July 25 – August 11 2008 / Mongolia: Vast Sky, Vast Land
To the Independent Republic of Mongolia (not Inner Mongolia, a part of China) for a total solar eclipse
Part 3 - Ger Camps and a Tent Camp
So a small subset of our eclipse group, just ten of us, are now starting out on a week's travel through some of the landscape southwest of UB.
That first day we drove across the enormous landscape of grasslands, blue and green, ineffable blue sky and no wonder they have the blue sky on their flag. We were on our way to a ger camp, just for tourists.
The long drive across grassy land, small mountains or hills, your odd horseman, ger or scattering of gers, doorways all facing the same direction and at a discreet distance from each other. Herds of sheep and goats, horses, lots of horses, and the riders, oh the riders, but you can't separate horse and rider, the horses trot in a peculiarly graceful way across the huge landscape and the rider flows with his animal, not moving at all, standing tall and firm in the stirrups. It is hard to describe theses riders and their horses. I will have to try harder.
Animals in mixed herds, sometimes the sheep all together in a circle in the middle. A bit of paved road, then braidings of dirt tracks. The oovos on the heights of land or on passes, thick with faded blue katas, and a mound of stones. [Ovoo: a sacred mound of stones laid by people at a place of power] Our drivers, when we stop at these, are seen to toss a stone and circumambulate in clockwise direction. Just in case? At lunch, a small pass and above it a rocky outcrop, and lots lots of flowers, I take their pictures and climb to the top of the hill, to eat apart from everyone although the food is pretty much inedible to me. There are some cars, some trucks heavily loaded, towering loads, of sheep wool. Sometimes a truck with the makings of a ger—spokes, the round central roof piece, pieces of furniture. People usually move each season, we learn.
But mostly: grass, neatly-contoured hills and small mountains, vastness of sky and land, the original land, and all is either blue above or green below, and a bit of brown.
The original land, even before it filled with creatures, only the plants and their partner insects. No trees here.
How do the people in the gers choose where to live?
In photography there is supposed to be this rule of thirds, for composition. But here it should not be that, instead it should be 50/50—half sky and half land, all the way to all the horizons. I wonder how one's eye travels, across these hills with their simple shapes. There is really nowhere to explore with the eye, for each view has only a few simple lines, no center, no excited spots.
Oh we see CAMELS! Ten camels, arrayed on either side of the road, grazing, resting, rolling slowly in the dust, doing what camels do when they are untrammeled. For some reason these camels and the sight of them here moves me to tears. I take many pictures of these camels. They are just being camels, here in a natural landscape. They are two-humped camels, and I notice that the arrangement, the space or shape, between humps, seems distinctive for each individual camel.
Seeing the camels made me weepy and happy.
I am trying to understand or incorporate this vast and benign landscape. Imagining flinging my ashes into the wind here, and each particle of my body flies free to start a new life. At the gas stop, there's a van with 25 people in it, men, women, kids, babies. Alex the astronomer, traveling with us, hands around pages of stickers, a really great gift that he has brought along.
I am thinking, this landscape makes me think because it provides a simple ground on which to draw thoughts.
So, since only a very few people can pass large amounts of their experience to others (although by example we may influence many more, but most people do not have a large audience in their lives)--anyhow, since only a few can pass large amounts of their experience to many others, and since one's experience passes away with one's life, the ONLY point/purpose of experiences is inner-directed existentially, ONLY to enlarge/unfold oneself.
Geography and climate have favored these people as it has not the Africans.
THE TORMENT OF PLACES OF WHICH YOU CAN NEVER BE A PART. Is that why I dream of landscapes, am ravished by landscapes? I am not sure what I mean by that but since the battery in my laptop is running out and I have a lot more I will not sit here and think about it.
I do now believe that there really are more animals than people here. Thousands and thousands of them, in huge herds, flowing easily up and down the landscape.
Yaks with long black hair. Reddish orange cattle. Goats of every color. Sheep with black faces. And everywhere the gorgeous small horses.
