You know how when you go
to the movies and the preview is always better than the movie...
How to capture the essence
of two weeks in Mongolia?
To frame this problem, I'll quickly
summarize what we did (and why we were offline for two weeks). We
flew into Ulaanbataar, the capital city of Mongolia, and after
organizing a group to share the expenses, headed out in a 7-seat
russian 4x4 minibus.
In 13 days we covered 2700km, with maybe 200 km
of asphalt and perhaps as much as 400km of unpaved road.
The rest
was overland (and rock and river). Each night we would stay in a
ger, a sort of felt teepee, but more like a yurt if you know what
that is.
Round, and low-ceilinged with beds arranged around the
sides and a simple woodstove in the center. Water was often only
what we brought with us (though breakfast and dinner were provided by
the family with which we were staying).
So... really out and
about.
On the drive South from
Ulaanbataar we quickly move from the dry dusty, rocky desert hills to
the Gobi proper.
The “Gobi” is the
dominant feature of the Mongolian landscape. Ultimately we would
spend 7 days here, covering about 1700km. This part of Mongolian
landscape mainly plateau at about 1500-2000 meters about sea level.
For the most part it is very flat, but there are mountains that poke
up suddenly, vitually without foothills. As you drive the vistas are
alternatively an unbroken circle of horizon, or an infinity of flat
with distant, craggy peaks.
The kind of view where an hours long
approach to the ridges that look “right there” seem to bring you
no closer.
The Gobi is not just the sand-dune “desert” you see
in pictures (although there is some of that), most of it is “steppe”.
Sparse, harsh earth technically considered grassland, but yielding
something more akin to a badly maintained baseline in a baseball
diamond than the infield or front-lawn texture that a westerner would
associate with the word “grassland”. Every few feet a tuft of
grass will poke through the hard, dusty earth. A meagre mouthful for
the goats, sheep and camels that the nomads try to raise in this
environment. As you look out across the landscape these infrequent
dots of color start to merge at the horizon. The parallax has the
effect of a pontillist painting, and at distance the tableland or
occasional hills defy their true nature by showing subtle hues of
green along with the browns and yellows. It is very beautiful.
It also seems... primeval.
This is among the harshest climates on earth. Annual temperature
variations in a single place can exceed 150 degrees Fareinheit. It
is parched. The result is very low density of plant and animal life,
and even today, of people. This leaves only the wind to wear down
the land that is slowly ascending from tectonic forces. It accounts
for the dust, and the flat and... the fossilized coral we found along
the way. We also saw (with the help of a guide) a nearly intact
skull of a sabre-toothed tiger – reenforcing the visceral sense of
anachronism and physical reminders of the many histories of this
land.
Of all higher order life
on Earth, people inhabit the greatest range in lattitude and climate.
No other creature is as adaptable. One day in the Gobi where we
were spending two nights (no driving) Susan and I were off for a
walk. Our hosts' gers were on a large flat part of the steppe that
abutted some nearly vertical red clay cliffs.
These very much
resembled the landscape of the American Southwest where erosion has
left red sandstone. But here the cliffs were only 20 feet or so.
Atop these were sort of tree-slash-shrubs, desperately holding to the
soil.
Along the edge nearest the cliff the trees seemed dead,
probably sucked dry by the wind off the adjacent steppe. But 5
meters in the trees were alive, and just showing their new spring
growth. The outer sentries were sheltering the other trees from the
wind. This area had a totally different texture of earth, flora and
fauna. I actually got photos of some lizards mating.
It was pretty
entertaining. The male had just sort of latched onto the female with
his jaw and was preventing her from running away. After a few
minutes of her dragging him along, trying to get away, she was
fatigued and stopped struggling. He sort of twisted around (without
letting go) and aligned the necessary parts. It didn't look
comfortable, but neither is small talk and pick-up lines so who am I
to judge.
As I was watching this
ancient, spring-time ballet a local boy happened upon me. Oddly, he
was carrying a shovel. Seeing my interest he showed me how he was
digging holes near the trees, and through gestures, explained that a
single shoveload of dirt removed near a living shrub gives a place
for the rain to collect.
This encourages the shrub to put out a
shoot and grow a new shrub. Eventually they dig up the roots, which
I was assured make good eating. So the trees here are sort of
quasi-cultivated. Its a lens into the history of all mankind. We
started as hunters and nomads, then as herders we could become
semi-nomadic like many of the Mongolians are today – returning to
the same grazing grounds year after year with the new seasons. The
process that this boy was performing, giving centuries or millenia,
would yield a new domesticated crop, and in a different climate and
era, lead to farming, permanent settlements... a history of
civilization in an afternoon.
The night before we had
watched as a local group shaved the camels. They were already
starting to shed their winter coats, and camel wool is valuable as a
trade good and indispensable as a resource for making gers, clothes
and blankets for the family. The method was interesting. After
lassoing the camels and eventually leading the stubborn thing out of
the group, two people would loop a line around the knees until the
camel felt itself “tripping” and would half-sit, half-fall down.
Then they hog tie him (over his strenous objection) before finally
using shears to cut what hair they couldn't just pull off in clumps
with their hands. In the meantime the other camels in the group all
turned away – none of them wanting to watch the distress of their
comrade. (**we were not allowed to take pictures of the camel shaving.)
In the afternoon when we
went camel riding and saw the sabre tooth skull the family patriach
proved the authenticity of the fossil skull by showing how a peice it
stuck to his tongue – a sheep or camel skull fragment (merely a
bone, and not a fossil) won't do this.
It all left me feeling
very ignorant. In days of driving through featureless land, our
driver was never lost once (and no, we didn't have GPS).
The
families we stayed with carve a living out of a landscape that would
kill me within a day of my plastic water bottle went empty – two at
the most. The people who live in this environment have a practical
knowledge and vocabulary that is much more than a language barrier
away from my understanding.
As an engineer I like to think of myself
as knowledgeable about practical things. I'm not just someone who
exists in the meta tier of civiliation, making a living parsing
english literature or some such – I build useful practical stuff.
I can change a tire, I know how electricity actually works, not just
the magic of “plugging it in”. I'm practical - you can explain
this stuff to me, damn it. But here I am a babe in the woods. From
the time they are knee high the kids are learning how to handle the
livestock, find water, to point their ger door away from the
predominant wind, dry the food that will keep, cook the food that
won't, and an infinity of subjects I don't even know about.
...
But it isn't just the
local nomads who adapt. All humans do, and so did we. Adapted to 6,
8 or 10 hour drives along rough landscape with loose shocks, to
sleeping in one ger with 4 new friends and beds about 20 cm shorter
than I am, to “toilets” that don't have seats, or flushing water,
or walls for that matter.
We didn't ever really adapt to the lack of
fresh food (no refrigeration and no roads means everything is dried
or preserved), but we managed. So in the spirit of adaptation, here
is a list of the top things for which I have a new appreciation:
Sit-down toilets
Flushing toilets
(yes, that is seperable)
Walls that keep out
the snow from the toilet (again, yes, it's own, seperable concept)
Fruit
Salad (Leafy Greens!)
Bactrian Camels (two
humps means one to lean on and one to hold on to)
Western or English
saddles (as opposed tiny little wooden ones)
Horses that are used
for pleasure instead of those expecting real horsemen with skills
Climates where poo
decomposes rapidly (less to step in)
Climates where poo
decomposes slowly (less to smell)
