The Hours, Days, and Years Continue Slipping By

Quilotoa, Ecuador - 2012

"And then there is the most dangerous risk of all –  the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later."

                                                                                            Randy Komisar

Mongolian Journey - Naadam Festival

It's the biggest Mongolian social event of the year – Naadam, a festival revolving around the "three manly games," including horse racing, wrestling, and archery. Women are now allowed to compete in all but wrestling.

The celebration is held throughout Mongolia, but the top draw is the three-day event in the capital, kicked off  by a grand opening ceremony.

And then it's time for the most popular of the three manly sports, wrestling.

The rules are simple. It's a single-elimination tournament with no weight classes. If any part of a wrestler's body, aside from his feet or hand, touches the ground, he's out.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

A wrestler must wear an open-front shirt because once a woman  – disguised as a man  – won the tournament, humiliating the rest of the field. Afterward, the uniform rule immediately went into effect to remove any doubt as to the sex of the participants.

The second most popular event is horse racing.

Boys and girls as young as five compete in distances ranging from nine to 15 miles through the desert in search of glory.

Not nearly as many people attend the ...

                    archery sessions.








or ankle-bone shooting, a new event added in recent years, featuring contestants

flicking sheep bones at targets

                         several feet away.

The games themselves are the attraction, but like with all journeys, it's the people that make the festival and traveling memorable.

Sadly, it's time to wrap up another trip. Mongolia might not be on your wish list, but it probably should be if you enjoy wildlife, solitude, and a glimpse into what much of the world must have looked like centuries ago before metropolises littered the landscape.

I've never been to such a wide-open country, a place that even though almost 1,000 years have passed since his death I could still imagine Genghis Khan charging across the horizon at any second.

But it's still not an easy place to get around. Although I prefer backpacking, it's a good idea to consider organized tours in rural areas, which is most of Mongolia.

Reliable travel information is sometimes hard to come by, but at least as far as we were concerned, Alexandra and I had a positive experience with Ganzo at Travel Gobi Mongolia.

Do your homework. I heard several negative comments from travelers who didn't get what they expected with other agencies.

As always, thanks for reading my blog and sharing in our journey.

Once again, I'll close with my customary reminder. My passion is traveling. I'm not sure about yours, but I'll bet it isn't working 9-5. Sadly, we spend far too many hours obsessed with climbing the ladder of success and chasing dollars, rather than chasing our dreams.

Death will visit us soon enough. Don't put off your adventures too long because one day it will be too late.

Mongolian Journey - A Horseback Rider's Dream

It's an unlikely love story. A Norwegian girl traveling through Mongolia meets a Mongolian horse whisperer, marries him, sells everything, and moves to the countryside to open a small tourist camp.

But it's the kind of scenario you'd expect to find in a wide-open country where anything seems possible.

Dream Adventure Mongolia, two guest gers with four double beds each, is rustic – no electricity, no plumbing, and an outhouse, but it's extremely comfortable and romantic.

It's a place to get lost on long hikes in the woods or go horseback riding for hours, which is included in the price. Alexandra and I have little experience with the animals, but after a short lesson, we headed out into the vast landscape, under the constant supervision of our horse whisperer, Puujee.

                

These aren't your typical, pampered horses locked up in stables. They live in the wild, getting rounded up each morning. One of the guests said she's ridden horses all over the world but had never been given such freedom to ride at will without a long list of restrictions. In America, the lawyers would never let that happen.

We spent two days at the horse camp admiring the scenery and savoring the gourmet food. Did I mention the Norwegian girl Jeanett worked in the restaurant industry for years. We both would highly recommend a visit, if alone to meet the couple's horse whisperer in training, Storm, a real handful.

Afterward, we headed back to the capital for the country's biggest yearly party – the Nadaam Festival, three days of horse racing, wrestling, archery, and merriment.

Mongolian Journey - An Intense Cultural Encounter

We've left the sands of the desert for the high cliffs of Yolyn Am, meaning Valley of the Vultures or Valley of the Eagles, depending on who's doing the translating.

The cliffs shade parts of the canyon year-round, meaning ice lingers here from October until the middle of July. You'll notice the ice at the bottom of the right side.





After another night's stay in a ger camp,

we flew back to the capital Ulaanbaatar, where we stayed with a Couchsurfer, which is one of my favorite things to do but something my girlfriend Alexandra had never experienced. I have to hand it to her. Couchsurfing homes can be quite lavish, but Ulaanbaatar wasn't an easy Couchsurfing introduction.

Our host, Berz, is committed to maintaining a connection with Mongolia's traditional way of life, although he resides in an urban setting. He, his wife, and their four children live in a small ger just outside the city limits in an area some might describe as impoverished.

When our taxi driver dropped us off, he looked at us as if we were crazy, and when we got picked up the next morning, the driver said she brought along her sister because she was intimidated to go to the neighborhood alone, a section known as the ger district.

Mongolians continue to flood into the capital in search of work, often preferring to remain living in their movable homes.

When we arrived, Berz welcomed us warmly and congratulated me on my recent 50th birthday.

"I hate to ask you on this special occasion, but can you pick up a shovel and help me collect cow caca?" he asked.

The family, by obtaining special permission from the government, is able to raise 10 cows in their yard, and cows require a lot of upkeep, including disposing of their digestive byproducts.

I'm always happy to lend a hand.

As you might imagine, Alexandra relished watching me carrying out my less than desirable task, but she got her turn later when she was asked to milk the cows, as well as help roll out handmade noodles for dinner.

