Culinary updates

Before heading to the taiga I did quite a bit of food shopping. I brought mainly noodles, but also coffee drinks, cereal drinks, bread, candy, peas, tuna, ketchup, buckwheat… As gifts I also took sweets with me, toothbrushes and toothpaste to balance this, drawing supplies for children, mosquito repellent, soap, coffee drinks etc. We first got through my food and the second half of my stay I was totally dependent on local food which I was very happy with. It makes sense to share if one household has more than the neighboring. Zaya and PJ had often a load of people over for dinner.

Before leaving Tsagaannuur for East Taiga an Estonian student living in London brought three apples imported from Chile. Everyone kept telling me they thought the apples were from China. Fresh vegetables were things I came to miss the most, and as soon I got back, I shopped some more for this faint tasting fruit.

For breakfast we usually had bread. Every day Zaya baked fresh bread on the stove. Usually yesterday’s bread lasted at least until dinner time. Warm bread from the stove smelled so amazing but it was forbidden to have it hot because it needed to cool down to be thoroughly baked and not collapse. Here the bread is cooling pressed between the tepee canvas and a pole.

I found a solution to this that turned into somewhat of a new trend– putting a slice of bread on the stove and then covering it with a thick layer of butter. I ate a lot of bread, man. Not unusually for more than one meal. PJ’s aunt made also taiga bread that was very crusty having been baked straight in the ashes. I’m sold to the idea of making bread myself.

One day I went looking for wild onions by the river but also found rhubarb (beyond metaphor as you can see). I had not expected to find rhubarb, in fact, I had not the slightest idea where in the world it would grow in the wild. In the taiga there’s jam made of it but even more commonly it is just toasted on the stove like the bread above and had as a treat.

Some days before my arrival Zaya and PJ got meat that was now drying hanged up one the side of the tepee. We had it often with rice. Or home made tsuivan (noodles): first dough from flour, then formed into pancake-like bread and baked on the stove, then dried/cooled and later chopped up into noodles. Very tasty! Zaya used a lot of garlic and was an excellent cook. She also made taiga’s rice pudding with reindeer milk which we had with sugar. It was so filling I almost skipped meals the next day. Food was always accompanied by milk tea.

On my way back from Tsagannuur to Mörön we stopped at a lady’s mother’s house. This is how detailed it gets. Mongolian diet seems fairly different to Tsaatan as they eat significantly more meat. It was a hearty meal that started with tea and some aaruul – Mongolian dried curd. Just outside I could see almost all phases of aaruul being prepared.

Zuun Taiga

The reindeer herders living in Mongolia are divided into two areas: East (Zuun) ja West (Baruun) Taiga. I went to East Taiga where two large families had joined to spend a summer in cool valley with their reindeer. In total there were currently 107 people divided to 23 families, and their approximately 350 reindeer. In West Taiga there are more people and reindeer, around 35 to 38 families. In East Taiga I was told that the total number of reindeer in both taigas would be just above 1000.

The reindeer wondered freely grazing in the valley and surrounding mountains often coming to rest by the ortz (tepee).

   

This is Zaya’s and PJ’s ortz where I spent my 8 days of visiting the camp. The day usually started around 9am, although either Zaya or PJ usually got up around 7am to make the fire. My tasks included wondering to the river to bring water, sweeping (which I was great at), bringing in firewood and helping with the dishes. Sometimes I assisted in cooking. I definitely did a lot of eating which I think deserves a post of its own.

   

Mornings proceeded after a long breakfast with catching the female reindeer and milking. Here’s a photo of Zaya catching her females (in the evening though) to take them back to the camp for milking. She gave me her husband’s wellies, tied my feet in cloth (socks not used) and took me with her as her assistant herder. Each family has 2 to 4 females that they milk getting about 200g of milk per reindeer. It is used to make tea and cook, for example to make very filling and tasty rice pudding. Families who have more females and can collect more milk also make cheese. Reindeer are not used for meat unless it is unavoidable to kill a reindeer once it has, for instance, injured itself.

Me and the reindeer I brought back for milking. Everyone laughed when they saw the photo saying I was so extremely tall that a reindeer looks like a tiny sheep when put next to me. Reindeer have very sweet always in for some salt.

Milking time in the evening looked usually like a patchwork of tourists, locals and reindeer scattered in their different interests of the event. The reindeer were pretty calm, only reindeer babies who were tied to the logs for the time being wanting to be reunited to their mums. The Dukha women and children were chatting, milking and sorting out reindeer. The tourists wanted to take pictures of the reindeer and the milking event. And then me, a student, wondering around, asking everyone questions that broadly divided into categories: having been asked hundred times before or ones that didn’t seem of much relevance.

A large part of the day was spent in an ortz socialising and relaxing. Here’s a usual view from our ortz. Reindeer often come by to ask for salt from the families they belong to. Other reindeer wondering by are not given salt. Men usually were occupied with firewood or carvings. Women were cooking or doing small household tasks. All happened in a very relaxed unhurried manner.

Most of the time was spent in an ortz having tea, chatting and visiting each other. Everyone walked freely from one family to another always being welcome and sharing food if someone had more than the ortz next door. Here two sisters (placing 2nd and 3rd in age in the village) are chatting to visiting Italians (film-maker in the far left) about a film made in 1996 that they had just seen. The Italian group brought it along and screened and the locals were indeed to see it. Electricity for it comes from solar panels that were distributed and sold half price by a World Bank project. The film lasting for few minutes was in Italian and presented a very mystical aspect of everyday life of the group. The second man from the left – the shaman of the village – was later interviewed by the Italians. Zaya is second from the right, translating. The tourist interest were mainly located on 5 groups from which 3 are captured on this photo: elderly people, the shaman, English-speaking Zaya who had moved to the taiga 6 years ago. The two other groups are children and reindeer who received a lot of attention, especially by being photographed.

 

Summer seemed a busy time– there was always something going on. Here a week-long or so school is being put up for children to learn written Tuvan, their mother tongue. Tuvan is written in Cyrillic script like Mongolian but has several additional letters. Tuvan is spoken but everyone is also fluent in Mongolian.

 The children who go to school in Tsagannuur and stay in the village during the winter with their families were all back for the summer. The taiga gets also gets a lot of visitors particularly from end of June up to beginning of August which is actually a very short spell of time. During my stay at the camp there were 23 tourists coming to visit the camp out of whom 19 I interviewed. Besides them it was me (borderline tourist) and a French anthropologist Magali who had been studying the area for 17 years and was now spending her summer holiday there with her two children. On the photo, a typical early July scene– children playing on the left, Magali in her beige top looking at the souvenir market organised for the tourists.

Roads and Horses

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.