Just like a classic internet dating experience, I had already fallen hard for Mongolia before we ever met, relying heavily on photos, shared music, and encouraging words from matchmaker friends who couldn't wait for us to get together. After years of teasing and intense build up, this July I endured 10 hours worth of driving, 5 flights and 16 hours of layovers so that Mongolia and I could finally meet! Our requisite first day in Ulaanbaatar was a Buddhist wet dream after years of living literally in the (high mountain) desert of non-Buddhist Wyoming, exploring Gandantegchinlen Monastery. A few of us were lucky enough to be allowed to photograph a sand mandala offering in Kalachakra Hall.
The monastery is a tribute to beloved Avalokiteshvara ~ om mani padme hum! ~
Monastery guardian
Kalachakra sand mandala
If our visit to UB was the coffee date of Mongolia, then western Mongolia was the full-on dinner date let's just keep going multi-day passionate love affair:
Our first campsite
Campsite friends
Van lyfe
Our second campsite
Bolat, our badass driver in his UAV Purgon minivan
Me & Bolat
The bridges were pretty jenky
"Rolling" through the barely-there roads of western Mongolia is a really romantic way of describing the several hour drives. It would have been wise to bring along both a chiropractor and a gastroenterologist as copilots.
Bolat raced to rescue one of our other vans - he sped into the river and whipped a 180 mid-river to tow the other truck. These vans can apparently drive through water levels coming up to the windows although this pic was a deep as it got this time.
WESTERN MONGOLIA We finally arrive in true western Mongolia, the landscape twin of Wyoming. Our first Kazakh experience was a Kazakh horse race in a spot between Sagsai and Tsengel. The racers run 10 gigantic laps around a vast valley, here's the finish line complete with police using tasers to move the crowds, adding an extra element of danger to this exciting event:
Seku, one of our stalwart drivers, enjoying the race
I refine my iPhone silhouette technique at the race
The dust is from distant riders on about lap 8
Our next stop was a several hours-long wrestling match, which, true to form, the guys found exciting and I couldn't even. So I sat by the river and enjoyed this little scene that played out before me.
Bolat and Nurlan, chess champions
These kids were giving serious pointers, truly. Apparently, in post-soviet countries, chess is still a thing.
Like all good love stories, there were weddings. So many weddings. Weddings involve elaborate tea time in yurts with the family of the bride, lots more wrestling, horse races, buzkashi (tug of war game on horses with a goat skin), horseriding competitions that I didn't quite understanding involving men kissing women and women chasing after men with whips, sweet snacks and candy thrown in lieu of rice, feasting on platters of horsemeat and shared cups of mare's milk, and way too much dancing.
The bride is supposed to look very unhappy as she will be leaving her family to live with her husband's family, she's not going to smile during this event
Wedding circle of guests
A champion wrestler snacking up before the competition
Weddings include communal eating - people split into a hundred small groups and sit around a plastic tablecloth and a massive platter of boiled meat (all parts) are served. This might include the entire head of a lamb or a shoulder blade of a horse (horse everything being the traditional wedding food). Someone in your little group is designated chief butcher and slices slabs of meat off with their personal pocket knife. Bits of the head were generally offered first, prize pieces, followed by lung. If you were lucky, large sheets of pasta were also cooked in broth and served mixed in, and towards the end of our trip that is what I was exclusively sticking to!
THE PASTORAL LIFESTYLE
Our first family stay was with Awez, his wife and several children, and their extended family sprinkled through the valley. We stayed in gers (yurts) which were lovely and luxurious to my Wyoming standards. Kazakh gers are much taller than regular Mongolian gers, and they Kazakhs decorate their gers to the max, so not only were they comfortable, they were exceptionally colorful and beautiful. Each ger had a woodstove which our helpers would stoke up each night right before bed, and we each had a real bed with an honest-to-goodness mattress and linens. It still got pretty cold at night so I usually used an extra camel hair-stuffed sleeping bag on top!
Boiling water for "showers"
Typical contemporary Kazakh decoration
Cats were the only true pets we saw, but we never saw anyone actually being affectionate towards them
Lots of family portraits in the gers
In winter, families live in stone houses, not gers. This is a typical winter house wall near the forest.
Awez wanted us to feast, which meant on our first day there we had to respectfully attend a sheep slaughter. This was really hard for me to watch. I needed some baby goat therapy afterward and the little guy fell asleep in my arms (he came looking for me in the gers later, probably not okay). This was really our only livestock snuggling - the animals aren't accustomed to affection, and the people there weren't accustomed to watching us constantly try to pet their animals. I think they let it slide due to all my tears.
