SSoP Podcast Episode 61 — Mongolia: Under the Eternal Blue Sky

This is a transcription of Mongolia: Under the Eternal Blue Sky

David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.

Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.

David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.

Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.

David: I’m David Humphreys.

David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.

[cheerful music]

David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Mongolia. Today in two truths and a lie, I’m going to tell you about Mongolian throat-singing. Amazing indigenous art form or grown men trying to sound like bullfrogs? We’ll get to the bottom of it. Then we’ll talk about five books we love.

David: I’ve got a story about a nineteen-year-old who signs up for one of the world’s most grueling races across the steppes of Mongolia – with almost no background or preparation. We’ll talk about how that worked out.

David: But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Mongolia 101.

Melissa: Let’s get oriented! Mongolia is a landlocked country in East Asia, tucked between Russia and China. If you have any impressions of Mongolia, they’re probably of the open steppes, fierce, regal-looking men on horseback, maybe with eagles perched on their arms, and Chingiss Khan and his Mongol Horde. All of that is generally right, but it’s only part of the story.

Melissa: Much of the central part of the country IS grasslands, the steppes. But in the south, the Gobi Desert stretches to China. In the north, a forest filled with spruce and fir trees reaches to Russia. And on the western border are the Altai Mountains, where Kazakh nomads share the land with snow leopards, golden eagles, sheep, bears, foxes, and wolves.

Melissa: The sun shines in Mongolia 250 days a year. But it’s chilly most of the time thanks to its elevation — it’s more than 5000 feet or 1580 meters above sea level. That makes it dry and windy. In photos you can see that many Mongolians have wind-kissed cheeks. July is a lovely 70-degrees Fahrenheit (21 Celsius) under a bright blue, cloudless sky. ut winter? Winter is vicious. It can get as low as -40 Fahrenheit (Did you know that -40 F is -40 C, too?!)

Melissa: On the map, Mongolia looks small compared to Russia and China, but it’s huge. It’s roughly the size of Alaska and six times bigger than the UK. Its population, though, is only 3.2 million people. But there are 4 million horses. The writer Elizabeth Kimball Kendall said, ‘To appreciate the Mongol you must see him on horseback — and indeed you rarely see him otherwise, for he does not put foot to ground if he can help it.’

Melissa: The official language is Mongolian and the nomads in the west speak Kazakh. Only people who deal with tourists speak English, although one blogger said you can get far with smiles and grunts.

Melissa: Mongolian history can be understood in two big buckets: the reign of Chingiss Khan and the communist era. Chingiss Khan founded the Mongol Empire when he united the Mongolian tribes around 1206. When he died 21 years later, his empire stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Ukraine — 4.6 million square miles (12 million square kilometers). In the plus column: He tolerated religious freedom, encouraged diversity, abolished torture, and created the first international postal system.But there are minuses. He killed an estimated 40 million people during his conquests and is quoted as saying, ‘The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy, to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.’ [DAVE - GK age] But he’s revered in Mongolia, is pictured on the money, and is honored with a massive silver statue in the capital.

Melissa: The other bit of history that’s essential to understanding Mongolia is that it spent 60 years under communism. There was no freedom of speech or religion. In fact, in 1937, almost all of its 700 Buddhist temples were destroyed, and thousands of Buddhist monks were murdered. In 1990, when the Soviet Union’s grip was beginning to slip, Mongolia held its first free democratic elections and continues to be a democracy.

Melissa: The capital is Ulaanbaatar. Almost half of the population lives there. It has a boomtown vibe, thanks to nearby mining for gold, coal, copper, and uranium. The skyline is a mix of glass towers and Soviet-block-style apartment buildings with some big monuments sprinkled in. About 800,000 people live on the edges of town in ger [gair] districts.

Melissa: Ger is the Mongolian name for what we’d call a yurt. It’s a round structure covered with thick canvas and felt. It’s light enough for nomads to deconstruct and carry, but sturdy enough to withstand Mongolian weather.

