Waking up on the trans-mongolian three and a half weeks ago I gazed out the window to a growing light over a flat featureless expanse. Unimpressed I turned over and went back to sleep. Sometime later I peeked out of my blanket again and was gobsmacked by the carnival of flora partying under the warm hue of the early morning sun. Pinks, oranges, purples, reds, yellows, I kid you not, harmonized with and reflected the beauty of each other comparing outfits of shapes and sizes. Pink shrubs that looked like delicate pieces of coral more at home in tropical waters. The landscape rolled out to meet a horizon of deep blue, that I had marvelled at previously in photographs but always ascribed to the trick of a photographer’s filter. This is what we had been dreaming of all those hazy polluted days in Korea and were not disappointed. The only trees we saw on our way through rolling panoramas were bright yellow and later discovered to be larch. Autumn had reached Mongolia in a dazzling array of uniformity.
We found a guesthouse in a huge big soviet style apartment block, rooms filled with bunk beds and shared kitchens. Prepared to become carnivores for the month we found a restaurant below that served up vegetarian food and rejoiced. The night before Monika and I had eaten on the train and opted for one meat choice of many served up with shitake mushrooms (yum)
and a truckload of msg (gross)! More fat and gristle than meat my stomach churned and I remembered my original impetus to stoke my mother’s ire and become vegie and it had nothing to do with animals rights or conservation back then! I picked at a couple of pieces and resigned myself to living on rice and potatoes for the next month. Fortuantely this was the worst I had to deal with and over the next few days we experimented with buuz offered by hosts in gers and actually came to like them. Buuz are mutton dumplings.
No-one eats lamb here and when our recent guide scored some meat to cook we asked her how she would do this. Taking a big pot she dropped the large cuts in and boiled them. Eeuugh!
The other main staple of the Mongols is dairy. In summer they live on white food, and in winter, red. Everytime we stopped at a ger we were offered dried cheese, a kind of hard chevre, yoghurt, milk tea, which is hot salty milk or my personal favourite (not)
airag, fermented mares milk which is supposed to be slightly alcoholic but I could never down more than a mouthful of the rancid tasting liquid. Cream was also offered and had a honeycombed outside and was kind of crunchy.
For our last night in the Gobi, Oogie (our guide) asked the family we were staying with to slaughter a goat for us so we could try a special dish she wanted to cook. A big fire was lit outside and rockes placed in the middle of it. A milk churn requisitioned, onions, salt, pepper and some token vegatables were placed inside along with the goats meat and the rocks when
they were almost melting hot. Then the concoction was placed in the middle of the now dying fire and left for some time. An interesting stew. When we offered the family some salad they tried it and declined more on the basis that this was horse food. How could we eat uncooked vegetables? I tried some of the goats meat and it tasted like tough lamb, no fat, quite tasty, but though my scruples for eating meat were softened, by now another problem had been in existence for a while.
I thought that the eating of the meat would be the difficult problem but I forgot that my body hasn’t digested anything that tough for twelve or thirteen years and it couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the intruding matter. Monika and I were soon charting our ablutions, from frequency, which wasn’t, to victorious descriptions of quantity, texture and colour when we
were successful. It sounds gross but this was serious business!