Adventures in the Land
of Ghengis Khan

By Kutina Williams
This article was printed in Abroad View magazine fall 2001

As I stared down at the snow on the mountains from the Russian chopper, I wondered what lay ahead. There were 12 of us, leaning on luggage, boxes and each other, as the helicopter hovered over the chilly Mongolian forests, nomadic herds and frozen lakes.

This was my first chopper ride, and what I had imagined as the nice glass bubble helicopter from Hawaii Five-O ended up being more like the chopper from M*A*S*H. Frightened of the possibilities of a crash, I stayed awake for the entire four-hour journey north to the small village of Tsaagan Nuur, which in English translates as White Lake. The town appeared from behind a mountain, and as we approached the unpaved grassy runway, I saw that a large audience from the village was awaiting our arrival. We gathered our things and stepped out of the chopper. I avoided making eye contact with the audience as I exited.

Once everyone was off the chopper, we were ushered to the small village army camp only forty miles from the Siberian border. At the camp, there were eight to ten rugged and hardened Mongolian men, clad in the traditional Mongolian del, sitting in a semi-circle. There were also a few dressed in worn camouflage and gun belts. After setting up camp, we decided to play a few games with the village children, who had gathered into a band of about '2 and were anxious to see us Americans. I initiated a game of "What time is it Mr. Fox," a game that I take credit for introducing to Mongolia. What would have been an easy game to start back in the States seemed to take forever in Mongolia, since we had to figure out how to say, "What time is it Mr. Fox" in Mongolian. We knew how to say, "What time is it?" easily enough, but we were stumped on the word for fox or wolf. After figuring out the word and enjoying at least 50 rounds of the game, we decided to stop and have dinner. What we ate for dinner was no surprise: mutton-not just any mutton but Mongolian-style mutton, fat and all (because of the frigid temperatures, fat is necessary for survival).

I watched one of the guards in a corner of the campground tie a sheep's legs together. He then knelt on the sheep's back and, while a small boy held down the sheep's head reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a freshly sharpened knife. It took no more than twenty seconds for the sheep to pass out and probably fifteen more seconds of holding down the artery before the animal was dead.

As honored guests, we were given a mutton dinner with entrails and all. I decided to settle for the sardines I had bought at the German market in Ulaan Baatar. After a small dinner, I went to my tent, climbed into my mummy bag and went to sleep, half dreading and half anticipating the next day.

We awoke the next morning at seven a.m. to the sounds of grunting and snorting horses, pots and pans rattling, dogs barking, and the smell of smoke and mutton grease. After three hours everything was finally ready for the students to start heading west, the only direction given for our trek towards the Tsaatan camp. The men who were sitting in the camp the previous day were our Mongolian guides. I could not help but wonder if we really needed ten guides-one for almost every student. I then realized we had about thirty horses too, which the language teachers, academic director, field coordinator and guides would ride, as well as three students at a time. Even though the horses were to be rotated within cooking groups, I had no desire to ride on a horse. I was content walking with most of the students the almost sixty kilometers to the Tsaatan camp.

We started walking west, and I was at the end of the foot soldier line. After three hours it seemed like we had gotten nowhere. The guides had not even left the camp yet; they were still packing the horses.

Before I left the States, I had found out I was anemic again. I was almost not allowed to go to Mongolia because of its high altitude. So I found myself tired, the soles of my feet rubbed raw from my brand-new Timberlands. It was windy, but the sun was intense. Our Mongolian field coordinator, whom we lovingly called "Papa Ulzii," suggested that I ride one of the horses. I remember looking at him mortified. "I cannot ride a horse," I said, as if he did not already know this. Everyone remembered how, just two weeks before, I had tried getting on a horse and ended up on its other side, on the ground. Still, Papa Ulzii thought it best that I ride, so I got on the horse. Mongolians are some of the best horsemen in the world, and they have to be. Mongolian horses are about a third the size of horses in the States, and they are used exclusively for transportation and as pack animals. The bottom line is that you would not give a sugar cube to these stocky creatures-you might get your hand bitten off!

I noticed that when the entire group finally got together, an armed Mongolian guard joined us. I wondered why, and I soon found out that three bandits had escaped from a prison camp in the Nation of Tuva, on the border of Siberia, and they had made it across the Mongolian border. They were hiding out in the forests and mountain passes through which we would be traveling. I thought, "Great…if there are three men running around who have escaped through the Siberian wilderness and are running around these mountain passes, they definitely will want a horse. Probably, they will go
after me, seeing how I can't even control mine." After three days of difficult travel, we finally reached the reindeer herders of the north, the Tsaatan, without any trouble from the bandits. The week we spent with the Tsaatan was the best of my time in Mongolia. Although I had known my host family only a short time, I was sad to leave my blind host mother Ulzii and my little sisters. Ulzii made a musk deer tooth necklace for me as a gift. It took me by surprise that I would receive a gift of any kind, especially such a gorgeous and precious gift.