Melissa: Ulaanbaatars’s ger districts are a bridge between city life and a nomadic existence. About 40% of Mongolians still live as nomads, herding yaks, sheep, goats, camels, and horses. They move two to four times per year, according to the season and the needs of their animals. I want to read you a scene-setting explanation from one of the books I’ll be talking about later:

‘In the winter, Kazakhs eat a lot of meat, but in the summer, all they have is milk and cheese and [fried bread]. Milk is literally life and death, and milk is endless work. Men and boys take the herds out every day in search of good grazing, and women and girls stay close to their [ger], in a world made of milk. They milk the yaks and cows at dawn; they milk the horses five times a day; they milk their huge herds of goats. There is no refrigeration, so they must also process all that milk every day. They churn butter for hours. They boil whey in hot little sheds. They make cheese’

Melissa: They also collect yak dung and spread it out to dry so that it can be used as fuel for fires. They carry water. They sweep the linoleum floors of the ger multiple times a day to keep it tidy. Being a nomad is near-constant work. However, everything I read made a point of saying that Mongolian people are very welcoming, good natured, and witty. There’s a lot of laughter. And everyone is welcome in a ger.

Melissa: I could do a whole episode on how to behave in a ger. There are about 3000 customs and etiquette rules in a ger, and they change according to region. The big headline is that everyone is welcome in a ger. There’s no bell. You don’t knock on the door. You just walk right in — but only from the right side of the door flap. And it’s rude to step ON the threshold. Inside, visitors sit to the left, family sits to the right. The back wall is reserved for family photos and a Buddhist altar. Guests are always welcome to spend the night, so if you sleep in a ger, make sure your feet point toward the door when you lie down. You also don’t want to lean on any pillars, whistle, take food with your left hand, throw trash in the fire, block the door, walk in front of an older person, or roll up your sleeves — that can indicate you want to fight. [DAVE]

Melissa: Having said all of that, nomads know it’s rough out there, so they’ll give you something to drink and a snack when you arrive.

Melissa: Which brings to what you’re most likely to drink in Mongolia: salty tea and fermented milk.

Melissa: Salty tea is just what it sounds like. It’s a brew of green tea mixed with an equal amount of milk and some salt. Sometimes a thwack of butter is added. It’s served in a bowl, not a cup, and Mongolians drink it every day, all day long.

Melissa: Another staple is an alcoholic drink called airag. That is fermented mare’s milk, and it’s been made the same way since the 13th century. According to reports, it tastes grassy and sour. One description said that it tastes ‘more expired’ than yogurt or kefir [KEE-fer]. During the summer months, nomads might drink airag instead of eating meals.

Melissa: Which brings us to food. First, forget about Mongolian beef from your local Chinese takeout. That is not Mongolian! That recipe originated in Taiwan.

Melissa: I should also mention the US chain restaurant BD’s Mongolian Grill. It’s one of those places where you pick out meat and veggies from a giant salad bar, then hand it over to be stir-fried on an enormous circular grill. That is in no way authentically Mongolian, but! a location of BD’s Mongolian Grill is now open in the capital of Ulaanbaatar.

Melissa: Real Mongolian cuisine can be summed up in two words: mutton and dairy.

Melissa: There are 30 million sheep in Mongolia. On average, every Mongolian eats 99 pounds or 45 kilograms of mutton per year. Typical meals include stewed mutton, mutton soup, mutton-stuffed dumplings, roasted mutton, and salty dehydrated cheese curds. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a few potatoes and carrots.

Melissa: An American who trained as an eagle hunter in Mongolia said that he has a Mongolian paper bill stuck to his bulletin board with a thumbtack and years later, it still smells like mutton fat.

Melissa: Literally no one says that food is the big draw for visiting Mongolia. Do you know what is? The eternal blue sky. The mountains. The grasslands. And the annual festival called Naadam.

Melissa: Naadam is held every July across Mongolia. It’s like the Mongolian Olympics. People of all ages compete in three traditional sports: horse racing, wrestling, and archery. But it’s also a cultural celebration with food, throat singing, dancing, and other performing arts.

Melissa: Naadam has been held for around 2000 years, and the games were meant to prepare men for war. prepare for war. One version of the name actually means ‘Three Manly Games.’ But today, the emphasis on MANLY is misleading. Everyone competes. Men, women, and even children as young as seven ride in the horse races. The photos of Naadam are AMAZING. The sky is that hard, clear blue. The horses coats are shiny in the sun. And the traditional costumes — bright citrusy colors, some shiny gold and silver — stand out against the green grass and brown hills.

If you would like to experience Mongolia, travelers from the US, UK, and Canada — plus 58 other countries — can visit with just a passport. No special visa needed! Atlas Obscura offers excursions to Naadam in the summer and a camel festival in the winter, with stops in Ulaanbaatar, a camel ride in the Gobi, a monastery visit, and a stay in a traditional ger camp. I’m very attracted to this idea.

