We start our long drive into the desert with a prayer stop at a large ovoo with a good number of ibex horns wrapped around wood and stone. From here our vehicle literally glides across the sands, skating through a low opening in the dunes. It is a pretty white ride, and in hindsight I should have given thanks at the ovoo that I'm not at the wheel.
The higher desert beyond is dotted with saxaul bushes. (A bad joke is made about their being called this since the plant sucks all the available moisture from the earth.) Their numbers thin out, and the landscape suddenly becomes green. We sneak through a broad dusty pass on the Altai, where a shepherd gives water to his flock. As our group mills about, stretching their legs, I make a quick climb up a hill above, and am surprised to see a small cluster of ger hidden in the valley on the other side.
Toward midday, there is a further surprise, that of a tarmac leading to a small town. It's amusing that someone would decide it was needed, as it simply vanishes again on either side of town. This is the last stop for trucks heading into China, which is a mere pass away. There are only a few vehicles today in Gurvantes, a two-horse town with a name right out of northern New Mexican. There are a number of ger around the perimeter, and a few brick buildings at center, as well as a small and door-less toilet shack that proves to be one of the grottiest squat-drop loos in the world.
We all file into the town grocery store to stock up on snacks and for Tulga to arrange our box lunch. The shop appears to be composed of just two aisles: one with alcohol and one with sweets. It makes sense that there's not any real meat here since that would taken off the hoof, though there is a cooler at the back, filled with offal and an extraordanant amount of chicken legs. It did seem somewhat incongruous to see the cartons of milk in the freezer toward the back.
Stocked up, we await for someone to show up and open the warehouse nextdoor where they store the cases of water. (If I ever publish a collection of my Asia travel pieces, it'll be titled Waiting for the Guy with the Key.) After a short drive out into the desert we stop suddenly for our picnic, literally in the middle of nowhere. We settle in for what we all expect to be another long drive, but then a surprisingly short time later, we arrive at camp.
Overall, this camp at Naran Daats will prove to be the least comfortable, due to its rock-hard beds and lack of hot water. (Apparently there was some, but not for me.) I try to find more comfort by folding all the duvet layers under me, which sort of works but I shiver through both nights. But such hardship always makes for an interesting memory, and after all, isn't that we paid for?
But I liked the camp's isolation, sitting at the corner of a broad ledge, overlooking a narrow canyon of white rock and red earth, that must flood wildly in wet weather, begetting a rich panorama of wildflowers in spring. A single family seemed to run the place, and I wondered at the young boy, how boring he must find it. (I find out later he spends most of the year at school in Gervantes.) The patriarch has long ago made peace with it all though, and most often he could be seen sitting before his ger, silhouetted beautifully against the landscape, his three-legged dog ever at his feet.
We go out to explore, climbing past an an ovoo and a makeshift spring filled with cans of beers for the night. At the top is a pagoda that has one of the Tibetan Tara's carved into the side. This adds even more holiness to the natural cathedral through which we walk. After traversing the
canyon rim we descend, crossing to the the far walls where Tulga finds us the spine of a dinosaur, jutting from earth. Fossils such as this continue to appear and disappear as the soft earthen walls of such canyons give way in heavy rains. Thus for a good guide, such discoveries are always new.
We'll find another set of bones the following day, shattered and calcified into pieces of fallen stone. Searching nearby is a small group of French, a family that I met earlier, as they passed us in their old Russian van. I remembered in particular their son of perhaps 12 years, who looked so delighted at finding dinosaurs, right down to his Jurassic Park T-shirt. The heat of the day would prove too much for the poor thing, as back in camp I'd see him walking back and forth to the loo, his mother alongside, who didn't look so good herself.
We spend the relative cool of morning exploring Khongoryn Els, called Mongolia's Grand Canyon by the locals. To me it is more Canyon de Chelly, extending laterally, rather than having the massive scale and depth of the Grand. Standing at the cliff's edge I remember well my descents into both, a descent I recreate today, first down onto a massive sand dune tucked into one corner, then downward still onto the stone floor. We move beneath the towering red walls, which narrows eventually into a slot canyon. The path out is along a dry riverbed, pushing at one point through dense reeds.
Lunch follows, in the shade of a small oasis. Tulga decides to wait for the heat to drop before we undergo our aforementioned dinosaur search (which also provides the ironic parallel of a good look at a massive lizard scaling a rock wall). Most of the group goes to the trucks to doze, but I decide to stretch out beneath a small juniper. As I lie there, I feel a connection somehow with the timelessness of nomads, and an simple understanding of how to survive out here. In the day's heat and the frigidity of night, beneath the flawless blue canopy, beneath the magnificent burst of stars.
I believe that we all share something similar on the day, in our own way. After dinner we sit awhile nursing Georgian wine in the gazebo at the center of camp, basking in the quiet and the awe, until the spirit takes us and for some reason we all begin to sing songs by Leonard Cohen. From Montreal to Mongolia. Why not?
On the turntable: Jean Michel Jarre, "Oxygene Trilogy"
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