The Desert Vet

by Alex Tinson

  I had absolutely no idea where we were going. There was no GPS. There were no signposts. You had to navigate by landmarks, such as a low hill in the distance. Sometimes there was no road at all, just the open plains of the desert. Any car that had been through left its own tracks, so there were tyre markings in every direction. We relied utterly on the knowledge of the local drivers, which was fine up to a point.

  The weather in April should have been sensational. It was the very end of the winter season and, while you might still get the odd cold snap, it should have been nothing like the frigid conditions of December and January, when the country is largely snowbound, turning this region into a no-go area for outsiders.

  At the end of day one of our journey there was a dramatic change. Off in the distance we could see a horrific black storm, and unfortunately it was heading towards us. We were in wide open spaces, with absolutely no protection and still some distance from any town. The Mongolians in the car were pretty cool customers, but I could feel a sense of unease building. You didn’t need to understand what they were saying to know this was getting serious. Before long it became urgent.

  We were still a couple of kilometres short of a place called Bulgan, a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, when the storm started to hit. This wasn’t rain: it was a black sandstorm, with tonnes of sand and stones carried by an enormous wind. When the locals get worried, you always know it’s time for you to worry, too. All of a sudden, everything came flying almost horizontally at us. Sand and stone began to pelt against the windscreen as we made it into Bulgan. Quickly finding a hut where we could take shelter, we abandoned the cars and hustled inside.

  There we spent two full days holed up with little else to do but play cards, drink vodka and hope like hell that our far from robust lodgings wouldn’t get blown away.

  As the black storm abated, we emerged to find that the town’s one and only public toilet had been blown clean away. So now, in the tall tales and true of Mongolian adventures, I had my own toilet story to match John Hare’s.

  Some weeks later I came across an article in the New York Times that described this storm as the biggest and most devastating to have hit Mongolia in recorded history. The paper light-heartedly suggested that the force of the wind was so great that parts of Genghis Khan’s DNA would now be landing in New York.

  Having survived this near death experience, we cleaned off the cars, checked the engines for sand damage and continued on. What we’d experienced was dangerous, but worse was to come.

  We were now four days into our journey, and heading towards the Altai Mountains in the Central Gobi; this is where the borders of Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan meet and is about as isolated as you can get. We were at the foothills of the mountains and beginning our ascent when, again, an uneasy feeling started to build in the car.

  Our driver’s local knowledge had managed to get us this far, but now it had run out and we were out of luck. He had lost his bearings in the open plains and wasn’t sure if we were on the right road into the mountains. This might not have been a problem if it was the middle of the day and the weather was on our side. But that wasn’t the case.

  Before long we were again caught in a sandstorm. It was nowhere near as severe as the black sandstorm, but it was disorienting nevertheless. And now it was getting dark, and cold. Suddenly we were terribly exposed.

  It was at this point that one of those moments occurred that makes you weep with relief. Two small boys riding Bactrian camels emerged as silhouettes out of the dust haze and sand. One of the boys was probably eight years old. His little brother was probably six. Our unlikely rescuers offered to guide us back to their father who, in exchange for some petrol for his motorbike, guided us to the main track up into the Altai.

  We were on our way again, but now it was starting to snow. The temperature dropped, and it kept dropping the further we travelled up the mountain. We drove on and on into the gathering dark, with nowhere to stay and no idea where we were heading.

  We knew the position was dire, but at that stage we didn’t realise how close we were to complete disaster. Alarmingly, the temperature had now plummeted to minus thirty-five, and it was still only 6pm. We turned off the road and took a track leading who knew where.

  By this time the snowstorm had become a whiteout. And then the gods smiled on us: we stumbled upon a small, round tent, much like Poonsack’s ger. There was smoke streaming out the top: this was someone’s home. And here was our shelter.

  It turned out that no-one was home, but this was no time to stand on protocol. The seven of us piled into the empty hut and made it ours, a little like Goldilocks and the Three Bears comes to Mongolia.

  The ger had a radio, some beds set against the walls, plenty of blankets, and a fire burning in a small furnace in the centre of the hut. We warmed up and gratefully settled in as the wind howled outside and the snow hit in ever-increasing waves.

  At one in the morning there was a rustle at the door. The Mongolian family had returned from visiting nearby friends a couple of hundred metres away and a short dash through the storm. They were mildly surprised to find seven total strangers in their home but equally they were more than happy to share the space. In the desert, giving shelter to a stranger is a tradition—not just in Arabia, but the world over.

  I always make sure I carry a small supply of goodies to give away when I’m on camel business in a foreign land, so I had some Harry the Camel T-shirts on hand, plus vodka, the local liquor of choice. A picture of a camel tends to create an instant bond with people who rely on them for their survival. Mongolians are also big on singing, so there we were in a tiny hut in the middle of the night, skolling vodka and launching into song as the wind and snow whipped around outside.

