The Hospitable Land
A small group of horses ambles along the gravelly landscape, their manes ruffled by the eternal wind. There is not a blade of grass in sight, not a speck of green, not even a dry bush that might sprout a few tiny leaves if rain came.
We have been passing the remains of dead horses, camels, sheep, and goats all day. The winter had been hard, with two metres of snow and temperatures that dropped to -35°C, cold enough that your spit freezes before it hits the ground. But the horses are well fed and healthy as they stroll through the endless desert, from yonder shallow valley to beyond the horizon.
This is Gobi, the most hospitable land I’ve ever seen.
It takes a special kind of person to live here. We who are stuck in our cities and towns call them nomads and make it sound different, mysterious, atavistic. While we coyly call ourselves digital nomads, we think of real nomads as if they were a people apart, not really us.
The Mongols do not call themselves nomads, except when talking to foreigners, nor are they members of some lost tribe, cut off from the world as we know it. They are a thoroughly modern people, at ease with technology, more informed about the happenings in the world than most denizens of the first world, and completely uninterested in moving to the city. Yes, half of Mongolia does live in Ulaanbaatar, but only some of those are true urbanites. Many, it feels, have just temporarily stopped moving and will be back in the saddle at the first opportunity.
It takes knowledge and skill to live here. We of urban wastelands depend on an army of nearly invisible specialists to keep our homes liveable, our fridges stocked, our lights on, our water flowing. To live in Gobi, one must be able to do all that oneself because there is no one else to do it. There is little room for error when the closest other human is a day’s walk away and setting off in the wrong direction leaves you stranded in the desert.
Our hosts on the first day were a pair of grandparents, their daughter with her husband, and a bunch of giggling grandchildren. While the husband was out with the herds and the daughter fixed a motorbike, the grandpa with his game foot took care of the stove and the grandma sewed a new silk jacket for her oldest granddaughter. Then she made tea, fixed a broken shovel and installed solar power in the neighbouring ger using a pair of nail clippers.
Can you install and connect a solar panel, assuming that is not your profession? You are not allowed to google it, ask ChatGPT or watch a Youtube video and the only instructions are written in Chinese.
Well, yes. I am convinced that you could even if you’ve never held a pair of pliers in your hand, even if Chinese is just so many squiggles on the page to you. You could figure it out, but you won’t because you don’t believe you can, because it would void the warranty, because you are not a licensed professional, because it’s not your job, because, because…
In Gobi, there are no licensed solar panel professionals, but there are plenty of grandmothers who do what needs to be done.
Yet none of those myriad skills would suffice without the most important one, the one we in the first world have most thoroughly forgotten: taking care of each other.
When you come to a ger from the desert, you walk right in. You don’t knock, you don’t wait for an invitation, you step in and say hello. A cup of tea is placed into your hand, hard bread and harder cheese is offered, a place is found for you to rest. And, of course, you are expected to reciprocate this automatic hospitality, not as a returned favour but simply because this is how people treat each other.
Driving through the desert, we encountered a herd of horses around an empty trough, stopped, and filled the trough from the nearby well. No, said Uka, our guide; she did not know who the horses belonged to. They needed water; that was all the explanation needed. A young dog that had wandered a bit too far from the closest settlement got the remains of our breakfast and a bowl of water. We waited to make sure it was headed in the right direction before continuing our journey.
On our last day, we stopped for a broken-down car on the side of the road. A father had been driving his two children to school, but his car had given up its ghost. Uka did ask if we were ok with giving the children a lift, but the question was a mere formality.
The school in question was in Ulaanbaatar, 400 km to the north. The kids, a girl of thirteen and her eight-year-old brother had been living there alone for the last two years, taking care of themselves and going home only for holidays. Yes, they agreed, they missed their family, and it was sometimes hard to be away for so long. But they had their friends, and school was fun, and they were delighted to try out their English on this random bunch of tourists.
I can imagine some OMG-stranger-danger-just-say-no helicopter-borne parents’ heads exploding at this point, but I have never seen such calmly competent and confident children in my life. Besides, they were among people. And people, you know, take care of each other.