White gentian, purple asters, edelweiss, pinks, mustards, thyme and juniper (so sweet and strong when the vehicle runs over them, and where we step on them, the scented oils released).
Here we are overnight at this ger camp, with hot water and cappuccino, not what I expected but welcome. We drive to some dunes at the sunset. I wander away, of course, and find a tiny line of tracks, gerbil it seems, and their feeding areas, on some legume bushes. I am happy to be in the twilight alone. If I were to wander off, and they were to leave without me, I would not be afraid because even though it is so big here, it seems there is always eventually a horseman or so, or a herd, or a ger on the horizon. Someone would come. So it is not lonely, I am not feeling alone as I did in Denali, where we went into the bush and no trails.
I had not really expected much but there were hot showers available at the camp and flush toilets, and our ger was spacious and light and clean, and in the night it was dark and the bed was firm and the blankets, and all was clean and I slept naked and peaceful.
After a fine night's sleep we come into the vans again and drive much of the day. In mid-afternoon we come in to a valley with larch woods on the surrounding hills. It looks a good deal like the high parks of Colorado, and I feel at home although still so far away. It is always so hard to resist saying, well, this reminds me of such and such a place, and of course the terrain is very similar, but then what does that mean—there are only so many different kinds of landscape in the world, and now that I think of it, I guess I have seen a good many of them--
Anyhow, at the end of the valley we can see what looks like a whole array of ger camps. kind of strewn in a line. I must say this is a far cry from the place we stayed yesterday, they all look a bit bedraggled, but whatever. And of course we are spoiled by our beautiful eclipse ger camp.
It seems this place was built by some Japanese entrepreneurs. It is quite a piece of weirdness. Here are the "hot springs" which had attracted me in the original writeup of the trip, but they are contained in a kind of bathhouse affair and fake rock pool. The ger itself is grungy and the beds and pillows are hard as rocks. In the dining room I am completely grossed out by the sight of dozens of flies burrowing in the coffee creamer container. I can hardly keep my food free of them. Disgusting.
One toilet works, the rest don't, and when I finally try the "springs" (which we are supposed to go in nude "for hygiene reasons"), the water to take the obligatory shower before going in is boiling hot—a trickle of boiling hot. So, basically, the place is falling apart literally and figuratively. Well, that's okay. All of us are well-seasoned travelers and have seen worse than this. And besides, we are in beautiful, beautiful Mongolia. What's not to love?
After lunch we go to visit a family in their ger. A man, 33, his wife, 31, and their two kids, a girl of 12 and a little boy of about 6. They don't have much in their ger--two beds on which we sit, a stove, an altar (with a statue of Lenin chatting with someone), a little shelf with some ceramic elephants and a very pretty blue glass clock. They own about 100 horses, some cows and yaks, perhaps 100 goats. The two of them take care of all these animals themselves. Our guide says they are kind of middle-income, but we think less than that.
It is very hot today, and the heat in the ger is even more intense, as the wife is cooking a huge pot of milk, every few minutes wiping the sweat off her rosy face with a red washcloth. At one point she ladles off much of the liquid and adds to it some white powder, and reaches in to stir this with her hands, her arms, right up to the elbow. It must be over 100 degrees where she is working, standing by the little stove.
We spend a long time in their ger, asking questions through our guide, and the smells are beginning slowly to make me nauseous. In one corner is a large container of some yellow substance, like melted butter, and a hundred fly carcasses lie on its surface. Above me is a string of shreds of raw meat, drying, covered with flies. The woman offers us a variety of foods, all passed around for each of us to take a drink or a bite of, from bowl or hand. I taste none of them. I just can't do this.
