Travelling not soliciting: Mongolia part 5-Ger life and life in the small towns and villages

Mongolia- Part 5

Ger Life

What is a ger? A ger is the Mongolian name for what we in the west usually call a yurt (yurt is a Turkish name, but it is basically the same thing). And yes Mongolians live in gers year round (even in the suburbs of Ulan Bator and in the residential areas of the towns and villages) and yes they are very practical, comfortable and ideally suited to the way Mongolians like to live.

There are some pictures here in the blog but a bit more of a description may be in order. First of all to remove a misconception, this is not “camping” in a “tent”. These are real homes. You can easily stand up in a ger almost right up close to the walls, they have beds and depending on the size---they come in 2,4,6, and 8 person sizes---they can have full suites of furniture with cupboards, chests for storage, stove for cooking and heating, TV, family altar, children’s tricycles and toys, sewing machine, maybe a generator-powered refrigerator, low tables with stools, whatever you might want.

Gers are round, with sides sufficiently high that you can stand comfortably. The round shape is ideal since the wind sweeps harmlessly around the round walls and so gers are very stable and not susceptible to being blown away. The walls consist of a lattice-like frame (think of those extending baby gates you put at the top of the stairs) covered by layers of sheep’s wool felt covered by a breathable waterproof layer of some sort of breathable fibre or more cheaply, plastic sheeting.

The gently rounded roof is framed of wooden spokes fitted into a wagon wheel-like central cap which in turn is supported by two solid wooden posts which descend into the middle of the ger itself. These posts are not fixed into the ground but stand on a round wooden floor covered in felt and linoleum and carpets which reaches to the edges of the walls and so is weather-tight.

The roof is also covered in layers of felt and a waterproof layer, leaving the wagon-wheel open to let smoke out and air to circulate. Then the walls and roof are covered with white canvas which is tightly bound with cinched straps or with horse-hair ropes. This opening in the roof can be covered with a separate flap of felt and canvas which can be drawn back or closed over by pulleys when the weather demands it.

The door frame is low –and you routinely forget to bend to enter and so bash your head several times a day—and hung with a brightly painted wooden door insulated with more felt. Doors always face south.

The interior walls are often decorated with prettily patterned cotton material. Beds are quite low single beds –and the younger members of the family often sleep on rolled out futons. Wooden tables, stools and cupboards are often decorated with bright painted floral patterns. Flooring is often linoleum (a practicality when people are tramping in and out in all weathers), with scattered rugs.

An iron stove sits in the centre of the ger with a stove pipe extending out the roof. Sometimes there are two stoves, one for heating and for boiling water and the other for cooking, depending on the purpose of the ger. And yes there are gers for different functions: there will always be a “family ger” where food is cooked and eaten and guests entertained but there will also often be one or more other gers for sleeping or for renting out to the odd tourist like us.

In the north of the country where wood is plentiful and the winters are even harsher, you see more wooden houses, especially in the villages and towns. These tend to be of the log-cabin sort but usually with brightly coloured roofs of shingle or tin, in the symbolic colours of Mongolia: Blue for the sky, green for the earth, yellow for the sun,

The toilet?---well that is the drawback for us westerners with our shortened calf muscles and Achilles tendons: you have a hike to the outhouse (usually very clean and non-smelly but bring your own toilet paper and flashlight/torch for night time visits) which is often an Asian-style squat and sometimes quite a hike in the middle of the night. Advance planning for a visit is necessary!

So what about the nomadic lifestyle, you ask?

Well the whole family moves from summer to winter pastures and take their gers with them. The dismantling and re-erection of the ger is a family operation and is usually done in a matter of a few hours or half a day with everyone helping out.

We were lucky enough to be in Mongolia at the time when people were moving from winter to summer pastures and so we were able to observe this process and even participate in putting up a ger. I say “participate” rather than “help” since I am sure we were more of a hindrance but it was a great opportunity to see the whole nomadic life-style cycle happening.

In spring/early summer the ger is dismantled and everything loaded onto the back of a small truck (previously a yak or horse-drawn cart was used) and then moved to the summer site. The summer and winter sites for the gers can be a matter of a few hundred metres to many kilometres away.

The choice of location is not always apparent to an outsider but I think it has to do with shelter. The winter sites have rough wooden corrals and covered stalls for the herds to shelter in the worst winter weather and are usually located in the lee of a hill or in a sheltered valley. These wooden corrals are left where they are awaiting the family’s return in autumn. Summer sites are in open plains where there is plenty of access to new grass and the breeze will keep the ger cool.

The allocation of pastureland is traditional but the Russians implemented some regulations which have remained in place and the allocation of pasture is now somewhat governed by the local municipality which deals with applications to take up another pasture site and resolves disputes. I suspect that if the country were more heavily populated this would cause major conflicts but it seems to work fine at present.

Traditionally the herds of sheep, goats, cattle, yaks, camels, horses provide almost everything that the Mongolian nomad needs. But these days consumerism has had its impact and most nomads want to have a solar panel, a satellite dish and TV, some western-style clothes, a motorbike or truck or car, education for the children. But they seem quite able to acquire these things by selling some of their livestock and maybe providing accommodation to the occasional tourist.

(See pictures of the livestock and of the people in other parts of this blog.)