Although we were unaccustomed to the environment, especially the community outhouse, the different level of hygiene, and six of us sleeping on the floor of the family's ger, we could not have asked for a more loving family and a better way to experience a facet of Mongolian life that most travelers never see.

One of the highlights for us was watching the two daughters perform traditional dance and hear the son play a Mongolian horse-head fiddle.

I must admit I also enjoyed helping one of the daughters work on her English.









We didn't perform, but since the kids love games, we gave them the stacking game Jenga, which the children and their father couldn't stop playing.

The next morning, the family hugged us goodbye and we headed off to our next stop  – a horse camp near Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, nestled in forest-covered mountains about an hour from the capital.

Mongolian Journey - Camels and a Lot of Sand

The Gobi desert isn't very inviting to most living things, but camels have thrived for centuries.

They can survive a week without water and a month without food, making them the animal of choice for transporting goods and people, including Alexandra and me.

Yes, it's touristy. So what.

Afterward, we checked out the Khongor sand dunes, which stretch more than 100 miles.

It's one of the most exotic and inhospitable places I've ever seen.

Things cool down tomorrow as we head toward the last stop on our Gobi tour, visiting the majestic canyons of Yolyn Am.

Mongolian Journey - Search for Dinosaurs

It's the second largest desert in the world, behind only the Sahara.

The barren landscape is littered with reminders of those creatures that succumbed

to the harsh environment.

.

Sand and brush extend as far as the eye can see in every direction.






The only signs of humanity are the occasional ger and two or three tourist camps scattered about.

We came to Bayanzag to tour one of the most famous locations in the world for dinosaurs.

In the 1920s, American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews discovered the first dinosaur eggs. Since then, hundreds of dinosaur fossils have been unearthed here.



Our guide Ganzo found several bones just beneath the surface. No, he didn't damage them and, afterward, recovered them.

                                   Alexandra and I also journeyed to Bayanzag

to view the "Flaming Cliffs," a name Andrews coined for the effect caused by the setting sun.

Like much of Mongolia, the landscape is what makes the country magical. I spent a couple of hours today just gazing out at the desert, experiencing the intense winds crashing against my body.

We finished off the day with the most prized feast in Mongolia – Khorkhog, lamb cooked by red-hot stones.

Tomorrow ... a camel encounter.

Mongolian Journey - A Land Like No Other

The landscape is what draws people to Mongolia  – mile after mile of stunning plains and mountains, where a traveler might journey hours without seeing a passing car, only a handful of Mongolians, but hundreds of animals.

Alexandra and I this morning met a nomadic family that's been wandering central Mongolia for generations.

Horses are essential to a nomad's survival, providing both transportation and food. Children learn to ride almost as soon as they learn to walk. The mares must be milked five to six times a day, allowing visitors to sample either fresh milk or fermented milk, both of which don't taste much different from cow's milk.

My stomach is still adjusting to the dairy products from multiple animal sources but guests not accepting at least a small amount is considered to be extremely rude.




In the evening, we toured the ruins of the 16th-century Ongi Monastery.

Tonight, we're staying at the luxurious Secret of Ongi tourist camp, named Mongolia's top tourist camp for four years. It's not the Rosewood, but the service is excellent and the shared bathrooms immaculate.

After dinner, performers modeled some of Mongolia's traditional clothing.

The setting of the gers nestled in the Delger Khangai Mountains is hard to beat. You won't find any malls or amusement parks here, but you will find extreme beauty and the melodious sound of silence.




We've now reached the Gobi province, a two-day, rugged journey taking more than 14 hours. Travel is slow in Mongolia due to the terrain and absence of paved roads in the countryside, but it's well worth the jolts to get here.

Next up, a search for dinosaur bones.

Mongolian Journey - Where are All the People?

Almost half of Mongolia's inhabitants live in Ulaanbaatar, an overcrowded, polluted capital inundated by drab, cookie-cooker, concrete buildings from the Soviet era when Mongolia was a satellite country of the USSR.

But outside of the the capital it's easy to understand why for most of its 800-year history the majority of its people were nomads ...

wandering the expansive, wide-open plains.






Mongolia is the world's least densely populated country – three million occupying 600,000 square miles.

You'll find few fences here. The government owns most of the land in the countryside, allowing nomads to roam at will and set up gers/yurts

wherever their livestock graze.





There's a whole lot of emptiness and a whole lot of delightful nothingness in the land known as blue sky country.

Still, Mongolia has an impressive past. The Mongolian Empire, first unified by Genghis Khan in the 1200s, eventually stretched across most of Eurasia.

During our first full day in Mongolia, we visited Karakorum, the former capital of the empire, stopping to tour Erdene Zuu, the oldest Buddhist monastery complex in Mongolia dating back to the 1500s.

Along the way, we met a friend of our guide Ganzo. The friend lives in a ger, and as tradition dictates, the hostess offered us food – yogurt, tea, and dried goat milk. Mongolians mostly breed five kind of animals, including horses, cows/yaks, goats, sheep, and camels, so most of the diet consists of food products related to these animals. With a nomadic history, the people weren't able to grow crops, meaning you'll still find little vegetables and fruit.

Tonight, Alexandra and I stayed in our first ger, a mobile, canvas structure supported by a collapsible wooden frame. A ger can be broken down in less than an hour,which certainly fits the nomadic lifestyle still practiced by 30% of the population.

A ger is usually quite cozy and quite comfortable.

Tomorrow, we begin traveling south toward the Gobi desert.