One Year Away

Joseph

The nomadic family we stayed with on our last night in the Gobi desert usually arranges for their visitors to ride horses.  However, the man of the family had died two weeks prior and there was no one to take us out.  On our last full day in Mongolia we managed to combine two of the things that we wanted to do; ride Mongolian horses and see the famous wild horse of Mongolia; the Tahki.

The Hustai National Park, about 100 km west of Ulan Bator, has 190 horses, the largest concentration of truly wild horses in the world.  We organized to get a car and driver for the day from UB Guesthouse where we are staying.  The cost for the car, driver and petrol was $60 US that could be split among the passengers.  I put up a posting on the guesthouse message board looking for two others to join us but no one came forward.  Since we’ve been spending significantly less than we budgeted in Mongolia, Penny and I decided to splurge a bit and pay the full cost ourselves.

The driver picked us up at 9.30 AM and we took off through UB traffic.  The rule of the road in UB seems to be that the driver with least regard for the safety of himself or his car has the right of way.  After about an hour of reckless driving we arrived at a rest stop where the driver got out, said "lunch" and walked in.  It was 10.30 AM.  Penny and I looked at each and waited.  We had eaten breakfast at the guesthouse and weren’t hungry.  It was 45 minutes before he ambled out.  Whatever he ate didn’t agree with his stomach and he started passing gas a few minutes later.  Then, just 2 km from the entrance of the park he pulled over, grabbed his roll of toilet paper and ran out into the bush.  Again we waited for our driver.

We finally arrived at Hustai National Park and were greeted by the guide.  We were the only tourists there that day so we had the place to ourselves.  She put in a video for us to watch that explained about the Tahki and how the wild horses were in fact reintroduced to the area after they had become regionally extinct. The park hosts researchers from around the world.  In fact, just two months prior the park had hosted the wonderfully-named, "Asiatic Wild Ass Conference".

The guide drove with us through the park and in total we saw three of the wild horses. We were lucky to see that many, some tourist don’t get to see any during their visit. 

After returning to the park complex we saddled up for an hour riding on regular Mongolian horses through the steppe (not the wild Tahki).  The horses are quite a bit smaller than any I’ve ridden before, but they are strong and it felt like the horse was ready to break into a gallop at any time. Riding through the steppe on a Mongolian horse in the afternoon sun was an experience I’m glad to not have missed.