| Ride Mongolia's Steppe |
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Page 3 of 4 
Hamid Sardar-Afkhami, the camp’s dapper 42-year-old owner, emerges from a ger dressed in jeans and a button-up shirt. His voice is deep and melodic and spiced with a tinge of learned aristocracy. “Welcome,” he says. “Please, join me.”As a young lady uncorks bottles of Mouton Cadet, we sit in the shade of a willow tree and nibble strong cheese and hard biscuits. A successful filmmaker with a Harvard Ph.D., Hamid grew up in Iran, where his family and the Shah were “close friends.” He now splits his time between Paris and this camp of a dozen gers, where he breeds horses, leads pack trips, and arranges workshops on issues that affect Mongolia. He slips so easily between English, French, and Mongolian that I can’t help but ask how many languages he knows. “You mean living ones?” he replies, and I leave it at that. About a dozen scholars, activists, and scientists arrive, and for the next few hours McCormick and the group quiz them on Mongolia’s environment. I find out that a gazelle eats on the move and will roam 15,000 square miles of steppe a year—more than two Serengetis. Munkhbayar, an activist, says he’s closed 35 mines poisoning the Onggi River and been shot at 37 times in the process. And the head of a 16th-century Buddhist monastery is especially insightful. “Everything has a center of energy,” says Baasansuren, abbot of Erdene Zuu. “In a river, it’s fish; in grasslands, the roots. I tell people that if you harm nature, it will fight back. They listen to monks better than rangers.” McCormick rocks gently in a chair, resting his chin on his hand while he studies the group. He is tall with a thin frame. When it’s his turn, his voice is calm and robust, and he’s eloquent about what he hopes the Nature Conservancy can accomplish in Mongolia. 
“We don’t want to stop development, because that would be unfair to a country that desperately needs jobs,” he says. Instead, the idea is to find areas that are sensitive to development or important to herdsmen and create conservation zones for healthy grasslands. Some regions would be off-limits to everyone; others would go to mining and industry. In between would be a wide range of buffer zones and reserves to keep development from pushing conservation efforts to the margins—the mistake we’ve made in the West, according to McCormick. “We need to move from thinking about protecting lands and waters from people, to conserving those resources for people,” he says. As the meeting winds down, I notice horsemen gathering in the Dend Valley, a pool of rich greens and caramel browns that flows from camp like melted crayons. Older men with pointy-tip boots, felt trilby hats, and saffron dels wander up from god knows where. Young boys in yellow jerseys dangle from their galloping steeds to pick up uurgas, or lassos on sticks. It’s the start of a small-scale naadam, a wildly popular sporting festival of archery, horsemanship, and wrestling. Hamid hands me the reins to a brown gelding, and I trot across the valley to watch. I’m riding a horse in Mongolia! I think to myself giddily. But my fantasies of thundering across the steppe like a great khan come to a humiliating end when my hat blows to the ground, forcing me to dismount and retrieve it. “I’d have a hard time being a Mongolian too,” says McCormick. “All that wrestling? I’d get killed.” For the next few hours, we watch as horses come screaming by in a race that traditionally spans 17 miles. Some riders sing songs to spur on their mounts. A competitor with a martini-print shirt picks up the most lasso-sticks to win that event. In the end, no one can match Otgonbaatar—“Youngest Hero”—who takes the winner’s purse of 50,000 tögrögs (about $40), almost an average week’s pay. “What will you do with it?” I ask, as he splashes airaig, fermented mare’s milk, on his stallion as a blessing. “I’ll give it to my parents,” says the hero, who is 12 but looks 8. “No, he won’t,” jokes a friend. “He’ll buy booze!” “And cigarettes!” shouts another, and everyone laughs. The nearest place to buy anything at all is an hour away by car. |
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