Gorkhi-Terelj National Park
A day in paradise
June 16, 2024
The sun was beating down. White fuzzies rose with the heat in the early morning. For the past week and a half, UB was filled with floating white fuzzy things that would gracefully fly up your nose like a tiny bug flying into a house through the most covert nooks and crannies. I’m assuming they had something to do with the pollen of the evergreens around the city. Pines are of the few trees that could survive not -30, not -35, but up to -45 degrees in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.
My friend Su and I approached the parking lot of Hazara Restaurant. Waving through the front windshield of a nearby car was our driver for the day—a lovely couple whom we had never met before who I found on a Facebook group for expats in Mongolia and who had advertised transportation services for tourist purposes. There are many ways to describe UB culture, and one of the flavors is the informality of the transportation system. While on semi-urgent occasions, we book an Uber, Lyft, or Taxi to get from place to place in the United States, here you stand on the side of the road, hold out your hand, and hop into the next car that pulls up to the curb. It’s like urban hitchhiking. Fast, convenient, and safe enough. If you were to copy-paste the same situation in most places in the United States, you might star in the next episode release of a crime documentary. A matter of cultural relativity.
We hopped in the car, buckled in, and were on our way. Blue glass towers and sturdy Soviet boxes zoomed past us. They turned into dog statues, strip malls, and then eventually into one long, straight road ahead through the middle of vast green dotted with the flick of a horse’s mane, the baa of a sheep, and the gravelly whine of a motorbike under a blue sea dotted with white cotton balls. On the car ride, Mr. Driver narrated to us bits of history about Terelj National Park, the significance of dogs, tree cultivation, and other facets of Mongolian culture.
After an hour, we pulled up to a large and slightly round parking lot not yet packed with cars and tour buses. We hopped out of the car and there towering high above us, piercing the perfect blue sky proudly, majestically, was a gigantic silver Chinggis Khan saddled atop a horse like a throne.
The metal was so smooth that it was almost liquid. My blood pumped with giddiness as I ran up the stairs and circled the base of the monument. We looked at it from different angles, took pictures, and then I did some fun touristy things (but who cares—I was excited), like holding a falcon that was big enough to eat me and then going for a short camel ride.
I am not sure what falcon man said, but for some reason he kept wanting me to shake it as it perched on the large brown glove which sheathed nearly my entire arm. The camel ride was exceedingly bumpy and the hump, being made of mostly fat and a bit of cartilage, was squishy and had a bit of a wobble to it.
As Su had never ridden horses before, that was the main event on our agenda. While I am allergic to horses, I wanted to ensure she had a good first-time equestrian experience and decided to risk the anaphylactic shock. Our car rolled up into a gravelly lot next to a river, the hot rubber tires crunching over the terrain.
Once we decided to hire guides for the ride, two young boys of about 8-10, maybe 11 years old, walked out two tiny horses to us. The hooves clop clopped over the small uneven white rocks. One horse was a deep chocolate brown, and mine was a soft chestnut. To my surprise, I discovered that horses in Mongolia are not at all like horses in the United States. They are much smaller. In the U.S., it would take me either a lot more flexibility or a stool to get on even a quarter horse as my personal altitude only stands at around 5 feet or 150cm. This time, it was a piece of cake. We mounted our noble steeds and waited for our guides. One of the other horses just next to me in the lot started bucking up a bit, whipping its head around. The people said it was just newly trained. Once the people calmed it down, the same young boy who brought out the horse mounted it, and I was given the other end of the rope he was holding. Never in a million years did I suspect that our guides would be children despite knowing that young boys race horses for the Naadam holidays. Two primary school boys were the guides to two slightly nervous 24-year-olds. Our small, majestic beasts waded through the river, and we were on our merry way. Less than 10 minutes into the ride, my guide’s horse started bucking up again and he angrily hissed a choo sound at it while my horse was pulled this way and that, to and fro while the guide horse was out of control. All I could think about was how terribly close to a tree I was. In my mind, I could see the horrible vision of the crunch of my leg sandwiched between my horse and the tree. I think all good sandwiches should have a suitable crunch to it, but not when it’s all bones, muscles, and tendons from my femur to my heel. Luckily, crisis was averted, and I thankfully did not have to make use of my health insurance plan.
Throughout the duration of the ride, our two guides who turned out to be brothers, quarreled the whole way because they could not hear each other over the wind and rustle of the trees and the stomp of hooves and the occasional car passing by.
During the ride, Su turned around and said to me, “He said that you look young, like maybe a teenager.” I did a double take.
“What? He said I look young? He’s 8 years old!” He’s young. I’ve been told that my entire life by family, friends, and acquaintances who are decades older than I. If for this first time in my life, I was hearing it from a little kid who was decades younger than I, then I suppose it must be true. The cream of the crop was when they thought my friend Su was my translator as she is fluent in Mongolian.
Wading through the river once more, we returned to the gravel lot where we started. Our next adventure brought us to a Buddhist temple on top of a small mountain. For miles and miles, grand peaks rested on the horizon, verdant green, disrupted only here and there by tan rocks formations. The hike up to the temple was lined with small yellow, white, and purple flowers. They seemed happy to be there, and so was I.
