Ask most Americans about Mongolia, and they will almost certainly bring up Genghis Khan, the 13th century slave turned warrior king whose horse-backed armies conquered the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching from modern-day China to Hungary. The more lascivious among us might even deploy trivia about how many women the ruler impregnated, resulting in millions of people whose Y-chromosomes a 2003 study traced back to the Great Khan. Most Mongolian barbecue dishes in the United States are, in fact, the advent of a Taiwanese American, and Anthony Bourdain never made it to the steppe nation. Yet the discerning foodie may recognize Mongols traditionally subsist on boiled mutton, sour dairy products and few vegetables. True fans of world music should have at least heard of khöömei, the style of throat-singing where deep, droning growls vibrate other vocal chords to create a haunting harmonic whistle. Well-heeled travelers increasingly see Mongolia as a rugged backpacking destination.
Other than in work-related settings, like here, I’m really not in the habit of talking constantly about the places I travel for my job. I would love to say that is because I’m tasteful enough to see how easily it can sound like bragging. In truth I suspect it’s more likely that I just spend most of my free time with the same few people who are texting me constantly, including while I’m away, so the most recent stamps in my passport are old news. But in the past two months since I returned from a reporting trip to Mongolia, it has naturally come up. And every time, I get the same reaction: eyebrows fling upward, eyes widen and there’s some variation on “uh, what was that like?”
Being out on the steppe reminded me of the ocean. I know that’s a strange answer. How could something be most easily likened to something from which it couldn’t be farther? When I was a little boy, we would go to Long Island’s South Shore beaches and I would stare out to the horizon and try to mentally map which countries I would hit if I could just go straight. The way the brown hills undulated in every direction, blurring the border between land and sky, made me think of the beach.
Bouncing along unpaved paths in a beat-up Korean 4x4 felt a little like navigating choppy waters. My hand stiffened around the truck’s grab handle as we bobbed along the unpaved path, casting a dust cloud in our wake. I chatted with my travel companions, but it was easy to drift off staring out at the endless sea of brown.
Listening to some dramatic Mongolian music helped ground me in the moment. Seeing animals was another jarring geographical identifier. Herds of two-humped Bactrian camels lounged around water oases. Black vultures stalked the skies.
But I don’t think I fully mentally grasped just how far from home I was until I arrived at Davaadalai Gongor’s yurt.
This was October, when the 41-year-old and his wife and son traditionally camp in this part of the central Mongolian province, or aimag, of Uvurkhangai. He welcomed me and my translator at the door to his ger – the beige, collapsible tent we call a yurt in English. The family had set out a feast of fresh cheese and plates stacked with bars of aarrul, a chalky sweet made with dried sour yogurt.
We sat on low stools around the table in the center of the ger. Per tradition, he took out an ornate snuff bottle containing a fragrant powdered tobacco. I took some on my hand and snorted, enjoying the mild head rush. Then he poured a bowl of airag, a drink made with fermented mare’s milk that tastes a bit like kombucha or Korean makgeolli. I drank some and gave him back the bowl. He poured me a small cup of “milk vodka,” a clear, soju-like drink also derived from dairy. I'm a pretty committed teetotaler, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I tried a sip; it was not particularly pleasant. He then pulled out a bottle of actual Russian vodka, which I politely but emphatically declined. He threw back a brimming shot.
Davaadalai exhaled through his lips and patted calloused, cold-reddened hands on his knees. He had followed the ancient formula for feeding a family. The nomad raised sheep and goats, just like his ancestors for every generation he could trace. He lived humbly, with a modest-sized herd. He maintained a colorful Buddhist shrine in his home.
It didn’t work for him.
Davaadalai didn’t change. He did the same things in the same places his family had for millennia, living off the land and grazing livestock on the continent’s central expanse of grasslands. But rapid shifts in Mongolia’s economy and climate are calling the very survival of the pastoral tradition into question.