Baby goat therapy
We also participated in the first springtime rounding-up-the-mares in order to milk them. This involved corraling the mares, taking them up pasture and luring their babies in - once the foals got close, the men lassoed them, wrestled a harness onto them and tied them to a line of rope staked to the ground. The mares would come over and stand next to their babies and the people would milk the mares. Afterward, the mare's milk is fermented, turning it into a thin, zippy yogurt drink. Kept in a metal container in the rivers, this would be served ice cold in homes during warm afternoons but it is most known for being the quintessential drink at Kazakh weddings. (This was really a delicious tasting drink, unfortunately, it's also an intensely probiotic drink and if your gut isn't up to the task, it can make you very sick, and it took several of us out the first week, including yours truly).
The innocents have no idea what's about to happen
After rounding up the mares and milking, the family and all their extended relatives toted milk tea and snacks up to the pasture for a party.
Awez' wife pours milk tea - lots of mixed animal milk boiled with a little tea. There's also lots of fry bread, fresh butter to lather onto your fry bread, and cookies/candy.
Unbeknownst to us, a singing competition was also part of the afternoon festivities. The Kazakh family wooed us with sweeping, melancholic traditional songs - it was very impressive! We enjoyed it thoroughly until we realized we were expected to return in kind, and that score was being kept! Our group managed to eke out a shaky rendition of a Beatles song and Silent Night, which immediately exhausted our international repertoire. After we made several (terrible) attempts at other songs, and our group being two points down in this competition, the family elder who I happened to be sitting next to requested for me personally to sing a song - apparently our translator divulged a private conversation I had with him the day before about being able to sing! So with a successfully adrenaline filled warble, I delivered an equally melancholic song which pleased the Kazakhs and shocked our own group. I told the elder I thought it deserved two points, which he happily gave, tying our score!
The elders belt out some tradition
Feasting on that sheep at Awez' ger - Awez, Bolat, Nurlan
Cheeses are a primary food - they are cooked and then laid out to dry on an outdoor drying rack for extended periods of time. They are served anywhere during this process - from hot, boiling curd drink, soft gouda-like texture, to rock hard sawdust. Typically served with tea.
More cheese
Camel and horse, Awez' compound
EAGLE HUNTERS Just like a man boasting on their online dating profile about their athletic prowess and discovering on the first date that they haven't played sports since high school, we discovered that eagle hunting is just a casual pastime here now and not the true eagle hunter lifestyle we had been duped into thinking due to The Eagle Huntress movie. Still, it was pretty impressive. We set up formal portrait sessions with full winter regalia and very fat eagles since eagle hunting is a sport only done in winter.
Essen and his fat summer eagle
Our first model demonstrated what a typical tea time looks like when guests come to visit
One of the sons shows off his dad's eagle for us after the photo shoot. He then promptly shoved it's head under the rushing river to cool it off.
Tired eagle after photo session
Shokan, the main event
If there was ever a Kazakh who spelled T-R-O-U-B-L-E, it would be this cowboy. Watch out, ladies, Shokan is in the house.
Shokan's daughter, Damel, an aspiring eagle huntress celebrity thanks to the movie The Eagle Huntress
THE WATERFALL
We had an epic adventure one day as our fearless leader, Tim, attempted to have our entire group hike up high in the mountains to meet up with his shepherd buddy who was out... shepherding. We found a lot of other shepherds - who were just as game to set up photo ops - but not the one we were looking for. We hiked for a few hours trying to find our guy to no avail.
It's steep!
