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Mongolia|life|November 11, 2016 / 11:23 AM
Two Americans gallop through Mongolia on horsebacks

AKIPRESS.COM - ger in mongolia 3 On a horseback-riding trip across Mongolia, a former D.C. insider and her young son gallop through the storied land of warriors and nomads. This is the story by Rachel Goslins published by The Wall Street Journal.

"When your travel agent requires you sign up for emergency medical evacuation insurance before she’ll book your trip, you know you’re in for a different kind of vacation. Leaving the Obama administration after six intense years, I’d decided to take the phrase “getting away from it all” literally. Mongolia. Even the name “Outer Mongolia” is shorthand for middle of nowhere. And so, unemployed and a little burned out, I planned a two-week horseback riding trek across the Mongolian steppe with my 9-year-old son. We’d be camping for much of that time, hours from the nearest paved road, much less the nearest hospital. I packed sunscreen and Neosporin, half chaps and a cartload of protein bars. I signed my son up for two weeks of riding lessons. And I hoped for the best.

In the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar we met our guides and the other riders in our small group, a lawyer from Northern California traveling with a friend, her teenage daughter and her daughter’s friend. Over dinner we taught our new traveling companions the limited Mongolian horse vocabulary we’d learned online: “choo” for go, “hootch” for stop. The next morning we all set out from the city in a bright yellow minibus.

Home to the world’s northernmost capital city, populated by warriors and nomads and endowed with a raw natural beauty, Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country on earth. It is bigger than France, Italy, Spain and England combined, yet has a population only slightly larger than that of Brooklyn. Driving here is its own kind of meditation. The steppe extends all around, like a sea of undulating green. Herds of horses, sheep and immense, shaggy yaks gather to graze in the valleys. In the 12th century these same grasslands, stretching from China to Hungary, provided an expressway for the Mongol army to conquer, on horseback, history’s largest contiguous land empire. We drove for six hours without seeing a tree or a fence. I thought of the rush-hour commute I was missing in D.C., already a lifetime away.

We’d be conquering the steppe on the backs of pony-size Mongolian horses, which may sound benign enough, and they are indeed shorter and stockier than, say, Seabiscuit. But these “ponies” are also the descendants of Genghis Khan’s warhorses, bred to run for days at a time and withstand winters of up to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. We met our own mounts at a stable in the picturesque Arkhangai province where we’d be doing most of our riding. We asked for the names of our horses but discovered they were called simply by their colors. I was riding “Brown”, my son was on “Beige”. I guess Mongolian horsemen aren’t the sentimental type.

Our days fell into a languid routine. We woke early to the sounds of the horses grazing around our tents. After breakfast we mounted up and headed out with a rousing cry of “choo!” (Often followed shortly by “hoooootch!”) We rode 10 to 20 miles a day, through varied microclimates – arid hills, lush valleys, the occasional pine forest. One day we traveled through meadows of wildflowers, drifts of lavender that grew thickly right up to the horses’ stomachs, suggesting a dream sequence from a perfume commercial. As all the riders picked up confidence, we picked up the pace. Trying to beat nightfall back to camp one afternoon, we took off at a gallop alongside a river. We didn’t stop for almost an hour, scattering herds of sheep and galumphing yaks in front of us, mud flying and our faces streaked with wind tears. “That was awesome,” said my son as we pulled up into camp in the darkling twilight.

Every day we stopped to visit with herding families we encountered along the way. When our legs got tired or we needed a break, we headed for the nearest ger camp on the horizon – a few sturdy felt-covered yurts and some livestock. Home to generations of Mongolians, gers can be disassembled and moved with the seasons. Aside from the occasional solar panel outside the door, or a Communist-era television propped inside near the family altar, they remain the same “circular houses” described by Marco Polo 800 years ago. With each visit, we were offered dried milk curds and salty milk tea, and occasionally, vodka made from fermented mare’s milk – all an acquired taste which I never acquired. (A few of us slipped milk curds in our pockets rather than offend the hosts.)

After a long day of riding, we would pull up into a new camp every night. While the cook made mutton stew or pasta on a gas burner, we set up our tents. After dinner, we’d play soccer or cards with the wranglers and tell ghost stories around a fire. Despite the rocky ground and occasional invading grasshopper, I slept better than I had in years.

We planned our trip to coincide with the two-day festival of Naadam, a nationwide summer celebration of what Mongolians call the “Three Manly Sports” – archery, horse racing and wrestling. We spent Nadaam in the small town of Rashaant, watching kids my son’s age and younger race thundering horses along a 10-mile course, bareback and barefoot. We saw men and women, in elegant tunics, shoot ribbon-bedecked arrows at far-off targets. And we held our breaths during the long, tense matches of deadly serious wrestling, before and after which the wrestlers performed an “eagle dance” – a slow-motion ritual of flapping and kicking. It was strangely dignified, considering the wrestlers were all hefty men in satin crop tops, embroidered briefs and velvet hats shaped like Sorry game pieces.

On one of our last days, we rode to a forest hot springs. There we met a few English-speaking locals and shared our running joke of yelling “hootch your horse!” if a rider took off too fast. “Why would you do that?” they asked, clearly puzzled. They explained that “hootch”, at least the way we pronounced it, was actually the Mongolian word for “cow”. And that may be my most enduring image of the trip: a group of smelly, exhilarated Americans galloping across the steppe with their Mongolian guides too polite to ask why they’ve been yelling “Cow!” at their horses."

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