Before the ride

Monday, June 19th

I am sitting in the Seoul Incheon Airport right now in a fancy lounge, eating good food and helping myself to a self serve bar. None of this luxury would be possible if I weren’t traveling with my friend Tanya, who has a broken back. I’ve been joking with her that she’s a friend with benefits and that all of this was certainly worth the suffering and financial cost she endured to acquire these amenities. Before this, there was the premier Miat Airlines lounge in Ulanbataar and free champagne in bu​​siness class. The joy! Fortunately Tanya thinks I’m funny, rather than insensitive. I think.

If you want to learn how all this came to be, read on below. ​(​​I’ll post the journal in four parts.) ​Tanya and I have just completed a 12-day horse trek over 700 km of Mongolian steppes and Gobi Desert. On our longest day, we rode 52 miles. It was an incredible adventure that we have been planning for years, since before Covid. The ride is called the Gobi Gallop. It is a charity ride, a fundraiser for kindergartens that serve the trashpickers of UlanBataar. That’s about all I knew before going, other than that it would be physically challenging and an exciting way to explore a new place. So, you get to start the story in the same place I was in terms of knowledge about the ride and Mongolia in general when I departed California at the very end of May.

Oh, and I finished nursing school and graduated in mid-May. I should mention that, though for the last three weeks it hasn’t been on my radar. That seems so long ago now…

Friday, June 2

It’s Friday morning in Ulaanbataar (which has so many spellings that I’ve given up on trying to find the right one; I’m committed to using as many as possible from here on out). Today Tanya and I will meet the rest of the Gobi Gallop group and be taken for a tour of the Veloo Foundation’s two kindergartens. We will also visit the garbage dump where the kindergarteners’ families earn their living. One day in UB was enough for me. Tanya was unwell, fighting a migraine and a cold; she was in bed for the day. I spent the day walking up and down Peace Avenue, one of the main big streets in the city, to buy some last minute supplies, bring Tanya food she could tolerate, and buy a pillow for the ride. My adventures gave me lots of opportunities to assess the language, the city, the Mongolians.

It’s funny — most of my life has been spent in three places: the US, Hungary, Indonesia. From Hungary I know what is looks and feels like to be in something that was behind the Iron Curtain. From Indonesia I have a sense for Asia and Asians. In Ulan Batar (different spelling this time) I’m struck by the mix of both influences. It’s ugly — like East Berlin ugly. People stand right at your shoulder when you’re at an ATM, just like in Bogor. Mongolians definitely act more like Hungarians. They are not super friendly or outgoing, at least not in the city*. (Sorry Hungarians.) I interacted with a dozen or so clerks and shop attendants. Nobody spoke English or smiled. Several pretended not to notice that I needed help. Versus Indonesians, who’d be all over any customer service opportunity with a foreigner. The language is bizarre, very staccato, does not sound like any Asian language I’ve ever heard. I’m told it’s structurally similar to Korean but the words are not shared. There are some guttural throat-clearing sounds that almost sound German and some lilting up and downs that sound like Swedish now and then. And there are all sorts of sounds I can’t make, no matter how hard I try.

*Ok, but don’t be offended. Read on. I changed my mind later, both about the city and about Mongolians! These were first impressions.

Yesterday was a national holiday — National Children’s Day. The streets were jam packed with people, there was music and events in the street, and absolutely everyone seemed to be eating an ice cream cone. I guess Mongolians are not lactose intolerant. Or I hope they are not lactose intolerant.

Yesterday we met two of the others in our riding group. We’re sharing an apartment with them in our hostel. This was sort of unexpected – the nice guy who runs the hostel has put up Gobi Gallopers before and thought it would be nice to stick us together in an apartment; instant immersion – but it’s been absolutely fine. Julia is a PhD cognitive linguist in her early 70s. She has ridden over 3000 kilometers in Mongolia, including in part of a 1000 mile race called the Mongolian Derby. It’s some crazy British thing that half of its riders don’t finish. Each rider can only carry 5kg and gets a new horse every 25 km. Julia and I had lunch and did some errands together yesterday, during which I learned about her work, her riding adventures, and her previous trips to Mongolia. In the afternoon a second woman arrived. Cele (“Seal”, short for Cecelia) is in her 50s, an Australian. Julia and Cele know each other already from a previous ride they did together here in Mongolia called the Blue Wolf Totem, a three-month trek across the country that covered 3000 km; this ride was organized by the same woman who runs the Gobi Gallop. Cele, too, rode part of the Mongol Derby in a different year.

Tomorrow we will be taken to the start point of our ride an hour or two out of UB and we’ll do our first ride together, a short loop, presumably to make sure that everyone can stay on a horse. Very much hoping I don’t fall off. Then, the day after tomorrow, our first long riding day!

Saturday June 3

Yesterday was incredible and long and exhausting. I was totally engaged and attentive the whole day, and by the end I was pooped. I think I’ve still got some jet lag, too. We had breakfast again in the hostel (bread, butter, jam, hard boiled eggs) and for the second morning again ran into the members of an archeology team from University of Texas. They are here on a three-month expedition; the lead is an expert in ancient cultivation — she identifies fossil components of certain grains. It sounds fascinating and the group is fun, a typical academic field expedition of nerds who like to party while they do research. Being one of those myself, I liked them instantly.

