Cows to the Left of Me, Gers to the Right

Lee must be losing his grip. We have a morning off! Most of us lie in for a late breakfast around 9, then spend the morning pottering. I walk out to try and find some shops, but completely miss the main square although it’s only a few streets away. I do find one souvenir shop with very nice T-shirts, high quality with an attractive and properly printed design, but they only have them in small!

The services of the Makhsum Centre Hotel are, to be polite, a bit dodgy. Their breakfast has to be among the worst I have ever experienced, with bread which could be used as a construction material, and the two pairs of trousers I send to the laundry come back inside-out and rolled into a tight ball. The laundry ladies at the Heure Bleue Palais in Essaouira who not only pressed my underwear but put each pair into its own separate packet don’t have to worry about the competition.

After lunch we head up into the hills for our own private eagle hunting festival. This is a long-standing Kazakh tradition, in which the hunters tests the relative skills of themselves, their horses and their eagles through a series of events.

We do seem to have added one new event to the traditional set. First we meet up with some of the participants who engage in the new sport of "riding your horse with eagle through water for foreign photographers". All score well, but there is an active debate between the participants with cameras about positioning. First discussion is about choice of background, whether to have cows or gers in the background. We end up singing "Cows to the left of me, Gers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you!"

There’s also the question of how to frame the action. Most of the others are obsessed with getting a head-on shot, but I also revert to the sideways panning approach honed from polo and horse-boarding and get some great variations.

Up the hill, the festival is opened as traditional with a song, but we forgo the poetry competition, Just as well as I’m starting to wonder if we’re supposed to contribute, and if so how well "There was a young lady from Bude" will translate.

The first events are tests of the eagles, timing them flying from the top of the nearest ridge to their master’s hand, and then to a moving lure towed behind the horse. The only slight problem is that this early in the season most of the eagles are too well fed, and the group only have one who’s in the right state of hunger. However after performing 3 times and getting 3 treats she is also well fed and visibly getting a bit bored.

The other sports challenge the horses and riders, and are better populated. They include a form of horse-borne tug of war, and a competition to pick up small bags of money while galloping past them at speed. Both competitions are won by the reigning local champion, a handsome chap in a pink shirt channelling a cross between Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones, and Oded Fehr as Ardeth Bay in The Mummy. Predictably the ladies all go gooey.

We engineer a further break with tradition by doing a whip-round and sending one of the drivers off to the village for beer. Excellent addition.

The eagle hunting festival may very well be the most intensive single shoot I’ve ever done. I captured 1330 images, around 57GB, but several of the team who left their cameras on high-speed mode are up at three or four times that number.

Once the sport is complete we have a series of portrait sessions, taking maximum advantage of the evening light, then it’s back to Ulgii for a late dinner. This is followed by a rather pleasant nightcap on the hotel’s roof terrace, using up the spare beer, plus a couple of bottles of wine for the ladies. Good day.