Between extreme weather and overgrazing, there’s hardly enough grass left for small-time herders to compete. To buy hay instead, nomads take out loans, borrowing against their livestock. When the next lethal winter kills the collateral, herders miss interest payments and get trapped in cycles of debt.
Davaadalai can no longer even afford the one luxury a hardscrabble life on the steppe was supposed to guarantee: closeness to family. He spends months out of the year now in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s sprawling capital and singular big city, working in manual labor, the one job for which a grade-school dropout is qualified. He leaves the herd of roughly 200 animals with his wife, Damdinjav Batnasana, 40, and their son Purev-Erdene, 16.
It’s all worth it for him, Davaadalai said, nodding to the rakish teenager seated across the ger. The father said he’s saving up to send his only child to college, far away from here. While it may scatter and separate the family by hundreds of miles, it’s the only way he sees to eke out a living in this new Mongolia.
“I’m worried that young people are forgetting traditions and the nomadic lifestyle,” Purev-Erdene told me, diverting his eyes briefly as he admitted this. “But the livestock is not going well enough. Who knows what next year or two years will bring? I’m an only child, so I think it’s better for me to go to Ulaanbaatar.”
The family was among more than two dozen Mongolian nomads, advocates and public officials I spoke with over the course of more than a week traveling between the capital and several parts of Uvurkhangai.
Save The Children International invited me to join two Australian TV journalists normally stationed in Taiwan and a British newspaperman typically based in Ethiopia on a press junket that toured some of the areas in Mongolia where the U.K. charity’s independent local chapter works with nomads. There were no strings attached: Save The Children’s media team is run by a veteran former Reuters correspondent who said the goal of showing journalists what’s happening in Mongolia is to generate more awareness of how fast the climate is changing there.
I landed in Ulaanbaatar on a cloudless, cold morning. The first thing I noticed on the 45-minute drive north from the airport into the city was the smog. It appeared like a giant wall of gray on the horizon of the highway, obscuring the skyline of Soviet-style blocks and new, half-built apartment towers. Throughout the city, I saw enormous smokestacks belching steady streams of coal pollution in the center of a sprawl, adding to diesel fumes from cars idling on congested thoroughfares. The brown, treeless ridges ringing the valley city contain the air pollution. But what really pushes this to the top of the list of the world’s most polluted capitals is the smoke pouring down from the unplanned neighborhoods on Ulaanbaatar’s outskirts.
For years now, nomads seeking a new, settled life have migrated from the far reaches of a nation more than twice the size of Texas to the one big city. Already accustomed to traveling with a mobile home, many arrive, find an open plot, and erect their gers. At least 850,000 people now live in the “ger districts” that surround downtown Ulaanbaatar.
Few enjoy access to electricity or running water. In the Songino Khairkhan ger district, I met Ishtsooj Davagdorj, who had just arrived in the city with her husband and two young children last year. Things were bad, and getting worse. She struggled to make enough money to even cover her long, complicated commute across the traffic-clogged city. Her kids were bullied in school by kids who teased them as bumpkins. Her chest burned from the dirty air. Worst of all, her husband was just diagnosed with cancer. Hospitalized and unable to work, bills are mounting and the family will likely need to sell their car to cover costs. It was still better, she told me over salty milk tea in her ger one night, than trying to raise livestock on the rural mountain steppe the family hails from eight hours west.
In another neighborhood, I met Bor Ankhiluntsetseg, who had arrived in the city a decade earlier. Before she moved to the city full time, she lived two lives – one in the countryside, where her widowed mother cared for her young daughter, one in the city where she hustled and worked and went out to bars at night with friends. Eventually she met a man whose gentle, romantic charm earned her trust, she married him, brought her little girl to the city and had more kids. She worked her way up in the local political machine in her neighborhood, becoming a district leader for the ruling Mongolian People’s Party. The job is to be the face of local government, and to know everyone in the district. She likes the job, and she’s personable enough to be good at it.
