There's a cultural gap in Mongolia. Because they were traditional nomads for so many years, they never developed an architecture or art. The Mongolian empire under Genghis Khan stretched from the Danube river to the Pacific -- Hungary through China -- yet he lived in a tent his whole life. No palaces, no pottery. When you're on the move and need to carry everything with you, you don't carve big marble statuary. So while the museums in Greece, Rome, and Egypt are overflowing with stuff, Mongolia just doesn't have much. But you hardly need a museum to see what their traditions are like. They still live in pretty much the same tents that Genghis did 700 years ago. It's probably the least-changed culture that I've experienced. Everywhere else we've been, people are "modernizing." Bedouins are building brick houses. India, Japan and China have traded in their traditional outfits for business suits. But man, in Mongolia, people are waiting for the bus in the same pointy hat, leather slippers and yak-felt robes that Kublai Khan wore in the 1400s.

Not to say that everyone there lives in the past. Women, especially, are dressed sharply in outfits that wouldn't look out of place in Manhattan. And bars have imported beers from around the world -- there's even a German-run microbrewery and a Mexican restaurant. It's sad, though, that so many people have abandoned their nomadic lifestyle and moved to the capital city in search of riches that aren't there. Since democratizing in the 1990s, the end of the Socialist state means that there just isn't a job waiting for everyone. Many of the people who moved to Ulan Baator looking for work ended up homeless vagrants, wandering the streets in a vodka-fueled depression. Their children became pickpockets or beggars. Not to say that democracy was bad for everyone -- the upper class did really well. There's no middle class; just a wealthy elite, a hard-working poor, and a countryside full of nomadic shepherds.

In the middle of the city square is a memorial to Mongolia's independence. Around it are three big piles of giant children's toys -- 5-foot-tall stuffed Mickey Mouses and the like. Their owners had gathered them together to get them out of the rain. They didn't look like they were for sale -- I assumed they were some sort of weird altar, a memorial to dead children or sacrifice to the Shamanistic god of childhood. Our tour guide explained that people liked to have their picture taken with them when they visit the city square. Oops. There I go, ascribing superstitious shamanism to a society that just wants a picture of their kid with Mickey Mouse in Independence Square.

But they do have their share of weird Shamanist superstitions. More than anyone else, I'd wager. Whistling is bad, because it attracts snakes. They spin these cool ancient brass cylinders with their holy writings inside, so that as the prayer wheel turns, the book inside gets "read." Before you drink vodka, you have to put the ring finger of your right hand into the glass, flick a drop to heaven, a drop to the wind, and a drop to the ground before downing the shot. To keep your tent from blowing away, you anchor it to the river by hanging a small bottle of water to the main pole. You never step on the threshold of a doorway, because that's where the god of the building lives.  You keep a saw in the doorway, so that any bad thoughts get cut out of your mind when you enter, and the doorway is intentionally only three feet tall to make everyone hunch and duck-walk into the door - since ghosts can't bend over, they hit their heads on the door frame and can't come in. Tricia thinks she's part ghost, since she whacked her head painfully on the doorway of our Ger. More than once.

Yes, we slept in a ger. It was the highlight of our vacation, and also the part I feared the most. After our city tour, the bus took us 50 kilometers out of town into the Mongolian Steppe. Words can't describe the beauty of the steppe. Green hills, blue skies, sheep and ponies, and now and then -- always almost out of sight over the horizon -- a cluster of cylindrical white tents. The rain was letting up, but the wind was crazy. One thing we learned about Mongolian weather is that it changes minute by minute. Pouring rain one minute, with wind so strong that you get nearly knocked over while walking, so cold that you need a heavy (waterproof) coat. Then ten minutes later, it's dry, sunny, and beautiful, and warm enough that you'd want to roll your sleeves up (except that doing so indicates to those around you that you're about to get in a fight. It's Mongolian custom to keep your wrists covered so as not to provoke those around you. Especially the drunk ones.)

