A TALE OF THREE CITIES

(photography from Christos Kanatas)

A Tale of three cities. (Ulaan Batar, Mongolia, 16.09.08)



Ulgii, Bayan-Ulgii aimag, North-Western Mongolia.

Ulgii was our first taste of city life after entering Mongolia.

We did not know it at the time, but Ulgii is very different from other Mongolian towns.

Ulgii is the fief of the Kazakh, which is the reason why when strolling the busy streets one almost feels as if being a few thousand kilometres east, somewhere between Asia and the Middle East, rather than in the geographical heart of Asia.
Muslim Kazakhs are here representing almost 80% of the local population, whereas in the rest of Mongolia they are an ethnic minority. (6% of the general Mongolian population is Kazakh).

Ulgii resembles a big bazaar. It is disorderly, dirty, noisy and full of activity. The bustling market takes over a quarter of the town, with the animal, fur and meat market spreading all the way to the suburbs. Only four of the town’s streets are paved, the rest is dirt. Rain only falls for 60 days a year in this region and every movement stirs clouds of dust into the air. Most people walk around their face covered with a surgical mask. Still, Ulgii has an air of ongoing festival. Cows wander the street freely, provoking storms of impatient blaring of car horns, stopping here and there to feed on piles of rubbish. Goats are running across the main square, chased by children, while an aloof-looking statue of Lenin stares patronizingly ahead, frozen in time. Girls stroll arm in arms, talking on their mobile phones and boys queue at the local ‘Internet and PC games’ parlour. Hardly anyone is dressed in traditional Mongolian clothes.
There are thousands of shops, selling anything from shampoo to musical instruments, horse saddles, fake Gucci sunglasses; samovars, disco biscuits and Mongolian pop music.
There are wedding corteges everywhere, coloured light-bulbs in the few rare trees, music pouring out of scratchy loudspeakers and at the local disco one can dance to the sound of heavy-duty European techno interspersed with mewling Kazakh pop music as bad as the sound of nails on a board. Never has anyone heard such a bad sound system.

It seems that the whole town is resolutely turned to the west, where many are already preparing to emigrate. There is an en masse migration of Kazakhs back to Kazakhstan, where they see better opportunities for themselves and their children. Many families send their older children to study in Almaty instead of Ulaan Batar.
Kazakhs are proud and industrious people, often very successful even in Mongolia.
Where alcoholism decimates many a struggling Mongolian family, Kazakhs will rally around the Mosque and help each other, their religious belief keeping them safe from the ravages of vodka. Mongolian authorities try to persuade Kazakh families to stay in the country by setting up special Kazakh schools and teaching even non-Kazakh children the Kazakh language as early as kindergarten.

Our guide and translator, Juka, a young Kazakh woman recently married and pregnant with her first child is excitedly describing what her new life will be like in Kazakhstan.
‘My husband and I will live in the city’, she says. ‘I am a teacher and over there I will have a lot of money. We will not have animals of our own anymore, which is a lot easier. My husband has family over there already who have many animals. They live in the countryside. But we don’t want to live like this anymore. We will have a car and visit them sometimes.’
‘Are you not sad to be leaving your own family behind?’ I ask.
Juka doesn’t reply. She smiles a little sadly, but she smiles.
‘Sometimes we will come back to visit them’ she says finally. We will have money to travel, in Kazakhstan’.
Juka already lives in the city. She lives in the suburbs of Ulgii in her husband’s family compound. As newly married couple without children they do not have their own ger yet and instead share a large Kazakh ger with the groom’s elderly mother and his two younger, unmarried sisters. In the same compound, organized at each cardinal point are four small and badly built wooden huts which they prefer to living in a traditional ger and in which the other married members of the family live with their children, a step away from a typical nuclear family. The rest of the compound is exactly identical as its neighbours, surrounded by high palisade, dusty, barren, with a small shack built over a hole for toilet. The family is relatively well off to Mongolian standards but this is the way everyone live. Water is fetched by the older children at a well just a few meters away from the gate, which alone is already a sign of luxury, as most other families have to often travel a few kilometres for water.
Juka and her husband left for Kazakhstan a few days after we left Ulgii.








Ulaangom, Uuvs aimag, Northern Mongolia.

Ulaangom on a summer Sunday afternoon. The town is wrapped in an air of sleepy, timeless serenity. The streets are wide, Soviet style. The few people around move slowly, stunned by sunshine. Two old women dressed in traditional dels are riding their ponies side-by-side, boots touching, cheerfully chatting to one another.
A jeep crammed full of goats drives past at a crawl, zigzagging on the rutted street. Near the deserted market three men in dusty dels and wide-brimmed cowboy hats sit on their haunches next to their sleepy horses, nonchalantly hobnobbing in the acrid smoke of their newspaper-skinned cigarettes. In a shady courtyard off the main street some old men in threadbare, colourless dels are playing pool under the intent eyes of a group of bedraggled children of all ages, their cheeks smeared with dirt and snot, their clothes in tatters. All of the men are playing for money. Whoever wins buys vodka for the others. It is a very democratic game. By the side of the road rusting cargo containers have been reconverted into street stalls where one can have his shoes mended or his tyres patched up. Between them the bare earth smells of urine. Packs of dogs roam the streets, often twenty of them chasing an unfortunate bitch already covered in bite wounds. In an alleyway a drunken man, almost comatose in his intoxication is on all four in the dirt, lost between one world and the next. Behind each building dusty no-man’s land display their equally rickety collections of pit-toilets shacks, their putrid smell stirred by the hot breeze. Near the end of the main street children are queuing for water at the communal well. They wait patiently under the baking sun before slowly making their way back home, staggering under the weight of their jerry cans. Only 10% of Ulaangom homes have running water and wells are few and far apart. Then just when I think I have some kind of understanding of this place, a brand new Hummer drives past, its windows blackened, leaving a trail of high-pitch Mongolian pop. Two girls walk out of an Internet cafe arm-in-arm, Asian Barbie dolls tottering on stiletto boots and skin-tight jeans. Their cheap imported Chinese t-shirts proclaim strangely misspelled pseudo-American slogans, such as ‘D-treme babe’ and ‘fashion-sweats’, at their arm swing fake, oversized Vuitton bags. A heavily pregnant woman climbs out of a taxi, wearing an elaborate sailor outfit. ‘Generation Fuk’ is boldly stitched in gold letter over her round belly. I cannot believe my eyes.