The sadness of leaving my host mother, along with the fact that it had snowed twice while we were there, ensuring that our return journey would be even more treacherous than the previous one, only deepened my despondency. I thought I would die in the northern Mongolian wilderness because of the rugged, mean horse (mine was by far the worst of the lot). The fact that I had walked out early from shamaness's ceremony the night before because it was too crowded did not help matters either. The next morning, when we were preparing to leave, I was told that the spirits were not pleased that one of the souls left the ceremony before it ended. The shamaness performed a special ceremony because of this, but people were still worried for me.

When it came time for us to leave, I was the first student on my horse, as always. We were told it would be important to follow each other in a straight line on the journey back because snow could cover up holes and, even worse, small ponds! Well, two hours into our trek back to Tsaagan Nuur, a large gap began to form in our caravan. Our guides, being expert horsemen, would occasionally follow their own paths, even though we were told to follow in a line. The student ahead of the guide in front of me was following the head guide, when suddenly the guide in front of me decided to take his own path. I was too far from the student to see the slender path that would have led me to him. So I tried to decide whom to follow. I must have taken too long to decide, because my horse made up its own mind: it chose to follow the guide-for about five minutes, that is. Then, against my pulling and tugging, it ventured off on its own route down the valley, in a totally different direction from the rest of the group. "Why do you always do this, you moron," I swore at the horse. "You won't be satisfied until I am dead, will you! You stupid fool!"

My reprimands were of no avail; the others in the group following me were nowhere to be seen, as they had not yet made it over the huge hill. My horse continued walking in the opposite direction, until at one point the imbecile walked onto the edge of a pond, which I thought was frozen solid until the horse and I broke through the ice. The horse's neck and head were above the water and I was in the water waist deep. The horse bucked, trying to get us out of the freezing cold pond, and instead got both of us even more wet. It was about five degrees Fahrenheit outside and I had worn jeans, which were soaked through. And to make matters worse, I can't swim. But I knew I had to get off of the horse immediately or be thrown off and possibly drown. My chance came when the horse was rearing back, and I rolled off its back onto the ice. I suppose I was lucky to be just light enough to keep the ice from breaking beneath me. As I tried pulling the horse out by the reins, his incessant rearing and struggling to get out of the hole caused the ice to begin breaking under my feet. By this time the remainder of the group was approaching over the hill and noticed what was happening. One of the guards came near and told me how to prevent the horse from going deeper into the pond. I finally got the horse out. I remember trying to mount it and not being able to lift up my leg because of all the water that had started to freeze on my jeans. My feet were getting numb quickly, and I eventually lost sensation in the very tips of my third and fourth toes.

I rode in misery for another two hours until lunch. After lunch, we walked the horses over a steep mountain stream. During my entire journey, my horse, the unusual horse in the group, would stop abruptly at the edge of each stream or river, practically throwing me off. I watched as the academic director in front of me tiptoed across the slippery rocks to the other side with his horse. "I can do this," I said to myself. I stepped on the first rock and was immediately snapped back by the reins, causing me to fall into the freezing cold stream just as my jeans had begun to dry. I got up, amidst inquiries as to whether I was okay. I was even more furious than before. After another half an hour, I realized that the route back was the exact same way we had come. We would again go up and down rocky overhangs, some of which had drops right off of the side of the mountain. I was angry with myself for having ever agreed to join such a dangerous trip.

I could not believe I was actually in Northern Mongolia riding a crazy Mongolian bronco over snowy mountain passes, through thick evergreen forests, and across frosty mountain streams, all the while evading Tuvan bandits. I had signed up for a culture and development course with the School for International Training, not a NOLS course. I wanted a semester abroad, a time to learn about a new culture and a new people, thus broadening my horizons as an anthropology major at Davidson College, but I had never figured on dying in the process. Now, after three months back in the U.S., I am dying to return to what I feel was the most adventuresome, most trying, most spectacular, most amazing three and a half months of my life.

At the time this article was written Kutina Williams was a senior at Davidson College, with a double major in anthropology and biology. She participated in SIT's "Mongolia: Culture and Development," which was the first American undergraduate program to operate in Mongolia. A highlight of Kutina's stay there was discovering dinosaur bones in the Gobi Desert. Following this study abroad program, Kutina traveled to Madagascar to study natural healing practices.