...a horse collapsed underneath me...

...twice.

To be fair though, it was a small and malnourished horse.

We were in Mongolia at the end of a particularly harsh and devastating winter, felt all around Europe and northern Asia. Whereas in England there might be a blizzard bringing two inches of snow, or delayed flights that slightly inconvenience travellers, Mongolian farmers had lost a ridiculous amount of livestock. There were piles of dead goats by the highway (a slightly paved road) and you could buy a pelt for about a dollar.

After a long week spent in the gritty capital of Ulaanbataar, we signed up for a van tour which Bob our friendly hostelier operated. We had been hanging around the Golden Gobi Hostel waiting for more people to arrive, who we hoped would be keen for a week long trip around the countryside. A Dutch couple arrived, and we talked them into the adventure and left the next day.

Zaya cooking up a feast in the
'kitchen' of a yurt

Our guide, Zaya, and our driver, Bayer (I think...) were awesome. Zaya was a Gobi girl, from a Nomadic family in the Gobi Desert in the south of Mongolia. She spoke perfect English and had a great sense of humour, asking us to tell her some jokes even before we were out of the city. And she was a very impressive cook, whipping up fresh food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with the most primitive cooking appliances available in the middle of bloody nowhere, with no running water, on a gas cooker, often with kids or kids (baby goats - see what I did there) running around her ankles.


Bayer was a driver and a half - a big fellow with a bowl haircut and meaty hands who we're pretty sure represented Mongolia in some winter Olympics at some stage. He had limited English but loved trying to talk with us and tell jokes, pose for photos and have a bit of a rough and tumble at cliff edges. Our van was basically a Soviet tank on wheels, shaped like a pig but with the suspension of a billy cart. The roads through Mongolia were barely existent, especially now before Spring, when a good part of the country was still under ice and snow. Bayer handled the van with extreme skill, often stopping in the middle of a snow field with no landmarks visible in the snow storm, having a bit of a think, then driving off in the - always right - direction we needed. He would zip through fields of snow, ice, creeks and holes without slowing down, flinging us out of our seats, over each other or straight into the roof.

Our tank on wheels

On one day of our trip - and I'm gutted I don't have a photo of this - we were driving through a complete white-out. I don't know what Bayer was navigating with - there certainly weren't any hazard lights because there wasn't actually a road. We came across two men who were herding their goats around with their little shitty car (lazy) which had become stuck in a snow drift. The flock were getting away and, like us, couldn't see a thing so were basically stumbling blindly in the white. We stopped and Bayer hooked up a tow rope and got their car out of the drift, but it couldn't go. So leaving the flock and hoping they'd hang around together, the two men jumped in the van with us to get a lift to the next village. And they brought a goat in as well. A very cold goat who was scared shitless, whose eyelashes were frozen (so were the shepherds) and who found it very hard to get comfy in the back of a van with six human people. The two men were bundled up in traditional outfits - a long trench coat-style felt coat with bright sashes around the waist. They looked so cold and miserable; I wanted to get a photo but didn't want to embarrass or offend them. We dropped them off at what I thought was the middle of nowhere but must have been near somewhere.

We stayed for seven nights with various families around the region. These families were mainly semi-nomadic, in that they will set up camp for winter in a sheltered place, then maybe head 50 kilometres away to their summer camp in more pasture land. Their camps consisted of a couple of yurts - round tents made out of layers upon layers of felt, with a lattice structure to hold it up, a small door with a particularly hard top, and an intricate arrangement of furniture around the yurt, usually a couple of single beds, a kitchen corner with everything neatly arranged, a dressing table with all their personal effects and a kind of shrine, with photos and religious stuff and pretty little knick-knacks. In the middle of the yurt was a little fire place which burned either wood or shit, with the chimney going up and through a hole in the ceiling, often chimney-sized, often just a little bit too big so as wind and snow could sneak in.

Our first yurt camp - at Karakorum, the site of the
oldest Buddhist monastery in Mongolia

The families who we stayed with were set up for tourists, with an extra yurt free of all the clutter of a home, usually with four or six beds arranged around the outside and a plentiful supply of fire wood or horse shit. The fire, and I guess this is an international characteristic, had the potential to go out at the most uncomfortable hours of the night. It could be sweltering in there when we hit the hay (literally), but as soon as the fire went out it quickly became apparent that yes, it was in fact -25 degrees outside. Usually the mum or dad of the family would pop in during the night and re-stoke the fire, but if they (understandably) just stayed in their warm beds, it would be a war of attrition as to which of us tourists would do the job. I have been known to prefer to put on a pair of ski pants rather than take responsibility for the fire. And this is possibly the worst climate in which to have a small bladder and a large thirst. It's a tough choice between just holding it in and not getting back to sleep, or running to the hole in the ground 100 metres away in aforementioned freezing. Let's just say there's a couple of yurts out there that may have been weed on by a mystery weer in the wee hours of the morning. And that weer may have received a few weird looks from the resident yaks.

Guard Yak

As part of the selling point, these organised tours offered activities with the families, in order to partake in and appreciate the lifestyles of the nomadic people. We visited monasteries, had old folk sing to us, fed herds of scraggly cows, Bayer cooked us a genuine Mongolian hot pot, and of course, we rode around on horses. Oh, and a camel.

It seemed cruel at the time, and it seems even crueler now. I don't even like riding horses. My legs aren't built to be wrap around such a hairy chunk of flesh (zing!), and my knees are all knocked up. So why would I get on a skinny, mangy half-sized horse and expect it to not collapse under me? Phill's obviously a bit bigger than me, so sure, give him the bigger horse. But believe you me, under all these layers of thermals, my brand spanking new purple Chinese snowpants, and the traditional Mongolian overcoat that Mrs Horse Lady lent me, I'm not exactly small. I want a man-sized horse, dag nammit!

So, we saddled up and Mr Horse Man led the four of us on our total of two full-sized horses to Orkhon Waterfall, which was about a half hour horse trot away. I just googled Orkhon Waterfall, and pictures like this came up:

This, however, is what we saw (and, just quietly, is a bit more impressive, and not just because I made it extra large):

The beanie's a bit of a giveaway

So much water, and frozen! And shaped like that! It was a frozen waterfall! Crazy. Phill and I ventured down to the frozen lake with Mr Horse Man and dutifully threw rocks in to try and smash the ice.

So the horse I was on had fallen on the way to the waterfall. It was a bit shaky on the ice, it was a bit skinny after the harsh winter, and it had a big Australian girl in stupid fluffy purple jodhpurs on its back. I would have fancied a bit of a sit down as well. When we arrived back at the family camp, everything went into cartoon mode as my horse promptly collapsed under me, with its legs splayed out to the side. I felt very bad. This family had four little kids running around, helping feed the flocks and chop the wood. Then in come these big white fellas, who promptly burn all their wood, jump on their poor underfed horses and then ride them around like hooliagns until they collapse. That's not a genuine experience with a Mongolian family! They would have hated me!

Later, we rode camels.
They didn't collapse.

Where: Mongolia

When: April, 2010