In the Path of the Nomads

IN THE PATH OF THE NOMADS


Who hasn’t dreamt of the Nomads?

If our own culture has been for so many thousands years deeply seated in its sedentary traditions, if our whole society in fact is and has for ever been entirely based on our permanence to one place, there is however something that has always captivated us, inspired us and fed our childhood dreams.

Who hasn’t once in a lifetime turned the page of a book and fallen in wistful wonder before the image of a tippee in a snow-blanketed forest, a yurt nestled on the flank of a mountain, or a caravan stretching across a sea of sand?

The Nomads have always fascinated us. Perhaps now even more than ever before as we, amidst the tangles of our modern society living, are yearning for our lost freedom, for space to breathe on this crowded planet, for the closeness of a clan, for all the forgotten wisdom of our ancestors. We have forgotten, or even perhaps never experienced, the feeling of wholeness and serenity that detachment from the weight of the so many things that we don’t need and connection with our universe can bring.


Now that a broken wheel has forced us back into the Altai village of Kosh Agash, the memories of the last few days and the overwhelming gratitude at having finally found the Nomads after driving helter-skelter for more than 8000km, through plains, swamps, mountains and forests, patches of wilderness interspersed with yet another grey town with its skyline of belching factory chimneys, its slums and palaces, chaotic traffic and clouds of dust.

For such a long time now, the Nomads have to us been a dream, a vision.
We travelled, and searched. We travelled until travel had become a way of life, until reaching our next milestone had lost its necessity, until we threw away the map.
We travelled until all the things we knew or had ever known about the world we had left behind, had become irrelevant.

There are only 300km separating Swiss-resort-looking Byelokoorika and the valley of the Talbooash near the Mongolian border. Yet both valleys are thousands of years apart.

There are times when fate takes you by the hand.
Finding the Nomads was never supposed to be easy.
Discovering this valley was a miracle.

Had we not met Anna on the side of the road at Byelokoorika as we enquired about renting horses for a week to ride to Mount Beluka, we would have un-knowingly strayed on the wrong path and the secret valley of the Shamans we were about to discover, would have remained a mystery.

From the moment Anna jumped into the truck and pointed forward towards the mountains, it was us, who became passengers.
Suddenly, our fate was in her hands.
The next few days were a blur, a blur of new words and shapes in the fog of our complete confusion as to which way we were going and what was happening from one moment to the next. The map had long disappeared.
We followed our guide.

Packed six in a row on the front seat of the truck we pushed at a snail pace higher and higher into the Altai. All around us the land kept changing. From one turn to the next, from one saddle to the next, pine blanketed mountains turned into giant stony slopes.
Villages became smaller and further apart.
The land lay vast and open, fenceless and wild, untouched.
Somewhere behind these snowy peaks live the Nomads.



KOSH-AGASH


The sun was setting as we rounded the highest saddle and begun a shallow descent into the Valley of Kosh-Agash.
Inge and I sat on the roof of the truck, wild with awe and adrenaline as the truck wound its way down the narrow mountain road. Above us the sky was an explosion of crimson and gold, while all around the mountains were a rolling ocean of blues and purples, capped here and there by snow-covered peaks growing hot pink in the dying light. Down into the valley blinked the few timid lights of a small village nestled on either side of a small stream.

We had reached the village of Kosh-Agash.
Fifty kilometres away, behind the next saddle, lay Mongolia.

Kosh-Agash, means ‘many trees’, ‘strange trees’, or ‘good-bye trees’, depending on who is translating and this is possibly precisely what happened to this region.
As far as the eye can see, there is not a single tree in sight, or not even any signs that there ever were. The vegetation is typical of a high plateau: dry, dusty ground, with the occasional patch of short, prickly grass.
Compared with many other Russian villages we have seen so far, Kosh-Agash is very tidy. True, dust is everywhere, kicked off in the ground in great spirals by the evening wind. But the streets, if they are busy with wondering cows, packs of stray dogs and children zooming about on oversized bicycles, are surprisingly clean. Owner-built wooden houses surrounded by small fences and stables make the place a perfect backdrop for a western movie. Every few houses, no matter how bucolic in appearance, is flanked by an enormous satellite dish in a more or less advanced stage of rustiness. Abandoned military compounds and watch-towers, half of them split and caved in by the eight degrees Richter scale earthquake that shook the valley three years ago, testify to a more turbulent past.


The people of the Altai are very different from the Russian. Their features are distinctly Asian. Their language also, has no connection with Russian.
Altai people are all descendant of Nomads, and if many of them became sedentary during the communist era of Russia, a few of them naturally returned to a semi-nomadic lifestyle after the transition period.
Some of them, like the Nomads we would meet in the Talbooash Valley, had probably preserved their lifestyle throughout 20 000 years without much changes, remaining too remote to fall under the control of the Communists.

Kosh-Agash is inside a restricted area. It is a border town, which has a long past of political unrest and conflicts between Nomads and local Communist enforcement.
To stay here one must apply for a pass, which can take over week to obtain. Of course the pass must be applied for from outside the restricted area, a village fifty kilometres from here where staying for a week or more waiting for our passports would have been a waste of time. The Nomads we have travelled so far to meet are here, in the hills surrounding Kosh-gash. We only have ten day left before crossing over to Mongolia and there is no way we are going to miss our chance to meet the Nomadic herders of the Altai. We have no pass and running into a Police Patrol would certainly mean big trouble. All we could do was make a dash for the mountains and disappear for a while until making a run for the border.