Tim Cope | In The Shadow Of Genghis Khan - 10,000km & 3 Years On Horseback Across The Mongol Empire's Eurasian Steppe

On The Trail Of Genghis Khan - Tim Cope (Book)

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Previous guests on the podcast similar to this!

Jack Weatherford - Genghis Khan & The Making Of The Modern World

Robyn Davidson - Australian Living Legend. Documenter Of Nomads.

Jon Lee Anderson - New Yorker Staff Writer, A Life Of Adventure.

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Tim Cope underwent a three year journey traversing the entire Eurasian steppe, starting in Karakorum, the old Mongolian capital, westwards through Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and finally Hungary until he reached the Danube river. 

The journey took him three years to complete and 4 horses. He picked up a dog along the way, and his journey saw him robbed, threatened, welcomed and exposed to murderous heat and cold.

I first wrote to Tim 4 years ago… so we’ve maintained a very spotty correspondence in anticipation for today. 

Tim Cope is is an Australian adventurer, author, filmmaker, photographer, expedition guide - a fluent Russian speaker - a bloody good writer and someone generous enough to offer me their time and invite me into their home here in rural Victoria. 

Timestamps.

00:00 - Tim Cope
02:50 - The Magic Of The Steppe
10:10 - Tim's Coma & Writing
13:15 - Tim's Backstory
24:50 - On The Trail Of Genghis Khan
33:01 - The Eurasian Steppe
37:41 - The Decline Of Nomadic Cultures
46:27 - Entering Into Kazakhstan & Finding A Dog
1:02:55 - Tim's Growing Reputation On The Steppe
1:10:50 - Alcoholism On The Steppe
1:19:12 - Abandoned Goldmine For The Winter
1:38:45 - Prostitution 
1:50:00 - Tim's Father Passing Away
2:05:46 - Hungary
2:12:30 - The Problem Of Fitting Back In
2:24:50 - Success & Book Publishing
2:31:00 - How Mongolia Has Changed
2:44:10 - Tim's Evolving Thoughts On Both Russia & Ukraine

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

I think there are broadly two patterns that emerge from the experience that that I often return to and I hold inside me as these kind of fountains of happiness that that that I still think no one can take away from me. One of them, of course, was the experience of being out in these incredibly wide open spaces. And I'll just give you a little flavor of what that was like.

SPEAKER_03 0:31

You might remember, if you're a longtime listener, Jack Weatherford joining me on the podcast four years ago, all the way back in the beginning on episode 19. He wrote this wonderful book called Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. He tells the story of how these otherwise unsophisticated, unorganized, disparate, nomadic step herders came to dominate the world in one lifetime. The book is full of war, history, the clash of civilizations. But what I loved most from it was of the anecdotes of constant riding and journeying to new lands that these groups of tens, hundreds, or thousands of nomads would partake in. Over 800 years ago, one mission at a time. Each Mongol, ten horses to his name, charging across the steppe, traversing mountain ranges, drinking a lot of fermented horse milk, and eating meat roughened beneath their saddle from a day's ride. Jack said as much to himself in the interview, there is some indistinguishable magic to the steppe, days of uninterrupted, unfenced, nomadic pasture under the grey blue sky. It is, after all, where horses were first domesticated, more than 6,000 years of equine evolution and passed-down culture. And so, in the absence of me making it to Mongolia myself and in pursuit of some romantic projection onto it, I sought out books on Mongolia. One stored out in particular. It sought out because it was an Australian expeditionist who had made the journey. This fellow, Tim Cope, who was seated across from me now, underwent a three-year journey traversing the entire Eurasian steppe. He started in Katakurum, the Mongolian capital of the Khan Empire, across westwards through Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, and finally Hungary until he reached the Danube River. The journey took him three years to complete and four horses. He picked up a dog, Tigan, along the way, and his journey saw him robbed, threatened, welcomed, and exposed to murderous heat and cold. I first wrote to Tim four years ago, so we've maintained a very spotty correspondence in anticipation for today. We discussed his journey in each nook and cranny of a tangent that made itself available. Tim Cope is an Australian adventurer, author, filmmaker, photographer, expedition guide, a fluent Russian speaker, a bloody good writer, and someone generous enough to offer me their time and invite me into the home here in rural Victoria. This is a long one in the making. I really hope you enjoy it. And here is the interview which we just recorded.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

Awesome.

unknown 2:46

I think that's really good.

SPEAKER_02 2:48

Uh 2005, I'd come out of four months of being stuck in Akbakai in in the um in this kind of post-apocalyptic landscape. I should say a uh a town, a society, um into the spring on the steppe, where for my first week out of there there was absolutely no one. And it's the kind of landscape where it's more akin to an ocean because it's almost featureless. The the sense of texture of feature is whatever the weather brings to that, whatever emotion you're projecting onto it. Um no one knew where I was except the animals and the land itself. Uh, my watch had long died. Uh I'd learned a lesson in that town. Um, they have a saying in Kazakh, if you must rush in life, rush slowly. I'd given up on my arbitrary uh deadline of reaching Hungary in 14 months. It turned out to be, of course, three and a half years. I was only two and a half years late. Um, and that released me from the pressure of meeting that deadline. In addition to that, you have in a horizon with zero fences, there are no obstacles that can't be traversed. I had this feeling with my three horses by my side, by my dog Tiggin um released from winter, running as fast as he could. It wasn't yet summer, so he could run even without letting his tongue out to cool down. He could run like the wind. Um I could camp wherever I wanted to because the spring grass was starting to come back. And I just felt like this this is the kind of unadulterated freedom that uh that I may never experience again. And it to this day it's almost indescribable. This sense of um, you know, your sense of place is so difficult to put into words. No one on this planet, in a planet that's so congested, that's so connected, no one knew where I was or what I was going through. Um and that instilled in me a sense of uh of freedom that um I guess I'd aspired to and which I did achieve. You know, that was one of the things that I went there looking for, and it attracted me to the step. That that sense of being able to break away from human constructs from the nine to five. Um and I I'd earned it by then, I'd been been through some struggles. Um, but that that type of experience I did have many times on the trip going forwards. Um from there. The other pattern, of course, was to go from those big open vast spaces into the embrace of strangers that took me in at all times of the day and night, um with without judgment, uh, with a hot cup of tea, with food on the table, um, without truly without interrogation. Um and nonetheless it's still terrifying when you turn up on someone's doorstep, you you just don't know what lies on the other side of that um that door as it opens, you know. Is it going to be a people that the person that uh that trusts me that I'm looking bedraggled, I haven't washed in two weeks, I've turned up in the night with three horses and a dog, I'm a single male. Um, you know, uh, and time and time again, people took me in as I was. And and I think um one of the other exciting prospects of this journey for me that that that kept that fire in my belly to help get over those many um obstacles to start the trip in the first place, was just um the fact that for 10,000 kilometers ahead no one knew I existed. You know, um there was there was zero perception until that door opened and there was someone looking back at you. Um and and that's also very freeing because there's um without preconceptions, you do tend to take things as they are. Um and I think that, if anything, is one of the great privileges of being in that environment Australian because uh there was a neutrality there that didn't come with any preconception or or any baggage or any distrust. So um I felt that that had I been a Mongolian, for example, I probably would have been treated differently. Um but I was able to maintain a very personal and direct relationship with all these different cultures. Um and yeah, look, I'm indebted to all those families that um that that took me in, and unlike any other journey that I've done with horses, when you when they're hungry, when they're tired, when you need something for them, um that is the the the driving priority of the journey and uh your my own needs were secondary. And if that meant staying in a in a little community that might have otherwise been uh intimidating or uh a little bit undesirable, you know, people who were potentially going to steal from me, uh etc. etc., then I just had to deal with that. I didn't have the luxury to pick and choose my friends based on my perceptions. I had to, I was constantly forced to uh to create um to find common ground and create and put your trust in them trust and relationship with people who were extremely different from me and who had only just met. And and I often think that in our society, and I'm guilty of this all the time. It's hard not to be when when you're when you're more independent the way we are, the first sign of uh distrust, it's easy to retreat back into your home, back into your shell or back into your own little community that can sometimes become a bit of an echo chamber with with um in terms of views and things like that. I think what's much much much harder is when you are when you depend on others who don't share your views, who don't share your life experience. Um, and that's what this type of journey forced me to do. So I think I think you know there's some of the the the magic things um that that I'll probably never experience that level again, yeah, and which I hold tight inside me. And um uh the book has been a commercial success in the scheme of things, um, but most importantly uh it was a it was a personal journey that that was deeply satisfying for me and enabled me to kind of um digest it, learn from it personally and and kind of move on. Well, kind of move on. It's still my life.

SPEAKER_03 10:08

So it was a beautifully written book. Did did you know you could write well before this came about?

SPEAKER_02 10:15

Um when when I was in year nine, uh I wrote a piece about actually going to a coma or coming out of a coma based on my real experience uh when I was uh about ten years of age, I somehow managed to get um Japanese encephalitis um and was eventually ended up in uh Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne. And when I did come out of my coma, I had no memory for the first few days. So I didn't recognise my parents. Oh my god. I had a lot of hallucinations which I can still remember vividly to this day. And I wrote a very descriptive piece for an English project in year nine, and my teacher said to me, You could be a writer. And I knew I loved writing then, probably even earlier, uh, but from that point onwards I realised that writing was first and foremost for me a way of processing things, a way of uh learning from experiences I'd had in my life. So um yeah, I'd been told that I could write and I loved writing, and my dream was to be an author long before I became an adventurer or or had that inkling. I think once I go into that deep state of writing, which I'm sure I I'm sure most writers experience when you get into that that flow state, um tapping into something um that's much deeper, and somehow you can tie things together that that kind of uh they transcend chronology and time. Um and there's always that beautiful symphony that that that bubbles up between uh the aesthetics of the writing, the emotions, the hard realities, uh I and I I I really love that that element of of writing um and finding a way to communicate that is to me um to me it's a it's an art and very fulfilling.

SPEAKER_03 12:20

So when you come out of a coma and you don't remember anyone, yeah, can you recall sort of how scary and and bewildering all that was?

SPEAKER_02 12:29

Oh I don't remember it being scary at all, but uh uh eventually I remember looking up at mum and something kind of twigged and I thought, oh, I know you, you know. And so it was like it was like I had uh I'd been clean reset. Right, that factory reset. So it was um everything started to to come back in one by one, and eventually, of course, I remembered everything. Right, right. But um it was quite an amazing experience to kind of start with a with a clean slave. And um yeah.

SPEAKER_03 13:07

And on the On the Trail of Genghis Khan wasn't the first book you'd written. You you'd done a book about this cycling journey across Mongolia beforehand.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

Yeah, when I was um well, I if I if I if I may I might go into a bit more of a backstory, but when I was 18, uh took a year away from between school and uni, uh travelled in Eastern Europe and and Europe itself, worked in Britain, uh came home to study law, and I just wanted to be out of there. Um I found a way out which was to study as a wilderness guide in Finland. By that stage I I had spent during that year over overseas some time in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria, uh Sarajevo, Belgrade, not it was 1997, so not long after the um the war, and I had just this incredible sense of fascination of the East. Um so Finland kind of was very close to Russia. Um wild north, it was my dream. So I ended up there, studied for a year as a wilderness guide, and uh eventually at the end of that I had this opportunity to either uh go back and restart my studies in Australia uh or commit to making uh an adventure out of life in a different way. And the letter that they the university sent me was something like um uh if you do not if you do not re-enroll, we'll consider that you have uh decided to pull out. And so I thought, well, I can't live out these dreams of ex of travelling and meeting these people and places uh on weekends. It has to be a it's it's all or nothing. So um yeah, I uh I I surrendered my return ticket to Australia. My friend in Australia who I'd met briefly at uni, he uh wanted to uh ride his he was a cyclist, and together we hatched the idea of cycling across Russia to China. Um this is 1999, and um yeah, so we did it. And uh at the end of that journey, our dream had been to write a book. Um, I soon went back to Russia after that journey to join three others on a rowboat trip through Siberia, and I was doing regular call-ins to uh ABC. Uh fortunately, I think it was Radio National that a publisher at Penguin was listening in that morning on her way to work, and via the ABC found me and said, You've got a great way of um describing your journey. Would you like to write a book about it? Oh mate, what do you think? And so I said um I would uh I'd love to, but I've got this other journey, this cycling journey. And um, yeah, so we ended up writing um I wrote my first book together with Chris who had done this cycling trip. So we did it in alternating chapters.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

The serendipity of having a publisher approach you. Yes. As I'm sure you know, having published many other books later, you know, like the opposite slog of having written it, getting an agent, trying to find a publisher interest, that's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

It was um it it was a incredibly, incredibly it was just serendipity.

SPEAKER_03 16:36

Do you talk up to serendipity though, or did you like obviously the humble answer is it's serendipity, but also it is something rather extraordinary, a story that you have to tell being only what 21, 22 at the time?

SPEAKER_02 16:48

Yeah, I was 21, and look, before starting our journey, I had approached untold publishers, I approached magazines. Right. Uh and I just got rejection after rejection after rejection. Yeah, yeah. Um I ended up we ended up it was the early days of blogging, but we had a website where we updated stories regularly. Um so it it it was quite an amazing experience for it to come to me after all of that. And one thing that's stuck with me, I mean, even for the later book, trailer Genghis Khan, I did in the end have an offer for um a contract for a book before I started the trip, but I decided not to sign. I remember taking it with me in the car with my parents to the airport in Melbourne before flying to Mongolia. Um, but it didn't feel right. Um it would it it I didn't know what the story was going to be yet. Yeah, it was so many unknowns, I felt like I do I don't want to be tied into some preconceived idea of a book.

SPEAKER_03 17:52

Um, and so and it ended up being years longer than you had anticipated as well.

SPEAKER_02 17:56

Yes, which would have made the publisher tear their hair out anyway.

SPEAKER_03 18:00

So and um it and then you'd have this external pressure of an obligation you need to fulfil very much.

SPEAKER_02 18:05

And I wanted the journey to be as authentic as it was, you didn't want this sense. So um it was serendipity, but uh one of those things that I'd I tried to force my way, break my way into being an author uh to the point that several writer friends of mine um they'd said, Look, you don't have to wait for someone else to uh give you the title of writer. You are a writer, you write don't worry about it, just just do your thing. Yeah, and that's eventually what I had to do and um it all kind of And it was it uh in Finland you started learning Russian? Hmm.

