After some very easy coercing by our man Joe back in Ulan Batar, we signed up for a two night tour out of Tsetserleg, Mongolia. We would be traveling over six hundred kilometres almost entirely off road. Some of it REALLY off road.

We would be one of the very first few foreigners to have ever done the route. Case in point, the beautiful young couple that hosted us our first night in their ger – we were the second white people they had ever seen before. The first being some cyclists the husband had seen the prior year through his binoculars.

To be honest, I debated about writing this up at all. Their are SO few places left in the world that are still this wild. I hate to be one to contribute to its demise.

The good news is, I barely know where we went. So I can’t really tell you where we were. It takes a skilled Mongolian to navigate this part of the world, not some dumb Canadian’s blog post.

The Minimalistic Mongolian

I hate how everything has to be such a thing now. I like eating food that tastes good. That makes me a “foodie”. I hate shit lying around. I guess I’m a “minimalist”.

People take themselves way too seriously these days.

Much of Mongolia’s population is nomadic to some degree. And this forces them to be pretty minimalistic when it comes to their belongings. Imagine if you had to pack up your home and move it every three to six months. Would you be hanging on to your university text books and wedding dress?

As an aside, it takes only thirty to sixty minutes for a couple Mongolians to put up the ger they live in when they do have to move it. About as long as it takes to assemble that tent you bought from Cabela’s. Most impressive.

Thinking back, I myself have moved nineteen times in my life so far. Which on average is around once every two years. Give or take. Perhaps that is where I get my minimalism from.

Minimalism goes against human nature though. It is not our natural inclination. No doubt that if the Mongolian nomads weren’t nomads, their belongings would slowly be piling up.

It takes effort to keep your belongings in check: time must be taken to periodically go through your belongings and to evaluate each item and whether or not you still need it. And if not, to get over the emotional attachment to it and get it out of your life. Alternatively, an external force can come into play. Either a house fire, or a death, or, being forced to pack it all up and move it. Over and over again.

Many studies are now pointing to minimalism as being a key factor to one’s happiness. The simple life. With less stuff comes less worry about your stuff. Gretchen Rubin’s book The Happiness Project digs into this concept a fair bit.

I can completely relate to the sentiment. The day I broke my emotional attachment to the rotting ’65 Valiant in my driveway (and sold it) was a happy day for me. Even though I once loved that car.

Mongolians, in general, are some of the happiest people in the world. Or so it appears. I can certainly see it when I see them talking to one another.

And I have no doubt their minimalistic ways play a key role in their happiness.

Trip Update: Tsetserleg, Mongolia

Day One

Our guide Eenee shows up around 9 am at the Fairfield hotel in Tsetserleg with Boornay, our driver.

Eenee grew up in a village just off the route we would be taking. As a young adult he worked in Ulan Batar for a number of years before deciding city life wasn’t for him.

My kinda guy.

Boornay the driver? Never done this trip before. And not a word of English. But he looks determined. Eenee doesn’t seem concerned, so why should we be.

We bring our stuff outside to load into another fucking awesome Russian van for the trip. This one turns out to be a much older, tired looking, fucking awesome Russian van than the last. Eenee points out some tourists call it a “Taliban Van” because apparently they do use them in Afghanistan. Jen doesn’t think that is as funny as me, so I decide to use it sparingly.

After groceries, and precautionary shovels and boards (it can still be winter here when it wants, after all), we head west for a precious thirty minutes or so of driving on tarmac. Then we turn left. After that I have little to no concept of where we went. I can really only describe what we saw.

We descend into a beautifully lush, green valley. Big, sweeping mountains on both sides. Cloud, fog, snow, wind, blue skies. All of it on one day. Then again the next day.

No roads anywhere, per se. Just ruts in the land. When one set of ruts gets too bumpy, another set materializes beside the old set. Over and over again. Sometimes until there is an eight lane highway. Surrounded by nature.

Without another sole around.

In fact I’ll bet in the two days of being off-road, we saw no more than thirty other motorists. Probably twenty of them on scooter.

A couple hours down the valley and Eenee gets the driver to stop. He hops out and runs up the hill to the right. A baby goat is standing there all by himself.

Eenee carefully flanks him on the left then sneaks up behind him. In one quick motion he grabs the goat’s back legs then lifts him up to his side. We had the night’s dinner.

Kidding 🙂 …but the goat would have soon been a wolf’s dinner if Eenee hadn’t noticed. Goaty gets thrown in the back of the van with us, and off we go to find the nearest flock. Out goes goaty off to (hopefully) find his mother.

Eenee cares a LOT about animals as you will soon find out.

Eventually our valley drive comes to a point surrounded by three mountain passes. But conditions are always changing so the only way to really know which pass is best… Is to ask a local.

We head left and bump a half kilometre or so across some rugged terrain to a couple gers on the side of the valley. A young man comes out with his dog to talk to us. As Eenee chats with him, the dog stands guard.

