Entry 10: In the Footsteps of Gengis Khan

After staying a week or so in Choilbason with Bimba, his sister and mom we arranged a truck to take our horses, Sony and I northwest 200 km to Dadal, described as an incredibly lovely small town of log cabins set in a picturesque valley a few km south of the Siberian border.

(the town of Dadal, comprising mostly of ethnic Buriats, who live in log cabins not Gers)

We helped load the horses onto the back of the pickup truck, not an easy task as the horses fight every push and pull and at times it appears they will destroy the truck, topple it over or hurt themselves. We had hoped the horses would have fatten up during their stay with the herders but they looked skinnier than when we left then as they had to be tied all night for fear of horse theft and thus couldn’t feed.

The first half of the drive to Dadal took only a few hours while the second half of the distance took the rest of the day and late into the night. We drove through several valleys and passes stopping at every ger to ask for directions which were few and far between. We drove on into the night on muddy, bumpy, nearly impassable roads along valley drainages and then winding up and through tree covered hills and passing the only bridge crossing of the Onon River, a major Mongolian River that has its headwaters just below the highest mountain peak in the area where Genghis Khan took refuge as a boy.

It was on this mountain Genghis spent his early years evading an enemy tribe leader that killed his father but by tradition had to spare Genghis’ life until age 11 when his enemy had the right to hunt him down and kill him. After flowing several hundred km just south of Siberia along the Russian border, the Onon River turns north and flows into Russia. The Onon is one of Mongolia’s rivers famed to be home to the Taimen, the largest - over 6 feet in length - Salmonoid species in the world. Look out Taimen, the Salmon Nomads are in town!

Our arrival to Dadal in the pouring rain felt to be an unfriendly welcome. With no one but drunk Mongolian men on motorcycles more interested in taunting than helping to ask for directions to wehre our super thirsty horses could drink. The sun rose the next morning, putting all my doubts aside, revealing a beautiful valley with soft rolling multi-colored hills bathed in sunlight to varying shades of blue, green and gray in the distance across a river tributary of the Onon lying just before us at the base of a gentle grass slope.

Just up hill of us, a cold spring surrounded by a wooden fence and decorated with hundreds of blue silk ribbons marks the place where Genghis Khan drank from as a boy.

Higher in the hills behind us were pine forests distinctly different from the flat dry grasslands we left behind in the East of Mongolia.

We spent the next two weeks exploring the rivers and hills around Dadal with our base camp located at a Ger of a young couple.

The owner of the ger, all thrity of his horses were stolen the year before (probably run into Russia) and now they only have cows. It seems that horse theft in the border areas of Mongolia is almost a multi-national sport. The girl spent part of her time fermenting a huge barrel of vodka, coagulating big vats of cream via a hand spun centrifuge and turning liter full bottles of locally picked red berries into jam, which I suppose they bartered with the towns people for things they needed like a solar rechargeable high powered LED flash light, the first that I’ve seen at a ger) that she proudly wielded.

(bread, baked from wood burning oven)

Sony and I did a one week horse trek loop down the river tributary and up the Onon river and over the hills and back to Dadal.

It was very difficult traversing marshes and steep hills along the river with grasses as high as the horses heads – over 6 feet in areas.

An amazing variety of wildflowers constantly surrounded us and wolves chattered through the night.

I figured a hobbled horse would be no match for a wolf pack so kept them tied close to our camp and stepped out of the tent periodically to build up the fire. On the last eve of the loop, we ran into the first tourist we’ve seen since coming to Mongolia two months ago – a French/Beligian couple with three horses. As they were on the other side of the river, we didn’t communicate much but we spied out all their horse gear with our binoculars.

Once back in Dadal, we met our second foreign tourists, two girls French and Indian, biking across part of Mongolia.

In exchange for taking them fishing, the Indian girl cooked us Indian food, in my opinion, the only thing better than sex. We had a great fishing experience, everyone catching trout while Sony landed a big 2.5 foot fish, just a baby but the famed taimen salmon. For the record, we released the baby taimen, even though I’ve heard that illegally poached fish taste even better.

