Mongolian Blues

Lost and hunted in the nomadic heartlands

This excerpt from my upcoming book describes my time in Mongolia. A shorter version originally appeared in a 2012 edition of 10 Magazine and was one of my first published essays. Included in the book, but not here, is the story of how I illegally crossed from Mongolia into Russian territory and was almost shot.

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If the tribes of North America had never lost their land, and if they still roamed the Great Plains and hunted in the foothills of the West, and if the animals they lived among—the deer, the leopards, and the wolves—continued to freely fill the landscape, then the result would be something like what Mongolia is today. That was the judgment of my friend and coworker John, with whom I traveled through the country a few years ago. According to him, it was one of the most pristine places on earth. The ragged Altai peaks of the west, carpeted with pines. The gentle grasslands of the east. The burning belly of the southern Gobi Desert. The maze of alpine rivers in the north, tumbling into Siberia, feeding the great Baygan Nuur, or Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world, which so placidly reflects the sharp pale air above you almost think it’s a mirage. When I read that the source of these reflective waters lay in Mongolia, I couldn’t wait to go.

As it happened, John was already planning to be there at the same time. He was a motorcyclist and wanted to travel overland by bike. I had wanted to go by horseback, like a warrior of the Golden Horde, but this would’ve necessitated a guide and greatly limited the extent of the country we could’ve seen. Mongolia is more than 600,000 square miles or over twice the size of Texas. John, an experienced motorcyclist, convinced me to take two wheels instead, so we spent a few weeks researching models and prices online, worked out a plausible route, and when summer came we packed our bags and flew to Ulaanbaatar.

The Land of Blue Skies, they call it. Sounded heavenly. I remember hearing that when Mongolia was forming its new government, it seriously considered turning the entire country into a national park. The entire country. But this made sense, I thought, since the majority of the land is already untouched and the majority of the people are nomads with no interest in owning any particular patch of ground. But I didn’t know which of Mongolia’s new governments this was. Was it when Mongolia gained independence from China in 1911? Or when it became communist in 1924? Or when it became democratic in 1992? Still, it was so romantic. I liked Mongolia already.

Until I actually got there. The city was filthy and dull, one of the ugliest places I’d ever seen, the people were rude, and at night it felt positively unsafe. We began our search for a pair of Russian bikes, which were cheaper and more reliable than anything else, and easier to work on too—simple parts that only required a wrench and a screwdriver, if not your hands. No special tools needed. No computer parts. Say what you will about Stalinist social planning, Soviet machines are reliable pieces of equipment. The AK-47, the T-34 tank, Belarus Tractors, or the first-ever crossover SUV the Lada Niva. All indestructible classics. But the Planeta bikes we wanted were harder to come by than we’d planned, so we decided to take a bus north to Selenge Province and try our luck there. I fell in love with Mongolia the moment we left the city. The dead and dusty streets of Ulaanbaatar gave way to plush rolling hills and unimaginably wide blue skies. I saw an eagle perched atop a telephone pole, bigger than a child, and a gray wolf loping along a hilltop, locals going about their business in long traditional cloaks tied at the waist with brilliant silk sashes. Sukhbaatar, the capital of Selenge, was fresh and clean with wide streets and smiling people.

We found a pair of bikes within hours. The dealer had a few Czechoslovakian Jawa Tino road bikes, but we ended up with two Chinese dirt bikes, not the Soviet work-horses we’d been hoping for, but they looked strong enough and were reasonably priced. I told John the two symbols on the side of the gas tank, 钢狼, said Gang Lang in Chinese and meant Steel Wolf. John was talking to the salesman when I decided to take mine for a spin. Here I should mention, I’d never kick-started a motorbike in my life. John had assured me if I knew how to drive stick-shift then a bike wouldn’t be too hard. He was right, but my first attempt was less than pretty. I lost my balance, rolled forward, and fell over. The salesman looked ready to back out of the sale but John quickly made a drinking gesture, implying I was drunk. The salesman laughed and wished us well. Riding drunk was less a concern than riding for the first time.

The green rolling hills of Selenge were gorgeous. And the Mongolian blues above were a kind of therapy all their own. The landscape looked like one smooth, endless golf course. Or, as John put it, “Teletubbyland.” Ideal space for learning to ride a bike. We traveled for days, floating over oceans of grass, camping under the open sky and marveling at the stars. I’ve never seen such enormous skies in all my life. Sometimes coming over a mountaintop, we’d pass an ovoo, or “pile,” a sky-worshiping cairn made of sticks and dressed with sundry objects: cow skulls, broken violins, wooden crutches, and always stunning blue sashes or khadag, symbols of the sky.

