Rounding Up The Horses To Milk the Mares

One of the Mongolian national traditions is Airag, aka fermented mares milk.  What coke is to Americans, Airag is to Mongolians.  Ulaanaa and his sister Sumiya round up and lasso the foals and tie them up for the day.  At the end of the day the mares are milked and the buckets brought to Adiya, their grandmother, to start the fermenting process.  The milk is put into a hide skin bag and hung in the ger.  The milk needs to be stirred often over a few days.  Anyone passing the skin bags picks up the wooden spoon and gives the milk a couple of stirs.
The taste is...well... sour with a fizz, not delicious, but not bad either.  It is custom to offer a bowl of this milk to anyone visiting a ger, and good manners to accept graciously and drink.   Thank goodness for the alcohol as it was an incentive to keep drinking!





Drinking Airag

Mongolia 2011

I love to travel, it seems to be a huge part of who I am.  This summer I had the good fortune to go to Mongolia with Timothy Allen, still  photographer for the BBC series Human Planet.  The trip was designed around photography and expertly produced by Panoramic Journeys.

I flew into Ulaanbaatar, the capitol of Mongolia where I met my team, Madhav, Rosie, Tim, Tudevee our expert guide and Nyama our divine driver.  From the first second we met, we laughed.  We did not stop laughing as we ventured into the great vastness of the Mongolian steppe.



We traveled in a russian built vehicle that looked like an old VW van, but could ford rivers and grind through sand.  Our journey took us through miles and miles of unfenced grasslands that eventually and abruptly bump into range after range of mountains and forests to the north and into the Gobi desert to the south and west.  There were no roads, we bumped along on dirt paths, which we dubbed, the Mongolian highway.



One of the first things we encountered was a Naadam Festival in progress.  It is a competition of horse racing, wrestling and archery. Naadam happens every summer throughout the provinces of Mongolia.
Kids and horses, and nothing but smiles.