Still, in spite of the pervading poverty Ulaangom seems vacant and orderly, sitting in stiff comfort on the crumbling ruins of it communist past. An outsized square marks its centre, soviet style, fashioned in cracked concrete slabs lifted here and there by the stubborn roots of shrubs. A solitary cow wanders slowly past the bronze statue of the old communist dictator Jumjaagiin Tsedenbal. Every second door opens onto a gloomy shop strictly identical to one another, where behind rickety counters dusty shelves display rows upon rows of imported biscuits and baskets of boiled lollies in garish wrappers. The streets are wide and bare under the sun, each a gateway to the open valley of red sand undulating in soft wrinkles. To the west the sun is setting in unearthly orange between purple peaks.
A small group of Buddhist monks pass me by on their way home to the Dechinraavjalin Khiid, the pallid resurrection of the ancient monastery, which before its pillage and destruction in 1938 contained seven temples and two thousand monks. Timidly rebuilt a few years ago, the temple is now no more than a concrete ger filled with plastic Buddha. Of the two thousand monks persecuted and deported to labour camps seventy years ago nothing remains but a few yellowing photographs hanging askew into the temple’s office.
Ulaangom is a place in limbo.
One upon a time it a was a busy trading place where caravans brought goods and merchants from the whole of Asia trading gold, spices and furs. With communism the merchants disappeared, but schools and factories were built, infrastructures developed.
Young couples getting married were given livestock, which although didn’t technically belong to them was enough to feed their growing family. When catastrophic weather destroyed herds the State helped with acquiring new herds. In Mongolia many people, especially those who struggle with poverty, remember fondly the time of Soviet protection, when it seemed everyone willing to work had a job and there was always food on the table. Almost invariably, those who now are doing well are very satisfied with the free market and proud to be the real owners of their animals. When the Communist abandoned Mongolia a few well placed and well informed people quickly privatise everything they could put their hands on and became almost instantly immensely rich, entering the global market their pockets stuffed with money that wasn’t theirs and quickly growing from there. In the meantime, anti-communist militants destroyed many of the buildings and infrastructure built during Soviet times, regardless of what use could be made of them. Every Mongolian town and village is eerie with the crumbling wrecks of never-finished or half-destroyed buildings. ‘Why breaking everything?’ mourns an old man before the bleak skeleton of a ruined apartment building. ‘These were fine buildings, stronger than anything we are building now. Why take revenge on buildings?’
‘Remember how they (the communists) destroyed our temples!’ retorts another man.
‘We do not want their things!’
The old man shakes his head. ‘These were fine buildings’, he keeps saying. ‘Fine buildings’.
The statue of Lenin, one hand in his pocket and the other raised to mark his point spreads a long shadow across the mangy square in the late afternoon light.
‘What to make of all this..?’ mumbles the old man.




Murun, Khovsgol aimag, Northern Mongolia.

After months in the wilderness, Murun is a shock to the system.
In Murun one cannot help but being reminded at every street corner of the nitro-glycerine atmosphere of ‘El mariachi’ or any such neo-western cult movie crammed full of dust, yellow sunlight, shady characters and gallons of tomato sauce.
In Murun one never knows whether to laugh or cry. There are so many fights erupting at every drop of a hat that I have often wondered in consternation if perhaps there was something in the water.
Well more than the water, the problem seems more likely to be related to vodka. Never in our lives have we seen so many drunks, even in the dankest, most wretchedly depressing industrial areas of Siberia. And Mongolians do not make graceful drunks. They become completely preposterous at the smallest drop, will reel and roll around swinging a vengeful fist at anyone after one glass and be lying face-down in the muck after two, yet when a Mongolian drinks he seldom stops until he passes out. The streets are littered with grown men lying sometimes halfway across the street or between the feet of their horses. People do not seem to be either upset or reproachful. Mongolians are very open-minded people and if I have widely heard that vodka is a bad thing, never have I heard that as a matter of fact if Vodka is a bad thing then people who drink vodka are bad people. I often wondered how can a man have such little pride that he would not think twice about drinking himself to the point of spending twenty-four hours lying in the dirt and his own excrements in the middle of a busy market-place, in front of thousands of people including his own family and children. But in Mongolia people are not spiteful. Derision and mockery are European traits. Mongolians are not like this. They may be, like in Murun, quick to pick a fight and swing their fists around but they are not malicious. The drunks we see in the street have good reasons to drink, or none, but the result is the same. It is a disturbing, saddening sight, a problem that has its roots somewhere too far enough underground to be easily cured, so what is the point in criticising?

