A Shamanic Encounter

Day 5 : A Shamanic Encounter, 7^th August, Thursday

Bayaraa, Namuul, Lhagwa and me in Moron

I left the town of Moron today in the Land Ranger. The rooftops of the handmade wooden houses shone brightly coloured in reds, blues, pinks and browns like a toy town. In a way they mimic the colours of the wild flower meadows, only much bolder and more garish. The town ends suddenly, and I am back in the open countryside again of open Steppe and hillside. I much prefer this to the town – it feels so much freerer and I have my own romantic fondness for the simple, natural way of life.

Black vulture

There were yak here, with a wise and steady gaze; every movement is slow as though they have all the time in the world. Perhaps they do.

The further north we went, the boggier the land became. The track was now strewn with rocks and dozing in the car is more difficult. Bayaraa, the driver, stops and points out some birds on the near horizon. They are black vultures, 15 of them playing in the wind, and I watch, fascinated. The route is climbing and a mist is descending. At the top of a hill (I assume it’s the top – the mizzle is heavy now and the view obscured) there is a Shamanic memorial. There has been a memorial on this site for 500 years, although not these particular wooden structures. There are stone carvings representing different aspects of the Shamanic culture, and 13 wooden stupas strewn with blue scarves to the sky gods. The twelve stupas each belong to one animal, and as I was born in the year of the chicken, it is this stupa that I head to. Bayaraa gives me some grain and rice from a container he’s brought with him and I walk round three times clockwise throwing the offering onto the stupa as I go.

Inside each one is something, and in some there are horse head skulls. These skulls are from race horses, not just any old horse, to speed people on their journey. It is raining now. ‘This will be snow in the Taiga,’ comments Namuul. Hard to believe in August that I will be in snow, and in fact we pass a patch of icy snow on the road just a short distance later.

Ulan Uul is the next town on the track. It appears out of the woods, a collection of wooden huts with colourful roofs and a stadium for the annual Nadeem festival. The streets are wide and made of dirt. Just 10km further on we set up camp on a hillside looking across to mountains. I hear the familiar sound of foraging on the larch trees. Water is collected from the river, and, despite the rain, we have our first camp fire to toast marshmallows. In my tent I fall asleep to a vast silence punctuate occasionally by distant echoes of dogs barking.