On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  At one stage, Attila Cseppento, the owner of the yurt camp, pulled me aside with a gleam in his eye that was definitely part pálinka. “Tim Cook—first night of travel you sleep in yurt tent. Last night of travel you sleep in Hungary, yurt tent.” He looked at me now, almost ready to cry, but shook his head slowly. “Beautiful, it’s beautiful.”

  Epilogue

  September 22, 2007, the day I rode into the national heritage park at Opusztaszer in Hungary, was one of the most fulfilling of my life. More than three years after setting off from Mongolia, I had achieved my dream to ride by horse across the Eurasian steppe to the Danube. There to share the moment with me were my mother, my brother, friends old and new, representatives of cultures across the steppe, and of course my family of animals.

  That same day, however, also marked the beginning of a process of what I could best describe as the surrender and shedding—not always voluntarily—of much of what had come to define my life on the steppe.

  During my time in Hungary I had thought long and hard about what I would do with the horses after I had finished. I’d considered giving them to Peter Kun or Tamas Petrasko, but in the end I was persuaded by a suggestion from János Loska that I give them to an orphanage in the small village of Tiszadob. I had stayed at the orphanage en route, and the director, Aranka Illes, explained that they had been trying to set up a riding program for the orphans for many years. At the end ceremony I handed over the horses to Aranka and several children who had traveled to greet me. The next morning the horses were loaded into horse trailers and driven off, and I was left with a now useless array of horse tack.

  It had never been within the realm of possibility to bring the horses back home to Australia, and so I had long expected this day. I had, however, harbored hopes of bringing Tigon home with me, so it was somewhat devastating to discover that getting him into Australia from Hungary would cost around $10,000—a nearly impossible sum of money at the best of times, but particularly at that point because I was broke. Additionally, Tigon would need to become a resident of the European Union before being eligible to apply for a permit to enter Australia’s strict quarantine, and that would require him to stay in Hungary for a minimum of another six months. János took Tigon home, generously offering to keep him at his horse farm.

  Six weeks later I put my bags down at my mother’s country house in Gippsland, Australia, and entered a world where I savored being in familiar surrounds and close to my family. Still, a part of me felt in exile, and I found it difficult to understand the relevance of all I had learned and witnessed. I realized almost at once that readapting to life in Australia, particularly without my animals, would be much more difficult than the challenges of being a novice horseman on the steppe. The hardest stage was yet to come. Little more than a month after arrival, several of my journals—which I had cradled across the length of the steppe—were stolen from my car in St. Kilda, Melbourne, outside my sister’s apartment. A campaign of appeals through media and with leaflets and reward posters proved to be of no avail. The grief I felt from this is difficult to describe, but suffice it to say that I felt as if someone had robbed me of a part of my life.

  The months following the loss of these journals were a low I would never wish to return to, but they also became the turnaround point for me on the long path to reconciling a sense of the significance of the journey for myself, and, most important, beginning the catharsis of turning my experiences into something of relevance to other people.

  With editor Michael Balson, my brother Cameron, and producer Richard Dennison, I began working through 140 hours of video that I had taken over the course of the journey, with the aim of making a film series for television broadcast. Simultaneously, I began putting my journey in writing—a process that was tinged with grief in the beginning because of the loss of some of my journals. As I began to write, however, I found myself so immersed in my experiences that I only had to feel the contours of my saddle—which is still infused with the smell of my horses and the steppe—get a whiff of wood smoke, feel the breeze wash over the hills near my mother’s home, catch a glimpse of a horse in a paddock, or hear the sound of a distant dog barking to feel transported back to the steppe. Where diaries were lacking, I realized I was also fortunate to be able to draw on maps, photos, and other writings I had done at the time. Most important, I began reestablishing contact with many of the friends I had made across the steppe—both through correspondence and, in some cases, by visiting them. In the middle of 2008, I took up an impromptu request by World Expeditions to guide a trekking journey in Mongolia, at which time I met with many of the people who had seen me off in the saddle all those years before, including Gansukh Baatarsuren and Tseren Enebish and her family and relatives. It was to be the first of a series of trips to Mongolia I have undertaken annually since.