SPEAKER_03 18:45

Okay. Why'd you decide Russia not finish? Russia had more applications. Yeah, it's just impossible.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Finland was a is a very interesting language, and I became very, very interested in in the Finnish culture, but I yeah, I Russian would have a lot more more usage, and I was at that time I was 19, as much as I loved Finland, it was a kind of more of a clinical uh environment, everything runs on time, everything's smooth, and life is compartmentalized as it is in many parts of the West. Um whilst next door in Russia, where we did some of our course, moment you crossed that border, I mean it was it was the Wild West. It was the type of chaos that I just drank in and loved. In the midst of that chaos, this is the late 90s, they'd were just going through that um uh that issues in 1998 where the currency basically just had massive inflation, um teachers hadn't been paid for weeks and months on end, people going back to growing food in their Dutches, uh literally fishing and hunting to put food on the table. And there was a sense of solidarity and in the midst of that that um those difficult times, a sense of life and uh and happiness and hospitality that couldn't be found in that much more uh kind of austere environment of Finland. So no, I was at the moment the first time I went to Russia, I've got to learn Russian. Uh as we talked before the interview, the the the environment is identical, but cultures that are at loggerheads with one another. On the course that I studied, we had we had Russians and Finns and um and Finns have this very moral sense of uh of independence and uh that you should never really expect to ask for help unless you've really tried to do it by yourself, whilst the Russians are very much of more of that collective thinking where it's very rude not to offer help without asking or even to help without without a request. And so we often found ourselves in uh conflict on that course. Um and I, as an Australian, I was interested in both of these um ways of doing things, and and uh but ultimately um spent more time in Russia than I did in in Finland.

SPEAKER_03 21:24

Yeah. Alright, so the reason why I wrote to you four years ago, this incredible book on the trail of Genghis Khan. Uh I love how you were 24 when you went, but it was the first time you'd ridden a horse was only something like six months before you left. Something like that. Um, and so could you just take us through from your time with this person in Australia who taught you a little bit about horsecraft to then you being in Mongolia and no one wanted to sell a white man a horse because they were under the impression that this guy's just gonna have him stolen on the first. Night, this is not a good use of our of our horses.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

Yeah. Uh I was actually first on a horse when I was about seven, but it was a very brief encounter. My dad put me on a horse that he'd brought home to where I grew up in Gippsland. Put my brother behind me on the horse. Our little Jack Russell came running out. The horse reared up. I went down. We both went down. I think my brother's face ended up in the dirt, but I broke my arm and I was off to hospital and and that was that was that was me and horses. And I never thought I'd get back on, to be honest. But seeing horses and Mongolian on this animal that's evolved as an indigenous indigenous to that environment over millions of years, it gave me completely different perspective of horses. And I thought the only the only way to truly discover the the steppe culture and the history and to transcend the modern era would be to jump on a horse myself. So when I came back, I did a lot of research, but it was it was actually where we're staying where I live right now. I was up the mountain here, Mount Bogong, where I had my first ride. I actually joined a five-day pack horse trip. I then spent three days with a horse vet and some trainers in Western Australian Market River, and that was it. Months and months of of uh of researching and connecting with people who were so-called long riders, so people who'd done journeys of more than a thousand miles on horses with pack horses. So uh, but I was forever just relying on the fact that um this reassuring concept that I would be riding amongst the original horse people of history, and that if I was to learn anything about horsemanship, who better than to learn from them? So uh I had a few basic principles, but when I first arrived in Mongolia, quite rightly the locals were very, very reluctant to sell me uh a horse. In fact, to buy my first horse, I enlisted the help of a Mongolian friend who on an election day when there were lots of nomads coming in from various points, he purported to be buying some horses for himself only to reveal to the buyers later that it was for me. I was kind of hiding at that point in the gur, a little bit horrified.

SPEAKER_03 24:34

Just in the passions passenger seat of the car.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

Well, in actually in one of the families, nomad GURS and um a Urt. And so they didn't have a lot of faith in me and and for good reason. Um but um and look, I first day of the trip I walked out of town from Hutterhort in the old capital of the Mongol Empire. I'd was too afraid to actually get on the horse. Um, and there'd been there was a number of Mongolians who'd gathered to to see this person, um, apparently, who was about to uh f follow in the footsteps of their great godlier Jingis Khan. Um, so it would have been a fairly unimpressive sight to see me walking out of town with three horses. But uh but look, I don't speak good mon Mongolian even to this day. Uh but being on a horse in Mongolia, by the time I reached my first camp, I mean people would have eyed me off for hours through their monoculars, they would have already guessed my age, they would have figured out what state my horses were in, what I needed. The tea was ready, they knew where the horses were going to graze. Um, it it the horses themselves became my key to that culture and and and landscape. So whilst it was terrifying and took about six months before I could wake up in the morning and not feel overwhelmed by uh the fear of dealing with these these animals.

SPEAKER_03 26:11

Um that's a long time to feel constantly anxious about are my horses okay? Are they going to be stolen? Are they gonna be attacked by wolves? Will they respond to my commands? Are they being fed? Are they healthy? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

That's taxing if anyone's I mean horse horsemanship is uh it's a craft that you where you never stop learning, and um I was as green as you can get, more or less. Uh but I think I think what I had completely underestimated was was just how I um how tied I'd be to them and to the land. That was it, that was the vice really it was on on one hand that was the reason I was there. I was there to be tied to the land in a way I hadn't been before. Um I was relying on, they were relying on me on finding grass, shelter, water each and every day. Uh it wasn't like trekking through the environment or riding a bike where you could choose a hill with a nice view. There had to be enough grass, and they would need at least 20 to 30 litres each per day. Um so and that's not something you could map out in advance, that's just something that you need to learn, and so I start I learned it from from scratch. So all those different things, um, and obviously trying to pack an animal and not get not get kicked and bitten and all the other things that can can Which you were all of the above at some stage. Yeah, little by little. Uh but I was very conservative in the early times. Um, and I don't think I had my first gallop until about a year into the trip or something like that. Something like that. In part to conserve the animals, but in part to conserve my own well-being.

SPEAKER_03 28:03

And it was on your sixth, sixth night uh they were stolen.

SPEAKER_02 28:09

Yeah, day uh day five. So I'd I'd set off with three horses, two pack horses, um, and and an animal. And at that time I was actually with my then girlfriend Catherine from who was from Germany. The German. And woke up in the middle of the night. I'd gone to sleep thinking I'd this is utopia, like this oceanic space of green grass, people bringing their horses, uh, animals back in to feed. Um, but yeah, three in the morning that had all gone windy, dark, and I could just hear in the distance uh the my horses galloping off. Uh I thought surely they haven't been stolen, but of course the only thing remaining out there was a uh a bell that a vet in Australia had said I should put uh on the horses at night to protect them from thievery. I had one horse of the three remaining, uh, and armed with this saying that uh in Mongolia, if you don't solve your problems before the sun comes up, you never will. Uh I I headed off, and a few hours later, as the sun rose, there were these this um herd of horses, and there were my horses kind of hanging on the back of that herd. Uh their halters were gone, everything was gone, but um didn't matter. There was a nomad nearby took gave them back to me, took me to his home, actually made me a couple of halters, and through the help of some translation via satellite phone, told me this proverb that um uh a person on the step without friends is as narrow as a finger and with friends as wide as the step. Nice. Um so it it was a it was a a real uh wake-up call for me that didn't you suspect that he was the one who stole them?

SPEAKER_03 30:01

Does it almost teach you a lesson?

SPEAKER_02 30:03

Could have been, could have been him. Like a very cheeky joke. I I learned with time that there's a large, there's a very fine line between friend and foe and and yes, could have well been. Yes, well see, when the the the guy who I bought one of my original horses from, he he rode with me for the first few days. And they always say that that the person who's most likely to steal a horse is the original owner. Okay you have to get as far away as far away as you can. Um and he had warned me many times about um horse stealing and to look out for it, to avoid it, I'd kind of dismissed it. So yeah, there was that speculation that it could have been him who'd stolen it, or it could have been the guy, obviously, who gave them back to me because he said, you know, I know I knew they were yours, you know, uh you must have tied them really badly. Um but uh I'll never know. Um but yeah, with time I learnt that really it's your responsibility to look after your horses, and if you don't create a connection with the local people, then you're kind of fair game anyway.

SPEAKER_03 31:17

Um and you got the you got the bell idea from the Australian Yes, from it turns out maybe that the bell attracted the thievery in the night. Potentially. Did you end up removing bells from the horses?

SPEAKER_02 31:29

No, I ended up using it uh not so much for thieves in the end though, but just so that what what I ended up doing was I'd tether two horses at night, and the third one I would l leave to roam so that they could um eat grass as they as they freely and I'd try to rotate those rolls each each night. Um and the bell would always be on that one roaming horse. Okay, very unlikely to go too far because we created our own little herd. Um, but uh it was reassuring to wake up in the night and hear a bell softly dinging in the distance. I knew that the horse was still there. Totally. And it was the times when it was dead silent that I would poke my head out of the tent and yeah, I'd I'd skip a beat until I saw the silhouette of the horse in the dark and having a sleep or rest.

SPEAKER_03 32:21

And so the title of the book is On the Trail of Yengis Khan, and you go from the old Karakurum Mongol Khan capital in the middle of Mongolia, right? Snat like to the Danube River in Hungary. Yeah. So that geographical region, the Eurasian steppe, uh talk about you know why it is a geographical region, like what are its qualities that make it so, and what countries' modern-day borders it covers.

SPEAKER_02 32:49

So when Chinggis Khan proclaimed himself uh the leader of the Mongol Empire, this is very early on. Leader of those who sleep in felt tents. Exactly. He proclaimed himself the leader of all those who live in felt tents. And by that he was kind of uh ordaining himself as the leader of all of the steppe nomadic cultures that range from Mongolia all the way to the Danube. Um, the so-called Eurasian steppe. Now the Mongols were just one of many, many steppe empires uh that goes back to the first era of horse domestication, roughly five or six thousand years ago. Um so the Eurasian steppe is an environment that is indigenous to the it's it's the the native environment of the horse, the wild horse and obviously domesticated horse. And it these days includes uh part of Mongolia, or all of Mongolia, uh Kazakhstan, the various Kazakh tribes, um, the southern republics of of Russia, so people like the Kalmyks, who are the only Buddhist people, well that were the only Buddhist republic in geographical Europe. Cool. Um there actually there's a long story about them, but the Kalmyks were part of the uh Oirat Mongols, the Western Mongols who had their own empire. Um then you've got the the steppe of the Kuban that's kind of the the the natural home of the the Cossacks um who evolved on the borderlands of of the Russian frontier. Um then you've got the the Crimean Tatars in in what was Ukraine and still is. Um then you have uh people like the Hutsuls of the Carpathians, um, who actually are still semi-nomadic and have horses that are the uh descendants of horses that the Mongols left behind in Europe when they retreated. And then you've got the Hungarians who the Madhyars, whose ancestors were the Madjars who came out of Europe um in about the 10th century, conquered the Carpathian Basin and founded Madjarasag, modern-day Hungary. All of these people and this environment is connected by a horseback nomadic way of life. Um and symbolically, Jengis Khan he proclaimed himself leader from the Orchon Valley. Um, and there was this belief in Mongolia that that uh he who rules from the Orchon Valley uh becomes a kind of uh omnipotent leader, uh a sacred valley.

SPEAKER_03 35:42

Because it's the most steppe part of the steppe?

SPEAKER_02 35:44

It's it's a sacred valley geographically, it's very um strategic. It's right in the center where you have that meeting point of those very arid um environments of the steppe, so bordering south towards towards the Gobi Desert. Uh northwards you have the the kind of prairie steppe that you might uh imagine, that typical open, green, undulating landscape that just disappears into the the never-never. Um, but it's also close to what is sometimes called the forest steppe, so that region where um the boreal forests of of Russia and Siberia mingle with those open plains. And nomadic people or nomadic horseback cultures have always occupied that that zone, stretching from the the boreal forests deep into the Gobi Desert. And so and the Orchons right in the centre of all of that. And he previously there'd been several empires that had had based their capital there as well. It became a a um an omen uh for that that most Mongolian people at least uh thought to be um a sign that you know this is a this is a a leader sent to us from the Hebrews. Right, right.

SPEAKER_03 37:10

And the one part of the book, one of the sort of sub-narratives, is just uh tracking the decline of nomadic culture throughout these various countries because for five, six thousand years it sort of looked exactly the same until industrialization. Whereas now, if I remember correctly, all throughout there was always signs of the nomadic route. But Mongolia and the eastern part of Hungary were maybe the only two places that were still really suitable where you could comfortably roll into a place and there would be places for your horses, people would understand instinctively why you were doing it and treat you as a nomadic uh traveler. Um is that fair to say?

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Yeah, look, I I think the one of the original kind of basic concepts that intrigued me and kept me awake many a night was as I read more about more about the Mongolians, you know, here we have the largest contiguous land empire that's ever been, ruled by a nomad who lived and died on his horse in a felt tent. And that's for most Westerners like myself and and what I learned growing up, it's incongruous with the concept of emperors.

SPEAKER_03 38:31

Also, he supposedly never stepped foot into any of his conquered cities. Yep, yeah. Whether we know that whether that's true or not, but it's like adds that mythology.

SPEAKER_02 38:41

Yes, no, there's a there's a very they had a very different approach to to a lot of our empire or a lot of other conquest-based empire making. I just thought, well, that that's really symbolic of how little we we know about and how much we underestimate nomadic cultures and cultures other than than our own. And I think that I think it's always a red flag when there's a culture that's being being demonized, uh, as the Mongols had been for so so long. Until the 1970s onwards, when re historians started to uh take a slightly different look at the Mongols um and and start to rebrand them, if you like, historically. Uh I think that you know if you look at the early stories, the Mongols were were judged through the eye through through the um uh the prism of Christianity, uh they were judged through the prism of those who were defeated.

SPEAKER_03 39:43

Yeah, they they became a caricature of, or the defining caricature of the savage, of the totally uncivilized person. And Jack Witherford in his book traces it back to a play Voltaire did when he couldn't openly disparage the royalty at the time, yeah. So cast them as Mongolian. Yes. And that that negative association sort of lives down and to the point where um in the United Kingdom, uh where people who were born mentally handicapped were officially deemed Mongol, yes, like it's a Mongol, and then that comes out of that as Mongoloid, and then it's like all these things that start seeping into our historical memory of these people. And there's still an open question. It's like uh you know a book's found on a Chinese library called The Secret History of the Mongols, which informs a lot of their the the glorious part of their history and so forth. Um, but yes, sorry.

