Page 39 - RADC 2016

Col John Ministery of environmentalism
I’m wondering as the galloping horses
and pursuing horsemen dwindle into the distance, round a corner and disappear from view. We’re alone in a thunderstorm, some of us without horses, on an exposed outcrop of mountain. The temperature’s close to freezing and the hail is coming down harder now. There’s not much shelter, so I just sit there on the slope and wait.
After what seems like ages, but in reality is only about a half hour, one of the horsemen returns. There’s no chance of cataloguing any plants now with the weather conditions being as they are so the plan is to head back down the valley to where a local Mongolian family have offered to provide us with food and shelter.
We walk leading our horses downhill
until we eventually come to a ger. This is
my rst experience of one up close and it
is a welcome site as it appears out of the gloom. The family usher our group inside – about 15 of us in total. Incredible hospitality when you think about it – how many British households would allow 15 strangers into their house to shelter them from a storm? This is the Mongolian way though – the premise being that if you give hospitality, you will also receive the same hospitality when you’re faced with a similar situation.
Inside the ger is brightly painted and decorated. Beds are arranged along the outside of the tent and there’s a TV and
Ger
laptop in one corner (outside there is a satellite dish and a solar panel for power). Close to the door hangs several sheep carcasses which they will use for cooking. There’s a hot stove in the centre fuelled by yak dung (there’s a plentiful supply of this along the valley oor)
extracting, restoring, scaling and advising. That evening during dinner (mutton and
rice), we have the evening brief. This involves individuals discussing events of the day and I get to hear about what the other group
got up to. They viewed some Bronze Age
keeping the ger warm. The family consist
These are passed around and are surprisingly tasty and much welcome.
tombs, but without shelter took the full force of the storm. Col John discusses what we can expect over the coming days. We will be making our way towards a valley called Namarjin. This is close to Tsambagarav – at nearly 4200m the
of a husband and
wife, grandmother and
children all wearing
brightly coloured
traditional clothes.
The wife is using the
stove to deep-fry
some kind of pastry
in mutton fat. These are passed around and are surprisingly tasty and much welcome. They also pass round bowls of “airag” which is a drink made of fermented mare’s milk; it’s de nitely an acquired taste.
highest point in the area. Its part of the Altai Mountain range that straddles the borders of Mongolia, China, Russia and Kazakhstan.
The next few days are spent riding, we’re still in our separate groups with our group cataloguing the ora and fauna as we
go along. I’m struck with the scale of the landscape all around me. Without sounding too clichéd, this is Big Country – wide valleys and snow covered peaks stretching for as far as the eye can see. My horse doesn’t put a foot wrong as we negotiate some pretty technical terrain – narrow steep ravines, exposed mountain ridges and river crossings deep enough for the water level to reach the lower part of the saddle.
After about an hour, the thunderstorm passes. Our horsemen have caught the escapees and returned them to their respective owners. We say farewell to the family and head back down to our camp.
We arrive back late afternoon and I receive a message from Prof Terbish that some of the residents of the valley wish to visit our clinics. We quickly set up our equipment in the tent and soon there’s a sizeable crowd outside so we get to work
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