What We Found In The Gobi
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009by Rach
Zooming through the Gobi Desert
Predictably perhaps, brown sand.
However, it is not quite so simple. The smooth rolling sand dunes I had expected are littered with stones, sprouting brown tussocky grass and dusted with occasional lingering patches of snow and ice. Sometimes the hills roll, sometimes there is dead flat as far as the eye could see, sometimes the flatness rises slowly to a gently undulating horizon.
Between two and six train tracks running side-by-side cut through the landscape for hour upon hour. Had I anticipated zipping through the desert in forty minutes? I don’t think so. But neither did I expect the barren desolate E – X – P – A – N – S – E to continue for so long. Awed by the sheer size.
Also slicing through the sand are hundreds of kilometres of power lines. How did I think Ulaanbaatar was powered? I guess I just hadn’t. But I certainly hadn’t expected to see wind farms (with windmills so large they dwarfed the power pylons) or wooden power lines strapped to concrete or metal posts rammed into the earth carrying electricity the entire length of the train line as well as branching off to even more remote places.
Remote we might be, but entirely alone we are not. Horses, cows and sheep dot the barrenness, some of them gathering at the starting-to-melt edges of frozen-over ponds. The horses seem to roam freely, but the cows and sheep always signal human life is nearby. They might be in a felted wool ger with smoke puffing from the chimney. They might be in a stone and gaily-painted timber house. They might be in a Russian-inspired rectangular apartment block, which looms on the horizon, a small speck becoming increasingly bigger as we near it (although to be fair, there are only a handful of these eyesores). They might be driving along the road. Now this is a very generous term. Occasionally along the train line a black and white striped barrier appears, signalling the presence of a “road”. If the road has been recently used, you are still able to see two tyre tracks in the sand.
We see two young children rugged up in padded coats and tied around the middle with a bright sash. We see a shepherd leading his sheep. We see a man on horseback rounding up some cattle. There’s an an old man sitting atop a fence. A boy kicks a soccer ball and a cloud of dust puffs up. Ironically, in one small community there’s a children’s playground with four planks of wood forming a self-filling sandpit!
After a couple of days on the train and another couple to come in a ger, every one of which, according to a Mongolian proverb that we now thoroughly understand, has a little bit of the Gobi inside during the springtime, we also came across these two:
The things you find!
And our first Mongolian photos:
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