Murun is the second largest town in Mongolia after Ulaan Batar and it is bustling to say the least. There are cars, horse-carts, trucks, bicycles, motorbikes, mounted horsemen and pedestrians stuck at every street corner into explosive-looking traffic-jams. The inevitable cows, goats and packs of dogs add to the mayhem, along with about a million children.
The first time we saw Murun, however, there were no children. It was still school holidays and most families, even if they do work or trade in the city, have sent their children in the countryside to help their grandparents or family members with the herds. The town then was grey, ominous, depressing. Walking through the market to provision for our trip to the Tsataans I narrowly avoided being struck by a stray slap destined to the woman standing behind me. Three middle-aged yoghurt-sellers were having a heated argument about God-knows-what and slaps were flying around. Incidentally, when I walk past the same point an hour later the three woman were once again sitting side-by-side, passably friendly to one another this time but united in a volatile looking squabble with another three street-sellers sitting a few feet away across the alley.
Needless to say I sped off.
Meanwhile Ramsay, while sitting on the driver seat of the truck waiting for a mechanic suddenly saw a drunk open the door and with no warnings at all drag him outside to attempt to punch him. Luckily the man was too unsteady on his legs to fight and was carried off by the momentum of his own punch, falling headlong in the dirt.
The list of incidents of this type could fill pages of absurd and near-comic descriptions.

However, when we returned to Murun three weeks later, bracing ourselves for another forced stay in this world capital of far-east burlesque, things had change completely. Well, the drunks and louts were still there, of course but almost completely buried in a sea of fluffy pony-tails, squeaky new school shoes and garish uniforms. Literally thousands of children had invaded the town, most of them down from the high country where their families had remained, having to send their children sometimes as young as seven years old to live at the school’s dormitory for the whole of the school year, often not seeing them again until the next holiday three months away, in the dead of winter. Some children do not see their families again until the following summer. The children we saw, however, seemed happy, confident and content, running across the busy traffic with their brand new school bags bouncing on their backs, an ice cream in hand.

THE WILD

THE WILD (Tsagaan Uul, Khovsgod, Northern Mongolia)

For three months, we trudged eastwards, deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
We long ago left paved roads behind, then trails written in dust and rocks, until even the trails had thinned to a single track, barely etched in the furrowed earth by the hooves of horses, until we reached the end of the world we knew.

From where we stood was the beginning of time itself, where the world had remained unchanged, untouched, protected by its own inaccessibility behind a rampart of mountains, a harsh and mystical world of prairies, forests and hundreds of scattered glacial lakes. Before us lay a wall of mountains behind which lay a maze of peaks and valleys: the Darkhad Depression is the ancient site of a glacial lake formed during the world’s first land formations, millions of years ago. It spreads over 100 000sq km of true wilderness, with the nearest jeep trail almost a hundred kilometres away. It is a world that can only be reached into by horses or foot. So that one crisp autumn morning we strapped our bedrolls onto the back of our saddles and set off towards the rolling hills.

As we forded the first river, our shoeless horses belly-deep in the icy whirlpool, carefully threading over slippery boulders and here and there carried several metres downstream by the current, it downed to us that this was the very point we had sought from the beginning of the voyage. For the past two years, and for some of us over half a lifetime, we had journeyed toward this very moment. We had dwelled deeper and deeper into the last few places miraculously overlooked by the rest of the world.
It was a long process, an initiation, as if the moment we had timidly stepped into this tumultuous river of life that is our endless journeying was the only time we had in fact acted deliberately. Then the current had carried us away, stripping us little by little of all that remained of our previous lives, of our past, of our attachments, of whatever knowledge we thought we had, until even our words left us before this world which beauty can never be fully described, which harsh environment quickly stripped us of thousands of years of evolution and turned us back into primeval beings climbing pines for food and rubbing muddy rocks on wasps bites, our faces cacked in dirt and horses’ sweat. We rode on and on, pelted by rain and sleet, galloping across high plateaux before storm clouds bruised green with hail. We struggled across mosquitos-ridden swamps, our horses wild with fear as they sank to their knees in the swallowing black mud. We slowly inched up to the 3035m Uuren Uul, climbing on cold-numbed feet over rocks and fallen trees, pulling our panting horses behind us. Round us the Ulaan Taiga wore the colours that gave her her name, ablaze with crimson larch and yellow pines. Violet cowbells specked the golden grass, or indigo forget-me-nots which here flower well after the first snows. Tiny streams trickled in the rich earth. Here and there the mountain exploded in granite blocks split in mock smiles by the pressure of ice, spilling mouthfuls of semi-crystallised snow quartz blinding white in the sunlight. Squeezed between the high peaks, the sky seemed a fight between sun and clouds, washing one mountain flank in slanted black rain and the other in molten light. At sundown, we dismounted in soggy clearings and set about making camp on stiff legs, laughing at each other’s gait. Water was abundant, and moss made a soft bed. Soon a fire blazed, and steam rose off our clothes, while in our blackened pot our dinner simmered and our stomachs rumbled in anticipation.
We nursed our frozen feet on warm stones and hanged our socks on sticks to dry them over the flames. By the end of the third day none of us had a single piece of clothing that wasn’t cacked in mud, a sleeping bag that wasn’t damp, or a pair of socks that hadn’t at least partially burnt. Our hands were covered in sticky black sap from climbing pines in search of nuts. We were covered in raw spots by the gruelling ride. Our noses dripped from the cold and water froze in the jerry can.
We ate together from our single pot, and never had bland rice or noodles tasted so good. We rationed our meagre supply of tea to one tea-bag per saucepan and drank it out of empty cans, for our plastic cups had been shattered by a bucking horse.
Never had we been so happy. We looked at each other grinning over the fire, joking at the events of the day. Ramsay had almost fallen off his horse when the latter trotted under a branch high enough for him but not for poor Ramsay who got flattened backward over the horse’s rump, almost toppling over in a roll spectacular enough for a circus clown-act. Ramsay’s pack horse had lost his load twice in the midst of a hail-storm right up the top of a pass and in full wind, while the rest of us galloped madly ahead, hooting with joy, unaware of Ramsay’s battle with his own horse, the pack horse, and the struggle to tie everything back on in the midst of the storm. Or Ramsay’s horse had jumped over a ditch, taking Ramsay by surprise, which landed him halfway off the back of his saddle right onto the metal piece used to tie bedrolls to, seriously denting poor Ramsay’s bottom and leaving him with bloodstains on his pants for days afterward. Or Ramsay had boldly stepped into a stream, assured that his ‘Robocop’ looking Mongolian boots were impermeable, only to discover that off course there weren’t, a mistake that he paid for dearly. Not only his feet froze to death and he burnt his socks one by one over the fire trying to dry them over the next few days, but for almost the entire rest of the trip his approach was heralded by the squashed frogs sound his feet made, which invariably sent us into gales of laughter.
Does it seem that most misadventures happened to Ramsay? Well yes, for the greatest part, which made them even the funnier. But if this sound cruel it can here be mentioned that those who laughed the loudest were not left unscathed. Mark’s cocci-bone was also bleeding by the end of the trip (somehow Mongolian saddles do not conform with European men’s bottom shape) and for my part I was attacked by marsh-flies and bitten on the lip, which thanks to some allergic reaction quickly turned my face into a gruesome lump, making me resemble elephant-man for days afterwards. There is a democracy in the right to laugh at each other’s misadventures. We are all equal in suffering, except perhaps for lucky Inge who somehow remained unscathed. So we forbade her the right to laugh, although we did make fun of her for spreading torn bin-liners over her legs when it rained in an attempt to stay dry, which we found hilarious. But she had no bruises and a perfect horse, so we had a debt to settle.

