On the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar, white yurts huddle behind wooden fences. They belong to nomads who have come from the steppe and live there for two or three years while waiting for their house to be built. The country of two and a half million nomads is changing: winters that kill the herds, grass that is growing scarce, mines that cloud the rivers, and children who already dream of another trade. From north to south, all the way to the dunes of the Gobi, those who remain still keep to the road of the pastures.
The city? Too much noise, too much smoke, too much pollution: “In the city, I get a headache,” says Chuluun.
Having come without their horses, and not much inclined to walk, the nomads who have settled in the city have “gone straight to the car”.Rappeur G and the members of his group are all grandsons or great-grandsons of nomads. They themselves are settled. He arranges to meet at the foot of the factory chimneys, where he campaigns for Mongolians not to forget their roots. Under the communist regime, he explains, shoe factories and tanneries short of workers were built in Ulaanbaatar, and many nomads came to work there. They arrived with their yurts in their luggage, and they keep on arriving. On the hills, these are not shanty towns of corrugated iron but towns of felt: you pitch the yurt, put up a fence, then build a house right beside it. It is the beginning of settlement. To leave the city, you need a Russian car and a driver. Jerry has been driving for twenty-two years, far from his family, to pay for his children’s studies. Two days of tarmac and tracks, without a single signpost: “I find my way by the mountain, the rivers. And from driving, year after year, you remember the routes.”
Rappeur G, “as in Gérard”, and his musicians landed in Ulaanbaatar a few decades ago.
In the land of Genghis Khan, an unexpected Mongolia “where tradition and modernity mingle”.At Chuluun and Odval’s camp, milking takes place morning and evening, all year round, and the mares are milked every two hours. Dung is gathered into heaps: in winter, it covers the fodder and feeds the fire. Inside the yurt, a few days before the big move, they distil arkhi, the spirit made from fermented milk. Odval, who looks after the milk, has had six children, all of whom have left to study. “It’s very, very hard. Sometimes I’d like to drop everything and leave.” In the woods, a boy helps gather the winter’s firewood, and he has already made his choice: “I want to become a driver because being a nomad isn’t really safe any more.” Chuluun, for his part, herds his two hundred sheep on horseback. He sees the grass retreating with the droughts, and the river “polluted because of a private company running a gold mine, right next door”. If people start privatising the land and stopping nomads from living their lives, he says, Mongolia will end up going to war. Four times a year, the family moves; the neighbours come to help, and the yurt is packed up in an hour.
After milking, the men give themselves over to the steppe; the women go back to the yurt to make butter, cream and cheese.
Only what is needed is taken from nature: a tree from the forest, a little water from the river, the sheep’s wool for the felt of the yurts.
Dismantling starts from the outside: the yurt’s door is too small to get the furniture out.Further south, other nomads no longer raise anything. They are called ninjas, because of the green basins they carry on their backs like the Ninja Turtles. The private companies have big machines; they dig by hand, sometimes as deep as ten metres, and an old bicycle crankset turns the winch. Mercury is too expensive. Christophe goes down a shaft on a rope. One of them used to be a herder: “My herd didn’t survive the winter. For a few years now, winter has been hell.” A friend of his lost nearly sixteen hundred animals; around here, only two or three families remain. Elsewhere, the steppe is crossed by the Trans-Mongolian, nearly two thousand kilometres of track from north to south. Aramold and his companions, employed by the state, follow the line to repair it. A sleeper weighs seventy kilos on average; the fastest change fifteen or twenty a day. Eight months a year, they sleep in a tent, quicker to put up than a yurt, and at night it freezes, down to minus five.
“Sometimes the rope breaks, and then it gets dangerous”: you can end up stuck at the bottom of the hole.
The slowest change ten sleepers a day; Christophe, for his part, prefers to “stick to the shovel”.At the end of the railway begins the Gobi, which covers a third of the country. On moving day, the camels are loaded: here, they still go where neither the jeep nor the Russian truck can. Souk, the camel driver, once covered two hundred and fifty kilometres in one go, for lack of grass, his family ahead by car with the furniture, he behind with the yurt and the herd. “There’s only one reason that makes nomads change place, it’s to be sure the herds always have something to eat.” He finds last year’s spot again, the old truck, the enclosure. He looks for a piece of wood the width of a hand to pierce the nose of a young four-year-old camel: it is the steering wheel. In the early 2000s, frozen winters and dry summers killed, he says, ten million head of livestock, and the nomads left. “Now there are only old people left. The young have all gone.” Chinese motorbikes have replaced the camels, and herding remains a job of day and night, seven days a week, for too little money. “No one will take over after me. No one.”
Usually you leave early in the morning and arrive in the evening; sometimes the journey lasts until late into the night.
In the Gobi, people sometimes miss the communist era, when “everyone had work”; today, most people are unemployed.
The green pastures are kept for another season: at the start of winter, the camels are taken to graze in the dunes.“No, I don’t like the city. For me, happiness is here.”Chuluun