Week on a Northern Mongolian farm
- Megan & Agathe
- 2 nov. 2017
- 4 min de lecture
After a 16-hour bus journey we finally arrive in Khatgal, northern town of Mongolia close to the Siberian border. Khatgal is a quaint town with houses made out of wood and colourful roofs, located near the huge lake of Khovsgol. At the station we meet again two frenchies, this time guys (!), who have also come to Khatgal to work on a farm. Our point of contact being the same, we learn together in the freezing cold, the meaning of Mongolian punctuality (pretty loose!). We agree to meet again in a week to discover the lake region by horse and compare our experiences as Mongolian farmers.
To best describe our experience, we would say: if Chris McCandless (from into the wild) really wanted to learn how to live completely independently and recused from society, he should have come to Mongolia! As we learned, Mongolians live simply, in our case we stayed in a one room wooden house. During the day time, the main room served as a kitchen/dining area and in the evening became the communal dorm: mum, dad and youngest daughter sleeping in the one bed and both of us sleeping on the floor.
Needless to say, living on a Mongolian farm leaves little to no personal space – especially at the weekend when the two slightly older kids come back from school! The two good sides to this were: getting to first-hand experience what Mongolian lives are like, from morning to night, and getting defrosted from the cold nights when the mother would get up first in the mornings to light the stove. Once everybody up and out of bed, we would have breakfast: milk tea and homemade bread with fresh clotted cream – benefits of living on a yack farm: deliciously fresh dairy products!
Once fed the mum would go milk the yacks whilst we had the incredibly important task of scooping up the poo lying around their yard! Even if obviously the job lacked glamour and was though work, we actually grew used to it and found ways of making it amusing! Once the yaks milked, we would lead them to fields where they would eat all day, and then do the same with the baby yacks. Around noon we would either eat leftovers from last night’s meal or have another slice of cream covered bread.
There was then two ways of spending our afternoons: at home or away. At home, we would partake in the cooking activities such as making cheese, yoghurt, bread, homemade noodles; gather wood for the fire or snow for the water or help with putting up their winter Ger.
Away, we would herd the hundreds of sheep and goats around the mountains for the whole afternoon. If climbing a mountain is already difficult as is, you can only imagine what it might be like running after sheep and goats for hours making sure they all kept up the pace and right direction: bloody exhausting!! This was even more stressful due to the fact that we had little clue what we were doing and where we were going; but the pretty spectacular views and the incredible sense of freedom made it one of our favourite tasks. When we came home we always had interesting surprises. During the weekend we had impatient kids waiting to traumatise us by jumping on our backs and dragging us around to play games - It’s quite a funny scene when you find yourself in the middle of nowhere in Mongolia in a dimly lit, coldish room, dancing the ‘macarena’ led by three eager kids!
On our last day it wasn’t the kids waiting to surprise us, but rather a ‘special’ dinner: that morning the father had freshly killed one of his goats and we found ourselves tasting every possible organ of the animal from the heart to the intestines which had all been boiled together. Surprisingly not too bad, yet not something we would rush to experience again!
The days’ work was finished by going to fetch the scattered herds of animals to enclose them near the farm.
A couple of things from our week in a Mongolian farm struck us. Firstly, how unmaterialistic Mongolians are - very little importance was put on their possessions, nothing seemed to belong to anyone in particular. Secondly, how cut off they are from the outside world – their only way of communicating was a mobile phone hanging on the corner of the window with a makeshift antenna. They did however get a few visits from family and friends. Finally, and most striking: the price of independence. We all dream of being self-sufficient and sustainable, in Mongolia this is achieved by many but at a high price. The work is long and though and there is no room for time off. With the risk of sounding cliché this whole experience puts in perspective many aspects of our own lives that we take for granted.
To sum up our week: were we incredibly uncomfortable at times? Yeah. Are we stinking from not having showered in a week? Yeah. Did we sometimes have mini breakdowns? Yeah. Were we dreaming of scooping poo? Yeah. Were we sometimes grossed out by the little to no attention to hygiene? Yeah. Was it all worth it? HELL YEAH!!
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