Naadam

(FYI:  the Mongolian word for yak calf is the same as the Mongolian word for piglet.  Yak piglets.)

Naddam is Mongolia's national festival where the whole country competes in the three manly sports: archery, wrestling, and horse racing.   

opening ceremonies

pedestrian traffic jam

off to the races

The yearling races.  jockeys age around 6-10, and usually ride bareback.  Naadam races are long-distance- between 15 and 30 km depending on the age category of the horses

yaks and yearlings

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We took four days to travel west to Arkhangai and a forage and dairy research station associated with the university.  They run a breeding program with yaks and cattle/yak hybrids, and publish results every three years in a booklet for herders.  Yak herders who maintain station yaks in addition to their own animals sell cheese through the station.  The station also provides fodder to its herders during difficult winter months.  The region specializes in a particular cheese product that the station formulated forty years back.  It's like a dry apricot cheese-cake.  We brought back over a kilo.  I took some pictures, so here they are. 

yak herder in Arkhangai

deworming sheep with a local vet

 

a client (goat herder) we were spraying sheep for

wet sheep

spraying sheep (for parasites)

love that forelock

yak and yak/cow hybrids with weird and wonderful horns

i think you may have mites

kind of cool

rainy weather

it's said the ponies with blue eyes make the best race horses

the effects of a bad storm. wet laundry and one dead sheep. (we tried to warm him up in the ger the night before, but he was a gonner.  hypothermia looks like no fun at all.)

a Mongolian lasso

that bad storm i mentioned.  we had the good fortune of getting stuck beside a rail car housing seven strong Mongolian boys, and they helped us out.

this post is for my mommy

i did not pick these

more taiga food

food

an unidentified (by us) plant gathered and eaten in the taiga

cutting up some homemade noodles, a popular staple

The following is a lesson on how to make a Mongolian party-food of blood-filled abomasum and intestine.

First, slaughter a goat.  This is done with an incision into the abdominal cavity and through the diaphragm.  You then  quickly slip your hand through the diaphragm and into the chest cavity, where you use your thumb to rip a hole in the aorta.  The animal bleeds out quickly into the pleural space, and the blood is effectively contained within the chest.  The blood is collected, and the animal is gutted, and then toasted with a blow torch to remove the hair. 

blow-torching a goat

Blood from the chest cavity is collected in a bowl.  The digestive tract is cleaned out with water, and the keratin is scraped from the rumen.

rinsing out the GIT

some clean intestines

scraping keratin

Removing clots from the blood

The abomasum and intestines are then filled with up with blood.

Filling the GIT

Tying off the abomasum

The bood-filled organs are boiled along with the lungs, liver, heart, colon, forestomachs, omasum, and kidneys in a pot of salted water, and there you go.

tada

sampling

Mongolian dairy is pretty delicious, and the best dairy animals, in my opinion, are yaks.  This is probably because yak milk is 6% fat.  The following sequence illustrates how you make sweet yak curd.  

Let fresh yak milk sit at 30 degrees Celsius for 24 hours.  The cream rises to the top, and the rest  ferments into yogurt.  Pour the yogurt into a steel bowl over a wood stove.  Heat to 80 degrees.

yak yogurt on the stove

Pour the heated product through cheese-cloth

The curd goes back in the bowl for cooking and mixing

lots of white sugar

into a mould to dry

all done!

Did you know you can distill "vodka" from mare's milk?  Mare's milk is extremely high in lactose (like human milk!)  Come to think of it, you could probably distill liquor from human milk as well.

thick fermented mare's milk

the apparatus

sealed at the top and weighted with water

there you have it. mareshine.

 other delights:

yak butter in your salty milk tea

dried yak meat makes good soup.  on the right is the super market variety of airag (fermented mare's milk)