Off The Rails

by Chris Hatherly

  She stepped out of the light and I looked up to its source. I hadn’t been in the ger for long, but even so I had taken a liking to the circular ceiling. Close to one hundred intricately decorated wooden rods rose to a small circular opening. Through this the slender chimney exited and the sky was visible. The rods were supported by walls of collapsible trellis. From beneath, the ceiling looked like a giant wagon wheel from which dangled a collection of drying fat pieces and sliced up sheep’s organs.

  Around the sides on the floor were a couple of mattresses, and close to the centre a few thirty-centimetre-high stools. There was a picture of Genghis Khan on the wall, and a special dresser with Buddhist tumblewheels, icons, candles and incense sticks displayed. The only sign of the modern world was a packet of Kodak Express photos on a tiny table.

  In this round little space was housed all of the woman’s possessions. With no dark corners, and in such a confined area, everything was on display. The amount of goods paled in comparison to the decadence of an average Australian room.

  There was a very good reason, beyond lack of money, to stem the accumulation of material possessions. Most Mongolians in the countryside move at least twice a year, roaming to sites better suited to the changing seasons. They had to be able to bundle everything up, including the ger, and fit it onto the back of a wagon. After a year of carrying everything on the bikes, we understood this principle very well: nonessential items usually got the flick. In fact there were many parallels between our travel reality and the Mongolian way of life. For one, the Mongolians were the first people we met who didn’t blink an eyelid at the fact that we rarely washed. To them, living in a tent and spending the day outdoors was the norm – it was just that we rode strange bicycles rather than horses. Of course these parallels were pretty shallow, too. While we had to cope with different weather conditions, they had to survive and be self-sustainable. It was pretty obvious that they were born into a life of hardship far more demanding than riding a bike across the country could ever be.

  ‘Uszhen gotov!’ she announced eventually. (We never did find out what her name was.) This was Russian for dinner is ready! We were astounded to learn that she spoke fluent Russian, and had lived and worked in Moscow in government administration during the Soviet Union.

  The woman moved over to me with the large pot and opened it. ‘What do you think, boys? Bon appetit!’ she boomed with a cackle.

  I froze. In the middle of the simmering milk floated the head of a goat: skin, eyes, ears and all. A smell wafted out like a shitted-up milking shed.

  ‘Tim, have you ever tried goat’s ear before?’ the woman asked.

  With a short knife she deftly sliced off a rubbery white bit and held it out. I turned to Chris, who was looking on with just as much anticipation as the mother and son.

  I took a hard bite of the warm slimy cartilage and smiled. I chewed for about twenty minutes but just couldn’t break it down. Eventually, I swallowed it whole and looked despairingly at the rest of the ear still in my hand. A little embarrassed, I handed it back to the computer engineer. I presumed that it would get passed around and eaten collectively. But, he threw it out the door for the dogs.

  ‘Oh, actually, Tim, we don’t usually eat goat’s ear,’ he said. ‘We just thought it was something new for you. The good stuff is the eyes and also the lips. Here, try some.’

  Thankfully, the main meal was a delicious bowl of homemade noodles with pieces of mutton. It was followed by goat cheese and yoghurt mixed with sugar and blueberries. The woman, like babushkas in Russia, was adamant that we ate until we couldn’t possibly fit more in.

  ‘Boys, boys, boys! Your family must be so worried about you. You are too skinny, eat, eat, eat!’ she repeated, shrilly. From there on we decided that she really was the equivalent of a Mongolian Baba Galya: generous, hospitable and jovially eccentric.

  With the setting of the sun, there was nothing more to do than settle in for sleep and bask in the feeling of an overly full stomach. We lay our sleeping mats down and slipped under the blankets.

  ‘What a day, hey?’ I said to Chris, with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon,’ came his sleepy response. The babushka blew out the candle and wriggled into her own bed, a foot away from ours. She softly conversed with her son and eventually silence fell.