Melissa: If you are, too, the show notes will be rich with links to everything you need to know to visit Mongolia. And that is the Mongolia 101.

David: I’m about to say three statements. Two of them are true. Mel doesn’t know which is a lie.

• Mongolia is so nomadic that Amazon uses longitude and latitude numbers instead of street addresses.

• In the 1200s, there was a Mongolian warrior princess. She refused to marry anyone who couldn’t out-wrestle her. She eventually married a man who was sent to assassinate her father. Which should be the plot of a Star Wars movie if it’s not already.

David: This next one needs a bit of exposition. There’s a form of singing called Mongolian or Tuvan throat singing. Tuvan is an area of Russia just north of the Mongolian border. They share the art, and Kentucky and Tennessee share bluegrass. Throat singing is a vocal technique where the performer sings two notes at a time. It is unlike any other sound I’ve heard. If you’ve seen Dune, you’ve heard some of it. They used it in the soundtrack. It sounds like this. The statement is:

• An American blues singer became an award-winning throat singer.

David: OK! One at a time. First statement: Mongolia is so nomadic that Amazon uses longitude and latitude numbers instead of street addresses.

David: First of all, according to Mongolians on Reddit, Amazon isn’t really a thing there. It takes about a month to get a delivery and it’s expensive. But, also — some people do deliver in Mongolia, so let’s have a moment of respect for them. Mongolia has about 3 million people — a few less than the population of Los Angeles — and they’re spread out over an area the size of 2.5 Texases. Or 3 Frances. Or 1.5 million square kilometers. About a third of those people still live a nomadic lifestyle. They might move every season. And they don’t move to places with street addresses. They move to the middle of that field, over there. Mongolia has plains, forests, mountains, and spotty cell service. All of that makes getting a package to a recipient challenging.

David: I was researching this and read about a deliverer trying to get a package to a nomadic reindeer herder. And I thought: you can stop right there. I hear the problem. In the past, delivery people might get a phone number to call for instructions on how to find someone. “I’ll meet you at this gas station.” Or, “follow the road until you see the really tall tree.”

David: But, eight years ago, the Mongol Post, the country’s postal service, adopted a new addressing system. It was created by a dot com startup. The startup is called what3words. What they’ve done is divide the earth into 3-meter squares. Then, three words were assigned to each one of those 3-meter squares. For example, the White House has a street address of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But it has a 3-words address of legend.sorry.brain. It’s like a secret code for every spot on earth.

David: If I say, meet me at ‘legend.sorry.brain,’ I’m talking about a 3-meter square near the Oval Office. 3-meters is not a lot of space, so the three word address can be more precise than a street address.

David: The system has been localized into Mongolian and 50 other languages. So, now a Mongolian can say, I live at this spot in this field, and deliverers can find them. And it works without an active internet connection. You can just download the app, and away you go.

David: I feel like this could be super useful for groups trying to find one another. Get your running team together at dramatic.stores.lucid. – Which would be a bit weird because that’s a spot near the Mad Tea Party ride at Disney World. But you get my point.

David: Statement 2: In the 1200s, there was a Mongolian warrior princess. She refused to marry anyone who couldn’t out-wrestle her. She eventually married a man who was sent to assassinate her father.

David: When the story is almost a thousand years old, there’s bound to be some mix of fact and fiction. But, according to the book, ‘The Secret History of the Mongol Queens’ by Jack Weatherford — he’s a professor of anthropology in Minnesota — yeah, that’s true.

David: He cites Marco Polo, who wrote about her. The explorer was headed back to his home in Venice in the late 1200s when he came across a large tribe run by a maybe unlikely pair. They were a father/daughter team. The father’s name was Qaidu Khan. He was a strict man – didn’t drink or eat salt. His daughter’s name was Khutulun. Marco Polo said she was tall and beautiful and a master of the Mongol military arts: she could ride, shoot, and wrestle. She had 14 brothers, and it was said she could outdo them all. Together, she and her father commanded an army of around 40,000 warriors. They controlled a good chunk of the interior of Mongolia along the Silk Route.

David: The story is that Khutulun said she wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t out-wrestle her. It was apparently common, in those days, to bet horses on the outcome of a wrestling match. So she would have her suitors put up some horses to wrestle her. In time, she came to have a herd of more than ten thousand.