SPEAKER_02 40:39

No, that's fine. Yeah, I mean I I I just what I really wanted to do was understand, explore, immerse myself in this culture, and return to Western society looking at the world through their eyes. Um, because I think that there has been a historical conflict between nomadic cultures, sedentary cultures that goes goes back because both of those cultures kind of uh evolved in parallel um in different environments. Uh one is not superior or inferior than the other, uh, but the narrative of the West is often that um that the superior the the nomads were the the savage barbarians who were uncivilized who came in from the east. And if you look at the the early days, of course, uh those who had never seen horses before, their first encounter, if you read Herodotus and were these um so-called centaurs, you know, these kind of man horse beasts that would come out of that great never-never land bent on destruction. Um so their f first encounters with horses was a very negative one. But as the the Western world and the Arab world and uh Central Asia, Southern Asia adopted the horse, the horse became increasingly a symbol of power and good. But but uh the kind of perspective of nomadic people remained very much imbued with a negative experience, and most of our narrative of the nomads has been written by those who were defeated, and that's never going to be a positive positive narrative. So um look, I wasn't I wasn't interested in following the footsteps of soldiers or conquerors. Um, I just wanted I like that one single idea that I wanted to explore the scale and breadth of this incredible place and the diverse cultures that are all tied together by that thread of nomadic life. Um and I wanted to kind of push back and give people um through my writing and so forth a personal insight into cultures that that are a little bit of a uh a blind spot in our geographical knowledge and our historical knowledge. Uh certainly certainly was in my upbringing. Um I I couldn't I don't think I ever learned anything about Central Asia or Mongolia. And I wanted to go to the Danube River, partly of course, because that was roughly one of the extents of the Mongol Empire, but more importantly, it it's where the geographical step peters out into the temperate climes of Europe, and so that's where historically it's it's it's the it's the end of the nomad world. Um and so it was naturally going to be the finish for me.

SPEAKER_03 43:39

So you're crossing Mongolia, it took you several months. Yes. And you're with uh your German girlfriend at the time. Yep. And she leaves um at one stage, her story unfolds, she gets sick, yeah, um, you break up.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 44:01

Um, but you then enter into Kazakhstan and this is when things start to get a little bit like it turns from the honeymoon of the trip was over. Right, exactly. Like the the idyllic rolling hills, cold, hot, but then there's always a yurth, there's always a nice person. That's right. And then into Kazakhstan.

SPEAKER_02 44:21

Yeah. I I I travelled with Catherine for two months. She arrived not long after I'd brought the horses and just set out. She actually met me in Hutterhorden and I said goodbye to her in a town called Ulangom in the far west of Mongolia. Uh so I still had another uh month or so to go to reach Western, the far west of Mongolia. And yes, as a kind of I look, I was 24 at that point, and um uh I was had a very singular focus on my expedition. She was uh uh a school teacher who was going back to Germany to work, and there we had this concept that she could come and join me during her school holiday breaks for different legs of the journey. Uh but yeah, she ended up um getting quite quite ill. Um and the the name of the issue escapes me now. It was actually a a grow a growth on her pituitary gland. Um the name of the condition escapes me at the moment, but it required um brain surgery to remove. Um and I was in the midst of the toughest part of the journey in many ways, which was the desert in Kazakhstan. Um and we uh I did get to see her very briefly at one point, but um, yeah, we broke up and to cut a long story short, by the time I reached Hungary she was married. Exactly. A good measure of how long my journey took a lot longer than I thought. Um, but I think it all um haven't been in contact with Catherine for a while, but but we have a very good relationship. Um she she fort fortunately I remember the name of that the syndrome, it's called Cushing's Cushing syndrome. So if not addressed and diagnosed soon enough, it's definitely a fatal, fatal condition.

SPEAKER_03 46:24

So you you cross into Kazakhstan. Yeah. Uh I forget if it was on this border you had problems with the horses, but maybe on every border that was a problem.

SPEAKER_02 46:33

Yeah, no, look, uh as hard as Mongolia had been as my initiation, it was summertime. There were nomads who had an unbroken tradition knowledge that they could help me with. Kazakhstan, you know, it was the start of autumn and what turned out to be the coldest winter in about 40 years in this little quarter of northeast Kazakhstan. Um, it'd get to about minus 52. And pretty chilly. And and a country that was still deeply traumatized by events of the 20th century and emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union. I mean, you have to imagine that I think it was about some sometime in the early 20th century, the census suggests that there was something like 95 to 97% of Kazakhs nomadic. You know, by the end of the 20th century, there were less than 5% people nomadic. In the same transition. And that was largely due to the process in the 20s and 30s of Stalin's industrial industrialization campaign that saw uh their possessions, i.e. their animals, uh, taken away. It wasn't like in agrarian Russia and Ukraine where uh really their their economy and their survival relied on their crops and their land. Uh for Mongol for Kazakhs it was their animals. So animals were taken by the state. Um a famine ensued, and roughly there's no one knows the exact figure, and it's still there are historical cultural wars still going on. Um but but but uh roughly 2.2 million nomads starved to death in that famine, um, after which the surviving Kazakhs really as an instrument of survival needed to adapt to that that new reality uh that the Soviets had brought. Only, of course, for that reality to come crashing down with the collapse of the Soviet Union. So and there were people people that I met in those early days of the trip who lived through all of those cataclysmic events. Um and so uh deeply deeply confusing to have sacrificed so much uh for the Soviet concept, only for all of that to kind of disintegrate, uh, to have that rug pulled out and to cling to whatever they could part partially their original um ancient nomadic way of life, part of what was the scraps that were left over from the Soviet era, and whatever else they could improvise. I mean uh in those early times, I mean, we're still talking early 2000s, um a good a good 15 years after the breakup of Soviet Union, but nonetheless, a deeply difficult transition, a bit of a reckoning of Kazakhs to to re re-identify themselves, to um to reconcile themselves with with their ancient past, what had happened during the Soviet Union, and to come up with a with a with a picture of the future for who they were and what their country would be. Um so that was what I was entering, and it was I met this man called Aset, who fortunately decided to look after me for the first two, three weeks, and um he, like many, many uh Kazakhs I met, he had this deep nostalgia about uh nomadic life. He had a sense of what it was. He'd spent his life as a um a horse shepherd, actually, which was one of the kind of renowned as one of the toughest jobs because you'd be out there uh shepherding, guarding herds of horses that are notoriously difficult to you know, horses move 24-7, they don't have sleep cycles like the rest of us. Uh but he he he inherited all the stories of how nomadic culture operated, and when he travelled with me, it was like this opportunity for him to live those out. Um and he had this sense that that I later would be able to put into words, which was that you know, I guess this is the definition of nostalgia in a sense that he deeply seemed to believe that somewhere in the future they'd be able to reunite and recreate their distant past. You know, that beyond the cataclysmic events of today, we'll we'll we'll return to that history, um, which is totally understandable. And of course, in a way that might be possible, but in reality, um time still moves in a chronological way.

SPEAKER_03 51:41

Um sort of downstream of their economic opportunity, the way people live their lives.

SPEAKER_02 51:49

Yeah, look, uh there was this sense like there was in Mongolia as well, but in a different way, of you know what what era do we cling to? Do we cling to um our roots as uh as as uh as an Islamic nomadic culture? Do we go further back? Do we do we go back to our shamanic roots, to our Tengriist roots? And they've had that debate in Mongolia as well, you know, do you because Buddhist Buddhism can be seen as as a as an import by the man by the Manchus who some would argue use Buddhism to pacify uh the Mongols. So you know there's that constant tension in Mongoli society today, as there is in Kazakhstan, about well, we've got this opportunity and freedom to recreate our identity now. Um, so what are we going to choose? Um and it often runs down political lines as well. Um, but anyway, this guy I said, lovely man living in a little in a little tiny village with a handful of animals, he decides to travel with me, and at the end of that time, he's still very worried about me. And he says, Um, you need a friend on this long road, you need someone to protect you from the wolves and keep you warm at night in the tent. And that's when he proceeded to give me this little puppy. Yeah, he said, uh, in our culture, dogs choose their owners, and he's definitely yours. He was this little tiny black um skin and bones on stick legs, who I'd actually seen the first night arrived in his village, leapt all over me. He was actually his son's puppy, six months old. Um, and I looked at this thing and thought, he's not going to survive more than two or three weeks. Um, little did I know, of course. But I I very reluctantly kind of uh rode off with him, but within a couple of days I couldn't live without this little little puppy. And the foresight of our set, um, as so many people on this trip, you know, their foresight was so far beyond what I could have imagined. And Tiggin became instrumental on my trip. I'd go to bed at night, even in those early days, and and and he was obviously thinking, well, thank goodness Tim's protecting me from wolves. At that point, I was I was paranoid still about thieves and wolves. I'd had a wolf encounter in Mongolia as well, and so I'd started to take those warnings a bit more seriously. Um and um yeah, Tiggen just took the edge off it, and in those early days, of course, he he was he he learnt to protect himself by uh standing underneath my horses when other big dogs and other horses attacked. Um but over time he grew into this great big proud dog that um truly became um our leader, yeah, and and and and definitely uh helped keep keep wolves and thieves and and other things at bay. And the dog's called chicken. Tigon. Chigon. Tigon, T-I-G-O, when I'm not pronouncing it correctly, it's pronounced something more like uh Toygan, uh, which means goshawk or fast wind in God.

SPEAKER_03 55:02

To jump all the way to the ends, he is with you for three years, well, or two and a half from when you find well from when you're giving him and then a year later you bring him to Australia. I can see there's a little imprint. Maybe that's him, maybe that's not.

SPEAKER_02 55:15

Yeah, so that's him.

SPEAKER_03 55:16

Um how long did he live?

SPEAKER_02 55:19

He lived for almost 15 years. Yeah. Um he not far from here is where I lived for four years while I wrote the book. And he and I would routinely roam up in the mountains. He would disappear for hours at a time chasing deer, and then he would return uh and and knead his premium meat and his pats by the wood fire. So he he walked between those two worlds effortlessly. Uh he was he was one with the dingos when he was out there, but um no, he uh unfortunately passed away just not too long before COVID. Um I was in Mongolia at the time, and it really uh it it left a huge hole in my life. It was like I woke up one morning without him, and I realized for all those years, despite times being separated, um it was such woven into the fab fabric of my every fibre that I I I didn't know how to breathe without him to wake up in the night and not hear him breathing or snoring or having a dream in his you know, muffled barks and his twitching paws and those little whiskers. Um you know, I I knew the contours of his body with my eyes closed. We'd spent so much time um I could anticipate uh everything every emotion he had, you know. So um it was it was devastating when he passed away, but you know, he had an extraordinary run. Um literally, I mean he he would have travelled it eventually about 10,000 kilometres, um a lot he did a lot more miles than I did. A lot of the time he'd be circling out on his own adventures, and then he'd he'd come back in touch base with my little caravan of horses, and then off he'd go. He was stolen several times, um he came under attack several times, but somehow, you know, luckily luckily uh one friend said luckily he wasn't a cat because they only have nine lives.

SPEAKER_03 57:28

You know, he was um yeah, there was a uh you you had to go somewhere for uh at some stage, and you had to leave chicken with with someone else. You get back and you realise he's just been abused, kicked, he's like cowering, not fair. Oh yes, yeah. I just and I wrote a note here just how murderous did you feel when you had discovered how he'd been treated.

SPEAKER_02 57:55

I mean, I've just recently become a father and it it would be the same if someone had would mistreat you know my baby. Um yeah, it was uh yeah, I I think the situation you're referring to, I was actually in Crimea. There was a time when he was stolen and disappeared for seven days. That's another story in Kazakhstan. But um uh in Crimea, I was staying with uh with a fairly rowdy bunch of of Russians, and um yeah, some someone for whatever reason decided to uh to kick him and he ended up having uh some bruising around his liver and it was a while there where they didn't think he was going to make it, but no, I was livered, but uh look at the same time uh oftentimes in this journey um I had to find a way to adapt and cope, and I couldn't get too offended every time something happened because it was just constant and have been uh but I remember holding him that night and thinking it would be the last moments with him, but but he recovered. I was staying uh actually near a place called Feodossia, um, close to where uh believe the it was during the the Mongol Empire that the plague was was transmitted uh to via the Genoese to to Europe, which of course devastated Europe. Like much of this journey, I and when I wrote the book, there was this very personal emotional journey going on always. Um but then there was also this sense of historical perspective. And as you mentioned earlier, I mean a lot of my journey was not really focused on understanding the ancient past, it was using the ancient past to understand the current condition of nomadic cultures, um be it Crimea, be it Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Mongolia. So um, yeah, and Tigan Tigan became, if you like, uh the way I found solace at the end of a day, or when I was in um a place called Bakhchisarai, I was there during this big physical confrontation between Tatars and and Russians who'd come from as far far afield as Moscow. Um there was a picket line that had been created by Tatars to defend Mussolims that dated back to the early founding of the Crimean Khanate. Um and uh the Russians decided that they well they actually built a meat market on it after the uh deportation of Crimean Tatars back in the 40s. And um anyway, this this horrible confrontation descended into violence. Uh they shut the town down, the army came in. At that time, the Ukrainian army or the Ukrainian special police uh they were uh they were the they were able to essentially be peacekeepers between these two opposing sides. Um but I remember riding out of there, I'd never been in such a violent place before or such a scenario. And so to ride out of something like that, retreat to my little camp. I remember camping not long after leaving Bakch Sarai, one of these canals that connect um the Crimean Peninsula to mainland Ukraine, and um yeah, I I I remember just you know retreating to that bliss of cuddling up with Tigan in the tent, three horses grazing outside, um, bathing with Tigan in the in the canal, cool off in the summer heat, um, and thinking how blessed I was to be able to enter deeply into these uh really really boiling point situations in pressure cookers that I would I can't imagine living in. Um and to be able to go back out there and and carry on. And to walk away from it, yeah. And um and to allow the experiences and thoughts and feelings to coalesce into ideas and written written written work. Um, but yeah, Tiggen, and I guess in in my narrative of the book, um like it was in real life, I mean I often take the readers into very intense experiences, only to retreat and um very much lighten the room with stories of Tiggen, right? Um and which was emotionally largely how I coped much of the time.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:50

Uh all throughout the journey there were these some similarities that connected their nomadic roots, like the way they would inspect the horse, the fascination they would have with your saddle. You wrote at one point that uh your saddle was travelling faster than you were because people had heard. There was this Australian man with this weird saddle, and you know, that did the job of connecting all of these different cultures, they had similar behaviours that they'd been taught, even the even when the people looking at the horses maybe they'd just driven cars their whole life.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:21