I wonder how she is going to get the white liquid off her arm-- I wonder if they ever get clean after they are born-- Just about the time I feel I will have to go outside it seems it is time to milk the mares. We all go outside and she and her husband milk a couple of them. She must do this every two hours. This is her life and will be the life of her daughter. Back at our camp John and I walk out and up into a meadow which has the richest concentration of wildflowers I have ever seen. Below the meadow of flowers and flies is a watering place for the animals, the source of the hot springs I think, and there is a huge teepee-shaped shrine of sticks, covered with khatas, at the precious water source.
In the evening the young women who work in the dining area put on shiny pink Japanese tops, and there is an elaborate karaoke setup. There are a few Japanese tourists here, and the rest of the people don't seem to be doing much, I guess they are staff but no one seems in charge. Later after dinner I go to take pictures of the meadow flowers but my camera is covered with flies and many of the pictures don't turn out.
Nightfall. We creep into our hard beds. I fold up the thicker cover to make a kind of mattress for myself, but my hips are bruised. Two generators are heard, dogs bark all night, a soccer game goes on for a while, and there is laughter in the darkness.
In the morning for breakfast we are served nutella with chocolate, Kitkat candy bars, weird coarse bread half baked, chicken and rice soup, sardines, evil-smelling cheese. Flies on everything, everywhere. I can't have coffee because I can't imagine using either the instant coffee or the creamer into which the flies have burrowed so enthusiastically and intently. YUK.
So the others are to ride horses this morning. It takes a long, long time to get them all outfitted with the proper size helmets, and then the proper size of the small horses. One of our number, a caricature, refuses to wear a helmet. The horse wranglers are in their long woolen coats with wide yellow sashes, and they are so close with horseflesh that the two animals are hard to distinguish. They must find all of this hilarious. Finally off they go, and John and I and the other non-riding couple begin to walk. It's not really a hike, just walking on the dusty dirt road. And it's very hot because we have gotten such a late start. I walk with the woman, talking, but really I would so much rather be by myself. Once I catch my foot in my shoelace and actually fall, with great irritation and embarrassment. I would so prefer to be alone!
Flowers, the low hills, dust, great expanse of space.
It's hot.
At length the horse riders are finished and we meet them at the top of the road. We leave the horses and their wranglers (talking into their cell phones) and all pile back into the vans, and leaving the road, drive across the grass to a line of trees, and across a few small rivers, and then here we are in our tent camping place. It looks wonderful! There are groves of small willow trees, and meadow across the main river, which is shallow and full of stones, but swift-flowing in its center. Across the river from our camping place are small herds of cows and horses, and as we eat in our blue dining tent a rain comes up and a herd of horses gallops past. Taking my breath away!
Seven large blue tents are erected, and some toilet tentlets, and even shower tents, and our dining tent. People go in the river to wash. I put on my bathing suit and wash off in the brisk water. I feel really clean at last. Then we go to rest in our tent and while we are in there an enormous wind storm comes up. The dining tent is half blown down. Our tent shakes and shivers, and J and I each lie in our little sleeping compartments at either side of the tent and imagine that we are holding it down. At one point, nervous that we may be blown away, I take passports, tickets, money and camera and place them on my person securely. For what if I or my bags are blown away?
In the afternoon we drive a short distance to Tstserleg, the local town, where our Mongolian guide grew up. There we visit the monastery. It turns out the mother of our guide used to cook for the monks, and the guide knows them all. They all sit together exchanging gossip (no doubt) and laughing together.
There is a large Buddha image on a hillside, new, and a small place of offerings. Having spoken to our Alyson this morning, and found out that she is in distress, I am moved to make a small offering to connect her, me, the Cosmos. I just place a little bar of chocolate with the rest.