David: She eventually married a man of her choosing. His name was Abtakul. The legend is that Abtakul came to their court to murder her father. He failed, and he was captured. Abtakul’s mother offered herself for punishment instead of him, but the would-be assassin refused. That impressed Qaidu so much that he gave the man a position in his army. The assassin went on to meet Khutulun and – in my imagination – she was attracted by his gleaming eyes and roguish charm. How could it be otherwise?

David: If you want to know more about Khutulun, you can read the book I mentioned: ‘The Secret History of the Mongol Queens’ by Jack Weatherford. We’ll include a link in the show notes.

David: Third statement: An American blues singer became an award-winning throat singer.

David: Paul Pena was a guitar player and singer who grew up in Massachusetts. His grandparents were immigrants from the islands off the west coast of Africa. Both his father and his grandfather were professional musicians. As Paul grew up, he learned African folk music, flamenco, and the blues. Paul was also blind. He was born with a form of glaucoma that gradually robbed him of his sight. He lost it all by the age of 20.

David: Paul would go on to play with Bonnie Raitt and Muddy Waters. He opened for the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa. He was part of T-Bone Walker’s band for a while. But the thing that he’s best known for is a song you probably know. He wrote ‘Jet Airliner,’ which was covered by the Steve Miller Band. Here’s that version: [music clip] And here’s what Paul’s sounds like: [music clip]

David: Paul was a short-wave radio guy. One night, he’s flipping around on his short wave and hears a strange sound. This is not unusual. There are a lot of odd sounds on short-wave. But this one sounded kind of — maybe human? Organic? He was fascinated.

David: Seven years later, he found an album of throat singing. People forget life before the internet. Seven years later, he found an album. And he taught himself some of the techniques.

David: He also, and, really, this should be the lie, he taught himself Tuvan, the language of Tuva. It’s a mix of Mongolian, Russian, and Tibetan. He couldn’t find an English-to-Tuvan dictionary so he did it using an English-to-Russian dictionary and a Russian-to-Tuvan dictionary. And he’s blind. So, he did it with a device that scans text and converts it to Braille.

David: The story is almost anti-climatic after that. Paul met a travelling throat singer. His name was Kongar-ool Ondar. Paul sang for him. Kongar-ool was impressed. He asked Paul to come back to Tuva and perform. Paul did that. While he was there, he won a contest at a thoat singing symposium. He won twice: he won first place – and he won “audience favorite.”

David: If you’re curious about Paul, there’s a movie about him. It’s called ‘Genghis Blues.’ It came out in 1999 and documents his throat-singing journey. That year, it won the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for a documentary and was nominated for an Oscar. The whole film is up on YouTube. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘Akmaral’ by Judith Lindbergh. This is historical fiction brought to you by the letter A: ancient Amazons and archaeology.

Melissa: First Amazons: The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about the ancient Amazons in the 5th century BCE. After the Amazons defeat in the Trojan War, they joined forces with Scythian warriors to form a new tribe: the Sauromatae [sar-oh-mah-tie]. The women rode out to hunt just like their male counterparts, and when they needed to, they went to war.

Melissa: Now archaeology: In 1993, a mummified woman from the same time period — the 5th century BCE — was found frozen in the Altai Mountains. She was dubbed the Siberian Ice Princess. Because she was buried in the permafrost, she was very well preserved. Her skin was intact, and her tattoos were still visible. She had a flying deer on her shoulder. When scientists did DNA testing on her, they learned she had a biological connection to the Amazons.

Melissa: This is where real history launches into the fictional story of Akmaral.

Melissa: This novel imagines the life of a female warrior 2400 years ago. It’s set on the vast steppes when Mongolia wasn’t Mongolia yet. But the mountains, the winds, the animals, and the nomads were there.

Melissa: Our heroine is Akmaral. She’s an orphan, but she’s part of a clan — a handful of families banded together as protection against nature and other tribes. When she’s five, a prophecy reveals that her destiny is to become a great warrior. This book tells the story of her life, from training as a young girl to coming into her full power as a leader. There are close calls, grief, brutal battles, and a forbidden love triangle along the way.

Melissa: I can’t decide if this is an adventure tale masquerading as a story of motherhood and grief — or the other way around. Just I’ll just say there are a lot of feelings in this book, but they are tucked in and around thrilling action.

Melissa: Many of Akmaral’s choices and the day-to-day habits of the clan are dictated by two deities: the hearth goddess Rada Mai and the god of war, Targitai. The hearth represents home, heat, safety, life, and food. It’s protection against snow leopards and wolves. In contrast, Targitai embodies violence and the force of attack. These two opposing forces battle within Akmaral AND play out in tribal life. Do you attack the settlement on the other side of the hill, or do you align with them for protection?

