Venturing into the heart of rural Mongolia
KARAKORUM, Mongolia — A few weeks ago, I was bouncing down a bumpy Mongolian highway, seated in a Russian-made UAZ van with my wife and two friends. Our driver was a larger-than-life character named Oyunbaatar, or Ogii. He wore a beret, and as he gripped the steering wheel, dodging potholes, he’d occasionally bark out streams of mystifying Mongolian.
In Russia, a UAZ van is known as a Bukhanka, or bread loaf, because of its boxy appearance. With impressive suspension, these off-road vehicles can be seen across Mongolia, rugged as the country’s vast grasslands. As we soon learned. Suddenly, without warning, Ogii veered off the highway, hit the gas and accelerated across the scrubby landscape and up a hillside. Within minutes, he had brought us to a 360-degree view of the steppes — with flocks of animals grazing in the distance, next to groups of white yurts, or gers as they are called here.
This is what travel is like in Mongolia: Huge distances. Broad vistas. Big skies. Bright stars.
For a week, we slept in gers, hiked mountains, rode horses, swam in lakes, soaked in hot springs. Along the way, we met several Mongolian families, including traditional herders who seasonally move their gers and animals to greener pastures.
Covering 603,000 square miles — roughly the size of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah combined — Mongolia is vast but home to a mere 3 million people. Half of them live in Ulaanbaatar, the capital. Most of the rest are spread out on the grasslands, making a traditional living herding and breeding livestock.
Yet even in the outback, signs of modernization are everywhere.
On our first day on the road, we came across a large flock of camels, including some newborns. The camels made for excellent photos, but we were surprised by the two shepherds that soon arrived. They were riding a motorcycle.
The next day, we stopped at a ger camp, perched on a plateau and run by an elegant woman named Yandag. Inside her ger, Yandag was making a batch of urum, the Mongolian name for clotted cream, or “white butter.” She soon stepped outside to track her livestock with the aid of some high-quality binoculars.
Outside her ger stood solar panels and a satellite dish for watching television.
In every ger camp we visited, families would invite us inside and offer us something, usually suutei tsai — salty milk tea. As we sipped our drinks and chatted, we took note of the colorful, ornate furniture inside these tents, including the altars festooned with photos of several generations of family.
A typical road trip takes you west from Ulaanbaatar, the capital, through Khustain National Park, where Mongolia’s semiwild Takhi horses are protected. More than 300 of these golden horses now roam the park, the result