Off the Wall

Distance in Mongolia is measured by time rather than kilometres, a direct symptom of the lack of actual tarmacadamed roads. Instead, the plains are crisscrossed with swirling tracks that intertwine and then span out in every direction like endless fingers.  Much like the deserts of the Middle East, you can’t help but wonder how people manage to find their way home?  Clearly the process is partly facilitated by an genetic radar that hones in on the 4th clump of bushes over the 5th hill, behind the eagle-shaped outcrop 210 paces east of the ovoo by Horse Skull Valley, then turns to the second star on the right and straight till morning.

We would drive for hours on end, hill melding with hill, ovoo with ovoo, callous building upon callous on my already harassed backside which had a tough time getting used to the  UAZ experience. The level of bump and shake often had me thinking that if I were a bottle of champagne, somebody was gonna lose an eye soon.

The Russian van had definitely seen better days. However, it was the best we could afford, and came complete with engine crank, a high wheel base and the capacity for 4-wheel drive which had to be switched to manually by virtue of unscrewing the wheel axle cover thingy, inserting some kind of metal-toothed gear yoke, and then closing everything off again. A wonderfully clear and mechanically correct description I realize, one completely commensurate with my expertise level.

Happily, our driver, who smoked a lot, smiled little and talked less, knew exactly what he was doing.  Just as well considering the fact that we would break down at least once a day and find ourselves atop some hill in the middle of the middle of nowhere, passenger seat plonked on the grass, watching his little behind wiggling side to side while he did another MacGyver on that ancient engine.

The trip west was long and tortuous, broken only by occasional stops in frontier towns for lunch meat. Meat, meat, meat, or should I say fat, grizzle, “bleargh”. By the time we reached Kharkhorin my innards were not happy with me.

‘Dysentery’ is a manageable thing when you are in the outback, where the privacy of the wilds and the calming whispering of the wind shaken leaves hypnotized slightly, taking your mind off the insatiable cramping, and a cool breeze would wipe your sweating brow and quivering backside.  In the outhouse of a central Mongolian town, it’s a whole other scenario.

My first experience of an outhouse was somewhat misleading and came about 9 hours outside UB near the monastery of Amar Bayasgalant. We stayed the night beside the monastery, within the half-heartedly picket-fenced garden of a ger lodge. The garden was filled with curiosities from a simple outdoor sink freestanding in the middle of the garden, to a bread bin that stood atop a fence post at the end of the garden.  At first I thought it was an inventive kind of letterbox, but when I opened it, discovered it was a tad more industrious than that, housing a bar of soap, a toothbrush and a tube of paste.

Of course the biggest curiosity was the wooden outhouse at the end of the garden. In my pre-malfunctioning bowels state, it wasn’t such a bad experience. It  had a wooden floor with a simple hole cut in the middle over which one had to balance, and try to aim with consideration.  It even had a door! It was a cold night, it had been raining, so the aroma was certainly not craw grasping. To be fair, I had been on worse squatters in my time.

As the days passed and my intestines turned into a gurgling mass of slime, the outhouses became less and less savoury, each visit leaving me counting the ever increasing costs of the therapy I was going to need when I got home.

In its more common appearance, a Mongolian outhouse is a barely 3 walled box, occasionally with a roof, and two four by four planks laid over a minimum two metre deep square hole. Now I say two metre deep, but that depth is approximately measured, and only to the top of the layers of human waste that you try to pretend is not there.

They often come in twos.

Leaving the black market area of Kharkorum, and overcome by urgency, I found myself running through the shanty and backstreets, following the stench to my nearest and only hope of privacy. I thanked God that he blessed me with balance as I dropped my pants at speed while precariously teetering on the two planks that stretched over the generations of excrement.   I spread out my arms to the spaced slat walls on either side, steadying myself before the impending explosion. I held my breath and closed my eyes trying to separate myself from the aroma of rotting lunch meat permeating up from the abyss, and the excruciating, cascading wave that was rapidly making its way through my belly towards my rear end.

“There’s no place like home! There’s no place like home!”

My whispered repetitious attempt at self-hypnosis was temporarily broken by the sounds of exertion followed by relief . Still clinging on to the walls for dear life, nails embedded into the wood, I turned to see a squatting local through the gaps in the slats on the adjoining outhouse. A little vein pulsated on his purple temple as he pushed and parped. My desire to plug my ears against his inner workings with my splinter imbued fingers was swiftly overtaken by my own personal Vesuvius.

The rest is a blur.

I came round to the sound of my neighbour loosing a final sigh of contentment, zipping up his pants, and passing me by with a whistle, and not so much as a ‘How do you do?’

I wiped the sweat from my brow with the sleeve of my jacket, crossed my arms over my knees, resting in my squat while I caught my breath and thanked the sweet baby Jesus that I was still alive. I felt a cool breeze about my quivering backside, but the associated  buzzing soon made me realize it wasn’t the wind.  I nearly lost myself in the pit as I pulled my pants up while simultaneously throwing myself out of the horror chamber.

