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.

Posted in Who knew?, Mongolia | No Comments »

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]  

Posted in Who knew?, Mongolia | 1 Comment »