Let’s get drunk with Reindeer Shaman
Okay it’s only 2026, can’t have been a long time since I posted a travel blog, right?
Last blog posted September 22, 2022
Excuse me?! How has it been over three years since I posted something?
Time flies, life happens, but the travel bug persists. Let’s work backwards here and start somewhere memorable.
And what better place, than Mongolia?
I braved the tropical humidity and toe fungus of Hong Kong, heat exhaustion in the terracotta tombs of Xi’an, and the watchful eye of Big Brother in Hohhot to arrive in UlaanBaatar by land. Trains and automobiles only, a journey we’ll dig into later.
Mongolia has always been a bucketlist trip for me. The most sparsely populated country by land mass. A country of herders and meat eaters and shirtless wrestlers waiting to be explored. Mongolia has its tourists, but for those who seek to explore it is still one of the most wild places you can visit. It still feels like the wild west, a place where a hoard of Ghenghis Khans troops could still appear from over the hill. This is a place you can still be a wanderer, someone who shares experiences and exchanges cultures rather than takes souvenirs and endless photos. In Mongolia, you can still be wild.
In a small office in Ulaanbaatar, I sat with my two Italian friends, Michele and Luca, sitting quietly waiting for a local guide to enter. We had spent several days in Ulaanbaatar, and were tired of the heat, smog, and drinking and smoking in the same two bars.
“She is taking a nap, please come back in two hours.” says the tour guide’s teenage daughter. We go outside and stroll through the streets of Ulaanbaatar, a city with one main smoggy street that’s still trying to find an identity. We grab a drink and a cigarette, talk over our options, and return a few hours later.
We tell the guide we want something different. To not sit in a tour bus with other tourists, be shuffled along between attraction to souvenir stall to restaurant. We want to be covered in mud, get drunk with shamans, and be free. “I have just the trip for you, then. You will leave on a bus tonight for Murun, and from there you will meet the reindeer people.”
Tell me I’m off to meet reindeer people and I’ll do whatever you tell me. I did not know how long of a journey it would truly be, braving a thunderstorm on a mountain top to get to the border or Russia in order to drink sweet fatty reindeer milk with leather-faced locals. The journey began with a fifteen hour tight hot bus ride, taking pee breaks in fields being chased by gigantic crickets and yelling at the driver when he fell asleep. I sat next to a short Mongolian woman who must have been no more than 25 years old. She kept falling asleep and resting her head on my shoulder, and when she awoke she would shoot up out of fear and apologize, almost expecting me to hit her for her transgression. We didn’t share enough language for me to tell her it was okay, I had plenty of shoulder to share, so we both slept fitfully bobbing our heads in the bumpy roads trying to grab slumber.
Miles of dark empty plains passed with the odd horse or herd of goats trotting, and at day rise seeing the gers with local families dotting the bucolic hills with wisps of smoke glimmering from their chimneys.
From Murun, a driver in a Prius (everyone seems to have a 20+ year old Prius here, and they drive them like 4x4s) drove us north to the lakeside town of Khatgal. We pulled over for a cigarette in the rain, and made some light conversation with him. Do you have a work as a driver often? “Just in summer, in winter I am accountant. Winter here very cold, -60 degrees.” Do you have a family here? “Yes, wife and two daughters. One daughter in high school, the other daughter study medicine in *HACK COUGH* city.” What city? “*HACK COUGH* city.” Oh… that’s interesting. Mongolian is a throaty language, and I swear we couldn’t tell the city name from a throat clearing.
In Khatgal, we slept in our own ger warmed by a wood fire stoked by a geriatric toothless Mongolian man and recovered from our bumpy ride.
We spent the day walking around Khatgal, a tourist attraction for locals. Folks drive their Prius 4x4s in from the cities with their own gers and just pitch up where they way. They enjoy the cool weather, take rides in rusty boats onto the lake, and have long barbecues into the nights. But we’re not here to barbecue, we’re here to find the reindeer people.
The next day we rode for twelve hours in an old Soviet Uaz van in the literal no-mans land of Northern Mongolia towards the Russian border. With our guide, Jimmy, we took breaks to pee, drink beer, eat dry stringy meat, and snap dreamy grainy photos.