We rode round these ovoo three times, in keeping with local custom, honking our horns as we went.  The sky is sacred to Mongolians and when you die, they leave your body on a high point where the birds can take you away in pieces and commit you to the heavens. They call it a sky burial. Then we’d descend into the next valley, keeping our eyes peeled for another settlement.

When we were lucky enough to come across a group of log houses, we’d park our bikes and eat in front of the local supply shop, careful not to spook the horses that were usually tied to the hitching-post out front. If we were really lucky, there was a kitchen offering cooked food. Mongolian food is nothing to celebrate, a lot of meat and noodles, mostly tasteless and greasy, but after hours on our bikes and with a dab of Cholula chili sauce that John kept in his bag, we were elbows in.

The Teletubby hills of Selenge soon gave way to the lovely gushing streams and verdant meadow valleys of Bulgan Orkhon. We were moving west toward Khovsgol, to the majestic lake we’d seen in so many pictures, when one afternoon we came upon a small crowd of log houses dotting the distant hills. We found our way quietly through the narrow streets to the local supply shop where, sitting outside munching on cheap Chinese biscuits, we were approached by two gargantuan men speaking in broken English. Our new friends were tall and blocky, like some Soviet-era statue of two farmers, so it was no surprise when they told us they were wrestlers.

Wrestling is huge in Mongolia. In fact, much to the chagrin of many patriotic Japanese, the last two yokozuna (the highest rank a sumo can attain) were both Mongolian. They do well at the Olympics too, and in Mongolia there’s a festival every summer known as Naadam, the centerpiece of which is a wrestling event where men from all over the country gather in various centers to test their mettle. Naadam wrestlers wear distinctive uniforms consisting of boots, tight leather trousers, and a shirt with sleeves but no chest. According to legend, a wrestler from the countryside once competed in the Naadam of Ulaanbaatar. The young wrestler threw champion after champion, crushing the competition, until no one was left. Then the wrestler stood before the crowd and defiantly tore open her shirt, revealing a pair of breasts. Ever since, the men of Naadam wear their shirts without fronts to honor her strength.

I told this story to the two wrestlers to see if they’d heard it, and they both nodded excitedly. It was obviously a story they knew well. After lunch, our new friends decided to join us all the way to Khovsgol, explaining that they knew a shortcut through the mountains. John and I waited for them to get their bikes and we continued on our way. Riding behind the wrestlers, I had an image of the kind of ferocity with which ancient Mongols must’ve raged over the Tibetan plains. Whether it was a rock, a hole, or a fallen tree, these men rammed ahead with no attempt to go around—and yet somehow never wrecked or even wavered.

Their bikes, you can imagine, had long since been stripped of whatever shocks they’d ever had and shook tremendously when we rode over hard terrain, like you thought they might violently come apart, but these guys rode like jockeys, just out of the saddle, calmly poised. After riding into the darkness for an hour or more, nearly blind, riding on faith, I started to get the hang of it. There was a certain rhythm. It was a miracle John and I managed to keep up, though admittedly I fell much farther behind than everyone else, particularly once night fell and I was left struggling to see the tiny patch of rugged terrain covered by my crappy headlamp. Eventually, we finally reached a place to crash—a solitary ger in the darkness.

A ger or yurt is essentially a giant round tent made of wooden beams and animal hides. The night we arrived, we were immediately served tea and yogurt by the oldest woman of the home. Getting into a ger can be unnerving one’s first time. The door is sacred and often covered with exquisite tapestries that are not to be callously hit with one’s knuckles. That means you can’t knock. And the threshold usually consists of a wide wooden board that you’re not supposed to step on. The proper way to enter is therefore to push the door open unannounced and take a deep step inside. You eventually get used to it. As for the experience of staying in a ger, the highlight for me was undoubtedly the yogurt. I don’t speak English well enough to describe to you how good this yogurt was. There’s also a certain kind of dried cheese that lasts forever but tastes like salty rubber. I kept and ate some, mostly because I’d read it was a favorite of the Mongols, but I have to admit it tasted like sucking on a shoe. The yogurt, however, was sublime.

