Mongolia

It takes three hours in Mongolia for me to be knocking down vodka shots in a nomad’s ger tent. This kind of hospitality comes as a shock after so much time spent dealing with the stony reserve and “fuck you, you stupid foreigner” attitude of many Siberians when you first encounter them. But I manage to adjust. That’s how they roll in Mongolia.

Ulaan Baatar is a bit of an ugly duckling, but you quickly pass through its concrete blight and hit the limitless wilderness of the Mongolian steppes, impossibly vast stretches of prairie laid out between craggy, forested mountains that just go on and on and on. It looks like Big Sky country in Wyoming, peppered here and there with the gers of nomads and their cattle, oxen, yak, horses, sheep and the occasional two-humped camel.

All around, a breathtaking nothingness. I hiked 40 kilometres round-trip one day with Urna, a local guide, and we didn’t see a single other soul. In summer the nomads camp on the plain so the herds have plenty of grazing; in the winter they huddle under the side of some mountain to take cover from the wind, though even then in bad years they’re essentially sleeping in snow caves. Some tents have a solar panel stapled to them, a solitary nod to modernity. And you can see why after all this time the majority of Mongolians choose to live this way, despite sky-high literacy rates and a growing economy.

On the first day I stop at the ger in Terelj national park with the family I’m meant to stay and find out today is “Elders Day”, when senior citizens are thrown an old-style party that starts at noon and lasts until 2 or 3am. Soon you learn the standard MO: Mongolian barbecue, solidified heavy cream with berries, potato salad, everybody gathered on benches in the ger – a large circular tent with couches along the sides and a woodstove in the center – gussied up in some combination of traditional local dress plus berets & second-hand t-shirts straight out of Williamsburg. One bottle of vodka after another after another, and a lot of singing. Mongolia has the hardest partying old folks out there. Potential retirement spot for April Isaacs? Must alert her.

The first shot of every vodka bottle gets chucked out the window as an offering to the gods, the rest are distributed across the table one at a time and you have to make a toast and sing before kicking it back. My ukulele comes in handy, though they clap on 1 and 3 to my Muddy Waters blues as if it’s a Sousa march, and shout “Hey!” at the end like Zorba the Greek. They themselves sing soulful, jaunty old tunes like “Father was a Fine Horseman”, celebrating lovers, the motherland and the like. Great people, stunning landscape, high intoxication level.

“What do you think of Mongolian women?” says one sixty-year old herder in what even I can make out as a thick regional dialect.

“Very beautiful,” I reply, “and very drunk!”

“So that means we’re going home together!”

Much laughter and more vodka shots.

Mongolian hospitality is a pleasure, but you’re considered a mannerless hillbilly if you ever say “no” when it’s offered. At another ger I visited they had just slaughtered a sheep, were busy filling the organs with blood and about to boil them. I was handed a huge tray of intestines as if it were a holiday fruit basket. A small slice of boiled stomach to chew on is sufficient, but they would have been mortified if I didn’t take something. Another example is the booze; the local vodka is good, but sometimes you have to suffer through a bowl of fermented horse milk first, which tastes month-old and chunky; you know you’ve had too much when it doesn’t make your stomach sick to smell it.

The next morning you see everyone from the party back in their civvies directing the cattle with sticks, and since there’s no refrigeration the leftover food gets turned into slop for the animals. You spend a couple hours each day getting water from the nearest creek. Horse is the preferred mode of travel, though some have 4WDs, and when you’re seven or eight years old they stick you on a horse, send you off onto the plain and tell you not to come back until you know how to ride it. People help each other out here, too, as a matter of mutual survival. At one point when our car is stuck in the middle of a river we were trying to cross – with a herd of goats passing us on both sides and “baa”-ing at us in what I can’t help but construe as open mockery – a passing tractor from the Soviet era hooks a chain to us and drags us out without our asking.

There are no roads out here. You drive across the unspoiled, bumpy open plain, sometimes through near-impassable mud banks in low-lying areas. There are no permanent buildings either, just the torched remains of a monastery every 100 kilometers or so – destroyed during the purges of Stalin along with the monks, most of whom were mass murdered – and at one point an abandoned Russian military complex with all the windows blown out.