That's right. I mean, and as I mentioned earlier, I think it it it it it to see in the distance at that point they didn't know I was on a I was an Australian, but to see someone travelling by camel by horse caravan through parts of Kazakhstan, Russia, Crimea where they hadn't seen that perhaps in their whole life, yet they'd been brought up in stories of that life. It um it it it just it it it almost enabled them to reignite and and that passion and that ability to relive their cultural traditions. They they from from from Mongolia all the way through to Hungary, there's there's a lot of traditions that are that link them, but I think the most important one is this sense that you never let someone ride past your home uh without uh inviting them in for a cup of tea, if not a feast slaughtering a sheep or a goat, um, and spending three days celebrating. The Mongols, like the Kazakhs, used to have this culture of for the first three days you don't have the right as the host to even ask the traveller where they're from, who they are. It's not your business to judge them, um, you look after them. And that was an extraordinary experience to have, time and time again, um, right up to the end in in Hungary, even in those cultures that uh have moved a lot further away from that life out there in the in the wild steppe.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:06

Robin Davidson makes this observation from her journey from in tracks, which was eight months, yeah, that she could remember every single campsite that she'd done.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:15

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:16

Um, you devastatingly had your diary stolen at the end. This is months, maybe a year after in Melbourne. But can you maybe not now, but as you were writing it, could you conjure up, you know, almost every step of the journey? Oh, definitely. Yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:34

Um and even now, if I'm struggling to sleep at night, I don't count sheep. I just walk my way across the step from camp to camp. And the challenge is to visualize and remember each and every day of three and a half years. And um I can I used to I think one of the things of being on being so deeply connected to a landscape like you are with animals, like with with horses. It's not that you're following a line, to the contrary, you're mapping the landscape for it in a different way. You're looking at places that could be dangerous for them, where you could find shelter, water. So you become hyper-aware of places that might have a really deep, soft soil or a swamp that could be dangerous for a horse. You get a sense of where the horses might run to if they escape. That's something I did every day. Every night there was an opportunity if the horses manage to break loose somehow. I've got to be able to try to predict where they might run to, which is ultimately a place that's sheltered from the prevailing wind, that has good grass. And so I mapped the journey through in that way, the entire through the eyes of a horse, really. And for whatever reason, I had a very, very much in my mind a bird's eye visual of the landscape I travelled through. And so even now if I look at um like Google Earth, not that it was available to me back then, but I can look at it and I know it like the back of my hand. Yeah, wow. Because I know exactly where the parched land is, where the swamps are, where the rivers are, etc. etc. Yes, so I think it's it's very hard to forget that it's it's becomes part of your own story in a way. Um kind of navigate it like it's it's the landscape of your own mind. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:43

Were you were you did you carry detailed maps to sort of figure out a direction at least the next day?

SPEAKER_02 1:07:48

Yeah, I had um look, I had what they called TPC charts with tactical pilotage charts, which were uh uh one to five hundred thousand, which is you know not uh doesn't show a huge amount of detail, but they're very accurate. So, in terms of using them, I had a basic GPS which gave me a GPS coordinate, and I could aim for points on that map based on the GPS coordinate on the map and just set a compass bearing each day. Okay, wow. So that was the basic way I travelled, but um more important than the GPS and the maps was um finding out from local people where the water and where the grass was and that type of thing. And as the journey unfolded in Kazakhstan, they would often hand me a piece of paper before I left with an introductory letter uh to someone in the next uh village or community or whatever it might be. And so um I'd often had a uh a way of introduction um long before I before I reached, and sometimes somehow word would would reach that place before I did. So um it was it was really serendipitous. The crucial thing was to find, if possible, um the the the more respected elder families because uh um when things were stolen they knew how to get them back for me. Yeah, I think that going back to my saddle, I mean, yes, word about my saddle spread. Sometimes, I mean the story as it does became what they call a long ear of the step, it became greatly exaggerated. I remember arriving in Crimea and being introduced to, I think it was the members of the historical society or maybe the the organization that runs the Khan's Palace in in Bakchisarai, and uh it's in the book, he um he introduced me as you know the modern Marco Polo who spoke 13 languages and had 12 horses and all this kind of thing. I sat there a little bit embarrassed.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:12

Um was that the fella who you who ended up being overly hospitable? Yes, and at one point it's like 3 a.m. You've already left town and he rocks up and he's boozed and he wants to cook you a fish stew or something, and you just had to say, Man, this is fucked and moved on.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:30

No, that was uh that was another occasion. That was a mare, a mayor of uh a place called Bilchazolity, I think, in in Ukraine. In Ukraine, yeah. Um yeah, but this this man um similarly uh began waxing lyrical after quite a lot of vodka.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:48

Yeah, what was your experience of alcoholism across the steppe?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:53

Um I mean Mongolians have a very ancient tradition of of drinking. I mean, the the saying goes that that uh the reason that the empire stopped in Hungary ultimately was because the the leader at the time, I think it was Ogadai Khan. He basically died of a drinking about a bender. Um so and then and they were never able to uh return to their original glory. Uh yeah, they they weren't able to to collectively agree on the the future expansion of the Mongol Empire kind of fell a little bit into um disarray. But um no, I mean Mongolians have uh have always fermented horse milk. Um they make what's called Nurmalarg, which is uh a clear distilled drink uh from fermented yogurt or from curd. Um they uh famously would would um would uh yeah be very hospitable with their alcohol. But um these days Russian vodka's been introduced to most of the societies and that's a lot more destructive than the than the traditional vodka.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:18

Um yeah, because I hear stories about the fermented mare's milk. Isn't it like two, three percent? Yeah, fermented mare's milk like how do you get so plastered that you pick up alcoholism?

SPEAKER_02 1:12:29

Well, no, it's a bit of a it's a bit of a myth that people um I mean I think it was perpetuated by Marco Polo who referenced um fermented mare's milk as being like a fine white wine. What he really was referring to was Nurmular, which would taste and look a little bit more like wine. That's the that's the um uh distilled so-called mon Mongolian vodka from and that that's about 20 well ranges, but say 15 to 20 percent, and people definitely get very drunk on on that, not so much on the fermented mare's meal, which is is very mild and but the vodka is a step function worse. Yeah, look Russian vodka 40 percent uh is is kind of came to chame to replace and undermine the local tradition of drinking nerdmal. Um and um yeah, I mean uh look like in Russia, like in all of the former Soviet Union, I think alcohol's a a big major issue. Um less so probably in a place like Kazakhstan um than Russia itself. Uh but but no, it's a it's a and I had to be very careful because not to accept vodka would be seen to be a little bit offensive, but when I'm looking after three horses and a dog, and there's always the the risk of them, the real risk of them being stolen, I had to always be on my toe. I mean I remember drinking with a gypsy man once in uh in Ukraine, and uh and then he actually admitted partway into this dinner after we'd had three or four shots of uh vodka. I'd been sent to his home um after being accosted by the local um authorities who thought I was an illegal uh tran that was preparing to transit through Transnistria and um which I wasn't, but anyway, they arranged this accommodation and I was debriefing with this this this man and he at some point said, Well, I'm I'm gonna try and steal your horses tonight unless you sell them to me. Which is kind of harks back to the ancient tradition of the steppe where if you don't agree to sell your horse or give it away and a person's fallen in love with it, well it's fair gap. Yeah, hang on to your horse. Um so I ended up spending most of that night out on the uh on the old on the icy ground holding the um the lead ropes of my horses, literally holding on to them so they weren't wouldn't be stolen. Um and that often precipitated um after after drink times of drinking and um I mean in Mongolia I remember in the early days multiple occasions where people tried to steal the horse and um they'd keep coming back and attempting to steal even they were literally legless. Um the only way they could move was on their horseback.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:35

So you you really and you describe it so well, but the exposure to the elements, I remember the hot. Um this was maybe in Kazakhstan, uh, but it's just unbearably hot, deathly hot even, uh, to the point where you're walking the horses at night uh in darkness, finding shade during the day, and then the cold, just the bitter cold.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:02

Yeah. Look, uh the winter was one thing, but I I've been looking forward to that. Uh uh riding with us across a snow-covered landscape gives you unbelievable freedom to travel in any direction you like. The animals eat the snow to hydrate themselves. I lived in fear of summer and it was even harder than I had imagined. Unfortunately, the way it worked out, I ended up being in the warmest part of Kazakhstan at the hottest time of the year, where they have every year more or less consistently 40 days in a row above 40 degrees. And the only way to survive was to ride at night time. I'd pack up, saddle the horses after dark. Um, I would ride through the night by compass bearing, we'd kind of run into these herds of camels and horses. Sometimes I'd be so tired that I'd kind of slump in the saddle or get off, fall asleep. But the the aim was to find somewhere to shelter before that great big ball of fire re-emerged over the horizon. And it it smelt like death, you know, that heat. Uh, there was nowhere to turn, uh no shade. The only shade I could create sometimes was by putting all the felt um and um woolen blankets of the horses over my tent. Um, and that way I'd still be in a pool of sweat, but um a lot warmer than a tent, a lot cooler than a tent. Yeah. But that coincided with uh the end of spring when you've got a lot of stallions uh racing around, and I was trying to protect my my horses. I'd have a pile of sticks and rocks, and if you're trying to rest during the day and getting up and throwing rocks and sticks, but but ultimately um at the these attacking stallions, but ultimately it was the people that came to my rescue in that part of Kazakhstan, they have underground huts where they spend a lot of their time during the day. Um but emotionally it was the hardest time the trip, um, as well as physically, because I'd spend time with these families that were just retreating, there's an incredible sense of togetherness, and as the cool air began to whisper its way across the land, and people emerged to have dinner and that type of thing, that was when I had to kind of get back on the road and kiss goodbye, this sense of sanctuary. Um, and so to emotionally get through that, one of the things I did was um even though I was travelling at night, I'd put sunscreen on because the smell of the sunscreen reminded me of you know time at the beach where I grew up in Gippsland, and something about the desert sand and the smell of sunscreen just uh gave me a little bit of comfort.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:50

Like you were just walking along one mile beach.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:53

Yeah, but no, it it was hard, and there were times when I had to go uh two days without at a time without water for the horses, it was really tough. Um, but um yeah, thanks to the people we managed to get.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:08

What about this abandoned gold mine village? Maybe not abandoned, but at least totally decrepit. Uh I remember you had hoped to get through it before the most hectic part of winter came. Yeah. And then you ended up having to stay there for three, four months or something. Yeah, look at it. Does that sound right? And it just felt like a completely hollow, desolate, depressing, sad town. It was.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:41

Um and yet, like like in all of these places beneath the surface, there's these incredible stories of um of people who beyond all odds retain that sense of of warmth and positivity. Um but uh yeah, I was riding through the Betpak Dollar, which is translated to something similar to the hungry steppe or the starving step. Um it was winter, a place that no man's would never have been at that time of year. Two days before Christmas I pulled out the map. A horse was getting an abscess in its hoof, uh tent seemed to be falling apart, I was unable to get proper GPS coordinates, so or maybe I was looking for excuses. Um I yeah, I looked on the map, there was a place called Akbakai and just convinced myself I had to get there. I I got there as quickly as I humanly could, um, but arrived Christmas Eve in the dark, dusk, um just a frozen mess, unable to kind of utter barely a word. And there's this couple of shadowy figures who came out, thought I was a lost Russian geologist, invited me back to their hut. Um, and at first, of course, I wasn't alone, I was warm, but in the morning um this different picture began to emerge of a of a of a very um morally and in every other way bankrupt um town that was was once um singularly a town that survived on the extractive industries, gold mining. Um a shell of mining collapse. Yeah, look uh towns like that all across the Soviet Union, they call them monogod, so towns based exclusively on one industry that were just left to their own devices when the Soviet Union collapsed. And you know, this place was just post-apocalyptic. I remember even as I rode in there, there was this apartment building, all the windows were you know gone, smashed. Um, there was no heating, there was no water, it was just this strange monolith of of concrete in a amongst the the rubble and tailings of of the gold mine, um, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. And on the third or fourth story, there was this this this Kazakh guy who had a fire going in the apartment building and kind of sealed up the window with plastic, and he was scrapping a living by building furniture in the old basement of the apartment building in what used to be a pool in Soviet. And in the old pool, he had his little workshop building furniture for the local people, and he, like all the people living in that building, were essentially squatting. Um and um and the the you know, the men I lived with, Grisha and Vitka, they were Russian men who had lost their truck driving licenses years before, uh caught driving drunk at the wheel, they'd never left, um, they were scrapping a living, um just in kind of servitude to but when you say call the living, it's a drug addiction and alcohol addiction. Alcohol addiction, so they had some terrible stories. I mean, Grisha, one of them telling me um that you know you've got to meet my wife, she's the most you know admirable, honest woman that you'd ever find. The time she murdered our neighbour in our kitchen with a knife, she called the police herself. Only a few more years and she'll be out of prison. Um Vitka had this terrible backstory where his I think his daughter had been killed riding a bicycle, and anyway, both their lives were in free fall. Yeah. Um, and um they were inhabiting this little shack on the just by the grace of of a local person who they were collecting firewood for, I think. Um, and they were actually raising puppies to eat um to survive. They had this um kind of as I have uh met on many, many occasions, uh living living with the with the pungent smell of of alcohol, Russian tobacco, and um and this I remember this frying pan that was you know had decades it appeared of of fat and ash and probably cigarette um ash and you know everything and it was just blackened um and still cooking completely um inedible food. Yeah, but well after a bottle of vodka they're still frying up potato in it and um they've got these little puppies next to it that they're preparing to eat shortly. They went out and caught some pigeons in a trap, um, boiled them up for Christmas dinner, and and that was just the beginning. I mean, my woes were obviously insignificant. A lot of people here were surviving off the contraband gold mining in industry, so repelling deep into these old shafts. Abandoned shafts to try and pick off the scraps. Yes, well, or to continue mining that had been previously abandoned by the state. Um, and then um, you know, many people had fallen to their death in these mines um in the previous year, and basically the the the way it worked in this town was that everyone in hidden secretly out the back, or not so secretly, um, yeah, they were they were using their own process of uh sodium cyanide and and mercury to to um the word escapes me, but to still distill down uh gold, which they'd then sell onto the contraband market for about ten dollars a gram. Yeah. Um so a picture emerged of a pretty desperate place at that point in my life, the most desperate place I'd ever uh experienced, and it was such a world away from the utopian nomadic life that I had I had visions of, and that I'd spent so long in Kazakhstan imagining. Um but fortunately I was um I was rescued by this man called Baidak who wandered into the the hut. He was kind of one of the benefactors, if you like, keeping Victor and Brischer alive at that point, uh bringing them food and and work time from time to time. Um and Baidak took me under his wing, he had an underground hut and a little cafe. He created uh improvised a fence around his property with um flattened sodium cyanide drums, and um there was no running water in the town, so he had um a cellar full of bottled water that he had trucked in. And under his wing we found somewhere for the horses to be looked after outside the town. There's no hay or grain around. Um but yeah, during that time I got sick, uh the weather came in, I couldn't leave. And then on the eve of leaving on one occasion, um yeah, chicken was stolen by unemployed mine workers, not Gritfisher and Grit Vitka, but um someone else who I'll never know exactly who it was. But um yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:01

And you're fearful that he's been eaten.