I go for a pee while we wait. In Mongolia you can pee basically whenever and wherever you want. On the road from Ulan Batar to Tsetserleg at one of the stops, I ran across the road to pee in the field. When I turned around to walk back, a dozen or so people were peeing AT me right in the parking lot, not twenty feet from the bus.

Eenee’s hunch about which pass is best turns out to be correct. In the van we hop, and when I look out the back window as we pull away, I see the dog walk over and pee on my pee, then chase after his owner back to the ger. Good guard dog.

Halfway up the pass, Boornay stops the van and turns it off. The van is getting hot. So he pulls out a couple wires from under the dash and ties them together. We hear a fan in the engine compartment fire up. Then Boornay starts the engine. Starting the engine sounds a lot like when Hans Solo tries to unsuccessfully use the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive.

Down to all fours he switches the transmission (4WD) and up to the snow line we crawl.

We are hit with another breath taking view as we summit. That Mongolian steppe you would see on any reasonable brochure advertising Mongolian tourism.

Further we go until we meet a river where we stop for a quick bite. Up to another pass and then head left, sticking to the river. The river being mostly frozen still.

Eventually we get to a bridge that we take, in need of crossing the river. But the bridge is frozen underneath so water is flowing all around it instead. Of course that’s no match for our trusty van!

Out later for another stop by the river, a herdsman comes to say hi. He is trying to find a way to get his yaks back from the other side of the half-melted river. Apparently hundreds of yaks die every year falling through the ice.

We wish him luck and proceed to bump along an old river bed for god knows how long. We even get out and walk for a bit at one point, to take a break from the pounding.

Eenee and the driver eventually decide it is time to stop and have a tea. That’s not the tea like you’re thinking. It’s hot yak milk with lots of salt and a bit of tea mixed in. Far from my favourite. So we pull up to the next ger and in we are invited.

We are offered an array of yak products including butter, yoghurt and milk tea. I’m thinking oh god, here we go. That time I dread where you must accept something weird and gag it down with a smile.

The yak butter actually turns out to be DELICIOUS. On a biscuit, that is. Closer to whipped cream than anything. And Jen loves the yoghurt so much, the lady gives her a jar for the road. Incredibly thoughtful.

Further along the dry river bed we bump. But like all tough times, the road eventually improves. Then another summit. And with the sun getting lower in the sky, we dip into yet another valley.

After stopping at an ancient burial ground which we are told dates back to the Bronze Age, we start our hunt for the night’s ger to sleep in.

Almost at the first town of the journey by now, we find a group of gers and eventually a young family that will host us for the night.

This is a very foreign concept to pretty much anyone in the world. Except Mongolians. You literally just drive around asking people if you can sleep over. And quickly someone will say yes. Free of charge.

But when you think about it, it works. Instead of banking money for these transactions, you bank favours. As long as people continue to trust one another and everyone participates, it works like a charm.

Western society is way too far in another direction for this to possibly work there.

We enter the family’s ger at around 9pm. The lady of the house hands us bowls of tea, and quickly starts chopping up yak meat. The family has already eaten dinner, but the point is moot: when guests come over, food will be served.

Pasta with yak meat is ready around 11pm. The taste is much better than the mutton we’d been eating too much of for two weeks before. But it does taste a little too on the liver-y side to really enjoy.

Sometime around midnight I ask Eenee if he has the time and he says for the first of many times on the trip, “there is no time in the Mongolian countryside”. He later goes on to explain that there are no schedules. People rarely need to be anywhere for anything in particular. The only real concern is if the animals are getting enough food.

We’ve noticed Mongolians really don’t seem to like early mornings. 9am is the earliest anyone has ever told us we needed to do anything. In fact, back in Tsetserleg, two guys at the hostel wanted to go horseback riding at 8am and they were told that was too early. Ha! My kinda place.

We eventually move over to the family’s second ger. There is only one terribly uncomfortable looking bed so we stack up rugs on the floor and call it bed for the night.

Day Two

We wake up to daylight and bitter coldness. Somewhere around the freezing mark. But apparently it’s Zoe’s morning to take care of the group. She’s bundled up with the dung fire going and water on the boil.

We eventually get us and our belongings together and into the van. No exchange of money is expected by anyone, but we debate if we should offer something. On one hand it is not a precedent we want to set. On the other hand it is nice to help these people (although it really isn’t needed), and we have no other way of ever returning the favour they did for us. Eenee tells us if we want to give money, we should offer it as a gift to the child. So we do.

Off to town for a quick gas and chocolate bar fill up.

Perhaps an hour out along a smoother dirt road than yesterday, Eenee beckons the driver to stop once more.

You know that picture of the sickly looking African kid with the vulture standing near by waiting for him to die? Off in the distance we see exactly that, but with a one day old horse.

Eenee is off again on foot towards it. The vulture flies off. The horse can barely walk at all, so Eenee easily scoops him up and carries him back to the van. We debate what should be done with the foal. The mom is clearly long gone, and apparently foals don’t get picked up by other horses like what can happen with yaks and goats and such. Eenee suggests he might take him home and keep him.