  I listened carefully, feeling cosy and secure in the intimate dwelling. The roaring cold wind that blew outside was barely audible, muffled by the thick felt walls. I could also just make out the sound of a herd of animals approaching with a thousand soft thuds upon the earth. Then, with a cacophony of snorts, they too came to rest. It occurred to me that the animals were like an extended family and they felt safe huddled up next to the ger.

  I adjusted my eyes to the starry patch of sky visible through the circular hole in the ceiling. Eventually the stars petered out just like the candle.

  I awoke once during the night, shivering in the cold with an ice-cream headache. The stove had burnt out and the temperature had plummeted to below zero. I didn’t envy the babushka as she woke too, hyperventilating before putting on her warm dele. She lit the stove and went back to bed.

  Dawn was marked by the rustle of animals rising and a light rain falling. I stumbled into the gloom, bent on capturing the sunrise on film. Before the sun had nudged over the horizon, the babushka and an old man from a neighbouring ger washed their faces with a splash of cold water before ambling over to a couple of sedate-looking yaks. I filmed as they sat side by side squeezing rhythmically at teats, often breaking out in laughter.

  Around them a herd of about fifty goats, four horses and a few sheep frolicked in anticipation of the first warm rays of the sun. When the sun rose the babushka lugged a bucket of fresh milk over to the ger. Next the old man set to catching a couple of goats to clip their hooves; he took chase with a lasso. Through the lens it was obvious that although these people were living a life of survival, there was a real art to it.

  No matter how exhausted I was, filming was something that energised me. I loved it, and in recent weeks I had begun to believe that maybe, just maybe, if I kept on trying, we really could make a documentary about our journey.

  Chris rose late with good reason: he felt ill. We spent another day and a half with the family, and in that time learnt more about Mongolian life than we had done in the past three weeks. Much of that time we spent drinking the famous airag – fermented mare’s milk. It came in large bowls, with the added ingredient of a few belly-up blowflies. It was sour and off-putting at first, but I grew to like it. It was slightly alcoholic, and the babushka kept telling us that you could ‘live off the stuff’.

  Finally, we straddled our bikes and rolled downhill, waving goodbye as the babushka threw ladles of fresh milk into the air for good luck.

  Then it was back to the open, almost featureless landscape; crawling into the distance, rolling along on our armchairs on wheels.

  A couple more days passed in a blur of parched yellow and the sour taste of airag. Our stop with the babushka seemed to have opened the floodgates to Mongolian hospitality. Sometimes trucks would come hurtling out of nowhere and a great big bowl of airag and blowflies would be handed down to us. If it wasn’t a truck it was a horseman waving us over to another ger in the distance.

  The hills flattened out altogether until we were on a wide crusty plain. It was so flat that from the low position on the bike only a sliver of earth was visible in every direction. The track became red and sandy, trailing its way through avenues of thorny grass. I felt like we were riding through a moonscape of crushed dry rock beneath a sky that seemed larger than usual. We began to see herds of camels loping across the horizon in search of food.

  There was something melancholy and appealing in the openness, and for long periods of time I had no wish to stop pedalling. It left me feeling exposed, as if I couldn’t hide anything, even from myself. I remembered the e-mail from my youngest brother Cameron that I had received in Ulaan Baatar, and began to think a
head to Australia rather than reminiscing about Russia.

  He had described his excitement about having his braces taken off his teeth. Then, at the very bottom of the letter, he noted that I had never even seen him with braces on. I hadn’t been in Australia in twenty-seven months. Especially for teenagers, a lot could change in that time. For heaven’s sake, Cameron was thirteen when I had last seen him, and he would be almost sixteen by the time I arrived home!

  Jon, two years younger than me, had completed school and was late into his second year living away from home, studying at university. The picture I carried in my head of him was still of a Year Eleven schoolboy. In childhood he had been my best friend, someone I did everything with. I hoped we hadn’t grown too far apart. Then there was Natalie, my seventeen-year-old sister. I had been shocked to see how she had grown during her visit to Russia last winter. I wondered how things were panning out in her life as she approached her last year of school.