Melissa: I want to read you a bit from when Akmaral is riding into battle:

‘Our warriors shrilled, high and sharp above their snorting beasts and the rattle of bronze tack against leather reins. We pressed and galloped, gathering speed that stirred a cloud of dust and pelted clots into a filthy spray. Our herds, our households, our safety, and our past, all left behind. The thunder of our hooves and the hammer of our hearts became the mighty storm Targitai had for so long been denied.’

Melissa: You can tell from that snippet that the writing is very descriptive. In some places, it’s more poetry-adjacent, and the story unspools like a saga from mythology.

Melissa: If you’ve ever wondered how anyone could survive living in nature 2000 years ago, this book includes every detail you need to know. There’s a lot of drinking milk and being cold. During an epic thunderstorm they just hunker down on the open plain and wait. There are a shocking number of horse sacrifices and a devastating surprise attack by a golden eagle and extremely dangerous, angry mama boar.

Melissa: I loved that Akmaral was treated with equality, respect, and sometimes fear, from the men around her. There’s no question from them that she’s brave enough, strong enough, or determined enough to fight side-by-side with the men in the tribe — and, eventually, she leads them.

Melissa: But her physical ferocity is coupled with an equally fierce ability to love. The men in her life. The children of the clan. And the land where they live.

Melissa: This story is suspenseful and exciting. There are bits that are terribly sad. There are scenes of triumph. There are plenty of plot points that made me flinch — being murdery was just part of every day survival.

Melissa: Watching modern videos of the horse racing at Naadeam and eagle hunting, it’s really easy to squint and see Akmaral in those images. This book is like a gritty, Asian version of Wonder Woman starring a heroine who could really have existed just as she’s imagined on the page. It’s ‘Akmaral’ by Judith Lindbergh.

David: My first book is ‘Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race’ by Lara Prior-Palmer. This is an autobiography. To hear her tell it, Lara Prior-Palmer was a bored and directionless 19-year-old in 2013 when the book starts. She was trying to figure out what she could do with her summer and maybe her life. An ad caught her eye.

David: The ad was for the Mongol Derby. The Mongol Derby is a 1,000-kilometer horse race around the Mongolian countryside. It’s typically described with words like “rugged” and “daunting.” The race is over 600 miles of steppes and mountains, with ever-changing weather and tricky navigation. Each of the riders races around, trading a horse every 40 kilometers. The horses have a mind of their own and can and do throw their riders and run off, leaving the rider far from … anything, really. About 30 people run it every year. Only about half of the entrants finish.

David: There’s a piece of copy on the website for the Derby that reads:

‘Before you consider applying for this race, we want to point out how dangerous the Mongol Derby is. By taking part in this race you are greatly increasing your risk of severe physical injury or even death. The nature of the Derby means that if you do fall off, the response time of the medics is going to depend on where you are. If you are seriously injured you may be hundreds of miles away from the nearest hospital. The Mongol Derby is an extremely physically demanding and dangerous race, and holds the title as the toughest horse race in the world for good reason.’

David: But Lara Prior-Palmer didn’t read that text. Nor was she particularly worried about her lack of training or experience for something like this. She had never done anything even kind of like this. But she sent in her application.Her own family was like: what? What are you doing?

David: Prior-Palmer has an aunt who’s a famous equestrian. Her name is Lucinda Green. She was a world champion in ‘individual eventing, ‘ which involves competing with your horse in three different kinds of horsey activities: dressage, cross-country, and show jumping.

David: Early in the book, Prior-Palmer goes to her house to borrow some gear and get some advice from her famous aunt. She writes:

‘Aunt Lucinda never likes to concentrate fully on one thing, so she was weeding the gravel in her driveway when she hollered some last words to me. I suspect you won’t make it past day three, but don’t be disappointed.’

David: But, to everyone’s surprise—literally everyone—Prior-Palmer not only finished the race—she won it. She became the first woman to win that race and the youngest person ever to finish. This book tells that story.

David: One of the best things about this book is that it breaks a lot of tropes that you think a story like this might have. book like this might have a narrative about rising to conquer one’s shortcomings, embracing the life-changing beauty of the Mongolian steppes, experiencing a deep relationship with the horses and nature, and a final act where the author returns changed, somehow majestically ready to get on with her adult life. Orchestra swells. We don’t really get any of that.

