Chris wasn’t so enthused, but after some coercion he agreed. We followed the horseman as his dele flailed wildly and his horse stirred up a cloud of dust. After some time we came to a pair of gers. They were plonked adjacent to a dry sandy riverbed. One was being used for cooking and the other for sleeping.
The horseman’s family were as fascinated by us as we were of them. The man’s mother and children stared at us, and we stared back. As they didn’t speak a word of Russian, conversation was limited, bringing the focus on to food.
Dinner began with a wok of a mash that tasted like sour uncooked cake mixture. The smell alone made me feel nauseous. But I had trouble explaining that I was sick and was fearful of offending. Next came a large bowl of fermented horse milk, complete with flies. I had been feeling marginally better during the day and worried that eating would bring it all on again. But what could I do?
After five or six cups of salty Mongolian milk tea and some homemade noodles with mutton, I lay in the ger clutching my stomach. For hours into the night, I tossed and turned, moaning with pain. Eventually, I stumbled out and vomited. Come morning, I had barely slept and felt severely hung-over. The thought of more milk and mutton would probably set off another spasm.
I rose from bed warily, careful not to make any sudden movements. No sooner had I rubbed my eyes than I was whisked away by our host. He knew one word of Russian. ‘Meat! Meat!’ he cried.
He dragged me over to the herd of sheep and without hesitation grabbed one by the neck and flipped it onto its back. While the poor animal shook and shivered uncontrollably, he took a knife and made a neat slit down its chest. He pushed his fist through the slit into the rib cage and pulled out the heart. It sat pulsating for a while above the animal’s chest and I thought I saw its eyes look down in terror, then begin to flit like it was in REM, before the shaking reached a peak. Finally, it went still: all over within a few seconds. The man poked at the animal’s eyes until there was no response at all. The tongue hung loose from its mouth and the heart was dropped back into the cavity and the limp carcass dragged over to the ger. If I’d been feeling pale before, now I was close to fainting.
Our host was eager for me to take part in the butchering. He handed me a knife and I began to cut as he directed. Even though it took intense concentration to control my stomach, I marvelled that I had become devoid of emotion so quickly: it was just a slab of meat now that it was dead.
When we finished, the innards were slopped into a big bowl and sorted out by the mother. She squeezed the faeces out of the intestines and refilled them with blood. Meanwhile, the meat was heaved up on top of the ger for drying.
Hoping that our job was done, Chris and I prepared to leave. But we hadn’t bargained on breakfast.
As a reward for helping with the slaughter, we were treated to a feast: a steaming pot of boiled intestines, liver, heart and head. The stench inside the stuffy ger was overpowering. Chris and I were given a knife each and told in sign language to dig in.
The family laughed, chewed, slurped, sucked and gnawed on the sinewy brown boiled mutton. The sounds of Chris eating paled in comparison to this family – they were real masters at orchestrating a symphony of revolting, irritating noises. Inevitably, we too cut off bits of intestine and sheep’s lips, but we were amateurs. It was more like chew, spit, chew, swallow with a look of distaste, and then gingerly pick out another delightful little treat from the communal bowl.
With this last chore over and done with, we rode off. Over the first hill and out of sight of the gers we dumped the bikes and collapsed in a heap on the ground.
‘Bloody hell, from now on I reckon we should try to stop only for civilised Mongolians. I just don’t think I could have taken much more of that,’ Chris said, spitting out a leftover bit of intestine from between his teeth.
‘As much as I love the notion of this nomadic culture, I have to agree with you. There’s not much romance in it when it comes down to it,’ I said, rolling over in case I needed to throw up.
‘Hey, I’ve got a thought for you. How does sliced supermarket bread, a meat pie, and homecooked lasagne sound?’ Chris said.
We decided to cook up a more palatable breakfast of semolina before continuing. A flush of shame and embarrassment came over us when, midway through eating, we turned to see our horseman friend on the hilltop. Presumably he had come out to check on our progress, only to find us scoffing down more food.
