- Dave

I was reading in one of my Mongolia guide books about people who bring their own riding gear and they interviewed a guide who said that the best saddle for comfort would be an Australian saddle. Meredith and I have a friend Sharon who is a serious rider and when I spoke to her and mentioned an Australian saddle, Sharon said, “no question, long days in terrain with lots of ups and downs? You want an Australian saddle.” I’d never heard of Australian saddles before. All I knew about was English or Western. It turns out that Australian saddles are modified English saddles, created when settlers brought English saddles to Australia and found that they didn’t work well for working cattle all day. They modified the design to maximize comfort and to make it safer, i.e. hard to get out of the saddle unless you actually want to. Ok, sounds good. It was tough to find one in New England though – it’s hard enough to find Western gear here. Almost everyone here rides English. I tried several shops around which had a couple of used saddles but none fit well. I got lucky when a woman in Rhode Island advertised a used Australian saddle on Craig’s List. I drove down one Saturday morning, rode it for a few minutes and bought it.

Getting it to Mongolia was a bit of an adventure. I sent it as checked luggage in a big cardboard box and with a lot of other gear packed around it for protection, the box weighed 65 pounds. (Luckily, Japan Air’s limit for trans-pacific flights was 70 lbs. or this was going to be expensive.) I was pretty relieved when I unpacked it 5 flights later at our first campsite in the park and it was intact.

The verdict after riding it for 10 days of 4-7 hours per day? It made a huge difference and was worth all the effort to find it and haul it over there. I’ve left it there in storage for my next trip back.

The saddle on my horse. This was a real Plush-o-Matic. In addition to the very high seat back an Australian saddle has, I also bought a foam rubber pad for the seat (called a Seat Saver or, less manly, a Tush Cushion). The saddle blanket was thrown in by the woman who sold me the saddle. Note the built-in saddle bags – sweet!

Yours truly all saddled up and at the very end of our ride. It was cold and windy that day and I’m wearing about 5 layers.

- Dave

Always an unexpected contrast: camels and snow.

Meal time was always a social event with lots of good conversation.

Dinner time meant plenty of food… 

…and sometimes a surprise like watermelon martinis.

The trip is a series of beautiful campsites but the ones near the end are my favorites.

The view from my tent near the end of the trek.

Our last campsite – at 10,000 feet next the glaciers.

One of the last things at each campsite: in the morning, our guide Eddie gets out a map and lay out the plan for the day.

- Dave

Karbai and Sarkut loading up a camel.

One fully-loaded camel. It’s amazing what they can carry – about 500 lbs. each.

We would usually saddle up and ride out ahead of the camel train to get a head start. There is a lot of varied terrain out there. Sometimes we were riding in valleys, some times over a rocky pass, sometimes through meadows.

Most of the trip was sunny but here we are riding through a valley on a cold, rainy morning. Bummer.

Riding over a 10,000 foot pass.

Walking our horses down the other side of the pass. Amazing views along the way.

Around mid-day, we’d stop for lunch on the trail. Lunch was always hearty – you never went hungry on this trip.

Amy and Jess, two of our guides with the lunch spread.

Our lunch spot as we rode closer and closer to the glaciers near the end of our trip. 

A lunch-induced food coma sometimes was unavoidable.

After lunch, more riding. Sometimes we would stop in a local ger. They would invite us in and serve us food like at the beginning of our trip.

This ger had a freshly killed goat carcass hanging on the wall. Its head was on the floor near the door. Pretty grim.

The area is full of history and there are many petroglyphs and deer-stones, etc. One day we were in an area with many of them and we spent time exploring.

A part of on rock panel showing an Argali sheep and a moose. Probably about 3 or 4 thousand years old.

The group rides through a valley on the way to the next site.

Some days were short – only about 4 hours of riding. Some were long and went 6 hours or so.  It was always very nice to finally get to camp and relax.

More to come…

- Dave

A group of gers from a local Kazakh family

Per local custom, we were invited inside and given food such as tea, cheese, yoghurt, etc.

The head wrangler named Karbai sang a song for us while playing the dombura.

Afterwards, we went outside where they put new shoes on two of the horses we would use.

Karbai hammers a shoe into shape while the other wranglers tend to the horse. Not easy to see here but the wrangler in the center of the picture is wearing a Hawaiian aloha shirt with surfboards and 1940’s cars on it. Very stylish.

Putting the shoe on the horse. These guys work pretty hard.

