So we set it up with Enkhtuya to hire a driver for three days in the Gobi for $400 total instead of taking her 3-day guided tour for $540 each. We would be responsible for paying for our lodging and meals, and our driver wouldn't speak English, but we were fine with that and liked saving the $680 at the outset. She had taken us to the Aero Mongolia office downtown to buy our round-trip tickets to Dalanzagdag, and they were just $147 each plus a service charge of 10,000 MNT ($5.56). The plane was scheduled to take off at 6:40 AM(!) Wednesday morning. So we awoke at 4 am and took the hotel's van to the airport at 4:30, arriving there at 4:50, though we had allowed an hour (no traffic at that hour). Then we found out that weather conditions, namely wind shear, were delaying takeoff until 11 am (we could have finished our sleep and had breakfast at the hotel!), then noon, 1pm, 2 pm, and it finally left at 3 pm. I had Enkhtuya call our driver to alert him about our late arrival. All air traffic had been suspended. We kept telling each other that we were lucky that this was our first real delay; everything else had been thankfully on time.
We finally boarded our Fokker 50 prop plane, whose wings are high on the fuselage, and arrived in Dalanzagdag at 4:15, where we were welcomed with a bowl of fermented mare's milk (it's like labne but three times more sour), and there was our driver, Ohchkee, a big hulk of a man, all smiles and holding a sign with our names on it. We recovered our checked baggage in a bin in the luggage hut, access outside, which it slid into on a metal ramp, having been fed through a window.
We piled our things into Ohchkee's good-sized 4-wheel drive Land Cruiser that we were relieved to see he had, and drove into town to a supermarket to stock up on our provisions, which we assumed we would have to supply. Then we were off to Roy Chapman Andrews' Flaming Cliffs (Mongolian: Bayandzag) about 60 km. away. We were soon off the paved road and onto the tracks.
The Gobi as we have seen it so far is mostly quite flat, sparsely green and rather gentle: no engulfing sandstorms yet. It is grazing land, and we were astonished at the size of the herds of goats we encountered. But most amazing was the herd of dromedaries we came across. They shied away from us despite everthing we said, and soon had split in two different directions, one on each side of the road. Dromedaries are two-humped camels, and these seemed to have their thick fur hanging off their rear end, as if someone had begun to shear it and changed their mind. A few of them kept looking at us, which I found very touching. They had red plastic tags on their ears, but no herdsman or yurt was in sight.
We arrived at the Flaming Cliffs at about 6:45. The sunlight was filtered by a thin layer of clouds, but it was still casting shadows in the orange light, so the cliffs lived up to their name. The cliffs were at most 40 feet tall. You could drive right up to the top surface and then climb down into the gullies. They very much resembled other Cretaceous beds I'd seen--in Joshua Tree National Park in California and Badlands National Park in South Dakota, but they were considerably less extensive. You could walk around the whole formation in half an hour. I descended into the gully following the wash and found no traces of dinosaurs, of course. That would have required some digging. But I did enjoy the formations, the mud mosaics, and even a small arch. We left at 7:20 just as the light was dimming and the shadows disappearing. But the sun and clouds were giving us a show!
Our driver then took us to a large stand of what looked like dead juniper trees: gnarled wood supporting sprays of thin branches, giving off a very Japanese aesthetic.
We then headed for his home in the village of Bulgan close by. Now Dalanzagdag is a small city, and this is a village, but in both of them the inhabitants live in yurts, just as if they were in the middle of the desert, except that they build solid wooden plank fences around their multi-yurt compound, where they plant a garden, erect their outhouse, and park and work on their cars. For a culture noted for its hospitality, the partitioning off of property with these 7-foot high solid wooden fences seems like an anomaly. But living in close quarters there's actually no way around it. From the air it looks as though everyone lives in a box.
Ohchkee introduces us to his wife and four children, sat us down in comfortable easy chairs in a yurt with a flat screen TV, a sound system, a fridge, and a Buddhist shrine, and within 10 minutes we each had a plate of warm food: chipped goat meat, rice topped with cooked tomatoes, and cooked slivered carrots, along with a bowl of warm goat's milk. His compound had two yurts, one more building and an outhouse. He was building a hothouse; the aluminum frame was complete, and he would cover it with plastic, probably visquine. He and his wife slept in one yurt, which also contained a water basin, with water ladled into a vessel suspended above it, and released by pressing up on a plunger. The water supply was nearby, on the other side of the door in a large covered pot, holding perhaps ten gallons. A towel, that apparently everyone used, lay across the room on a table. They were permanently camping out in their own home.