After the meal, I put foot to pedal rather gingerly. Chris was already a speck fast approaching the warped heat mirage on the horizon. I didn’t get far before dropping the bike and falling to the usual retching position. I watched the intestines lather a patch of rock shards. The foul sight gleamed in the bright white glow of the sun.
I hadn’t kept any food down for twenty-four hours. I wondered what the Gobi still had in store for us.
Later that day, between running out of toilet paper and discovering that my bike frame was breaking in half for the third time, a thought struck me: it was Chris’s birthday.
For a couple of hours I tried to think of the best way to congratulate him. In the afternoon I finally caught up.
‘Hey Chris, you old bastard!’
He grinned wryly and so did I.
Blood, Sweat and Sand
Gobi Desert – Inner Mongolia
Late Autumn 2000
———
Chris
Cathy Freeman won an Olympic gold medal on the day I turned twenty-two. It was 25 September and the 2000 Olympic games were well under way. Cathy Freeman was winning gold, Ian Thorpe was smashing world records and we were riding peacefully through the desert. Apart from the opening ceremony, I had not the faintest idea of what was going on.
I sat by the tent, stirring the dinner and letting my mind wander over obscure parallels. Sydney was hosting one of the biggest sporting events in history. Thousands of cameras were beaming pictures to billions of people all over the world. The Gobi Desert was hosting my birthday, and it had about as much significance as a camel burping. Admittedly, Tim was catching the action on our little video camera, but even he hadn’t remembered until halfway through the afternoon.
But then, why should he? I laughed at myself and swivelled around to take in the surroundings.
We were in the middle of a desert and all morning, we’d seen only endless expanses of salt-bush and a few camels on the horizon. Days ran into one another and dates had no meaning at all. If anyone had asked us the day of the week, we’d have had, at best, a one in seven chance at the right answer. What relevance did my birthday have out here, anyway? It was twenty-two years after the actual event and the passing of the day hadn’t marked anything significant.
Tim was up the hill, filming. He steadied the camera on its tripod, hit ‘record’, then raced back down the slope and skidded to a stop beside me. We were acting out a celebration.
Carefully I opened the present I’d bought for myself back in Choyr. ‘Look, it’s a block of chocolate!’ (Surprise, surprise.) ‘Wow. Here, you have half of it, mate.’ I offered the block to Tim. ‘Good, isn’t it?’
Tim raced off to film another angle, and I laughed. At first I’d been annoyed when Tim wanted to film us ‘enjoying’ my birthday, rather than simply enjoying it with me. But, in the end, what did it really matter?
———
I crawled out of the tent the next morning to catch the sun sneaking stealthily over the horizon. I yawned and stretched away the stiffness from my joints, then stumbled out into the cold wind to pee, scanning the ground quickly to make sure that I wasn’t about to step on any of Tim’s overnight ‘landmines’. The shorter daylight hours in Mongolia had given us a great routine of eleven hours’ sleep per night, but we hadn’t covered much ground over the past few days.
We rode strongly all morning to reach the town of Ondershil. It was a rambling town made up of the traditional white gers partitioned off into neat square blocks by ramshackle fences.
We did our shopping for
the next four or five days in all three of the village shops, then looked around for a place to fill up the fuel bottle for our stove. In the end, we had to visit the town’s diesel-fired power station and ask the operator to siphon a litre of fuel from the generator’s 10 000 gallon tank!
We finished our chores and packed our bikes, chatting for a short while to a group of people who had gathered around. Just as we were about to pedal off, however, we heard an urgent cry from behind us.
‘Waaaiiiittt!’ came the shout, in heavily accented Russian. We turned to see a short, stocky man rushing importantly through the crowd, holding a bottle of vodka. He also had a few dirty glasses tucked under one arm.
‘Wait, my friends!’ He panted as he came to a halt. ‘Before you leave, you must drink with us!’ He turned to the crowd for confirmation and got a rousing cheer. He glanced back to catch me grimacing. ‘No, no, no,’ he chided, waving the bottle. ‘You must drink before you leave. It is an honour!’ I looked at Tim and he winced.