Since we parted with Neale a month ago our Mongolian experience has been bliss. Not that traveling with Neale was bad, we learned so much about horses from that scruffy Aussie sheep herder and about ger life along the way. Maybe it was Neale’s do or die attitude about his quest to do nothing but an East to West Mongolian trek, in the straightest line possible, border to border that brought us bad energy resulting in complicated, un-relaxed travel or maybe it simply takes time to adjust to a place as unfamiliar as Mongolia. I always feel it takes me several weeks or more staying in one location to begin to feel a new place. In contrast most American barely have time to get off a plan and whisked to their resort destinations for a few days stay before they are back in their office chair. If vacation is defined by work and only a break from work, is that really a vacation?

The bliss that I now feel here doesn’t mean we haven’t had any problems; the red horse I was leading pulled so hard on his lead rope that my GPS dropped to the ground, which he then trampled as I could not get my white riding horse to stop on time. The GPS is my lifeline and I can now only read half of the LCD screen and daily, it is getting slowly worse, we rode back to camp after dark one eve and within a heartbeat of turning on my flashlight, the always skiddish red horse I was riding jumped so hard sideways to the left that I was falling backward before I could react. As I fell, my leg twisted hard before I could step out of the stirrup and the rope from the Brown horse I was leading wrapped around my neck and pulled hard almost strangling me as the Brown horse, now spooked, took off full speed after Red. I can now impress the ladies with a story about how I got my neck scar from the days I used to knife fight. Each night we use a section of rope called a hobble to tie three legs of each horse together so that it can not gallop off although a hobbled horse can still easily move many kilometers if it wants. The hobble also doubles as a whip to get a riding horse moving which I inadvertently dropped on the ground, spooking Red into throwing me off him (again) as he galloped into the grass adjacent the path stirring up a hornets nest, which then attacked the rest of us. Trying to shake the hornets, the White horse tried to gallop off in a straight line but I was able to get off the ground and grab his lead rope in time. I felt like the center pole of an insane merry-go-round as White ran in circle around me, bucking, pulling, and shaking his head violently until I decided to join the horses and run away also. Eventually, we managed to shake the hornets and gather up the horses. The semi-wild red horse, demoted to permanent pack horse, then went bucking wild when the pack slipped too far forward down onto his neck while walking downhill. A seamstress in Dadal fixed the bags that got torn apart in the bucking frenzy and we had her make two new bags to fit over the riding horses asses to lighten the load for Red. I discovered, there is a fine line between making the pack saddle to tight and not tight enough. I pulled so hard on Red’s belly harness, that I think I may have done permanent damage to his skin. It got real swollen, Sony cried, and now he is resting for a few days in a vacant pen we found by the river and he fortunately, looks almost like new again.

The next morning after our fish dinner, the girls left to continue their bike ride to Ulanbaatar while I am happy for having this horse riding experience, I hope someone shoots me before I ever decide to do another horse trip. I don’t think there is a better way to experience Mongolia than to enjoy solidarity with the people and ride horses as they do, but I am sure I can walk faster by the time it takes to pack and care for the horses each day as they barely walk as fast as a human at 3.5 miles per hour. On bikes, the girls cover as much ground as a vehicle each day but I think miss out on the experience of being a salmon nomad. I made sure to carefully check out all their bike gear in case I prefer to travel by bike someday but feel river kayaking may be the best way to explore this country next.

Back to the bliss….After finally leaving Dadal and parting with our host families, we headed up the ONon River and now camped river-side, the river recently swollen by thunderstorms.