There is a lone shining prayer wheel and I go to it to send prayers or intentions for her. One of our group, brother of the astronomer, and a Buddhist enthusiast, comes and corrects me that I am turning it in the wrong direction. I am so hurt. Violated. I wait only a few minutes before telling him off. It doesn't matter! I tell him angrily. He of course, being a good soul, is deeply apologetic. But I think it was good for him to know. I told him, it doesn't matter which direction I was turning the prayer wheel. I was busy, I was--praying. For you, dearest Alyson. In town, we stop at a "supermarket" where I buy plain cookies and a beer for tonight, and John gets a small bottle of local vodka. Also I find some little bowls to buy, one lovely gray and blue one, one with the five important Mongolian animals on it for Alyson (camel, cow, horse, sheep, goat) and one with the eight auspicious symbols on it for me. [The eight auspicious symbols of Buddhism: the right-coiled white conch, the wheel, the parasol, the endless knot, the pair of golden fish, the victory banner, and the vase of treasure.]
Also we go through a small outdoor market where I delight myself by competently purchasing, for about eighty cents, an orange bandana.
After dinner at tent camp our American guide Ray, a gentle man, gives us a fine explanation of Buddhism. The literal among us ask their impatient, unimaginative literal questions, but I am delighted with Ray and his teaching, and tell him so. I am happy to find that I already know the basic things he teaches. But it is good to have an expert tell me. Our dinner is expertly prepared, on some tiny field stove, behind the vehicles. Everyone attending us is an expert--
There are cows in the field crossing our river, passing through camp, trotting briskly past our blue tents. I love it all.
And, in the night, a fierce, fierce rain and windstorm. I have images of our tent being carried away in the water!
In the morning our tent is filled with crickets, grasshoppers, daddy long legs. Burrs from some plant in our little field. A local dog comes round and is given hot dogs and butter, and gets petted and played with. The willow grove seems untouched by the wind and rain. The flowers are bright. Cows are in camp, and horses pass through.
Then the tents are struck, we all pile in the vans, and drive a short distance to this new place, a fine ger camp hard by a great rock, and our ger is all orange and blue, and has power in it so I can write with abandon.
After lunch, and a small nap, we have a little hike or walk, first over to the great rock, probably a volcanic plug, and then along a lovely river in a grove of small willows.
The rock is covered with graffiti, all in Cyrillic I am somewhat happy to say, and brilliant with katas, mostly of blue, but others of red yellow and white. There is a Mongolian flag fluttering at the top, and I can't imagine how anyone got up there to place it.
All over this landscape are places of power: the heights of land, passes, rivers, bridges—and at these places the people have made oovos, conical piles of rocks, often with a staff in the middle upon which are tied sky-blue katas, tattered from wind. One walks around them in a clockwise direction, adds a rock (as we have seen our guides and drivers do), or, if by the road and one can't stop, one honks the horn in acknowledgement.
Our astronomer Alex Filippenko just can't open his scientist's mind enough to understand this idea of power-filled places. I find my own mind able both to accept the strictures of science and the possibilities of spirit: my eclectic nature! What pleasure it gives! So we walk along the river, amid the grasses and little trees. Here and there are bones of domestic animals, and there are small herds, of horses, cattle, goats.
We stop for a long time by a household of several gers, to watch some very young children, perhaps three, seven and eight, wrangle a small herd of horses within an open pen. The kids are apparently supposed to separate one horse from the others, by getting its foal to come out so that the mother will follow. They are absolutely casual about darting in and out of this nervous herd, pulling on halters, whacking rumps, and generally trying to assert themselves. Our group stands nearby, gaping appreciatively at what's just an hour's work for a kid here in the grasslands. When the task is finally finished, and our group makes ready to move, Alex gives each of the kids a page of stickers. He's done this every time we've met some kids, and it's a big hit, and very thoughtful and imaginative of him.
Our Mongolian guide Sangay tells us that there are, according to him, "Two hundred words for the colors of horses, but no word for tsunami [since we are vastly inland]." Obviously something he has learned in guide school, but a nice idea.
Today at breakfast two musicians play for us. They'd come last night but arrived after dinner. The man wears magnificent leather and silk clothing, and she is in elegant silk also. They play stringed instruments and sing for us. He does the hoomi "throat singing". I had thought before that this was only done by a very few people, but back in eclipse camp even a few of our crew sang in this way. The sound vibrates so deeply that you feel your breastbone is moving. How did these people learn to do this? What exactly are they doing, to make such a—a peculiar sound?