  Toward the end of 2008, things began progressing quickly. In the fall I found myself in North America after accepting an invitation as a presenter to attend a travel and adventure festival in Montreal. On the way back to Australia, I stopped over in Washington, D.C., from where I traveled to New York with literary agent Gail Ross and met with several publishers in Manhattan, among which were editor Anton Mueller and publisher George Gibson of Bloomsbury. Within a couple of months I had a contract.

  During 2008 I missed Tigon greatly and kept in close contact with János Loska about his well-being. There were many stories of mischief to be recounted, such as when Tigon followed a passing horseman for a day and took all the farm dogs with him. János lamented that he had had to send a taxi to pick them all up. True to form, Tigon became a father at János’s farm, and one of the offspring was given to the Tiszadob orphanage, where he was named Tigi.

  In November 2008, more than twelve months after I had last seen Tigon, I received a letter in the mail. It was from Australian Quarantine—a permit for Tigon to enter Australia had been granted! I was still without money, however, and the catch was that it would expire within a month. I happened to be in Perth at the time, staying with my friends Rob and Rachel Devling, and with the help of Mike Wood of Mountain Designs, I was able to arrange a special fund-raising presentation. The response was overwhelming, and with a sold-out theater of people who had come to listen to my story, $8,000 was raised in just one night.

  In early December 2008, Tigon was taken from Budapest to the Vienna airport by Hungarian veterinarian Edit Budik. From there he was flown to the United Arab Emirates and loaded onto an Australia-bound flight to Melbourne. On December 12, 2008, Tigon showed no hesitation as he came bounding out of his quarantine enclosure to meet me (although he then ignored me for half an hour while he chewed on a marrow bone that I had brought as a welcome gift). In January 2009, when I sat down in earnest to begin the long journey of writing the book, Tigon was by my side, and I was well on the way to bridging the great divide between life in Australia and life on the steppe.

  Since that time, much has happened, both for me and for the many people on the steppe with whom I still share a close connection.

  In August 2009, I made the first of several trekking journeys back to the Kharkhiraa-Turgen mountain region of western Mongolia, in cooperation with Tseren Enebish and World Expeditions. There, we hired Dashnyam as our head camelier and guide to make the same trek I had done with him over the high pass. It was a wonderful experience to reunite with Dashnyam and his family and tell him news of my journey to the Danube. Dashnyam’s circumstances had changed little since I had said farewell to him on a cold autumn morning in 2004. He was still living a marginal existence with very few animals to support his many children. I had hoped to see the horse I had gifted him, Saartai Zeerd, but he explained that the horse had become old and his family had eaten him the previous winter. More recently, his one and only other horse had been stolen, and so he was all but horseless. With the help of the trekkers on the initial 2009 journey, we raised enough tips additional to his salary for him to buy a new horse—and in later years a second horse and a camel. Since
then, Dashnyam has become a grandfather—his daughter, whom I had photographed in 2004 (see image section of the first photo insert), gave birth to a boy in the spring of 2012.

  Two other important things happened for me in the summer of 2009. After many trials and tribulations, I received news that ZDF, the national broadcaster of Germany, acting on behalf of the ARTE channel, had granted funding for a three-hour documentary series about my journey. ABC in Australia soon followed with their support of a version of the series, and I spent much of the next year working on the film, which was titled On the Trail of Genghis Khan (Auf den Spuren der Nomaden in German). The series has since been broadcast in several countries and languages.

  The other important event was that I met a young Mongolian woman, Khorloo Batpurev, with whom I fell in love. I would spend the summers of 2010 and 2011 in Mongolia, guiding my annual trip and writing my book in Ulaanbaatar, where I shared an apartment with Khorloo. Since then, we have remained mostly in Australia—Khorloo concentrating on her studies, and me on my book.