After what felt like a lifetime we appeared in a random village to sleep in a small shack and dine on another plate of dry stringy meat with hot milk to drink.
When we woke up, we hopped back in the Uaz for another couple hours drive till we were just on the Russian border. Here we rode atop tiny hearty horses and rode straight up a mountain, stopping only to cover ourselves in rain ponchos and huddle against the ground with hail pelting us from behind. Lightning rumbling the ground around us, our cold hands holding on to the reigns of our frightened horses. We squatted as flat as we could against the ground and prayed to whatever God was listening, and realized that, if we got struck by lightning, we’d be sixteen hours by Uaz to any form of hospital, so our fates were likely in the hands of the reindeer shaman to bring us back to life.
But all storms clear, and we were back on our horses to ride through an alpine valley with a herd of hundreds of reindeer trimming leaves from scrubby mountain bushes. Down into the valley and towards the river we continued, until three little boys on the backs of reindeer ran along the river with us towards their village.
A ramshackle collection of eighty families, all living in tepees in a small valley with their dogs and reindeer. A small volleyball net for the kids to play, a maggot-filled pit toilet in the bushes for each family, and nothing but the Taiga sky and wolf-filled forests surrounding us. We communed in our host’s tepee that night, one of the local shaman, who we shared a bottle of vodka with along with some dried meat and hot milk. He drained the bottle himself, which was our cue to return to our tepee. Rain continued to pour through an opening in our tepee, made of leftover plastic wrap.s and garbage bags. A small furnace warmed the hut, and we took turns waking up to feed it during the middle of the night. Our beds were felled trees cut in half and laid out to make a flat board on which we laid a sleeping bag. At night, the boards would flip ove,r and you’d have to flip them back over and through a log into the furnace. At night, a wolf stole away with a baby reindeer, and in the morning the men were on their horses hunting wolves on the mountain peak.
But morning always arrives, and with it, fresh reindeer milk.
We sat with our binoculars and watched the men shooting at the trees on the top of the mountain, for we were not man enough to be invited to hunt wolves with them. Two barefoot Western women, one from New Jersey and the other from Switzerland, came up to us, reindeer shit squishing between the toes, to ask us if we had met with the shaman yet.
“Ya, we got drunk with him last night.”
During the day we’d collect fire wood and watch the reindeer children race on their steeds, and the teenagers sit by the Starlink to watch YouTube videos. Even in the remotest Mongolian-Russian border, you can shitpost memes as much as you want. We gave our reindeer herder hosts a gift of soap, an expandable bucket to wash things in, and some cookies. The wife seemed especially excited about the bucket, saying she could hold a lot of reindeer milk in it. They would continue to stay here for a few more weeks, then the families would disperse and take their reindeer to separate pastures to graze. When winter came, the wives and children would go back to the city to wait out the cold while the men hung out with each other and their reindeer. We said goodbye to our hosts, hopped on our horses, and prepared for the journey back to Ulaanbaatar.
Getting back meant another six hour horseback ride and sixteen hours on the Uaz, followed by another thirteen hours on the bus from Murun back to Ulaanbaatar. On the way, we took a day in Khatgal to repair from the ride and took a kayak down the river, only to be caught in another thunderstorm. We pulled our boat up onto the river bank and sat in the covered bed truck of a local shepherd who was taking a nap in the field. We took the day bus back to Ulaanbaatar this time, passing by Volodymyr Zelenskiyy’s birthplace (his father was an engineer in a big Mongolian mining town at the time) and endless hills where local shamans made shrines of bones and sticks. And always a waving at the smiling local willing to share hot milk tea and a bowl of dried meat.
Mongolia is not for the faint-hearted, comfort seeking tourist. It’s for those who desire to experience life and dust themselves off after. Even through the discomfort of squatting behind bushes to poop and the bumpiest bus rides on Earth, I miss the endless sky and rolling holls, and I miss the warm milk tea served by a smiling local who is just as grateful as I am to spend time with a kind soul. Through everything, you will leave with your heart full, and I guarantee you will want to return to the endless skies and open plains as soon as possible.
The Weekend Rambler 