by Alex Tinson
So here they were, foundation members of the ancient explorers’ club, as I thought of them. John and Jasper were naturally keen to see the work we were doing at the Hilli research centre. By this stage we had moved well beyond embryo transfer and had also produced the world’s first frozen embryo camel calves. We were also close to two more world firsts: pre-sexed embryo calves and identical twin camel calves.
John and Jasper were staggered at the level of technology we were working with and the evident affluence of our surrounds. I think they might even have slightly resented the fact that all this highly advanced work was in aid of breeding faster racing camels.
But it was evident to John and Jasper that together we could work to regenerate the stocks of Mongolia’s critically endangered Bactrian camel. And that’s what we planned to do.
If you stay around the desert frontier town of Al Ain long enough, you are sure to meet extraordinary characters like John Hare and Jasper Evans. John and Jasper are examples of that very rare breed of westerner who turns their back on a conventional life and adopts the ways of the camel, holusbolus. It is tempting to label them eccentric, but that’s not fair. For them a camel is not just an animal. It is a way of life.
When you journey on a camel you unhook completely from all that is modern. Why would you bother with digital-age gadgets when you can take yourself off and immerse yourself in the most exotic parts of the world, areas which are inaccessible to human-made machines? You slow down. You see things missed from a car or a tourist bus whizzing by. It’s just you, your thoughts and the rhythmic motion of the camel. Nothing else. In truth, most people can’t handle that challenge. Above all, life atop a camel can give you a fabulous sense of independence from the props of modern life.
Of all the big characters I have met simply by being in the world of camels in Al Ain, the most remarkable is Michael Asher, another out of the great English adventurer mould. Michael has the distinction of having done more camel kilometres than anyone else in the world.
Michael came to Al Ain because he was writing a book about Wilfred Thesiger, the grandaddy of the British breed of desert explorers and Arabists. In the 1940s, in the company of the Bedouin, Thesiger made the incredibly arduous camel trek across the vast expanse of Arabian Gulf desert known as the Empty Quarter. This feat earned him the unending admiration of a young Sheikh Zayed, who later, as UAE president, honoured Thesiger with the adopted name ‘Mubarak bin London’, meaning ‘the blessed one from London’.
But even though Sheikh Zayed, as tribal leader, had given Thesiger protection to travel through his lands, there was one tribe, the Al Dhuru, who had wanted to kill Thesiger as he made his crossing. Almost fifty years after Thesiger’s crossing, Michael Asher wanted to know if I could help him make contact with the Al Dhuru tribe. He was planning to follow in Thesiger’s footsteps across the Empty Quarter and wanted to rent half a dozen of my camels to make the trip.
Michael’s infatuation with the camel began after he had served with the police anti-terrorist unit in Northern Ireland. Disillusioned with what he’d seen, he decided to make a big change. He moved to the Sudan in the late 1970s to work as a volunteer teacher and, while visiting a market, saw a camel for the first time. Straightaway he bought it and rode by himself for 1500 kilometres to join up with a camel train and make the journey to Cairo on the ancient caravan route known as the Forty Days Road.
Following that Michael lived for years at a time with Arabic-speaking tribes in the north of Africa and continued to make extreme camel treks. It gives you an idea of how much the camel was part of his life that five days after he was married he took his wife, the daughter of an Italian tank commander, to cross the Sahara Desert east to west by camel. He wrote a book about it called Impossible Journey: Two against the Sahara, which just about sums up what it must have been like.
Michael can trace a spiritual lineage that goes back to TE Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’: British men who become captivated by Arabia and its world of survival and honour, centred around the camel. Indeed Michael Asher has written his own account of Lawrence’s life as an Arabist.
Like Wilfred Thesiger, Michael shunned what the modern world has to offer. He didn’t own a car—he didn’t even know how to drive. He just wasn’t interested. He came to believe that the industrialised world was necessarily a destructive force, sweeping away smaller civilisations, their cultures and their ways of living. It wasn’t just an opinion or a position for the sake of a good argument. He lived and breathed his belief, formulated on top of a camel.
