A Round Peg in a Square Hole – Living in Gers in Mongolia

During our first week in Mongolia, we stayed in seven or eight different gers—learning not to call them yurts; that is the Russian word for the same thing. Holly was both excited and anxious for the experience, a bit scarred from visiting traditional homes in the Ecuadorian rain forest twenty years before. Would the families in these gers be sincerely welcoming, or would it feel like an awkward, insurmountable social divide?

The design of a ger is genius; the perimeter is made of a latticework that collapses for transport, two posts hold up a central circle of the ceiling, and rafters bridge between the walls and that central circle. The whole thing is wrapped with felt and canvas. It can be built in an hour. A wood/dung burning stove sits in the middle, and in our experience, two to six beds are spaced evenly around the perimeter with a small table in the central area near the stove.

What’s interesting, of course, is how substantively similar they are, and yet different in our experience. The first one that we visited was in Gorkhi Terelj National Park. There were four gers in a straight line, each with a concrete floor—meaning they never move—and a family lives in the small three-room house next door—because why would you live in a ger when you can live in a house? They are basically running a ger-based bed-and-breakfast. Three generations are living together in the house. They were friendly and welcoming, coming out to greet us when we arrived and offering us far more food than we could ever hope to eat. Everything was very basic, and I’ll spare you the description of the outhouse, but there was a lot of happiness and a lot of generosity to be had.

Our next ger experience was similar in so many ways and yet so different. We stayed outside of the National Park, in an area much more sparsely populated. From our ger, we couldn’t see any other buildings, tucked as we were in a beautiful valley. Unlike our first stay, the yard here was fenced and immaculately kept (subtext, “no animal feces”). The outhouse was made of cinder block, but still very poorly ventilated; I’ll spare you any further descriptors. The ger itself was the same.

The most considerable difference was our host. As Holly and I dozed, he taught the boys how to play games with the ankle bones of sheep. He invited us all to try our hand at archery, and he took the kids one at a time for a short ride around the ranch. Talking to him further, through our translator app, we learned that until four years ago, he was a member of Parliament. He is the Ulaanbaatar archery champion, and horseback riding instructor, and decided that teaching people about traditional Mongolian culture is what he really wants to do. He is clearly affluent, running a business proudly. Yet, while he treasures the traditions of ger living, at night he gets on his motorcycle and rides off down the canyon to be in his modern house with his wife and two daughters.

The third experience was as different as the other two, perhaps more so. This was a Kazakh family, really a young couple. They live in one ger and rent out another. The floor of this ger was open to the grass and the morning frost outside. The wife milks cows every morning and evening and makes dried cheese curd—more than you’ve ever seen in your life (or might hope to). The husband, meanwhile, is busy herding animals most of the day. Our interactions were minimal and awkward until the hostess gave our boys a big hug at the end of our stay. Their situation felt more like a family farm running Airbnb to help make ends meet.

Next, we stayed in what could best be likened to a roadside ger motel. The accommodations were clean and tidy but with no cultural exchange overtones. It was alongside a dirt track through the countryside with no signage or indication on any online map I could find. The guides know where it is, and apparently, that is enough. The owners, or caretakers, we couldn’t tell which, pointed us to a ger and walked away. We made gestures towards our water bottles, and they pointed to a water barrel. And that was that.

Our fifth and sixth ger experiences were the best, by far. These families are close kin to our tour coordinator, and with them we felt most knit into the goings-on of ger living. They encouraged us (and chuckled at our ineptitude) to help herd and milk the goats. They involved us in preparing yogurt and cheese, as well as collecting fuel for the fire. We cooked and ate a big family meal together, complete with games at the end. Staying in this ger was like staying with friends back home.

It is so easy from half a world away to lump a group of people into one big bucket, to make assumptions based on the lines drawn on a map. Our ger experiences reminded us that once we zoom in to meet people face to face, they are all different and yet the same as us in so many ways. In America, there are plenty of families running a bed breakfast and greeting travelers from afar for fun or profit. And there are plenty of successful politicians and businessmen retired to a simple life for the same. Likewise, there are plenty of young couples trying to make ends meet by renting out an extra bedroom. And there are more than enough cheap roadside hotels.

Ger in the Gobi Desert, or 3-bedroom colonial in the American suburbs, living is the same; in this case, just circular instead of square.