Little Houses on the Steppes
Western Mongolia 2014
We stayed here with a Mongolian family for two and a half days. We women bunked in the nearest ger and the men on our tour slept in the farthest ger. The family, who were our hosts, cooked, slept, and served our meals in the middle ger.
The gers were heated by a small dung-burning stove in the center. You can see the stove pipe protruding from each ger. Dung burns hot but the fire dies quickly and the Kazakh women (this part of Mongolia is populated by Kazakhs) had to replenish the fuel and empty the ashes frequently.
Soon after we arrived, in those Russian vans parked near the middle ger, the men of the family chose a sheep from the herd that was milling around nearby and slaughtered it for our welcome dinner. Needless to say, dinner was served fashionably late. I was dreading a mutton-y taste to the meat, but it was tender and delicious. Some of the meat was cut into strips and hung on the walls of our ger. The smell of mutton pervaded the ger, but we soon got used to it.
Mongolian Ger Interior
The ger is quite roomy. Three women slept on the beds that you see here and three slept on the ground. The ger was placed near a stream and the ground was damp and to be bluntly truthful, the earth smelled of urine from the nearby herd. Here our hostess fills the stove with dried dung. In case you are wondering, there was no smell.
Normally the family lives in this ger and the men and women of the family entered whenever the needed something that was kept in the cabinet or behind that curtain on the left of the photo. They never knocked. Luckily, it was cold and I don’t think any of us were ever en dishabille. It always shocked us just a bit to look up to suddenly see a strange man in our midst.
I could go on and on about our brief stay here. It was a wonderful time. And though there were other ger camps with modern facilities, I wouldn’t have stayed anywhere else.
I’d seen gers in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. They remind me of igloos, don’t they you? I suppose the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz and Uzbeks were some of the folk who traveled north to cross the Bering Straits thousands of years ago.
Jim Zuckerman and Kevin Pepper will be returning to Mongolia for future photography tours. Contact them here:
Contact Jim at: www.jimzuckerman.com
Contact Kevin at: http://northof49photography.com