Looking for Khovd

The journey to Khovd from Uliastai was planned to be split over two days, partly due to the distance involved and the condition of the roads. We’d heard there were tourist ger camps near some lakes a days drive away, so hoped to stay there and perhaps have a swim in the evening.

Side streets of Uliastai after a thunderstorm.

 I’d enjoyed my stay in Uliastai; it was a pleasant little place with a gentle feel and the surrounding mountains almost felt like paternal arms around the town. The previous two places felt a bit like frontier garrisons, but Uliastai seemed to have an identity and purpose of it’s own, despite the fact I read it too was established as a garrison town by the Manchurians, whoever they were.

On our last night there, we took some food down to the river, just bread, tuna, some bad spreadable cheese, an onion and a jar of strawberries, washed down with a couple of beers and had a sunset picnic. Ben and I went into the waist-deep freezing river for a bit of a paddle, but it was too cold to immerse myself for long.

Our picnic down by the river.

We left the next morning just after 8am and were soon on the steppe highway of sandy tracks through open grasslands and rocky peaks. I really enjoyed the ride, it wasn’t too bumpy, or I was getting used to being rattled about, and the spectacular scenery was an ever changing Windows standard screensaver.

The road towards Khovd - a Windows desktop wallpaper all the way.

Land of the blue sky.

These little square huts are fairly frequent on the steppe, and are a shelter for herders.

Pretty, isn't it.

Ben in the cave.

Around noon we took a 90 degree turn from the track we  were following to head towards some rocky outcrops a few miles to our left. Our driver knew of a deep cave in a small canyon and so when we stopped we dug our torches out of our bags and made our way up the scree and into the mouth of the mountain. The chamber quickly turned into a narrow oesophagus, and the darkness swallowed us up when we turned our lights off to experience pitch black. At first the cave felt very clean, almost as if it were made of fiberglass and I was actually at a theme park, it then involved a little bit of climbing, and only Ben and I continued into the darkness. It began to get wetter and dirtier, as well as much shallower, and I became slightly shallow of breath as the air deteriorated. We were crawling on our knees and elbows by the end and wouldn’t have been able to go any further without sliding on our bellies, which we decided against as we didn’t know where the next shower would be coming from. We could hear the girls calling as we started to make our way back, and decided to approach in silence in order to try and give them a fright. We also decided to turn our torches off, should they give us away, and so very gingerly edged our way back, feeling every surface with every inch of available flesh in a black darker than death. I really enjoyed this, unusually the dark didn’t bother me and it was a great sensory experience. At one point I couldn’t feel any more surface for my feet, so we flashed the red night-light on, to reveal an 8 foot ankle-breaking drop onto boulders. We navigated the danger before continuing in pitch black, occasionally hearing the girls voices as we edged forward. Eventually we began to see a splinter of light that grew into a soft glow before becoming blinding white; it was the entrance to the cave and we had reached sunlight. The girls were outside waiting, having got bored waiting by torchlight perched upon a rock, we’d traversed the entire way back without our eyes. We had the remainder of the night before’s picnic, bread and tuna, before getting back on the road.

Cave man.

I didn't get bored of it all day.

Steppe highway.

In the afternoon the grasslands gave way to gravel fields and desert and the sun pressed down like a hot weight against my skin. I have one arm twice as tanned as the other, due to it being draped out of the window for most of the journey. All day, even in the grasslands, we hadn’t passed a settlement and I can’t recall a single solitary ger or herder that I saw, and we perhaps only passed four oncoming vehicles; it really was remote. The desert again was a field of bones. Mongolia is famous for having excellent fossil deposits; well when we are all extinct dinosaurs, the fossil deposits will continue as skeletons sleep everywhere you look here. I wondered if some great animal war had taken place, but then recalled reading that a few very harsh winters killed millions of livestock, perhaps some of these were the evidence.

Skinning the sheep.

