“Why are you here?”
I was in a field, a grassy wetland in a valley on the Mongolian steppe. A few creeks and waterways rambled close by, a pair of Demoiselle Cranes playing overhead, that wonderfully large Eurasian bird; no trees, just grasslands and distant hills. My friends had set up a ger (yurt) in the field next to an archeological dig I had heard about six months before, nose down in a book, armchair research. The farmer drove up just moments before and came offering welcome and fermented mares milk colloquially called airag. He was confused as to why I was here, what brought me to this place, a place where his livestock roam, but mostly he wanted to drink, and so we did.
On the southern side of the valley, about 45 minutes away, was Karakorum, the ancient capital city of Genghis Khan now a monastery and small museum site. Even in the time of Genghis Khan, it was a nomadic place, but in certain times of year the valley would be filled with horse and soldier and ger. It was a place picked because of geography, access to central Asia and east Asia, but the valley had also been other capitals prior; the Göktürks (a.k.a. Türks, Celestial Turks or Blue Turks) had come from here, it was the birthplace of the Turkish language and culture which later was forced south and west to the Anatolian peninsula. I was here because of the Uyghurs, as this valley was also the birthplace of Uyghur history, a culture I had spent a lot of time with when I lived and worked in China in the early 2000’s. I had spent time in places like Kashgar and even had taken on an alias, Tu Da Hun, which was explained to me to be something akin to “Billy-Joe-Bob”, the Uyghur country bumpkin name, a name given to me by a family I was somewhat adopted by in one of the great grape valleys of Turpan. Coming to this valley in Mongolia was personal, specific, autobiographical. I had latitude and longitude coordinates to help me find it, and asked friends in Mongolia to help me spend some time here, stay the night, and set up a ger. There was a large rectangular rammed earth wall about the size of a football field, and the place is called Khar Balgas.
We drank, the farmer and I, and shared my dinner and wine. He shared his mullet and airag, and after 30 minutes of very little vocal communication (I don’t speak Mongolian and his English was rusty), he slapped my back, took a picture of me, and waved goodbye. Below is a video of him leaving in his Prius, the car of choice on the steppe.
“I want to get off the beaten path, to experience something authentic.”
I hear this sentence often working in the industry of travel, and I understand why. There is something in this, some need we are all looking for, an idea that is key to helping us shift the way we move about the globe, a want to avoid something, and to seek something else. Our casual linguistic canary in a coal mine.
Geography, weather patterns, location, and place affect our lived experiences. If you live in a coastal floodplain, there are patterns that emerge. Monsoon seasons in the Himalayas, avalanches in the Alps, winds across the great plains, the way light shines from the sky in the desert, all of these things affect our architecture, art, food, language, religion, and song. Our culture, the sum of our collective lived experience. Our culture is a result of place, a way of defining what it means to be human and alive, a way of knowing and a way of being.
When we travel, we are seeking out experiences in other places, we are seeking out an alternate way of being, other ways of knowing. It is seeking off of our own beaten paths, to shake our collective cages. To avoid the familiar, at least to a certain point. This is what I think people mean, they want a path that isn’t filled with the sameness of their own, a path that is populated with other ways, ways that are particular to the place they are traveling in.
There are old habits of seeing places on lists, places that interested others in some far off time before, wonders of the world from a hundred years ago that still make it on the lists of places one must see in a lifetime. Lists we name after the morbid ticking clock of death, thus giving this list a rushed and anxious feel, a bucket lists, before we kick the bucket. It is cheeky, yes, but also creates a lust of getting through the list before it all stops. Venice, Paris, the Grand Canyon. These are the places that suffer from over tourism, that are covered with people when the weather is good. An interesting thing happens when a place becomes popular in this way, the initial interest of the place, in most cases, ceases to exist, a quaintness is lost and then is theatrically recreated in order to support the economics that grew around the popularity. But what if we shifted the reasons for travel, the goals we set when we decide to pick up, pack, and head out of our homes. What if we used some other paradigm or formula outside of the lists, the top 10’s, following our ‘feeds’. There is an old way of doing things that can easily be stirred back to life, an individual and particular curiosity that we all innately have, we know how as we practiced this often as children, our own interest, our own awe and wonder. The path off the beaten track is through your own childlike and evergreen awe.
Part of my work is researching a place, in order to have some sort of objective sense what makes a place particular. I spend time in the country or county, I study the place, its history, language. I realized early on in travel that I was being steered by an industry, by the constructed recreations of place so I could continue selling the idea of place that no longer existed. But it was so obvious to me that what was actually there was so much more interesting than the theatrical version, that Paris outside of the tropes was so much better, that Vietnam was not what I thought it was, it was much more.
I wanted to splash water on my face to see what else there was. I started to pick 3 or 4 ideas that would drive my research trips, something driven out of personal curiosity, something selfish and strange. The stereotypes of surfer philosophies hit hard with me, I loved surfing and the tao it brings. One of the things surfing taught me was using the activity to drive travel. I am no skilled surfer, I look like a drunk theme park character, but I love it. I used it as a tool to get me to small villages I never would have sought out without it. It was a way of being, a way off of the path.
I used that same idea to draw from on my research trips. I would find something to follow and drive me, and then I would let go and allow for things to happen, for an idea of place to form. I went to Ireland and wanted to learn about Holy Wells. Anytime I saw a hand drawn sign off the side of the road that said HOLY WELL THIS WAY (and there were many) I would go, and park, and walk into the field or glen and see the well and talk to the people. I went to Bhutan to ride a race on a bike with a Royal Family, the goal not being the race, but the excuse of the race to see what the place felt like without being on tour. I went to Nepal to learn about Mandalas and allowed that to take me to places . Through letting my curiosities drive rather than the business of travel, it allowed me to find things I never would have seen on the beaten path, on the tour. It allowed me to sleep in Khar Balgas and drink airag with a farmer named Batbayar. It felt and was special.
To have everyday awe and wonder, to work at this ability and skill, this might be the key to getting off any of the beaten paths. It is something we can practice, something we can get better at, and something we have been good at in the past when we were children. For me, it is found in photosynthesis, the miracle of quantum mechanics and the act of turning light beams into food, it blows my mind. Birth and death in the springtime, the connectedness of mycelium in a walk in the woods, birds at flight, laughter, seeing friends interact and connect, communal singing at a party, feeling history through artifacts. Knowing what strikes awe in me helps me travel better.
Industry is the economic activity concerned with the processing of materials and manufacturing of goods. The process of this is to perform a series of operations on something in order to change or preserve it. I am avoiding the industrial and the procedural, instead seeking the spontaneousness, the seemingly chaotic and emotive that emerges through hope and joy, and other paths outside of the beaten ones.