Since leaving Ulaan Baatar, we haven’t had access to the internet, so I’ve stored up my blogs. Now, on the last day of our trip to Hovsgol Province of Mongolia, I can post them at last. Happy reading!

On the flight from Ulaan Baatar (“UB”) to Moron I had a great view of the countryside, at first rolling and grassy, then increasingly mountainous. Soon before we landed, we saw the snow-capped mountains of central Mongolia south of us. The fun part was spotting gers (yurts) which showed up as white dots, since we were in a propeller plane that didn’t fly too high. Each ger was set in a wide valley, often with a river or stream flowing nearby, and I wondered what it would be like to live in such isolation, especially for woman who needs to stay close to home with small children.

After two days on the ground, I’m getting a better impression of what nomadic life is like. There’s a lot of visiting back and forth by horseback or motorcycle, so it’s not as lonely as it looks, and a nomadic family moves at least four times a year, finding new neighbors with every move.

We stopped to chat with one family on the move to their summer pasture. They’re going north to the same area we are heading for, near the northernmost town in the province, Tsaagan Nuur. First came the horses, about a dozen of them, herded, to my surprise, by a guy on a motorcycle. When the horses ran up a hillside, he just scooted along after them. Being herd animals, they stick together, so it’s not like herding cats.

Next came the big flock of goats and sheep with lots of yaks mixed in. I love yaks! I don’t think I ever saw one except in movies until we got here to Hovsgol. A yak looks like a very hairy cow with a shaggy head, long eyelashes, bushy pantaloons in back, and a bushy horse tail. They’re  nimble as goats on the mountainsides and rocks. The little ones are really cute trailing after their mothers, but not as hairy. The baby black goats are the most adventurous. When the older ones are grazing, they dash around in a gang, jumping up onto high rocks, butting heads, exploring at the edge of the herd, and taking a break once in a while to butt mom’s side and demand milk. 

The big flock was shepherded by a man and a young girl on horses, and bringing up the rear was a woman wearing a sky blue Mongolian deel or coat. I just learned this morning that the deel has super-long sleeves because no one used gloves or mittens until modern times. I can’t imagine how cold that must have been if you had to use your hands outdoors in the Mongolian winter! The woman was leading a string of six camels with one wobbly-legged baby running along loose. Tulga, our guide, says that it’s always a woman’s job to lead the camels.

These people were planning to go about a hundred miles. It’s spring, the birthing season, and I wondered how the smallest babies would make it so far, plus one of their two dogs who was running on only three legs. Tulga says they wrap up the littlest ones, like swaddling them, and carry them in packs on top of the camels when they are tired. I read once that they do this with newborn camels in camel caravans in western China, but you can’t put a baby camel on its mother’s back because she’ll just try to  turn around and go backwards looking for her baby. Instead you put it on another camel’s back, and then the mother follows happily along. 

There’s much more that I want to write. I’m seeing so many things that excite my imagination and that I want to use in my writing. But mostly it’s just great to learn about these amazing Mongolian people and how they live.

It’s our third morning in Hovsgol, pouring rain, thundering in the clouds, and we’re about to hit the road. We’re hoping to stop where Tulga can use his iPhone to create a hotspot so I can transmit this blog. It’ll be a crazy ride, all on dirt roads after a night of rain, and about 100 kilometers to go. Then the next day we get our horses and head into the mountains. I don’t know when I’ll be able to connect to the web after that.

Time to hit the road (with a splash)!

(Mongolian herd animals.)

Here’s our campsite from our second night in Hovsgol Province. As soon as we got settled in, along came this big flock of sheep and goats, just checking us out and letting us know it was their pasture we had chosen to sleep in. A herd of yaks wandered past, too. Of course the pasture came complete yak pies, goat pellets, and sheep pellets, but really it didn’t smell too bad, and it was charming to wake up to the “baa” and “maa” of the kids and lambs right outside our tents. As the days passed in Mongolia, we would learn that all the grasslands we saw were pasture, and no matter where we camped we were just guests on the herd animals’ turf.

When I got up in the morning, there was frost on our tent. I had been toasty in my sleeping bag all night, but it turned out that both Morley and Pacey were cold even though they went to bed with all their clothes on. I did put on all my warm layers before leaving the tent, and I stood on a big rock brushing my teeth and shivering. We had checked the weather online before we came, but we had no idea it would be this cold in mid-June.

