Gobi Desert

Here we go!

It wasn’t until I reached the Gobi desert that I started to appreciate Mongolia for its endless and deeply blue skies.  The skies between the intense glowing sunrises and the equally magnificent sunsets that follow that are strangely also very blue.  The silence all but for the wind and the solitude in such a vast expanse all felt comforting to me as was watching gazelles prance across the horizon and swifts dance along the gusts of wind.

I was entering a disconnected but comfortable state, each day blending into the next, no longer knowing or caring which day of the week it is.  I finally began to embrace the journey.

Both not at all and more than I expected

Before seeing a documentary a year ago, all I knew of Mongolia was of camels living in a desert.  When I saw “Mongolia” on the customs form halfway on the flight from South Korea, I thought I’d be going someplace warm until I recalled the pilot saying the destination airport was -21.  Those two clues didn’t add up until I looked out the window and watched the shallow brown hills below slowly get more and more white.

All sorts of emotions flowed through me in those initial moments of finally knowing where I was headed.  Relief, confusion, worry, acceptance, and more. I then finally opened the first of the envelopes Sabine had prepared for me to lead me to the final destination.

Right from the beginning of this plan, I told Sabine that I wanted to make it to exactly where the dart landed so a not-so-close city wasn’t going to cut it. After a couple days of searching for a guide that could understand English, I found Baatar in Dalanzadgad.

Gobi Desert – Camels!  OMG, so many camels!

Baatar agreed to take me on a tour into the Gobi desert, closer to where the dart landed, and to get my first taste of Mongolia.  About 60km west of Dalanzadgad, Baatar pointed his Landcruiser south of the highway and we started going offroad over the rolling hills next to a mountain he frequents in the summer.  He was taking me to a popular waterfall he takes tourists to except the river and falls are completely frozen in January.  Sliding down the ice river sure was fun though!

After horsemeat dumplings for lunch in a nearby village, the highway abruptly ended and we were now following the desert highways that snake across the steppe in no pattern whatsoever.  None of the “roads” showed up on any of my maps. Fortunately, guides that venture into the Gobi have these veins well memorized.

The road quickly got rough and it became time to enter the Dakar rally.  Landcruisers are well known for being almost god-like.  They’re nearly indestructible and can drive seemingly eternally in any terrain and that makes them the ideal weapon in deserts.   Baatar told me his two hobbies are racing horses and rally driving.  From what I can gather, his old Landcruiser only has one speed: 80km/h.  It may have been felt like a snail’s pace on the asphalt but it’s borderline insane in the desert.  In the passenger seat watching a rally driver pilot a Landcruiser through the desert, I was witnessing this man at his craft.  I was left genuinely impressed at how that vehicle was able to stay planted and bite such loose soil and not roll over as it felt like it should.

We stopped for a quick break in one of the numerous tourist ger camps littered across the desert that was closed for the winter but still staffed by a solitary nomad for security.  This was my first experience inside a ger (essentially a Mongolian yurt) and the guy had a nice flatscreen TV, washer and dryer combo, and some other appliances to live comfortably over the harsh winter.  All of this was fed by a large array of solar panels that power the camp.  The real reason Baatar had stopped here was to try to fix the antenna on his phone he uses to contact the nomad families.  It was the wrong antenna connector type for his phone so he managed to grind down random bits from a can of parts from his Landcruiser.  Breakdowns in Mongolia are to be expected and this was the first of several times seeing drivers pull out a can jammed with random tools, screws, bolts, etc so their vehicle can make it another kilometer.

By sunset, we reached the first nomad family and it was certainly an interesting experience.  It was my first time tasting authentic Mongolian food and I really didn’t care for it, which seems to be completely normal for foreigners. All the “Mongolian Grill” type restaurants in Canada are mothing like food in Mongolia and I didn’t see a single similar establishment or style of cooking during my month here.

Upon entering the ger, I was immediately handed a glass of hot milk tea and a container of snacks. This seems to be an unwritten mandate for nomads.  If a visitor drops by, you immediately drop whatever you’re doing and serve them a hot beverage and hand them something to eat. No exceptions!

I’ve always been a coffee person so I’m just getting used to this whole tea thing.  The milk tea was odd but ok for a bowl or two.  Then there were the snacks.  The container held a random assortment of what looked to be some small hard bread bites.  Some were chewable to a tolerable extent while others you could nearly break your jaw trying to crack open and then there was the taste…. or lack thereof.   These bites had such an intense flavor of nothingness I couldn’t help but wonder if is was just dust compressed into chunks.

Weirdly enough though, I started to like them!  After the strong taste of nothingness passes, there’s the faintest essence of sweetness.  Many nomads prefer to just dunk these bites into their tea bowls to soften up but I preferred the challenge of using my teeth to shatter their nearly impenetrable shell.

The basis of almost every meal roughly consists of meat, a few vegetables, and maybe some home-made pasta that is all cooked in a giant skillet over a dung-fueled fire.  Sometimes well-water is added and boiled with the other ingredients and it is served as a soup.