After breakfast, volunteers and employees of the Veloo Foundation (Julie Veloo’s organization that runs the Gobi Gallop and other races and events to fundraise for the kindergartens) arrived at the hostel to collect our expedition boxes and the luggage we will leave behind in UB. Then they loaded us into a minivan and swept us off to collect other riders at other hotels. We then drove to the outskirts of the city, toward the dump and into the Ger District. As these things often go, things became shabbier and broken as we left the inner city and headed outward. While we drove, Julie told us about the city, Mongolia, the Ger District. There are three million Mongolians and half live in UB. This was not always so and is only recently so. A combination of climate change and overgrazing (fueled by the government’s reward program for making lots of babies, the cashmere industry, and rich city people who have large herds as nothing more than status symbols) is making it impossible for the herders to feed their animals, especially during winters that follow summers with poor grass growth. There has been drought. When the herders can’t make it herding, they pick up their ger and move it to the outskirts of UB. (Gers are the dome-shaped homes of most Mongolians. They can be assembled in less than an hour.) It is law that one can stake out a territory of a certain size (small, like a quarter of an acre) by finding an empty spot and building a fence to mark the boundary (just like in our old Wild West). Fences are marked to begin with by old tires, then replaced by wood or oil drums banged flat. (Sometimes the fences are really creative – we saw one later that was made entirely from car hoods.) Thus, the Ger District. There is no running water in the Ger District, or plumbing; the lots have an outhouse and water is carted from community wells a km or two away. I saw later in the market aisles and aisles of water containers; these are an essential part of many (most?) households in the city and much of the countryside. Mongolia has very little agriculture. I’m not sure about industry other than coal. Herders who move to UB drive taxis or buses or pick trash in the garbage dump, which they use or sell or eat. Some is medical waste, which is sorted, dusted off, and sold back to clinics.

Julie Veloo moved to Mongolia ten plus years ago with her Malaysian husband, who is in oil. She fell in love with the horses and the herders and she learned of the Ger District and the children who pick trash with their parents in the dump. She resolved to get all children under six out of the dump and into schools by building a kindergarten in the Ger District. Eventually she also supported the government in setting up another school that is literally on the very edge of the dump. Yesterday we visited both, which are beautiful and well-planned. We also visited a community library that Julie built next to her school, as well as a sewing shop that she established to give work to some of the local women. I was measured for a gown to wear at the gala fundraiser at the end of the ride; I chose a traditional dress. Both schools have kitchens, and the children are fed good meals each day. They also sleep, and sometimes they sleep for three or four hours because sleeping is not always so good in a ger with a big family and garbage trucks bumping past at all hours. Both schools also have a doctor. School is just being let out for the year, but the kids were still there for their last day at Julie’s school. We were treated to an awesome singing and dancing performance and then we sat and played with the kids. I fell in love with a very smart little girl; I picked up some books (in Mongolian) and asked her to tell me the names of things in them. She figured out quickly what I wanted, and she was delighted, and in a few minutes she was practically in my lap and laughing at my efforts to pronounce the names of cat, dog, ball, flower. The pronunciation is hard! The rolling RRRRs I can do, but there are other complicated sounds that come from somewhere in the throat that I don’t quite get. This little one was very cute.

After seeing the schools, we were treated to a tour of the dump. We stood on a hill just outside of it and watched the garbage trucks roll in. As each enters, men leap onto it and begin sorting the crap in the moving truck; there is competition — you want to get there first. It is dangerous and there are frequent deaths. Outside of the official dump there is illegal dumping to avoid the fees associated with the official dump. I saw two or three dead dogs, big shaggy things.

I was impressed with the project and struck by how integrative the work is and how similar in many ways it is to the work I did with Kinari and Health In Harmony. Julie talked about how empowering getting a start in school is for the children (almost all are able to go on in school after they finish her kindergarten) and the library is for the adults who bring their children there. At first the mothers were afraid to come in, ashamed of being dirty. Now they come. She told how the community began to organize trash pick up around the school and library, which is incredible really when you think about how they spend their days in trash and it’s not really the kind of thing they might notice — but they began to notice and to take pride and to be invested. Julie explained that the trauma of being a trashpicker kid is not really generational yet — at most it was their parents who came from the countryside. She hopes that by educating these kids and helping new arrivals to avoid ending up in the dump, the cycle will be broken.

After the Ger District tour we headed back to our hotels and hostels. I headed right back out again with Cele (the Australian) and Charlotte (a lovely Irish lady) to see the big market. We didn’t have much time as we were expected to meet Julie and the whole group again for dinner and drinks, but, in the time I had, I found seventeen thousand things I’d like to go back and buy. There is a whole horse gear section, with beautiful soft reins and traditional saddles and stirrups and bits and tall soft leather boots. The textiles are to die for, silks in vibrant colors with incredible patterns. And dresses…and baby clothes…

Dinner was fun, in a hip modern restaurant with things like Caesar salad and french fries and steak. We talked about the day and Julie told us more about the upcoming ride. The group is fun and smaller than expected, with only eight versus the 14 initially expected (not including Julie, the Mongolian doctor who comes along, and the herdsmen and crew who will support us). I don’t yet know why some of the expected riders did not come, but I don’t mind the smaller group size. Others in the group include Sara, from down under, Betsy from Nevada and Annapolis (she splits her time), Charlotte from Northern Ireland, and Christina, who teaches horseback riding and also writes articles about travel for magazines. By chance, we are all women.

That was yesterday, minus the details of what might have been slightly too much vodka with Julia (the linguist, not Julie) and Cele before bedtime. They are quite fun! Today we will drive to a horse camp that is the start site of the ride via a grocery store (to get wine and sugary snacks to sustain us on long riding days) and a national park with a Genghis Khan statue. We’ll do a short ride in the afternoon and then start the real stuff tomorrow. Woohoo!