August 25, 2008 by Karin.

Mongolians worship the blue sky as their Father and their land as Mother. And in Mongolia, we do not rip up our Mother to install highways, a convenient network of paved roads, or regular signage indicating direction and destination.It makes for some scenic rides…and very long ones at that.  In fact, it would 8 hours of scenic driving to travel the 360 kilometers (223 miles) from Ulan Bator to Kharkhorin. I used to pride myself on the ability to be rocked to sleep during airplane turbulance but rides in Mongolian vans were so full of bumps and side-of-head banging against windows that I just couldn’t sleep through the headaches.

  We cheered whenever our van found its way on one of these rare paved paths. Outside of Ulan Bator, this was the most comfortable kind of road to drive on.  (Think of this as “off road.”)

Above is a typical road in the countryside. (Coined by a member of our group as “off-off road.”) Every time another vehicle passed by, we had to close our van windows to keep the stirred up dust from entering. We often felt like we were in a safari, watching (and being watched by) herds of animals, field mice, and the birds that eat them.  

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August 24, 2008 by Karin.

I think I was more excited than most people about the solar eclipse. Excited enough to learn how to say it in Mongolia: nar sar khirtekh.

Lots of tour groups were taking tourists out west into the countryside especially for the viewing. The woman at the neighboring hotel told me we were too far from Siberia to experience it properly. And someone from our Habitat group said we it wasn’t possible to watch an eclipse without a sheet of pin pricked construction paper. Still, I hoped.

Our group was leaving the Flower Hotel after our first dinner together when the doormen gestured us toward the bunch of Japanese guests gathering in the parking lot. It took us two seconds to figure out why they were making such a fuss and holding their cameras up at the sun.  



 I stared at the sun for a while, trying to make out some sign of the eclipse but had to give up. I needed to massage the sizzle out of my eyeballs.

While we stood around trying combinations of sunglasses over eyes and cameras over sunglasses, Chris pulled out a rectangle of magic glass made especially for eclipse viewing. It didn’t look like much but anyone who looked through it would gasp with amazement. It didn’t take long for the local kids to get word of the magic view and they moved to the front of the group, grabbing the glass from adult hands, passing it to one another. Meanwhile, a few Japanese tourists formed a line beside us for their chance to look through the glass. 



And that was how our group bonded that first evening.   

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August 20, 2008 by Karin.

Let’s get to the real reason I was in Mongolia…

For my BIG birthday in June, Nico decided to help me realize my dream of going to Mongolia. (To get beyond using it simply as a homepage motif and a personal metaphor for unattainable fantasy).

He signed me up for the Habitat for Humanity build in Kharkhorin http://www.habitat.org/cd/gv/trip_desc.aspx?type=1&code=gv9300 and after the four days of traveling in Mongolia, I met up with my group of fellow builders at the Sun and Moon B&B in Ulan Bator. Angela and Kimberly were the leaders of our group of 17 and at the neighbor ger bar, they took us through the orientation, generously highlighted with get-to-know-you games and reminders to Drink Water.

That night, team member Steve wrote the first entry of our group journal. His was an edge-of-your-seat account of the adventure survived by a third of the team members upon arrival in Mongolia in the dead of the night. After negotiating their own transport into town, the group of 6 found themselves locked out of the B&B. And Steve, who got out of bed to speak to them through the mosquito screen, realized that the rest of us were locked inside the building…and the caretaker was nowhere to be found.

Click below to read Steve’s entry.

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August 19, 2008 by Karin.

Sighting around Terelj National Park at dusk:
The camel’s front feet were tied to keep it from wandering too far but it still managed to waddle down the hill, roll around (on its back!) in a mound of dirt, and visit the nearby herd of sheep and goat. The next morning, its owner came down to retrieve it from where it was resting near our outhouse.

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August 18, 2008 by Karin.

(photo: a bunch of hybrid cow-yaks)

“Murl, khon, yamaa, ukher, temee”
“Murl, khon, yamaa, ukher, temee”

Zolvayar (the boy who walked my runaway horse) had me recite the five words after him over and over again. I thought he was teaching me to count one to five but what he taught me were the five snouts, the names of the five animals central to Mongolian culture.

The horse, sheep, goat, cow/yak, and camel are crucial to the Mongolian livelihood. (The Mongolian population is 2.8 million. The livestock population, 34 million.) Finding land for their animals to graze is the main factor in the nomads’  lifestyle: packing up and moving four times a year.

The Lonely Planet details the relative values of the five animals:
-a horse is worth five to seven sheep or seven to 10 goats
-A camel is worth 1.5 horses

At one point, I asked Zolvayar why the herd of sheep and goat nibbling their way toward us that afternoon didn’t venture into his family’s area. He shook his finger “no.” With our newly shared vocabulary and fingers a-pointing, he explained that our land was for horses. The sheep and goat belonged to the people a 100 meters down the hill. Cows were the animals of choice for the family across the road and as for the camel, that belonged to the nomads of the ger and caravan, camping on the top of the hill.

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August 14, 2008 by Karin.

Going to see takhis was Sandy’s idea.