I was able to help Michael meet with the tribal leader he was seeking. We drove out to meet Owais, who lived a hundred or so kilometres from Al Ain in the deep desert. Owais was a very influential camel man, part of the older generation who had grown up hunting with a falcon from the top of a camel and defending his territory with a gun. He was a very tough, imposing character, but also quick with a laugh. Owais was perhaps in his late thirties when Wilfred Thesiger was crossing through Al Dhuru territory, and about seventy when Michael quizzed him in fluent Arabic on his recollections.
I had massive respect for Michael; he was a singular human being. Having said that, I doubt that many Emiratis themselves would go along with his or Thesiger’s view that modernity is a bad thing for tribal societies. Thesiger predicted that the discovery of oil and the wealth that flowed from it would destroy the freedom of the Arabs to travel the deserts, to pick up their few possessions and go in any direction they desired. But if you speak to the Emiratis, I don’t know if they would agree with that. I suspect they wouldn’t. They’d say Thesiger was a dreamer and that he was projecting his romantic ideas on them.
The Emiratis have a way of looking at this through the lens of religion. They often say: we struggled for thousands of years and now Allah has rewarded us. Having lived for so long without the benefits of electricity or good medical care or air-conditioning, the Emiratis I know don’t want to go back to the past.
I know too that I couldn’t do what Michael has done, as much as I admire him for it. I rode a camel for a few days during the Great Australian Camel Race, just to get a sense of how tough it was for the competitors to make the three-month trek. I was left sore and limping, and glad to get off.
I knew my place and it wasn’t on top of a camel for any extended time. It was far more likely to be behind, in front of, next to or leaning over it—wherever I needed to be to do my job as a vet.
And to be quite honest, I prefer to make my epic voyages in the comfort of a car or a plane.
Seventeen
Into the Gobi
No desert is easy, but the Gobi Desert of China and Mongolia is something else entirely. It is one of the least hospitable places on Earth. Now I was finally set to embark on my mission there: to put our improvised equipment to the test in harsh conditions outside the lab, and to secure access to a herd of endangered wild Bactrian camels, located on the border of Mongolia and China.
My new friend John Hare had documented his incredibly arduous journey across the Gobi in a book called The Lost Camels of Tartary, which I read to prepare for my trip. One small detail stuck in my mind: one of the great hazards was said to be the toilet pit, where the extreme cold freezes urine, forming an icy, pointed spike. So if you happened to lose your balance and topple over in the act, you risked being impaled. Or so the legend goes.
The great thing about following the camel trail, of course, is that it takes you deep inside a society. It gives you a chance to see firsthand the customs and ways of isolated populations. I was looking forward to that as much as the challenge of bringing our breeding technology to a new frontier.
I had kept in touch with John and his ancient explorer mate, Jasper Evans, since they’d visited Al Ain, and also caught up with them at a camel conference in Beijing. There was the exciting prospect that we might travel together through Mongolia and start some programs to breed up the numbers of wild Bactrians.
Of course you can’t simply waltz in to
a foreign country and get started. You need permission from government and in a developing country like Mongolia there are a host of international NGOs working on agricultural, farming and wildlife programs. The idea was that John might co-ordinate our work through these organisations, but the bureaucracy and the paperwork proved to be difficult and time-consuming. I tend to be impatient to get things done so I decided to cut through the barriers and work directly with some well-placed government and university contacts I’d made. I might not have followed the rules, but it meant I could actually get something done.
There had been a huge international hullaballoo in recent years about the giant pandas being under threat. Yet at the same time the number of wild Bactrian camels had dwindled to the point where they were even rarer than pandas. This didn’t quite capture the world’s attention in the same way that cute bamboo-chomping pandas did, but the camel was in many respects more important, particularly to the local population, as a means of survival. Mongolians use the camel for transport, and to produce fuel, hair, milk and even meat in extreme circumstances.