I was afraid of the unknown -- what awaited us in the gers. Here's what I figured: each of us (probably each couple -- they wouldn't split us up would they?) would be assigned a nomad family's ger to sleep in. Tricia and I would share the tent with 4 to 10 nomadic shepherds who would want us to eat freshly boiled mutton with them before drinking vodka and fermented mare's milk until finally it got dark (around midnight) at which point we'd try to sleep huddled in a corner. At least it would be a cultural experience. Maybe if things were really good, they'd heat some rocks up and rock-boil us a skinned marmot.  Chimmga, our tour guide, told us that marmot is the most delicious of all meats -- even better than horse. 

I was ready. We have a duffel bag full of ramen. According to Mongolian tradition, you don't have to eat much of what is offered -- but you can't ever refuse without trying. So you pretend. Take a piece, fake a nibble, put it back. Everyone saves face, and you leave more boiled mutton for the folks who liked it in the first place. Then we figured we'd heat some water up later and make ramen. 

Here's what happened instead:  the bus pulled up to the top of a hill overlooking a green valley. At the top of the hill was an ovoo -- a shamanist shrine built of rocks, cow skulls, sticks, and blue silk scarves. It's good luck to walk around it clockwise and add a rock. I hope it's good luck to take pictures of it, because I took about twenty. From the top of the hill, you could just about see forever -- the sky was clear and blue, with just the last few drops of raining coming out. It was still bitterly cold and windy. Tricia barely made it in her clockwise perambulation before getting back in the warm bus. But off in the distance you could see where we'd be spending the next twenty-four hours. A ger camp at the bottom of the valley.  The road was dirt (or what Chimmga called "a natural road") about half way from Ulan Baatar. The bus wound its way down the last part of natural road to the camp, where they assigned us our tents. Our own tents. No nomadic families. It was awesome.

The tents are about 15 feet in diameter, and 10 or 15 feet tall. In the center is a wood-burning Franklin stove, with a pipe taking the smoke out through the roof. The furniture is fancily painted multitasking wood -- each bed is also a dresser, the table has drawers. The tent wall is made from split wood lattice. When you unpack and set up a ger, you unfold the lattice like a tall fence made from those long-distance boxing gloves in cartoons. They consist of 5 sheets of lattice work, each of which you unfold and tie together. The center posts hold the roof up, and from the round top are a bunch of spokes, each of which rests in between 2 of the lattice fencepieces. Then the wooden frame is covered with layers of felt made from sheep wool. (Or yak, or camel -- what you've got.) A rope is wrapped around the outside, the door is attached, and if you can believe it, the whole process takes a half hour. You have to set the furniture up first, since it's bigger than the door. I guess that keeps ghosts from stealing it.

We had the whole thing to ourselves. The fire was already burning, making the ger's inside a toasty alternative to the cold windy Mongolian steppe outside. After unpacking a bit, and changing clothes, we headed to the ger camp dining hall, where they had made a tasty dinner for our group. Of the 10 or 15 people staying in the camp that night, 4 of us were vegetarians. They had made a set meal for the group, but whipped up a special meal to accommodate us. One guy has a nut allergy, and they worked around him as well.

After dinner, Chimmga showed us the Mongolian traditional game of ankle bones. The bones of a sheep foot have 4 distinctive sides, and about a quarter of the time you roll them, they land on one of those 4. It's an ancient dice game, which I suppose would involve gambling. Chimmga said no, that gambling divides people and is bad for society -- they just play it for fun. I bet some of them gamble. Anyway, you roll ankle bones, and depending on which configuration comes up on top (you can tell if it's a "sheep," "camel," "horse," or "goat" based on the shape of the top part of the bone) you get to move a bone closer to the opposite side of the playing board. You can also use the bones like I Ching or Magic 8-ball to divine the future. 

The beds were sized for little Mongolians, but tucked into a little fetal ball I slept soundly all night. We were told not to lock our doors so that the camp staff could stoke our fires at 6 AM. That way we'd wake up to a nice warm room. To move from constantly watching your back for homeless pickpockets to being out in the middle of nowhere in a place where you shouldn't sleep with your door locked was a gratifying experience. I'd hate to have made my assumptions about Mongolia from our time in Ulan Baatar alone.

We spent the next day wandering the Mongolian Steppe. We walked a half hour to the next nearest tents (a long way to borrow a cup of sugar, said Ben from Singapore.) There was a nomadic family who were tending their sheep. The whole extended family travels together in about 10 tents -- three generations of shepherds, 2 or 3 hundred sheep, a dozen cows and goats, 5 dogs, and 20 horses. The kids were so cute -- Ben gave them balloons to play with and they had a blast playing with them. 

