Kazakh eagles

September 10, 2008 by Karin.

A family of Mongolian tourists pose as masters of the eagle.

Free roaming farm animals were exotic to me. So what’s exotic for Mongolians? Kazakh hunting-eagles, why not?

In front of Erdene Zuu, sat two escorted Golden Eagles. They were likely trained as hunters but were spending their summer vacation posing with guests.

 A photo of the Kazakh bird in its element.
 http://www.mongoliatoday.com/eagle.html  

 

 

 

 

 

 Birds are traditionally trained to attack foxes, not small children.

 

 

“Get it off! Get it off!”

I yelled desperately to a bunch of people who spoke no English. Batdolgor (our social worker) who held my camera kept snapping away, kept making the “wait, hold on, one more” gesture. She was waiting for the bird to spread its wings, for the bird’s owner to step aside, for my face to take on a more appropriately stoic expression.

For 1000 tugrug (about 1 US dollar), I posed with the smaller of the two birds. The trick to making the bird spread its wings is to make it unsteady, to shake it. In the photo, the trainer had to shake the bird so many times that it had slid down the thick glove and was getting close to my bare arm. It was a heavy, heavy bird.

Remind me to work on my triceps before attempting a trip to Kazakhstan.

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Naughty Monks

September 9, 2008 by Karin.

In Mongolia, monks practice Tibetan Buddhism and temples are filled with constant humming and chanting. On Sunday, August 3rd, our group was taken to Erdene Zuu monastery, originally built in the 16th century. 

There, I asked Hoghi our interpreter about something that had been puzzling me. ”How come some monks chant so diligently while others are so relaxed about it?” In temples, monks sit on colorful cushions in two facing rows. The older, more experience monks near the alter are usually in the middle of chanting through pages of Tibetan prayers, eyes half closed in devotion. Meanwhile, the rest of the monks toward entrance of the temple are slouching, stretched back on their elbows as if watching a boring tv program and desperate for distraction.

Hoghi said that though the lamas were allowed to practice freely upon the fall of communism, Tibetian Buddhism in the country never quite recovered. Nowadays, monks can get married, even have girlfriends. Later, I found out that monkhood in Mongolia is similar to monkhood in Thailand. It’s something to do for a few years (a little like military service) before moving on with normal life.

Sitting behind a row of monks in Ulan Bator, I got a view of what they stashed in the shelf under their desks: packs of ramen and choco pies.

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The Mongolian sense of time

September 7, 2008 by Karin.

or, How an 8 Hour Drive Took 12 Hours.

Let’s go over the numbers:
2 vans
2 Mongolia drivers
1 interpreter
1 social worker
360 kilometers to travel
8 hours predicted for the drive
17 Habitat for Humanity volunteers on vacation mode

These factors together led to our first experience in “Mongolian time.” (We didn’t just live it, we lived it up.) This is what happened:

Shopping, 10:30am: On our way out of town, the vans dropped us off at the State Department Store where we exchanged money and stocked up on processed snacks from Eastern Europe. Seized by a sudden ”I don’t know when my next meal will be” panic, I grabbed a post-breakfast ice cream from Lavazza.

Sickness, 11am: Instead of heading out of the capital after the department store, the vans turned back to the B&B. Francine, one of the liveliest members of our group, had assumed an uncharacteristic position: doubled over in silent anguish. While our leaders tucked her into bed, the rest of us waited outside and watched the locals go about their daily life.

 A boy with a big head and his two small friends.

Absorbing the local culture, 11:30am: Outside a nearby building, two men circled each other, gearing up for a street brawl. The younger one held up his hand while he dug into his pocket. We gasped, expecting a knife, but he was only pulling out his cell phone, which he placed carefully on the ground. We, along with the building occupants and passersby, watched the older, larger guy pursue with angry shouting and aimless punches. Cell phone man didn’t say much but kept backing away, turning only to lauch an occasional spot-on back kick. It wasn’t a fair fight at all and ended when cell phone guy backed out of the front gates. Someone from the second story dropped a tissue down as consolation for the larger man, now with a bloody face and no one left to yell at.

Manly games, 2pm: After two hours of driving on signless dirt roads, our drivers started asking for directions. Before we had time to doubt their competence, they pulled up at a sports festival, a naadam, located in the middle of nowhere. The naadam was sponsored by the train company for its employees and their families.

 It was the most action we had ever seen concentrated in the middle-of-nowhere countryside and we had to wonder, how did all these people locate the festival? How do you give directions to a random field of grass two hours west of Ulan Bator?

Under the relentless blue skies of Mongolia, shade is rare. The locals stayed cool wherever they could find relief, such as under their vehicles.

 This family was entering their 11 year old son in the horse racing competition. Unlike other participants, their horse only had a square of fabric for a saddle but they assured me, (through the aid of the Mongolian phrasebook) “Yes. Horse. Fast.”

Our interpreter, Hoghi, bought some boiled mutton from a vendor wheeling his barrel of meat from car to car. Like all the mutton (and indeed, all the meat) we would have on this trip, it was tough. But like any meat stewed in salt, it was pleasant on the tongue and came attached to a tasty bone to gnaw on.

Van relief, 4pm: Our vans stopped and while some of group wandered toward discreet dips in the horizon for bladder relief, the rest of us watched our drivers perform intervention magic on our overheated vehicle. They yanked out the suitcases so carefully lodged behind the heads of two others and myself.

 Flipped up the seat of the front passenger, poured hot fluid out and cold water in. Team member Chris offered to hold a plastic water bottle to receive  the fluid coming out of the vehicle and watched helplessly as the stuff melted the top of the bottle and traveled downward to burn his fingers. Luckily, we had handwipes and Tina’s aloe vera on hand to perform an intervention of our own. 

Lunch, 5:30pm: The restaurant was a one room space in the middle of what resembled a strip mall in a ghost town. Exhausted and hot, we sat down to a lunch of mutton stirfry, steamed white bun, and sheep milk. The can of Sprite as a particular stand out. Ahh tasty, so tasty.We asked the driver how much longer the drive would be. He said 5 or 6 hours. In Mongolia, it’s better not to ask…but it would take us a long time to learn that.

Stocking up on water, 7pm: Driving over a bridge spiritually protected by blue silk sashes tied to the rails, we watched the silhouettes of bathers in the lake. Our drivers pulled over at the chance to refill their water containers. The rest of us got out of the car, 17 cameras pointing at the stripped down Mongolians and quickly found ourselves assaulted by tiny, excited flies. But the flies didn’t bite and couldn’t distract us from the magic of the moment. On the other side of the bridge, a herd of horses decended into the lake for a drink.

Sunset, 8:30pm: “Why are we stopping again?”"The driver’s pulling over so we can take photos of the sunset.”We had already been taking photos of the sunset (and of the sheep, and electrical poles, and many gers) from through our windows. Most of us were too lazy to unfold ourselves from the cramped van again but not wanting to seem ungrateful, we handed our cameras to the van driver and had him take photos of the sunset for us.

By the time our driver pulled up at the hotel in Kharkhorin, we were hardly surprised that it was almost 11pm. The Mongolian sense of time that allows for diversions and flexibility turned out to be well in sync with that of our group’s: our individual agendas, cameras, and of course, unpredictable bladders. And with that, we grabbed our suitcases and headed straight to our rooms…and to our first sit-down toilets in 12 hours.

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The paths that criss-cross Mother’s back

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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Solar eclipse

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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Habitat for Humanity

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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The camel dance

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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The five snouts

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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Wild horses

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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How to talk to Mongolians

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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