Author Archives: Andrew

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.

We’re up before 4 to drive to the airport for the flight to Ulgii. Check-in and so on go very smoothly thanks to the experience of our guides, I’m not sure we would have navigated it without them. The airline collect about £3 in excess baggage fees from me (and from most of the participants) but there’s a stupid system where this has to be paid right at the other end of the departures area, with no useful signage, just the guides’ help. At least Argentinian Airlines put the lady with the till right next to the check-in desk, much better.

The opportunities for retail therapy in Ulaanbaatar Airport’s domestic departure lounge are, to say the least, somewhat limited, but I do manage to negotiate purchase of a packet latte and use of the hot water boiler. The resultant drink is as white as snow, despite the packet confirming that it is at least intended to include coffee, but it’s sweet, wet and warm. The flight is very smooth. As we near the end I get a good aerial shot of a snow-covered mountain, not realising its significance for the day’s activities.

Some cities are pretty close up even if they look disorganised from a distance. Ulgii belies the obvious nominative determinism by looking quite pretty as you fly in, courtesy of a mosaic of pastel-coloured tin roofs, but once you’re driving through it the old, decayed Soviet-era buildings and the massive amounts of new construction are both very visible.

We check into our hotel, get a bite of breakfast, and then hit the road. We have a 2.5 hour drive south to meet a family of eagle hunters. Although nomadic, they are usually to be found in the shadow of Mount Tsambagarav, the same snow-covered (and very sacred) peak I had photographed from the plane.

We have lunch with the head of the family, Askhabyl Shaimurat, who answers our questions about their life and the culture of the eagle hunters, and then after lunch we alternate between a couple of portrait set-ups, and photographing a couple of the more active hunters doing action shots, riding through water with their eagles. As the sun goes down we all move up hill to capture our new friends in environmental portraits lit by the evening glow.

We wait until sundown, and then it’s another 2.5 hours back to the hotel, which we reach near midnight, Ulaanbaatar time. It’s been a very long and action packed day, but full of wonderful photographic opportunities with a great family.

See also the Iceland Camouflage Masterclass and Namib Desert Camouflage Masterclass

With my digestive system playing fairly nicely I decide to join the morning shoot. Rendezvous time is set for 5.15. At 5.14 I walk into the car park as fast as my little legs, dodgy knees and metal hip will carry me, to see the jeeps pulling out! I have to wave dramatically to flag one down and get in. I know Lee’s trips don’t follow US Ranger principles, but this is a new extreme.

I needn’t have bothered. When we get to the location it’s blowing a gale, whipping up sand all around, and the light is very poor. Mike has his cameras protected by plastic bags and puts them down for a minute, and by the time he picks them up they are already covered in sand. We cut our losses, thank our models (at least the human ones), and head back to breakfast.

After breakfast we pack up and set out on the first stage of the long drive back, which we plan to break near the canyon at Tsagaan Survarga.

Lunch is taken at a Korean restaurant where for the first time in the trip we are met by customer-facing staff who have both very limited English and non-existent customer-handling skills. I get a beer, but the girl on the till is unable to either make the right amount from the various notes I offer, or make change, or explain the problem. Eventually one of the guides has to bale me out and I pay with a card, but then have to persuade the girl to return the correct notes I already passed her. I’m sure there’s no intent – the Mongolians I have met are all scrupulously accurate and polite in their dealings with me – but it does suggest that the restaurant needs to work on their staffing policies. On a positive note the soup I have ordered is tasty, but difficult to eat with chopsticks!

Another couple of hours brings us to the Gobi Caravanserai camp. The futuristic buildings are like something from a classic sci-fi movie set on Mars, and not unlike the Chilean observatory used as a location for Quantum of Solace. The new en-suite rooms are nicely appointed but there are no chairs and I am having to type this standing up and stabbing the keyboard like Rick Wakeman does, so that’s a few points on the clock…

The other big problem is that the newly-built rooms ("hereinafter referred to as ‘the ovens’, m’lud") have large glass windows and doors facing the sun for much of the day, but no A/C, no forced ventilation (e.g. a fan), and no means of natural ventilation such as an opening window. The only option is to open both the patio door facing the desert, and the main door facing the courtyard. Chance of invading creepie-crawlies 100%. Chance of invasion by something larger (e.g. curious camel, snake) non-zero.