David: Prior-Palmer feels like a very normal 19-year-old girl throughout the book. She’s awkward. She talks about how unpleasant some of it was. She never thinks she’s going to win the thing until she does. She primarily seems to be motivated by how annoying she thought the girl in first place was. Prior-Palmer writes about coming home and wondering if she’s different, and she’s all — maybe? All of which I found pretty endearing.

David: And she writes some great lines. She’s an excellent short passage writer. I’m going to read you three that caught me. Here’s the first:

‘We remain on the same plain I entered last leg. plain so vast it would be silly to carry on thinking we matter.’

David: There’s another line that goes:

‘Green is an unlucky color, according to my mother’s imaginary handbook.’

David: I thought that was such a great phrase: ‘my mother’s imaginary handbook.’ Isn’t that what most of us are doing before thirteen, trying to figure out our parent’s imaginary handbooks? And there’s this bit, which I’ve been hitting repeatedly as we do Strong Sense of Place.

‘Other than for conquering (territorially, economically, or psychologically), I’m not sure why we ever try to get an idea about countries as a whole. We find our own countries too complicated to define, and that must be the truth about other countries, too: imaginary and secretly borderless, they bleed into their neighboring seas and lands, impossible to fully catch.’

David: This was a fun read. The adventure is bigger than life. But the author is very down-to-earth. She’s fun to hang out with. This is ‘Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race’ by Lara Prior-Palmer.

David: If you’re curious, the next race of the Mongol Derby is coming right up. August 4th - 17th, 2024. You’ll be able to follow it on the official Mongol Derby site. We’ll point to that in show notes.

Melissa: My next recommendation is ‘Stand on the Sky’ by Erin Bow. This is a YA novel about a young girl determined to become an eagle hunter. Before I get into the book, I want to tell you about falconry in Mongolia and the tradition of hunting with golden eagles.

Melissa: I mentioned the Altai Mountains in my 101. They’re in the western part of the country, and they look just like the kind of mountains you would draw as a kid to say ‘mountain.’ They’re pointy and dusted with snow at the top, like a bunch of different-sized triangles piled up against each other. They’re windy and craggy — with nooks and crannies that are home to snow leopards and golden eagles.

Melissa: For hundreds of years, Kazakh nomads have ridden their horses into the mountains to adopt eaglets to become their hunting partners. This is treacherous business. It’s bitterly cold. The eagles are protected by their mothers. And their nests are set in jagged perches that do not invite visitors.

Melissa: The hunters only adopt female eaglets because they’re larger and more agressive than males. And they have to be taken at the right age — when they’re old enough to have learned to hunt, but not too independent or they won’t bond with their human. The eagle becomes part of the family, living inside the ger most of the time. The two become a team, but the relationship between hunter and eagle usually lasts only six to eight years, then the eagle is released back into the wild.

Melissa: An adult female golden eagle can weigh up to 15 pounds (7kg) and have a wingspan of up to 9 feet (3m). They’re majestic and intimidating. Even after their training, they retain a wildness that seems barely held in check.

Melissa: The eagles help their human catch foxes, rabbits, marmots, and even wolves for meat and fur. And in October, they might compete in the Golden Eagle Festival.

Melissa: Imagine an open plain at the foot of the mountains. There are 70 to 80 hunters on horseback wearing furs and colorful hats, with their eagles perched on their right arms. For two days, they compete to determine who looks the best sitting on their horse, whose eagle is the most accurate, and which eagle can dive the fastest.

Melissa: Now we get to the book ‘Stand on the Sky.’ It combines adventure with a sweet coming-of-age story. Our heroine is Aisulu. When the book opens, she and her brother — she adores him — get caught up in a dangerous caper. Right off the bat. First page! You immediately understand the beauty and the perilousness of nomadic life. Eventually, Aisulu finds herself in possession of an eagle and becomes determined to compete in the Golden Eagle Festival.

Melissa: The book traces the relationship between the girl and her eagle and takes you inside the family ger. You get a clear picture of what it might be like to live among the nomads for a while. The cards are stacked again Aisulu — First, she’s a girl. And even though there ARE female eagle hunters, there aren’t many, and there are none in her family. Second, the situation is complicated because her brother has fallen gravely ill. Third, the only teacher available to her is her uncle. Her closed off, stern, irascible uncle.

