6. Unexpected melody in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia

By Filipe Morato Gomes	Where is the Gobi Desert?
I could never think of such a surrealistic event. I was in Dalanzadgad, a remote village in the heart of the Mongolian Gobi Desert, when I heard the sounds of a known song. It made me sing and smile. Like Mongolia itself, an amazing country to travel in.

I could never think about such an unbelievable and surrealistic surprise in the heart of Mongolian Gobi Desert. I was in Dalanzadgad - remote Mongolia -, a place where you can get to only through roads which do not deserve such a name, sinuous ways taken from the rocky aridness of brownish flats or river beds without any water. A place where kilometres are measured by hours and time passes at the slow pace of a moving camel.

The colours of the Gobi, Mongolia

We left Ulan Bator, Mongolian capital, provided with a gas stove, several sets of plates and cutlery as well as enough food for a week, indispensable goods to overcome the monotonous Mongolian gastronomy which is based almost entirely on mutton. It is incredible that the whole Mongolian population survives eating mutton at every meal. Although cooked in many different ways, it tastes the same all the time, with a strong, incisive nauseous smell. All over the country. It really drives a foreigner to despair.

The funny thing was that the group for this off-road expedition started to be organised while tasting a mutton dish. The plan of this expedition was outlined with two kind Swiss girls, curiously with the same name, between two forkfuls of lamb. And the result was a long trip on a four-wheel-drive Russian van through different parts of rural Mongolia, from Gobi Desert to the big lakes in the North of the Mongolia.

A Mongolian girl posing in front if her ger

We had an excellent driver, Nêma, a Mongolian we could trust but unable to speak more than a couple of basic words in English. Two Israeli brothers, Ofri and Eilon, were also part of the group, as well as the Canadian Christian who, as the result of an unbelievable coincidence, happened to turn up again on my way. I find out that Ofri, an excellent companions and a very experienced traveller, left Israel four years ago as soon as he finished the long and compulsory Israeli military service. He travels wherever he wants as far as he can afford it; then he chooses a place to stay for some time in order to get financial support, doing any job which may be worth working at; afterwards he turns back to the road, finds a job again and gets to know the world. “When do you come back to Israel?”, I asked him, curious. “I have no plans to come back”, he replied as if he was saying the most natural thing.

At some point we decided to stop in Dalanzadgad, a small but comparatively important Mongolian city, to buy food for the coming days of the expedition. Bread, pasta, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, water, and whatever we might find. And toilet paper. In the local market, overcrowded with people who were likely to come from very far away, a very common murmur in street markets like this one was abruptly hushed up by the sounds coming from somewhere we could not find out. From a café, from a car, yes, there was no doubt, I was then sure the sound was coming from inside a van just like ours, parked nearby.

On the way to the market of Dalanzadgad, Mongolia

I recognised, sort of dizzy, the sounds which echo on the walls of the houses, the voice, the mixture of English and Portuguese that filled everyone's tympanums some months ago. It was hard to believe. It was too surrealistic. I was in the middle of a street market, in the central square of a village somewhere in the Gobi Desert, surrounded by people with different faces, strange habits and typical clothes, far from home, very far indeed, listening to the hymn of the football Euro Cup 2004, sung by the Portuguese-Canadian Nelly Furtado. Unbelievable! I couldn't help singing the refrain, smiling, smiling openly just like any other emigrant shaking off old memories of his lovely homeland.

About the Gobi - a word which means desert itself - I quickly found out it is not a typical desert as we imagine them: sand, sand dunes, sand, sand dunes. It is a piece of land that becomes more arid, with more stones and less vegetation as you approach the southern frontier of Mongolia. But it's quite fertile in terms of animal life. Villages are rare. Small groups of people usually connected by familiar relationship form tiny communities, here and there, composed by three or four circular strips of tradition which the Mongolians name gers - the Mongolian traditional houses. They live unbelievably isolated, with no neighbours nearby and apparently far from the surrounding world. I say apparently as it is not rare to glimpse a bit of modern and technologically developed civilization in those rural homes - another surprising image in these isolated landscapes: Satellite TVs. I would not be surprised now if people hummed the same melody that took me by surprise in the market of Dalanzadgad.

(originally written in Portuguese)

» Read Moon of unusual honey on the Trans-Mongolian railway
» See Photos - Gobi Desert, Mongolia
» See Photos - Central Mongolia

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