Picking myself up out of my stumble, squinting in the sunlight, the sound of buzzing fading, I brushed myself down, pulled on my sunglasses, and did a walk back to the UAZ of which John Wayne himself would have been proud.

While standing by our van waiting for our guide, Soyola, to make his way back, a passing drunk stopped dead in his tracks. With a somewhat shocked look on his face, he bent his knees slightly and pointed at me. “Michael”, he said hoarsely, looking around him as if for clarification and then back to me. I knew I looked a tad dishevelled after my ‘personal moment’, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was up with him. He continued to point and in my paranoid state I attempted to refix my black hair back into its ponytail.

“Michael, Michael”, he shouted again and then walked at me, his drunken body bent at an almost a 45 degree angle and his arm outstretched for a handshake.  “Sainbano”, I said as I held out mine and he grabbed it. Shaking it vigorously with his other hand clasped over our two, he began to babble at me in Mongolian. My arm was almost loosed from its socket by the time Soyola finally made his way to us. The drunk let go of my hand and excitedly turned to our guide, babbling and pointing at me with little drunken giggles, occasionally separated by more Michaels.

Before shooing the drunk away, Soyola managed to translate his ramblings for me. Between the sunglasses, black hair, and diarrhoea exacerbated paleness, the poor man had thought me Michael Jackson, alive and roaming the dirt tracks of Mongolia.

I began to laugh, wondering when exactly Michael had invested in a boob job, but then my belly started to growl at me again. Unwilling to put myself through another outhouse experience that day, I managed to persuade everyone it was time to leave.

“Pedal to the metal MacGyver, fast as you can to the second star on the right and straight on until that 4th clump of bushes over the  hill there, if you please!”

Jagga the Scut

Mr . Byambatogoh’s home sits atop a small hill, separated from the higher green peaks to the south and west,  and grassless outcrop range to the east, by shallow stub grass valleys. We arrived there via a local bus from Ulaanbatar to the small town of Sanser, where we were eventually picked up by a family friend who drove us cross-country in a 15 year old Toyota, to the two-ger homestead.

Sanser is an odd little frontier town comprised of a scatter of ramshackle wooden buildings, each seeming to represent a bar, or shop, or restaurant, or combination of all three. You can’t help but feel like you are in Tombstone as you drive through it.  Horseback is the preferred mode of transport, though occasionally a motorbike with a family of passengers would pass by kicking up the dust and tumbleweeds.

Horse hitches adorn the front of most establishments,  and the look that the occasional 2 gallon-capioed drunk would give you, as he stumbled out of a distillery with a half-burned cigarette hanging from his mouth, only amplified the sound of the theme tune to the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly that was running through my head.

After navigating our way across the almost invisible track way running beneath the tall grass that coated the undulating expanse which lay between Sansar and the homestead, we were welcomed by Mama offering a bowl of salty milk tea and a basket of ‘treats’. We sat on one side of the ger, while the family sat on the other curiously watching our every move. Nibbling away at the goat-hair infused, hard, homemade cheese, we precariously balanced the bowls of hot milk tea in our right hands, occasionally bringing them to our lips, over-emphasizing slurps for effect.

After perhaps a half hour of awkward nods, repeated incomprehensible phrases combined with huge sweeping hand gestures, occasional moments when we were clearly being pointed at and gossiped about, failed attempts at quoting from our phrase books, and at least two refills of the salt milk tea, our hosts eventually up and left us to our own devices.

Our accommodation over the next three days was the ‘guest ger’ of the family homestead. It was an 8 wall example, furnished with three beds, and a mirrored dresser decorated with family photos and a pair of ceramic camels. The family alter, complete with a photograph of the Dali Lama, rested against the northern curve of the round structure.

Our hosts, Mama & Papa Byambatogoh had their outdoor lives written all over their faces in uncountable wrinkles that doubled each time they lit up in a smile, which they did a lot. They were blessed with three sons, and one ‘sort of’ daughter-in-law.

 We didn’t see too much of  Papa over the three days, but Mama was a constant. She always seemed to be on the go, making cheese, cooking meals, monitoring the milk cauldron, regularly stirring it by scooping up some of the mixture in a small plastic pot, raising it high above the rest, and then emptying it back into the mix from aloft. The scooping and dropping was done numerous times in quick succession, kicking up the smell of the salty brew and mixing it with the not unpleasant smoky aroma of burning dried sheep dung that the daughter-in-law had dutifully collected from their back yard pile.

How hard these ladies work is unquantifiable, but watching  Mama herd, coral and then continue to milk some thirty or so goats in the middle of a rain, thunder and lightening storm was certainly a good indicator.

