The Furgon UAZs are a very basic, but extremely tough and reliable, 4WD people mover. First rolling off Soviet assembly lines in the 1960s for use by the military, it is the T34 of people movers. Consequently, it is perfectly suited for touring Mongolia’s rugged, wild terrain.
My route took me north from Ulaanbaatar to Lake Khövsgöl on the Russian border via the Selenge River, then looped back anticlockwise via the hot springs at Tsenkher and Genghis Khan’s imperial capital at Kharakorum. Somewhere in excess of 2000 kilometres in total.
The Mongolian steppe is epic, strange and beautiful. A series of elongated, grassy valleys and plains, ringed by mountains and linked end-to-end by passes, are sparsely dotted by the white gers of nomadic families. In the lee of the mountains, more permanent but currently unused wooden structures are made ready for sheltering animals through the harsh winter.
No wonder this is nomad country; horse country.
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Naadam, the most important public festivals, consist of horse racing, archery and wrestling competitions. By sheer dumb luck my visit coincided with the annual National Naadam Festival.
On a high plateau, Neolithic “deer stone” monoliths (so named after their carvings) reference the long ancestral prehistory of human occupation and struggle for survival in these lands.
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In the more temperate regions, groves of larch, birch, willow and pine nestle in the gullies, surrounded by fields of spectacular wildflowers, some familiar some not.
Mongolia has a very old musical heritage involving throat-singing and string instruments such as the Morin Khuur (horse head fiddle) and the Tovshuur and Hu (guitars). If the melodies, while distinctively Eastern, seem familiar it is because they tend to follow pentatonic harmonic structures, as most Western rock music does.
Incidentally, there is a rock band out of Ulaanbaatar that uses electric versions of traditional instruments called The Hu. Clever!
Some years ago, the gentleman with the haunting voice playing the Tovshuur in the video asked his daughter why she was crying. Evidently, she was upset by his boozing and chain smoking, and afraid for his health and the family’s future. Deeply moved, he quit drinking and smoking on the spot. He also rediscovered his Buddhist devoutness and went vegan …the latter no easy practice in this part of the world.
That curious little critter is not a Siberian hamster but a Siberian squirrel.
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