The second time John and I stayed with a family was more interesting. We were again blessed with bowls of yogurt the moment we sat down, as much as we could eat, then shown to our beds. There wasn’t room for us in the ger itself this time, so the father led us outside to the shed, where he had two cots, woolen blankets, and cotton pillows. John and I had worn ourselves down trying to keep up with the wrestlers all day, and this was the first time we’d hit a bed in weeks. But lying there, with the cold air passing through the open window and the bright light of the stars pouring in, I began to think about our utter isolation from the rest of the world. You do realize, I said to John, our hosts could kill us and no one would be the wiser. I mean, we’re weeks from the nearest city. They could cut our throats and wouldn’t even have to hide our bodies. John looked at me for a minute. Jesus, David, calm down.

Just then, the father burst in with a rifle in his hand. He looked at me, holding his rifle high, and stormed over, reaching for my throat. I nearly screamed. Then his hand passed over my face as he grabbed a jacket that was hanging on the wall beside me. Seeing the look on my face, he paused. He looked at his rifle. Then back at me. Then he laughed. Some time later, John and I heard rifle shots in the dark. The next morning, we came out and for the first time we saw the flock of sheep that flooded the nearby hills. We had arrived by night and hadn’t realized that the father and his family were shepherds. A fresh wolf carcass had been hung over the fence to dry.

A few days later, we reached the lake. Our wrestling companions said goodbye and turned homeward. We waved them off and rode for the shoreline. Khovsgol was surreal, a lake in the middle of pine forests surrounded by fields of rubble, with turquoise waters reminiscent of a tropical cove. The surrounding slopes were lush and leafy, full of life. We rented a ger by the water and decided to rest for a few days. At a local supply shop, I picked up a pair of wolfskin boots and a black ankle-length overcoat known as a deel, commonly worn by Mongolian herders. I  made local friends and gave them some of my biscuits, but they spit them out when they realized they were Chinese.

Reclining in the plush luxury of Khovsgol was almost enough to make us forget our plans, but after a week we set off again, this time moving south into Moron where we would cut west and head for the Kazakh culture of Bayan-Olgii, where wintry fire circles reverberate with the overtones of khöömii singers and snow leopards move like ghosts across the rocky slopes. I never made it past Moron.

Somewhere along the twisted, rocky paths of the forests outside Khovsgol, I found an argali skull with two huge corkscrew horns and mounted it to the front of my bike. Halfway through the open fields of Moron, just days after passing through Moron City (pronounced mo-rone), that John and I parted ways. An emergency required me to be back in Seoul, so I wished John well and headed east, hoping to reach Moron within a day or two, sell my bike there, and take an overnight bus to Ulaanbaatar to catch a flight back to Seoul.

I camped that night on a hill slope near the treelike, walking distance to a river where I could fetch water to boil and drink. Along the way, we had come to know Mongolian hospitality, staying at gers, but this works both ways, and to a Mongolian, a tent is just a very poor person’s ger. I learned this when I awoke the next morning to find a huge Mongolian man in boots and a yellow deel sitting in my tent, the flap open, his horse standing outside, and him chewing through the last of my Chinese biscuits. You don’t knock when entering a Mongolian ger, and he sure looked friendly enough, but all I could think was this guy could’ve strangled me to death in my sleep. Instead, he sat quietly for about half an hour, then got up and left.

I stopped at a supply shop to buy some bread rolls and a bottle of Genghis Khan vodka, thinking the vodka would help me sleep in the tentless cold. The owner was kind enough to let me have two empty rice bags made of canvas, which I planned to cut into a makeshift sleeping bag. I set off for the next town but it got dark before I was halfway there and I ended up mistaking a dry riverbed for the trail. Lost in the dark of the woods, I caught the shape of two wolves on the ridgeline. I sped up and looked again later and there they were. I was being hunted by two gray wolves, long and lean, like mako sharks with legs.

I panicked. I tried outracing them, but was only becoming more lost, and wasting gas, so eventually I had no choice but to stop for the night and wait for sunlight. As I was cutting the bottom out of one of the rice bags, I spotted the red glint of their eyes in the distance. I tied my jacket around my throat for good measure and slept holding a World War II-era Soviet bayonet knife I’d picked up at a supply shop in Khovsgol. It was freezing, yet the sky was so lovely it distracted from the cold and soon I was asleep. The vodka helped too. I began to dream of an old Mongolian legend I had read about, the story of a boy who fell in love with a distant girl of the eastern plains, but when his wife found out she killed his horse so he couldn’t visit the girl and so he made a stringed instrument out of the horse’s skull, femur, skin, and hair. The boy sang to his distant lover and on the bare back of the wind his songs carried long across the yellow plains to reach her, so they say, and sweetly warmed her lonely heart. You can still get yourself one of these instruments today, called a morin khuur.