The lightening was so close and bright last night it’s flashing as seen through the tent walls hurt our eyes. The view of the immense valley and distant mountains surrounding us is so big that we sat in sunlight today and watched the spirals of tornadoes form off in the distance to the north as thunder clouds built, formed, and floated passed us off to the West. In our river route from Dadal, we were treated with days of solitary riding, no Gers or people in sight,

incredibly pretty mountain passes and the most idyllic camp I can remember, next to a Ger with a small cold stream flowing passed feeding the big Onon river, purple flowers growing everywhere which our host mashed into salsa tasting of onions and big green smooth shapely mountains rising all around us. Sony and I waded out into the Onon and soon our fish bag was full of big trout.

On rainy days, Sony and I stay holed up in the tent and play Dungeons and Dragons.

The rules have changed much since I last played 25 years ago. So we have the new rulebooks in PDF format on the netbook to guide us. Every time a horse rider gallops up to our tent to investigate, I nearly question which world I am in. By the way, if anyone is interested I hope to form or join a Dungeons and Dragons group when I return to Seattle someday. We are now camped in Batshireet, a small frontier town, in the backyard of a cute little log home appearing palatial by Mongolian standards since it is the only home I’ve seen with two stories and a balcony.

It is chilly rainy and grey now after many days of hot clear sunshine. The remainder of our journey to this town set in the foothills of the region’s largest mountains alternated from joyous to difficult as we spent several days going one way and then having to back track as the road we followed terminated at the edge of a deep section of river with a cliff on one side and hills too steep on the other side to pass with horses. The joyous part was camping along the river, catching too many fish to eat and absorbing the beautiful scenery and the Mongolian activities all around us, picking berries, harvesting hay for the approaching winter,

hunting parties riding off into the mountains with their guns and dogs, herders herding (one of them a five year girl on a horse), unattended herds of animals coming for a drink then passing off into the hills.

Entry 9: The start of the horse trek

The evening after getting our visa extension approved, we organized a ride to Choibolsan, an eastern Mongolian town a distance of 350km. The ride picked us up at 2 am, bad for us since we could not see the poor condition of the minivan – that the driver was checking the front wheel before the ride and every ten minutes there after was the sure sign that breakdown was imminent. The driver and to our surprise, another female passenger helped pack our gear in the back. Sure enough, only 100km east of UB, two hours of driving time, we broke down on a lonely (and only) stretch of road. The driver not only took off the wheel that was having a lot of side to side motion but the entire metal brake assembly and ended up dropping the bearing in the dirt.


Putting the dirty bearing back and reassembling the wheel, he was barely able to drive 20 miles back in the direction of UB when miraculously his brother appeared in a Chinese imitation American Jeep Grand Cherokee and we were able started off again. The terrible driver was now able to drive 80 mph instead of the 20 mph he had been doing in the minivan with the loose wheel and we drove on hard top for another two hours before the road just abruptly ended in the backyard of a Ger where a herder was adding to cow shit to his already huge pile.

With several rough dirt tracks to choose, we drove another 5 hours through very dry grass country until we finally found hard top again - 1 mile from the center of Choibolsan. It began to rain hard and the terrible driver exhausted from driving over 15 hour was in a hurry to get rid of us. We had a GPS coordinate for Neale but couldn’t find him right away, so we waited at a hotel lobby but was unable to check in – apparently all hotels were booked that weekend. Over an hour later, Neale finally found us and now the driver, annoyed and irate drove us to a concrete slab of a building from the era when Russia took control over Mongolia

and dumped us out nearly throwing our gear whie driving away. So enraged, he almost left without payment and didn’t seem to care whether he got it. We slept on the dirty floor of an apartment and a girl came the next morning demanding way too much payment.

We spent the next day trying to arrange a ride to our next destination, Sumber, the most eastern town of Mongolia and ended up at another hotel lobby hoping someone – a guest, the hotel receptionist - might speak some English. While the receptionist did not speak English, she did contact someone who did, and also contacted a driver, who agreed to drive us. The driver turned out to be her brother in law and the English speaker, Bimba, a 27 year old male native to Choibolsan, a Latter-Day Saint she knew from the Mormon church here! Bimba agreed to accompany us to Sumber as our translator and we left at 3 pm the next day after spending all morning and afternoon being told by multiple drivers we could go and then couldn’t go. We drove for 5 hours with two pleasant drivers and Bimba, our hired translator, before arriving at one of the several military checkpoints we would pass en route.

