The carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat lies under the bed in a nomadic family’s ger in Mongolia as the sleeping bags of visitors are rolled out on the floor next to its remains. Its head, with fur and horns intact, lolls in a corner by the door.
The temperature is near freezing, but the felt-lined, wood-lattice structure provides shelter from the blustery winds of the Gobi. The thick portable tent of the typical nomadic home traps both heat and the gamey smells of mutton boiling on the stove and strips of meat hung from the ceiling. Milk in a large cloth sack is left to strain into a metal bucket nearby.
While the Mongolian government relies on the country’s resources such as gold, copper, coal and other minerals to attract foreign investment, some of its nomadic population are offering homestays to supplement their rural incomes, capitalizing on the opening up of their country.
Photo: Reuters
“We are happy to let visitors stay in our ger. In Mongolia, we can drop in on friends and people can visit us without any notice,” said Tovshinto Vaanchig, a 51-year-old horse herder who also owns sheep and goats.
However, getting to the homestays, often in the herders’ own one-room gers, remains tough.
Visitors must endure hours in four-wheel drives on bumpy terrain across sweeping steppes. The landlocked country remains in a time warp, with many of its people living side-by-side with animals and retaining old traditions.
Tour guide Oyunbolor Demberel and her father, Demberel Otgon, rely on tourists who want to see the unspoilt natural wonder of the Gobi’s sand dunes, mountains and steppes for work during a few months each year from May to September.
After a few hours of driving around a region of the desert inhabited by horse herders, Otgon finds a family who have suitably calm, wild horses for tourists. Mongolian children learn to race these small horses when they are about six years old and many are expert riders who use no saddle.
Apart from horses, cows, goats and sheep, Mongolia’s herding economy depends on the hardy, two-humped Bactrian camel which is indigenous to Central Asia.
Enktuya Borokhin, 52, is the matriarch of a camel-herding family. She moved six weeks ago to find pasture for 400 animals and will relocate again in a month in search of better shelter for winter. The Gobi has extreme temperatures, from minus-40?C in winter to more than 40?C in summer.
Borokhin’s tourist ger is spartan, but the walls are decorated with colorful cotton cloth from China. The family moves their only stove into the ger for guests and end up cooking all their hot meals with their visitors.
The daily staple is meat, such as mutton and goat, although Mongolians also eat camel, horse and beef. Milk tea is commonly served with curd and fried biscuits.
They cook a stew by candlelight. As night falls, the camp eases into sleep, lulled by sounds from braying camels to barking dogs.
Borokhin is up at dawn when the sun pokes through the horizon in a soft haze of pink.
Her daughter Gantsetseg skillfully lines up goats for milking behind the gers. The necks of the animals are tied with rope woven so that they are lined up in two rows facing one another. The milk, cheese and other animal produce, including wool, are sold.
Borokhin says she is pleased that three of her children are studying agriculture and technology in the city, while three others have chosen to live in the countryside as herders.
Mongolia does not manufacture substantial amounts of finished goods and cannot sustain economic growth without significant exports of resources to neighboring countries. People who move to the capital, Ulan Bator, are hard pressed to find work and unemployment is a problem.
Bordering Russia and China, Mongolia has a population of about 2.8 million, with less than half living a nomadic life. It is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world and does not have the skill base, the capital nor the capacity to carry out large mining projects without foreign investment.
Tourism is also hamstrung by poor infrastructure.
“I earned good money when I worked for a mining company doing data entry, but these jobs are hard to come by,” said tour guide Demberel, 35.
“We hear stories of people who have found gold and now everyone hopes they too can find gold. The big cars in the cities are owned by those people in mining,” she said.
Even as Mongolia looks forward, the past remains close in the form of legendary warrior Genghis Khan, who established the Mongol empire in 1206. His name is on everything from the capital’s airport to postcards and vodka.
“We don’t have much, but we are a rich country with a long history. In Mongolia, we say that Chinggis Khaan is still feeding us,” Demberel added.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion