First summary – How it all began

Day: 432

Sunrise:
06:59

Sunset:
18:49

Total kilometers:
2517

Soil condition:
Asphalt

Temperature – Day (maximum):
15 °C

Temperature – day (minimum):
minus 1 °C

Temperature – Night:
minus 6 °C

Latitude:
49°01’656”

Longitude:
104°03’559”

Maximum height:
1304 m above sea level

At this moment I’m sitting in Tovuu and Baatar’s apartment, looking out of the window into a courtyard bordered by more ugly Eastern Bloc-style bunkers. The land where your eyes never meet begins behind the next block or the one after that. Although it was only the end of September, it has already snowed. In a few hours, the sun will have licked the snow away again, but in the coming weeks it will lose the battle against the approaching winter. Here, protected by the walls, in a man-made dwelling with radiators and hot water, winter can no longer harm us, it has lost its power and terrifying force. That’s a good thing, at least for a while. At least until we have fully rested and regained our strength to continue our journey through life. But now another, already familiar phase of life begins for us. We will start our journey home in a few weeks. Embrace family and friends. We will enjoy not being strangers for a while, speaking to people in our own language, living our own culture, evaluating and reviewing our experiences, pictures and films and telling people about Mongolia and the way of life of the peoples living there, which is strange to us. We will certainly enjoy our time at home, inhale the luxuries of civilization and when we get used to the fast pace of life in the West again, we will pull the ripcord to continue our nomadic life.

Still sitting in my well-traveled folding chair, my gaze glides from the ugly courtyard back into the room and lingers on the tapestry in front of me. The pattern woven in red, blue and light green is captivating. It starts to turn slowly, like a spiral that slowly sucks my mind into itself and brings up the memories of the past 14 months. It’s as if the spinning spiral takes my mind back to a time when two people sought, found and lived the real adventure. It seems so bizarre to me as if we were actors in the cosmos playing the leading roles in an adventurous story. But was it just a game? Wasn’t it stark reality? Were the two people really called Tanja and Denis? In the spiral fog, I suddenly feel the stress of preparing for a trip to Mongolia that was on shaky ground right from the start because of the tough visa regulations. The idea of riding horses to one of the last reindeer nomads on earth to spend a winter with them was downright absurd. And yet one piece of the mosaic followed another until we were sitting on the plane to Ulan Bator with an NGO invitation and soon 200 kilograms of excess baggage accepted by the airline. Even if it wasn’t a miracle, the trip seemed to me to have been graced by just such a thing.

Suddenly I feel again how hectic and aggressive the traffic in the Mongolian capital seemed to us, the many administrative procedures, the paperwork, the trembling and anxiety and then the relief of holding a Mongolian identity card and a one-year work permit in our hands, which opened the door to an extraordinary expedition trip. I remember the challenges of the technology letting us down, waiting for the many parcels with the equipment and special food we still needed, the first conversations with our translator Ulzii, who hardly spoke any English and turned out to be an egotistical loser during the trip.

What a sublime feeling it was to have moved our base camp from Ulan Bator to Erdenet. How warmly Naraa had welcomed us into her home. I think of the sobering visits to the abattoir and the many, sometimes difficult negotiations with horse owners. The search for the cart horses and the joy of finding Sharga and Bor in a logging company. She remembers the elaborate construction of the horse-drawn carriage or how Sara’s uncle Tsagaan ran off with his advance on his salary, never to return. It was hair-raising the way we were ripped off in the first few weeks, the way the people licked money out of our pockets or the way one of the shepherds put an old horse on us instead of a sar and disappeared with the money. It was a real feat when our translator Taagi Sar stepped back from the shepherd and left the old horse there. For days we were afraid that this evil man would repeat the horse, but Sar stayed and became an important member of the expedition. And then Mogi came into our lives. A dog that barked at everything it saw and soon drove me mad. Who would have thought at that time that it was mainly thanks to him that we hadn’t lost all our horses to thieves.

I fondly remember how one of the most important people on this trip came to visit us. How we had the first discussions with Bilgee about the planned expedition and his duties. His initially exaggerated salary expectations, his caring, level-headed manner, his willingness to help and his wealth of ideas. Without him, this trip would undoubtedly not have been so colorful, sometimes funny and, above all, successful.

We look forward to your comments!