As days passed we noticed that our minds became less and less cluttered. It seemed that the dirtier we became the happier we were and the more serene we grew. Our intellectual beings faded away, sucked back into some astral height of which we had suddenly been completely cast off. Instead our feet were growing more firmly planted in the earth, our minds fully but peacefully engaged in the next chore, such as shaping a slither of wood to brush dirt of a horse, where it would otherwise become a hard lump which would ultimately rub itself into a wound, or tightening or loosening a saddle strap depending on the time of the day, or making a lean-to to protect ourselves from the incessant rain and try to dry our clothes, or washing our faces into an icy stream without falling in head-first, (which happened a lot, unfortunately. Mark once fell twice in a row).
We had no books, no other distraction than each other’s funny idiosyncrasies, and all our energy was taken by our endeavour anyway, leaving us completely exhausted after a full day’s rough ride and the sorting out of camp and horses. We fell asleep the minute we lay down, unaware of the rain dripping into our damaged tent and soaking us further. We woke up every morning to a frosted blanket and another miracle of simply being in the mountain. We stretched our stiff muscles and marvelled at yet another perfect day. Before us the tight gorges were shrouded in mist, a nearby spring trickled in grass beds dressed in frosty crystals. Washing yourself gave you an instant ice-cream-headache, but then filled you with strange warmth. Not feeling your feet for days on end did not matter anymore, for soon lay the promise of a fire and the pleasure of warm stones underfoot.
The journey had taken us to where we wanted to be. Somewhere along this turbulent path we had lost everything but the clothes on our back, a soggy bedroll, a toothbrush and a bar of soap.
This was all we needed. The lighter we were, the happier we grew.

Beside we had something else to keep us feeling elated. Somewhere deep inside these virgin valleys lived one of the most mysterious and remote people of the world: the Tsataans.
These were the people that we had come from so far to meet, and would have gladly travelled twice this distance if necessary. Constantly moving from one valley to the next in search of the rare moss and red larch their reindeers need, they are very hard to find. So we rode on, scrutinizing the forest for signs of recent camp.
Somewhere, nestled in the narrow valleys of the Shishigt Gol or one of its tributary, we would find a few tippees and see with our own eyes these mythical, reindeer-riding men, so remote than one can only hope to reach them during three month of the year, after which the mountain closes over them, and only after days, or even weeks of riding so deep into the wilderness that memories of any other life has sometimes almost faded away.

Zuud (dream)

Züüd (dream) (Altaan Els. 22.08.08)


When time does not matter anymore every moment is eternity.
Days here are so filled with wonder, beauty and revelations that from morning to night there are no hours, no clock, only the depth of each moment.
I feel like a gold collector, but the river is teeming with ore. I am overwhelmed. I have no choice but to shoulder this load of almost overpowering gratitude to the world, with too many words to write, too many pictures to take, so many moments of bewildered happiness that I stumble into each new day like a sleepwalker.

Mongolia is a land of deserts and mountains, of temperatures shifting more than eighty degrees in just over a few months, yet every few kilometres brings you to a place entirely different from the one you have left behind, a place where once again no matter which way you look, you will be left speechless by the indescribable beauty of the landscape.
Mongolia is a land where people are some of the poorest in the world, yet never have I encountered such generosity, such candour and nobleness of spirit.

In spite of its vast emptiness, you are never alone in Mongolia.
Somewhere, barely visible against the green rolling hills will be a ger, a herd of goats, a friendly face.
A ger is a refuge, a symbolic home where one is always welcome, simply, without fanfare, just as one of the family.

How to face the world after Mongolia?
How to return to a world where one must forever apologise, be little, be needless, be alone? In Mongolia there is room for everyone, for every faith, for every character.
In a land where mere survival entirely depends on co-operation, on assisting one another naturally, there is no place or time for chicanery. Mongolia is one of the coldest inhabited places on earth. For month on end, families shelter together in tiny, circular, privacy-less little felt tents. There is no place for isolation. Here isolation is death. Love prevails, tranquil, unconditional love.