SPEAKER_02 1:27:04

Yeah, for a week. Um I thought that's it. I had this terrible dream of him blackened uh with tar and uh staring out at me in my my my dreams, calling for me but not being able to find me. And yeah, eventually this man Bidark did find him uh miraculously, put him in a sauna for a day with uh concoction of raw eggs and vodka. Um yeah, he loved eggs, didn't he? Yeah, yeah. Oh Bidark, when we went to his palace, um that's what it was to us. He he uh yeah, he just he just brought out one egg after another, and Tigan ate uh a giant bowl full of old stale bread and milk until his belly was just about to pop, but he just couldn't stop eating. Uh, we'd we'd landed in paradise, yeah, with Baidak. And Baidak had this incredible pride in ancient Russian traditions, and he had a An old Kazakh saddle, much like the one we I've got now in my home. And um and he was still, despite living in this place, you could see his eyes light up talking about those traditions and that that that previous life and how much pride he had in keeping horses. He actually had a herd of his own horses that were living essentially wild out on the steppe. And he said, Oh, look, every every winter a few of them get stolen and eaten, but but whatever. Um, you know, uh Allah looks down on all of us and he sees everything. So uh my conscience is clear.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:34

But you you you had essentially this open passport culturally because you were channeling this old nomadic tradition which they all romanticize and wanted to go into. That's right. Had you been had you been on your bike, for instance, they m they they wouldn't have looked at you the same way, right? There'd be less respect, maybe more opportunism.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:53

I think you know, arriving by any other means, I would have been uh a novelty, a kind of a fleeting novelty for someone they didn't quite understand. But on horseback it was a conundrum for them because on one hand I was as familiar as as their own, uh in more familiar in some ways than many of their own, yeah, because um they'd grown up on their father's and grandparents' stories of nomadic life. So they knew everything about me and the horses and what they how they should treat me. Um and yet I was Australian and in the modern era. But speaking Russian, right? All the time. Yes, speaking Russian, yeah. Um in the modern era uh uh very few of of of they'd find very few of themselves travelling long distances by horse. So I I whether be it Hungary or Crimea, Kalmykia, Cossacks, um despite the fact that I was on the trail in ostensibly of the Mongols, I was really on the trail of of nomads more generally. Uh the nom the Mongols, of course, being um King of the Nomads. Yeah, the the most well known and perhaps the largest, definitely the largest nomad. The most romanticized. Um yeah, uh, but but certainly not the only uh empire.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:18

So um because we're still in Kazakhstan, yeah, and we haven't made it to Ukraine yet, where you learn the news from your father. Oh, that's right. But before that, this journey, how many times did you sink into a pretty deep depression and nihilism? And I just want to throw in the towel, fuck this, you know.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:39

Uh look, I I could probably safely say that I never I never really thought about throwing in the towel. Um, but I did think that I'd have to throw in the towel a few times if if things didn't work out. Um and one example of that was uh the border between Kazakhstan and and Russia. Um just before reaching the border, the the Kazakh police came out, uh made me follow their patrol vehicle back to the station. I had to unpack the whole horses, they um confiscated my passport. Um they said I needed to check whether I was potentially a terrorist because Chechnya wasn't far, etc. etc. This type of thing had happened before. Um but it was a it was a kind of a uh a good port of what was to come because uh I was about to kind of enter this extremely difficult um the thickets of bureaucracy, as opposed to the the searing deserts and the the storms of of winter. Um so uh when I first tried to cross the border, uh I was able to convince the Kazakhs to to allow me to leave with the animals, but after crossing no man's land into Russia um at the border, they turned me back and they said, Look, um you you you have no permit for taking your animals into our country, either surrender your animals here and go on alone or return home. So I had no choice, of course, but to go back. But the borders were only open for till midnight or something. So by the time I got back, the border was closed. I grazed my horses for a day or a night in no man's land. Came back to the border with Kazakhstan, uh, but the shift had changed and no one recognized me, and so they wouldn't they refused at first to let me back in. Um I then met uh one particular customs officer who took a liking to my dog, Tigan, and said, Look, if you um if you give me your dog, I'll grant you a permit to come back in and what's more to get back into Russia. I refused to do that obviously. Um and eventually they there was an agreement where they allowed me back in, but only if I were to go to stay with the family near the border, they knew where I was, um, and then I had to go back and extend my visa by I could think I could do it by two months or something. And then it was just this giant battle to get permits to re to leave Kazakhstan again. Um I had to get a wild animal export licence to take the horses out, and then I had to get a transit permit for the horses. Um, but technically a transit permit came from the authorities in Moscow, and usually the horses in this day and age are transported by truck or train. Um, there was no provision laid out in the legislation for an animal to travel by its own four feet or for someone to ride them. And so this was a conundrum, and we were blocked right up until a few days before my visa expired, and that was one of the moments when I thought, well, I'm gonna have to throw in the tower because if I have to give up my animals now, my three horses and chicken, well, it's not worth continuing because they've become the trip, it'll be a failure, and um I will I will have failed them essentially. So uh but um it was unbelievable. I walked back into the Kazakh, the local department of agriculture on the border that had been helping me, uh faxing back and forth to Moscow, and they were about to go on break. You know, I'd almost given up hope, and I got there, and there was this lady, she was just like trembling and holding up this fax that she'd just received from Moscow. And because of all of the just the I guess the persistence, someone nice in Moscow had sent this beautiful fax that said, This grants permission for the four horses to be to travel on their own feet with Tim riding them, and um and for the dog Tigan to travel uh svoem chodam, which means basically, you know, on his own four feet by himself. And it was just like this. It was there was there was defin definitely uh an angel looking. I mean, I then had to race to the border where the horses were. By that stage, the digging had disappeared, been stolen, the customs officer lived nearby. There were anyway, he turned up again. Horses were all there, goodness knows what happened to them in the meantime, but I got out with one day left on my visa. And uh or or on the last day of my visa, it might have been, you know, and it was just you know, after six weeks or two months of that living in constant uncertainty about whether the trip was possible or not.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:47

Or you were six weeks in that bureaucracy.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:50

Yeah, well, almost two months, I think. Fucking hell. Um, and um, you know, I I got through and I just, you know, ru the the the they let me into Russia and I just felt like a free person. Wow. Um but you know, ironically, I ironically, I soon later arrived in a place called Kalmykia, um, this Buddhist republic in southern Russia, which is actually populated by uh essentially Mongolian nomads who had um they'd been there since the 17th century. Um and um I it was it was a game of cat and mouse for me in Russia because I didn't technically have a permit for riding horses through the country, there's no such thing. Um and to ensure that I did things correctly in each province I travelled through, I needed to get a vet check that I still had everything according to my customs declaration, um, and technically because they were in transit, I wasn't allowed to stop anywhere. Um, unfortunately, in Kalmikia, um while overnighting on a farm, uh one of my horses stepped on a big rusty nail, and we stayed there while it healed, but it it it turned out to be an infection that despite treatment wouldn't recover. That was what the local vets told me. So we had to make the kind of heartbreaking decision then to move on without uh without that horse.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:21

Which was the horse he left behind?

SPEAKER_02 1:37:23

Um he was a horse called Cork, which means like uh grey or green in um it actually depicts a grey horse, but it means green in Kazakh. Um and I I I've still got this kind of uh feeling of terror in my eyes when I remember when we rode out of there because he could barely walk on, he couldn't walk on that foot, and he tried to kind of stumble after us, but eventually, you know, realised that his herd was leaving him. That's heartbreaking. So those type of moments were were heartbreaking for me. Um and it wasn't that I was physically stopped from going forwards, but the the meaning of the journey had become so invested in my animals, and this this incredible increasingly rich connection I had with with Tigan and horses that without them it kind of would have been an empty, meaningless journey to finish without them. Um so yes, the battle of bureaucracy to get into Russia, out of Russia into Ukraine, out of Ukraine into Hungary, it became um it certainly became one of the one of the many themes of the of the of the of the challenge.

SPEAKER_03 1:38:38

There is a detail which pops up again and again and again. Uh starting in Mongolia, even finishing in Hungary. But the sort of conversation that your partners you would be riding with, people you would be staying with whenever it was just men, would always come back to some type of prostitution. Like, how do you like it's probably not the best question to ask in front of your newborn son, but did that sour your view of these cultures in a sense?

SPEAKER_02 1:39:11

Yeah, well, look, I um it became more and more apparent to me that like anywhere in the world, I think when when there's uh a complete deficit of of of women um and there's lots of men about there can be this toxic um narrative that starts and the conversation often plums the depths of some pretty almost directly it felt like. Oh no, definitely. I was I look, I I grew up in in Gippsland, uh, Victoria. My my parents were school teachers. I knew nothing of alcoholism growing up. Um I knew about rural life and I'd played enough Australian football and spent enough time um at kind of booze ups uh in my teen years where I'd seen a lot of and I heard a lot of what what I found fairly um at that time for me pretty shocking language and behaviour about women. Um and uh so uh but nonetheless I just nothing prepared me for for for what I experienced. But I mean I remember arriving, I think it's in the book in Kazakhstan, and I'm out there riding with this this man called Ruslan, and um it was a beautiful environment. Just it was autumn, it was uh a kind of autumnal ocean of grasslands all kind of moving in the in the in the wind. Um we I just bought my horses in the Altai Mountains and we were galloping down to this step, and we came to a walk uh and he turned to me and I thought he was going to apologize for disappearing on a on a five-day bender several days earlier. But instead he came and just asked something like, So, uh so how much do girls cost in Australia? I said, What do you mean? You know, and um and that became a a pretty common starting point of conversations with with men across the steppe. Partly I think because of their perception of the Western world, um, and um too many Hollywood movies where within a fleeting moment uh these two meeting couples are in bed. Yeah. Um where women are beautiful and easy. That's right, and whilst uh in in in in a place like Kazakhstan um that's been Islamic since I think the thirteenth century, um it's it's it's extremely important for for women to to remain virgins until their wedding night, essentially. Um and so obviously the the conclusion of that is you know having having a a a girlfriend is definitely taboo. Yeah. Um so there's a there's in villages all the way through uh prostitution's just an open reality, yeah. Um which was confronting for me because obviously I hadn't grown up ever really facing that or knowing about that.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:37

Um seeing it up close, was there something more revolting about it than you maybe would have initially thought, or did it just become like you began to uh sympathize and understand with the situation and and it became less judgmental?

SPEAKER_02 1:42:57

Yeah, look, I I think um there came a certain point, and I remember it pretty clearly in in southern southern Russia. I mean there were there were there were there were comical moments if you could depict it like that, like where I'd have I'd wake up in the night and there'd be um someone that's come to my tent door, or some Cossacks coming into my tent, and they'd they'd met me earlier in the day and they'd come back and say, Look, um, we've we've we've brought a lovely prostitute from the village for you, and they'd all kind of crowdfunded this girl to come. And uh, you know, like I I was taken aback by that type of thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:36

Yeah, and but they must think you're either really rude or gay or something's wrong with you for saying no to it.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:44

No, no, that the the common perception was that I was either um either gay or using prostitutes. There was nothing else in possibly bear between. Exactly. But um uh in in this place called Tymashevsk, I ended up spending about six weeks there while I battled bureaucracy to get my horses into Ukraine, and I fell in with a a man called Luty, who was a a bit of a local uh a local overlord, a baron if you like, who was a ostensibly a wheat farmer, but there was a lot more going on there in the industrial complex that that I I was put up in. Um I'd go into his little smoky office every now and then and he'd um throw a couple of hundred dollar bills over the the bench and say um oh you know, buy some cigarettes or something. Um and they would he and his kind of assistants would often go off on these uh weekends of you know debaucherous partying where they'd rent a sauna out and and have uh you can imagine what un unfolded. Um and when when that became increasingly confronting for me because uh I was relying on Luty and his his comrades and they were offered inviting me for these these weekends, and I was always refusing, and they thought there was something very wrong with me. Um but I guess I was morally confronted and I probably came across as being prude and uh as uh on self-reflection, perhaps given my upbringing, I was, you know. Uh I guess what what was what I found really confronting in the end was that I started to feel like I was complicit in their kind of moral, what I saw as a little bit of moral depravity, because I was relying on them for all my help. Yeah, I was living with them, they were helping me to find someone to look after the horses through their connections. I was getting all the paperwork ready, trying to find a way to get through the Russian border and into Ukraine. Um, and so perhaps because of that sense of complicity, when you're so deep into it, they no longer saw me as being Australian. Now, by this point, I'm speaking fluent Russian. I don't really feel like I can be a third-person detached observer as a journalist or a writer should be. I was a I was very much involved and dependent on them. Um my editor felt that I was being in my initial first draft of the book far too judgmental of them. And he said, Look, you need to step back, and like for your most of the time on your journey, you need to be more curious to understand, to understand what's brought this society to this point, all these men to this behaviour. Um, rather than be offended by it. And I'd kind of fight back and say, Well, look, at this point it's very hard for me to take a step back because I was so vested and dependent on them. Um but um but in the end, yes, I was able to to put them into context with everything I was learning. Um but but yeah, it was it was really it was really confronting, and it wasn't easy to remain um an observer and not become deeply drawn in to it. And and also to have my own views challenged. You know, I think that's the thing about travel, oftentimes. Yeah, um in the near and far, you know, that you meet people who have a different world view that that challenges the premise of the way that you see the see the world.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:48

You become more you become more defensive, you become more empathetic to the realization that you would perhaps be exactly like this if you would have this set of experiences. Potentially, like there's nothing special about you for being the way you are. That's right. It's really a combination of all the things you've experienced up until that point and the way you've dealt with them. You know, but had I don't know about you, but had I been born very middle class in Kazakhstan, you know, I think I'd be on my high horse if I pretended like I would have put my mouse up morally to this type of behaviour. Yeah. Just don't think that'd be the case. No.