Sumber, being a border town near the Chinese border, requires special permission for entry. Neale found this out in a more round about way, spending a night in jail a week earlier, at one of these military checkpoints, after driving 10 hours to get near Sumber only to be driven right back to Choibolsan. With some discussion with the military in a bug infested one room building (checking our passports, registering our names, etc) and, with the world cup game barely discernable on the old TV (Korea vs. Spain?) we were allowed to pass through all the checkpoints only to arrive in sumber another 6 hours later and be told we actually did not have the permission to be there.

We were made to camp next to the military compound and after a day and night of convoluted discussions and meetings, we were told we could go to Nomrog, near the east border but had to be out of the military zone in one weeks time. This seemed a big victory for our expedition.

The buying of horses negotiations was arduous. We finally ended up with eight horses, five from one herd, and three from another.


We planned with one of the herder’s and his son to meet us by the river at 6 am the next day but they never showed up. After much hassle and time (we woke at 4 am and finally departed at noon), we put saddles on the riding horses, packed the gear on the pack horses and parted with Bimba who helped us tremendously with the military, police, and herders.

getting all the gear together

(over 4 hours later, finally putting bags on the horses)

The first day with the horses was hell. It is traumatic for me to even think back of it and write details so, I will just summarize. First the heat of the day was tremendous and we were almost covered black with mosquitoes. The horses were anger from being separate from their herds and annoyed by the heat, the bugs, and us. Sony got thrown off the back of her horse twice, her two horses ran off twice (Neale retrieved), and Janusz got bitten by his horse twice. Beyond thirsty at only 6 km into the ride, we stopped off at a Ger and got water – that was the best part of the day.

Neale wanted to me to set a course straight to the southeast corner of the country irregardless of land features, water or roads, so we rode off into a dry plateau and rode several hours in the intense heat with no water in our packs and no water in sight. Janusz' pack horse was the next to try to run free and we were fighting the horses every step of the way as they didn’t want to leave their home and probably sensed we were going into danger (no water). We rode several hours in the intense heat with no water in our packs and no water in sight.

What we thought was salvation on the horizon (a white structure – a GER! ) turned out to be just a stone monument to the Russian mongol defeat of the Japanese in that very location during World War II. So I decided to beeline it back to the river but many sandhills blocked our way. Neale got behind and we lost him. It was beyond insane, even one of my reigns broke off and I could not steer the horse back to the town around the hills. The horses now tired and stumbling were running and at a frantic pace (back to their herds and near the river) we could barely hold on. The horse I was leading was the biggest horse and kept trying to get in front of my riding horse. We could not even stop to rest since Neale had the gear to tie up the horses and was no where near sight. The thought of water drove us on, I almost cried when the first Ger came back into sight. But only one old woman peered out and we needed more help than that. So we rode on to the next Ger where a 21 year old mommy, her 4 month old baby, her brother and his friend saved us from losing our horses and possibly all of our gear. We ended up spending the next week at this Ger, trying to forget our harrowing experience and relaxing to the rhythm of farm life: the boy herding the cows; the girl milking her cows each morning, and her 4 month old baby;, boiling milk, baking bread, preparing yogurt, swimming in the river, fishing, lounging in the Ger, and even drinking cold fresh water from an artesian well, located just behind the Ger.

Making yogurt: first, milk the cow

then, boil the milk

Yogurt!

here's Leo relaxing

Neale relaxing...