Inside a ger there is a whole world, a world built around fire and family.
I often thought that Mongolia is a child’s paradise. Here small children never have to be separated from their parents. There is always someone to snuggle against, someone to provide entertainment. Life is simple, understandable. Perils are simple to understand and unchangeable: a deep well, a high cliff, the hooves of a horse, a hot stove. The world is full of smiling faces and welcoming arms. A toddler can see his mother milking a cow and he understands where the milk comes from. He will see a sheep being slaughtered and know where meat and fur for his winter coat comes from. His family is always around him. In almost every ger three or four generations are represented, with in nearby gers other members of the family.



********


The smoothly undulating hills have been replaced with sharp, angry rocks.
The horizon is full of rocky needles pointing straight at the sky. Here weather has played havoc with the land, shaped it with some kind of fury.
The ground is sandy, made of pulverised mountains. Erosion has shaped the windward side of the sand dunes into abrupt, rock-pitted toboggans. At the bottom of the unstable cliff runs a swift flowing river, thick with ice.

It is only late august but already the sun has been bleached of all warmth.
A very old lady wrapped in a dusty del is making her way slowly towards us across the barren plateau, hunched against the stiffening breeze.
Her grandsons are running ahead like a flock of playful birds, their cheeks red with cold.
She stops at the bottom of our ladder. ‘Sain-baino!’ we call to her. ‘Come in!’
She lifts her smiling face towards us and only then do I realise that she is blind.
Her vacant eyes resemble the milky eyelids of the eagle I held on my arm a few weeks ago. Her face is shaped by wind and laughter, covered in hieroglyphic wrinkles; the same fine, strong, but gentle creases that define the mountains around her. Her slightly hunched but still stately posture does not denounce her blindness. Neither does her step, slow but unhesitant among the stones and thorny bushes.
Her children are her eyes. And the mountain that she knows so well does not deceive her. Thorny bushes are preceded by their sharp scent. Large stones had been there since her childhood.
She cannot climb into the truck. So we make hot, sweet tea from the fragrant herbs that grow around our camp and stood outside with her, arched against the wind, holding our steaming bowls with both hands to keep warm. She looked around at our invisible faces. She smiles and nod with inner satisfaction. Her grandchildren sit on their haunches in the red sand; sucking on the handfuls of boiled sweets we gave them. They observe us and converse softly, only ever lifting from us their intent gaze to rest it for a moment on their grandmother, as if more than a few instants without seeing her might suddenly allow her to disappear, leaving them defenceless among us strange people.
Behind us the rustle of the river seems to gather in substance. Snow-laden clouds converge against the already whitening mountain slopes.
We drink our tea in silence, smiling at each other above our steaming bowls.
We have no words to share, no language, so we share in the moment.
It is simple. Beautiful.
Time trickles peacefully and the scene gathers pigments in the colouring-box of my memories. Silence allows for details to emerge: three berry-shaped glass buttons at her shoulder, stitched with tiny brass bells; the glint of a silver thread running along the hem of her scarf. On her feet she wears thick leather riding boots, Russian army-style, several times too big for her. On her ears flash little heart-shaped diamante earrings, of the kind you would find on a little girl, perhaps a present from a granddaughter. I feel a lump in my throat.
She is too beautiful for words.
She drank her tea with her eyes down, in noisy, appreciative slurps.

Then, as if summoned by an invisible clock, the family pile up their bowls and touch their heart.
The old lady holds our hands together in both of hers. ‘Bayar-tai’, she says.
Her words of goodbye sound like a riddle. Her voice also, has the clarity and innocence of a little girl.

They walk away pushed by the wind, the littlest boy holding his grandmother’s hand. Together they thread carefully among the stones.
Ahead his older brothers chase each other in the red sand, carried by the sound of their own laughter.

NAIRAMDAL (Friendship) (Tsengel. Mongolia. 07.08.08)

The song rose in the darkness, pure like the crystal river that flowed past.
The girls held us by the hand and we walked six in a row among sleepy horses, drunk on the magic of their voices and the ethereal splendour of the starry sky.
I close my eyes for an instant and led myself glide over this moment.
To feel so small, so light, so insignificant and yet so deeply happy; a smiling, tiny buoy bobbing up and down in a sea of gentleness. The girls sang their melodious Kazakh songs, speaking of winters and warm summer winds, of fattening sheep and blissful weddings, of abundant milk, celebrations and life.
In the moonless light we made out the soft, welcoming shape of a Ger. The girls’ hands tightened over ours, hot and dry, pulling us toward the painted wooden door of their home.
‘Tsai!’ they said. ‘Moloko! Come and eat’
The door opened and we were pushed in, caught in the tide of singing girls.
Inside we blinked in the sudden light, lost for a moment in a swirling world of warmth and colours, the permeating smell of milk.
The Ger was a tempest of crimson and bright orange, volutes of cotton coils and twirls chasing each other in a voluptuous dance all around the circular walls. Every surface was decorated with plump, embroided felt, each of the little brass bed lining the inside perimeter covered in rich woollen blankets. A neatly pressed suit hung on a pink plastic coat hanger next to a yellowing picture of a patriarch. An old women breastfeeding a toddler stood up as we entered, greeting us with a gaping smile, her face a furrow of lines that seemed to converge toward her eyes like rivers, filling them with light and wonder. Her baby suckled as she spoke and gestured to us toward a small table near the hearth, his one visible eye darting curiously at us, glinting like a dark stone in a riverbed. The girls sat next to us all talking at once, while the oldest rushed around the tent, collecting here and there food for her guests: a bowl of dried curds from a large cotton bag, a large bread from a pillowcase, a giant kettle filled with hot yak milk, a jar of cream. The table disappeared beneath piles of butter, sugar, yellow cheeses in waxy shells. We looked at each other and began to eat, dipping our buttered bread in milk, smiling above our steaming bowls as they looked on with cheer joy at our appetite. A group of red-cheeked children burst in, bringing with them the scent of the night. They sat near the door, laughing and murmuring in each other’s ears. Their hands, like the hands of their older sisters, always busy touching each other’s hair, hands or shoulders, giving and receiving love and tenderness in the most natural way in the world, like a mother touches her child.
‘Sisterrrr! Sisterrr!’ they called, bursting into laughter when we smiled in return.
We had no language to communicate, but mirth and gratitude need no words. They are written in irrepressible smiles and the warmth of a glance, the touch of a hand.
We sat in this world of joy and colours, of love in a million multicolour stiches sewn into a home and the riches of all this food they had conjured up with their work, skills and care for their animals.
Outside bullets of parching winds shook the few, ragged trees, sending twirls of spiralling dust high into the air, blurring the stars.
Of Mongolia there is too much to tell. Where to begin?
But if all had to be said in a few words… it would be that one has never known what genuine, unbounded friendliness and unadulterated human spirit truly was, before encountering the Nomads of Mongolia.
These people are a miracle, yet do they know how precious their mere existence is in this nuclear world of eight billion lonely souls?