There are, though, more of the decorated poles, those ubiquitous sky god antennae, set atop a boulder pile and decorated in strips of cloth in four colors: blue for the sky god, green for the earth, red for the fire god and yellow for Buddhism. Mongolians have been Buddhists for centuries now and their shamanism is syncretized to it in the same way that African religion is to Christianity in Haiti and the Latin Caribbean. You find traces of shamanism in the culture today like a faint strain of Beethoven amid the street noise of Manhattan at rush hour. The only ones who practice full-on old-style shamanism are the Reindeer People up north – remote and awe-inspiring even to the average Mongolian nomad – whose villages are accessible by several days on horseback, and only before snows close off the mountain passes in September. The Reindeer People keep to themselves.

For everyone else the old culture shows up in little mannerisms. You circle the shaman pole clockwise three times to make a wish when you pass, and an offering of two cigarettes to it when traveling on a voyage. Don’t throw garbage into the fire because “fire is a god”. And when you take down your tent and move, you leave no trace of yourself on the land. There are also the usual hucksterish shamans running around offering the same stuff you’d find in a South Bronx botánica, prescriptions for ridding yourself of back luck or making someone fall in love with you, though the instructions are more exotic: “fill a sack with horse meat, douse it in vodka and dump it in the woods by a stream” is a standard recipe. But their primary function is to use the shaman poles to travel up to heaven and direct the recently dead to their new home.

Throat singing is the coolest extant aspect of shamanism. This is where western Mongolians and their neighbors the Tuvans eulogize the mountains they consider to be gods – everything is alive in this system, even the rocks – through a style that generates larynx-like vibrations and pitches in various parts of the body. The best can generate tones in two parts of the throat and within the bronchial tubes at the same time for three-pitch chords. My last night in Mongolia I went back to Ulaan Baatar to see them perform. It’s not a parlor trick, this is soulful singing with phrasing as moving as a great opera libretto or jazz ballad. I also ran into some backpacker mates from Baikal at the concert, and we went out after for a night on the town, which in Ulaan Baatar means weaving through the midnight bustle of Seoul Street and bar hopping its storefront restaurants and taverns as locals crowd into chicken buses outside (which serve as the local transit system), practically stacked on top of one another around the traffic circles.

On the train out via the Gobi Desert I get my first border guard bribe experience (my passport is beat up so the guard wants US$20 to let me leave the country, laughably small so I don’t argue) and then meet my new bunkmates, who turn out to be animists of a different stamp, Eva and Staas, a Dutch couple celebrating their graduation from a prestigious school of industrial design in Eindhoven by travelling around the world for a year. At first I think they should come work for Google, but then I realize they’re too smart for Google. They need to go find somewhere smarter to work, wherever that is. Staas is going to start his own advertising agency; he specializes in designing mechanisms with various levers and knobs for people to play with as they interact with a brand. Eva is more into research; her thesis is a large circular object “printed” from a “3D photocopier” that can create any plastic object that you pass it via computer blueprints.

Eva’s object is a little Hal from 2001-ish for my taste; it senses where you are in the room and follows you with blinking lights. Steeped in the theories of phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, who divide being from consciousness at the point of interaction, so that whenever you touch an object – a cement post as much as a person – it is also touching you and can be said to be “conscious” at that moment. It’s a world view ancient as the Reindeer People, and apparently it’s making a comeback.

Based on this Eva wants to make our environments responsive to us, sensing our moods and responding accordingly, perhaps even providing them with a personality of their own, so that they don’t always do what we want them to do, and convey their own “moods”. Examples of their prototypes abound, and they even have one that is being made commercially available next year.

These guys view robots as “anthropomorphic”, fodder for morons who just don’t get it, the same disdain we have today for myth-gods like Cupid and Thor. What they want instead is a magic polymer forest, where every aspect of our environment interacts with us, guesses our moods and responds, makes life engaging and has a life of its own. Some parts make more sense than others – and all of it might make more sense when you’re stoned – but they’re way out there on the bleeding edge, at the forefront of the intelligent homes and interactive animist environments that are probably our future, a world of objects as alive in their way as those sacred mountains of the primeval Mongolian steppe that we now leave behind.