It was 9 AM and, even though the sun was promising a hot summer day to come, there was still dew clinging to the grass. Kids and their ponies were scattered around the outside of the small local stadium, clumped in groups of two or three. A few still looked sleepy eyed – no doubt hauled out of bed extra early for the day’s festivities – but most looked bright eyed and excited for the competitions to come. Horses and kids alike were decked out in their finest, dads and moms rushed around attending to last minute details. A mom carefully pinned a number to the back of her son’s shirt, adjusted his hat. A dad fussed with a horse’s mane, spoke softly and seriously to his teenage daughter – a little last minute coaching? A steward announced that horses and riders in the day’s first class should begin lining up. The taller kids scrambled aboard on their own, the shorter ones got a leg up from a handy adult.

It could have been a 4-H show in Iowa, or a hunt class in Connecticut, or the start of the annual rodeo parade in my own Colorado hometown. I said as much to my companions as we watched kids and ponies form a rough line outside the stadium entrance. It could have been anywhere where people still love and ride horses but, in fact, it was the outer reaches of outer Mongolia. There were stark differences too, of course, and though I took note of those over the coming days it was the similarities that I carried home with me. I went to Mongolia for a variety of reasons, some deeply personal, others rather silly, but the main reason I went was to meet and ride with one of the world’s original horse cultures.

The morning’s first race was for mature stallions, marked by their long manes (all other riding horses in Mongolia sport roached manes) they were small, 12 and 13 hands high, and sturdy, able to easily canter to the next county in a day without tiring. Their forelocks had been tied up into a distinctive up-do, resembling Pebbles on the Flintstones, their tails were wrapped in sky blue katas – ceremonial Buddhist scarves. The jockeys were children between 8 and 13 years old, all had ridden since the day they were able to pronounce the word chuu (Mongolian for giddyap) and hold the reins. The kids were dressed in traditional brightly colored jockeys’ outfits – many handed down through generations – they included a crown shaped hat and sometimes, a cape. All but the smallest jockeys would ride bareback and, for reasons I was never fully able to discern, barefoot as well. The race would be 30 kilometers long and last three or more hours, most of it out of sight of the spectators who waited at the finish line for horses and jockeys to cruise in from an ocean of grass – rather like watching a yatch race to conclude.

Nadaam Festival Racer

As strange as some of the trapping of a Mongolian horse race seemed to me, there were things Mongolians found strange about me. Wearing a helmet when one rides is seen as very eccentric to most Mongolians. Mongolians name horses about as often as Americans name their appliances, they are after all, not members of the family, nor are they pets. Most Mongolians would be perplexed, even horrified, to see horses kept confined in stalls for much of their days, they are after all, meant to roam free the wild steppe and open grasslands. I found myself incredibly grateful for the gift of affluence. For having been born in a society with the wealth that affords us decent veterinary care by merely picking up a phone. The wealth that allows us to keep horses not as transportation or wealth or food but merely for the pleasure of an afternoons ride. The wealth of knowing that if I fell off my spoiled horse on such a ride, a hospital was just a short ambulance ride away. I suddenly realized what a gift it was to be able just to gift my horses with a name because he was my friend and not the key to my daily bread.

Despite all this I found that the nearside of a horse is the left side the world around and horse people are basically horse people wherever you go. Get a couple of young people on horses and soon enough they are giving each other those familiar sidelong glances, sizing each other up, the race is soon to be on. Nothing in my opinion, can quite compare to racing off across the fenceless wilds of the Outer Mongolian grasslands.

We travel I suppose to see the remarkable, the exotic, the unfamiliar, but in the end it is really the familiar, the utterly mundane, that we usually bring home with us. Later in the afternoon, after the kids races had been run, the wrestling matches and the archery competed, the festival food all eaten, the local gossip passed around, our guide set out a couple of empty water barrels in standard clover leaf pattern and challenged a couple of young guys to an American style race. Whooping and laughing, they rollicked around the barrels in what couldn’t really be described as a standard pattern, but, it could have been any backyard rodeo in Wyoming or a playday in Texas or gymkhana in Ireland. Wherever people still love and ride horses.

Trying a hand at barrel racing