As I brushed my teeth I watched the sun’s rays moving up the valley until they struck the grass just across the creek from me and steam started rising. So I walked over there, and ah-h-h-h-h it felt warm. The valley we were camped in was long and narrow, and here and there on the slopes were low log structures roofed over. We learned that these were winter camps, and the structures were shelter from the cold for the smaller animals. Families would come back to the same camp year after year, and set up their gers (yurts) to live in. The camps were close enough together that I imagine the winter must be a pretty sociable time. 

As we drove up the valley it looked like almost everyone had left for their summer camps, but soon after we pitched camp a motorcycle came and passed slowly by while the two guys riding it looked us over. Pretty soon another motorcycle cruised by, and shortly after that another. I don’t know how many came by in all, that evening. Tulga says it was just an example of how fast news travels among the nomads, the news that foreigners were camping in the valley.

I was surprised to learn that the herders bring their animals to the low grasslands for summer and to the mountain valleys for winter. It was just the opposite of what I expected. The reason is that the wind on the grasslands will help keep the flies down in summertime, but the narrow mountain valleys like the one we camped in are more sheltered, providing protection from the wind in winter.

The yaks are shy, and so it was hard to get a good yak photo close up. Namuul said the yaks are the smartest of the herd animals, and he called them “the homesick animal,” because they were brought to Mongolia from Tibet many centuries ago. They’re very cute, and I spent a long time trying to get a photo of their bushy tails. As we drove through the grasslands in the following days, we saw mixed herds of yaks and cows, and occasionally bulls that were a cross between yak and cow, called a “hainig” (or something like that) in Mongolian. The hainig were huge and shaggy, with a yak head, big horns and a horse tail, sort of like they were put together by Dr. Seuss.

Mongolians use all their herd animals for meat and milk, and they make lots of things from their hides and hair. I went nuts in the market buying hand made straps of braided horse, yak, camel, sheep and goat hair which are sold for everything from saddle girths to strapping a ger together. I also got a couple of gorgeous camel hair blankets. 

Horses, yaks and camels are the beasts of burden. The camels are the tallest, and the horse herds are the prettiest as they prance and run across the grass. All the animals we saw were healthy and pretty well fed, even though it wasn’t the fat season. The summer monsoons begin in mid-July, and that’s when the grasses will really grow and the animals begin to fatten up for winter.

These two kids came to check out our camp last night. Others visitors included a herd of cattle, a flock of sheep and goats, a pair of cranes stalking the riverbank with their chick, a hungry dog, and a pair of very curious magpies. I was surprised, because it seemed like we had camped in the middle of nowhere. 

We’re on the floodplain of a clear, swift river, by a sandy bluff with mountains on both sides. On the plain above, there’s a small homestead with a ger (yurt) and a few small corrals and sheds, a Mongolian ranch. That’s probably where the two kids came from. The river valley had similar homesteads scattered every mile or so. At first I thought it looked like a lonely life, but in fact, people have jeeps and motorcycles so they get out and see their neighbors and go to town, which is about a 30 minute drive. And we saw several people getting around by horseback along the way. What a great place to grow up!

Yesterday we flew from Ulaan Baatar to Moron, a town in Hovsgul which is about half way across Mongolia on the Russian border. Today we’ll pick up permits to go near the Russian border, and then we’ll head north into the mountains.  After so many months of anticipation, I feel like I’m living in a dream, and everything is as good as I imagined. In fact, I slept better last night in our tent than I have since I left home.

The herds and flocks here look like they’re living wild, and they have no fences. Our guide, Tulga, says that when the young are born, the herders keep them at the ger while their mothers go out to graze or to drink at the river, and so at the end of the day the herd or flock always come home for the night. The sheep and goats may be kept in the corrals at night if there are predators around, and the larger animals tend to stay close by.

We asked about predators, and it turns out there are brown bears (like grizzlies) in the mountains around here, as well as wolves. I’d love to see both, but not “up close and  personal”… Maybe we’ll get lucky when we make our horseback trek into the mountains to find the reindeer herders and their shaman.