The Nomads of the Talbooash

Coohkboohk sat on a steel-framed single bed covered in thick woollen blankets and yak skins. Her frame was so frail than she appeared almost weightless.
Her face was the colour of dark leather and so furrowed that she her whole features had with time become frozen in a symphony of emotions ranging from surprise, to extreme tranquillity, to the purest gentleness. Her slanted eyes were tiny and almost disappearing being the heavy curtains of her eyelids, but sparkling like the river rushing alongside her ger. To us Coohkboohk was the mountain itself, so shaped and coloured by her environment as to emanate it within and without. We were in the Valley of the Goddess and Coohkcboohk was the Goddess.
At Coohkboohk’s feet sat her son Volodya, smiling proudly, encouraging us to drink more of his delicious yak milk, and eat yet another bowl of sweet curds.
His niece Kuruz, her long black plait swinging softly past her waist, was filling up bottles of milk for us to take home.
Then Marc took out his flute and began to play. The sound of his music filled the soft, circular interior of the ger. The whole family sat rapt and smiling in respectful silence, Koohkboohk’s eyes luminous in the gloom, fixed on Marc’s flute.
Rain begun to fall outside, drumming lightly on the felt cover and falling in brilliant dust through the round opening at the centre of the roof.
A ger is a little circular house made of felt. It is so robust and warm that no matter how demented the mountain weather outside, inside it the atmosphere was almost womb-like in its calm and warmth. In the middle sat a rusty stove in which our hosts were burning flat cakes of cow-dung. In a circle, along the walls of the ger were two beds and a cooking stove. Saucepans were neatly hooked-up on the wall above it, with next to it large bags of flour and dried curds. Kuruz piled a plate high with the flat golden breads she had just baked for us and more milk was poured into our bowls. We talked of our countries and families, but every times we offered thanks for the extraordinary hospitality we were shown we were only met with slightly surprised looks, as if gratitude was not expected of us in the least. Upon arriving we had offered the family some gifts of rope and horse blankets, also a good stainless steel shackle I had taken from my boat. The rope was Volodya’s favourite. He suspended it to his belt and kept stroking its soft fibres. Bringing rope as a gift, or anything to do with horses was a splendid idea given to us by Tim, an Australian friend who had already spent close to ten years in this part of the world and twice travelled the whole length of Russia and Mongolia, once on a bicycle and once on horseback, a trip which took him from Ulaan Bator to Hungary and which lasted over three years. Tim had spent much time with the Nomads, Kazakh Nomads such as Volodya’s family among others and knew much about their customs.
Volodya’s family owned six hundred and fifty horses and almost the same number of horses and cattle. They owned several winter corals as well as this ger, in which they spent the summer, high in the mountains where the pasture was rich for their herds. Volodya had seven children and was himself one of five. Koohkboohk was the elder and matriarch of the clan, much loved and respected babushka. Koohkboohk spent her days looking over the goats, enveloped in her perennial calm and the aura of her resplendent smile.
When it was time to leave we were accompanied by the two young boys Amoohr and Agailek, who were in charge of escorting us to the safest place to cross the river to get back to the truck and our camp.
Saying goodbye was not easy. Even in two short visits to the ger and such a short time in this miraculous land we had already become so attached to our hosts that the realisation that we had to leave the next day and travel to Tashanta and the Mongolian border left us dreamy and a little sad.
We had journeyed so far to find these people.
We had journeyed so far to gaze into their eyes and learn some of their mysterious ways to live in this world in such a light way.
What we learnt in meeting them we cannot put in words, or film, or pictures.
They left in our heart an indescribable feeling of peace and hope for the future of the world. We live at a time when most scientist and environmental specialist tell us that we are doomed, that human beings are the cancer of the world. Yet upon watching these people live their simple, rich and peaceful life one cannot but feel that it is possible for a human to leave no mark upon the world.
For thirty thousand years men had lived in this valley, yet the valley had remained unchanged, or perhaps unchanged by its inhabitants if not for the general effects of Global Warming which, Volodya explained, had made the permafrost of Mount Talbooash melt to barely a patch of grey ice over the past ten years, something that had never happened before, he explained. Now the river flowed faster and the shape of the valley begun to change. More and more often, spring would come too early and then freeze again, creating a hard layer of ice, which the animals couldn’t break. Every year, Volodya lost hundreds of animals. For some herders of the Altai, the situation sometimes meant that they would loose most if not all their herds in just a few days, leaving them to starve. The effects of these disrupted weather patterns are felt all throughout the world, yet in fragile eco-systems such as the Altai it is quickly becoming disastrous. The Nomads have done nothing to contribute to this deterioration of the world, yet they are some of the most directly affected by it.
Once, walking alone in the mountain I came across the print of a ger in the soft ground. Around the abandoned camp were scattered a few bones and a tiny felt shoe, forgotten behind. These were the only evidence that there ever were people living for months in this place. A soft print in the grass, a few bones, a leather baby shoe that they had stitched and embroded themselves, with you could tell just by looking at it, all the love in the world… these were, with an oval pile of stones which marked the grave of a dead, the only visible testimony that this had been a whole family’s home, just as all the mountains around were their home, since the beginning of time.
There is no electricity in the steppe or the mountain, there is no running water, or TV or phone, yet these people have so much in just the way they are.
As we packed up to leave we saw Agailek and Amoohr playing near the river. They stood on one leg and tried to capsize each other, a simple game which absorbed them completely. The sound of their laughter followed us far along the trail back to civilization, high and pure in the mountain wind.