Winter evenings are long for nomad families.  Livestock gets rounded up before sunset so the after-dinner routine is relaxing to some TV, beginning with the 6pm “Komment” news program that everyone seems to watch to stay connected with the outside world.  While I couldn’t understand any of the shows, many of them are entertaining nonetheless.

Then I looked over to my right as the mother of the family was breastfeeding her youngest daughter, no cover or anything.  Umm, ok?  Back to the TV.

Later I look to my direct right to see what the grunting was all about but it was just the two daughters each on their potties struggling to squeeze one out.  Ok…. better just keep my eyes on the TV.

Nights in the desert in January are very very cold.  Gers heat up fast but they also cool down just as quickly.  If you don’t have several layers of blankets, you’ll be cold halfway through so there’s often someone responsible for waking up to add wood, dung, or coal in the fire.

After breakfast, Baatar and I set out towards the dunes again and he asked me which one I’d like to climb.  Obviously, I just said whichever is highest so off we went to the tallest, which is about a 300m tall triangle of sand.  The climb was about as I expected.  It’s like climbing the loose slate scree slopes in the Rockies but you slide down and sink in a bit more.  It felt like the climb was going to take forever but I was easily deceived by the smoothness of the sand.  I was exhausted and climbing maybe 7 or 8 meters before resting again and it looked like the crest was still 200m away when, in fact, is was only 20m away.  Fortunately, the crest itself was icy sand so it was comparatively easy to just walk along the crest.

When I started plotting a route to head down Baatar said the easiest way is to just slide down so off we went!  Running in sand is exhausting, even down its down a steep slope with patches of hard and soft sand.  It was certainly a good morning workout and, after dumping the sand from my shoes and pockets, off we went again.

The next nomad family lived beyond the western edge of the Khongor sand dunes and had a livestock of some cows that roamed freely but their primary animals were camels.  I was told this family and the last family move twice per year.  This family didn’t have a truck so I suspect they still transport everything by camel.

Staying with this family was just as interesting.  They served me dried camel milk curd, camel vodka, and most disgusting of all… fermented camel’s milk.  I had heard stories of how gross Airag is and it really is as nasty as everyone says.  I managed to stomach a cup full but that was my limit.

After having dinner, the women and children got ready for their nightly routine and left into the bitter cold to go milk the camels by flashlight.

The men had spotted the alpha male camel when out rounding up the camels by motorcycle.  This male had been out roaming for quite some time and, because it’s now rutting season, the male hasn’t eaten in months and is looking to mate.  He eventually wandered home and stood watching over his pack with a towering stance, declaring his dominance over the others.  He was very aggressive and did not at all appreciate being approached.

Before coming to Mongolia, I had no idea camels are pretty much the only large animal that has perfectly adapted to both the extreme heat and extreme cold climates that deserts can whip up.  There are only three types of camels today and two of them are in Mongolia.  The vast majority are the single-humped and slightly smaller Dromedary camel but Mongolia has the two species of two-humped Bactrian camel.  The domesticated Bactrian camel can be found all over the Gobi but the wild variant is only found in the protected area in the southwest Gobi, where my dart landed.  The wild Bactrian camel is uniquely able to drink a saltwater slurry if more desirable water resources are unavailable.

I set out in the afternoon for an hour riding camels around the “forest” at the end of the dunes.  I’m sure it looks like a forest in the summer but it just looks like petrified trees in the winter. Delicious petrified trees that camels can’t get enough of.  Watching them chomp down on the dry and tough thorny branches was an odd sight.  They may have to regurgitate it and chew that cud many times but camels are able to digest almost anything.

Camels are not at all comfortable though and, when you get them into a sprint, it’s a very bumpy ride that left me sore for days.  I find riding horses to be much smoother in comparison.   Since they can sprint up to 65 km/h, I was very glad these camels were not behaving well so they didn’t want to run much.

The evening was a busy one as the neighbor family we stayed at the night before had dropped by.  The father of that family had bought a new Chinese motorcycle the night before and I looked at it with such confusion the next morning.  He rode it over to this other nomad family and they immediately put down the center stand and started completely disassembling the wheels.  From what I could gather, they were replacing the stock tubes with better ones so they wouldn’t get punctured as easily on the sharp desert rocks.  The bike just sat on its stand until morning as everyone gathered inside the ger to play some card game.  This was a smaller ger and was packed with twelve people inside.  My guide Baatar was preoccupied with the game so I had no one to translate anything for me.  I was too busy entertaining the kids anyway.  I was like a shiny new toy to them so they all wanted my attention.

I’ve caught people taking photos of me and it was weird at first.  One lady even stuck her son next to me in an elevator and took a picture of us both. To be fair, even I’ve been shocked each time I see a white person in Mongolia.  I’m sure we’re a common sight in the summer but I’ve only seen maybe 13 white people over the last month.

After the card game and after many shots of vodka, the one father had to leave his disassembled motorcycle behind.  He stumbled out the door and got a ride home with his wife so it was time for bed.  The night was crazy cold again inside the ger and I think Baatar was starting to regret taking me out into the desert.

We spent the next day driving back to Dalanzadgad along a northern route beyond the mountains to stop at some points of interest like a spot where some ancient stone etchings of ibex still lie and an area known as the flaming cliffs.