On the road again

Tim Cope: “To see these nomadic people have the freedom to be able to gallop wherever they pleased completely irrespective of where the roads were gave me a completely different impression of landscape. There’s no fences or roads, there’s no private property. People are living in their yurts. It was a lifestyle that was an exotic fairy tale. What would it be like to live in that world where there’s only a couple inches of felt separating you from these really extreme conditions.”
Dr Paul Mason: The nomadic lifestyle is often exoticized, and we find it very alluring watching it in Hollywood movies. But It required a great deal of knowledge and skill in order to go on walkabout, live off the land and become part of it. It is very possible for anyone to adapt to a new lifestyle, If a sedentary Australian was to become a nomad they would reinvent what being nomadic meant.
Tim Cope: Nomads believe that horses carry you into life, through life and into the after life. And that’s why they used to be buried with their best mounts if they outlived them. Without that union of man and animal on the Steppe, life itself wouldn’t be possible. We’re talking about vast regions that swing from -50 to 50+ °C. It’s infertile, huge distances between watering holes. There’s this sense of camaraderie of man and animal, they’re in it together battling the elements. Much of the nomadic way of life is gone. I’m trying to put the pieces back together, and understand what it was like and how it came to the way it is today. I would stumble upon clues like the ‘terlik’ saddle blanket made completely from woven horse hair from the tail and the mane. I’d been told all the way along, from Mongolia through Kazakhstan, they told me, ‘Have you see the horse hair saddle?’ And sure enough, this old guy in a village right on the border of Russia, he knew how to make them. He’d been making them all of his life. Once upon a time people right across the steppe knew how to make these saddle blankets. He explained that’s how he’s able to ride through rivers, rain and keep going. If he had a felt, or a wool or any other kind of blanket, it tends to rub the skin of a horse. And I started to wonder if therefore it was these kind of saddle pads that the mongols had once used on their great campaigns in Europe. It was like this tiny little clue that was evidence of this culture that once stretched unbroken from Mongolia to Hungry. https://soundcloud.com/nicholas-adams-dzierzba/all-the-pretty-horses