Mongolia - No country for vegan men

When I'll post this, we'll be already in China*. But now, we're crossing the everlasting countryside of Mongolia by train, while drinking powder salty Mongolian tea and chatting with a super cultured beautiful Mongolian woman who lived 10 years in Europe.

We’re still moved from our 2 weeks in the countryside and I think we had a greasy food OD. I’ll say that Mongolia is definitely no place for vegans; since Mongolian are nomads they only have their livestock to move from place to place and they eat almost exclusively from their animals products (adding maybe salt, sugar, tea, flour). They eat absolutely every part of every animals: goats, sheep, cows, yaks, horse, camels and their milk in every possible state; all this without a fridge! I should add that Mongolia is no country for foodies either. Our guide did wonders with what she had, but Mongolian food can be  at  most called interesting but definitely not tasty. They don't use spices, everything is first boiled, meat cuts are really  greasy, most veggies come from abroad and they get to Mongolia in very bad conditions (as we'd probably throw them away),

We came back from 2 amazing weeks of infinite fractal landscape which mutated from flatness to mountains to lakes and rivers to deserts. We were 6 travelers, a guide and a driver. Our guide was a short chubby smiling 28 years old girl from the Mongolian wild far west who may probably be able to fight a furious bear and prepare it for lunch while humming (but was terribly afraid of domestic cats). Our driver was a middle age tattooed guy with many scars and heavy drinking habits, who was mainly cheerful except when we thought he was having a heart attack. We traveled together with two Belgian girls who we waited in U.B.; Teresa, the Spanish girl with whom we waited  and wandered in the meanwhile; and  Duncan, a Master student from US who joined us at the last minute.

And we enjoyed together sunshine, rains, hails and sand storms (sometimes in the same day), and also tons of milk (from either yak, goat or sheep) and much more greasy food than what our body could handle. At least my stomach (and my adventurous partner's stomach) passed through every possible condition (to not enter into details). (However, the two Belgian girls were OK the whole time. For one of them the explanation might be that she was vegetarian, but it seemed that the mix of beer and chocolate from their country make them able to digest even  fried broken glass bottles, who knows...)

Now we have 17 hours on the Trans Mongolian railway till we arrive to Zamyin Uud (last Mongolian town before China), and it seems like the right moment to recapitulate how come we stunk so strongly when we arrived back at the hostel in U.B!

Khairhan sacred mountain

We reached our first destination after 6 hours riding on a semi-destroyed road that run on a semi arid landscape set between mountains repeated as far as we could see.

 So we got there and we entered to the family ger, which was pretty much the same ger we would enter a half dozen times more in different settings: a very hot circular space with a dong fueled stove and a chimney in the center, a couple of beds, Buddhist icons at the opposite side of the door, and a strong smell of goat, meat, milk and sweat. Outside the ger, there were the family's animals: lots of goats and sheep and some cows; and steppe and mountains and more steppe and more mountains.

Iohi holding a goat at the front of the family ger 

Our guide cooking inside the ger

We stayed two nights there, one in tents and the other one in the small family's ger (but without the family since they traveled somewhere else). We had the chance to see the father and one of the kids cleaning a goat by removing the inside and burning the outside. Mongolians don't kill their animals too often, but when they do it they use every inch of the animal. The outside part of the goat (everything without the guts) was taken with the family when they traveled, it was some sort of family holiday and they were going to celebrate it by doing a "hotpot" somewhere near there. A "hotpot" is a particular way to cook the meat of any animal and our guide claimed it was too strong for the tourist stomach. However,  we got promises of a future hotpot for us until 10 days later...

So for the second day, the 8 of us stayed with the ger, the animals, and the inside meat of the goat, a.k.a. our lunch...

Our guide happily cleaned the parts and made some   sausages filled with everything and  those sausages were boiled over the stove inside the ger… It’s hard to describe that smell, and I’ll leave it to your imagination. Anyway, we actually ate some of it, and we got a promise of no meat for the dinner.

Boiled inside meat sausages with rice

So we tried to digest the food by walking and climbing those mountains that repeated unrealistically everywhere. It's really weird to see a landscape and think it looks as computer generated! But I guess we only see so much landscape on a screen.

We came back by dinner time. We found our dinner done inside the empty ger (all the family was away) but the guide/cook and the driver weren't around. So we waited, it was 8:15 and she said dinner will be ready by 8:00… And we waited more, it was 9:00 and we decided to heat the food… And I think around ten, she appeared all out of breath, saying she was sorry, the baby cows were lost and it took a lot of time, and she must milk now the goats and sheep before the milk inside them spoils.

So we went outside to help her, and the idea was to herd ALL the goats and sheep inside a tiny fenced space and then to milk the females. So she started to milk them inside a big sea of cloudy animals, and it was very hard for her to move inside that tiny space filled with goats and sheep. She asked us to kick the males out of the tiny space and then Duncan and I did that by grabbing the goats by the horns and lifting the sheep outside the fence!

Afterwards we all had to kick all the grown up animals out and put the babies in, and then to look for some of the baby cows, and it was completely dark and it took hours! We went to sleep very late and extenuated...

On the next day before we hit the road again, the whole family came back, and we saw more or less the same process being done in 10 minutes by two people instead of 7 and in 3 hours…

*We've been in China already for 10 days now, but I had some technical problems, thanks Cheng for solving them!