Or as near as I can tell. That was his name. Our guide and translator said his name is rather rare. Her [ our translators] name was Mandakh which we found was not her name but her thought of self? It's a weird thing with Mongolians. We never learned her name. Just her name for herself. "Modern one". Or as my wife called her "Mongol Go Girl". It's a womans lib thing.
Orob cooks and drives the camp. Just like my grandfather Pete.
He erects the yurt off of the toyota pickup each night as we travel to join him in the near gobi. I'm one of three of our group of twenty who are on horses. The rest are on camel.
He is a wise man.
The flies are killing us. He laughs. For a couple of days. Then wraps us in goat cloth and wipes our face with a potion made from willow. The flies don't eat us anymore. We instead listen to stories of Orob TuV and his family as translated to us.
Life is good. But not without some suffering. Just like real life.
Adventures In The Near Gobi... Or what 450 dollars and a couple of bribes can buy in the off season in Mongolia.
My grandpa Pete cooked for the CCP camps up Greys river during the depressions. He was shot. Stabbed. Left for dead. A couple of times.
It was wonderful as a kid to listen to his tales of cooking three meals per day for over five hundred "city slickers", as he called them while they terraced the side of Washington peak in 1931 to 1935.
Up on the Commisary Ridge it snows to about thirty feet deep each winter. You can drive over the pass in July and see the dead branches in the pines that tell the killing snow.
Grandpa taught us all these stories. About 'Big Bob From Jersey' and the night the sheriff came to camp and shot it out. About the girls who sold their bodies and about "Will the Drunk" who shot grandpa because he came home from the whore house at 3 AM and demanded a meal and grandpa told him to get screwed.
Anyway. History doesn't have to be great to be real. My family history is just fine with me.
Me and grandpa had a deal.
He hated my dad and because I was my dad's favorite, Grandpa didn't much care for me.
But we struck a deal.
His favorite grandkids were lazy. I was not.
So when I got to be seven years old, I was his man. To load hay. To unload Hay. To unload coal.
He was a freighter. Carried hay and coal between colorado, utah, wyoming and Idaho. At about ten dollars per ton profit. Seven tons per load...
So I would work and love my grandpa. Seven tons on as a seven year old kid. Seven tons off as the same.
I once emptied a seven ton load of slack coal at the Star Valley Cremery when I was seven years old. Or so. I can't remember exactly. Too many bad things going on at the time. But about then.
One scoop shovel at a time. Over and over and over. Well. Try it. It may be good for your soul.
Because? I loved grandpa. I wanted to be all that he expected.
Sad. I know now that he could never love me. Because I reminded him of dad.
Anyway.
Ain't life a weird thing?
We are tolerated and welcomed, though I fear soon forgotten.
I get the sense that we are just intruders to be given our due and dismissed.
From such an ancient land, I can expect nothing else.
I came here to study Ghengis khan. In Ollumbataar I see the bright russian and mongolian horse men and think that it is but a brief memory.
For one thing... I would have had to fight or die had I arrived in this midst when the mighty god sat in rule.
So. It's as well I am a silly tourist.
From the Journal Of SVW
We are made to feel as kings.
It is a bit nerving. To see the truck pass us in the desert every morn at ten AM and the cook to wave at us and to know that we must pursue the desert and the rocks and the various sights.
We are shown wonderful ruins and "digs" from the 1920's where the Brits dug up all kinds of bones. We just want to be on. Away from the flies.