Ohchkee set us up to sleep in our yurt, spreading out blankets on the floor, which Barbara chose, given that she is more accustomed to floor sleeping, and I got the bed, which was little more than a plank on a platform, and just as hard as the floor. Our lights were out a little after 9, and I did manage to sleep through the night.
We got up rested at 6 am, had a simple breakfast, and were out by 7:20. On our way out of town we passed a small Buddhist temple that must have served the whole town. It had the standard walled-in courtyard with fancy Chinese style gate and large prayer wheels embedded in the front wall. It was interesting to see all the elements of the Buddhist temple essentially in miniature.
We were anticipating a drive of five to six hours to get to the dunes about 134 km away, but it took us less than four hours. We made a stop around 8 am at the yurt compound of a young couple and their adorable daughter attracted by their large herd of goats. I plunged right in to photographing them; most shied away, but one little black kid came up to me. The low position of the sun put halos around their fur, and their long shadows reinforced their forms.
The couple invited us into their living quarters and gave us warm goat's milk and some deep fried triagular meat pies; I took one for the road. In return I gave their little girl one of the sheets of laser stickers I had brought to give as gifts to our overnight hosts. But these were turning out to be formal (though very friendly) commercial arrangements, and I had the feeling that my gifts were very much beside the point. The hosts had their price in mind, and that was sufficient.
But this spontaneous exchange was really based on generosity, and the little girl was the exact right age to begin to be interested in paper dolls, the theme of the sticker page. She seemed dazzled by them, couldn't take her eyes off them, showed them to her mommy then her daddy. It was a little piece of glitz culture in a land of outhouses and carried water. I took their family portrait, noticing as I exited their main dwelling that they had a metal bin full of presumably goat dung inside by the door. I assume this was their fuel.
Note the bin of goat dung in the lower left.
Then we were off again, barreling down the supertrack at an average speed of 60 km/hour. Sometimes there were multiple parallel tracks; sometimes the track got very bumpy. I was continually amazed that Ohchkee knew when to turn when an alternate route presented itself. We finally arrived at the sharp but low hills that had lined our horizon for many miles. The track went straight through what turned out to be a broad canyon, no problem. Sometimes there were dry stream beds we had to avoid.
Suddenly Ohchkee spotted what looked like two small deer in the road next to the canyon wall on the right. We went off the track towards them, and soon saw that there were many more, and that they weren't deer, rather diminutive mountain goats, which I believe are called duikers (you learn this at zoos). There were four of them, then three more, then four more, and we realized we were seeing a whole herd. We got out of the Land Cruiser and climbed part of the way up the canyon across a gully from them. They gamboled up the rocky hill, some of them appearing in dramatic silhouette on top. We saw juveniles, each one following an adult; at one point a buck tried to mount a doe. In 15 minutes they had all disappeared to the other side. Enkhtuya later told me it was quite rare to see wild animals in the Gobi, and that they would make themselves scarce once the tourist season was fully underway.
Suddenly we saw a small creature the size of a gopher scamper across the road and disappear into a hole in the dirt in the embankment on the side. Then we noticed these holes everywhere. We were clearly in the Gobi equivalent of a prairie dog town, except that these creatures were much smaller than prairie dogs and more elusive. No chance I could photograph one at this point, though I did succeed later on. They turned out to be picas, non-rodent relatives of rabbits.
We reached the yurt compound where would stay the night, about two miles in front of the dunes, at 11:25, less than four hours driving time from our departure. It was a four-yurt compound tended by a solitary man, who also owned a herd of dromadaries. We were welcomed with warm goat's milk and a bowl of fresh deep-fried bread products, including some dense little sugar-covered donut spheres, which were too delicious to pass up. Barbara opted for the two-hour camel ride, but I stayed back, having had enough camel time in Jordan. She was back by 2, and our host served lunch, which consisted of a soup with goat meat, chunks of hard goat fat, and spiral pasta. Some of the goat meat was too tough to bite into, much less to chew. I skipped the fat chunks. The broth was tasty, however. I contributed some of the pickled shredded vegetables in a jar I had bought the previous day.
Our new host is on the far right, Ohchkee our driver in the middle, and Barbara on the left.