Eventually we reached a small ger settlement, two or three families were settled out in the desert, next to a strange old brick built house that apparently used to be a type of hotel, a halfway house for those on this journey. There was no sign of the tourist ger camp we had heard of or hoped for, and nowhere to stay here, and the day was drawing to a close. The families were offering food, and whilst I declined a meal, we waited there an hour while the others ate. Other travelers were also taking food here; we met four motorcyclists from Switzerland who were on a 5 month adventure, and a French researcher called Fred who was with a party from Khovd university, and he invited us to come and spend the night out in the desert with them. We had nowhere else to go, so we made our way out to the outpost, which was the only building left from some Russian collective abandoned nearly 30 years ago. There was no power or running water, and when we arrived two Mongolians were skinning and gutting a sheep on the porch, so I sat and watched the process of that, which was fascinating and gruesome at the same time. Ben and I played a bit of basketball with a group of Mongolians on an old cracked court covered with shards of glass and lumps of concrete. We lost 6-1, but I didn't feel too bad about it considering they play it all the time and I've not played since I was 17, and I'm always happy when I manage to score, regardless of the result. Selfish player. The building itself was crooked but clean, just the odd cobweb and pile of bat shit, but that’s to be expected. We were jokingly warned of the ghosts, and it was a perfect setting for a horror movie with it being so remote and featureless around the horizon, but I never once let my imagination trick me into fear, perhaps that part of my childhood has finally evaporated.

You don't see this in Tesco.

Cutting the stomach from the oesophagus - a horrible smell of rotting grass wafted out.

Ladling out the blood from the chest cavity - this will be stuffed with the fat into the organs and boiled - delicious!

One thing that hadn’t evaporated under the desert sun was a huge lake that stretched as far as the horizon just a few hundred metres away, and we changed into our shorts and waded out into the water. It was ever so shallow and 100 metres out it was still only thigh deep. We bathed for a while and washed the dust from our pores as the final rays of the day made their way to us. Bad planning on my part meant that I was out of water. I had a few mouthfuls of juice left, and a warm can of beer I’d been carrying since the barbecue at Bayankhongor. I decided to save the juice for breakfast, so spent the dusk and early part of the night sipping on that can, much to the jealousy of the Swiss biker I was chatting with who cried a Shakespearean ‘My kingdom for a beer!’. Bats flittered about and mosquitos bit as we talked of everything between here and home, and I took a twenty minute exposure of the outpost. I’d wanted to do some star trails but sods law this would be the one night with thick cloud. I was asked by a Mongolian if I wanted a shot of vodka, of course I did so I was sent into a room of six young Mongolian men, none of whom really spoke English, and I’d been given five cupfuls before I left. I thought it would help me sleep on the hard wooden floor: it did and I woke up with a mild headache rather than backache.

Bathing in the lake - Unuru and Zaya.

The abandoned outpost.

Twenty minute exposure - the light trails are people's torches as they go for a wee.

Looking down on the van.

The next day we continued through the desert and later in the morning we made a stop to have a look at a hydro electric power plant, which was just a dam, a building and a substation looking thing, but I was treated to a decent flight display by some Swallows. We also took a short break by another lake, I scrambled up the red rocky hill for an explore and a photo from the top, discovering some abandoned eagles nests along the way.

We arrived in Khovd (silent K) by late lunchtime, so went straight to a hotel restaurant and I had a soup, which consisted of meat and chunks of potato and carrot in an oily water, and a potato and spam salad, which I enjoyed more. We then went to the children’s centre in which we would be staying and working, where more food, an almost identical meal, was put in front of us. I managed to eat most of it. Later on we went out to the children’s park, which had a bit of a fun fair, with a small roller coaster, swinging pirate ship and carousel and so on. We bought two tickets each which cost 50p per ride. We went on the roller coaster which was entertaining enough as I’ve never been the biggest white knuckle ride enthusiast, and then on the swing carousel which was quite good fun. We wandered about and some kids were playing football with a flat ball, I decided to join in and enjoyed being the best player on the park for once, and wasn’t afraid to muscle the teenagers off the ball with my slender but still adult frame; they were too old to patronise but too young to compete against. We went to a Buddhist temple which was next door and had a walk around the fairly unkept complex, before retiring to the children’s centre for the night.

Big kid - hanging about in the children's park

When I was told I would be a big player in Asia, this isn't what I thought my agent meant.

Goatboys and Indians

The Buddhist monument in Altai at dusk.