Everything was heaven compared to the days with Neale except for the first night, when we lost one of the horses. The perpetually disorganized Janusz did not realize he had the extra hobbles (or more accurately, did not bother to thoroughly search) in his bags which would have been used to restraint the horse. Then two days after we arrived, Neale, haggard, in a shroud of mosquitoes, followed by two unsavory Mongolian men, stumbled through the Ger door. We thought maybe Neale had abandoned us and instead of following behind us back to water, continued to beeline it to the most Eastern part of Mongolia in Nomrog Park. Afterall, he was still dealing with amateur horse riders and chasing down the horses that would run off every chance they got. Unfortunately for Neale, his two days apart from us, were not spent riding to Nomrog, but rather included a tortuous 20 km ride to an unfriendly Ger where he was fed food that made him throw up, a man that took all his rope that he bought in Australia, (he recovered half of it a few days later), the loss of both his horses (a man tied his horses incorrectly and both escaped in the night), and a big dog bite to the ankle. After a heated discussion and a demand for money, the two unsavory men that brought Neale, left. Neale inaccurately assumed the men were trading two new horses for $10 rope from Australia.

(perhaps misunderstandings are understandable considering this is how we often communicate)

That week, we did recover two horses, the third we never found. Maybe the owner either hid it from us or turned it into horse meat. Neale gave up his idea of starting from the eastern border, possibly a good idea since we already exceeded our allotted time in the area as deemed by the military. They did not want us around. Before setting off again, we asked Bimba to come back as our translator and ride with us for two weeks.

We agreed to the follow the river (this time) down stream to a point where its course wound to its most western extent before flowing to the border of China.
After two days ride we arrived at the most westerly river bend. Also, a location of a pretty Buddhist site with a large white rock image carved into the side of the hill.

That night Neale left two horses without hobbles and they fled in the night. He and Bimba spent the next day chasing them down almost all the way back to their herds, riding a total of 70 km return. Meantime, Sony and I took a nice horse ride to visit goat herders on a hill high above the river.
Incredibly, Neale returned that evening with the two horses and we arranged with a herder to cross the dry steppe above the river to Buir Nuur, a big lake 50km to the west. Now with only seven horses, the herder packed our extra gear on his motorbike and we followed him 10km to the first and last well en route to the lake. All but my two horses took advantage of a final drink and we headed off again.
Although I instructed the driver to only go 5 KM ahead, he decided to drive the final 30 km all the way to a Ger to wait for us and drank vodka. However annoyed, I was just happy to see that he didn’t drive off with all of our gear (not unlikely scenario as later Neale would have half his gear stolen when he had it shipped back to Choilbolsan). We camped at a Ger next to the lake where we swam and camped for a few days. The scene around our tent took on the feeling of a circus like drama as herders from all directions came to the lake to water all sorts of animals – camels, horses, cows, goats and sheep. Boys, some just a few years old, were racing their horses past our tent in preparation for Nadaam, the biggest holiday in Mongolia. While other boys sang songs while herding their animals.




After some deliberation that evening, we decided to break up the Fellowship of the East-West quest.

Janusz so anxious to get back to the city, he jumped off his horse at the first sight of a car leaving for Choibolsan - even leaving the precious saddle he brought from Poland behind. Bimba helped Neale find a herder to ride across the 250Km dry stretch of steppe west back to Choibolsan with four horses while Sony, Bimba and I decided on a relaxing week of travel 50km with three horses along the lake edge visiting Gers, swimming in the lake, and enjoying the scenery.

We have been traveling around the lake for a week and we are now looking for someone with a truck to drive us and our horses across the bone-dry steppe back to Choibolsan. Herder families live about 10km apart along the stretch of the lake and word travels fast in these parts. We have been hearing rumors that Neale ended up putting his horses in a truck instead of herding them across the steppe. Maybe his guide left him – this would not be surprising since he is a bit of a conman and a slave driver, pushing all those around him to go as fast as possible in a straight line east-west. Doing so proves only counterproductive - making so many bad hasty decisions that he ends up wasting more time than saving. Sony and I have decided to pen the horses in Choibolsan if we can get them there, then sell the oldest one. We then plan to truck the horses north of Choibolsan where we can start another one month long trek along a river in the area where Gengis Khan was born and would at times return in his life to the highest local mountain to seek guidance from nature: the sky and the wolf. The Lonely Plant guidebook describes this area as having picture perfect villages of alternating meadows and forests similar to Switzerland in contrast to the area we rode in the past month - an endless sea of grass flatlands spectacled with round, white dots (GER homes). The people in this border area with Russia live in log huts as due their Siberian neighbors.