Suddenly in the night I was ripped awake with a powerful tug on the jacket. I sat up swinging my knife, hitting only air and surrounded by silence. Had I imagined it? Feeling silly, I took my deel from around my neck and put it on. Warmer now, I quickly fell back asleep. The next morning I mounted my bike and noticed the sleeve of my jacket. The fabric was torn open and some of the inner padding was pulled out. I checked the ground for animal tracks or scratched debris but the grass looked fresh. Unprovoked wolf attacks are rare, and when they do happen, wolves almost always target children. In India, they call it “child lifting.” A wolf enters a hut at night and grabs a baby with a silencing bite to the mouth and nose. When wolves attack adults, they usually take women, and usually start like sharks with a probing attack to test the prey. If this was real and not in my head, then apparently I passed the test.

I rode on, lost and low on food and gas, with no water, in one of the least densely populated regions in the world. You can easily ride for days in Moron without seeing another soul. But I didn’t have days. I had been a fool to leave town at night, and now I was facing death for the second time in two days. When my gas tank got fatally low, I stopped to write a letter to my parents, telling them I loved them and that I was sorry for being so reckless. I tucked my death note into the breast pocket of my shirt in case anyone found my body. Then I wept like a stupid fool. Then I wiped my face and rode on, figuring all I could do was ride until I had no gas, then walk until I had no strength, then sit down and wait for the end.

My bike was beginning to sputter when I saw a flash of light. It was so quick and gone so soon, I almost took it for a trick of the brain. But I thought better of it and turned back to look again. It was something and flashy and glimmering. Something metallic. I rode over and found an old farmer with a rifle on his shoulder and his wife by his side. He was inspecting a hill by poking various points in the ground with a stick, looking for some kind of burrowing vermin. I practically assaulted the poor guy. Armed with my Lonely Planet phrasebook, I thumbed through the pages trying to work out an explanation of the past 24 hours. Lost! Wolf! Two wolf! Bite bite! No water. No gas. I cry. Many cry.

The old man and his wife were looking at me very seriously, very strangely. I thought maybe they were scared. Then I realized they were trying not to laugh. I gave them both big hugs. I think they were a little startled but I couldn’t help myself. I asked them for directions back to town and the old man tried to explain, but I was terrified of getting lost again and begged him to show me the way. So with a sigh and big smile, he agreed to lead me back to the road. He siphoned gas from his bike to mine, left his wife on the hill with the rifle, and rode with me over a series of hills and through a valley to where the trail picked back up. I never would have made it through that twisted path on my own. I tried to pay him a fistful of dollars but he wouldn’t hear of it. I offered him my wolfskin boots but he said no. I asked him to at least tell me his name, and so he took my phrasebook and flipped through it for a minute, then pointed to a phrase and turned the book around to show me—sakhiusan tenger—angel.

Bayar laa, bayar laa, I said. Thank you. I kickstarted my Steel Wolf and rode very slowly down the winding and sloped gravel road to Moron. I have never seen the sun shine so brightly. When I got to town, I gave the bike to a local family. In Mongolia, a sturdy bike or healthy horse can change a family’s fortunes. But before that, while still riding along the path, I passed two young girls, no more than nine or 10 years old, walking through the woods hand-in-hand.

They said hello in English and asked me where I was going. People in Mongolia, I had noticed, were often more interested in where I was going than where I was from. They even made assumptions about you based on this, the way we in the West make assumptions based on where someone is from. When I had told folks I was headed to Khuvsgol Lake, they correctly assumed I am an outdoorsy person.

I told the girls I was going to Moron. They said they were going that way too. This was surprising since it was at least a day away by motorbike. Quite a hike for two little nomads. I asked where they were coming from and when they told me, I realized this was over a week away in the other direction—by motorbike. I was stunned. I asked why they were walking so far and whether they knew there were wolves in these parts. They laughed and said wolves don’t come inside. Naturally, they were moving ger to ger. Again I asked, But why are you walking so far? One replied, We go for buy bread. I didn’t know what to say. I think the girls saw what I was thinking. Not bread, the other corrected. This, and she lifted her hand to show me her friend’s hand clasped in hers.