  When we emerged the next morning it looked like we’d woken up at Mawson Station. There was a thick blanket of snow. And plonked down in the middle of it, calm as you please, were our host’s Bactrian camels, quite unaffected after a night exposed to the most severe weather imaginable. We later learned that fifteen Mongolians had died in the area that night. We were very nearly amongst them because, if we had been trapped in the car, we would have frozen to death.

  Our hosts gave us instructions on how to find a passable road for the final leg of our journey. Heading slightly north we negotiated a treacherous snow-covered track which led us to a rare bitumen road that had been cleared by the local authorities.

  We had finally reached our destination: a designated preservation area for the wild Bactrian camel, at the top end of the Gobi Desert in a border area with China. We had planned to be there in good time for a special event: the birth of a wild Bactrian baby. But what with getting lost, being hammered by unseasonal storms and nearly perishing twice, our putative two-day trip had become a five-day nightmare. We missed the birth by two hours. Nevertheless, I was able to get a good look at both the mother and the calf, enough to see that they were quite different in appearance to the domesticated Bactrians at Poonsack’s farm.

  The local authorities had done their best to preserve the dozen or so wild camels that roamed across the reserve, which was actually an unfenced expanse of desert. They had managed to stop them straying into China or further afield in Mongolia by putting out food. But that was the extent of it. Otherwise the camels lived wild and were at the mercy of wolves and other predators.

  Batsuri knew the local governor, who had arranged a series of meetings with the members of the local governing authority. He took the running on outlining our plans to breed up the numbers using embryo transfer with Poonsack’s camels. There’s no doubt the plan was feasible, but it was hard to get the message through that we could achieve the equivalent of twenty years of breeding in one year.

  Meetings, meetings and more meetings. We left with an understanding that the local authorities would consider the proposition and that Batsuri would be the link man. This wasn’t something that would be settled any time soon.

  I left reflecting that I had g
one to a lot of trouble for camels in my life, but I’d never before come this close to dying for the cause. If those two little kids hadn’t turned up on their big woolly two-humped camels, we would have been history.

  Eighteen

  Guns and politics

  When I redefined Harry the Camel’s mission as a global ambassador for conservation, I hadn’t reckoned on where exactly that might lead.

  Populations that rely on camels are typically in the world’s poorest areas, parts that can be lawless and dangerous. I’d had some experience of this while on a trip to Pakistan on official business for the Hilli Embryo Transfer Centre. We were in need of more camels to act as surrogates and Pakistan was a cheap source of supply and a place with close business links to the UAE. My trip on that occasion coincided with the 1997 election campaign, a fierce contest between the incumbent prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif.

  Going to the bathroom in the home of a well-to-do Pakistani, I couldn’t help but notice a Kalashnikov nestled between the basin and the bowl. And when my hosts left the house to go shopping they travelled with armed security, such was their fear of random attacks by Islamic extremists and/or political rivals.

  It was 2001 and because of Harry’s do-gooding, I found myself in another country and in yet another precarious position. This time I was huddled in the rear of a four-wheel drive on a single-lane road at 5500 metres travelling across the Khardung La pass, which winds through the Ladakh mountain range. Indian Army lorries were bearing down on us on their way to the Siachen Glacier, scene of the world’s highest-altitude conflict, between India and Pakistan. Looking down a sheer 1500-metre drop, I could see the carcasses of trucks and buses that had fatally misjudged the room they had to make way for oncoming traffic. Everything about this latest camel mission was a white-knuckle ride.

  The Khardung La pass was the only way to get to a herd of ninety Bactrian camels trapped in the Nubra Valley, one of the highest deserts in the world at over three thousand metres above sea level. The Nubra Valley is in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and bound by two of the world’s highest mountain ranges. It’s a picture-postcard spot, ringed by danger. Travel west a few hours and you’ll be in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where US Special Forces found and killed Osama bin Laden. That gives you some sense of the tensions at play in this slice of the world.

  The camels had been stuck in the valley since the 1960s, from the start of the Sino-Indian War. Prior to that, traders had used them as pack animals carrying goods along the Silk Road. But the trade had stopped because of the war and now the Bactrian’s numbers had dwindled.

  In the good times, the shaggy two-humpers trapped in the Nubra had been a major tourist attraction. But these were the worst of times. Tensions between India and Pakistan were high. Al Qaeda was threatening and the tourists had well and truly stopped coming.

  Having road-tested the portable embryo transfer technology in Mongolia, I was confident our techniques would work in the field—even in very basic conditions at three thousand metres above sea level, so high that you need altitude sickness pills to work there. But the problem was that the herd was so small in the Nubra Valley there weren’t enough female surrogates to work with and therefore build the population in any significant way. You might as well have simply mated the two-humpers with each other.

  If there was to be a serious reproductive program, we needed access to another herd. The answer was down on the desert plains in the Indian state of Rajasthan where there were one-hump camels aplenty. These were biologically close enough that they could successfully carry the embryos of two-humpers. Indeed our Dubai competitors had successfully mated a two-hump and a one-hump camel and produced some fast camels, so we knew there would be no trouble in having one-humpers as surrogates to produce Bactrians.