SPEAKER_02 1:48:28

Yeah. Um, and so that brought me to, I mean, I remember sitting down with a with a priest uh in a nearby village uh to Timashevsk, and that was while I was living with these guys, and he sat down and he said, Look, um look, I can't quite remember his exact words, but it was essentially something like, you know, uh a cut takes a week to heal, a broken bone takes six months to heal. But the type of trauma that that people experience during Soviet times, especially during the 20s and 30s, that takes generations to heal, especially when uh the the moral basis of society is pulled away and and and and kind of destroyed, which it was during Soviet times. And for him, of course, that meant meant um the church uh which was the institution, if you like, that that that supported and held communities together at a very grassroots level. So um that helped put things into context for me, but um uh it also just shone a light on how naive I was, you know. Right, right. I mean that type of behaviour is is not uncommon in my own country, it's just it wasn't my personality. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:52

All right, so we get through Kazakhstan, we get through the bureaucracy of Russia, we enter into Ukraine. You gave an explanation for some of your experiences. Early throughout there, but how far is it into Ukraine when you get the call about your father?

SPEAKER_02 1:50:07

Well, I'd um I'd spent three months in Crimea that was a really tough time for me. Um obviously much tougher for the local Tatar population that were being um kind of prosecuted in in many ways by by Russians, by Russians who lived in Sevastopol and elsewhere. But I came out of Crimea, um yeah, really, really quite uh quite down and um this sense of injustice was overwhelming me about what was happening to these people in Crimea. Um but I thought, well, look, I've only got a couple of thousand K's left to Hungary, and luckily I can move on from this. Um surely I've been through the biggest challenges by now. I enter Ukraine, it's kind of a breadbasket of Europe, as you might imagine. Just incredible, unbelievable fertile fields that just stretch to the horizon day after day. You're riding suddenly not through steppe but through little back roads and and these beautiful little uh villages uh where there's still the clopp of the horse and cart, where people are still using the common land around the village for grazing their milk, their dairy cow and their sheep, as well as going to the larger fields. Um it all seemed to be coming to an end. Um, but I was probably about a thousand a thousand kilometres into Ukraine when um, and a thousand case from the end, approaching a place called Kodoma, or I'd just gone through Kotoma, which is in the north part of Odessa Oblast. Um and uh it was autumn, so I was getting cold in the evenings, I was riding along, it was getting dark, I was looking into a gully to see if I could see some fodder for the animals, a good place to camp, and uh my satellite phone which I'd left on accidentally started beeping, and eventually I thought, oh, I better get off and check it. So I got off the horse, pulled it open, and there was a message uh to call directly to home urgently, called home, and um yeah, it was it wasn't actually my mum or any of my family that answered, it was uh a family friend of ours we've known since I was a kid, and um I I knew something was up when they answered. And um, of course I soon learned that my dad had um been in a car accident that day and um and died instantly. Um and you know I here I was, sun was falling, dark, cold, got very impatient, hungry, horses, they've had a long day, Tiggin. Um I just went into this kind of autopilot mode where I was now I'd already left Ukraine, I wasn't there, I was somewhere back home with dad. Um but that other kind of uh part of me somehow made it down to a gully, made camp. Um, and then all night I was on the sat phone trying to uh arrange plane tickets from Kiev back to Australia, arranging somewhere for the horses to be. And um, yeah, the next morning I rode the horses back to Codoma, where I'd stayed on a collective farm, um, an old collective farm, and I remember riding the horses back, uh, and it was just you know, by this stage I hadn't slept for 24 hours, and it was a very, very misty cold morning, and the sun was kind of you know shining through it, and and there were so many times during that ride where it was like I could see from the corner of my eye my dad, you know, wandering through the forest next to me, looking at the trees. Um when I was a kid, I can remember seeing his calf muscles and uh an old backpack. And I one thing that stuck with me, I don't know what age I was, but him him kind of kneeling down and saying, Um, you know, isn't life amazing? And just picking up a plant, and that had stuck with me to this day. Unfortunately, dad had uh retired a year before, very early, he was only 55, um, and um he had been planning to come and spend some time with me. Uh it didn't happen. Um, but I think, you know, my dad, my mum has always said, you know, he should have got married about uh 20 years later than he did because he he had this will to travel, but but um he had uh the first of four children when he was 28 when I was born. Um and life had ever since had been about uh family and career. And um, and anyway, I that stuck with me, but I I held on to that. I wasn't yet ready to move on, so I went home to Australia, um, left the horses and dog behind, and then for the next four or five months it was obviously just we were all me and my two brothers, sister, my brother had been in Chile studying on exchange, and uh my sister was I think in Melbourne anyway. We all convened and I spent almost four months or four and a half months even at home and had to make that decision you know, do I go back and finish a trip or not? Um, and ultimately I left Australia feeling like I left too early, um, but had left and neglected my animals too long. Fortunately, the director of the collective farm had been um looking after Tiggen personally and the horses all that time, um, which was no mean feat. Uh, but you know, I I can see especially consider compared to my siblings, like they had to go back to their studies, their work, whatever. I was able to return to spring and just let that grief play out as I travelled onwards. I loved the chapter that I wrote about my dad and and and his death, but my my editor, Anton, who became, if you like, my mentor, and I think editors always, there's a misconception outside the writing world that that editors are like ghostwriters that get in there or like teachers that get in there with a red pen and and alter your work. Um, in my experience, editors have never done that. They challenged me, like our Anton did, to write better, and they equipped me with a few concepts and tools, but they were um brutally honest when it needed to be. And he told me that um uh that that that that I wasn't good at writing about personal things, and um that this chapter just didn't fit uh at all, and we might have to consider leaving Dad's death out altogether of the book, more or less. Um so that challenged me to uh to rewrite the book, rewrite that chapter and put everything in context, and there were a few things I did. Um and when the book was all said and done, I got this nice note from my editor to say that um his favourite chapter in the whole book was about my dad's death and how I'd contextualize that in the greater story.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:55

Um you do write really movingly about particularly the mirage that you saw, yeah, and then that point you just made where you could return to complete this journey, yeah, which although is very consuming at all times still free.

SPEAKER_02 1:58:13

Yes, yeah. I um I think a pivotal moment for me was, and this is in the in the book as well, I think, was going back to Ukraine, riding out of the collective farm. My poor horses were a shadow of themselves, former selves, they'd been in a barn for all winter. You know, the muscles had atrophied, they were had been standing in um uh fetlock high uh cow manure for uh for all that time in a dairy shed, essentially. Um but I was able to locate very easily the last campsite that I had been in when I then knew that my dad had been alive. Um and I camped on the exact spot, put the tent on the same footprint of where my tent had been, the same little you could still see the depression. Um the snow had melted, and there it was, you know, you could see, and it was this haunting experience of putting down my tent and realizing that you know the uh my former self with a father had been here, and this symbolised from this point this is my last campsite where I can hang on to having a dad, and beyond this, I'm riding into the unknown, you know, without a dad, and um that was very, very powerful for me. Um and ironically, the last you know, the last thousand or whatever it was, thousand and a half Ks to the end, in many ways the easiest part of the journey. Getting into into richer and richer uh fertile landscapes where gone are the worries about finding enough grass, there are no wolves, obviously. I didn't anticipate another winter, there's no deserts.

SPEAKER_03 2:00:06

Theft culture, but um prosperous people.

SPEAKER_02 2:00:09

That's right, but but life felt um acutely fragile in a way. And I remember meeting this uh this lady Ferona, who might have might have been 90. Um, if memory serves me right, it's in the book. Uh and she I was sitting there having lunch by a stream, and down she came barefoot, um herding a little a few her little goats, and she invited me back to her family home, and I learnt that she'd she'd learnt to read, I think, at the age of 80. Um, and her yeah, she told me this long story, partly by her children who were there as well, over the dinner table, but how she'd somehow survived Hawadomor and the the famine uh in in Stalin's time uh during that industrialisation campaign. Um she'd somehow survived that era despite um seeing so many of her loved ones as a as a child die or be sent off never to be seen again. Um she'd seen those horrors. She'd then been through World War II. She lived in um a part of Ukraine that would have been pretty fiercely fought between between the Nazis and um and Russia. Uh she'd then witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union. And here she was at 90, still alive. And here was my dad in one of the safest, uh most prosperous countries on the planet. My dad had was born in 1950, hadn't seen any, witnessed any of this in his lifetime. Um, but he you know he was died in a car crash at 55. And it all was very perplexing for me at the time. You know, how can it be? How how come his story ended at that age? And and um so I yeah, I was very acutely aware of that as I as I kind of rode towards the natural end of my journey.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:19

Yeah. Uh what are you acutely aware of there?

SPEAKER_02 2:02:23

Well, I became acutely aware more aware of risks just generally, you know, that that there are so many missteps you can make um knowing unwittingly or or otherwise, uh, that can randomly bring you to my and um and I'd trodden this thread, and he was my dad. He'd uh retired at 55 and and and and had one year of retirement, and life is kind of wiped out.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:48

And uh he had um very briefly fallen asleep at the wheel. Yes, which is what happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um which yeah, I I was feeling it today. I feel it every time I get on the highway actually, especially because I got this tiny little Toyota Prius. Yep, yeah. And for the listeners, you know, between Melbourne and where we are now is wombats, kangaroos, they're just they litter the sides of the roads because they're jumping out all the time. It's and like that that risk is aware to me. It's like despite my best effort here, I still I'm not uh I'm a slave to this animal jumping out. There's very little I can do. I mentioned the car because with a tiny car like that, you you're quite fragile.

SPEAKER_02 2:03:33

A large kangaroo is uh at 110 kilometers an hour.

SPEAKER_03 2:03:37

Like it'll it'll go through not a it's not like it's gonna break the windscreen, but it'll go through the car. Yeah, yeah. But uh the the that digression is just to sort of make an analysis on the point you made about being more aware of risk. So your father um is driving a road, he probably drove a thousand times, you know, that's right, and then here you are two and a half, three years into a trip where that is objectively, by every measure, more risky, you know. So, like you were in a sense still rolling the dice, not necessarily to death, but to pretty bad outcomes. Yeah, yeah. At any point you could have fallen off the horse, could have gotten sick, you know. There was one there's one crazy night uh where you're there's like ten wolves howling around your camp and you're just out there like a madman with an axe, like trying to scare them off.

SPEAKER_02 2:04:30

Or, I mean, as I said, the uh the most dangerous wolf is the one that walks on two legs, and there was a really lovely, lovely guy in Russia once who um probably in somewhere in might have been Stavropol or uh Kuban, and he um he came up to my tent in the evening and said, Look, we're coming back with my Cossack mates tonight, and um uh we're going to uh kind of what did he say? We're gonna throw you in the we're gonna stab you or uh cut you up with an axe and throw you off throw you out there to the to the yabbeys to eat and we'll sell your horses to the meat factory. So something like that. So I I slept with my little little hand axe next to my pillow that night. Of course I never never came back. But um yeah, that I had had many a night. Um the worst fear of course was being seen. And it wasn't uncommon for someone to turn up um after dark, uh, and you just never knew what the outcome might might be. But but yeah, wolves and everything else. There were so many strands to my experience. You know, there was there was at that point my own personal journey that was coming to a natural end, uh, and part of that of course was returning to a world trying to try starting to think about returning to a world without a dad, um, without my horses and without without Tigan. Um there was the part of me now firmly looking at the world through nomadic eyes and and realizing how how many misperceptions there are about nomads and how how how incredibly um ignorant Europeans must have been when nomads came out of that great big kind of neverland to the east. You know, by the time they reached villages in in Central and Eastern Europe, those those nomads, let's say it's a Mongol soldier, they've they've traversed the world, they've they've been through extraordinary diversity of of challenging geographies. They've they've seen a huge diversity of cultures, of societies. Um, and by the time they kind of travel over these Carpathian mountains, I mean, quite naively, they blocked the passes of the Carpathians, um, I think with timber. Uh thinking that might be a bulwark to the Mongols. Of course, it was the Carpathians compared to the type of landscape that they've come from. It's so easy to navigate. They they break all the rules. And um so I'm kind of looking at the world through that eyes as I come into Hungary. Um, I'm looking at the future of nomadism, you know, and I'm kind of looking to Hungary as well, you know, is this what the future holds for all nomadic nations? A country that um at that point was already part of the European Union, um, still a land with no fences, where people have a great pride in their nomadic heritage, but they never no longer really live it out. Um, at least the majority of people don't. Is that the future of nomadism? Um I'm thinking back to places like Kazakhstan, where you know what's the future of nomadism there? Are people really going to return to the past or not? Um what the the pattern I had seen and I had with me as I finished was thinking back to some of these big areas of land that the government had started to lease out, like on 70-year pastoral leases, where suddenly nomads or people descended from nomads were still living on that land, were now forced to confront a difficult um decision. You know, do I remain on this land that's now being leased by probably a wealthy um business person from a city or a town? Do I become subs an employee and subservient to them and continue to live on my ancestral land? Or do I leave and go somewhere else? You know, is that the future of some of these nomadic cultures? Um it's different in each part of those. But anyway, that that's that's part of what I was thinking about when I when I kind of came to the end, I was thinking about the um the land itself and and how the landscape as I reached closer and closer into Europe, how the pure density of population changed the way that people uh viewed the world. Yeah. The way that um, and it might sound trivial, but to me it was it was it was kind of mind-boggling how once you have a world where with uh roads, not net I still there were still weren't fences, but even with roads and wheat fields, crop farming, people mentally could only really map their land via the roads that they travelled. And by arriving on horse, I'd ask, you know, how do you get to the next village? They couldn't tell you, well, it's along that creek through that forest and over that hill, it'd be down that road and then take a left. And I realized I had no idea. They didn't have a geographical mind map of their landscape, whilst I could tell at a glance at that point exactly where the natural path would be for a horse person like myself, and so I would um break those rules and just set off, and of course, I'd reach that village in a much quicker time. And I started to think about how in a world where we all start to map our landscape through the prism of of roads and buildings and human constructs like towns, um, we just are oblivious to uh the lay of the land in the way that a nomad still is today in a place like Mongolia or or Kazakhstan. So they're the type of thoughts that were buzzing away in my mind as I kind of came closer and closer. The you know the Hungarians is another chapter of the story in itself because of course they'd come riding out um in the 10th century into the Carpathian Basin, conquered the area, formed a nation, and um they saw me as uh walking in the the foot the shadow of their own ancestors. Um so once again, despite the fact that the Mongols of course had had laid waste to Hungary, uh infamously quite quite a brutal um campaign in Hungary and and there's bit there's still a lot of grudges held by Hungarians as a result, nonetheless I was accepted. Um With open arms, uh, because I was kind of carrying the the flame of the torch, if you like, of uh of nomad cultures. Um, so all those things were were percolating through me. Uh I guess I was thinking about, you know, what do I do when I get home?

SPEAKER_03 2:12:14

Yeah. You you write uh in in those reflecting moments at the end of the book that you're worried that when you get back home uh people wouldn't be able to relate to who you had become. It's now more than 20 years on from the journey, at least when you started it. 20 years. Do you do you still feel that?

