Deborah Kalin

I may or may not have contracted some form of con lurgy despite barely managing an attendance. (Turns out a con in your home town? Surprisingly inconvenient. The dayjob expects you to earn your keep, instead of swanning around pretending you're a real grown-up writer.)¹

So instead of actual, you know, content, on the producing of which my brain cannot focus because it keeps whispering that whisky would surely help our current circumstances, I give you photographic evidence of the Mongolian volcano what broke me, and bit me on the way down for good measure:

the volcano (long extinct)

The black shadow covering the lower third to half of the slopes is made up of fist- to head-sized rocks of black pumice, packed ankle to mid-shin deep. Initially I was concerned about the steepness of the slope winding me and making me too slow. The steepness wasn't a tenth of the problem that the lack of secure footing turned out to be.

did i mention it was steep?

I made it about a third of the way up, by which point I'd fallen quite a way behind all my surer-footed companions — and fallen so many times my dodgy ankle was considering how best it might club me unconscious and drag me back down to less challenging terrain. That was the point I realised that getting back down was always more difficult than climbing up in the first place, and if my ankle twisted itself one more time I was going to have to come down riding on someone's back. Or scooting on my backside the whole way.

the view from one-third the way up

So I turned back. And I was right: coming down was much, much harder. I should totally have commandeered a piggyback, because as it happened I ended up falling, slipping, sliding, riding a wave of tumbling pumice, and, yes, scooting down on my backside a good portion of the way. I'm counting myself lucky that my only real injury was a mildly-aching ankle and a palm gashed open by a toothy chunk of pumice.

1. Probably just as well. Not sure I could've pulled off that sort of pretence for more than half a day anyway. [↩]

Those of you who follow me via Faecesbook Facebook may have gathered that I fell in love with the horses while I was over there.

I was always taught that the official definition of horse vs pony was simply that a pony was under 14 hands high at the withers. Turns out from a quick google this may actually be a competition-only definition, and that ponies have a different conformation to horses. Whatever, my point is that I had a terrible time not crying out "Look at the PONIES!", which I understand is deeply offensive.

(Seriously, though. Look at the ponies!)

They're an ancient breed, suffering little impact from human-induced selection, which probably explains their straight-backed conformation as much as it explains the incredible variety of hide colours.

The Mongolians (who don't name their horses) have over 300 different names for the colours of their horses. I was astonished when I first learnt this: I was even more astonished when I saw that the Mongolian horses need over 300 names for their different colours. There are horses over there sporting hides for which I had no descriptor.

They're short of stature, but they have hearts as big as the Mongolian sky. Those little horses will go, and go, and go. And they'll choose the pace, thank you very much. (You wanted fast, didn't you?) This was fine by me. The first word I learnt to pronounce properly in Mongolian was the command to go faster. Then, while cantering¹ through countryside riddled with the burrows of the Mongolian gerbil, my Mongolian horse-riding guide taught me, through mime and mimicry of animal noises, the Mongolian names for horse, cow, sheep, goat, and camel. He also threw in dog and tiger for good measure.

If I ever make it back to Mongolia, it will be for a horse-riding holiday.

1. A process perhaps best described as being perched atop the world's most willing pogo stick [↩]