There’s no WiFi in the rooms, and for the first time in the trip I don’t have a usable signal on my Mobicom Mongolian SIM. The bar beckons.

After an early dinner we head out to the canyon. Although these "badlands" are being bathed in beautiful late-evening light, they are almost impossible to shoot because of the force umpteen gale blasting up the canyon walls and across the top where we are trying to work. Regular readers will know how I boast of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/5s, or even multiple seconds for wider angles. I’m struggling to get a usable shot at 1/500s, and all the while worrying about taking a tumble.

As soon as the sun is down we head back to the hotel and sit outside waiting for the Milky Way, in the hope that at least an astrophotography opportunity might save the day. Sadly there is sufficient cloud that we’re unlikely to get a true and uninterrupted sky shot, but the conditions are sufficient to get a few memory shots. As I don’t have another model I opt for trying to get a "Milky Way Selfie". None is perfect (it’s really not that easy to run into position in less than 10s and then hold a pose for 20s), but I do get a couple of decent memory shots.

The overnight power outage goes unnoticed, but I have a rough night courtesy of a howling wind and unexpectedly high temperatures. Having suffered with the cold mornings in Zimanga I have brought all sorts of cold weather gear for our dawn shoots, but the day dawns with the Gobi Desert at 26C. I don a T shirt, and suspect I have wasted half my luggage allowance. Sod it.

The dawn shoot echoes the evening one. We have the same herders (and quite possibly the same "lead" camels) in a slightly different location the highlight of which is that 4 out of 5 Land Cruisers get stuck in the sand and have to be towed out. I get more great shots, especially with a great dawn breaking behind the models, but it’s very much an extension of the previous session.

Back at the camp I am suddenly struck by what can most politely be described as "Khan’s Revenge", and have a difficult morning running frequently to the facilities. Fortunately things seem to settle down during the afternoon, but it’s all a bit ominous given the amount of driving and flying on coming days.

After lunch I have a kip, and then plan to catch up with the blog. However I’m stymied by yet another power failure. I have internet access courtesy of a local SIM (which if I understood correctly gives me 15GB for about £4), but no power to the PC. Oh well.

I decide that discretion is the better part of valour and opt out of the sunset shoot, which based on weather conditions looks like becoming an extension of the previous two. The night has also been tagged for possible astro shots, but with heavy cloud cover that looks increasingly unlikely. I therefore hide in the bar, waiting for power to be restored, and am rewarded with a cut-price beer because the lad behind the bar has opened one too many, and selling it to me half-price is the easiest way to sort out the stock position. Excellent!

Day 3 is mainly a long drive south, to not far off the Chinese border. Thanks to the emergency replan this is a bit longer than expected, and we’ll also have a slightly longer drive back on day 5 returning to Ulaanbaatar from a more southerly site, but at least Mongolia has maintained its reputation for hospitality and kept a roof over our heads each night!

The main road south varies dramatically in quality and condition from place to place. After, say, 10 miles driving uninterrupted at UK motorway speeds you reach a section where the drivers have to pick their way around potholes almost deep enough to swallow a Land Cruiser. We make good time, but perhaps still less than the original plan allowed for.

Lunch is taken at the rather magnificent Grand Gobi Resort in Dalandzadgad. This combination of hotel, restaurant and night-club is styled like an enormous ger, but inside dominated by a statue of Genghis Khan. The food is good, but the portions are ridiculous. After a hefty salad with camel meat which most of us assumed was "it", we are each presented with a plate of 6 meat-filled pastries (think Cornish Pasty or empanada). One might have worked, two would have been generous, three covering absolutely all bases… We’re all sad to see so much food go back to the kitchen, but the heartiest trencherman amongst us manages 3 1/2.