We meet a lovely random shepherd at the top of the mountain, imagine the thoughts running in his head when we arrived, gasping for air
Seku cheating on the hike with another random shepherd
The slopes were steep, the weather testy, and the group started to drop off one by one and head back to camp. This left me, our leader Tim, fellow American Tayo, and our Kazakh translator, Nurlan. At the end of the valley, we could see a waterfall at the end of a glacier, and Tim conveyed that he had his sights set on this long ago. A raging spring river, loose boulders, snow, and a large slope of scree separated us from the waterfall. It took awhile to find a viable path over the raging glacial river, and although Nurlan made it look like a walk in the park, the rest of us struggled. It was taking so long, in fact, we had to agree that if we hadn't summitted by 4pm, we had to turn around. About 15 minutes from the top, as we worked our way through the boulder field and could hear the thudding and cracking of rock slides on the other face, it started to rain sideways. Success was ours that day though, and after 5 glorious minutes at the top, we jetted back down. This was an extremely challenging, adrenaline-filled experience for me: the day before I had thrown up 5 times (thanks a lot, mares milk) and had slept for 12 hours, so on this hike I ate lots of extra Twix, drank water straight from the glacier, and had to give myself frequent pep talks to get through, and ignored all the voices that were saying "We have no first aid kit, if we slip there will be no rescue, we are miles away from help, we have no extra gear, what the hell are we doing, Aaron Ralston lost his arm this way, we still have a 3 hour hike back." I also relied heavily on Nurlan's athletic prowess to help get over big obstacles, like glacial rivers. Essen, the shepherd we had been looking for earlier, casually walked up to us once we were back in the valley, "Oh, there you are. Oh, yah, I've been up there to the waterfall (no big deal)." For the next couple of hours we deliriously stumbled back to camp in the icy rain.
Streambed: We didn't have to carry extra water, thanks glacier!
River crossing
Nurlan stops to walkie-talkie back to basecamp
Nurlan at the waterfall
The waterfall is just to the right of the glacier. It's so rainy! I'm pretty certain I was the first woman in this spot
FINALE
The Kazakh families we stayed with originally migrated to Mongolia from Kazakhstan generations ago. War, borders, and social changes have left the Kazakhs in Mongolia relatively isolated and they have been able to maintain their culture in a way that Kazakhs in Kazakhstan have not. They are a nomadic tribal people who stay within their clans, remain close to one another, and continue to live a pastoral lifestyle which means they migrate to lower elevation for the winter and migrate to the mountains in very early spring before their animals give birth. They raise sheep, goats, yaks, cows, yak cows (!), horses, and some families also have camels. As a young Kazakh person, when you meet your potential future fiancee, you have to recite back seven generations of your family to make sure there is no overlap with relatives, that is how you determine whether you can marry or not!
Typical motorbike
Our translator Nurka's family yurt
Our trip was stellar thanks to the caliber of the families we stayed with and the caliber of our support staff. At the top was our lead guide and translator, Nurka, who was not only those things but she was also our friend, confidante, and mother to all. No matter how many hot showers we asked for at all times of day, or fresh fruit requests, or a helping hand with hair washing out of a bucket, Nurka provided these things in such a happy way that she made it seem like it pleased her to be able to serve us. She straddles a difficult line in her culture by breaking out of the traditional female role - after spending a year working in England - she is unmarried, independent, works outside of the home, is confident, demanding, and strong. She pulled me aside one day and said that the Kazakh men in our group decided that I was a much more traditional Kazakh woman than she was! (This was really only because I was behaving a little shy and deferent with our new friends, and possibly because I was the least shakable in our foreign group). And that she wished she could be more like me as it would make her fit into her culture better.
Our beloved Nurka (Nurbakhyt)
Nurka
Typical shepherd dog
One of our drivers had a Seahawks hat! Seku and Doake
The Kazakhs we spent time with were stoic, quiet, gentle, tough, protective, and proud. The greatest compliment you could give them was that you felt you could trust them, that they would keep you safe, and if you called them by family names (brother, sister, father) to convey how strongly you felt about your friendship with them. The men were easily affectionate with one another and extremely respectful and mindful of physical space with women, the women were kind, everyone was happy to be close to us. The men were particularly impressive as they are saddled with immense responsibility very early on - they are expected to be able to do anything and everything, from being able to pull down horses, slaughter animals, ride a motorbike, move families across extreme landscapes; they are true leaders of their families. I could be around a Kazakh man in his early 20's and feel confident he could take care of anything (and I had a few men in their 20's convey that I would make them a good wife! Thankfully, they couldn't tell how old I was!).
I fell in love with this place and its people, and there were several tearful goodbyes as we left our various homestays. In many ways it felt like all my previous life experiences, especially Wyoming, lead to this point. It was an easy culture for me to slip into overall (and while many others in our group struggled, to be fair, the dance parties were my biggest challenge), and in many ways I felt like "these are my people!" I can still feel the ground under my feet, smell the smoke in the air, sense the dampened acoustics of our gers, and be uplifted by the ger-scent of meat, old sheep fat, ripe milk, feathers and smoke.
And so I look forward to my next date with western Mongolia, to go beyond the obviously romantic feelings I have now and find true love. Until then, I will happily pine away.
