It’s my last few hours in the nomad camp, Altanbulag District, Tov province, Mongolia.
I woke up about 615 am today, 20 minutes earlier than usual. The driver (Amma) is supposed to be here at 1200pm, so there’s still time to do some work. Durukh has been using a motorcycle to do some of his herding, and bringing in some untamed horses. If your curious to see what “hobbling” is you can have a look here as well as read about it in my previous post. Durukh is undoing the horse hobble:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uacDv9Eqv0M&w=560&h=315]
There was no horse roundup this morning. We started off with the goat sorting as usual. After sending the goats out to pasture, Durukh went to water the livestock, and I cleaned up the area the Ger by “dung harvesting” which is a nice way of saying “shoveling shit” as we would in the USA. The dung are collected and stored in neat rows several meters away from the Ger as seen in the background of the picture below.
Let’s discuss the science of “shit” 🙂 . Before coming to Mongolia I had heard that the chief contributor to global warming was actually cattle droppings and “emissions”. I would guess that this is because of their high methane content. Methane is a fuel source and “greenhouse gas.” I had also observed that the cow dung was preferred as a cooking source. This makes absolute sense because of the high methane content in the cow dung! The horse dung was preferred for other uses like warming the Ger (stove fuel) in the morning. The horse dung was also used to fill cracks in the walls of the goat shelter, so I’m guessing that it has some insulating properties as well. It may be that the horse dung is smaller, better formed and easier to handle for these purposes. Anyway, most of this is based on observation and we need a real nomad to explain it to us.
Durukh came back later in the morning and was pleased with the amount of dung I had transferred from the corral area to the piles. We next set upon disassembling part of the goat shelter. During the winter snows, a massively large tarp is thrown over the framework of the shelter to of course keep the snow out and provide a bit of warmth for the goats and sheep. It was a difficult task even for two grown men because the tarp was so big and heavy. I sort of realized that he wanted to get this done before I left…..
The morning was coming to an end and packed up my stuff (which took all of 10 minutes). 1230pm came and went. I’ve found the attitudes toward time are very different here in the outback as compared to the city. I used the extra time to take some last minute pictures around the camp. I realized that I didn’t have a single picture of myself an horseback, and there were no horses in the camp that day. Oh well… I also use the time to shoot some of the clips in this summary video:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfZkdQzF2lc&w=560&h=315]
Amma showed up about 230 pm. He had another English speaking brother whose name I can’t remember. Interestingly, his brother told me he learned to speak English by playing online video games with International friends!!!! Oh technology 🙂
We said our goodbyes and started the drive back to Ulan Bator. I learned I’d be sharing the ride with another volunteer from Australia. We started the drive to that camp….
I drove off with the driver brothers with a heavy heart……..
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