Melissa: This book is filled with the small, important details of ger life and eagle training. Like… how Aisula catches mice to feed the eaglet before it can hunt on its own. Lining up the goats for milking. The sheer volume of buckets of water and milk that get carried back and forth every day. It’s a physically demanding life, but the community bonds are lovely. And necessary, too, right? No one can survive in that environment alone.

Melissa: I enjoyed it for the vivid setting and precise details. It’s ‘Stand on the Sky’ by Erin Bow. I got very into researching eagle hunting after this book. If you want to explore more, I have two recommendations:

Melissa: First, the documentary ‘The Eagle Huntress’ from 2016. That’s a true-life story of a 13-year-old Mongolian girl who became the first female eagle hunter in twelve generations of her family. The first scene is her capturing her eaglet. Very dramatic!

Melissa: Second, the photography book ‘Hunting With Eagles’ by Palani Mohan. He spent five years living with Kazakh eagle hunters, and the pictures are just dreamy. They’re collected in an epic coffee table book, but he also has almost all of them on his website. I’ll put links in the show notes for those.

David: My second book is ‘Border Crossings: Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway’ by Emma Fick. This book is a bit of a cheat because it’s only about a third in Mongolia, but there was so much good stuff here that I decided to tell you about it. It’s a graphic novel about riding the Trans-Siberian Railway.

David: As a reminder, the Trans-Siberian Railway is a railway that runs from Moscow east. It’s almost 10,000 kilometers long, or about 6,000 miles, making it the longest railway line in the world. It covers eight time zones. If you ride it straight through, you would be on that train for a week.

David: There are three main lines. They branch off about halfway through Russia. The main branch continues through Russia from Moscow to the Sea of Japan. second dips from Russia into China. The third runs from Russia through Mongolia and then down to Beijing. That’s the one the author and her now-husband rode.

David: They took a month to do it. They started in Beijing and went north and east through Mongolia and then into Russia. They’d ride a bit, get off, look around, have some adventures, and get back on. This book describes every step of that trip, diary-style, from when they got the idea in a used bookstore in Helsinki to their final evening in Gorky Park.

David: The book is hand-written, and Fick illustrates it with loose, friendly watercolor pictures. There’s a lot of them: a couple hundred. We get everything from the inside of each sleeper car to the streetwear of Ulaanbaatar to drawings of what she ate along the way. She has the salty milk tea in Mongolia, and pistachio ice cream at Gum’s in Moscow.

David: In the city of Omsk, she has a dish that the Russians call ‘Herring under a Fur Coat.’ It sounds just awful to me, but I’m allergic to fish. It’s beets and mayonnaise on a layer of steamed potatoes and carrots, served over a bed of salt-cured herring. Optionally, there’s a sliced, hard-boiled egg on top. She described it as ‘not for the faint of taste buds.’

David: In Ulaanbaatar, Fick and her husband stopped for a ger tour. guide picks them up in a car, and they drive hundreds of miles into the countryside. They see temples and stop at a very lonely restaurant. They stay with two nomadic families for a couple of nights.

David: Here’s where we get the biggest sense of Mongolia. We get a lot of detail. Fick shows how a ger is made and furnished: beds here, TV here, family altar here. She introduces us to the families she stays with and tells us what they wear. She plays chess with them, and a game that involves sheep anklebones. She describes the food and how it’s served. There’s both formality around, say, what is served when a guest arrives, and what order the food is presented to whom. Father gets the first pick. Then guests. Then other men, women, then children. That kind of thing. Fick writes:

‘To me, the ger looked small from the outside – probably because I was comparing it to the vast landscape around it – but when I crossed the threshold, I felt as if I were passing through a magic portal behind which space ballooned improbably. The interior revealed itself to be spacious and open – even with 10 people inside – yet cozy. The interior world of Mongolian nomads is opulent and spacious, an apt complement to the visual bounty of their natural surroundings: passing through the ger’s threshold, whether from inside out or from outside in, I marveled at the vastly different but equally remarkable worlds that awaited me on either side.’

David: Hearing about the ger tour took me from ‘wait, is that something people do?’ to ‘wait. is that something I want to do?’ Drive out to the middle of a huge field and sleep in a big tent with people I don’t know who don’t speak my language and eat their food that’s foreign to my palette? … Maybe?

David: And in that way, this is the best kind of travel book. It takes something that seems like a wild adventure and makes it seem plausible or doable without removing too much of the ‘wild adventure’ part. This is a good pick if you’re curious about Mongolia or the Trans-Siberian railway. It’s ‘Border Crossings: Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway’ by Emma Fick.

