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Mongolia: a
magnificent metaphor
Mongolia is a transcendently beautiful country, but it isn't a prime destination for hedonists or the physically unfit. In many places outside Ulan Bator, the capital, niceties such as sidewalks, indoor plumbing and modem connections are unheard of. Sheep, horses, goats, yaks and cattle graze everywhere, and in an area twice the size of Texas, there are less than 2,000 kilometres of paved roads. Indeed, the country is still a catchword for remoteness, as in, "I've never seen the lot so full. I had to park in Outer Mongolia." Truth to tell, it was the very idea of visiting a metaphor that had stirred my imagination seven weeks earlier, when I was invited to join a U.S.-Mongolian archeological team on 16-day trip to unearth buried artifacts. Mongolia's reputation for inaccessibility notwithstanding, tourism has increased since the country broke free of Soviet domination in 1990. In Ulan Bator, there are museums, Western-style hotels and billboards for Citibank and Dell. There are also random reminders of the country's socialist past. As I walked through the city on my first day there, I came upon a small square with a statue in the centre -- a clutch of workers marching triumphantly toward the light. Several children were using it as a jungle gym, climbing atop the marchers and spitting pomegranate seeds on their heads. That night, I joined expedition organizer Gus Grabscheid on the drive to the airport to meet the 10 other members of the U.S. group. We spent the night at the Palace Hotel, assembling in the parking lot in the morning -- a dozen Americans and a 20-person Mongolian support team including Professor Batsaikhan, head of the archeology department at the University of Ulan Bator (who, like most Mongolians, uses only one name), and several of his students. Our caravan consisted of a kitchen truck, storage van and four ultra-rugged 4-by-4 jeeps. Our driver, a soft-spoken and seemingly unflappable man named Terbish, was one of the three owners of Genghis Expeditions, a local touring company that supplied the vehicles and support staff. Heading north out of the city, he turned off the highway onto a barely worn cow path. In Mongolia, there is simply no way to move expeditiously from point to point: Bouncing, trundling, crawling across the car-unfriendly terrain, it can easily take a day to cover 250 kilometres. But the leisurely pace yielded the richest sightseeing I had ever experienced. My eyes pasted to the window, I watched clusters of gers, herds of yaks and goats, and the occasional Bactrian camel pass by. Gazelles loped across the steppes. Mongolian cowboys in flowing green and purple robes galloped in the middle distance. Huge condors and hawks perched on tree stumps. Cattle grazed near a bend in the Orkhun River. And horses, mostly in large, untended herds, were everywhere. On the steppes, there are virtually no roads, only faint paths and dry riverbeds. Sometimes Terbish would turn off the trail and take a shortcut across the grass, the other vehicles trailing behind. "You've driven here before?" I asked. "No," he said. "Then how do you know where you're going?" He smiled. "I just know." We were picnicking within sight of a ger when a woman on horseback cantered up, tied up her horse and strolled over to us. She had a weather-worn face and a lovely smile and chatted briefly with Terbish. Her name was Alima. "She wants us to come in," he said. We filed in through the door of the ger and found seats along the side of the one-room dwelling. Ger design hasn't evolved appreciably over the past millennium, nor does it allow much room for improvisation. The walls are invariably made from latticed strips of willow and larch, lashed together with yak-hair rope and leather strings. The roof consists of sloping poles, radiating from the centre like the ribs of an umbrella. The exterior is sided with felt. Your standard ger can be dismantled in an hour or two and reassembled as quickly in a new location. Assisted by her six children, Alima set out a platter of hard, tangy goat cheese and several bowls of a milky-looking potion. "Ah, aureg," said Bill Forstchen, a science-fiction author and college professor on his second trip to Mongolia. "I've been waiting all year for this." Aureg is fermented horse milk. I took a few sips; others had drained their bowls and were asking for refills. "Not bad," I said, smiling wanly. A few days later, we visited a herdsman named Namsrai whom Mr. Grabscheid had met the summer before and had been looking forward to reconnecting with this year. A sturdily built man in his 50s, Namsrai was at home with several family members and greeted us warmly. Mrs. Namsrai set bowls of dried sheep curds and milky tea before us, as well as a tureen of noodle soup with chunks of mutton and whitish fat floating near the surface. Then she appeared carrying a bowl containing the entire gastrointestinal tract of a sheep. With a knife, she carved generous servings of ovine tissue. I sampled lung, stomach and heart, and a small section of the sheep's lower intestine stuffed with what appeared to be blackberry jam. It was actually a mixture of sheep's blood and flour boiled to a disturbing viscosity. Outside, Mrs. Namsrai gave us a demonstration in the art of dung gathering. Depending on its source and age, dung has a wide range of applications: heating, cooking, construction, wound care, pest control. And because dung is by definition produced by herbivorous animals, it is high in fibre content, which is why it is surprisingly odourless and burns so well, especially when it's had at least two years to season. With the effortlessness of a professional lacrosse player, Mrs. Namsrai scooped up chunks of dung with a curved wooden shovel and flipped them deftly into a willow basket slung over her shoulder. Then I tried it. Working the dung onto the shovel was easy enough. But getting it into the basket was tricky -- sort of like sinking a three-point hook shot. I overshot the basket a few times, once nearly hitting Mrs. Namsrai. She laughed. Later that afternoon from atop a nearby bluff, we looked out on the grounds of a 10th-century Mongol citadel. I grabbed my metal detector and joined the others in the hunt for artifacts. Scouring the grounds with no particular plan in mind, I unearthed an eighth-century Chinese coin, a bronze earring, two buttons and part of a belt buckle. As soon as I made my first strike, I set the detector aside, knelt down and began attacking the hard-packed soil with a tool that more resembled a vegetable peeler than a spade. One of Prof. Batsaikhan's students, a reed-thin young man named Otgoo, appeared with a more serious shovel to take over the digging. Otgoo and I dutifully turned over what we had found to Prof. Batsaikhan, who was meticulously sorting all the spoils gathered to date, making careful notes on their provenance, and arranging them on a dining table outside the kitchen truck. There were Sung dynasty coins, Khitan jewelry, Huunu ornaments, Mongol arrowheads -- some designed specifically to fell an enemy's horse -- and sundry sharpening blades, surgical instruments and ceremonial bowls, all dating back to between the sixth and 13th centuries. Toward the end of our expedition, we ran into another tour group -- this one comprising a half-dozen women about to begin a five-day horseback trek through the forests of the Hungai Mountains. They joined us and our Mongolian friends in our dining tent for dinner that evening and stayed for our now customary after-dinner bilingual sing-along. The Mongolians sang first -- beautifully and with passion. The Americans followed -- execrably and with passion. Then it was the turn of Susan Belgrave and June Robinson, two remarkable British horse-trekkers well into their 70s, who evidently thought no evening on the steppes of central Asia would be complete without Cole Porter: "Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide open country that I love. Don't fence me in." Gazing up through the tent's ceiling vents at the biggest, starriest sky I had ever seen, I thought those were the most poignant and insightful lyrics ever written. Global Research & Discovery Network, the group (founded by Mr. Grabscheid) that organized the expedition, is planning more trips to Mongolia. For more information, phone (201) 363 0488, e-mail [email protected], or visit http://www.globaldiscoverynetwork.com. Genghis Expeditions leads expeditions, horse treks and cultural journeys
throughout Mongolia. For more information, phone 976 (11) 310 455, e-mail
[email protected], or visit http://www.genghisexpeditions.com. |