The asian workweek is intense. Long days that don’t end before 9pm and, for many people, a 6-day workweek. Breakfast is the family meal of the day, as it’s the only time when everyone is guaranteed to be at home at the same time. If work wasn’t omnipresent enough, then smartphones finished the deal and removed the already fuzzy boundaries between work and homelife. So when it came time to use up precious vacation days, I started choosing locations based on a map I found on the internet showing dead zones for Blackberrys and Iphones.
That was how Mongolia popped into the picture. And not just Ulaan Baatar (because there is sketchy cell coverage there), but the farthest corner possible where the Mongolian border meets China and Russia. The plan was to land in Khovd, where we would meet our driver and guide and wind our way through the Altai Mountains to Tavan Bogd National Park, in the western-most province of Bayan-Ölgiy. The last three days of the trip would have to be done on horseback as there were no in-roads and the terrain was too much even for our russian-made Furgon.
Tavan Bogd, or the Five Holy Mountains, is the most remote place on earth that I have ever been. All food had to be schlepped in unless you could subsist on marmots and eagles. The nearest store was a three-day drive. Medical help was further. Distances between nomadic gers were far so that their large herds had enough space to roam. This meant our Tuvan horsemen had to ride 16km on horseback to fetch more homemade vodka after it ran out. There are no houses, no towns, and aside from the odd nomad and their ger (all outfitted with satellite dishes and solar panels), there were no people. It felt like the most lonesome place on the planet.
On our last day, as we were packing up our camp at the gate of Altai Tavan Bogd National Park, one of the neighbouring nomads sauntered over on horseback and introduced himself in fluent german. Although his ger was several kilometres away, he’d managed to hear that one of our group was from Germany and wanted to invite us to dinner. As it turns out, as a young man, he’d been part of a university exchange program and had been sent to study engineering for four years in the then East German city of Dresden. After his studies, he returned to Mongolia and back to his life as a nomadic herder, living with his sons and daughters and over 800 horses. He was eager to talk to a german and was as disappointed as we were, to find we had to leave. It would seem, these days, you’re never quite as faraway from the familiar as you’d like to imagine.
