‘Let’s go somewhere different this year.’ Back in 2013, with international travel an expectation of our retirement plan, and a border-closing pandemic unthinkable, I had set my wife a challenge.
An hour spent surfing travel sites and she emerged from the office triumphant. ‘How does a yak trek in Mongolia sound?’
Mongolia? My blank stare invited her to continue. I was soon convinced—this would certainly be different. Within a week we had booked and by late July that year we were in a vintage Mongolian Airlines B737 from Hong Kong, descending into the surprisingly westernised city of Ulaanbaatar.
Our guide for the next two weeks, Oso, showed up at our hotel that evening to brief us. The tour had two main components: a trip south to a ger[1] camp in the Gobi Desert before returning to Ulaanbaatar to regroup before heading north into a remote and picturesque area of mountains and streams, traditional lands of the 13th century Chengis Khan[2], who in these parts is celebrated as the greatest of national heroes, not the brutal Eurasian scourge of western history.
A Russian 1960s minivan offering few concessions to passenger comfort took us south the next day. Progress was slow over an increasingly broken road-surface that morphed into unmarked tracks across sparse grasslands. Neither driver nor guide really knew where we were heading, as the ger tourist camps relocate each season. With shadows lengthening, growing tension changed to jubilation when a painted rock beside the wheel ruts indicated ‘nearly there’.
The ger camp was surprisingly comfortable. Each couple had a large ger, with solar power, a dung-burning stove, twin beds and a short walk to the long-drop toilet and shower ger. There an ingenious battery-powered pump provided a warm trickle from a bucket heated on a dung stove. Meals were large but of limited variety and the walks and tours to local Gobi Desert points of interest were a window into a land and lifestyle vastly different from ours.
Getting to the northern component of the tour took us over similar barely-there tracks, with steep rises that challenged the minibus until we were delivered to another, but larger, ger tourist camp. A day later the real fun began: the yak trek. Contrary to our expectations, the herdsmen drivers and their yak-train of loaded wagons took the low road and we hikers took the increasingly challenging ‘no road’ across lush plains, marshes and mountains to finish each day at a camp set up by the yak drivers. Famished from our exertions, we tore into our evening meals, produced by Tuul, the accompanying cook, as we squatted around a cloth spread on the ground.
One day a furious thunderstorm broke just as we trekkers summited a mountain, with torrential rain and lightning strokes too close for comfort. The warming and drying dung fire in the ger was very welcome that night.
All that was then. Now overseas travel is impossible. Maybe we will be too old to resume adventurous wanderings when international flights resume. Or maybe not. For now, we relish our memories of travels past.
[2] More usually the name is Genghis but Mongolians insist on Chengis as the anglicised form.
Burnside Writers Group 