The 4th of July was a wet one. The rain kicked in the night before and by the morning it was pummeling the city in thick sheets, a relentless, chilly downpour that made you forget that it was actually summertime. The forecast called for at least twenty-four hours of this ceaseless piss, followed by wet and nasty conditions off and on for a week or more.
This was the day we planned to temporarily suspend the Fellowship of the Ger. Scraggs and Scott were keen to ride horses, which, in Mongolia, is like walking the Great Wall in China, seeing the Grand Canyon in the States, or eating pasta in Rome: It’s just what’s done. Most everyone who visits for more than a couple of days gets on the back of a horse at least once in their trip. Locals grow up riding, so much so that it is often said that Mongols learn to ride horses before they can even walk. I found this to be at least partly true, given the number of children I saw on horseback once we hit the countryside.
In order to do as the Romans do, Scraggs and Scott had booked a five-day horseback excursion into a national park south of the city famed for its sweeping vistas and population of wild horses. It sounded like an ideal trip made up of days following the winding Tuul River through the steppe, with nights spent underneath the wide, twinkling expanse of the summer Mongol sky. Heady stuff, indeed.
Will and I had opted out of the horse trip, both out of frugality and fear: while I’d grown up in the countryside, I’d only been up a horse a couple of times; I’d never really ridden one solo, and now, firmly into middle age, I wasn’t looking to start. I knew how much power those beasts possessed and I figured that I’d be taking a big enough risk just by jumping in a car for three weeks and careening over the pot-holed calamities that passed for roads in Mongolia.
After all, the closest I’ve ever been to death in my travels abroad has always been in cars piloted by local psychopaths. Vehicle mishaps are certainly the traveler’s most underappreciated danger, too often overlooked in favor of more sensational ways to die, such as crime or terrorism.
Of course a horse is a vehicle as well, and as Scott and Scraggs packed up and waited for their guide to come pick them up in the morning deluge, I asked them if they were still keen to proceed, given how unfathomably nasty the weather.
Both responded with grunts, grimaces, and determined nods before slipping into their guide’s dented-up, mud stained white Prius, which sputtered away in mist of the bone-chilling drencher. Will and I shrugged and went about our day, which included moving out of the Tara Guest House to another situated just a block down from the State Department Store in central UB. This involved us packing up and hitting the jagged pavement, and soon we were humping our bags through the rainstorm across town.
Ulaanbaatar had obviously not been designed with heavy rain in mind, as the drainage system in place was clearly inadequate for what the elements demanded, forcing us to wade across immense puddles which formed on the sidewalks and traffic-snarled roads. Despite the fact that we both wore rain jackets and sturdy footwear, there was just no way to avoid getting soaked, as this was the kind of rain that didn’t just fall from the sky, but also seemed to crawl up from the ground.
After checking into our guesthouse and downing a lunch of sheep fat and meat piles at Buuz Khaan—a fast food franchise serving up proper Mongolian stodge—we made the very sensible decision to hit a couple of the city’s museums for a much-needed dose of history and culture. The couple of hours we spent wandering the halls of the National Museum of Mongolia and nearby Fine Arts Zanabazar Museum not only fed our heads, but kept us relatively dry by restricting our activity to indoor pursuits. This seemed like a win-win.
Still, I couldn’t help but think how Scraggs and Scott were fairing out on the unsheltered steppe, and despite the undeniable romance of experiencing the great expanse of Mongolia from the back of a horse, not a single cell in my body envied them that day, as I knew that such an unrelenting, torrential blast can only bring misery. I had spent too many days of my youth in the Pacific Northwest getting drenched outdoors, so I was well-acquainted with that particular brand of shivering shittiness.
This Mongolian rain was cut from a similar cloth of that of my childhood, and my suspicion that things could not have been going well for my mounted compatriots was confirmed late that afternoon as I lay stretched out snug in my bed at the guesthouse. Will was still out spelunking museums, and as I drifted in and out of a divine nap, my phone began to sing. It was Scott, and straight away I knew that something had gone awry.
His voice was calm to the point of crisis, and when he softly informed me that Scraggs had been involved in an accident with his horse, my blood turned as cold as the rain outside. For a brief moment I expected him to follow this up with the news that David was no longer with us, or at least seriously maimed, so when he went on to say that our comrade seemed to be doing “remarkably well, given what he’s gone through,” a warm sense of relief overtook me.
Scott recounted the story, how the two of them, plus their guide, had crested a hill and were heading down a steep slope when Scraggs’ saddle suddenly slipped onto his horse’s neck, startling the beast, who reared and bucked in panic. Scraggs was thrown, but his left foot got stuck in the stirrup, due to the chunky hiking boots he was wearing in an attempt to keep his toes warm and dry.