‘Okay, okay. Thank you for the honour. We will drink, but just one, you understand?’ Tim waved a single finger at the man. ‘Just one!’
‘All right then, we will each drink one.’ The man quickly placed the three glasses on the ground then poured steadily, measuring the entire contents of the bottle into equal thirds.
‘Just one,’ he said solemnly, as he handed me the biggest shot of vodka I’d ever seen.
I gulped and looked helplessly at Tim, who was staring with dismay at his own glass. There was nothing for it. The crowd were chanting encouragement and waiting.
I licked my dry lips nervously, steeled my nerves and braced my body. Then, with a feeling of resignation, I poured the long draught of deathly liquid down my throat.
It hit my stomach like a car wreck and I instantly felt as though my chest had just been carved open with a red-hot butterknife. The backs of my eyelids pinged painfully with a billion multi-coloured stars and there was a sound like an endless, crashing wave in my ears. I staggered around a bit and shook my head to clear my brain. Tim was leaning on his bike, clutching his empty glass and looking ill. Our short friend was standing serenely nearby, an imbecilic smile spreading across his face.
We hopped back on our bikes and pedalled away as fast as possible. We were only wobbling slightly.
We rode out of town that afternoon with a raging tailwind, and blasted a further sixty kilometres on a rough and corrugated dirt track. Along the way, we passed a white felt ger with a satellite dish outside the door. Buddhist nomad culture, unchanged in centuries, meets western technology.
We made camp in a wind so strong that we had to lie Tim’s bike down and tie ropes to it to anchor the tent. Tim was still suffering badly with a stomach bug and after a little experimenting had found that the only things that he could keep down were plain oats and water, or macaroni. I cooked up my own delicious meal of steaming borsch soup and ate it as he sat gnawing on a crust of bread and shivering in the icy wind. I thought back to the hotel room in Omsk, where I’d been in a similar condition and he’d come back from the market with a bag of hot potato pies.
With a grin, I offered him some of my soup. ‘Mmmm. Jeez, this is really delicious. It really warms up the insides. Are you absolutely sure you don’t want some? Just before I finish the lot, see.’
Tim scowled at me. ‘Piss off, ya mean bastard. I’m feeling terrible.’
Next morning the wind was blowing as strong as ever. The only difference was that it had turned during the night and was now coming from the opposite direction. The anchor line tied to Tim’s bike was useless and the tent was flapping crazily about our heads. We crawled out into the freezing gloom of pre-dawn and found that, once again, our water bottles had iced over.
We huddled over the roaring, belching diesel stove as Tim cooked breakfast. Then I packed up and set out – riding in all my clothes – while Tim sheltered out of the wind behind his bike to watch the sunrise and update his diary.
About mid-morning I was startled out of a daydream by the sound of galloping horse hooves. I pulled on the brakes and looked up to see a young Mongolian man in traditional dress grinning curiously down at me.
‘Sa sainbaino,’ he greeted me politely and I responded in kind. I asked him in careful Mongolian if he spoke Russian or English. This was one of my few and definitely most useful, phrases. The man beamed at me with a gleaming white smile and replied with an eager shake of his head that he didn’t. I tried again in a few Mongolian monosyllables and sign language and we got a bit of a conversation going. I understood enough to realise that he was inviting me back to his ger for some tea.
I shared a few mugs of the delicious milky and slightly salty Mongolian brew with the man and his family, and was obliged to have a few nibbles of sour goat’s cheese biscuits as well. I walked around the back of the ger to admire his herd of about forty goats, wandering across the nearby hillside. I stayed for about half an hour then set off to catch up with Tim.
We covered a lot of ground on a long and terrible track during the course of the afternoon. The corrugations were shocking, and I alternated between a splitting headache from the constant bouncing and falling over in the sand as I left the track in search of a smoother route. Tim, on the other hand, was feeling great; zooming along somewhere in front he didn’t stop for lunch until three. The next day, however, the tables were turned. I was feeling fantastic and raced off, leaving Tim to follow in my dusty tyre-tracks, miles behind.
