Becoming real herders

Horse riding

Mongolia never fails to surprise me. Today, the plan was for us to ride horses at this beautiful and wild place and so we did..but what surprise me the most is although the owner knows that we have never rode horses before, they guide and let us ride the horses on our own. For the girls, at first each horses is accompanied by either Mr Erbolat (I call him Mel Gibson) or Nolan but as for me, I rode on my own from the start. It was quite easy actually ie pull the head up to stop the horse from moving, left to turn left and right to turn right..of course kick the horse at the side with both legs if you want it to run or move faster...the girls later rode by themselves as well as they seems comfortable with it as well..

 Mr Erbolat (Mel Gibson), the owner of the home we stayed for 3 nights..

 The Mask of Zorro in the making

 Us three together with Nurlan

 

Ride to work

We rode along the beautiful landscape in temperature of about -10 (later at noon increased to about -2) for about 3 hours. Along the way we can see many herds moving from the summer place to the owner's winter place and after seeing that we can handle the horses comfortably, they decided why not let us experience something more...just watch the video and understand what i meant..

Yes yes yes..we really experience the nomadic life 😀 ..we became one of the herders (gembala)..we helped one Kazakh nomad to control and move their herds containing cows, goats and sheeps...funnily he trusted us and ran off or shall i say hop off to a house nearby for a quick bowl of tea (yeah they drink tea in bowl and using salt and one thing i also observe here is that they are very welcoming..they even entertain stranger who drops by their  house with tea, bread, cheese and cream). We continued migrating with the herds for at least half and hour before we leave the herds as we need to ride back to our homestay...along the way we caught up with another herds and we then helped to control the herd and move together with it..

 Awesome work site

 Leaked scene from Ice Age 7

 

Can you see my teeth 😬😀

Successful herders 👏👏..and we paid to work instead of getting paid 😅

In short, I never dream of this and never thought of doing this..I have seen this in cowboy drama scenes or natgeo and i can't believe that this can now be ticked off from my life to do list (as if I have one 😅).

We ended the day with a good bonding session ie playing cards..and the best part the Mr Erbolat and his wife, our guide Nurlan, the awesome cook Babalat and 3 of us played together until late at night..it was indeed a perfect day..

 

 Learning mathematics together 😀

Earlier - Russian Van, Ger and ...

Next - New found family