SPEAKER_02 2:12:34

Um, yeah, look, I think uh I think, and I've been back to Mongolia pretty much every year since then. Um I think eventually I feel like I've I just become in the same way that you can be bi or trilingual, um I've had to accept and adapt to the realities here. Um but there it lives on this burning sense of happiness inside of me to know what lives over there, right? That life goes on and and to think of think of that world that I've had an opening to. But but but definitely when I arrived back, it was very confronting to think that no one could really relate to what I'd experienced. And that's still the case. I mean, it's the nature of a solo journey that there are a lot of memories that I have uh that didn't make it to the book, etc., that that only I could only make sense to me. But but it's also so foreign of something to relate to. Yeah, and and I when I got back, I mean I found it, I found myself uh feeling feeling empty because I'd left this life that meant so much to me. I left my animals and Tigan and um I'd so I'd walked so proudly into these places with my animals and I'd started being unable to ride and ended feeling like I was um really uplifted by these animals. Um and I'd kind of come to see the world, you know, nomads talk about pedestrian cultures and horseback cultures, and from horseback, pedestrian life doesn't look particularly good. Horseback life's pretty good, you're up high, you can go anywhere you want. Yeah, there's this um sense of empowerment as well, um, which it's hard hard to describe, and it's it's not um a sense of you know, Mongolians, unlike in the traditionally in the West, their relationship with horses is not about um breaking the will of an animal, it's about harnessing the incredible energy and power of these animals, and and that in turn empowered empowers you, empowered me. So to kind of arrive there and then to go home without the animals, without Tiggen, to a world where what I'd experienced made very little sense to the vast majority of people was really tough, and then and Victoria wouldn't have changed in those three years.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:09

Well back to that total familiarity.

SPEAKER_02 2:15:11

That's right. I was returning to a world that was uh equally as naive about where I'd been as it had always been, but in a in a in a strange way, because I'd been away so long, uh my siblings had grown up so much in that time, I'd lost my dad. I came back kind of unlike all my other travels, I came back kind of wanting to return to a bit more familiarity. Um but dynamics had changed, you know, my my uh dad being the primary one, um having not no longer being there, and that shifts of course your dynamics with your mum and siblings and all that kind of thing. Um but but yeah, I I was clinging on to all those things that that that uh reassured me that what I'd experienced was real, that I wasn't just imagining it, um, which is why it was I think you're probably leading into this, but um so heartbreaking when I had um a whole bunch of my diaries stolen. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:16:17

Yeah, so that that occurs later um in the epilogue. At one point you're joined by a uh filmmaker, a videographer, and um you go to his house and you have all these diaries from your trip, and they're stolen from your car. And you know, like I said to you when we were talking before the podcast, but it's just like I couldn't for me somehow that was the most devastating part, you know, of of the book. Um obviously you have personal relationships that are devastating, but as a reader, having just consumed this journey and I can imagine because you write so beautifully, like you you you you feel in your heart, I have this great story that I really want to be telling, and to almost feel like the contents are ripped from you. The sense of hopelessness, pointlessness of the journey. I can imagine you went through all these stages. Oh, yeah. Um, but then I mean you still produced and you can still remember it. And yeah, I think you run the book as well. That as you did start to write it, it always just opened up to you, you know.

SPEAKER_02 2:17:19

Yeah, look, I I um I think there were some silver linings, uh, and I'll explain um to that to that experience. But it did feel at the time that it was easy, would have been, and I probably did, you know, kind of um spile into a a sense of being a victim of a world that wanted to rob me of all these experiences and perceptions that I'd had that that would challenge the premise of our life here. You know, a world where uh trespass is is is a is a is a very meaningful word, and private property is such an obsession. I come from a land where uh there are no fences, freehold doesn't exist, and it's a right for everyone to have a home when they're born. I mean, there's no question about that. I return to Mongolia every year, and for the nomads out there, um uh even the poorest of nomads, um, really their riches are measured by how many animals they have. Having a home is really never up for debate. Um so I I I you know I'll never know who stole them. Um but look, it wasn't long after that that I found myself in uh in New York, approaching with my literary agent a number of publishers, and um I'd written intentionally a sample chapter of the book based on a section of the journey for which I'd lost my diaries. Because I knew that I had to somehow prove to myself that I could write without using them as a crutch. Um I managed to do that and uh and managed to to um to meet this wonderful editor called Anton Mueller and um and a publisher from um George last name escaped for me right now at George uh from Bloomsbury and they at once wanted to make this the best literary piece of work that they they could, and um I really liked them and the rest is history. We I ended up getting a contract to write for them. Um but the process for me writing a book is uh I mean the first chapter, the first draft is the most exciting because I'll kind of prep myself for days and weeks, and by that I mean getting right into the headspace. Um of the great things about diaries sometimes are not necessarily the words but the feelings that they can evoke, the memories. The memories are there, but it's the feeling, in my opinion, for writing, it's the feeling that matters. If you want to write evocatively, there has to be feeling. Um, and that to me could be uh the nature of my handwriting, which reminds me that I was so deliriously tired, but feeling a sense of you know exaltation that night. I can feel that and see that in my handwriting. But I can also see the the the muddy paw print of Tiggen on the page because I remember that he was hungry and wanting his dinner and he's pouring my page saying, Come on, finish your writing so we can have food. Um, in some diaries, there's still a bit of sand that falls out from that entry because it was a storm and there was sand in the air. So those um type of things in a diary uh are like a live wire that you can uh grab onto and it takes you right back. Um and I can go to into a kind of a tunnel experience of writing for a long time where I'm reliving everything as if it's yeah the current day. Um but what I found was of course was that there were other keys into that experience. I'd take I'd actually written a very extensive, I think it ended up being like three or four hundred thousand words of a blog on my website, so and I had my photographs and I was able to I had I had photos and video and um I still had a relationship with all the people I'd met, so I was able to, for some parts, double check the names and spelling of people and all that type of factual stuff. And what I found, of course, was that to actually write properly, um I needed to uh to to once I'd spent weeks preparing for a chapter, I'd start with a blank page, all the notes I'd taken from all that kind of stuff, I put it aside, and then just write. Um it's very important that you're not just uh wrote uh learning wrote and then repeating what you've written. You're writing a book, you're not just writing a diarised account of a tra a travelogue. You're tying together so many different threads, historical threads and factual threads, feeling, personal. So um, yeah, that's how I ended up writing the book, and obviously I remembered far too much. And the first draft of my book was um was was yeah, probably 300,000 words or something like that. Final version? Final version, I think, was about a hundred and if I'm not mistaken, a hundred and seventy.

SPEAKER_03 2:22:51

Wow, so chopped the knof.

SPEAKER_02 2:22:52

Something like that. Yeah, but it's still a big book, you know. No, I yeah. The average average book's probably what ninety thousand, seventy to ninety thousand. So I kinda I I I intentionally kept that loss of the diaries to myself um until the very end. Right. Because I was spooked the publisher. I was worried that um yeah, my my my editor might lose uh confidence in me, which I don't think he would have, but anyway, that was something I I'm over it now, but it was very, very um deeply um uh deeply sad. Oh, you you could feel it.

SPEAKER_03 2:23:35

You could feel that through how you reported on that from those moments. It just sounded like the lowest depression, yeah, um feeling of pointlessness. Yes, that you a different type of depression to grief. You know, just a total a feeling of failure, kind of was what what came through. So um between it was maybe three years between the end of the journey and the book being published. Does it sound about right? Maybe a bit more?

SPEAKER_02 2:24:03

No, a bit more than that. I think it would have been I spent two years making the film series, the documentary series. And the film the book came out in 2013. All right. So it's actually more like uh five. Five. Five years. And three years of writing the book and two years of making the documentary.

SPEAKER_03 2:24:25

But you would you'd receive a bunch of awards, recognitions, maybe even medals, um, you know, for exploration for Genny One Australia's Explorer of the Year. Uh yeah, Adventure of the Year. Adventure of the Year. Yeah. So you're sort of um starting to be swept up into some type of niche fame. You know, and anyone who's interested in Adventure in Australia would for sure have known you. But I'm I'm curious to know how, and I edit it so you don't have to answer. And even to me, you don't have to answer. Uh but how commercially successful was the book?

SPEAKER_02 2:25:02

Um, the book uh a couple of things. I mean, if I'm if if uh if it's okay, I'd probably kind of backtrack a little bit. Um I couldn't find a publisher at that time in Australia that really had I felt understood or had the passion for for the book as I saw it. Um when we discovered Anton Mueller and George Bloomsbury in New York, I knew that I had someone who who kind of somehow just got it. He just really deeply understood it. Um and my feeling from the very beginning was that people in Europe, people in America, even, just the nature of proximity, history, they probably would gravitate more to the story, to the cultural, historical context of it, uh than Australians, given that we're just so far removed from the Eurasian step. Um more broadly culturally, we are just more insular.

SPEAKER_03 2:26:14

Yeah, well, across many ways.

SPEAKER_02 2:26:17

By nature of geography, there's just no question that we're we're more insular. Um and so the book was uh to be first published in America, um, and secondly in the UK, thirdly in Germany, and lastly Australia. Um things turned around, so in the end, it was first published in Australia, then America, and so the tour kind of took me around the opposite way. But I remember finishing the book and having this moment, and I hadn't even contemplated this until that, oh what if people don't read it? It's an epic book. Yeah. In the I mean, uh obviously we've moved on a lot since then, but even back then we'd already entered the world of um Twitter and sound bites and YouTube. Yeah, YouTube and and Instagram had Instagram shit, yeah, definitely. Was still kind of, you know, that was the frontier of social media. Nascent to life. Um but um yeah, it was I I had not even considered once whether people would read it or not. It just wasn't on my radar. All I knew is that I wanted to write this book and I put as much passion in as I could. And my publishers, I think, also thought, well, look, this is a kind of an old style journey. Um it's it's it's fairly verbose. Um but um look, it uh it it ended up starting off in Australia, it sold really well. Um I I think it's probably sold in Australia about 50,000 plus hard copies of the book. Um that's really commercially successful. And probably fifty to a hundred thousand more uh in in the US and Europe and UK and elsewhere. So um uh it it it was amazing that that's amazing that that people and and what's more so it justifies the publishers' investment and then some big time. What I hadn't expected was um the the I guess the way that the stories resonated in in Australia. Um and I think I think people were attracted to my personal story and the adventure story and um but also and and and probably got more than they bargained for because of the just the the sheer volume of of historical and socio-political content in the book as well. Um and vice versa. There were people who were probably armchair historians who um who found that it was much more personal and um much more personal and and evocative than a kind of hard history book. So I not by design but but just the way it was, it did capture a wide audience and um I felt really really you know thinking back to when I was 14 and I dreamt of being an author, to me, um that book was uh as big achievement as the um as this as travelling across the step itself and it took just as long.

SPEAKER_03 2:29:48

Um and um but well deserved it like it really is the the writing, at least for me, yeah. Um obviously the journey and everything, but I don't uh uh with the podcast I end up reading a lot of books um and I find whether it's just my own taste or whatever, but sometimes as you're going into it, you realize oh this is gonna be really good because you just get this sense that like the author is all over it from a from from just the prose perspective, like you're invited into this world, you're not just consuming information, you you're living it out. You know, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 2:30:26

Yeah, that's it. It really is a job. I mean it means it means a lot to me because um I I don't forget for a single day what the uh you know the the effort that that went into it, but but but mostly what the pride I guess I take into it is that that I promised a lot of those people in those worlds um that I would tell their stories. Right, right. Um and um and so I I did feel indebted to all these people who'd taken me in and not only taken me and looked after me, but but opened up about their personal stories and the story of their their um their recent history. Um so to be able to capture that in a way that that that people found intriguing um I I think for me is the is the real measure of achievement of the book.

SPEAKER_03 2:31:19

But since you've gone back to Mongolia every year, more or less, have you noticed in the say 20 plus years since you first went there the ubiquitousness of the phone and the motorbike? Are these further decaying the nomadic spirit and maybe what it is to be nomadic?

SPEAKER_02 2:31:40

Um look, I I think it's a it's a it's a really good question. Um I think there is a I think there's a there's a there's a broad um concept, particularly in the West, that whenever the new world brushes up against the old, the inevitable loser is the old world. Um and whilst I think that is probably true in a lot of cases, I think in I think the the the reality is a lot more interesting and complex than that. Um when I did when I did the journey, certainly I think the biggest impact uh on the knowledge of the land, the plants, the skills of of nomads has been from mechanical travel, so uh motorbikes and four-wheel drive. So these days most nomads um their knowledge is in a smaller mapped area because if they travel far, a lot of them will travel by by motorbike or car. And since I did the journey, um China has been producing these extremely economic bikes that you can buy for two or three hundred US dollars, and they've replaced the old um heavy Russian planetas and and things, Matinishevsk. Um so they've become more accessible to nomads, so definitely that has changed things. And look, I I think it's interesting to comment on go a little bit deeper into into that and drill down because uh you know there's there's a fantastic book called The Central Legacy called by um Björk Rink, and he he talks about how the horse changed the course of human history. And I don't think that's a uh an overstatement. It's um uh once you read about it, I think it's very convincing the huge impact that the relationship of with horses um has had on had on and on societies around the world. But anyway, he talks about how um when we travel at a speed, I think, about a greater than say 40 kilometers an hour. Our brain can no longer really interpret things in detail. And so it just releases a bit of serotonin or whatever it might be to make us feel good, and we kind of glide across the landscape. But on a horse, the vast majority of the time, even when you're going in a trot or a canter, sometimes a gallop, you're at a speed where the human brain can still interpret all the detail. And I mean all the detail. Every plant, every depression, every track, every little contour in that landscape. And what I found was that that uh in the modern era, uh, and I still find this, that that beyond the kind of boundary of where they ride their horses, let's just say beyond where they graze their animals, if they were to ro if they were to drive their motorbike to town to do shopping, then their description of landscape changes uh dramatically. They no longer have that tactile ability to describe it in a nuanced way that makes sense to a horse rider. And so I found that all the time when I was riding my horse. You know, if they were a horse rider who'd ridden that by horse, you could bet that their description would be very accurate. But you know, once it's a if it's a person who's only ridden it driven it routinely by bike, they'll say, you know, turn left at the Red Mountain. When you see that hill, go around to the right. Um, they could be talking in the scale of 50, 100 kilometers, whilst on a horse, you're talking every hundred meters. There's a feature to to kind of follow. And so your map of the landscape um shrinks in your mind as soon as mechanical transport is um is introduced. It's such a lovely theory.

SPEAKER_03 2:35:53

Yeah, because it proposes a lot of implications. Oh, definitely, and maybe explanations for a movement away from environmentalism and a proper feeling of the land that we're on and respect for it.