In the van the horse is loaded and off we go. The reality of what Eenee just said, screaming at me from my frontal lobe.

Two days of bumping around in a van with a semi-frantic baby wild horse? Are you crazy??

Perhaps an hour down the road. I really don’t remember the scenery because I’m too busy thinking about the situation. We get to another village. The horse tumbles out and stumbles around. Eenee and Boornay  are invited into someone’s house for tea and discussion. We prep some snacks in the van.

Eenee eventually returns to the van, apparently having come to the conclusion that it might be best to find a local home for the foal. We all whole-heartedly agree. The locals suggest we go find a ger with a goat herd, because apparently goat milk is the closest thing to horse milk.

Off we go. But this time the horse is a lot less frantic. We’ve fed him some sugary water. Perhaps he realizes we are trying to help him? Who knows. He’s one day old. What the hell does anything that’s one day old think. At this point, I’m relaxing about the whole thing and actually consider that it might not be that bad bringing him the whole way back.

Perhaps it’s because we gave him a name: Slim Shady. Slim for short, of course.

Not far, we find what we are looking for. We pull up and turn the van’s engine off. A woman eventually emerges from her ger. At first unable to hear the van’s honks over the blowing snow.

She looks confused at first, but her face quickly turns to happiness when she hears the news.

Out of the van tumbles Slim once more, and into her ger she pushes him with excitement.

As we pull away, she comes out with some yak milk in a plastic bowl. We wave goodbye and she throws the milk in the air. A gesture of good luck for us.

We drive to the end of the valley and up up to an even higher plateau. At this point we are much higher in altitude than anywhere we have been in the country. Upwards of three thousand meters? It is well below freezing, and snow is blowing everywhere. Walk too quickly and you are quickly dizzy and out of breath.

Now completely surrounded by snow covered mountains, we crawl across probably the roughest part of the trip for a solid hour or more. One last summit, and we begin a snowy descent in amongst the yak herds.

At the bottom of the hill the sky goes blue so we stop for some pics and an afternoon ice-cold beer. Ice-cold because it is in the van with us that doesn’t have heat.

A herdsman pulls up on his bike telling us to stop by for some milk tea. So we do.

Along with the tea we are offered something resembling a mini version of a sugar coated doughnut hole with a bit of jelly in the middle. So I pop it in my mouth and immediately wonder if they’ve given me a piece of yak dung that’s been sitting in the sun.

But Eenee eases my mind a little and tells us it’s probably dried yak cheese. So I smile and eventually get it down while breathing solely through my mouth to avoid the grotesque flavour.

Apparently it was a really tough winter for these tired-looking yak herders and they are in the process of burying hundreds of dead yaks – over half the herd. Very sad and likely a sign of things to come as humanity continues its quest to destroy the earth as we know it.

On the other hand they seemed optimistic because they had many baby’s currently out in the pasture.

Back in the van, perhaps another hour’s drive we pass the vulture-covered mound of dead yaks. A few more hours of driving on the day, the landscape getting ever greener and less snowy. We arrive at a town close to sunset, where we will be spending the night.

Eenee does a wander around town for us and finds a room in a real building with four beds in it. By beds, I mean probably closer to bed frames. But we will take it!

There happens to be a singing group in town and hence some sort of a gathering at the community centre. And so after a beer and some pasta, we opt to wander over to have a look. We walk into the steamy, gamey-smelling room filled full of local spectators and not so surprisingly, we start to take over the show a little. At least amongst the back rows.

But within a few minutes, and one final karaoke duet, the show is over. Unsure what happened with the singing group, we emerge with the masses and wander back in the freezing cold.

Day Three

Up and at it a little late today. The town is only about 40kms away from the one Eenee grew up in, so he ended up staying up fairly late to socialize with old acquaintances.

The place had one of the more perplexing toilets of the trip. A huge pit out back with a four foot tall structure on it and no door. Just boards laying over the huge hole underneath. I’m imagining you could probably squeeze three or four people in there at once? No doubt three others WOULD have squeezed in with me had my luck been worse that day.

A short, thirty minute bumpy ride and hallelujah, we hit pavement!

Not far down the highway, we hit one of the larger tourist destinations in the area – the White Lake. I don’t really understand why the lake is so popular. Really its just a big lake that’s frozen most of the year.

But what DOES turn out to be cool and easily the highlight of the day, a visit to the extinct volcano at the end of the lake. We make the drive up to the parking lot and hike the five hundred meter or so trail up to the rim. Beautiful view at the top, I can’t help but to be enticed into sliding my way down to the centre of the caldron. How often does one get a chance to do that!

A rather tough go down, and a much easier time getting out, Eenee eventually tells me it’s actually forbidden to go in it. No big deal though, he says.

And a couple hours drive and we find ourselves at the point where we made our original left turn off the tarmac. The perfect loop.

Phew… that turned out to be a long story! Thanks for sticking with me if you made it this far 🙂 This undoubtedly will be one of the highlights of the trip. I couldn’t help but to share it in great detail!