The bowl of fried bread is on the table. The fresh pieces, still warm, were on top, but if you dug down just a little, you got to the rock-hard stuff.
Then we were off to the dunes. Ohchkee drove for about half an hour to a designated parking area, which faced the highest point of the dunes in our area. They reach 200 meters in height and go on for 180 kilometers, according to our host. The wind was blowing hard, and I was anticipating being in a sandstorm, so I brought the goggles I had carried since the beginning just for this occasion, also my plastic camera cover (for rain and sandstorms), wore a jacket to keep the sand out of my vest with all its pockets and crannies, and put on my boots. I was afraid the blowing sand would prevent me from changing lenses. I also brought my panoramic camera, loaded with a fresh roll of slide film--36 exposures gives me nineteen 72 mm wide panoramics.
The wind was blowing hard, but it stayed at foot level. Nothing got in my eyes to speak of, and I could change lenses and operate the panoramic camera freely. The first thing that attracted my attention was a dried out pond that had left a light blue residue, and a shelf of flakey sandstone that framed it. This provided an interesting subject with the smooth curves and subtle gradient contrasts of the dunes themselves in the background.
Barbara was way up ahead of me, so I proceeded to climb the dunes. At first, however, they weren't as difficult as I had anticipated, thinking I'd be sliding back 60% of the way with each step. The sand surface was somewhat hard for some reason. But then when the slope increased, so did the difficulty. I felt I was practicing Leninism in its purest form: three steps forward and two steps back.
Looking back at the dry pond on the left and a wet one on the right. These evaporated ponds are very alkaline.
After an altitude gain of about 60 feet, I turned around, and so did Barbara. I decided to go back a slightly different way. On the other side of a sand mound from the dry pond bed was a pond with water in the vague shape of a foetus. I slid my way down a rather steep embankment, which was great fun, and soon found myself at the water's edge. Also interesting were the blackened stems of dead plants that filled a small field in front of me. Then the ground texture changed a few times, and each time I could put the dunes in the background. The abstract compositions were fascinating.
Once back at the Land Cruiser we met an Italian Swiss woman named Donatella, who was visiting Mongolia for two weeks with her photographer sister, who was still high up in the dunes. It felt wonderful to be speaking Italian out here, since I had been feeling so linguistically ignorant since Tibet, and she also appreciated the opportunity to take a break from English, the lingua franca of Asia.
Donatella, right, with her guide and our driver (left) Ohchkee.
On the way back to our base we stopped to photograph an encampment of dromadaries, that included little ones as well. I circled the area where the camels were tethered, to the loud cries of one of the juveniles, and trying to avoid stepping on the camel shit which virtually paved the area. I finished out my roll in the panoramic camera and took a bunch of images with the digital, then we headed back.
We finally boarded our Fokker 50 prop plane, whose wings are high on the fuselage, and arrived in Dalanzagdag at 4:15, where we were welcomed with a bowl of fermented mare's milk (it's like labne but three times more sour), and there was our driver, Ohchkee, a big hulk of a man, all smiles and holding a sign with our names on it. We recovered our checked baggage in a bin in the luggage hut, access outside, which it slid into on a metal ramp, having been fed through a window.
We piled our things into Ohchkee's good-sized 4-wheel drive Land Cruiser that we were relieved to see he had, and drove into town to a supermarket to stock up on our provisions, which we assumed we would have to supply. Then we were off to Roy Chapman Andrews' Flaming Cliffs (Mongolian: Bayandzag) about 60 km. away. We were soon off the paved road and onto the tracks.
The Gobi as we have seen it so far is mostly quite flat, sparsely green and rather gentle: no engulfing sandstorms yet. It is grazing land, and we were astonished at the size of the herds of goats we encountered. But most amazing was the herd of dromedaries we came across. They shied away from us despite everthing we said, and soon had split in two different directions, one on each side of the road. Dromedaries are two-humped camels, and these seemed to have their thick fur hanging off their rear end, as if someone had begun to shear it and changed their mind. A few of them kept looking at us, which I found very touching. They had red plastic tags on their ears, but no herdsman or yurt was in sight.