  Somewhere underneath I was beginning to accept the reality of returning to Australia … and I was looking forward to it. I also had a sneaking suspicion that if we worked damn hard, we could even write a book as well as make a doco! The faster I got back, the faster I could set off on a new journey.

  Mongolia, I thought, was the perfect buffer zone. On the home-straight, everything seemed to be crystallising rather than falling to pieces.

  Although I had mentally overcome a hurdle, I couldn’t afford to assume that we would have a clean run to the finish line. Just outside the small town of Choyr, I was reminded that our journey wasn’t all about rosy contemplation.

  All night I tossed and turned with growing nausea. It felt as if someone was playing a game of pinball in my stomach and bowels. It verged on agony as I farted heavily, and knew with a sinking feeling that my diarrhoea was far from gone.

  Eventually, it came in one great rush. In my desperation, I dived outside and made it just two metres from the tent before an explosion splattered the earth. It was below zero outside, and in my underwear and bare feet I was instantly a shivering mess. The bouts continued for twenty minutes. Progressively I froze in the squat position, unable to grab my down jacket. The wind was the worst of all – it cut like an evil, cold knife. Although it was a relief to return to bed, in half an hour I was out there again. The constant activity made me thirsty, and I discovered to my dismay that our scant water supplies had frozen solid. I scampered out five times before I lost count and began to worry about the deadly landmines that I was leaving around the camp.

  I had been asleep for an hour or so when I was woken by horses gently pressing the tent with their snouts and snuffling. I opened the door to see a curious herd silhouetted by the predawn hues. Their manes shivered in the breeze far more fluidly than my body had done all night. This would be a routine that carried on for weeks ahead into China. Herds of horses and camels would surround the tent just on dawn and wake us. It was a special time of morning, when the earth seemed to be exhaling and at its calmest. I thought I might as well get up and do some filming.

  By the time Chris rose, I was lying on the dirt outside, cradling the video camera and staring blankly at the tent. I had watched as the frost rose in a vapour with the first rays of the sun. I didn’t have the energy to talk and preferred to keep still; it felt like someone had been kicking me in the guts all night. Thank God it’s Chris’s turn to cook, I thought.

  It was mind destroying to wonder how many debilitating nights lay before the refuge of China. The intense cold was another worrying factor – it felt like we were being chased by the onset of winter; frostbite was the last thing I wanted.

  ‘Chris, don’t bother with sugar or milk in the porridge. I don’t think I can stomach it,’ were the only words I could manage.

  After breakfast Chris joined me in the dirt and we spread out the gimmicky map between us. For a few days we’d been planning to diverge from the line of the trans-Mongolian and do a 300-kilometre loop into nowhere and rejoin the railway at Sainshand. With several trucks a day passing we had been yearning to go out and see what it was really like away from this major route.

  ‘So what do you reckon?’ I asked Chris.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d love to get out there. It’s just that we aren’t in good shape at the moment. It would be harder, but definitely more interesting. What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, I agree.’

  Somehow, as perverse as it seemed, we decided to take the plunge. With waves of nausea still flowing from my stomach, I was agonisingly aware that we were choosing to make life harder.

  In Choyr we filled up with some salty, sulphur-smelling water that was pumped up from a well. It was selling at one cent for every ten litres and was considered very good quality by Gobi standards.

  On the way out we asked for directions to the tiny settlement of Ondershil. The men swung their arms out in an arc pointing towards one of any number of tracks that wound aimlessly into the distance. With the compass and some guesswork we set off.

  For the next two days we saw little transport, and the only gers were tiny flecks in the distance. Time passed and I fell into a lethargic daze. The corrugations and bumps threatened to upset my stomach completely, and the headwind continued unabated. I ate almost nothing except some dry, tasteless biscuits and stopped frequently to relieve my bowels. The nights were plagued with the same draining theatrics, making sleep scarce. This left me constantly thirsty, yet anything I drank and ate went straight through. To make it worse, we had rationed out the drinking water to 1.5 litres per person per day, so there was little water to waste.