We left the desert town of Altai, with it’s brown dusty roads and crooked fenced ger neighbourhoods at around 8am. I hadn’t particularly been looking forward to the drive as I knew the roads would be bumpy and I hadn’t fully managed to shake the sick feeling still gripping my stomach after my meal from the cafe at the end of the world. The sandy roads were slightly smoother than the boulderous ones we had been on previously, and the open window fed cold air into my lungs, suppressing any feelings of nausea. The landscape looked like it was right out of an old Western film, but instead of cattle rustlers we only passed goat herders. Perhaps they were in fact goat rustlers. Goatboys would surely never work as a genre of gunslinging film.

About an hour into the drive the front tyre I was sitting above gave out an almighty hiss and our driver hit the brakes. A sharp stone had torn a deep gash into the well worn rubber  and we were delayed for 10 minutes whilst the van was jacked up and the wheel swapped with the spare. We were soon on our way again and hoped to stop by a naadam happening in one of the small towns not too far out of our way. We stopped to ask a passing motorcyclist, who informed us that it wasn’t on, and was just another case of Mongolian misinformation. 

The road out of Altai 

Looks like the Old Wild West.

The wild west landscape became greener and valleys rose up out of the rocky plains. The road weaved along the valley floors, like a compacted river of dust and rock, following the path of least resistance. The environment seemed to change slightly with every interlocking spur we rounded; soon trees warmly appeared, the vegetation became more diverse, though still limited, and the geological formations were bordering on the pornographic. 

Around 11.30 we stopped at a ger and popped in to have a cuppa with a family. I hadn’t been inside a household ger until now and it was something I had been looking forward to. The layout was pretty much identical to the Iron Age roundhouses at Flag Fen, a central hearth (stove in this case) and beds surrounding on each wall. This was very brightly decorated inside, with nice soft carpets on the floor and felt fairly clean. There were children’s toys scattered by one of the beds, a small television set on one side, and a small larder near the door screened by net curtains. The family offered us milk tea from their goats which was warm, salty and welcomed, along with bread and some thick cream from their livestock to spread on it. They asked if we wanted to ride their horse, and I hadn’t ridden yet in Mongolia and so grabbed the opportunity, and the horse, by the reins. I couldn’t remember the last time I had ridden a horse, but I knew the basic principles of control and direction and was happy to give it a go unaided. At first I just sat atop the horse as I walked it up and down and it felt too tame like I was riding a donkey at Blackpool. I spotted a herd of goats slightly further down in the valley floor, so set myself the challenge of herding them up to the ger. I brought the horse up to a quick trot as I descended the valley side, and the wooden saddle dug sharply into my delicate thighs as I bounced up and down on the back of the beast. It was a bit too painful and perilously close to my important bits for this soft cowboy to bare, and fortunately I’d reached the herd I’d been heading for by the time I met my pain threshold. I tugged on the reins and maneuvered my animal around, to march the scraggy little goats up the hill and back to the ger. I only had about 15 of them in my breakaway flock, but it was enough to start with. I ushered them in the direction I wanted, and they obediently trotted in front of my horse. I heard laughter as my herd and I approached the household, and I think the family enjoyed my attempt at being a herder, or goatboy, as I will insist on being called. I asked if I had got the job, but I didn’t understand their replies. I guess it’s a case of they’ll call me. 

A boy playing outside his ger. 

Herding the goats.

They had a few children who were really fun but tiring to play with. I threw myself around, spasming in the dirt as the boy’s imaginary bullets ripped through my torso and playfully pinned my twitching corpse to the valley side with mental machine gun fire. I shot him back though. I blew his fucking brains out. I’ve played enough boy soldiers to beat a six year old. I got to kick a football around a little bit which was great and I’d missed it after a month. My touch was slightly rusty and my lungs were slightly dusty after five weeks of smoking and no exercise. We went back into the ger to sit with the adults and drink some more tea. A toddler being cradled by his father was given a 4 inch long lump of fat to suck on instead of a dummy. I nearly gagged. Apparently it’s the fat and gristle from a sheep’s tail. We gave them a bag of toffees and they gave us a bag of dried curds, and I took a family portrait of them before we said goodbye and continued on our way. 

Bang bang. 

Dishing out the goat milk tea.

Suck on that, Johnny Boy - fat from a sheep tail

Family portrait.

The valleys became higher and it all felt more mountainous. They almost felt like huge stadiums, the valley sides were ginormous stands, the flat valley floor a giant arena. A few pine trees began to appear on the slopes, but only much higher up and nestled in the shady crevices of the hillsides, like a green and prickly pubic hair. We then climbed highly before perching on top of one of the peaks, where below in front of us we could see our destination of Uliastai.