We arrived at the Flaming Cliffs at about 6:45. The sunlight was filtered by a thin layer of clouds, but it was still casting shadows in the orange light, so the cliffs lived up to their name. The cliffs were at most 40 feet tall. You could drive right up to the top surface and then climb down into the gullies. They very much resembled other Cretaceous beds I'd seen--in Joshua Tree National Park in California and Badlands National Park in South Dakota, but they were considerably less extensive. You could walk around the whole formation in half an hour. I descended into the gully following the wash and found no traces of dinosaurs, of course. That would have required some digging. But I did enjoy the formations, the mud mosaics, and even a small arch. We left at 7:20 just as the light was dimming and the shadows disappearing. But the sun and clouds were giving us a show!
Our driver then took us to a large stand of what looked like dead juniper trees: gnarled wood supporting sprays of thin branches, giving off a very Japanese aesthetic.
We then headed for his home in the village of Bulgan close by. Now Dalanzagdag is a small city, and this is a village, but in both of them the inhabitants live in yurts, just as if they were in the middle of the desert, except that they build solid wooden plank fences around their multi-yurt compound, where they plant a garden, erect their outhouse, and park and work on their cars. For a culture noted for its hospitality, the partitioning off of property with these 7-foot high solid wooden fences seems like an anomaly. But living in close quarters there's actually no way around it. From the air it looks as though everyone lives in a box.
Ohchkee introduces us to his wife and four children, sat us down in comfortable easy chairs in a yurt with a flat screen TV, a sound system, a fridge, and a Buddhist shrine, and within 10 minutes we each had a plate of warm food: chipped goat meat, rice topped with cooked tomatoes, and cooked slivered carrots, along with a bowl of warm goat's milk. His compound had two yurts, one more building and an outhouse. He was building a hothouse; the aluminum frame was complete, and he would cover it with plastic, probably visquine. He and his wife slept in one yurt, which also contained a water basin, with water ladled into a vessel suspended above it, and released by pressing up on a plunger. The water supply was nearby, on the other side of the door in a large covered pot, holding perhaps ten gallons. A towel, that apparently everyone used, lay across the room on a table. They were permanently camping out in their own home.
Ohchkee set us up to sleep in our yurt, spreading out blankets on the floor, which Barbara chose, given that she is more accustomed to floor sleeping, and I got the bed, which was little more than a plank on a platform, and just as hard as the floor. Our lights were out a little after 9, and I did manage to sleep through the night.
We got up rested at 6 am, had a simple breakfast, and were out by 7:20. On our way out of town we passed a small Buddhist temple that must have served the whole town. It had the standard walled-in courtyard with fancy Chinese style gate and large prayer wheels embedded in the front wall. It was interesting to see all the elements of the Buddhist temple essentially in miniature.
We were anticipating a drive of five to six hours to get to the dunes about 134 km away, but it took us less than four hours. We made a stop around 8 am at the yurt compound of a young couple and their adorable daughter attracted by their large herd of goats. I plunged right in to photographing them; most shied away, but one little black kid came up to me. The low position of the sun put halos around their fur, and their long shadows reinforced their forms.
The couple invited us into their living quarters and gave us warm goat's milk and some deep fried triagular meat pies; I took one for the road. In return I gave their little girl one of the sheets of laser stickers I had brought to give as gifts to our overnight hosts. But these were turning out to be formal (though very friendly) commercial arrangements, and I had the feeling that my gifts were very much beside the point. The hosts had their price in mind, and that was sufficient.
But this spontaneous exchange was really based on generosity, and the little girl was the exact right age to begin to be interested in paper dolls, the theme of the sticker page. She seemed dazzled by them, couldn't take her eyes off them, showed them to her mommy then her daddy. It was a little piece of glitz culture in a land of outhouses and carried water. I took their family portrait, noticing as I exited their main dwelling that they had a metal bin full of presumably goat dung inside by the door. I assume this was their fuel.
Note the bin of goat dung in the lower left.
Then we were off again, barreling down the supertrack at an average speed of 60 km/hour. Sometimes there were multiple parallel tracks; sometimes the track got very bumpy. I was continually amazed that Ohchkee knew when to turn when an alternate route presented itself. We finally arrived at the sharp but low hills that had lined our horizon for many miles. The track went straight through what turned out to be a broad canyon, no problem. Sometimes there were dry stream beds we had to avoid.