  During the writing, I have followed with great interest the unfolding circumstances of the lives of many whom I met on the steppe. None are more important to me than Aset from Zhana Zhol, who accompanied me in the winter of 2004–5, and Baitak and his friends in Akbakai.

  It wasn’t until a year after Aset traveled with me in Kazakhstan that he told me he had spent fourteen years of his life in jail. At the age of just twenty, while working as a taxi driver, he had been involved in a brawl and accidentally broken the jaw of a policeman. He hadn’t mentioned it at the time because he feared it would scare me off. Since my journey with him, Aset has moved from the village of Zhana Zhol into the city of Oskemen, where he lives with his wife and disabled son, Guanz. Back in 2005 I was able to return the saddle that he sold to me, but it has to date gone unused in his new city life. Guanz is doing well, now studying at university. I have promised to send more updates about his former pup, Tigon, and hope to visit them again one day.

  Baitak and his wife, Rosa, left Akbakai in 2006. After selling his horses and home, Baitak bought a herd of sheep and goats and at the time of this writing runs a cafe on the main highway between Almaty and Astana. When Baitak left Akbakai, he took the alcoholics Grisha and Vitka with him. Vitka continued his ways with vodka and returned to Akbakai, where he died in the autumn of 2006 of a combination of malnutrition and alcohol poisoning; Baitak arranged a funeral for him. Grisha worked as a welder for some time but then went missing, and Baitak has not heard from him since.

  Madagol, the herder who looked after my horses that winter in Akbakai, never recovered from the broken leg he incurred in his fall, and he now lives in Moiynkum with his son and daughter-in-law. His wife died of cancer at age fifty-three in the winter of 2007–8.

  In terms of gold mining in Akbakai, Baitak tells me that things have since been cleaned up. In 2004 about half of the city’s three thousand residents apparently had been involved in gold theft. The mine is now in private hands and security guards are harder to buy out. He tells me that only 10 percent of people are now stealing, and that as a consequence, the black market price for gold has increased by more than 300 percent.

  In the years between the finishing of the trip and the publishing of this book, it is worth noting some of the political and economic changes across some countries of the Eurasian steppe through which I traveled. In the political sphere, Vladimir Putin stepped down as president of Russia in 2008 to become prime minister but has since returned to his role as president. Of the many “color revolutions” among former Soviet states, all have been reversed. In Kyrgyzstan, the Tulip Revolution, which ousted President Akayev in 2005, brought some semblance of stability for just five years until the 2010 so-called Second Kyrgyz Revolution, which was followed by violent interethnic conflict in which as many as two thousand people, mostly ethnic Uzbeks, were killed. In Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, from the Russian-leaning Party of Regions, came to power in 2010 and has reversed many of the reforms of his Orange Revolution predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko. Yulia Tymashenko, who at the time of my travels in Ukraine was in a bitter power struggle with both Yushchenko and Yanukovych, is currently languishing in prison after being found guilty of abuse of office when brokering the 2009 gas deal with Russia—a case that is widely regarded as politically motivated. In Kazakhstan, on the other hand, Nursultan Nazarbayev remains in power and has essentially become president for life after the parliament passed a constitutional amendment allowing him to run for president as many times as he chooses.

  These political changes I’ve outlined, as turbulent as some may have been, probably have not brought much influence to bear on the trajectory of life and culture of the steppe peoples as I encountered them during my journey (although in Ukraine it is true that the Ukrainian language and culture have undoubtedly been dealt a blow by Yanukovych’s pro-Russian policies). In Mongolia, however, it may be a different story, for it is a country that has recently seen, and will no doubt undergo, a dramatic economic shift.

  In 2001 copper and gold deposits worth an estimated $350 billion were discovered in the southern Gobi Desert. After many years of political wrangling and negotiation, an investment agreement on the development of the deposit—which is known as Oyu Tolgoi—was reached in 2009 between the government of Mongolia and the mining corporations Rio Tinto and Ivanhoe Mines (now Turquoise Hill). Commercial mining at Oyu Tolgoi, which is expected to be one of the five largest mines on the planet, is scheduled to begin operation in 2013, and at full production will provide an estimated 30 percent of GDP for Mongolia.

