Julian Varsavsky
08/07/2021 21:09
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 08/08/2021 2:42 PM
I am going by train from Beijing to Mongolia in the Trans-Mongolian: the first sun of dawn lights the Gobi desert red and
the profile of a herd of wild camels
evokes the Silk Road and the great Mongolian horde that broke the undefeated Chinese millennium.
Hours later, the stony plain turns into a steppe, that little pasture like a golf course without trees or shrubs.
In the distance a man rides with a flock of sheep towards a ger, a circular white felt tent of the nomads with a stove-kitchen, whose chimney is a central post: they
resist -45 ° C with burning dung
.
Eagle hunters parade during the start of the Golden Eagle Festival in Bayan Ulgii, Mongolia.
Photo: Hannah Reyes Morales / The New York Times
The rattle of rails heading to the capital Ulaanbaatar does not give way: we have crossed half Mongolia without seeing a city or town, checking the statistics by eye: 1.73 inhabitants per km²,
the lowest density in the world
. Of the 3 million Mongols, half live in the capital, some in small towns and the rest in that dotted with solitary white spots that I see behind the window (40% are nomadic or semi).
At dusk I can see thousands of gers crowded together like suburbs of Ulaanbaatar.
We arrived at the central station but until a while ago, I had only seen circular stores (their number exceeds that of houses).
By taxi I go through the center of a valley with a large concrete plaza next to the Government Palace and the only postmodern building, a glazed blue candle.
Around,
Soviet-style blocks
and some buildings (Mongolia was the second communist revolution in 1921).
And then, the ring of gers in a dusty and dimly lit city that sometimes turns into a neighborhood.
The gers are so appreciated that many houses have one in the background.
Genghis Khan's empire at its greatest expansion, in the 13th century.
I go for a walk and in
front of the statue of Genghis Khan
in Sükhbaatar square I meet Angarag: 55 years old, thick and tall like the average Mongolian, who speaks English: “My father was from the south of the Gobi desert and I am urban; But
just looking at a horse makes my eyes shine
. Every two weeks I go with my family by truck to the steppe to sleep in ger and ride among herds. In each drop of blood I have a wandering instinct that forces me to move (I have two gers saved for when I need them). My daughter has four horses and my son two ”.
I go deep into the steppe in a Russian UAZ-452 van, an old rolling shoebox built to last forever.
I travel 500 kilometers to sleep with a nomadic family who rents a ger.
The guide spots the gers and warns by phone that we are close.
A sixty-year-old couple comes out to greet us with wrinkled and dark skin due to natural life.
They have
their watchdog for two hundred sheep and one hundred goats that graze out of sight
, two horses, four yaks, three cows, a motorcycle, a solar panel and a plasma screen where Mr. Altan watches Mongolian fighting, a national sport.
A man trots on horseback in Mongolia with a bird of prey in his hand (2018).
Here, falconry is a tradition passed down in families for centuries.
© Steve McCurry / Taschen.
We enter the family ger without compartments and they offer me sour fermented mare's milk.
We sat on rugs next to an altar to Buddha, the ancestors, their best horses, and Genghis Khan.
The guide translates and the man always speaks: “Our three children went to study;
We move twice a year and we are
the last nomadic generation
;
winters are harsh and monotonous, for five months we spend most of the day indoors.
Young people want privacy and fun.
If I go out riding, sweat freezes on my lashes.
Months go by without bathing
until the rivers thaw.
There we saw blocks of ice that we leave in the open air to drink ”.
Mongolia: The monument to Genghis Khan.
Altan offers me yak butter tea and adds, “
Once you've tried the hot shower, it's hard to come back
;
but I don't want to go to the city, I would get bored and I wouldn't have a job ”.
The worst scourge for the nomad is a dzud, snowfalls that with climate change seem to be cruel to that culture.
Modern problems
In 2009 one killed 8.5 million animals.
Some 44,000 families lost everything and 164,000 half: they only have to go with their ger to Ulaanbaatar, without water or sewers (many end up in gold and coal mining).
The one who does well equips his store with a microwave oven, washing machine and Playstation.
The anchorage in the city
has led 10.8% of men to alcoholism
.
Half a million have emigrated to Ulaanbaatar and
street children emerged
.
Life is expensive there: they do not produce their food and spend a bag of coal per day.
The 300,000 chimneys of the gers cloud the sky and the air becomes unbreathable.
Some regret it when there is no turning back.
In the countryside, certain nomads enrich themselves by acquiring remaining animals from the sedentary: they are like landless landowners with thousands of heads.
Mongolia Mongolia the steppe and the eternal blue sky.
Nomadic families live by moving with their herds, assembling and disassembling their yurts or ger.
A Darwinian look would see a cultural advance in sedentarization. The great journalist Ryzard Kapuscinski wrote in The Empire: “In Europe they have the habit of writing about people from the desert who are underdeveloped… It does not occur to anyone to think that such judgments cannot be made of some peoples who, in the most adverse conditions ... they
have known how to survive for millennia and create the most precious type of culture, because it is practical ...
and that has allowed entire peoples to exist and develop, while many civilizations fell and disappeared forever ... only by force can they be forced to life sedentary: through an economic or political imperative. He is a man who knows no price when it comes to paying for the freedom that the desert gives him ”.
In East Asia
, man settled 10,000 years ago
next to rice fields (later he protected them from the Mongols with the Great Wall).
But in Central Asia the land only gives grass: the herd forces eternal drift.
There is a tendency to believe that when the nomads stop, an ancient cultural castle will collapse on them.
Horses and Mongols have an ancient relationship.
But no culture disappears unless it is exterminated or dispersed. Perhaps in half a century, that life as an intermezzo will hardly exist anymore. But the Mongols will continue to be one of the most unique and - like all - cultures in constant flux. Not for that they will lose their identity. For centuries they will perhaps have their ger in the back of the house or packed in the closet. And that practical people,
which until today disarms their home in half an hour and rearms it 500 kilometers further on the day
, hardly loses its link with the steppe.
Even if she throws in his face
the cruelest icy air that exists outside of Antarctica
.
The cold has never been an impediment in the lands of the largest continuous empire in history - 800 years ago - that subjugated almost the entire known world of the time, from the Chinese shores to the banks of the Danube.
Julián Varsavsky is a writer and journalist
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