Our fire stoker came into the ger again at 5:15 am to light our fire and I got up shortly thereafter after a peaceful night's sleep. We left after breakfast to head back to Ulaanbaatar and the opening ceremonies of the National Naadam Festival celebrating the 803rd anniversary of the Great Mongolian State, and the 88th Anniversaryof the People's Revolution. Thankgoodness we arrived early as although the stadium was quiet when we arrived, it was absolutely packed when the ceremonies started at 11 am. It was exciting to be part of the colourful Mongolian traditions. The main arena filled with wrestlers and archers in national dress; dancing men and women in flamboyant costumes; a fashion parade of men and women's traditional dress; and military and cultural bands.
The event was opened by the President of Mongolia, Mr. Tsakhia Elbegdor, amidst a swirl of horses and military, and the crowd swelled with pride to the playing of the national anthem. Horses play a large part in life in Mongolia and thre were masses of them in the arna. It was like a mix of cirque du soleil acrobatics and the RCMP musical ride. To be able to experience this important event was spell binding.
After the opening ceremonies, we watched the first round of the wrestling. This is nothing like our hyped up North-American wrestling, but simply pure sport. There was no rink, and at least 4 couples were wrestling on the grass in the arena at one time. Events lasted anything from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes. The goal is to get your opponent on the ground. Matches were drawn out of a hat, and partners were often mismatched; large strong men were matched with small lightweights, and generally there was no "match". Even kids participated matched up to bigger men. On the big screen in the stadium we watched the horse racing. Again quite different from our own format. Horses, often ridden bare back, and often ridden by young boys, take off on a cross country course for different distances and arranged by sex, The Stallion Race, or by age group, Two Year Olds. It was fabulous watching them gallop across the Mongolian countryside flat out!
After the wrestling we left the large arena and wandered through the numerous food stalls ending up eating some typical dumplings which were delicious. Then we wandered into the archery. It all seemed very casual with all the men lined up in one row ready to shoot and the women in the next row, like golf with the women shooting from a tee closer to the pin. We watched two female archers who we sat and ate with in the food stall and then wandered out of the archery stadium to watch the ankle bone shooting. This was really different with a chap aiming a dominoe like chip towards two ankle bones sitting on a shelf in a rectangular box about ten feet away by a flick of his finger. Quite fascinating. After that we wandered around the various stalls; watched the kids getting pony rides, wondered at all the different costumes and generally enjoyed ourselves. Then it was time to meet the other 2 in our group and head back to the hotel. We had a shower, dinner, and quickly checked our email before leaving for the station to catch the train to Irkutsk.
This train is very similar to the Beijing/Ulaanbaatar train except that our carriage is newer and we are sharing it with Jon and Chris. It left the station dead on time with Russian precision. It took quite a bit to organize our carriage and put all our stuff away, but we did it and then settled down for the journey which we knew would be interrupted around 5:30 am for the start of the elongated border crossing into Russia.
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