Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

I liked the herders at once. There were a brother and sister and their spouses, none older than twenty-five; their parents, who’d recently departed after a long visit, were encamped within a day’s ride. The couples readily answered our questions. So I learned that camels are easier to take care of than sheep; your flock will not mix with others. You let the adult camels roam during the day, but you stay with the babies and yearlings and guide them home in the evenings. The mothers return to be with the calves, and the males follow them, so the herd stays together. Camels yield good wool and can manage with infrequent meals. About five times a year, the herders pack their gers onto their camels to seek better grazing land.

We had by then learned basic ger etiquette, so we knew that men sit on the west side and women on the east, that you are always given something to eat and drink, and that it’s rude not to try what you are given. Usually you get milk tea, made with tea, salt, sugar, and whatever milk is on hand (this time, camel milk), and often you get airag. The herders made us soup from dried mutton, and we added some onions and potatoes we had brought from UB. These items were new to them. The onions they liked; the potatoes they found “disgusting,” complaining that they “had the texture of dirt.” At night, a ger is usually lit by a single candle, and in the flickering light we talked until it was late and the children started dropping off on the floor. Not wanting to take the only beds in the ger, we returned to our tents just outside.

The next day the rain began. It seemed unfair that there should be heavy rain in South Gobi Province, where the annual precipitation is about five inches. It seemed particularly unfair that it went on for three days, making the road we took as we headed back toward Ulaanbaatar virtually invisible and barely navigable. It seemed utterly unfair that our tents were not waterproof as guaranteed and that none of us ever quite dried out. And it seemed cruelly unfair that I had gotten sick from something I had eaten at the Naadam and that it was now kicking in with a vengeance. I felt as though I were a dry-clean-only item in a mobile washing machine. We got stuck twice. We jacked up the vehicle, checked the tires, tore up nearby plants, and established traction by laying the branches underneath. I had just finished reading the manuscript of a friend’s novel, and its pages did well for getting the wheels reengaged. The earth might as well have been made of marshmallow.

For the first half of our trip we enjoyed camping and driving and staying in a different place every night. But now we’d had enough of it, so a friend and I flew north to stay in Khövsgöl Province for the rest of the trip. It’s hard to write about Khövsgöl in a fittingly superlative tone after having described Övörkhangai’s very different beauty. We took a bumpy four-hour jeep ride to Khövsgöl Lake National Park. Having a national park in the middle of Mongolia is like having an urban development zone in midtown Manhattan, but in principle it means that hunting is forbidden, which explains why the wildlife is particularly plentiful there. Khövsgöl Lake contains three-quarters of Mongolia’s fresh water; it is enormous, lovely, dark, and deep. On its banks are fields of wildflowers so brilliant you might think you were looking at a shoreline of butterflies. All around the lake are steep mountains. There are no buildings with foundations anywhere. Each morning we decided whether to take a boat ride or go hiking or ride horses or ride yaks (which no one who had a horse would ever choose to do except for the novelty of it).

I’d heard of the Mongolian reindeer people, the shamanist Tsaatan, and had always wanted to meet them. The five-hundred-odd members of this race keep far from the beaten path; anthropologists and devoted travelers often have to ride three or four days through the woods northwest of the park to find them. We were in luck, however: a Tsaatan child had spent the night nearby, and he agreed to lead us to his cousins. We were told it was an hour’s drive and then a three-mile walk. We had not fully understood that it was a three-mile vertical walk, but we climbed gamely with our seven-year-old guide and a few relatives he had gathered in the valley—assimilationists who had turned to goatherding. We followed a mountain stream that runs into the lake. As we ascended, the view opened up behind us. From time to time the boy would point out a bear’s cave or an eagle or a deer.