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Crossing the Kharkiraa with Three Horses and a Camel
Article courtesy of Tim Cope – www.timcopejourneys.com
Reintroduction to the Wild
I spent the day preparing things, getting to know Dashnim’s family, and using the rare time to rest and write diary. Just on dark Dashnim arrived with a camel. He had travelled about 30km to find it. His five children rushed out to greet him in the dying light. I waited for Dashnim to stake the camel before approaching. A plan of mine had been brewing all day and it was time to tell him. Schneke, Kathrin’s horse, was starting to show signs of fatigue, and what’s more he had always hated rocks. The next section was to be particularly rough terrain. I wouldn’t ride him again, so it was time to say goodbye.
Through a satellite phone call with Tseren, she translated that I would like to give the horse to Dashnim for the equivalent of two days work (about $27). Dashnim was over the moon, and after I said goodnight I listened to him tell the news to his family in the ger. Schneke couldn’t have found a nicer home.
PHOTO FAMILY IN GER HERE
I woke in the morning with a sense of new and excitement. After some tea and bread in Dashnim’s ger we packed the camel and discovered that with some little adjustment my pack-saddle fitted this Bactrian breed of camel perfectly! The camel let out a melancholy cry as we tightened the straps and I got a whiff of its rotten breath. Its eyes and feet seemed enormous and overall made my packhorse, Rusty, seem tiny.
Then with the swing of the legs over the saddle we were off. The first part of the day we weaved our way up a canyon, criss-crossing the icy cold Kharkiraa river. It came rushing down the over smooth stones and boulders, a translucent blue. Leafy aspen trees grew along the banks just beginning to turn yellow. A few hours brought us into a wide rocky valley where we paused for lunch. Around us peaks rose blocking out much of the sky.
Soon there appeared a camel train. There were about ten camels in all, each packed with around 250kg of gear steadily making their path downwards. It was a family of Khotont people migrating to the plains for Winter. The Khotont people are a tribe numbering about one or two thousand and live primarily in the Kharkiraa. Their history is very murky. No one really knows where they came from or when. They have adopted many Mongolian customs, but their language is different, and their facial features differ from Mongolians. The color of the train was dazzling. The women leading on horseback wore silky deles and colourful headscarves. Sitting in the cane baskets on the first camel were two small children, their eyes peering out between pots and pans and pieces of Ger tent. When they stopped to greet us the camel went to its knees, and the women pointed at one of the cane baskets laiden with rugs. It wasn’t until some sheepskin was taken away that I realised that deep within this cocoon was a newborn baby. Just its face was visible, eyes gazing up through a frame of fur to the sky. I was taken by its calm, captured expression. What a world it had been born into.
A little further up this deep valley the pyramid peaks of the Kharkiraa cut into the sky. High above, glaciers clung to almost vertical slopes. The air cooled and in the afternoon light the dark shapes of ancient ‘Kurgans’ and ‘Turkic’ grave markers dotted the otherwise wind-cleaned steppe. Dashnim suggested that in one Kurgan about 45 people would have been buried along with horses. Around these ancient sites I always had the sense that the people of today are aware of their history but do not understand it. The history of people in Mongolia lives on in the clothes, songs, expressions and way of life. Nomads live from day to day, with the changing of the winds, and looking into the future, let alone the past is largely irrelevant. This valley had obviously been populated for thousands of years, but how much had really changed in that time?
We camped in a remote gully with a family of nomads tending to a large herd of camels. I spent a couple of hours repairing Dashnim’s basic tent. The zippers were broken and he had been using safety pins to keep the snowstorms from blasting inside (without success). He was euphoric once it had been fixed, and then pointed to the huge holes in the floor- burnt by a misused gas stove on a previous trip. He would have to cope with that. Throughout the night I was woken by the howling of wolves, movement of animals, and inevitably the sound of gunshots. Hunting wolves, marmot, fox, and even snow leopard are standard practice despite Kharkiraa’s status as a national park.
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