Brushing through Mongolia

Yesterday when we had had someone to help us interpret our guide, we had learned that for us to get there in time riding was the only way forward, no driving or walking, and we had also been told that now that we were out of the mountains and swamps, the horseflies would be much diminished in numbers, leading me to eventually cave and agree to continue riding. So after stocking up on water for the first five hours of the day when we would be crossing a large flat shadeless plain with no streams, reminiscent of a slightly greener Gobi Desert, we went to find our guide who had gone missing and found him and his hangover; he certainly hadn’t gone to bed when we had. We had had the best night of sleep in ages though, perhaps even since Ulaanbataar, so our patience wasn’t wearing quite as thin, and I’ll take any opportunity to read in my book.

While we had generally been very pleased with Turbat, this day was very unlike our other experiences with him. He was hungover (though he did apologise for this to such an extent that it became embarrassing), spent a lot longer packing, had to undo all of his packing because he had done it incorrectly the first time, and once we were underway he realised that he hadn’t brought any water and ended up drinking ours; not that we didn’t want to share, but his lack of planning meant that all of us ran out of water to drink under a fierce sun, and the great dry plain meant that there was nowhere to fill up.

Actually on that point, in the middle of nowhere two cars had stopped, a pavilion tent had been erected and two families were picnicking underneath the awning, with the children running out to greet us. Turbat wasn’t in the mood for stopping for a social visit, so we pressed on; one of the last things we had been told via translator, was that today and the following day would both be very long days.

We rode from Renchinlkhumbe in a straight line towards a row of mountains, which like the town that refused to disappear from view behind us, never seemed to get any closer, hour after hour of endless grass, dust, and the occasional hut with horses, until suddenly they rose up ahead of us, somber and covered in clouds, a storm we avoided as we immediately turned left at the foot of the mountains and rode alongside them, until a river stopped any forward progress. A lone figure appeared appeared from a hut on the far side, a ferryman, who grabbed a piece of wood with metal protrusions from the end, clambered onto a mostly square platform of what was mostly a large mostly wooden raft, and pulled it across by locking the metal protrusions onto a steel cable that was suspended from either side of the river.

We got off our horses and pulled them onto the raft, they were clearly nervous at the unpredictable movements of the raft and the creaking of the wood. Ever seen in Hollywood movies how nervous horses behave, scraping the ground with their hooves and snorting air loudly? It’s surprisingly like that in reality too, the thought had definitely crossed my mind that the horses might either panic on the small platform and my clothes would be very heavy in the middle of a river, or the horses might just jump off, and in particular the pack horse might have trouble swimming weighed down by its pack. Time passed slowly as our ferryman ferried us across, but once there the horses were noticeably easier to get off than they had been getting on.

Sadly the river was entirely green and didn’t in the slightest look potable, so we filtered some of the ferryman’s water, but even that was something I’d only drink under more dire conditions than we had yet found ourselves in. He lived in a tiny hut that barely fit a bed, a barrel of stagnant “drinking” water, and a tiny simple stove; he had a friend visiting outside who was either fixing his own or the ferryman’s motorcycle, also a common pastime here given the poor quality of these Chinese motorcycles. We continued ever onwards, rising into the mountains from here, past lakes still as ice with small farms dotted around the far side of the shores (no one seemed to live up against the “road”), dozens of cows and yaks walking freely around the mirror-lakes; a few yaks had wandered all the way to “our” side of the lake, but they were as docile as yaks have always been.

Looking at map of Mongolia, we were now well into the “bump” on top of Mongolia, it’s northmost area by far; there had been no phone signal in the mountains between Khatgal and Renchinlkhumbe, but understandably so as no one lived there; here people lived in some numbers, permanently, but no phone signal and no antennas for short range radios either. Isolation.

Past lakes and the scant trees remaining, struggling with both the heat of the plain below and the altitude of the mountains, we rode through a last pass before the southern reachers of Dood Tsagaanur, Lower White Lake, came gliding into view as the sun threatened to sink below the rim of the semicircle of mountains here. Turbat found a place for us to camp, on sloping humid ground, where a small green and brown stream of water was producing impressive quantities of white foam, never a good sign for potability. Tired of his antics today, Silja and I refused to accept and rode on, we were on horseback as it happened and didn’t really have to accept it. Barely a stone’s throw away, we found the southernmost reach of the lake, flat and dry grounds for putting up the tent, enough wood to lit a fire for cooking dinner, and the lake was decidedly cleaner than the stream we passed by.

