week I´d had a lesson in all things horsy. I knew how to saddle up my own horse. (The guides trained us up for a saddling competition on the last day, which Dirk claimed he won. Though after his antics on the last night I´m sorry I didn´t call for stewards inquiry.) I also learned how pack animals behaved, why they like to trot along with their noses right in the tail of the horse in front. I had first hand experience of the expression chomping at the bit, and knew the implications. Lucky for me on the last day my horse was chomping at the bit, just in time for the end-of-week race. At the starting sign he took off like a wild thing, only to be caught by an ex-race horse ridden by Sabine, who won by 2 lengths. The race was great crack. Seven horses going at it full tilt, muck flying up in the air, hooves thudding, horses breathing down your neck. You can really feel the excitement in the horse when your on it too. And they really do seem to enjoy it. In fact it´s a real challenge trying to calm them all down after, and stop them from running off again.
I never would have believed that I´d enjoy this trip so much. The organization was excellent. The food was top notch. We even had mongolian campfire pizza! The group and the guides were great. We had a few sing-songs, plenty of crack, and plenty of mongolian folk-stories. There´s something very relaxing about trotting along on your horse through the wilderness. Not that I was feeling stressed beforehand. But if you ever were, I´d recommend it as a trip to ease all the troubles away.
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