The whole ger is taken apart and loaded onto to a van (replacing the traditional yak- or horse-drawn cart) and moved from the winter to the summer pasture. Taking it down and re-assembling it can easily be done in one day and usually everyone pitches in and extended family and neighbours help out.

The van is unloaded and the various parts laid out

Everyone has their own task

This is a washing machine hooked up to the solar panel. All the materials are washed before being rehung

The walls take shape (see blog for description of the parts and the process)

These are the all-important central posts

We "helped"

Another ger in another part of the country is packed up. This family slept in the ger the previous night and when we awoke in the morning about 7 am this is how much they had done already

The winter pastures include a corral to provide the animals with some shelter in the long bitter winter. The winter corral is simply left where it is pending the return of the family in the autumn. No one would dream of taking it over or disturbing it

The winter corral in the eprevious picture was in the south where there are no trees so it is made mostly of stone . This one was in the north where wood is abundant and so wood is used as the building material

The guest gers vary in quality although all have the basics: beds with some sort of mattress ( often pretty lumpy!) , a small table and a stove and a linoleum floor often with rugs

This was a "luxury" ger

Another version. Each of them will have an individual touch since these are not commercial operations. They are just and extra ger set up by an ordinary herding family to make a little extra money on the side---like a bed and breakfast in the west.

Some of the gers lived in by the family themselves will have full suites of furniture like this one

ditto. You are usually invited in to the family ger to have a welcoming drink of salted milk tea and biscuit or sheep's cheese. This is part of the Mongolian tradition of hospitality.

And here is the drawback to ger life! It is always a hike to the outhouse.

Life in the village or town

The villages and towns are not beauty spots! This is in part because of the requirements of Mongolian land law.

Each Mongolian is entitled to 0.7 hectares of land. But to get this he/she has to register and has to fence the land in. If you are not registered you are ineligible to send your children to school or have any of the (limited) social services. If you do not fence in your land you lose it.

This has hit hard those nomadic families who have drifted to the city when a harsh winter like the one in 2011 has killed off their herds since they have left their land behind and so cannot get an allocation in the city.

The result is that the residential areas of towns and villages are made up of one or two dusty dirt streets lined with compounds surrounded by stockades of roughly-cut unpainted boards about 8 feet high.

Over the top of the stockades, you can glimpse the roofs of gers or the brightly painted roofs of wooden or brick houses, but a stroll around town is hardly an illuminating experience particularly in the larger towns with their chaotic traffic.

We did stay one night in one of these compounds and inside it was lovely—very private with a luxury ger for guests and a separate wooden kitchen/dining cabin and storage sheds and a generator for electricity. No running water or sewage of course---only the central part of Ulan Bator has that.

The villages and towns are fascinating, though, for the insight they give you into the daily life of the people who live in the town.

“Secular” towns are really a new concept in Mongolia and most of the infrastructure and buildings of the towns and large villages only grew up in the Soviet era, when the Russians tried to bring order and regulation to what they saw as the dangerous theocracy of the Buddhist monks and what they saw as the unproductive and chaotic Mongolian nomadic lifestyle.

Many of the towns –Ulan Bator being one of them –had existed before the Soviet era as sites of large monasteries. The existence of these monasteries –and many were huge with hundreds or even thousands of monks --would have encouraged the growth of a settlement around the monastery providing the usual satellite services needed by the monasteries such as butcher shops, tailors, blacksmiths, masons, cooks, merchants.

So when the monasteries were destroyed on Stalin’s orders, the settlements which had grown up around them were turned to secular use and became administrative centres.

Now the towns are home to the municipal government and the hospitals, post offices, secondary schools, etc for the region.

They also normally have a thriving rabbit-warren of a market area, with stalls often housed in freight cars, industrial boilers, shipping containers, abandoned and decaying Soviet era concrete sheds.

These markets sell everything: horse tack, stoves and furniture for the ger, nuts and bolts, T-shirts, fencing wire, plastic funnels, writing paper, lanterns, rope, bolts of fabric, jerry cans, mobile phones, carpets, you name it.

In the food market you can buy goat or mutton and maybe beef cut into big slabs and layed out on the counter –none of your namby pamby refrigerated units and plastic gloved white-coated staff. There are rolls of processed meat, salami style, which look unappealing but are surprisingly good and wholesome. (see the nest part of this blog for pictures of the food markets)

As dusty street in a southern village

Satellite dishes abound---although admittedly this one is a little larger than normal!

This village is further north.Wood is much more used for building in the north where it is abundant

And another Only the largest towns have any paved streets

A typical small town street. Note that most people are dressed in the traditional del

A small village in the central part of the country. This shows the stockades around the compounds and the coloured roofs

The houses often have colourful roofs. This one is done in the colours of the Mongolian flag

This is a small local cafe in a small town

A guanz (see next blog part on "food"

A not unusual sight

A typical village/small town shop selling every thing from jewellery to shoes to hair dye

A small shop in the north

ditto

This was a fairly large regional capital, but the pattern is similar

Ditto

We stayed in this Soviet-era hotel in a medium sized town. It was dire Note the antlers on the pillar

We didn't stay in this "hotel"

A "supermarket" in a medium sized district town

And inside a general store selling blankets, clothes, jewellery, and haberdashery

Another district town

All the towns have a market which serves their district. These are always lively places but the buildings used reflect the Mongolian commitment to thrift---always "recycle" things if you can. Shipping container make excellent market stalls