Though the mission was to help save the camel, in this story it was the Bactrian that saved my life, literally. In fact, I nearly perished twice.
The capital city of Mongolia is Ulaanbaatar, and what a dreary, desolate and desperate place it was. ‘Ulaanbaatar’ means ‘red hero’ in Mongolian and that gives you a good idea of its heritage. Mongolia has a border with Russia on one side and China on the other. As the locals put it, they lived between the bear and the dragon; the challenge was not to get eaten alive by either of them. Mongolia was under the control of Soviet-era Russia for much of the twentieth century and this was reflected in the severe grey blocks of flats that had come to dominate the capital once the Soviet urban planners got to work in the 1950s.
Like other Soviet satellite states, Mongolia staged its own uprisings in 1989 and 1990. This led to democratic elections and a change to a market economy. Ulaanbaatar was a city still very much in transition year. Vast parts of it were so poor that families lived in the underground sewer network to escape the brutal freezing temperatures and the wind-whipped city streets. That’s all changed now; today you’ll even find Louis Vuitton stores there. But when I visited, it was nearly impossible to find a cappuccino, which is my ready reckoner for how remote a place is. After much searching I found one café that served a dismal, insipid cup.
Of all the places in the world to kick off with the HEF Foundation, this must surely have been the toughest.
The camel breeding season in Mongolia is winter, when temperatures have been recorded as low as minus sixty degrees Celsius. This would be the ultimate test for the new techniques I had developed to do embryo transfer in the wild, because at that temperature the embryo would instantly freeze.
So for this first trip the aim was more modest: I decided to conduct initial tests of how embryo transfer worked in the field not in the coldest winter months of December and January but in April, when conditions are not so harsh. One step at a time.
My main contact was a Mongolian man called Batsuri, who I had come to know through John Hare. Batsuri had a fine sense of humour and spoke good English, which was unusual in Mongolia. By day he was employed as a scientist at the Mongolian State University of Agriculture near Ulaanbaatar, but he had a special passion to preserve the two-hump camel and luckily he had the means to pursue it. Batsuri’s brother, who had apparently done well by owning shares in a vodka factory—what else?—agreed that embryo transfer could make a real difference and was prepared to put some money behind it.
Most importantly, with Batsuri as a partner in this venture I could cut through the red tape and get down to the real work of saving the camels. Batsuri had access to a herd of domesticated Bactrians we could experiment on before applying our techniques on the wild Bactrians. In the months before my arrival I had been in constant touch with Batsuri. I sent over vials of drugs and a very long list of instructions so that he could superovulate some of the females and also prepare a herd of surrogates to be ready to receive an embryo transfer. It was all timed so that I could check the results with this species of camel and carry out some embryo transfers in the field.
I spent a night or two in Batsuri’s apartment in a grey Soviet high-rise before setting off to a farm a day’s drive out of town, where our experimental Bactrian herd was kept. To describe it as a ‘farm’ is generous, if not downright misleading. It was, in fact, no more than an area of flat, stony desert completely devoid of vegetation, except for the odd small desert bush. The owner of this patch of dirt was a man called Poonsack, who was known locally as ‘Rich Poonsack’, for no other reason that in this desperately poor country he owned something, no matter how modest. As well as a large herd of camels, Poonsack ran a small number of sheep and dozens of goats.
Aged about sixty, Poonsack was in every way the traditional Mongolian farmer: physically tough from a life lived at the mercy of the elements, a real Genghis Khan character, and skilled in the ways of survival. When it came to slaughtering a sheep, he produced one of the most extraordinary manoeuvres I’ve witnessed. He rolled the animal onto its back, made a quick incision under the sternum, reached in through the abdominal cavity and grabbed the sheep’s heart and held it. The sheep barely moved.
Poonsack had never visited the capital, Ulaanbaatar. He had had very little exposure at all to the modern world, yet it would turn out that he was quite partial to a night of karaoke, helped along with some vodka, of course.