The statue of Genghis Khan highlights an interesting problem. Most countries and their areas/cities can call upon a number of recognised cultural or historical figures to represent their image. Sometimes, as in Cuba in 2010, there is a conscious decision to limit things to a few chosen public figures. (They chose to iconise Fidel, Raoul and Che, but could have chosen from a range of musicians, sportsmen and gangsters!) However Mongolia’s interaction with the outside world is dominated by a certain 13th century warlord, and the outside world have few other references. He therefore dominates their imagery, but hopefully as Mongolia proceeds to make its own way outside the shadow of the Soviet Union we will start to recognise, and they will start to use, some other characters.

After lunch we head west from Dalandzadgad. The first 200km is on a very good new road and dispatched quickly, but then we turn off the surfaced road and head due north across country, through an impressive mountain valley, and reach the end of the Khongor sand dunes.

Before we reach the camp, we’re intercepted by a group of camel herders, who have been pressed into service to model for us as we photograph the camels and dunes. The sky is quite cloudy, providing less than ideal light to capture the dramatic scenery, but good light in which to do portraits of the herders and their animals.

After the shoot we do the final few miles to the Gobi Erdene camp. We’re each accommodated in a log cabin which is superficially attractive but scores very high on my Dysfunctional Hotel Room Design Index. [Update: the room not only scores a massive, unprecedented, 68 points, but has contributed 4 new categories!] Highlights include a single power socket positioned between the main and bathroom doors, but nowhere near any other surface, intermittent power which goes off during the night so nothing has charged, and a tap which is not actually screwed into the sink! Not impressed.

The big problem with Mongolia is that it’s so big. Big and empty. The distances between points of interest are usually several hundred km, there are few internal flights and a limited rail network. To explore multiple tourist destinations you are going to spend a lot of time on the road, and only a proportion of that will be on surfaced main roads.

On our second day we are therefore collected from the hotel by a convoy of five Toyota Land Cruisers, and set off on our long drive south. The jeeps are numbered, and to avoid any losses the drivers are determined to keep a tight convoy, in correct sequence, while making rather better progress than the official speed limit prescribes.

The resulting driving style can most politely be described as "enthusiastic", although we also exchange less printable terms. The drivers regard speed limits as non-applicable guidelines and no overtaking zones as vague suggestions. High speed progress is regularly interrupted by last-second braking and swerving to avoid potholes or crossing livestock.

Things are not helped by limited communication, even though each vehicle has a walkie-talkie. Following several near misses where our driver fails to brake quickly enough in response to brake lights in front, our jeep 4 is nearly into the back of jeep 3 during a more sudden than expected, unannounced, turn off the road to visit a family of horse breeders.

Sadly most of the horses are tied or corralled together, and difficult to photograph, but we do get some shots of the young lads riding bareback. However the family’s hospitality is unimpeachable, they welcome us into their ger and are happy to pose for portraits, although I decline the offer of fermented horse’s milk…

As we are getting back into the jeeps there is a more sudden than expected discovery that there’s been a cock-up on the accommodation front, and the camp we thought were expecting us for the night are not actually expecting us for four days. Fortunately the camp we had planned for the fifth night has space tonight, so the replanning is minimal, but it does mean turning tail and driving 100km back towards Ulaanbaatar, before we strike left on a rough trail to the revised location.

As per the highway speed limits, the drivers regard the unpaved routes as guidelines, and frequently strike out across unmarked terrain, or take multiple parallel routes to avoid being in each other’s dust trails. However the speeds are lower, separation a bit better and the surprisingly smooth progress is an impressive demonstration of just how good the suspension of a modern SUV can be when being put through its paces. Then, when more suddenly than expected the flat terrain turns into a steep climb up a narrow, rocky channel, you realise the Land Cruisers are in their element.

Although we arrive later than planned (the drive from the horse breeders has taken nearer 3 hours than the promised 1.5) we make arrangements to go and get some sunset photographs at the dramatic granite formations of Baga Gadzrïn Chuluu. This turns into an excellent 2 hours photographing the rocks in sunset light by camera and drone. This is the first time I have used my drone "in anger" as a mobile camera platform. The only challenge is working out which drone is whose, when you have all six in the sky.

A great end to a day filled with both the right and wrong sorts of excitement.