Suddenly Ohchkee spotted what looked like two small deer in the road next to the canyon wall on the right. We went off the track towards them, and soon saw that there were many more, and that they weren't deer, rather diminutive mountain goats, which I believe are called duikers (you learn this at zoos). There were four of them, then three more, then four more, and we realized we were seeing a whole herd. We got out of the Land Cruiser and climbed part of the way up the canyon across a gully from them. They gamboled up the rocky hill, some of them appearing in dramatic silhouette on top. We saw juveniles, each one following an adult; at one point a buck tried to mount a doe. In 15 minutes they had all disappeared to the other side. Enkhtuya later told me it was quite rare to see wild animals in the Gobi, and that they would make themselves scarce once the tourist season was fully underway.
Suddenly we saw a small creature the size of a gopher scamper across the road and disappear into a hole in the dirt in the embankment on the side. Then we noticed these holes everywhere. We were clearly in the Gobi equivalent of a prairie dog town, except that these creatures were much smaller than prairie dogs and more elusive. No chance I could photograph one at this point, though I did succeed later on. They turned out to be picas, non-rodent relatives of rabbits.
We reached the yurt compound where would stay the night, about two miles in front of the dunes, at 11:25, less than four hours driving time from our departure. It was a four-yurt compound tended by a solitary man, who also owned a herd of dromadaries. We were welcomed with warm goat's milk and a bowl of fresh deep-fried bread products, including some dense little sugar-covered donut spheres, which were too delicious to pass up. Barbara opted for the two-hour camel ride, but I stayed back, having had enough camel time in Jordan. She was back by 2, and our host served lunch, which consisted of a soup with goat meat, chunks of hard goat fat, and spiral pasta. Some of the goat meat was too tough to bite into, much less to chew. I skipped the fat chunks. The broth was tasty, however. I contributed some of the pickled shredded vegetables in a jar I had bought the previous day.
Our new host is on the far right, Ohchkee our driver in the middle, and Barbara on the left.
The bowl of fried bread is on the table. The fresh pieces, still warm, were on top, but if you dug down just a little, you got to the rock-hard stuff.
Then we were off to the dunes. Ohchkee drove for about half an hour to a designated parking area, which faced the highest point of the dunes in our area. They reach 200 meters in height and go on for 180 kilometers, according to our host. The wind was blowing hard, and I was anticipating being in a sandstorm, so I brought the goggles I had carried since the beginning just for this occasion, also my plastic camera cover (for rain and sandstorms), wore a jacket to keep the sand out of my vest with all its pockets and crannies, and put on my boots. I was afraid the blowing sand would prevent me from changing lenses. I also brought my panoramic camera, loaded with a fresh roll of slide film--36 exposures gives me nineteen 72 mm wide panoramics.
The wind was blowing hard, but it stayed at foot level. Nothing got in my eyes to speak of, and I could change lenses and operate the panoramic camera freely. The first thing that attracted my attention was a dried out pond that had left a light blue residue, and a shelf of flakey sandstone that framed it. This provided an interesting subject with the smooth curves and subtle gradient contrasts of the dunes themselves in the background.
Barbara was way up ahead of me, so I proceeded to climb the dunes. At first, however, they weren't as difficult as I had anticipated, thinking I'd be sliding back 60% of the way with each step. The sand surface was somewhat hard for some reason. But then when the slope increased, so did the difficulty. I felt I was practicing Leninism in its purest form: three steps forward and two steps back.
Looking back at the dry pond on the left and a wet one on the right. These evaporated ponds are very alkaline.
After an altitude gain of about 60 feet, I turned around, and so did Barbara. I decided to go back a slightly different way. On the other side of a sand mound from the dry pond bed was a pond with water in the vague shape of a foetus. I slid my way down a rather steep embankment, which was great fun, and soon found myself at the water's edge. Also interesting were the blackened stems of dead plants that filled a small field in front of me. Then the ground texture changed a few times, and each time I could put the dunes in the background. The abstract compositions were fascinating.
Once back at the Land Cruiser we met an Italian Swiss woman named Donatella, who was visiting Mongolia for two weeks with her photographer sister, who was still high up in the dunes. It felt wonderful to be speaking Italian out here, since I had been feeling so linguistically ignorant since Tibet, and she also appreciated the opportunity to take a break from English, the lingua franca of Asia.
Donatella, right, with her guide and our driver (left) Ohchkee.
On the way back to our base we stopped to photograph an encampment of dromadaries, that included little ones as well. I circled the area where the camels were tethered, to the loud cries of one of the juveniles, and trying to avoid stepping on the camel shit which virtually paved the area. I finished out my roll in the panoramic camera and took a bunch of images with the digital, then we headed back.
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