Mongolia's nomadic families endure an impossibly difficult life, one that is practically unfathomable to the average Westerner. Some 40 percent of the country's population still holds to nomadic ways, moving their animals and their homes across the land with the seasons, coping with savage winters and brutal summers, producing and trading milk and cheese, lamb and mutton, wool and cashmere.
There are no fences or gates here, no signs announcing PRIVATE PROPERTY or NO TRESPASSING, just tire tracks in the dust and the random flyspeck town selling fuel and beer and chocolate. But that may be changing. We have rolled past more than one ger with solar panels and a satellite dish on its roof and a motorcycle or a sport-utility vehicle parked nearby. Global interest in Mongolia for its mineral wealth is growing. The country hides beneath its craggy surface deposits of copper, silver, gold, uranium, and coal that may prove to be the richest on earth.
On our final day in the Gobi, we come upon a bustling throng of nomads gathered around a tiny building over which flutters the gold, red, and blue Mongolian flag. They've come out to vote in today's parliamentary elections, and many of the men have donned traditional garb - a calf-length tunic called a deel with a brightly colored sash wrapped around the waist - to demonstrate their enthusiasm and respect for the democratic process. Mongolia, a socialist state from the 1920s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, is these days fiercely proud of its young republic. (The New York Times has since reported that some 74 percent of the country's 1.6 million eligible voters turned out to cast their ballots in this election.)
They're building a highway outside Bayankhongor, a frontier town of about 23,000 on the northern edge of the Gobi, where we'll catch a flight back to the capital. Well, calling it a "highway" is a stretch; it's really little more than a wider, straighter, generally smoother version of the same rutted, meandering trails we've been following for four days. But although this intermittently paved stripe in the desert is far from a Mongolian autobahn, it does point to a quickening way of life here, even in this far-flung quarter of the country. This land, where from time immemorial one horsepower equaled one actual horse, is quickly digging, grading, and asphalting its way into the mechanized age. ...next page >>