Since yesterday I’m back to having internet. Here’s some pictures
of my journey to East Taiga in Northern Mongolia (from UB 15h bus + 15h
car + 10h horseback). It was a quite a long way to get there I thought. I
got good training on how things go the way they do and there is simply
no way you can resist that in a country as large as Mongolia. At times I
felt very powerless, and annoyed. And annoyed for feeling annoyed. I
got ripped off all the time in the beginning, later on I picked up on
fair prices.
I left UB to take a bus to Mörön some time during the last week of
June. I was very impressed how the ride had improved: the small and
packed “Russian jeep” a year and a half ago was replaced with a large
air-conditioned Chinese bus with a dvd player.. Also, the delay of
departure had come down to one hour compared to the earlier three. We
left around 4pm and got to Mörön already at 7am. In Mörön I organised a
border permit that I needed to visit the reindeer herders’ camp and that
I had been refused in UB. I got it in a day (paid a lot) and took a
shared car up to Tsagaannuur. The car was supposed to leave early in the
afternoon, then having been temporarily cancelled due to lack of
travellers, in the end we left Mörön just after 9pm and got there after
noon. I guess I haven’t ever really minded delays and changes of plans
when I travel, it’s more of a plus most of the time. But feeling of
needing to get something, whatever it was, done, definitely made me a
slightly less of a relaxed traveller. Luckily, I did have multiple
chances to practice going with the flow, for instance when my guide came
to pick me up early from the reindeer herders’ camp or when I managed
to take a bus back to UB that I did not have ticket to and which had
been sold out.
Me hard at work participant observing tourists in front of my ger at a guesthouse in
Mörön on the day I got my border permit sorted and was waiting for a car
to take me to Tsagaannuur.
The subjects. First they bought two horses who kept biting, hitting and
escaping. After stitches in UB and more pain they decides to sell the
horses and get motorcycles from the local market instead. They were
going west towards Olgii while I headed north.
The new cultural landscape of the Land of Blue Sky. On the left our car
which ran out of petrol some kilometers before Tsagaannuur Village
while, we had already reached Tsagaan (White) Nuur (Lake); in the middle
a group of French-Swill tourists on a horse trek from Khatgal to
Tsaatan (Dukha) reindeer herders camp; far right a herd of goats.
Sitting on a hill waiting for something to happen– someone to come by and bring us petrol.
And even more importantly– where’s the shower? Oh the heavenly
shower. Luckily I got to Tsagannuur just on the day of a village shower
day, I mean, on the day when the communal shower house was open. All the
thoughts over different kinds of worries were literally washed away. It
was a new day, a new beginning, my hair was clean and smelled nice. I
stayed at the Tsaatan Tov (House or Tsaatan Visitor Centre) which was
put up about five years ago and felt somewhat stranded now. Borkhuu, a
Dukha man who moved to the village due to his wife’s health now lives
next to the visitor center and manages it. Most of the people coming by
the visitor center are with a tour because otherwise language is a
problem when organizing horses to the reindeer herding camp etc. It’s a
long story how the visitor center came into being and now has kind of
stopped functioning and I’ll give it more attention in my next post.
A Swiss girl who I interviewed a few days after staying at the
Tsaatan Tov gave me Smith’s Love Over Scotland that I read while waiting
for a bus back to Mörön. I didn’t enjoy it too much but it definitely
made me feel nostalgic towards Edinburgh which was a strange sensation
being tucked away in a small village like Tsagaannuur. But that’s
besides the point, there was something else in to book that I could
relate to. Smith writes about an anthropologist (very established, he
says, not a student) waking up on the first night in the field realizing
there is someone else in the house, the room, where she had fallen
asleep thinking she was alone. That someone was just looking at her once
she opened her eyes. I can confirm Smith’s suggestion that being quite
scary. And it created a moment of hesitation– why was I so far? Why had I
come alone? And was it a good idea to set off with a guide the next
morning who I had never met?
The answer was obviously yes, it was. My guide was good and took care of
me on my first experience on a horse that lasted over ten hours
straight. That’s how long it takes to reach Tsaatan camp from
Tsagaannuur. This a photo of me and my horse on a break. I mastered
trotting on the way back. I didn’t fall off the horse but I was quite
scared as I always am with everything all the time. Eventually the horse
fell but I stayed on it, it got up and was fine.
We are going down from a mountain pass, it was around 9pm then I had
just led the horse all by myself first time in my life which I’m very
proud of. My guide has just picked up a stone to add it to the ovoo
ahead.
It was beautiful to be so high up near the sky.
Dukha camp in a distance. It’s quite a wet valley with numerous rivers
providing lush bushed for the reindeer to ear. The white dots are
tepees (ortz). I was told it was about 2300m above sea level.