One of our number said that he had read an article somewhere in which Mongolians were described as a confident people. I like that word very much and I think it is apt. They make a living from this large land, move about it to make that living, have their competent ways of doing things and work not against but with the landscape and the animals. Confident. Independent. Upright. I rejoice that they decided to rid themselves of the Russians, and did.
Long, long graceful organic lines of low rounded relief, the green hills, not one tree on any horizon. Brilliant and blue empty sky this morning. Demoiselle cranes in the grass. Simple original forms and colors: blue, green, brown. A large eagle, with yellow beak, on a post by the road, is unperturbed when we stop to photograph him.
Where there is no paved road, which is most places, drivers have taken matters into their own hands. Along valley floors there are braidings of road leading down into the valley and up the other side, dust clouds trailing vehicles all across the expanse. Each driver, heading in the same direction as the others, chooses the track he thinks is best. At length there is some paving, and we get up on it and drive to and past the small town risen around the ruins of Karakhorum, the site of civilization hereabouts since 200 BC and on through its time as capitol of the great Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire the world has ever known. Still.
Here's our final ger camp, our ger with its somehow soothing arrangement of orange and blue spokes and wheel open to the sky above the [dismally hard] beds, the little stove, a small table. A little orange door through which one must stoop or hit one's head. The grass around and beyond to the horizons, the glittering stars in the dark…
Just after supper in the large dining ger, I hear the sounds of tv; Olympics opening I think. Here's a ger with a satellite dish hard by, and the sounds are coming from in there. I hang around a little. Two women come out, both Caucasian. "Is that the Olympics you have in there?" I ask. "Yes," says one of the women. "Can I come and watch?" "Sure, come in," she says.
Inside the ger, arrayed on four beds around the tv, are at least 15 people. I settle down on the end of a bed. "We don't understand what we're seeing," says my new friend. Well, no; the narrative is in Mongolian and the images are confusing—but of course it's Chinese, the visuals, and perhaps more subtle than many of us can get. I watch for a while, then ask where they are from. "Poland," she says. So here I am, an American in Mongolia watching the Olympics from China with some people from Poland. I just LOVE this!
My hips are bruised from sleeping, or trying to sleep, on these hard beds.
This morning I see in one direction sheep and goats, in another, gers against the green hills, in another a crow above the grass, and in the fourth, two plus one family gers. Today we go back to the ruins of Karakhorum, to visit the ancient Buddhist site, more than a thousand years old, with its monastery of the 16th century, built from the ruins of the ancient capital. One hundred eight stupas [a stupa is a mound-shaped structure containing Buddhist relics, and 108 is an auspicious number] surround the Erdenezuu Monastery.
For a fee, one is allowed to take pictures inside the temples. I am so excited to be able to do this. Always before, in such places, no pictures have been allowed. In fact, at the beginning of this trip, at the first temple we visited, I bought a tiny souvenir of a plaster altar, brilliantly painted in all its dazzling and confusing complexity, which, I thought, I could hold up to my eye, closely, and have thereby some faint experience of the real thing.
But here I can make real images of the overwhelming, mind-buzzing, attention-riveting kaleidoscope of color and shape and glitter and startle.
Outside there are tiny souvenir shops and rows of tables all selling interesting copies of religious goods as well as horrible schlock. I so love the religious goods. But I already have so much, so many objects at home, and I steadfastly refuse to be seduced by most of this. Though I do buy a tiny brass camel, to remember my roadside camels and to add to my collection of animals from our travels.
Now we are driving to our last ger camp.