  Our plan of action confronted us with a second challenge: how to ensure that the embryos would survive a trip that might take two days, from the Nubra Valley to Rajasthan, in unpredictable conditions and without reliable refrigeration. We had done feasibility work on this in Al Ain, where we had experimented by leaving embryos in a holding solution out on a bench for up to thirty-six hours at room temperature. We discovered to our delight that there was no impact on the transfer rate. So, with some fancy footwork we had improvised a scientific solution that worked. All we needed now was to get our hands on the Bactrian camels.

  I had been working with Indian colleagues to negotiate with the local government department responsible for the Nubra Valley camels so we could procure half a dozen or so for the project. The camels were owned by various tribal leaders, but government officials would have the final say. My ultimate vision was to set up a specialised research centre here to regenerate the herd and to use camel rides to fund it. A new international airport was being built at the nearby town of Leh and it seemed to me that the tourists might one day return.

  The only things that could stand in our way were bureaucracy and local politics, and this meant finding a way through a maze of agencies and petty officials. They proved to be impervious to the logic that we had the only embryo transfer technology in the world, that I had adapted it to work in the field and that this could help save the local herd for future generations.

  In the end, the government hierarchy took the view that there should be an Indian solution for an Indian problem. This was one of the frustrations of working in places that might need assistance: the government gets in the way. As with Mongolia, I was determined to find a solution. The only way around this particular block was for me to train Indian vet students in the art of embryo transfer through lectures and demonstrations. And so, HEF India was established with a clutch of powerful local politicians on board. There would indeed be an Indian solution for an Indian problem.

  Although this was not as straightforward as I had originally hoped, I still found we could do a power of good. I was able to sponsor the publication of a camel journal through the Haryanna Agricultural University, to engage Indian vets in the techniques of camel breeding and conservation. I was also able to stump up money from our HEF fund so books could be provided free to students; as well, we supplied ultrasounds, gloves and other equipment needed to carry out embryo transfer.

  The danger of getting into Nubra was only matched by the danger in leaving it.

  On the way to the airport at Srinigar, we stopped over at the Dal Lake for a short stay on a houseboat; of the seventy houseboats on the lake, we were the only customers. The guest book showed that Charlton Heston had once stayed here, an echo of another era before terrorism arrived.

  At the once-glorious Oberoi Hotel, too, there were no other guests and we were waited upon by dozens of underemployed Kashmiris, watching their livelihoods go down the drain because of conflict and local terrorism.

  In the city of Srinigar the Indian authorities enforced a 9pm curfew, and there were machine-gun nests and sandbags on every corner. ‘Trouble in paradise’ doesn’t even begin to capture the air of menace. I felt like I had a target painted on my head. It was truly scary stuff.

  When it came to leaving, I encountered airport security like I have never seen before or since. I was searched before entering the airport grounds, then all batteries had to be removed from devices before check-in. And, as we passengers walked across the tarmac to the plane, security checked us again. But they were, after all, trying to counter a terrorist group prepared to drive bombs through the periphery fence.

  Five days after leaving Srinigar, the reason for the heightened security became clear. I was transiting through Hong Kong and running late to get to my gate, which was at the end of the terminal. As I belted along I looked up at a television screen and saw something horrific unfolding. A plane was flying into a skyscraper in New York. And then another plane crashed into a second building. For a moment I thought it was a movie, until I heard the commentary.

  The date was the eleventh of September 2001. Life in the Middle East was about to change. And before too long, so was mine.


  Nineteen

  The Dad trail

  My family life was fraying around the edges. Patti and I decided to call it quits but, thankfully for both of us, our three daughters remained our central concern.

  Our decision to send our oldest girl, Katya, to boarding school in Melbourne had turned into an unmitigated disaster. She was having a terrible time.

  The idea had been to put some distance between her and Khaled, as well as to give Katya the best possible education for her final two years. In reality, though, she suffered terrible anxiety being separated from Khaled. She was lonely; she was all at sea being away from her family. In short, Katya missed the place and the culture she called home. Indeed, things got so bad for her that she almost needed to be hospitalised.

  This is one of the occupational hazards of being an expat. If you stay away long enough, it becomes harder and harder to know where home really is. In Katya’s case it wasn’t about a lack of anchors. She was just marooned in the wrong place.

  Meanwhile, things weren’t much better for Khaled. At the age of eighteen he was sent to university in San Diego, where there was a community of Emiratis who would hopefully watch over him. However, there was something else going on.

  Katya and Khaled were, in fact, continuing to keep in touch regularly. On one occasion Khaled took a flight out to Australia from San Diego to see Katya, who was now in Melbourne and staying with Patti. The two of them had pretty well disregarded everything I had said back in Al Ain.

  I’m not the sort of parent to pull out the big stick, but we were trying to handle a very delicate situation. After Khaled’s dash to Melbourne it was made clear to them that enough was enough. Katya knuckled down to complete her high school exams while Khaled stayed in the States to complete his studies.