Turbat needed to make stakes again, don’t know why he didn’t keep them from day to day, but our parched horses were so desperate for water after such a long day, that Silja who was holding two hadn’t the slightest chance of holding them back as they walked towards the lake, and pulled her in deep enough to soak her shoes; Turbat had at first tied their legs together, but they were so thirsty that they just started jumping to the lakeside, so instead of risking that they’d fall over and potentially break something, he untied them and we held their reins.

As Turbat finished making new stakes, the sun crept behind the western parts of the mountains that form a semicircle around the southern reach of the lake and bathed the horses (and everything else) in golden light, at the same time as the horses walked around what looked like the most mole infested place in the world, but which probably had a rational explanation that I’m unaware off. We filtered the water for the second time, it was a lake after all, and found a large amount of tiny living… Things, barely a millimetre across, that we threw back into the lake, before we once again made rice with vegetables and tuna over an open fire, as an astonishingly beautiful sunset lit up the sky.

Starting today I had been riding Silja’s horse, though with Silja’s inferior saddle. All in all it was a much better experience, her horse was better at keeping pace with Turbat’s lead horse, it wasn’t as easily upset as the other horses, and didn’t make me nervous or fearful. Silja, who’s beginning to feel better, lambasted me for not accepting it earlier, she had been suggesting that we swap ever since the second day, but I had refused on the grounds that I didn’t want to make my trip better on her expense, that wouldn’t be Kaldor-Hicks efficient, particularly with her illness to consider.

But I couldn’t keep walking, and it became impolite of me to continue to refuse. In hindsight, Silja hopefully thought the trade worth the possibility of continuing the trip, but it didn’t always seem that way, she spent much of the day swearing and cursing at the horse she had ended up on, the stubborn horse I had been riding the first day, trying to get it to move to where she wanted to go.

The second day started well, it was a startlingly beautiful place to wake up, the lapping waves on the lake that had appeared during the night, and a much quicker start to the day had us underway much earlier in the day. This also turned out to be our longest day by far, we rode for a total of nine hours, 33 kilometres in straight line, which we certainly didn’t do.

The first business of the day, breakfast, suffered a bit today as our bread had been squashed at some point yesterday, the pack on the pack-horse is tightened quite thoroughly, and we can no longer cut slices without them crumbling apart, and have as a result started just smearing knock-off nutella on the flattest surface of the bread, and biting pieces off from the loaf itself. As soon as civilisation is out of sight, it’s much too easy to behave like a caveman. A local came to talk to Turbat and help him with the horses, and even a bit in English to Silja and I, though the conversation was made difficult by him substituting every single word he didn’t know with “welsh”; not the language, just the word.

Silja is now riding on Turbat’s horse, but truly the most remarkable sight today was what rode in the opposite direction, a group of eight Russian tourists all of whom had comfortable Western saddles (the kind cowboys used on cattle ranches by cowboys) which we looked longingly after until they (along with their riders) had disappeared from the sight. We continued on and clambered up a large hill on the western shore of the lake, crossing through a pass at the tip with a sign proclaiming something in Mongolian Cyrillic next to a concrete picnic table under a permanent plastic parasol, because why not build one of those here.

Riding down on the other side of the pass was our steepest slope so far, though maybe I felt that way because I missed the largest mountainpass during the first days by horse as I was walking, another strange sight greeted us, a town. Turbat met a friend on the other side, and kept trotting to keep up with him, something neither my legs, pelvis, or bladder were up for, but if I forced my horse to stay behind, it would eventually start running to catch up so I once again got off the horse and walked, though it was painfully clear to me that that wouldn’t be an option for an entire day; eventually Turbat’s friend left to go in a different direction and the horses slowed down again.