The family’s youngest son, Pathgrl, whose name was so unpronounceable at first that we nicknamed him Patrick, was a little diamond, burning with an almost unquenchable energy, and a total shark at the game of Anklebone. Patrick was easily the best at communicating, and had even managed to pick up a small smattering of English from other travellers that had passed by through the years. His playground was the dung-splattered wilds of the west, and his playmates a scraggly cat and its kitten (both called Mishka), and anything else that could be prodded, poked or ridden, be it goat, dog, horse, camel or beetle.

Their eldest son, a handsome boy, was studying the traditional arts in Ulaanbatar, but dropped by long enough to lull us with a Long Song or two.

Then, there was Jagga, the one in the middle, who, forgive me for saying, I frequently suspected had been dropped on his head as a bairn. He was our main guide during the three day stay. He was twenty-four years old, had just about made it through high school, and had spent a little time in the Mongolian army. I called him ‘the idiot son’. My co-travelers were both amused and a little appalled when they heard me call him that, replying in his defence, ‘… but he’s a good farmer.'  Indeed he was, and in this neck of the steppes, I guess that’s all that matters.

Talent for farming aside, our host’s middle son was what my mother would call, 'a scut of a young fella.' He was the main reference point for my initial comparing of Mongolian goat herders with the Irish itinerant. Jagga has the squashed-nose look of any Ward or Hackett that you might see dragging his heels around an Irish horse fair, and forgive me for saying so, the manner of one to boot, God bless him!

He likes his drop, and the tobacco, and is totally lacking in social graces with neither Western niceties (not that you’d expect them), nor Mongolian laws of hospitality representing any part of his repertoire.  Maybe I’m being too harsh on the boy, perhaps it was our fault because we interrupted his Nadaam plans. Clearly, the older brother had originally been lined up for the duty of ‘minding us’ during the festival, but got called away last minute, and Jagga got lumped with the job instead.

My initial move to dislike him came out of what seemed, at first, to be a playful game at dressing up. He pulled a beautiful silk deel from out of the guest ger dresser and insisted that I try it on. Not thinking it more than a bit of fun, I obliged and we photographed our little Mongolian family. We danced around a little while his girlfriend looked on, and then he carelessly announced that I should wear the robe to the festival on the next day.  His poor maligned girlfriend’s face dropped on the other side of the ger when she realized that any thoughts that she may have had of wearing her Sunday best to the opening ceremony next day had just been blown out of the water by Jagga’s thoughtlessness. I promptly took it off and declined the offer.

On our first morning, as we prepared to leave the homestead for the Nadaam horse race, he scammed 30,000 togs out of us for a magic taxi.  It had the ability to shape shift between a Prado, a tractor and numerous other vehicles in between. The original plan was to go on horseback, but Jagga decided that the ‘maasheen’ would be better.

At the village Nadaam, we enjoyed the festivities, accompanied here and there by the pregnant girlfriend and random machine drivers. We would run between the wrestling competition and horse race, occasionally popping into a fast food ger to indulge in Kosher (deep fried meat patties) and airag (fermented mares milk).  Jagga snaked off at every opportunity. Most evenings were spent going from distillery to distillery looking for our vagabond guide. He would eventually be found rosy cheeked and dishevelled, helped into the car by whoever happened to be our taxi driver on the day.

We were under no illusions that the extra bills we’d handed over, outside of the eyeshot of his parents, were funding his vodka habit, and our multi-formed taxi was really the good will of locals that his long suffering girlfriend had managed to persuade.

One of the blessed joys of the extreme language barrier that we found ourselves up against, was the licence it gave me to call him a ‘dirty, thieving little bollix!’ to his face. All I had to do was fake a smile mid abuse, and he’d nod his head and give the thumbs up.  One of the few moments we were in agreement I think.

Our last evening at the homestead was spent playing frisbee.  The whole family and a visiting neighbour joined in the fun, and we enjoyed a good hour around dusk playing and laughing.   At one point, I rugby tackled one of my travel companions over a playful insult he had sent my way.  Our hosts were very impressed thinking I had picked up a trick or two watching the wrestling matches at Nadaam.  Instead of trying to explain the whole ‘rugby playing’ thing, I simply mimicked the Eagle dance of a victorious wrestler while they pointed and laughed.

Our departure from the Byambatogohs next morning was filled with hugs, kisses and badly pronounced Mongolian Thank You’s. Both Mama and Papa were there to wave us off, while Patrick chased after the machine. As we drove away from the two gers in the middle of nowhere, I was amused by the sight of our friend Jagga pulling himself out from under some blankets beside the fuel pile at the back of the family ger . The Mongolian version of ‘being in the dog house’ clearly translated to ‘sleeping by the dung heap.’ My last and abiding image of Jagga, is of his pregnant girlfriend chucking a wicker basket at him. When it fell to the ground, he dutifully picked up and began to fill it with the contents of what had been his bed.