The mom, wearing a Barnhard's Tavern t-shirt (Golly, I'd like to know the story of how a T-shirt from an Irish pub ended up on the wife of a nomadic Mongolian shepherd) brought her daughter into the tent and invited us in for tea and cheese. It's the traditional hospitality of the nomads. You don't even knock on the door, there's just a standing invitation to everyone. And if you arrive at dinnertime, you get fed. No matter when you arrive, you get tea and dried cheese. And if you stay long enough, they'll ask you to sleep in their ger for as long as you need to. You could walk across Mongolia and sleep and eat for free with people who can barely afford the salt they use to make their cheese.

Not that you'd want to eat the cheese. It's dried salted cottage cheese curds made from yak or sheep milk. Sour and a little "off" tasting. But it makes the tea taste good by comparison. The "tea" is boiled milk, salt, water, and green tea leaves from Georgia (the former Soviet republic, not the Southern state.) Lots of milk and salt, not much tea. Maybe it's the grazing that does it, or maybe I just rarely drink sheep milk, but Mongolian milk has a funny taste, and the tea is mostly milk. 

They don't start making fermented mare's milk until July, so I didn't get a chance to drink any. I did try a Mongolian beer, which was quite good. The next day, back in Ulan Baatar, had the best beer of my life. My new favorite beer. Beats even Newcastle. Not as sweet as Belgian beer, amber in color, with a pronounced flavor like Red Hook. It's made by the Apu brewery (www.apu.mn) and it's called Hoi Haroi, which is spelled something like XAP XOPNH. Mongolians speak their own language which is distantly related to Japanese but sounds like Russian. They had their own script, but it was hard to read and write, so they switched to Cyrillic for their written language. So it looks AND sounds like Russian, which makes the whole place seem a little bit like Russia with Chinese people in it.

Actually the people are distinctly not Chinese. They actually look more like Pima Indians than anything else. So many similarities between these distantly related people who crossed the land bridge so many years ago. Tepees (some gers in North Mongolia look exactly like the Great Plains Indians'), shaman (medicine men) wearing antlered headdresses and leather outfits. Even the music has a "hey, hey, hoy, hoy" Navajo feel to it.

 

We spent an hour or so chatting with the nomad family, asking and answering questions via Chimmga. How do they cook the cheese? After it sets, they cut it into pieces with a thread, then put it on the roof to dry out. After drying, it stays edible for up to ten years. Do you have gers and yaks in America where you live? That kind of thing. Fascinating. The head of the family came home after we'd been eating his dried cheese for a while. He offered us his snuff bottle (it's impolite to refuse, but I rather enjoyed it. Tobacco-free snuff made from some sort of mint leaf. Better than the tea.) 

That brown stick in the rafters is for scraping the sweat off your horse.  The tassels on it are made from tail hair from your horses.  So is the rope that holds the little water bottle to the ceiling.  They make rope from the hair of any horse that they sell, so that their horse will always be a part of their family after it leaves.

We asked the man of the house plenty of questions. He's in his sixties, but wasn't always a nomad. He went to school, graduated from university in 1960 with a degree in physics and math, taught school for 2 years, then joined the police force as an inspector. After traveling to Moscow and Germany, he retired from the force and brought his family out to the fields to raise sheep. Just an amazing man to talk to, even if we didn't share a language. And dressed to the hilt -- all the men in the family wore traditional wool robes, pointy shoes or leather boots, colorful hats. The sons showed off their riding ability for us. They took turns picking up cigarette boxes from the ground while riding their horses at a full canter. Like Annie Oakley. And these guys weren't circus performers -- just kids who were raised on horses the way American kids learn to ride a bicycle. They also like soccer and hula hoops, so they aren't completely isolated. In fact, the elder man has a cell phone, and his daughter has a TV that runs from a solar panel in the roof of her ger. When it comes time to pack up and move, they'll either use their horse-drawn carriage (if they're not going far) or rent a flatbed truck from a nearby neighbor. There's always someone around with a truck.