Ever changing landscapes.

This had been the shortest and most pleasant journey so far. The visit to the ger had been really enjoyable and the landscape more diverse, or at least more stereotypically Mongolian (to my mind) than previous drives. Entering into Uliastai it felt really different to the towns we had already visited. Perhaps it’s the fact that many of the streets are tree lined, or that the attractive mountains close in on the town making it feel fairly cozy and protected. For some reason it reminds me of a small town in northern India, though I’ve got a fairly limited frame of reference, but I have seen cows and pigs wandering the street here. There just seems to be slightly more detail in the culture here, as if the Soviet influence struggled to make it over the mountains the way it perhaps so easily rolled over the desert and steppe. 

This is our driver’s home town, and the evening after the first day’s clinic he drove us up to a view point where you could see one of the higher peaks in Mongolia that has snow on it’s top all year round. We scrambled up some of the rocky tops and enjoyed the views and tossed a rock onto the shamanistic ovoo. We also visited a Buddhist monument on the edge of town which was interesting to look around and again gave good views over the town. We’re hoping to take some food down to the river this evening, and I’ll take my shorts so hopefully I can have a swim.

Nice views over rocky peaks 

Team West - the group I am travelling with.

Ovoo - many of these shamanistic monuments are all over the countryside.

Looking out from the Buddhist monument.

Sky God is angry with you, Uliastai!

Uliastai from the Buddhist monument.

The Buddhist Stupas.

Looking down on the town.

I heard the views were great from down there. I thought I saw a bus load of German tourists. 

On the Mongolian Road

Four Mongolians, two Australians and an Englishman drive west across Mongolia in an old Russian van. This wasn't the start of a laboured joke, but a little adventure that would last 16 days and take me through all sorts of beautiful landscapes. I'm currently six days and 1000km into the trip, and the group I'm traveling with are running clinics and workshops to help families with disabled children in different regional centres across southern and western Mongolia. The expedition is funded by mining companies who wish to fund social projects in the areas they operate in, and I am tagging along to document their work, both in photographs and a short documentary film. I shall write about the work of the NGO in a future blog post once it is over, but for now I will just discuss the journey.

We left Ulaanbaatar at 6.30 in the morning when the roads were still relatively quiet. We had a 12 hour drive ahead of us so it was best to beat the rush hour and gridlock gripping the city, where all avenues are choked with honking cars. The van we were traveling in is an old Russian vehicle, a bit like a VW Camper crossed with a minibus, and the inside smelt like a Second World War museum; petrol, tin and perishing leather. Combined with the smell, the hum of the engine and the rattle of the axel, I thought it might be a little like flying in a C47 over occupied Europe, every pothole was another barrage of flak jolting my bones which were trying to sleep. The main difference being the fear of death was replaced with the excitement of travel and adventure. 

I spent the first part of the day dozing in the back of the van, I was tired and the bumpy unmaintained roads were uncomfortable, so reducing my levels of consciousness seemed to be a good way to decrease the discomfort of travel. We drove through an emerald wilderness of soft green velvet draped across gentle hills. Isolated gers were scattered like discarded buds of cotton wool in the distance, and countless herds of horses roamed freely like zebra on the Savannah. We stopped for lunch in a very small town; I was introduced to the cuisine, if you could call it such, and had mutton and noodles, which tasted dirty and sweaty, as everything I have eaten so far does.

Rural Mongolia - gers, horses and hills.

In the afternoon the landscape became more rocky, like if Mars had some grass, and we wound our way along bumpy unpaved tracks, meandering through the wild landscape. We passed a few settlements here and there, but only consisting of a few gers grouped together, and the odd herder on horseback. We crossed paths with the occasional 4x4 or lorry but otherwise we were on our own. Our destination for the day was a town called Bayankhongor, where we would spend two days working in a children's centre, and we arrived in the sleepy frontier town by sunset. We stayed in a hotel for the two days, the hard mattress was made of horse hair, and it seemed the pillow was stuffed with dried beans, but nevertheless I slept well after an arduous journey, which was like being shaken by a flight simulator for 12 hours.

A lonely tanker on the road to Bayankhongor

We only passed a handful of people all day.

