Mongolia’s nomadic lifestyle is endangered by a changing ecosystem, the introduction of ownership structures and a booming mining industry. Beatrice Jeschek learns how community-based tourism is trying to help.

Every hard line on her face tells a tale from Toghtogh’s life as a nomad. Her little hands are neatly folded in her lap of traditional deel clothes. The 75-year-old likes reds with embroidered golden ornaments that shine in the sun, reaching into her round ger, a nomad home with eight walls.

You start missing it, being close to nature. You realise you were part of something unique

On the mirror table sits a pink-white porcelain horse that could easily be a unicorn. Photographs of family members are pinned to the lace next to yellowed newspaper articles. Her touch is gentle when she welcomes foreigners into her world.

Her neighbours happen to be golfers. The herdswoman lives just a few metres away from the Ghengis Khan Golf Country Club in the Terelj National Park. Amid the golden autumn colours reigning in September, those green circles seem misplaced. A booming mining industry based on huge deposits of coal, copper, gold, rare earths, uranium and ore has attracted many foreign investors and a new type of Mongolian tourist, who fancies golf.

In 1997, tourism had just started with two small ger camps. Now 40 clusters of tourist houses surround Toghtogh and her family.

“There is far less wilderness now,” Toghtogh says, pointing to the drastic changes over recent years. The introduction of ownership structures after the fall of communism in 1990 fed a desire for settling.

Many nomads are afraid that when they come back from their winter place, the land where they had stayed last spring would have already been claimed by someone else. Toghtogh understands that ‘owners’, she smiles about the word, have to use fences to keep trespassers at a distance. But it’s difficult to get used to.

Alongside new capitalist structures turning the earth of the countryside upside down, the ecosystem has changed, with increasing droughts and grim winters called dzud. These ‘snow droughts’ in recent years caused the deaths of innumerable cattle and forced many nomad families to move to the city.

In Ulan Bator – the noisy capital with long traffic jams among nameless streets and endless construction work – flat broke former nomads now occupy the outskirts in haphazard settlements.

For a short while, Toghtogh worked in Ulan Bator as a saleswoman. But she had the urge to come back to the countryside.

In 1981 Toghtogh settled in this area, lifting her hands in a gesture of blessing. This place has a built-in clay oven, she says proudly. Why not stay here the whole year, then? Toghtogh looks irritated. “One has to move,” she responds.

She has nine children and 21 grandchildren. Two of her nieces live in the US and one has just arrived on her doorstep to visit her aunt for the second time in 12 years.

The wooden table is filled with cake, butter, cups of butter tea and all sorts of colourful sweets. The high value placed on Mongolian hospitality has definitely survived in changing times.

So far, nomads have either been pressured by environmental and political issues or ignored by a booming economy. Now a tourism niche wishes to be their fairy godmother and the spell is community-based tourism.

All locals close to a tourist camp can get involved. Cooking, guiding, hosting – supposedly there are no limits for nomads or small-town Mongolians who want to embrace cultural pride, live traditionally and sell their products.

When Toghtogh receives tourists in the busy summer time, mostly Japanese and Arabs returning from a golf course or her neighbour’s ger, she sells a bit of her self-made cream and yoghurt. With this additional money she buys soap and flour.

Batjargal also works with tourists. Since he was eight years old, the horseman has lived in the Terelj National Park.

When the Tuul Riverside Lodge opened its luxury gers with flushing toilets and thick duvets for visitors, he saddled his favourites out of 40 horses and brought them into the thickly forested Maikhan Tolgoi mountains. On his ger walls, he has hung pieces of horse manes to be close to the ones he sold.

The 35-year-old is deeply connected with his galloping beauties but he does not mind sharing them with foreigners. For a one-hour horse ride he gets 5,000 tugrig (about €2.50) per tourist .

Years after Julia Roberts visited and rode Mongolian horses in 1999, her stardom scent still sticks with Nomads Tours, one of the major tour operators in the country, which has a contract with Batjargal.

The possibility that tour operator arrangements with nomads will presrve just a softer, tourist-friendly version of their lifestyle at the expense of the real thing is dismissed. “We tell them they should just try to be themselves,” says Indraa Bold, governing board director of the Mongolia National Tourism Organisation. The key is to get paid for what has often been ‘exploited’ hospitality for centuries.

Music, dance, archery, horse-racing and wrestling are part of the business plan. Especially during the colourful Naadam celebrations each summer, which date back centuries, visitors are “a catalysator for tradition”, Bold says. The same skills the nomads’ ancestors used to fight enemies in times of the great Mongol Empire now attract visitors from around the globe.

Meanwhile, more and more city people flee the smog to get in touch with their inner nomad, says tour operator Solongo. Her name means ‘rainbow’. Out here, the landscape is as colourful and pure as her name. “It’s a harsh lifestyle, being a nomad,” Solongo says.

Until she was seven years old, her nomadic grandparents took care of her. Her best friend was a lamb dubbed Khalzaadai. “You start missing it, being close to nature. You realise you were part of something unique.”

Most of the wild heritage in Mongolia is still unspoiled, although “the grass gets less,” Solongo says. When crossing the Tuul river on thick jeep wheels, making soft waves through the water, one leaves behind the omnipresent money machinery of modern life. Ahead lies another treasure, of the spiritual kind.

So far, a whopping average price of €1,200 for an international plane ticket from the only European departure point, Berlin, to Ulan Bator has kept mass tourism at bay. This won’t change for the time being as Mongolian Airlines holds a state monopoly.

At present, about 400,000 tourists per year arrive in Ulan Bator. However, those who stumble upon offers on the internet, and are willing to pay around €100 per night for housing, can expect a piece of exquisite Mongolian beauty.

It will need more spells by the Mongolian tourism organisation to seriously reach out to wanderers and backpackers around the world; those who want to breathe freely and hike, fish and seek out the truths of a fascinating culture.

But with so many Europeans desperately needing a holiday from their hectic world, there is a rare alternative in Mongolia. Here, an original and genuine treatment to the stresses of modern life can be found – living with nomads.

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