Children of the Mountain

As evening came we set up camp in the shelter of a small rocky hill in the centre of the Valley of the Goddess.
Here and there, among the rocks and stubby mountain grass were randomly scattered hundreds of animal bones, but no signs of herds.
The valley lay empty, swept by wind and the dying sunlight streaming between the clouds.
In the truck Maya cooked ‘five fingers’, a traditional dish of boiled horsemeat and large, flat noodles that we all shared out of one bowl and ate with our fingers.
The mountain air was sharp and cool, and every now and then the crack of thunder resounded deafeningly over the mountain.
Our dry cow-dung fire belched thick, fragrant smoke but kept us warm as a few large drops begun to fall, pushed hard by the wind. We huddled closer to the fire as Agalash strummed his two-string Altai sitar, conjuring visions of galloping horses and cascading rivers.
Agalash could not have been more than fourteen years old, but his aplomb and virtuosity was arresting. His fingers rushed along the neck of the sitar without the slightest hesitation. Only two strings to the instrument but we were awed by the richness and diversity of the chords and melodies he played. His typically Altai features were set in an attentive mask, his gaze shifting from hand to hand and every so often to briefly gaze at his mother.
Agalash’s features, set well beyond his age were fascinating to observe. His quiet confidence and calm assessment of our motley crew was something typical of the Altai people.
The next morning, when two little Kazakh Nomads materialised seemingly out of nowhere next to the truck, riding a stout and gentle looking pony, I again found myself captivated by the serenity of their features. Riding saddle-less and with a hand-made bridle without a mouthpiece, the two little boys were one with their mount. The pony’s ears twitched to attention at their slightest movements, listening intently to the tone of their voices, as if the animal’s only concern was the safety and contentment of its mount. With the boys were two big dogs resembling a cross between a German Sheppard and a sheep. The dogs also seemed rapt in their role of protector, circling the boys and keeping a suspicious eye on anyone coming close to them.
Where had these boys come from? I wondered as I looked around. There were no signs of gers for kilometres. The valley was empty but for a large herd of about a hundred cows grazing peacefully across the river, slowly progressing north. These cows were probably the charge of these two little shepherds, who would not have been more than ten years old and who in spite of their obvious curiosity in our sponsors’ logos bedecked truck and our strange, dirty faces, did not forget for an instant to keep an eye on what was happening to the cows and their young, especially as some of them attempted to cross the dangerous, fast-flowing river.
Amoohr and Agailek were their names, Altai names they added with pride.
They dismounted and sat on their haunches in the hot sun, giggling at our earnest attempts at communicating with them in a mix of Ramsay’s hilariously inventive sign language and our few words of Russian. They pointed toward the deepening gorge, to the side of the mountain where we suddenly made out the shape of a ger, tiny in the distance.
‘Our family is living there’ they said. ‘You are welcome to go and meet them’.

