Some thoughts and reflections about life in Mongolia

Its warm again. Which is nice, and what makes it even nicer is that it’s not super-hot. Neither the car nor the cook has arrived yet. Kim has worked in Mongolia before so she is not as naive as I am but both of us have learned a few new things about the herder-mentality.

1. As long as there is a tiny bit of something left, you do not need to get more. For example, if a car is going to town (which takes about 1 hour one-way) and there is one slice of bread left, we do not need to buy bread. However, when the car comes back and someone has eaten the slice we are in desperate need of bread and must immediately go and buy more. The same applies to water, vegetables etc. As long as you have some left, there is no need to replenish the supplies. Since many things can only be found in UB or Dalandzadgad this view of life is a bit frustrating. (though, his was not new for Kim).

2. “this water is not so good for drinking, smells a bit bad, good for shower or cleaning” might mean that the water smells a bit because it has been sitting in the jerry can for too long. But it might also mean “someone put gasoline in that can, better not drink the water”. I was a bit surprised when i noticed that the result of my latest shower was not that my body was immensely clean and smelled like roses; rather I had a lingering odor of gasoline around me.

3. 11 days ago Oyuna, our cook, asked if she could have five days off to accompany her daughter to Dalandzadgad. That seemed reasonable and off they went. We haven’t seen her since and are now quite sure that when the locals say, ” I will be back in five days”, it means “I will definitely be gone for five days and god knows when I’ll be back”. It’s not that they are running away from work or so, it’s just that no one knows when there will be a car coming here, or if that car will break down or not… For the last week we have asked Namshur and Midgi when Oyuna will return. The only answer is “maybe tomorrow”.

4. We have been cooking our own food and since neither Kim nor I are too keen on dried sheep meat, we’ve had lots of vegetarian food, pasta sauces and tuna. We are happy but Namshur complains that his stomach gets very acidic from too much bread, vegetables and pasta and that he needs sheep meat. Kind of fun.  I’ve never heard that meat will help against acidic stomachs. On one of the rainy days, Kim made tortillas that we stuffed with beans, rice, sheep and chili sauce. Best sheep burritos in all of Asia I think. That day we also learned how to tenderize your dried sheep meat. You simply choose a piece that catches your delight, put it on a big flat stone (the stone has been sitting on the kitchen floor since we came but we haven’t really paid attention to it before) and beat the crap out of the sheep with a hammer. Kim and I are both eagerly waiting for this to be shown on TV on a cooking show “and now, it is time to beat the sheep…”

5. The standard answer to many questions is “no problem”. Kim and I can’t really agree on what exactly this means. I think that the locals simply leave out the words “life threatening” in between so what they really say is “no life threatening problem” while Kim thinks that “no problem” means something in between “hopefully” and “in your dreams, sucker”.

6. Namshur and Pujii are both very good in English and sometimes we forget that they might not understand what we are saying. This is further enhanced since all of them want to please and help so they pretend to understand. Yesterday I taught Namshur how to use the GPS so he could go and collect a trap camera and bring it back to camp. We practiced with the GPS in camp. I showed him how to store a position, find a stored one and how to set the GPS to show you distance and bearing to the position you want to go to. Namshur practiced for a while and said that he understood and was ready to go. Good I said, so do you know approximately where the camera is? What camera he replied. ” The camera you are going to collect”.
“Oh, am I to collect a camera?”…

So what has happened since last… Not much.
I was wrong about catching a cat on the 2nd of September, too bad, we almost caught one though. A week ago the trap camera in Lower Camp Canyon (I will start writing the place names cause Kim has promised to send a map to Chappen as soon as she gets home) photographed a snow leopard at a trap site. He was standing looking at the big pile of rocks that were stashed between him and the scrape that he wanted to get to. Short explanation: everything takes place at the foot of a cliff wall, the trap is set close too the wall cause snow leopards like to walk along walls (according to Tom and the pictures we’ve taken agree with him), on the other side of the trap we buried a big piece of scrap metal that the snare is attached to and on top of the metal there is a pile of rocks. The idea is that the leopard will walk between the rock pile and the cliff and that the rocks will funnel him into the snare. In theory this holds. It’s just that our spotted friend didn’t agree; he thought that the rock pile looked a bit suspicious so instead of walking between the rocks and the wall, he climbed the rocks and took a pee at the scrape.

A few bad Swedish words could be heard quite far from the camp when we looked at the pictures from the camera…

We had some mail contact with Tom and Chris about the funneling and rock-pile-building. I think that Aztai was the 14th snow leopard ever to be collared and so there is very little knowledge of how to trap them. As I have written previously, Tom really knows what he is doing and I have learned a lot from him.  But, even though he is the one who has caught the most snow leopards, it’s still just six individuals. Naturally, the trapping is based on trial and error and Kim and I have the huge benefit of having cameras at the trap sites so we can actually see what the cats are doing, what scares them and even where they place their feet. The concerned trap was one of the first we set and in the beginning, everyone really wanted to help, and we might have gotten a bit carried away in the rock-pile building…

Anyways, shame on the ones who give up. We went to the trap, threw away all rocks, moved the trap and the metal piece and opened up the area so it wouldn’t look as suspicious.

As we have hiked around and checked and fixed the traps after the rain, we have taken away lots of rocks. In some cases I have replaced them with small thorny bushes, hoping that these will not look as threatening but still do the job of funneling the cat towards the trap.

A couple of days later we downloaded the pics from the Lower camp canyon camera and you can probably imagine that the bad Swedish words that came out of my mouth this time were even worse and could be heard even longer cause on the pictures there was a new cat standing on top of our trap. He has one foot on each side of the %#@#$& trap, looked into the camera for a while, then walked to the scrape, turned toward the camera and really took his time relieving himself…
We looked at the pictures at 5 in the evening and before nightfall, I had pulled a trap that wasn’t in a great location anyway, hiked to Lower Camp Canyon and set a second trap. This one is set so that if anything with spots and a long tail as much as thinks about taking a pee at my scrape, he will for sure end up with an orange dart in his buttocks.

Oh, got to write one last thing. A couple of days ago as I was sitting on my bed changing to my boots I noticed that something was moving in Kim’s bed. Kind of odd I thought and took a closer look. Sure enough there was a snake crawling around in the bed. I called Kim but the snake didn’t seem to appreciate the commotion so it tried to hide in the sleeping bag… Namshur claimed that it wasn’t toxic, grabbed it by the tail and carried it out (that ought to keep mom from visiting the camp…)

Tags: field camp