On our final evening in Bayankhongor, we were invited to the staff from the children's centre summer party, a barbecue held down by the river just out of town. Earlier in the day they had boiled the organs from the sheep, all stuffed with blood and fat, and left them in a bowl on the table we were working from, apparently as a treat for us to eat. It smelt like death on a farm, I wasn't sure if it was dinner or the remnants of a foot and mouth outbreak. I opted not to eat any at this time, thinking I would be offered it at the party in the evening where I would have to try it out of politeness - so I wasn't going to put myself through this ordeal twice. Fortunately for me, the foul smelling guts never made a reappearance so I never had to eat it. I was told the meal we were having was pronounced 'whore-hog', which I thought was a fitting name for some of the roly-poly ten-pinters found in the nightclubs back home. The food itself this time was actually rather nice. They steam cooked an entire butchered sheep, in a kind of milk churn, sealed with water and packed with hot stones, heated over a fire of horse shit. The meat was pretty good, I think us being fussy foreigners were given the prime cuts, and I was force fed a few shots of vodka, although I was happy to be polite to my hosts. After the meal the Mongolians played a drinking game, and instead of beer drank airag, a fermented mares milk which contains about 3% alcohol. I was given a mug filled to the brim, I took a few sips but had to hand it back. It tasted like a sour and fizzy milk, everything I am educated to throw away. I enjoyed watching the drinking game, it was like an anthropology field trip, but all that I really learnt was how similar it all was to home.

Preparing the 'whore-hog'.

Mongolian drinking games - fermented horse milk.

A boy out herding his goats.

The next day's travel would take us across the Gobi desert, and our destination was a town of cracked concrete and peeling paint called Altai, though it's actually smarter than the previous town; it actually has traffic lights. We left Bayankhongor again early in the morning as it would be another long drive to Altai. The patchy grass soon gave way to desert, and horses turned into camels, and camels turned into corpses the deeper we drove. Not long into the journey I watched a pelvis of a long perished beast be crushed under the wheels of our unforgiving wagon, and long silent horses slept into pieces in the sand. We passed a few people who flagged us down, one had run out of fuel, another seemed to have just broken down. We gave some fuel to the former, the latter seemed to be fucked. The way was littered with bleached bones and blown out tyres: a warning for those trying to cross the Gobi, and we didn't pass any form of settlement or sign of habitation for hours. After a while the mirages gave way to dunes, and then the dunes bowed down to the distant Altai mountains. When we did occasionally reach a settlement, one was by a brown shallow river we had to cross, the other by a dirty and sorry looking lake, it felt like they were the outpost at the end of the earth, far removed from a life I am familiar with. I wondered how they stay sane. I start to lose it if my broadband keeps disconnecting. First world problems, hey.

I wanted to get some shots of the van driving through landscape for the film I am making, so set up my tripod in a shallow river to film the vehicle crossing. As I was wading out, my flip flops were sucked into the sediment, and as I pulled they both snapped, so I spent the rest of the day barefoot, much to the amusement of the few locals we met. I left my flip flops in the desert, to be discovered by irate environmentalists or delighted archaeologists. The clap-trap van rattled across the arid landscape; we were constantly tossed up in the air and clutched back by gravity as we hurtled towards the horizon. We stopped in the small settlement by the lake, which consisted of maybe 20 gers, a couple of brick buildings and a single petrol pump. The outskirts of the outpost were littered with rubbish, plastic, broken bottles and baked toilet paper. It was actually just like Tatooine from Star Wars, not that I've been there. We opted to have some lunch in the single cafe there, we had the mutton noodles again, which were dirtier than before, and they would come back to haunt me like a violent poltergeist in my stomach. Four hours later, and 15 minutes after we arrived in Altai, I was violently sick and this would continue all evening. I assume they mixed some of the dried shit they use for cooking in with my meal, I felt awful and could not keep anything inside me. The other end started later on, and I was spurting evil from both ends of my axis; and then my nose started bleeding. Leaking from three holes at once. At least I didn't piss myself.

A herd of camels were the last thing we passed before bones littered the way.

Giving fuel to some who had ran out.

Our driver and two of the girls on the trip in the cafe at the end of the world.

One of the few signs of life we passed.

The Gobi road.

Three unwashed children playing outside the offending restaurant.