The day after we returned from Terelj, she convinced me and Wei to join her on a day trip to Khustain Nuruu. We had no idea it would take three hours of travelling on bumpy, unpaved roads to get there. “They’d better be worth it,” Wei and I would have warned Sandy if it weren’t for the fact that we were easy-going, but meek, followers. 

A quick note on the takhi, or Przewalski horse:
The takhi resembles horses from prehistoric cave paintings. It’s the last truly wild horse in the world, having never been domesticated and keeping all 66 of its chromosomes. (Horses normally have 64.) The takhi become extinct in Mongolia back in 1960 but with the breeding of a dozen surviving in European zoos, the horse made a comeback. Today, over 200 takhis have been successfully reintroduced to the Mongolian wild, in Khustain Nuruu National Park. I got the impression that the chance to see the horse was about as special as spotting a unicorn.

After we entered the park, a 15 year old guide got in our car and we spent another half hour on the bumpy roads.

“Do you see it?” our guide asked. The driver pulled over.

We squinted a few miles up the hill. “Where? Where?”

“It’s yellow with a white nose.”

We got out and after a few minutes of determined gazing through our binoculars, we made out fuzzy tan figures behind some trees.

“Okay, can we go back now?” Our guide asked, still sleepy from the bumpy ride and hungry from a lunch interrupted.

“No! We came all this way!” 

Our driver happily left the car in the valley and led us up the hill. Every half hour, we looked through our binoculars, decided we could do better and kept hiking. 

An hour and a half later, our young guide had polished off my pack of nuts and raisins and decided to rest on a rock. But not before reminding us of the rule to stay at least 200 meters from the horses.

Our driver had taken tourists to the park for the past five years so we followed him until we were able to watch the group of 9 horses from the same elevation. Then all of a sudden, a bunch of white and tan noses appeared over the top of our side of the hill. It was a group of 11 takhis, big ones and little ones, travelling in a pack.

They were so cute and so close and in the silence of the surrounding mountains, we watched them work their magic, the simple miracle of existing. It was indeed as special as being in the presence of unicorns. Later, our guide told us that we had been much closer than 200 meters from that second group which pleased us greatly. We reckoned that we had seen 1/10th or 1/11th of all the takhis in the world in that one afternoon.

[For more info and a rated PG13 photo of the horses, check out http://www.takhi.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=50〈=en]  

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August 14, 2008 by Karin.

“Sain bainuu.” I usually initiate conversations with “hello.”

If a Mongolian strikes up a conversation with me, it would be with a finger in my direction accompanied by the question: “Korean?”

Or the question: “Japanese?”

I used my Mongolian phrasebook as often as I did my Lonely Planet guide. Traveling in the past, I was shy about attempting the local language but in Mongolia, it was very rewarding. After hello, I’d turn to the Small Talk section of the phrasebook and half read, half point to the Cyrillic translation for “What’s your name?” and “How old are you.” Then progress to page 49, the listing of family members, to describe the existence of children/siblings.

A woman in Kharkhorin told me, “8 kids. Four girls, two boys.” Answers that didn’t add up were not uncommon and a 208 page phrasebook was not equiped to deal with the complexities of real life and human mortality.

Without a Mongolian to English dictionary, it was hard for the locals to ask me questions back so they would often express themselves in writing.

This was Zolvayar telling me in half Cyrillic, half roman alphabet, that his father is Mongolian but lives in Seoul (which he traveled to by plane). The picture of the moon and sun below is an illustration of “tomorrow,” to ask if I’d be leaving Terelj for Ulan Bator the following day.

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August 13, 2008 by Karin.

My first time sampling Mongolian cuisine was in a pastel tiled joint in the covered part of the Black Market. Gordon and I had steamed mutton dumplings and stewed mutton topped with a mysterious glossy white chunk. He had warned me about this, the highly regarded fatty sheep tail.

As a guest in many a Mongolian household, he was regularly honored with extra fat on his plate as a way of saying, “You’re our guest. Have this fat and be warm and healthy.”

Someone else had told me that vegetables are still a relatively new phenomenon in Mongolia and regarded with suspicion as a less healthy alternative to meat and dairy.We also ordered a bowl of the popular “suutei tsai,” the milk tea with salt. (a.k.a. salted milk that you keep sipping in hopes of locating a hint of tea).

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August 12, 2008 by Karin.

Gordon and I were walking through the central square of Ulan Bator, the site of post-election riots earlier that month. On this particular Tuesday, however, all was calm and I got to take a photo with the statue of Ghengis Khan (we were separated only by two guards and a stretch of rail). My camera and I also followed around a group of Mongolians visiting from the countryside.

“Why don’t you ask to take a photo with him?” Gordon pointed to the man in traditional dress.

“Do you think he’d let me?”

“Sure. But he might want to kiss you.” Gordon joked.

I handed him the camera and tapped the gentleman on the shoulder. He consented to a photograph together, stuck his cigarette in the side of his mouth that still contained teeth, and put his arm around me. Afterwards, I must have had the happiest, dopiest smile on my face because he reached forward again, pulled me close, and planted a kiss on my cheek. It was my first (and only) kiss in Mongolia and set the stage for many a memorable interaction with the Mongolian people.

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