The Wild Path

‘Are you ok up there?’ shouted Ramsay
We could just see the top of his mushroom-style ponytail prodding out from the truck’s window.
‘All good! Go for it!’
Already, the truck was lurching forward, jolting over stones and into the potholes of the track as Marc and I held on for dear life to whatever we could find to steady ourselves against the wild rocking of the truck beneath us.
Riding on the roof of a truck on a mountain track is no mean feat, but a million times more fun than to sit inside the madly crashing cabin, especially now that we were no less than height people, plus a dog.
Marc and I looked at each other, wild with fear and boundless hilarity.
The truck moved in hic-ups in a storm of noise and dust, while we laughed so hard into the wind that our lips became glued to our teeth.
Behind us rose a cloud of dust, blurring the mountains in the distance.
Inside the truck were crammed Anna, the Russian girl who had joined us two days before, Maya, our Altai guide and her teenage son Agalash, as well as our usual crew: Inge, Isa and her freshly adopted dog Sasha, (who was definitely not used to travel in such conditions, hid his nose under his forepaws and vomited everywhere), plus off course Ramsay, our trusted driver, negotiating each bump and dip with a master’s touch.
After our near disaster in Omsk, when our back wheel had almost fallen off, we all felt each of the traumatic jerks with very much concern. Three of the bolts holding the wheel to its hub had completely cheered off. Some of them were altogether missing and others had been replaced with the only bolts we could find, which were of very poor quality steel and kept snapping every few kilometres. To make matters worse, the hub itself had suffered damaged, with some of the bolts mountings widened and misshaped after we hit a stone at high speed on the bumpy Siberian roads between Kurgan and Cel-Abinsk.
Riding on the roof of a truck climbing a pitted mountain pass is quite an exhilarating experience. The only thing I could hold onto with my only good hand, (the other one having been permanently shattered three months ago in a bench-saw accident), was the bicycle’s handle-bar, itself holding by one thin rope to the stub of an old antenna on the roof. As the truck lurched on across the deserted pass, bouncing me laughing from side to side on my precarious perch, I couldn’t help but struggle to maintain some kind of blind faith in the safety of my anchor. If the bicycle broke free, I would fall off almost four metres straight onto very uncongenial looking rocks.
If opting to travel on the roof of your vehicle as opposed to inside it may seem a bit reckless, in this situation it was categorically the less worst possible way, if not downright the best. Bumps were felt a million times worse inside the truck, where to borrow Ramsay’s expression, one felt like a sock in a tumble-drier. The only manageable place to sit without ending-up covered in welts and bruises was on the front seat, which was normally designed to accommodate three people, but which right then was crammed with no less than six unfortunate souls squashed like sardines in a can and near asphyxiated from the hot dust that poured in through the windows. Closing the windows was not an option either. Between the heat and the poor dog’s vomit vapours, the atmosphere inside the stifling cabin would have quickly degenerated into a complete pandemonium.
Meanwhile, between fits of laughter, coughing and disjointed bits of shouted conversation over the racket of our valiant engine and the million things that rattled and banged in the back of the truck, we progressed slowly towards Mount Talbooash, which other-worldly peacefulness contrasted so much with our crazy bunch that this alone was enough to send us into hysterics. What on earth would the Nomads think of us, or anyone else for that matter, if they saw us right now, a tiny but insanely noisy speck slowly inching forward in this empty, age-old valley in a delirious cacophony of voices from six different languages, while Maya looked on slightly alarmed and her son Agalash somehow managed to play his two-string Altai Sitar without missing a note in spite of the mayhem.
The vast plateau, surrounded on all sides by mountains, resembled a large volcanic crater. Its stony, seemingly barren looking ground was interrupted here and there by icy streams bordered by a narrow strip of lush green grass, the only vivid colour to be seen as far as the eye could see.
The Siberian Altai is immense and incredibly diverse in scenery from one valley, or one plateau to the next. If the mountains before Kosh-Agash were richly covered with Siberian Pine or Russian Birch, the plateau we were now travelling on could easily be used in a remake of Mad Max. Cows, horses or yak skulls, complete with horns and frontal tufts of hair were everywhere, bleached white by the sun. Every now and again a marmot poked her head out of a burrow and scurried madly before us before disappearing again.
A few kilometres later, a river suddenly interrupted the track. The stream, swollen by the previous weeks incessant storms, was waist-deep and the current strong enough to send large stones rolling down with it.
‘OK!’ shouted Mark over the gushing river. ‘I will climb on the back platform and film the wheels of the truck as you cross the river’.
Marc, in spite of his quiet looks had quickly revealed himself right from the start to be an amazingly audacious and enterprising cameraman.
He had an eye for exactly what exposures he needed to build up a film and would stop at nothing to get it, even if this meant that he had to hold on by one hand to the bucking aft-platform of a truck fording an icy torrent and film with the other.
Without Marc there would be no film, no documentary at the end of the trip, nothing to present to the sponsors. Without Marc there would be no studio and editing house on wheels. Marc somehow managed to build a short film every couple of weeks, which is quite a feast considering the circumstances. Watching him trying to edit a film on his laptop in the back of the ever-bouncing truck, struggle with the very little available power supply, or even try to concentrate in such a small and crowded place would make anyone cry with sympathy. Marc went on, somehow, uncomplaining, even when after seven hours of struggle with a homespun and temperamental Internet connection in an abandoned coop-farm in the middle of nowhere, staying up half the night while we are all sleeping peacefully, his downloading of the film to our web agent in London failed at seventy-five percent…!
‘You sure you want to do this?’ asked Ramsay incredulously. ‘There is nothing to hold onto on that platform! You’re crazy!’
‘I’ll be fine’ replied Marc earnestly, already finding a way to attach his tripod to the side of the truck and mounting the camera to it. ‘Let’s do it!’
Ramsay climbed in and on we went, down into the rocky river, water almost submerging our gigantic wheels. Our faithful truck slowly jerked itself forward over the boulders, wheel-turn after wheel-turn and we somehow made it, narrowly avoiding bogging ourselves down in the shallows on the other side.
In the rear vision mirror we could not see any signs of Marc.
‘Marc!’ we called, ‘Are you still alive?’
Marc hooted in reply. ‘Its in the can!’ he said. ‘Scary but great! Can’t wait to do it again on the way back!’
The way back… yes, somehow we would have to do all this all over again.
But for now the path lay winding its way higher into the Altai range, a path definitely more suited to horses than trucks. Marc joined us inside the truck and we all shared in the exhilaration with great reinforcements of hooting and slaps in the back.
One thought we all shared though, in spite of our boundless enthusiasm and thrill in each new day of the adventure was the question of whether our back wheel would hold on for long enough to see us back to at least Kosh-Agash or not, in which case we were stuck in the middle of nowhere, days walk from help if ever we could even hope to find some. One after one the bolts broke on the hub and we had run out of spares. Tightening the remaining nuts had to be done every ten kilometres and we were advancing at a snail pace.
In the eventuality that we made it back to Kosh-Agash and bought more bolts for the wheel the problem whoever remained the same. The hub was damaged and needed replacing, something we definitely out of the question. Not just this but our tires also were completely frayed and two of them had already been patched up twice. Our clutch grease-sleeve had also split and necessitated constant manual greasing of the arm or it would get stuck at the most inopportune moments. We were also steadily loosing oil.
After five weeks on the road and eight thousands kilometres our truck and only mean of getting back to Amsterdam was showing definite signs of fatigue.
Would our truck and home to the five of us last the distance all the way back across the Steppes, mountains, forests and deserts we still had to face to get back home?
Time only will tell.