leaving Ulaanbaatar

 

       Two weeks and three traffic accidents later and we are finally leaving the capital.  Scenes from rural Mongolia are vastly different from Ulaanbaatar, where women dressed like Russian pop-stars deftly navigate their four-inch stilettos through noisy construction sites, around the hummers vying for space on potholed roads, over the unconscious drunks who decorate the city’s sidewalks and staircases.

       I like this place. 

       There’s a diverse collection of musicians, a theater, a ballet, an opera, a circus, and drinking buddies to be found on any night of the week.  But the relentless thrill of jackhammers and swinging cranes is beginning to affect my nerves.  Deafening traffic chokes every street, and everything smells like mutton, even the bank notes.  Especially the bank notes.

       I’m going to risk inevitable cliché here, and comment on the traffic.  I’ve found this same paradox in many countries; there’s no hurry to go anywhere until you’re behind the wheel of a car, and then suddenly it’s a careening race of death.  Maybe this is the common cultural thread that sedentary Ulaanbaatar shares with the rest of her country.  Everyone is perfectly content to spend an afternoon in the ger, sharing family news, eating deep fried snacks, and drinking vodka.  We get fuller, and drunker, and warmer, and lazier as the day wears on, the stove continues to burn, and the salty milk tea flows.  Then at some point there is occasion to remove ourselves from our inebriated languor and mount a horse, and I am suddenly tearing after my companions like the wind on crack. 

       Given the choice between death by hummer or horse, I pick horse, hands down.  So it’s off to the countryside I go. 

Yeehaw.  

Spongebob and the Russian tank

herding sheep and goats

a young girl by the river and a young horse feeling the effects of a recent castration (sans anesthetic)

The view from our dorm.  Every once in a while a truck startles a herd of horses into running back and forth through the neighborhood.

 

Successful exchange of knowledge is a gratifying thing.  It feels like a small triumph of humanity.  While visiting a family of herders, the father told us his greatest losses in sheep were due to uterine prolapses at lambing.  Here’s a picture of Dayle with a scrap of fabric, cotton string, and a large curved needle from the ger sewing kit, demonstrating ways to sew up a prolapse.  The father seemed pleased with the technique.  Then we all moved on to enthusiastically discussing the merits of different breeds of cattle.  So that was nice.    

The daughter of veterinarians we know with a family friend in the country

Making mutton pancakes.

A Kasakh man with his golden eagle.  The Kasakh are a Mongolian Muslim nation, and use their eagles to hunt fox and wolves.  This man brought his bird near Ulaanbaatar for the summer to make money off the tourists.