I stopped to wait for him not far from Sainshand and we rode in together the following morning.
———
Our first priority was to find food and lots of it. We pedalled up a rare strip of bitumen – the first we’d seen in over a week – then veered off the road and came to a stop outside the door of the first eating house we saw.
It was locked. We prepared to ride on in search of another, but the small crowd that had gathered urged us to stay. They were also waiting for the café to open too, it appeared, and one of the men spoke a little Russian. ‘The chief lady will be here soon!’ he informed us brightly.
We went through the standard routine of answering questions about our trip. One man asked our Russian-speaking friend to get us to translate some ridiculous techno-babble written in English on the back of a Chinese paint tin. The misspelt, ungrammatical English was challenge enough on its own and what we did manage to translate into Russian, our Russian-speaking friend could not understand well enough to translate into Mongolian. In the end, after ten minutes of heated discussions, we settled on an approximate, one-word summary that survived the trip through all three languages: ‘Paint.’
The paint tin owner stared at us in stunned silence, then walked away looking distinctly dissatisfied.
An hour and a half after we’d arrived we finally met the ‘chief lady’. She marched up to the door with another woman in tow – the assistant chief lady, I assumed – and cut a path through the crowd and up the steps. The crowd melted away. It seemed that they hadn’t been waiting for opening time after all.
Once inside, we sat down ravenous and ready to order but, to our dismay, we had to wait another half hour while they scrubbed the pots from the previous night. By the time our meal finally arrived, my head was resting on the table and Tim had slipped from his chair, a slowly dying pile on the floor.
The food was worth waiting for, though. Hot noodle soup! Afterwards, Tim stripped the baggage from his bike and headed into town to find someone to add yet another layer of welding to his cracked bike frame. Meanwhile, I sortied down to the small but bustling market to restock our food supplies.
On the way back, I was startled almost out of my skin by the unexpected sound of a Scottish voice calling out from behind. ‘Oi! Hallo there. You must be a foreigner then. Where are you from?’ A lightly built, orange-haired man wearing jeans and sneakers and carrying a briefcase was angling across the road towards me.
‘I’m an Australian,’ I answered, curious. ‘There’s two of us, act
ually. We’re just passing through. How about you? Do you live here or something?’ Sainshand was a town of no more than a few thousand people. It was hard to imagine what this man could be doing there.
‘I’ve only been here in Sainshand for about a year now, but I’ve been in Mongolia itself for over five years. Officially, I work for the Mongolian government teaching English to a few paying students. But really, I’m actually working here as a missionary.’
‘Oh yeah, what sort of things do you do then?
‘Well, the people on the land – the nomads – have generally been all right. But last winter was terrible. It got to minus fifty degrees and a lot of people lost a lot of their livestock and are now struggling to survive. And, of course, their children grow up without any education at all, so that’s one of the things that we’re trying to address. And in the towns, like this one, things have been going pretty much downhill since the Russians pulled out in ninety-one. There’s a lot of poverty now, so we’re trying to help people as much as we can.’
‘I see.’ It seemed fair enough. ‘How many people can you help, though?’
‘We have limited resources, of course, but everyone in the town knows that we’re here and we try to help those who come to us. We have a little school and a church where we teach people about Jesus. And we also have funding to help them buy food and clothing, or livestock for the nomads when they need help.’
‘Okay, so are there many Christians in the town then?’ I had read that nearly one hundred percent of Mongolia’s population were devout Buddhists.
‘We have a little flock of over two hundred here now, but can you imagine? When we first arrived a year ago, there were no Christians here at all! We’re growing faster all the time, too.’ He smiled happily. ‘About six months ago we were able to send a couple of the younger men over to America to train with our organisation and hopefully, they’ll become ordained before returning. They’re due back by the end of the year, so we’ll be able to leave them to run things by themselves while we move on to another town.’ He smiled again and glanced at his watch. ‘Oops! Late for choir practice. Sorry, I can’t stay to chat, but it’s been nice talking to you. Goodbye.’
Off The Rails Page 29