We practiced drawing water up from their well, and filling a concrete trough with the water we collected. It's good karma according to Lamaist Shamanist Mongolian Buddhism to provide water and food for animals. I got a little karma from the work I did, but it would take a LOT of effort to fill that concrete trough with a small metal bucket on the end of a 50-foot rope. 

I've done "local village safaris" before, and it's always been so fake. People who make a living by allowing tourists to see how they live tend not to live in traditional ways. It's got a circus freak aspect to it, and even taking their pictures is a weird experience. This was so unlike that. Possibly the most "real" experience of my life. The boys (after dismounting their horses) offered to wrestle the tourist men. Wrestling is a traditional Mongolian sport -- sort of half sumo, half greco-roman style. One thing I knew was that anyone who practices traditional sports to the extent that they can sit in the saddle and still pick up a pack of cigarettes from the ground would kick my ass to Sunday in a match of traditional nomadic wrestling, even if I was 2 feet taller and 50 pounds heavier. So I passed.

We did go horseback riding. Chimmga arranged for some Mongolian steppe ponies to be saddled up for us to ride. It's different from regular horse riding, though. First of all, the horses are tiny. Second, they're basically wild. They've been branded, and ridden before, so it wasn't like we were breaking wild ponies. But they run free during the day. No stables. No groom. When someone wants to ride a horse, they just go out to the field and lasso one. A gang of 4 guys from the camp went around in the morning while we were visiting the nomads and they lassoed up 10 or 12 horses for us. Then they stuck saddles on them and gave us some instructions. Traditional Mongolian saddles are made from 2 pieces of wood -- a lot like Bedouin camel saddles. You stand in the stirrups, with the back of your butt resting lightly on the rear wood panel. Luckily, they're prepared for gringos like us, and had a dozen English-style leather saddles. We rode in a group up a hill, then trotted a while, and cantered back to camp. Only an hour, and my butt was sore.

We learned so much about Mongolian culture and the Mongol people. Chimmga knew absolutely everything. We tried to stump her, tried to get her to say "I don't know, I'll have to ask someone." And not just about culture (example: Mongolians never eat veal or lamb, because wolves eat babies, and people shouldn't be like wolves) but politics (the ratio of women to men in the Mongol parliament, and the history of Russo-Sino-Mongol land disputes) and language. She was raised by diplomats who traveled all over Europe. Just about every Mongolian we met, tour guide, nomad shepherd, or camp worker, has been to more places than most people in America have. The horse guide had just come back from London, where he studied business. The camp cook had been in Mexico, working in a Mexican restaurant while he traveled. 

I wish I could write down everything I learned from Chimmga. I wish I could even remember it all! 

One thing I need to mention, though, is the farewell. As we got on the bus to leave the camp, the whole camp staff came to say goodbye and shake all of our hands. It was very sweet. Then, in Mongolian tradition, they sang a song for us, after which we needed to sing a song for them. (They love to sing. And they have no embarrassment about it. It's like what you imagine life was like in the 1920s, with the family gathered around the bouzouki, singing traditional songs. "Hey, everyone," you'd shout, "let's sing a song!" Just doesn't happen like that these days.) So we tried to come up with a song that all of us -- Americans, Canadians, Dutch guy in his 20s, Brits in their 50s -- would know the words to. That's a tall order. Eventually, realizing that we weren't going to get on the bus until someone started the song, someone burst out with Jingle Bells. So here we are, on the Mongolian Steppe, at a remote campsite, in June, singing Jingle Bells. Surreal.  Weirder still, is the fact that the whole camp staff started singing along.  Either it's popular all over the world, or tourists always end up singing it when they leave.

We got back to Ulan Baatar (the double-A doesn't mean to say it longer like "ba-a-tar" but instead that the accent is on the first vowel sound, so it's really "oo-lan batter") in time for a walk through town and dinner at "Mongolia's Only Mexican and Indian Restaurant." It might be the only one in Asia, for that matter. Decent Mexican food, although not traditional Sonoran style. We saw the owner -- an Indian entrepreneur, noting the conspicuous lack of Mexican restaurants in Ulan Baatar, I suspect. It explained the distinctive Indian flavor of the Mexican food. An unintentional fusion cuisine. The burritos had more cauliflower in them than you'd expect in a normal burrito, but the cheese was better than anything you find in Egypt or India. And the margaritas were great.