  Oyu Tolgoi is not the only big mine under development in Mongolia. Tavan Tolgoi, also in the Gobi, is thought to be one of the largest unexploited reserves of coking coal in the world. This is not to mention the untold smaller mining projects currently under way across the country.

  Given the scale of Mongolia’s resources, and the investment that has been poured into the mining sector in recent times, it is not hard to imagine that a transformation must now course through Mongolian society. Nonetheless, the economic statistics are mind-boggling. In 2011 Mongolia was the fastest-growing economy in the world—the GDP had increased from $1 billion in 2001 to $11 billion just a decade later. Even compared to 2004 when I set off on my journey, the Ulaanbaatar of 2013 is unrecognizable. At rush hour, the city’s roads are jammed with a chaotic sprawl of traffic, among which one cannot avoid the spectacle of fleets of luxury vehicles. The Soviet-era apartments that once loomed large over the city’s suburbs are fast being outnumbered by new developments, which include gated communities and multistory office blocks in the city center—many of which have been built in anticipation of the mining production to come.

  With a boom of this kind, it comes as no surprise that there are many allegations of corruption against Mongolia’s politicians, complaints about the lack of transparency of deals with multinational mining companies, and rumors of foreign companies taking advantage of Mongolia’s inexperience in dealing with such large-scale projects. Then there is the problem of high inflation and the growing wealth gap between rich and poor, and questions over the environmental impact of mining. For one, the scale of mining being developed requires vast quantities of water—a fragile resource in the Gobi and one that is key to the survival of nomads.

  Much of what is happening in Mongolia resembles the early stages of Kazakhstan’s oil boom, only in a country with a population of just 3.2 million—many of whom are still nomadic—the effect is bound to be more profound. And this inevitably raises the question of what this will bring to bear on the nomad’s economy and culture. No matter how ethically mining is managed, there is, of course, a very real risk in the long term of the marginalization of nomadic life and, ultimately, its slow demise.

  Whatever may await in the future, though, for many, such as Dashnyam in western Mongolia, the fast pace of change in Ulaanbaatar is worlds away. And at the present time the constitution of Mongolia still prohibits the privatization of grazin
g lands—that is, with the exception of mining leases and areas suitable for crop farming. For the time being, the ancient rhythms of steppe life that revolve around the horse reign supreme in the Mongolian countryside.

  Returning to notes of a more personal nature, in 2006, the year before I reached the Danube, Kathrin Nienhaus, with whom I had begun the journey, married Frank Bender. We remained in contact, and Kathrin has been a great support, ranging from her counseling at the time of my father’s death to helping me trawl through details of our time together in Mongolia for the purposes of this book.

  It is also of note that Gansukh Baatarsuren, the young Mongolian man who helped me buy my first horses, splits his time between Mongolia, and Australia with his Australian partner, Sonya. We remain good friends.

  And a word about my animals in Hungary. In the years since I left the horses at the orphanage, Aranka has kept in touch, sending photos and updates of the horses, and the orphans who have learned to ride on them. Not long after I left Hungary, the soccer oval was permanently transformed into the horses’ paddock. A measure of how long my book has been in the works, however, is that at the time of writing, Taskonir, who is now probably into his twenties, has been retired from work. Kok unfortunately suffered some kind of injury to one of his legs and is lame. Ogonyok continues to be ridden by the children. Tigi, Tigon’s progeny, unfortunately went walkabout one day and never returned.

  Lastly, plans for the future. I have many dreams of traveling in northwest China, Central Asia, and even Australia, mostly on foot, with animals. I’m also interested in the origins and migrations through time of the Roma people (Gypsies), and on a different note, I dream of writing a children’s book about Tigon and visiting my horses. I have begun a program of taking Australian students to Mongolia and raising money for the school in the village of Khovd, and I hope to continue this.