  The further we headed away from the railway, the wilder the landscape became. The tracks were barely used, and we relied increasingly on guesswork.

  On the third morning we came across a shallow lake. The water was brown, salty and only a couple of centimetres deep. But we decided it was the perfect location for an early lunch. As we were cleaning up, my temper boiled over. For the past few days Chris had taken to licking the knife clean – again.

  In the heat of the moment, I cracked. ‘Chris, what are you doing licking the knife clean? I thought we decided last year that it was banned!’

  ‘What! Since when? That’s the way I do things. It’s my knife. I don’t think it’s unhygienic and anyway, we don’t have enough water to waste on cleaning.’

  From there side-track arguments grew upon side-track arguments and we continued to scream insults at each other. It went on for an hour until we were both ready to pass out. For a while we slumped to the ground and lay panting for breath. Then we just started again.

  By the time we finished I felt more exhausted than after a day’s ride, when in fact we had only ridden about ten kilometres. From the lake we struggled five kilometres further and set up camp, agreeing that the day was as good as written off.

  That night I had an ominous feeling that I was about to fall seriously ill. In a desperate attempt to revitalise myself I pulled out all the vitamin and mineral tablets I had and popped a couple of each. Then I found a concoction in a small bottle that was some kind of therapeutic oil. The Buryatian family had given it to me to use in case of bad health. I dabbed a bit onto my hands and rubbed it into the beard-free skin on my face and over my chest.

  Morning brought with it the unfamiliar feeling of a settled stomach. I sat up and moved … still no nausea. Chris was already up and for some unknown reason doing push-ups near the tent. With the sudden wave of good health, I decided to join him. Without saying anything, I lay down nearby and started pushing up and down like a maniac. I lasted fifteen before the sudden urge to vomit stopped me dead in my tracks, and I dropped to the dusty earth.

  I heard Chris do the same, but he was laughing hard. ‘Tim, what the hell have you done to yourself? Your face is bloody bright orange. That oil is for taking as a liquid, not an ointment, you silly bastard!’

  I too would have laughed if it wasn’t for the fear of throwing up.

  The landscape changed yet again and w
e were met by a howling headwind. Before us rose pointy hills and wide slab-like plateaux. Over every rise, every new rocky saddle, there was another view stretching into the distance … just hills, wind, vague tracks, hills beyond hills and hills beyond that again. The sea of yellow grass was replaced by the odd thorny tuft of growth and bushes sparsely scattered among the sand and rock. Geckoes often sprinted off in front of the bike wheels.

  With the battle against diarrhoea pretty much lost, the only thread of sanity and inspiration came through my increasing obsession with filming. I went to bed dreaming of new angles, new shots, and wrote down lists of scenes that we had to shoot before Beijing. At times it felt as if the journey would never end. And yet time was running out for filming. The shot I wanted most was a silhouette of us riding against a sunset or sunrise. There would be two projects finishing for me in Beijing: the film and the cycling journey. And I couldn’t relax until both were over.

  We passed through the tiny outpost of Bayanjargalan and continued on to Ondershil. From there we would aim back towards the railway line.

  In the late afternoon I was rolling down a sandy, rutted part of the road when I was startled by a shriek from behind. The front wheel dug in and I fell into the sand. I spun in the direction of the voice.

  A horseman with a dusty face was staring down at me. In his hand he held a long pole and a lasso. His dele was faded and in tatters from years of use. He looked enquiringly, cocking his head, before pointing over a hill, then at Chris and I; an invitation to his ger? We had stopped at countless gers since the Mongolian babushka experience, but only once since turning off from Choyr. I was keen to spend some time with these ‘wilder’ Mongolians.