A vastness of the unintentioned world…
Roadside stands an enormous oovo at which we stop. There are countless objects left here: medals, dishes, wreaths, a pair of crutches, leaves, glittery things…I circumambulate clockwise three times, leave some fragrant leaves and a paper on which I have written our family's names. I think the oovos are an attempt to hold on to the numen of which one is/was a part. From oldest times. When a human was simply a gathering on the landscape along with grass, rocks, hills, small animals and other large ones. Clouds, sky. Rain. Flowing water. Snow and wind.
And to our last ger camp. Even though I know we are actually pretty close to the city, you would not know it. A cluster of white gers lies across the grass, and there's nothing else.
Well that is not really true. For some time I have been thinking that even though this landscape appears so empty, actually if I went wandering off, from a lunch stop or a ger camp, and found myself with nothing of people on any horizon, if I just sat down and waited, in a little time would come some herd of animals, or a horseman.
This camp is in a national park in which the Przewalski's horses, or Takhi in Mongolian, the wild horse known only to this part of the world, are now flourishing. They had gone extinct in the wild in the 1970's, but efforts by the Dutch and others, who had them in zoos, led to their reintroduction about 15 years ago, and now there are nearly 200 of them.
The idea is to drive to where the horses have been seen recently at dusk recently, at a water hole. After a short drive we all get out and walk. I am thrilled to have one more chance to walk here. The group separates and I am slow, because I want to look at things. There are some sulfur butterflies, puddling for salts at the edge of a small muddy place. There are beautiful grasses everywhere, some taller than I am, all glinting silvery in the low light.
A group of seven horses is spotted on a hillside. They are yellowish in color, stout, with rounded muzzles; I watch through my binoculars. John and the rest are way ahead, along the undulating road. I don't know if he has seen these seven horses or not, and I want him to, so I take off as briskly as I can, leaving the others in my small group behind.
Up and down, up and down. When I finally reach him, yes, the others have seen horses and they are RIGHT THERE. Seven more, including a cream-colored foal. The horses walk slowly along a tiny valley, grazing, their tails switching, bodies alert but relaxed.
A small group of us silently stalks them, parallel to their little valley, looking across and somewhat down on them. In total silence people spread out on the hillside, cameras clicking and no other sound. The light continues to drop, the sun setting. The horses are so close we can hear their snorts and nickers. They seem unperturbed by our close presence. In silence then, only the sounds of the horses, and the silence of the setting sun and the golden light like a deep bell, or the vibration of hoomi singing.
Back at the gers, and after dinner, the bed for once seems comfortable and we look forward to a night of good sleep. But when we come back from dinner, we find an invasion of large black beetles, many dozens of them. They climb up the walls and drop unpleasantly from the low conical ceiling, onto the little table, our heads, and our beds, plop. Plop. Plop. Sangay comes in and helps us catch them and put them outside. But the mat on my side is covered with black carcasses and I do not much like the idea of having them drop on me when I get in the bed.
But after we douse the flashlights and candle, they seem to stop coming and I fall asleep. Thinking of the long, long "day" I will be spending next, on our way home.
Around midnight I wake up to the quiet sounds of some people talking and giggling in a nearby ger. I think it's some of our people, and after I have lain there in irritation for nearly two hours, I finally get up and creep outside in my underwear, ready to tell them to stop. Oh. No, they are speaking Mongolian. Is it maybe our drivers? I'm sure not gonna trot over there in my underpants and confront them. So I go back to bed, thinking of the beetles I am treading on in my socks, hopefully dead ones, and since I realize I cannot understand what the people are saying, finally sleep. Our last night in a ger.
By 8 am we are on the road, such as it is, on our way back to Ulaanbaatar. The braided roads fill the wide valley, and each driver takes his own choice, for all are going in the same direction. There is a little paving, a little more as we approach the city, then finally only one paved road. You can see, where the paving has come, how the braided roads on either side of it are beginning to heal.
Yes. A confident, independent, practical people. No, we don't need to carry "papers." Yes, we can go live anywhere we want to, and we travel abroad if we like. The young democracy is working. Stay proud and confident, you people in your vast land under your vast sky.