SPEAKER_02 2:36:07

Modern cars, you they're designed, I mean, there's engineers that spend a lifetime creating uh an insulation from the road noise, a sound quality within the car that allows you to completely transcend where you are, turn the music up, and you know, and off you drive, and and you do get that serotonin release. I think Bjark Rink says something like um something like uh lots of driving to the human mind is is is to the stomach, you know, just eating um colossal amounts of bland macaroni. Um it's it's it's not particularly healthy for the brain to be switching off how this seroton release. Anyway, so um that's one way that is changing, and and motorcycles have become more prominent, but more importantly, roads as um climate change has an effect in Mongolia, and on top of that, uh there are far too many goats because of the market prices of uh cashmere. You know, nomads used to have a very small quantity of goats in the herd because too many goats leads to unsustainable grazing. Um you combine climate change, which means they're pushing further into remote areas to find pasture, which means more roads, which means more pressure on wildlife, um more pressure on um uh plant species, uh those things are real and um and and changing. That's a that's a that's a real threat to to not just nomadic culture but just being able to live out there. I mean Mongolia, like Australia, doesn't have a huge whole heap of topsoil to lose. And once you have a uh a degradation of those grasslands through overgrazing, particularly with goats, um, you're never getting that soil back. Um so um, but back to your comment about smartphones. I think smartphones is a really interesting one that I've grappled with a lot. Back in 2000, year 2000, when I first arrived by bicycle in Mongolia, I remember going past uh a little newly opened mobile uh network office. There was a queue hundreds and hundreds of meters down the street. You know, nomads, city people, young and old, all queuing up for a telephone. You know, for a nomad, what could be more convenient than a mobile? People who've been able to leapfrog copper wire. So arguably, you know, mobile technology, be it mobile phones, be it um batteries, little wind generators, solar panels, um, they've been able to adopt those without corrupting their way of life in in many ways, because it's not changing the their knowledge of the land around them. Having said that, um uh during COVID there was uh uh investment across Mongolia, well I was not able to go, in these kind of micro mobile towers, and most of them are solar powered. Um they had you know it was Herculean efforts to build them, usually local nomads ferrying with camels, everything all the construction material needed, um cement, steel, everything to these really inaccessible mountaintops, no roads or anything. Anyway, they have set up these um these towers in all of across the country in most of the known summer grazing areas, winter grazing areas, autumn, spring. Um so those smartphones that nomads used to have, well not smartphones, just as standard mobile, but they used to they used to use um uh like a C DMA network that wasn't a digital network. Suddenly, and they'd only use them when they could drive or ride to somewhere that had reception. Now, in the last two years, um they are carrying smartphones which are connected to 3G, 4G. Um and I'll just give you one small anecdote which I think spells a change. Um in my journey, nomads always saw me coming long before I saw them. Like it was a it was a it it was uh it was guaranteed. Like uh they know everything that moves, they're so present and aware of everything in their in their world. Um anyway, I was I worked with a guy uh running expeditions now for probably eight, nine, ten, twelve eleven years, and I love going there because they're always so present. And anyway, I come over a hill and I see him down lying near next to the track with his horse, and I just think what's he doing there? Like and he had his back turned to me, and I eventually got within um you know a few meters before he just suddenly you know got a fright, turned around, and there I was there. And I realised then that he'd ridden up to that point because he got 4G there, and he was on his phone uh watching a um like a serialized Mongolian TV programme. And I thought that's the first time in all those many years that I've known him that I've seen him long before he saw me. You've been able to see a covenant and he was so glued to that that he lost all perception of the world around him. And um and so the so in the last two years that's been the biggest change I've seen in 20 years because they um yeah, suddenly uh we'll get to camp, and uh instead of sitting around playing cards or just chatting or whatever, they'll be off to the nearest hillside that has 4G to all sit around um watching a movie on a on a phone. So current currency currency now are um uh power banks. Right. So that that has changed things. I mean look it it um once that once that process begins, I mean we're all human. So yeah that but that that's been the biggest change. Um and um That's a really it's it's a change in me. When I did that when I did that journey, I didn't I had a satellite phone, but you know that's that's kind of uh ancient technology. I didn't have a smartphone, I didn't have Google Maps, I had an extremely basic GPS. Um oftentimes you forget looking back that that the using the tools we have now um the trip looks very different um than it would now if you if you were doing pull it but on Google Maps to do the walk. Oh, there are so many resources so many resources out there.

SPEAKER_03 2:43:45

All right, well Tim, can't thank you enough for being so generous with your time. Inviting me into your home. Uh wonderful book. I projected a lot of adventure onto your story, and obviously this is four years in the making, so I really do appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 2:44:00

Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, thanks thanks for um making the effort and finally persevering to and getting here. Yeah, no worries, mate.

SPEAKER_03 2:44:08

Yeah. Hello all a Merry Christmas. I just wanted to leave with this last part of the interview, which I had excised from the very beginning, uh, just because it kind of naturally went there. But when I was editing it, later realized it definitely broke the flow of the interview. And it was Tim reflecting on how his own experiences, extensive experiences across both Ukraine and Russia had evolved in light of the ongoing war there. Tim, of course, knows a lot of people who are now participating in the war efforts for Ukraine most specifically. I didn't hear him mention much about Russia, but he speaks very sympathetically about Russia and how much he loved the country and the shame about it changing. But anyway, I'll play it and you'll see it for yourself. And since it is Christmas and the end of the year, and the last you'll hear from me, especially in 2025, if you have the time, a five-star review on Spotify or Apple would be greatly appreciated. And that's all from me. I'll see you next year. Here is Tim. How was your view on Russian culture evolved, especially since 2022?

SPEAKER_02 2:45:10

Well, look, my I've experienced Russian culture through the lens of of the Finns, um, from that Western side. Um obviously all of the trauma of the winter wars and uh Russia as a as a kind of imperialist threat to Finland. Uh, but I've also I kind of sided with these beautiful people in Russia culturally. Um that northwest part of Russia I felt were I mean kindness just spilled out of them. Right. When I travelled there previous to the bike ride and later, I mean there was this one lady, Baba Gallia, uh, in the first two weeks of that that cycling journey, she uh stopped us you know mid-track uh in the village, it was snowing, it was minus 15 or so, and she said, You're not going any further until you have hot mushrooms too. Um she if we didn't need too much convincing, and we went, I've defrosted, realised that I had this tingling in my toes, pulled my socks off, she looked down and screamed out, you've got frostbite. Um took me down to the clinic where we had uh this little surgical operation. I was looking, my Russian wasn't great then. I was looking through my English-Russian dictionary, and the doctor looked down and said, Don't worry, this is not going to cost anything. Um, but please bring me a kangaroo as a gift when you come back next time. Um anyway, fortunately the frostbite wasn't too bad. He snipped off the flesh, and we recovered and we got to live for several weeks in this village with Baba Gallia, and they treated us like their own kind of adopted um grandchildren, and that stuck has stuck with me forever since. Uh and uh it made me realise too that for me travel is all about that opportunity to to step into the lives of other people, the environments of other people, and have that privilege to look out through their world, literally through the windows of their home, uh, oftentimes. Um so to me she represents all those early experiences in in Russia, um the flexibility, the the way they but the open-heartedness. That's right, and Siberia was another another total different culture. Um more akin in some ways to Australia, where it's more like a colonised uh a feeling of a of a colonised landscape where the um indigenous peoples of Siberia are in some parts more marginalised than other areas, like then but there's a big difference between North Siberia and the South. So I started to become a little bit uh cynical about the Russian narrative that that their model of colonization of Siberia had been a lot more peaceful uh than the colonization of you know by the Brits or your discovery was that it was not peaceful? No, not when you talk to indigenous people, and not when you start to see the the way that some Siberian people would treat um indigenous Siberians with I have to say a similar there's a similar um uh similar tension to what you'd find in Australia. Yeah. And so I've started to think there's a lot more to this story. I was travelling at all times across the steppe through nomadic societies that had all been colonized in one way or another by the Russian Empire and then by the Soviets. So I started to get a very different feeling of Russia from that southern edge, and it's a very, very long southern edge, many, many, many thousands of kilometres, and and and very multi-ethnic in its makeup. Um and I started to meet Russians, of course, who live on still live in that kind of frontier. And to me, they a lot of those people were were not really they they um I couldn't recognise those same Russian people I'd met in those early days. So I felt that Russia is just such a a giant country, it uh it it is it's very complex. Totally with so many hundreds of republics and so many different indigenous peoples. Um the the homogenous kind of Russian notion that's exported doesn't really bear any sense of reality when when you're on the ground. And so um look by the time I reached by the time I reached southern Russia, where you've got people like uh Chechens, Kalmyks, Cossacks who suffered uh woefully during Stalin's industrialised campaign. And then you got even further to that, Crimean Tatars, who were probably mm in some ways most cruelly deported uh in 1944 to Siberia and Uzbekistan. Um they were kind of wiped off the map, literally, they were removed from the Encyclopedia of Soviet peoples. Um there was an attempt to erase them from history um and repopulate Crimea with with Russians. Um and of course, being in Sevastopol back then in 2006, just after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, uh it was really a real eye-opener. They talk about Sevastopol, you know, being a navy, a navy uh port, the port for the Black Sea fleet, it being it was more Soviet than the Soviet Union. It was the last kind of hanger-on. Um nowadays you could call it more Russian than than Moscow. I mean, uh the sense of um tradition and nationalism in Sevostopol to me was quite confronting because the Orange Revolution had just passed, uh Yushenko had come to power on the wave of that revolution, and I expected naively to arrive in Ukraine and and and congratulate the people who'd who'd thrown out the um Yanukovych and the the old Russian guard, only to find that of course in Crimea the Russians were unbelievably hostile to uh the European leaning powers that be. So, you know, on the ground it was just so complex. And then as I got into Ukraine, I started hearing personal stories about a lotomore the the well, the genocide or the be it be it organised or in intended genocide. A famine that was either created through sheer incompetence or intentionally, you know, there's many different interpretations, but either way, I mean the stories were just horrific. Right, right, right. Um and the modern stories of Ukrainian culture being completely disregarded by Russians. Um I'd spent a lot of time with Russian families in Crimea and Sivostopol and their modern-day views on Crimean Tatars, on uh on nomads, even Mongolians, Kazakhs, Cossacks. Um that's another whole story, a little bit different, but um yeah, I started to to uh to find it uh hard to tread that line between um between the kind of imperialist Russian culture and the open-hearted, more judgmental travel throughout the village. It became harder and harder for me, and and so I ended up spending a year in Ukraine. Um and at that time things were still politically very unstable. Um and so uh whilst I still to this day absolutely love Russia and Russian culture, uh I mean to me there's absolutely no there's there's there's uh there's there's no doubt as to to who the who can stop the war at the moment. Right, right, right.

SPEAKER_03 2:53:36

And who the aggressor who the aggressor is, who's at fault. Yes, yeah. I mean it's not the denazification of Ukraine.

SPEAKER_02 2:53:45

Absolutely, I mean yeah, it's in in it's uh there's some obviously been some outrageous outrageous ways of uh justifying the the the invasion. Um special military operation. But but Ukraine has a long history with with Russia and and uh a security pact for them with anyone is really crucial just simply for survival of their culture for no other no other reason. But like everywhere else, there there's no simple answer. It's a very Ukraine itself is a very, very complex nation with a very complex history and also very multicultural, very, very multi-ethnic. Um they're uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:54:33

I was um super surprised by the just how multicultural they were. This is only one anecdote, so it doesn't tell a full story. But I was in um Preszischmir, bad pronunciation, but it's a Polish uh border town with Ukraine uh uh four days after they had invaded. And so there was all this um there was just trains every 20 minutes coming through full of uh women and children, a couple of drunk men, but then as well, surprisingly, thousands and thousands of Vietnamese people. So there's this whole Vietnamese contingent within Ukraine, yeah. Um, and probably there's a huge Indian contingent there, and there's maybe a huge Bangladeshi contingent there. It's like maybe not Australia, but like there are people who are not either Ukrainian or Russian that live in that country.

SPEAKER_02 2:55:20

Oh, it's a it's a um it's a fascinating country. I mean, I remember spending quite a bit of time with an organization in southern Russia, it might have been Hurson, uh, where you know that the government was incredibly proud of just how diverse their culture, their their their population was. Uh there were books promoting ethnic diversity in in Ukraine in a way that I hadn't seen as openly in in Russia, not from government sources anyway. Um so I yeah, I there's just so many friends of mine in Ukraine that have been um affected by this by this war for no other reason than they are Ukrainian. And I think that that uh you know f Ukrainian culture to survive, Ukrainian language to survive, they need that sense of of sovereignty. And it is a very rich culture that's still emerging uh from from the shadow of the of Soviet times and Russian Empire times as well. So um yeah look it's uh it's it's uh can I say it's it's it's a deeply traumatizing war. Uh that needn't have have been in my opinion.

SPEAKER_03 2:56:48

You spent a year there uh so presumably you have old friends there and people you had stayed with have you been able to speak with them?

SPEAKER_02 2:56:55

Yeah I speak regularly with my Ukrainian friends. Uh I have one friend actually the son of a priest in western Ukraine.

SPEAKER_03 2:57:03

Oh yeah that priest was a mythical figure himself wasn't he?

SPEAKER_02 2:57:06

Yeah Iran so his son uh was studying over in at Yale I think in the US when the war started he came home and he's actually been an interpreter for journalists on the front line um and now he actually crowdfunds for for various battalions um especially those that that come from his region of um of western Ukraine and the stories that he has from the front lines are uh they're just they're just devastating you know and it makes you realise that I mean to this day uh I mean the the army is is basically crowdfunded from a grass very grassroots level I mean he I've his his community will try to raise money just for uh bulletproof vests or scopes that they'll buy online from Sweden or or elsewhere.

SPEAKER_03 2:58:04

Yeah which like land cruises or old cars essentially I remember there was a whole thing yeah about people driving in all these old cars from Europe uh dropping them off on the border and then it being driven to wherever to be repurposed as a vehicle for war.

SPEAKER_02 2:58:19

Yeah and these days uh inventive ways of drone protection drones themselves but on a grassroots level you have in carpa in the Carpathians it's considered obviously a safe refuge uh a lot of women and children living as refugees with in those communities spending a lot of their time uh making food sewing in the early days at least you know camouflage nets and um it it it's it's an incredible effort and a lot of a lot of local people local entrepreneurs they'll often use their own credit to buy something that's essential for their own um for their own army unit um from their community and then go to crowdfunding to try to cover the cover the credit repayments. I mean it's it's it's devastating.