Mongolia – Freedom Of The Nomads – An Eerie Travel Secret Shared

Mongolia – At The Edge Of The World – Fascinating And Wild

Oelgiy is a sleepy provincial capital at the farthest west of Mongolia – a vast country which has only 2.9 million inhabitants. It’s 1800 km away from the real capital, Ulan Bator, and somewhat cut off through the fantastic Altai mountain chain.

So Oelgiy is populated mostly by kasac nomads, who came here 140 years ago in search of new grassland for their herds. And it’s amazing how people are clinging to their tradition. Although most people in Oelgiy are now living in stone houses, they like to put up their yurts in the courtyard in summer – or they move to the outskirts of the city with them.

In one of the distant outskirts of Oelgiy lives Aidos Schabdanuly with wife and daughters on 25m2 in his “Ger”- (yurt). Inside this small space, beds and all household articles are well organized and a small stove fed with dried cow-dung makes the cool evenings cosy and warm (never mind the stink – I suppose they are used to it).But the modern nomad household sports a solar power station plus a satellite antenna for TV channels from all over the world.

While the daughters are sending one SMS after another – like all teenagers seem to do these days – their father sits in the entrance and gazes into the distance. He is worried – as in socialistic times you knew you could get a small pension when you grew old, today – you don’t even find the meanest jobs. Those are only to be found in the city – 5 days of journey away.And higher education for the girls is just too expensive…; but there is hope, as more and more tourists are using Oelgiy as their starting point for trekking and jeep tours through the wilderness of the Mongolian west. They buy food stocks and petrol, before they start off into the wilderness completely devoid of human life.

We squash into an old UAZ jeep and target Altan Z”gz, around 100km distance from Oelgiy. In Summer, this is the favourite “party” place for many nomad families where they gather to celebrate the Mongolian Naadam Festival. On the 3 hour drive we go through broad valleys of the high mountain region with glaciers on top – a spectacular view – past wild rivers. Now and then we see some yurts standing in the middle of nowhere.  No vegetation covers the mountains – a strange sight for someone coming from the European Alps. Grass in the valley is nice and green and the air smells just great, crisp and clean.

At the Naadam festival, horse riding and wrestling are the main disciplines. Since there are no weight classes – like in boxing or wrestling sports here, the winner is obvious: it’s the one with the most fat – or the heaviest, anyway. It is a nice sport and a lot of fun – for us – but naturally, the locals take this deadly serious. The riding competition is spectacular – but you can hardly see much for all the dust.

We get a good explanation for this, too: “We are dependent on the extremes of nature here. All we do is try to enlarge our herds of yaks,  sheep,  goats,  horses and camels.” And it’s not an easy life. The older ones clearly understand why many of the young ones go to the city in search of luck, or are leaving Kasakhstan altogether.

But many of them come back again, too. They are homesick for the wilderness and the freedom of life here. “We nomads, we need our freedom!”

Our friend from Moscow, with whom we have made this trip, had actually planned a guided tour into the Altai mountains with us, from one nomad place to the other, where we would sleep in “guest” yurts, which are somehow adapted to Western tourists – with a broad bed, a settee and a washbasin, (I did not enquire the toilet question) and there is even something like a yurt restaurant, where they serve a kind of goulash made of horsemeat, which you eat with your hands. This comes with Kumys – or salted and buttered tea with milk – great when you are thirsty – and we would have made the entire trip on horseback together with our guides and some extra horses for the luggage.

Unfortunately, I had a bad car crash the previous year with lots of broken bones and would not be fit enough for such an adventure. But – having come here for this mini-excursion, I can see how lovely this would have been. And fancy how much weight I would have lost – with all the excersice and the kind of food, where you only eat just enough so as to not to die of starvation – just like you always should in normal life!

Well, there’s always another time!  And since Kasakh people are extremely supersticious, they dip their finger into every drink they take, and flick it in all 4 directions of the sky to the Gods, in order to thank them for their gift. An old woman read in the tea-leaves in her cup that I’ll return – for sure! Some ghosts are sure good for business….she told me some other things that were rather eerie, but this is indeed a travel secret I shall not reveal here!

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