Mongolia pastures green

The Gobi desert isn't completely barren: some areas are lush and teeming with life. See for yourself, from the back of a camel, says Robert Nurden
Published: 17 December 2006

Our host, Enkhtuyaa, waved me towards the guest's place of honour at the back of his ger, the nomad's traditional home. The tent was circular and made of felt, warm in winter and cool in summer. He handed me his snuff bottle, whose sharp, tangy smell was of sage mixed with earth. Then came the brittle goat's cheese, which I nibbled and passed on.

By this time other members of the family had left off from herding the yaks and sheep out in the Gobi desert, stepped inside, and were lounging on brightly coloured settees, their wind-chaffed cheeks glowing in the half light. They stared silently at us, their new guests, as we lounged on the rugs, resting our weary limbs after the day's camel trek.

Above us bright orange slats tapered to the summit of the ger, where a thin plume of blue smoke snaked out of the stove pipe into the 35C heat. Enkhtuyaa's family was relatively prosperous by nomadic standards. " It's better than in communist times," he said. They had two motorbikes, solar power and a satellite dish. "The problem is the wolves that come down at night and kill the weakest livestock," he said. "We go out with guns, but there are too many of them and besides, nowadays young men can't shoot properly."

Apparently, their neighbours had recently moved 900 miles, not to greener pastures for their animals - as is usually the case - but so they could be nearer their daughter who had just started a business studies course at Ulaanbaatar university. Before settling on the right piece of steppe, they had made sure they were in mobile phone contact with her. Even the herder's ancient lifestyle acknowledges the 21st century, it seems.

Soon it was time for bed, which was a limb-restoring, camel-hair mattress, from where we could see the stars twinkling through the hole at the apex of the ger. There was the screech of an owl and then oblivion.

The next morning our hostess, Uyanga, ladled some mare's milk on to the ground as we geed up our camels - helped by our leader Delger - before setting out for our second day of camel trekking. Apparently, it was a mark of respect for her to perform this ancient shamanistic ritual to bless our expedition across 30 miles of one of the earth's most inhospitable regions.

Far from being just a parched desert, the Gobi teems with life. As we swayed gently to an easy rhythm, wildlife was never far away: in the air, bearded vultures, eagles and buzzards, and, on the earth, lizards, ground squirrels, sand grouse and partridges. Somewhere out there were Gobi bears, snow leopards and ibex.

Away to our right as far as the eye could see were bare plains where, incredibly, occasional herds of horses and gazelles grazed on, well, virtually nothing. To our left the Khongoryn Els, towering banks of sands that sing, 985 feet high and eight miles wide, and beyond them, the crags of the Gov-Altai mountains. In between, there was a fast-flowing river and either side of it meadows full of purple irises and grass as green as anything in England. Just the right place for a picnic lunch.

We were becoming attached to our Bactrian camels. Mine, Shiree Ulaa, was especially intelligent, gentle and forgiving of the awkward way I clawed and scrambled my way on and off his bony back. In July, when I was visiting, camels are usually thin and scraggy, their humps - reservoirs of moisture and fat - reduced to flaps of skin. But Shiree was still the proud owner of two healthy humps. We got along just fine. But he didn't take such a shine to our cook: every time she walked past he turned and spat at her.

Soon we were in the saxaul forest, a slow-growing shrub that burns like coal, tolerates salt water and drought, and provides life-saving fodder for the camels. Temuujin started singing khoomi, Mongolia's strange resonating throat sound, which floated off into the thin Gobi air. It sounded not unlike an overworked fridge, yet melodious for all that.

We could see rain falling, but it was so hot that the water was evaporating before it reached the ground. We escaped the heat by ducking beneath the saxaul's shade. Delger dug a hole in the sand. Clean spring water rushed into the cavity and we quenched our parched throats - an old trick of the nomads.

"This is the goyoo," said Delger. He pointed out a spiky plant that grew two feet above ground and six feet below it. "We use it as protection against heart disease, and we sell it to the Chinese, who pay us lots of tugrugs [local currency]." Proud to show us his home patch, Delger took us to a little shelter of saxaul twigs that he and his fellow camel herders used as a base when they rounded up their camels at the end of each winter. Amazingly, every year, thousands of camels are returned to their rightful owners.

We camped out in Western-style tents and at last the sands lived up to their name and began to sing, a low hypnotic moan. Howling wolves added to the eerie sound. The next morning, through a slit in the tent, I saw Delger leading the camels away. They had slipped off without saying goodbye, and in their place was a 4x4. For us, the camel trek was over.

But another adventure awaited. The vehicle whisked us east across the Gobi grit to the Flaming Cliffs, where in 1921 Roy Chapman Andrews - the maverick American explorer who provided the inspiration for Indiana Jones - unearthed fossilised remains of dinosaurs.

Temuujin, a keen archaeologist, and I wandered over the jagged red outcrops of rock. Below us there was the shoreline of a 50-mile-wide, dried-up lake. " Look at this," he shouted. He pointed at a small hollow in the ground within which were tiny, mottled fragments of four eggs. They were, he said, the fossilised remains of 80-million-year-old dinosaur eggs. There were, in fact, hundreds of such specimens on the site.

Half an hour later we found part of a fossilised dinosaur bone from the same era, the late cretaceous period. It was then that palaeontology, which had always seemed a dry and dusty pursuit, sprang to life, and I was hooked.

The Compact Guide