The next day, like last year, many of the locals – easily over 100 – came out and staged a Kazakh version of naadam for us. There were horse races, tug-of-war (usually with a goat carcass but they used a pair of jeans for us), and a game where they have to pick something up off the ground while staying on a moving horse. One of our guys named Sarkut won that one.

Two Kazakhs in the horse race next to the lake.

The next day, we hit the trail on our horses to head to the next camp site. More to come…

- Dave

Impressive. Ouch!

After we were done in Ulaan Baatar, we flew another flight 3 hours west to Ulgii, the westernmost airport in Mongolia and the capital of that region. We stayed again at the Eagle Ger Camp along the river:

The river that runs next to the Eagle Ger Camp.

Our gers. Mine and my…ger-mates…is in front.

We were in Mongolia during naadam which is the time of the annual Mongolian games. Although the games in Ulaan Baatar are best known, they are heavily commercialized and it is tough for spectators to get close and really experience them so we went to local naadams instead. The naadam is made of “the three manly games”: wrestling, archery, and horse racing. In Ulgii, we only had time before we left to watch the archery portion of the games although we did see more later.

Focused before shooting. The goal is accuracy, not distance.

Before leaving Ulgii, we had time to visit a man who owned and trained 3 golden eagles used for hunting. We spent some time there interacting with the eagles and most people got a chance to hold them on their arm. I of course was too busy taking pictures to remember to get IN one. Oh well…next time.

Looking one of his eagles in the eye.

After leaving Ulgii, we drove about 6 hours over really bumpy roads to get to the park. Along the way, we stopped for lunch in a town called Tsengel and watched the wrestling part of their naadam:

The two wrestlers size each other up.

Then they lock in a grip. They stay like this for a while and it looks like nothing is happening but you can see the leg muscles are flexing.

One of them is thrown off balance…

…and goes down. All it takes is touching an arm or leg to the ground to lose.

At the end of the day, we arrived in Altai Tavan Bogd National Park at the lower end of the lake called Khoton Nur (nur = lake in Mongolian). It’s a beautiful location and it was even nicer to see our tents already set up for us since some of our guides had arrived a day or two earlier:

Our camp site at Lower Khoton Nur.

We spent a few days here, meeting our local horse and camel wranglers, getting used to our horses, etc.

More to come…

- Dave

The pictures posted are a larger size than previous galleries which I think looks much better but download times may be longer. Please let me know if there are any issues.

I’m now working on some of the panoramas that I took on the trip and will post again when they’re ready. As always, feedback is welcome. Enjoy!

- Dave

• You Stupid Horse
• Farty McSmellerton
• Poopy McFartington
• Valiant Steed
• Good Boy
• Bad Boy
• Eating Machine
• Best. Horse. Ever.

BTW, Dave changed horses for the last three days of the trip because the U in UPS changed to “Useless.”  He was given one of the larger, stronger horses that the guides had and eventually he earned the name Brutus (although by the end Dave regretted not using “Goliath” since it fit nicely with his own name).  I wonder if we’ll hear later this summer about UPS having been eaten.  They do that you know.  It’s true.  It happened to Amy’s horse from last summer’s trek.  Apparently the horse wasn’t pulling its weight anymore.

- Meredith

I brought a GPS data logger with me on this trip. It’s not a full GPS device with screen, etc. The idea is that by minimizing all the extras (it’s just a GPS chip and some memory), the battery life is extended much longer than a big device. It seems to have worked pretty well. By massaging some of the data it created, it was pretty straightforward to create the map below of the entire route we took in western Mongolia (for those of you that subscribe to our blog by email, you’ll probably need to pull this post up in your web browser for the full effect). For those not on the trip, we started in Ulgii at the Eagle Ger Camp. That’s the waypoint on the right-hand side. We then traveled clockwise ending up back at the Eagle Ger camp.

Below the map you’ll see the elevation profile of the trip. I wish it had the waypoints noted in it so you could see the elevation of each campsite. Maybe I’ll fix that up if I get time later on. You can play with this map like you would any Google map. The Terrain button is pretty cool I think. And if you have Google Earth installed, click on Earth for a 3d view of our route. If you have a taste for the technical side of GPS and want the GPX file that describes this route, just let me know.

- Dave

Tavan = 5; Bogd = spiritual leader/saint.  There are 5 peaks surrounded by glaciers.  The back side of the mountains are on the Chinese and Russian borders.

- Meredith