This town is supposedly the only place in all of Mongolia where fishing businesses operate, though I was unaware of that that at the time; we were caught entirely unaware of the town’s existence as we had been told that Renchinlkhumbe would be the last town we would pass through. We rode slowly into town and first bought more bottles of water (the lakewater is clean, but not very tasty), biscuits to chew on during the day, and lollipops. We then found a shop even better stocked than the one in Renchinlkhumbe, but quickly decided against buying anything, the chocolate was the same terrible one as we had tried previously, and the apples on sale were all rotten (oh how we yearned for fruit).

Deciding, aside from a single lollipop, that we should stick with the authenticity of the trip and followed Turbat around the town. Even more randomly planned than Renchinlkhumbe, houses were placed as if dropped by chance from the sky in entirely mismatched colours, roads bent and turned for no obvious reason, and several houses had had extra floors tacked on with no consideration for the aesthetics of the original house; it was all in all a strange sight indeed.

We rode slowly out of the town and came upon the entire reason we stopped here, a military checkpoint that verified our permits for visiting the border area north of here (because of the Naadam we hadn’t been able to get the permits before we left, so we had left our passports with the wonderful MS Guesthouse who had obtained the permits, and sent both passports and permits up to Gurvansaikhan, as the town is called, by motorcycle where they had been waiting for us.

When we arrived at the checkpoint it looked like any regular house, except for the tall gate, and the soldier on guard hardly looked like one, he was slumped over a tiny desk, half asleep, sitting on a chair with its back missing, and his girlfriend was watching a concert on a TV in the back of the room. Turbat coughed until the soldier looked up and haphazardly stamped our papers a couple of times and waved us away, though I can’t much blame him, signing up for the armed forces and stranding in one of the remotest corners of Mongolia, verifying permits for tourists, which because of the infectious horse disease had slowed the amount of visitors to a trickle, must feel like a punishment.

We rode on under a truly fierce sun, Silja and I covered in thick layers of sunscreen, farther up north along the shoreline until we reached near the northern end of the lake, and turned west along one of its tributaries, a suddenly busy stretch where motorcycles would come hurtling past about every 20 minutes, as much of a rushhour as they get up here. Turbat talked to every single rider, he in fact had been stopping to talk to everyone we had passed on the trip, it’s just how things are up here, I imagine they all know each other or at least a relative, talk about the weather, the road conditions, and then wish each other a prosperous and safe onwards journey.

We arrived at a long metal pontoon bridge, where we had to get off and lead the horses across, they aren’t fans of walking on metal or the sound of their hoofs on metal, though in terms of evolutionary behaviour walking on metal pontoon bridges is probably quite a rare occurance anywhere, but particularly in Mongolia. Turbat seemed to know the bridgekeeper who lived on the far side, a perk of being a guide in these regions probably, and he invited us inside for a cup of tea where I abruptly made a fool of myself.

The bridgekeeper’s hut was larger and better furnished than that of the ferryman, and the bridgekeeper immediately handed both Silja and I a cup of the notoriously terrible tea they brew up here in the north, and though I wanted to drink it out of politeness and to show my gratitude that he hadn’t served me yoghurt as we so often suffered in the Gobi Desert. But when he handed it to me some of the boiling hot tea spilled into my hand, and reflexively pulling my hand towards my body, I spilled the entire bowl of tea on the floor. Well done. This didn’t particularly upset our host, he had a linoleum floor on stamped ground, but he didn’t give me a second bowl of tea either. Behind his house, as I went looking around to pass the time, I found an English saddle, the most comfortable type of saddle (as a reminder, we were using Russian saddles, a thin cushion on a metal or wooden frame), but the bridgekeeper wanted too much for it, particularly given how far we’ve already come, so we continued ever northwards without it.

From the bridge and in the direction we were headed, the roads disappeared entirely and we were now riding through grass fields, the forests around us getting denser and and denser, the rivers drying out entirely, the distance between the huts becoming greater and greater, and the mountains wilder, not a long distance by Mongolian standards to both the east and west of us (though a solid distance beyond the horizon) was Russia, and before we even registered it, even the grass fields ended and we passed the last loneliest hut in all of Mongolia, the last Darkhad dwelling (the Darkhads are the dominant ethnic group this far north).