Up close, the two-humped Bactrian camels were remarkable looking animals, much bigger than the racing camels I’d been working with. They had developed a thick woolly coat as an adaptation to the extreme cold. Altogether it gave them an enchanting air. Being a pack animal, they were more like the wild camels of the Australian outback. And of course it would not have been possible to open up the Silk Road trade routes that shaped much of Eurasia without the strength and endurance qualities of this breed.
We unloaded the box loads of ultrasound equipment, petri dishes, flushing fluid and flushing lines that I’d brought over from Al Ain and set up my new ‘lab’ in Poonsack’s ger, a small, round Mongolian tent similar to a yurt. I balanced my trusty microscope on a wobbly old wooden table and set down a milk can behind it, which would be my lab stool for the duration. It was indeed a long way from the multimillion dollar research facilities of Hilli.
Batsuri’s idea was that ultimately we would collect embryos from the endangered, wild Bactrian camels that were located a couple of days’ travel away, and bring them in for transfer to the domesticated camels at the farm. Wolves posed a huge risk to Bactrian calves born in the wild so this place offered a safe environment. And it was a patch of Mongolia that we could control for our work, without the need for permits and permissions.
As a first step, it was essential to get to know the physiology of the Bactrian. Were there any differences to the Arabian or Australian camels I was familiar with? Even minor variations in the shape or size of reproductive organs would have an impact on how you could transfer embryos or flush them. So once again, I would spend a large part of my time at Poonsack’s farm with my arm stuck up the rear of a camel, getting a feel, as it were, for what we had to work with. There were a lot of things to consider. Would we need insulation around the collection tube, for example, given that we would be moving embryos and fluid from the body heat of the camel to the minus degrees Celsius of the air temperature? The main aim, though, was to see if the superovulating drugs had worked and if there were any embryos fit for transfer. Back in Al Ain, this was a routine procedure. We had ‘crushes’ to immobilise the camel, with its rear towards me as I set to work from a stool. There was no such luxury at Poonsack’s farm. We immobilised the camel by securing it with ropes while in its natural resting position: balanced on the knee pads of its front and back legs and its large sternal breast plate. A couple of the local boys held on tight, one at the rear and one at the head to stop it turning around. There was a consta
nt threat of sandstorms so we positioned the whole operation behind an old stone wall, which would hopefully give us shelter. Then the tricky bit: with the camel in its resting position rather than standing up, there wasn’t enough drop for the length of tube which syphons fluids from the uterus. The answer was to dig a metre-deep hole behind the camel, drop the end of the syphoning tube in there and have a helper lying on the ground with arms extended into the hole with tube in hand. Another helper stood behind the camel squeezing flushing fluids into its rear. Meanwhile, I was on my hands and knees, with one arm extended into the camel, on the top of its cervix.
As a gerry-built solution it was quite a sight, with locals hanging on to a nervous camel and two of us grovelling around on the dirt around a big hole in the ground, all against a backdrop of Mongolian gers, fences made of rocks and dozens of goats wandering around.
We had successfully improvised a way to collect embryos and transfer them. And that was quite an achievement. Examining the embryos under the microscope, it was obvious that they were not as robust as they needed to be, so though we’d proven that you could superovulate a Bactrian there were still improvements to be made.
After close to a week at Poonsack’s farm, I was satisfied that the basic technology worked, with some minor tweaks here and there. Now it was time for the second leg of the Mongolian mission: a two-day drive to the south-west of the country near the Chinese border, where I could see the wild Bactrian camel for the first time and talk with the local authorities about how we could breed up their numbers.
Batsuri and I returned to Ulaanbaatar and joined up with two professors from the University of Agriculture and three younger men brought on board to help with driving and the heavy lifting. We got two vehicles—one a serviceable Nissan, the other a slightly dilapidated Russian-built model—and set off.
Twenty kilometres out of the capital the bitumen ended abruptly; our link to even the most basic of civilisation was cut. For the rest of our trip we would not see another vehicle. Or even a single tree. It was flat, stony dirt all the way—like being on the moon.