The horse bolted, dragging him over the stone-strewn steppe for about two hundred meters, repeatedly bouncing his body over the ground like a rag doll. Scott witnessed it all from the back of his own horse—which began to get agitated as well—until David’s foot finally came loose, freeing him from the violent maelstrom. Scott was convinced that Scraggs was gravely injured, or even dead, but through adrenaline, shock, and pure British toughness, he sprung to his feet in the sideways rain, badly beaten, but still in one piece.
It was just the two of them along with their guide, a young Mongol who apparently wept and froze up at the sickening spectacle, forcing Scott to—at least momentarily—take figurative control of the reins. He instructed the guide to call back to the home base (only thirty minutes away by horse) for a car, and, after some expert maneuvering on the part of a driver over the slickened, mud-slogged slopes, Scraggs was soon lying in the back seat of the simple, non-four-wheel drive vehicle as it made its way back onto the highway to a hospital in UB.
Within two hours, Scott was back at the guesthouse, where, after a couple stiff belts of vodka, he went back over the story with Will and me at least three times. He was clearly in a kind of shock, and as he carried on, we all assumed that the doctors would keep Scraggs in the hospital overnight, but soon enough a message came through on our phones from our wounded compatriot: I’m out. Come get me!
After locating the hospital on Google maps, Scott and I set off to extract Scraggs, who was either well enough to leave on his own or under the care of physicians so negligent that they were allowing a severely injured patient to make a break for it. We also made the intelligent decision to walk rather than risk a cab, as it was still rush hour, and traffic in Ulaanbaatar could only be described as demonic.
Lacking a subway or any other kind of metro, the capital’s traffic was nightmarish by default. The city was only served by a few wide Soviet-style boulevards, with a spider’s web of narrow side streets in between that quickly became clogged. This, along with the fact that half of the country’s residents now called Ulaanbaatar home—with more arriving from the interior each day—adding far more vehicles to the already-shaky infrastructure than it possibly could handle.
This resulted in near-constant gridlock—bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go chaos that could only be described as a gargantuan clusterfuck. UB’s outdoor soundtrack was one of squawking car horns, squealing brakes, rumbling buses, and nouveau riche dickheads in wannabe sports cars revving their engines at crosswalks.
Another bizarre feature of the city’s streets was the lack of standardization when it came to steering wheels. Despite the fact that Mongolians drive on the right side of the road, many of the cars—including an inordinate number of Toyota Priuses—were imported from Japan (where they drive on the left) and never got converted. This meant people piloted their cars from different sides, depending on the make and model, which only added to the overwhelming sense of pandemonium.
Despite the fact the city stretched and sprawled its way up and out of the Tuul River Valley, central UB was very walkable, and within an hour Scott and I made it to the hospital, where Scraggs sat in an otherwise empty lobby. While certainly shaken up, the tests showed no broken bones or head injuries, and after a taxi ride back to our guesthouse that took as long as our walk there, David eased down on his bed, cracked a beer, and thanked the universe that he was still alive.
His bandaged back was covered and gouged in bleeding cuts and abrasions, and his left knee was pretty banged up, but he had survived the ordeal otherwise unscathed, save a newfound respect for the power of horses.
The only question now was whether he’d continue as part of the Fellowship or drop out and return to Korea to recuperate. To lose him would be an immense blow that would surely impact the whole trip for the worse, so the three of us fervently crossed our fingers that he’d bounce back over the next few days. Part of that also depended on the weather, at least when it came to morale.
That day had seen the most rain in over twenty years in Ulaanbaatar, resulting in widespread flooding along the banks of the Tuul. Parts of town were completely submerged, and the forecast called for more periodic cloudbursts that certainly tarnished the splendor of our summer travels. We were just a couple days in and things were already tough.
Even in the city, Mongolia was living up to its expectation as a wild, unpredictable place. We knew this coming in: we were aware that extreme weather was something we’d inevitably have to deal with, that the elements would sometimes work against us in extreme ways. The best play in that case is to usually sit things out until conditions improve, but we were hungry to bite off the natural splendor that Mongolia offers up in spades and went ahead with plans anyway. Scraggs and Scott were eager to get out in it, and trusted that their outfitters knew what was up.
Conditions were so nasty on that 4th of July that no one—especially inexperienced riders such as Scott and Scraggs—should have been making any kind of journey on horseback. It wasn’t just that it was rainy: the whole region was inundated with a moisture so thick and overwhelming that it made its way into everything, including the ropes and straps designed to hold a saddle firmly onto the horse.
Whether David’s saddle slipped just because the rain had made things swollen and slick was up for debate. It may have been the fault of the young guy who fastened it. He could have just done a lazy, shoddy job, but I can’t help but think the weather had something to do with it. After all, this was biblical rain.
What’s clear is that the company should have called off the trek until at least the next day, but the pandemic was brutal for Mongolia’s tourism sector. They were as eager to recover as we were to get out on the steppe, and the mound of cash Scott and Scraggs plunked down was likely too plump and tempting of a prize to risk losing through any delay or change in plans. The tour company got greedy. They pushed ahead when they shouldn’t have, and because of that, my friend nearly died.