We crossed into the dense forest and came out on the other side to an utter hell of flies, tiny insects swarming around everything everywhere covering people and horses alike. By now we were very much too tired to go on for much longer, but out here there wasn’t much choice either, we also had to cover ground tomorrow and we had to camp near water, as the long day in the hot sun had almost exhausted our supplies and we didn’t know when we’d be able to fill them up again. The landscape was beautiful though, dense forests, high grass, lakes here and there in the distance, mountains and large hills shooting up everywhere covered in dense vegetation. Even by comparison with the otherwise fertile by Mongolian standards area around Lake Khövsgöl, this was teeming with life and vegetation like nowhere else in Mongolia, with the opposite being true for human presence. True wilderness.

We finally arrived at a small flat section with not much vegetation by a small stream at 21 o’clock, far later than any other day, where three wooden poles stood ready to tie the horses too, so that I could pitch the tent, put in our bags, and roll out sleeping mattresses and bags, while Turbat prepared his stakes for the horses and Silja went to sit down in the icy cold water, following a long day on a painfully uncomfortable saddle. What felt like it shouldn’t happen out here, but did anyway, was that two locals came riding in the opposite direction of where we had been going, as the sun was setting without anything even resembling gear for staying the night somewhere, though I’m guessing by the looks of them that they could rough it anywhere. They stayed for a while, talking to Turbat, actually till beyond when Silja and I had gone to bed, I heard them leave as I fell asleep, riding through the wild landscape in pitch-black darkness. Madness, what couldn’t their horses trip on?

I had started skipping dinner more often, this day like certain others settling for dried yak meat (still not boiling it), or if I’m particularly hungry I will eat some of our bread with knock-off nutella. Breakfast is a meal I’ll never skip, potentially because Turbat takes so long to get going in the morning but mostly because it’s my most important meal; lunch out here is often just whatever bread biscuits we have, dense and flavourless as they are, or something equally unfilling. Instead of taking a long lunch break, we favour shorter breaks throughout the day, to get out of the saddle long enough to stretch our muscles and move about a bit. It likely wasn’t the healthiest of situations, but the level of exhaustion after a day like today, I’d rather go to bed hungry than cook a heavy dinner over a campfire.

The next morning I went to get water, only to find that the stream had dried out, leaving us with little water from the get-go; Silja put on both trousers and spandex to spare her legs some of the incessant rubbing of the saddle at the expense of two layers in the Mongolian summer heat. We didn’t have knock-off nutella for breakfast, but something else we had been eating on occasion, knock-off The Laughing Cow1, though we discovered that it had long since expired. The wild grassland and rolling hills too came to an end, though not before we had forded a crystal clear river where we filled our water bottles, and then headed into the forests that grew at the hills of the gently sloping mountains, no jagged cliffs here. It was a wild forest, toppled trees lying haphazardly about, and which is also where it became quite clear why the Tsaatans can only be visited by foot or by horseback.

The wild forest starting thinning out, though we still had to take detours off the hardly visible path to go around fallen trees too large to ride over, and purple and blue flowers started filling out the space between the trees, until the trees stopped entirely as we neared the top of the mountain we were on, with a grand view of the surrounding mountains, all of them as smooth and friendly as ever I have seen. When we reached the top we found the last remnants of the winter snow and ice still clinging to the rockface in large and small patches, leading the way to our second to last mountain pass. The distance from here to the last mountain-pass was covered in very little time, as we rode along the inclination as opposed to either up or down the slope, to a pass that revealed a steep snaking path down a steep slope covered in dense brush (the photo is taken at the bottom, I didn’t venture a photo while walking down), water running along the path or spreading to cover it entirely.

We got off our horses and started leading them down the steep valley fringed on either side by jagged cliffs, it would be too dangerous to ride them down a steep wet slope covered in smooth rocks, but my horse was being a jerk about it and kept pushing me into the dense bushes on either side of the path, while tugging at the reins like a dog that hadn’t been trained. Eventually it pulled sharply at the reins, and instead of being pulled down to the ground I let go, and it picked up its pace to catch up to Turbat, while I waited around for Silja to catch up and we walked down together. We got back on our horses, turned a corner and came upon the sweetest and most beautiful sight in the distance, white tipis from one end of the valley floor to the other, smoke rising lazily in the still air, our trials and tribulations were over for now.