Melissa: My final book is a stunner. And! It’s going onto my short list of books that didn’t sound like my kind of thing and are now close to my heart. It’s ‘When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East’ by Quan Barry.

Melissa: The setup will not sound like everyone’s cup of tea. Here it is: A young monk named Chuluun is assigned a mission to find a child who is the reincarnation of the great lama. He sets out across Mongolia with his estranged twin brother on his last worldly experience before taking his final vows.

Melissa: This description did not set me on fire. But then I read the first few pages, and it was immediately clear this book was going to blow up all my expectations.

Melissa: First, that flap copy is true but not wholly accurate. What it doesn’t say is that this is really a road trip story. Or that the twin brothers have a magical connection to each other. Or that during their search for this very important reincarnated spiritual teacher, they will have huge adventures — while also, you know, confronting their relationship and questioning their spiritual commitments. As you do.

Melissa: The story is narrated by Chu, the young monk. He’s obviously devoted to Buddhist beliefs — he’s about to become a monk for good. But he’s also a young man. With curiosity. And hormones. Sitting in the truck next to a girl, he’s almost breathless when her long braid brushes his shoulder. He’s human: He loses patience with his brother. He questions and commits over and over to his spiritual path. And here’s one of my favorite things. When he’s about to say something really important to us as readers, he says, Listen without distraction.

Melissa: Oh, I love a narrator that addresses me directly. I am IN, Chu. I’m with you.

Melissa: We’re inside his head a fair amount as he goes on this quest. His internal monologue weaves bits of Mongolian history and family stories into the narrative. So there are details about Chingiss Khan and how the monasteries were destroyed under communism. There’s a really nice passage about the American paleontologist who found dinosaur bones in the Gobi in the 1920s. And all of that is made relevant to the lives that Chu and his brother are leading now.

Melissa: Big swaths of the story are like a travelogue. Their search for the lama takes them on a road trip across all of Mongolia — to reindeer herders, to eagle hunters in the mountains, and to the Gobi Desert. They go to Naadam and the Golden Eagle Festival. They survive a car crash and experience a massive sandstorm. They stop at a meditation center on the edge of the desert and take a tragi-comic camel ride.

Melissa: The plot points made me want to read as fast as I could to find out what was going to happen next. But the sentences are so precise, I wanted to take my time and linger. Some passages verge on poetry, like this one:

‘Can you hear all the universes glimmering in your heart? Are you ready to drop the world’s bait? What would happen if we each renounce the need for a grand narrative and simply vow to be present for each moment along the path?’

Melissa: And I’m, like, Yeah! What if we did! And then there’s something like this, Chu describing what it’s like to drink camel milk:

‘There are no reindeer in Khentii. There are no camels there either, though I once taste the milk of such an animal, the taste like sand and unbearable heat.’

Melissa: This is how he describes the meditation center:

‘Thirty minutes after we stop and make camp, the five of us walk a kilometer in the last dregs of daylight to a spot in the middle of the desert. The landscape looks utterly empty, like walking on a red moon, then we crest a dune, and the world changes. A sprawling complex appears nestled in the sands. And the luxury! Everything made of stone and blond wood, glass and chrome… People walk the grounds in bathrobes, westerners with small white buds in their ears, many of them carrying bottles of water, zazen pillows tucked under their arms… We pass a cafeteria… everyone eating, their plates piled with more greens than I eat in the past year. Everywhere the sound of bare feet padding across hardwood, the sound of air being recirculated, the temperature like floating in a warm broth.’

Melissa: I didn’t expect a book about a spiritual journey, family trauma, and self doubt to be so entertaining. But this is one of the books that makes me so grateful for this project because the quest to understand Mongolia put it in my hands. It’s ‘When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East’ by Quan Barry.

Melissa: If you wanted to do a little reading project, you could pair this with ‘Death Is Hard Work’ by Khaled Khalifa. That’s another literary road trip novel; it’s set in Syria. It’s darker than this one — a well-told family story set against the backdrop of civil war.

Melissa: You could also buddy ‘When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East’ with that book you read about Buddhism for our Thailand episode: Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright.

David: Those are five books we love, set in Mongolia. Visit our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com for links and details. We’ll have a link to Genghis Blues, the movie about the American throat-singer, and we’ll tell you where to find details about the upcoming Mongol Derby.

David: Mel, where are we going in our next episode?

Melissa: We’re going on a fjord safari in Norway.

David: We’ll talk to you then.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of ArtHouse Studio/Pexels.