I am in a friendly competition with a coworker back in Boston to maximize daily steps to promote good health. We use a Fitbit to measure how many steps we take each day. Our trip to Mongolia presented a challenge; how do you achieve your step count goal while on a vacation that involves a lot of sitting? Well, it turns out, I need not have worried.

Day one of the great horse adventure found us meeting our guide, drivers, and cook and loading our gear and ourselves into two Furgons. A Furgon is a four wheel drive Russian-made van with high ground clearance which was necessary for the off-tarmac travel.

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I had intended to mimic Netflix and Amazon and post all our Mongolian entries at one time, allowing people to binge read the entire series or take it one story at a time. Unfortunately, on the day I’d set as the deadline for submission from Doug, Chris, John and myself, we are all pretty brain dead. A six-hour car ride on bumpy roads followed by a cashmere factory tour, a traditional dance and music folk review, shopping and packing kept us busy until nearly midnight yesterday, the last day of our Mongolian excursion. Then we were up this morning at 4:00 am to catch our Aeroflot flight to Moscow. Consequently, Ten Centuries’ Mongolian Series will be released in installments; three posts today, a couple more in a day or three.

What is Mongolia like? Vast, mostly empty, mostly treeless. Dense with culture, history and tradition.
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It was John’s fault. That’s right, John was totally to blame. Anne warned us. We didn’t listen. John waxed philosophical on the merits of sweeping across the barren steppe astride a sturdy hill pony to re-enact the assault on Europe by the hordes of Genghis Khan. Anne thought it a flight of fancy that would pass once the newest in the long line of home projects was identified. Distract him with shiny objects. It didn’t work. John is stubborn and once an idea is born it becomes inevitable. And like a troupe of rag-a muffin camp-followers, we flocked to his banner.

A bit of background. I am allergic to all things furry. Horses are the worst and I violently explode with each sneeze. Chris and I absolutely love the idea of losing ourselves in the vast untamed wilderness of centuries past. But John insisted that it was to be done from a saddle. I’m allergic to horses – what a dumb idea.

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The Mongolian Horse is strong and tough. Though smaller than horses in America they seem to be able to go forever. I weigh between 200 and 210 pounds and my horses (one in the Gobi Desert for three days and another in the Orkhan Valley for five) carried me about 5 hours each day covering 30-35 kilometers over sand dunes, up and, possibly harder, down mountains, through streams, walking, trotting, and galloping, in thunderstorms and 95-degree heat. They never gave up. Impressive.

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As we waited to take off on our China Eastern Airline’s flight from Beijing to Xian, the flight attendant noticed our lack of reading material and very kindly supplied us with an English language edition of The Global Times, China’s version of the NYT’s International Herald. Just beneath the magazine title on the front page was the tag line “Discover China, Discover the World.” Another prominent text box next to the title announced, “Discuss China, Discuss the World.”

On this side of the globe, there is no question what country is the center of the universe, and it isn’t the United States. In the pages of the Global Times we learned that “Chinese investors are attracted by the large US markets, but China still has advantages in overall costs as well as innovation capability.” That “the present-day China is no longer a mere listener to the US” as “China and the US are now on an equal footing,” and that “future US development is inseparable from China.” We also discovered that due to the “irresponsible educational behavior” of the Chancellor of UCSD (John’s and my alma mater), who invited the “exiled” Dalai Lama to give a commencement address, that our degrees from UCSD might not be recognized in China. From the Chinese perspective, “the history education the American students receive remains outdated and full of imperial perspectives,” and that failure should have repercussions. Fortunately, we’re not looking for jobs in China.

This is a nation on the go and full of attitude.

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This was not my first visit to China, but it might as well have been. What we experienced this week was unrecognizable from the People’s Republic that my mother and I toured twenty years ago. In the fall of 1997, Beijing was a bleak, gray, crumbling, congested, chaotic, smoggy, urban mess. Despite ubiquitous signs prohibiting public spitting, sidewalks were coated with phlegm and respiratory distress was evident everywhere. People were drab, dressed in leftovers from the Mao days; dreary greens, blues and browns, nothing that would draw attention to an individual. They buzzed about on bicycles and loud, pollution spewing two-stroke motor bikes. Crossing the street required playing chicken with vehicles coming from every direction. Whoever blinked, lost. Mind you, Mom and I had a good time in 1997. The food was (and still is) excellent. We loved watching the women doing tai chi in the morning in the scraggly patches of grass that passed for parks and, in the evenings, the couples dancing on wide spots in the sidewalks. As two, tall, white women in China in 1997, we also attracted a lot of attention; sort of like minor celebrities. Everywhere we went, people wanted to have their picture taken with us.

Today is DIFFERENT. Where to start? There are so many possible angles. What struck me immediately, perhaps because I sew and love fabric, was the women. Gone were the colorless, shapeless, anonymous caterpillars. In their place; beautiful, look-at-me, butterflies. For a couple of days, as John wandered through major sights I’d seen before (The Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City), I followed along and had fun with my camera channeling Bill Cunningham.*

* For those of you who don’t know who he was, Bill Cunningham was a fashion photographer who specialized in candid and street photography. His fashion spreads ran weekly in the New York Times and were a wonderful commentary on sartorial trends. Bill worked until a month before he died last June at the age of 87. There is a great documentary on him. He was also a friend of Doris O’Neil’s (a tidbit for those who know who Doris was).
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It was Doug’s fault. That’s right, Doug was totally to blame. Wednesday was fully booked. A walk up Diamond Head, a hike up Koko Head, a quick swim and a shave ice. Off we went. The walk up Diamond Head included switchbacks, stairs, a tunnel, a spiral staircase, beautiful views and was sufficiently long and steep to warm us up.

We then went further east to Koko Head. Koko Head used to have a funicular. That is now the official trail. A dead straight path consisting of 1,447 railroad ties spaced unevenly acting as steps of varying heights from too low to too high. It starts off gently then gets steeper and steeper until it feels like you can reach out and touch the ties in front of you. Challenging to say the least.
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[Note to readers: Over the next six weeks, we will be using Tencenturies.com to post commentary on our 2017 trip around the world.]

Background:

A decade ago, John read a book about Genghis Khan; how Khan rose from commoner to ruler and then solidified his vast empire through savvy assimilation of disparate cultures and innovative, peri-modern administrative governance. Somewhere between pages 1 and 352 of that book, a desire to ride across the Mongolian steppes on horseback (perhaps with a pendant fluttering in the wind on a long, garlanded lance) germinated in John’s imagination. There it grew until three years ago it surfaced in one of our periodic “what shall we do next” conversations. At the time, I smiled and give John a vague non-committal, spousal nod. We were mid-way through our Kenyan experience. I secretly assumed that spending two years in one endless arid grassland would dampen John’s desire to venture immediately into another. I was wrong. John pushed for Mongolia in 2016 but the trip was postponed by his mother’s and my father’s failing health. In 2017, Mongolia was back on the schedule.

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This is the text of a talk I gave for The Nature Conservancy earlier this week. Just a warning; it is longer than the average blog post. It seemed appropriate as a kind of wrap up. It takes you from the start to the finish. Happy reading.

John, and I have just returned from two years working with The Northern Rangelands Trust, in Kenya. We’ve been back in the United States for about a month. I have to admit I still feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle and I’m struggling to catch up. In many ways the cultural shock coming home is much worse than it was going.
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