Sony and I are now back in Choibolsan staying with Bimba’s family planning our next trek and resting the horses, after another jarring ride.

(loading our horses for the ride back. The truck broke down about 4 times this trip.)

When you get in a minivan and the sidewalls and ceilings is covered in the same padding used in insane asylums to prevent people in straight jackets from injuring themselves, you know it is going to be a bumpy ride. Not only did the ten hour ride from the lake back to Choibolsan massage or rattle (not sure which) the internal organs, huge amounts of dust quickly clogged the nose and eyes even with a face mask and sunglasses, while a fuel leak saturated our brains. The driver took us on back roads to avoid military checkpoints that may have not permitted us to move horses since there is a district wide foot and mouth disease epidemic which only affects cows and sheeps, but horses could spread the disease via mud on their hooves. Adding an extra tortuous hour to the journey, our driver drove in a big circle to oil wells the Chinese recently installed just inside the Mongolian border (which could spell doom for the remaining wild herd of gazelle in this area should the planned pipe line project be built). Earlier that day, we helped the driver’s son net Carp in the lake and the driver kept trying to sell the now stinking, bloated and ungutted fish to Chinese oil well workers, neither of which knew a single word of the other’s language. Attempts to communicate were made by writing in the dirt with sticks. The driver ended up giving the fish away.

We arrived on the outskirts on the Choibolsan, the forth largest city in Mongolia (populating 80,000) , but still just a smattering of dilapidated buildings and a single eerily lit smoke stack pouring out black smoke from the town’s only power plant. We slept next to a Ger and the driver had one of the herder’s sneak the horse he brought across the river into the animal market. He sold the horse to some Chinese from Inner Mongolia with strange Mongolian accents (according to Bimba). The horse will probably be sold for meat in China which I fear will also be the fate of our horses in a few months. We quickly heard rumors that Neale was still in town and went to visit him the next day. Turns out, he rode and herded his four horses from the lake and sent his bags back to Choibolsan via minvan in order to lighten his load for the arduous trek. His bags arrived two days after he did, picked over and half missing. True to the rough and tough Australian outback attitude, Neale left the next morning to ride by himself to UB without almost no gear left, no permits and two horses. The other two he sold. Unceremoniously, we parted ways again. We hope Neale made it off okay since it seemed the people he chose to board with in Choibolsan were more of the unsavory type of folk he so easily attracts.

That night, Sony and Bimba went on a stealth mission to ride the horses through and across the river, bypassing the bridges which are under military control. The 7 km trek took an unexpected 3 hours due to the unexpected barbed wires fences they encountered and not being able to find a shallow part of the lake to cross. Crossing the river well past midnight, the horses were kept at the Mormon church that night. The next day we found a wonderful herding family living just outside town to care for the horses and a young newly married herder collected our horses and herded them to his home.

It may seem that we are suffering by what has been written however, we are enjoying our Mongolian experience immensely. No where else in the world is there such an extensive nomadic society left. Although it seems that every Mongolian we meet thinks that they are going to walk away rich after helping us once (I’m sure in part because there are thoughtless tourists and come in and drop 100usd to stay in a Ger overnight the equivalent of a year’s salary for many herder’s that are still on the bartering system, not the monetary one). They are still genuine, opening their homes and lives to anyone.

(the inside of a GER. The stove is in the center and acts as kitchen and central heating system)

(sharing photos and movies with the families)

(one of many meals cooked for us)

(A wolf shot and skinned by the herder. Warning Wolves: stay away from our herds)

(Taking the horse for a drink)