But when intense rain triggered a flood in her neighborhood, spreading raw sewage from open pit latrines over a densely-populated area with thousands of residents, the family’s home washed away. Luckily, they could move in about a mile away with her mother-in-law. While she’s been able to net some resources for affected families in her district, anti-graft policies that only seem to be enforced at the lowest rungs of politics prevented the government from giving her, an appointed official, any assistance.
As her family rebuilds, Bor was focused on the 2024 election. Her position is an appointment, so if the opposition party wins in June, she could be out of a job. Her daughter, whose 18th birthday is three weeks before polls open, will cast her ballot for the first time.
To my surprise, the teenager didn’t say for sure she would vote for her mom’s chosen party. She said she wanted to do research first. But she said it’s hard to invest herself in any kind of patriotism when her dream, like many young Mongols, was to leave and go to South Korea.
Her mother admitted she feels the same way, and would love to go to Japan. Ishtsooj fantasized about a U.S. visa, but figured it was totally out of reach. Maybe her kids could go abroad. But that would mean getting them good jobs, which means decent education, which costs money she can’t imagine having to spare.
My reporting from Mongolia is in two parts, and features original photography I took with my Fujifilm. The photos used here are all exclusive outtakes appearing first in this newsletter.
HuffPost published part one, examining life for those still out on the steppe, on Friday morning. You can read it here.
Part two, on the challenges of settling down in a big city, came out today, Saturday. You can read it here.
I highly recommend the other journalists’ reports:
Read Addis Ababa-based freelancer Fred Harter’s report in The Guardian.
Watch ABC News correspondent Kathleen Calderwood’s segment here:
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. Thank you for your time and attention. I hope you felt this exclusive perspective and summary of my reporting from Mongolia earned it. If not, maybe these music recommendations will.
Whenever I travel, I try to listen to local music. Not doing so feels like opting for a burger over local cuisine. One night walking around Ulaanbaatar, I searched the city’s name on Spotify and resurfaced a song I had added to a playlist years ago; a delightful, if too short, little remix of what sounded like schoolkids singing over a simple beat. The track reminded me of the disappointingly homophobic Australian DJ Pogo’s sample anthem from Bhutan, but much better. The one word of Mongolian I mastered was “thank you” – senbeno. Now I can hear it in the song. It’s called “Gegeen Ugluu,” Mongolian for “holy morning,” by the low-fi house-y instrumental hip-hop producer Bodikhuu. I hadn’t ever noticed the name of the album before on which the song came out in 2012. Standing in the cold on Peace Avenue was probably the right place, after several years, to finally read the name: “Welcome to Ulaanbaatar.” The video on Bodikhuu’s YouTube page is set to footage of 1960s Mongolia:
My reporting tries to show you Mongolia’s urban and rural problems. So I feel like this part, too, should showcase the country’s impressive range. About halfway through the six-hour drive out of Ulaanbaatar to the countryside, my travel companions fell asleep. I wanted music, but I had limited 3G service and everything on my downloaded playlists had soundtracked long workdays and rides on the R train for months. It felt so out of place to hear that while looking at the open expanse of Mongolia. I managed to get one song downloaded from a Mongolian folk playlist. It’s called “Orphan Camel Colt,” by Namgar, a four-piece Russian band whose songs are billed as fusing the musical traditions of Mongolia and Buryatia, the bordering Russian republic where more than a third of the population are Buryats, a Mongol ethnic minority.
The song itself is haunting and mournful. It’s beautiful. I listened to it over and over again on the drive from Sant to Kharkhorin, and have kept it in rotation since coming home.
If you aren’t already signed up for free emails, please consider subscribing or sending this newsletter to someone who might.
It takes time to put these emails together. Endless thanks to those of you who pledged money for a subscription. If you feel inclined to pay for this newsletter, it helps me justify the work it requires on my off hours. For now, I’m planning to keep most posts free for anyone to read. Paying subscribers can help me keep it that way. But I will have some occasional inside-circle updates for those of you who enjoy this newsletter enough to reward it with your business.
Signing off from cloudy Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where we are already thinking about how to avoid traffic from the Dyker Heights Christmas lights.