Mongol Magic
Friends from around the globe converge each year on a camp in the remote grasslands of Mongolia for a week of exotic adventure and revelry that culminates in a polo tournament. Kim Visudharomn takes us inside the Mutton Cup
It’s a little past 10pm in the Orkhon Valley of central Mongolia last summer, barely an hour since the sun turned the clouds pink and orange as it began to slip behind distant mountains. Now the scenery is hardly discernible, the air still, and all would be silent if it were not for the incongruous thumping of bass, beats and … Beyoncé. Drunk in Love blares from one of the gers huddled at the foot of a grassy hill. Used by day as the tack ger, its felt walls, usually lined with saddles, reins and riding helmets, tonight enclose perhaps the most eclectic party in the country.
Investors, entrepreneurs, fashion buyers and hoteliers lock arms in jiving embrace with nomadic herders, shamanic healers and artisans, the former clad in garishly coloured polo shirts, the latter in jewel-hued dels, traditional Mongolian jackets belted stylishly at the hips. The gamey scent of goat from supper lingers as bowls of a traditional fermented horse milk intoxicant called airag are passed around the makeshift dancefloor. A mix of hip hop, top 40 and disco streams from a single unwieldy speaker, which is eventually hoisted and carried outside, with the throng of inebriated revellers following like mice behind the Pied Piper to dance in the moonlight under the vast starry sky.
This scene is listed on our itinerary as “The Famous Bodog Party,” and it’s just one of numerous beautifully bizarre, how-on-earth-did-i-get-here moments that we’ve experienced since arriving at the Genghis Khan Riding and Adventure Camp for the Mutton Cup, a week-long adventure on the untamed Mongolian steppe that culminates in a friendly polo tournament played by international and Mongol riders.
Our days have been filled with outdoorsy diversions amid breathtaking scenery that has frequently left us speechless. We’ve galloped through wide open plains and up edelweiss-strewn hills on stocky, semi-wild horses, which are released every evening and rounded up again by herdsmen on motorbikes at dawn. We’ve picnicked on a mountain strewn with precariously stacked boulders, and we’ve kayaked down the Orkhon River past herds of horses and running yaks, their skunk-like tails swooshing in the wind. Waking from our ritualistic post-lunch siesta, we’ve been greeted by goats and kids grazing, literally, at our doorstep.
The Mutton Cup was conceived over drinks on a winter evening in 2016 at the Shangri-la Hotel in Kathmandu. Brothers Sangjay and Rinchen Choegyal and their childhood friend Jack Edwards decided they would turn their love of adventure and fun into an annual event that would bring together a diverse range of friends from around the globe. They’d throw a week-long celebration in the most unlikely of settings, full of extraordinary activities and a carefully chosen cast of characters. It would be a truly new experience that could not be replicated anywhere else in the world—and being invite-only, one of the most exclusive.
“Our friendship group is truly international, and the idea for the Mutton Cup was born through a longing to bring these amazing people together at a spectacular location and to throw one hell of a party,” says Edwards.
“We like it when the people coming don’t already all know each other, and they tend to be quite eclectic,” Rinchen adds. “That keeps things interesting.”
As for the eyebrow-raising name of the event itself? “In the West, mutton refers to adult sheep meat, but in the East, where we all grew up, it’s typically goat,” explains Rinchen. The tournament’s name takes inspiration from the celebratory meal served at the end of the tournament, the aforementioned “bodog” dinner— disembowelled goat cooked from the inside out by hot stones sewn into the cavity of the carcass. Charming. “It’s a funny, jokey word, isn’t it?” Rinchen laughs. “Anyway, we like the unpretentious rusticity of it; it’s true to the experience of life on the steppe. Plus, bodog is a style of cooking with great cultural significance in Mongolia, said to have been first practised by Genghis Khan himself.”
The trio hosted their first Mutton Cup in 2017, inviting 25 of their friends along for the wild ride. They booked out the entire Genghis Khan Riding and Adventure Camp, the very place where they’d learned to play polo in their teens (the camp began life as the Genghis Khan Polo Club in 1996). They have returned separately and together many times since, each forming their own special bonds with the camp and its team. “Our families have been close to the founder of the polo club, Christopher Giercke, for many years,” says Jack.
Recalls Sangjay, who was taught to play polo by an exindian cavalry colonel in Mongolia, “I first visited the camp in 2009 when I came to watch Rinchen complete an overland race from London to Ulaanbaatar in a Skoda. I wasn’t really expecting it, but the immediately humbling nature of the Mongolian steppe is hard to describe without descending into superlatives and emotions. And since we hosted the first Mutton Cup in 2017, the event is now the first entry on my calendar.”
A Mutton Cup takes a few months to organise, with tasks divvied up and undertaken by the boys along with their regular jobs (Sangjay as the general manager of Bangkok architect Bill Bensley’s latest Cambodian resort, Shinta Mani