It was cloudy and
windy when I got up and left the ger this morning, so rather than try
to take photos around the camp, I walked up the hill behind,
accompanied by the two camp dogs, where I got a great view over the
surrounding hills and valleys. Breakfast, when I came back down,
consisted of the ubiquitous milky tea, filter coffee, and a slightly
odd concoction of 'yellow rice', flour, milk and dried goat meat.
Suffice to say, I don't think it's going to catch on.
After breakfast, the
girls fed the lambs and kids and then took turns riding one of the
camp horses. It was Sarah's first time on a horse, and she didn't
really enjoy the experience, getting off as soon as she could, but
Zoe, having been horse riding a few times at her friends' birthday
parties, was much more enthusiastic and went for a ride out to the
herd of goats and sheep with the ranger's husband.
Then, it was time to
leave, and after a group photo with our host family, and the
distribution of some token gifts (loom-band bracelets and some toy
trains that the girls were given on a German train), we hit the dirt
road again. After a while, we made it back onto tarmac, but not for
long, as Nyama took us off onto another dirt track. This led us first
to some unusual burial monuments – in this case some raised stone
slabs, rather than the simple rock pile that we had seen behind the
camp – and then into some more forested countryside. This was a
shortcut that Nyama had improvised, but as he was just heading in the
general direction of our ultimate destination, without a sat nav, GPS
or map of any sort, we were at the mercy of the often near-indistinct
tracks across the hills and through the forests, so progress was
rather slow and meandering.
Eventually, we
stopped beside another patch of forest for lunch. While Tuul and
Nyama set up the chairs, tables and food, and Kate and the girls
kicked the football around, I went for a walk through the trees.
Spotting something blue ahead, I walked a bit deeper into the wood,
but then I saw some movement and noticed a man sitting beside a tree.
Given that we were in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, I
quickly backtracked to the car and told the others what I had seen.
Nyama was clearly intrigued (slightly nervous?) and he asked me to
lead him to the man, who turned out to be accompanied by another.
Nyama is a very friendly, avuncular fellow and he quickly put the men
at ease, which was probably a good thing as they were illegal
loggers.
After lunch, we
drove down the hill and eventually reached a ger camp. But as we
approached, it was clear that there was only one ger there, which
made us a little nervous. It got worse when we met the family that
lived in it, as it seemed to have quite a few members. As Tuul and
Nyama spoke to them, it emerged that they weren't expecting us –
they thought that we would be coming in a few days, so their other
ger was somewhere else - but they said that they would still be able
to put us up.
We all went inside
their ger, where they served us milky tea and handed around a bowl of
pale-coloured pellets, which Nyama said were dried curds, a bit like
dried yoghurt, and very nice. We grabbed one each and popped them
into our mouths. Eeeeeewwwww. Definitely an acquired taste, like hard
nuggets of sour milk. When you crunch them up, they get stuck to your
teeth, so the taste lingers that much longer.
I started to
interview the head of the household, but wasn't really getting
anywhere, when Tuul abruptly cut short the interview and went
outside. After a while, she came back in and told me quietly that we
had the wrong family. We quickly made our apologies, jumped back into
the van and went in search of the right family.
Luckily, we didn't
have far to go and we were soon being greeted by people who were
clearly expecting us (they had even dug a new pit toilet in our
honour). They showed us to our ger, provided us with some non-milky
tea and generally made us feel very welcome indeed. Once we had settled
in, we joined the family in the animal pens, where everyone was hard
at work reuniting the lambs and kids with their mothers. Each day,
they send the adults to feed in the hills, while the babies stay
behind in the pens. Each parent and offspring has a piece of
identical cloth tied to it to enable them to be reunited again in the
evening, but with numerous animals jostling about in the pens, this
was still much more easily said than done. It was made even more
onerous by the fact that the back pen had a wooden roof that was just
low enough that I bashed my head on it with tedious regularity.
When all of the baby
animals were happily paired up with their mothers, sucking away
vigorously on various teats, we retired to the main ger. As we sat
talking, Tuul called me over to see a type of 'fly' that caused the
family some trouble. Not a fly, but a very large tick – and I soon
spotted another crawling on the cap of another family member. As we
had decided not to pay the ludicrous fee for getting inoculated
against tick-borne encephalitis, this was a rather alarming
discovery, but thankfully, none of us got bitten.
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