Two WT adventurers shared their experiences on our Mongolia’s Golden Eagle Pageant journey, the place they stayed in a standard ger camp, met eagle hunters and their households, and witnessed the thrilling video games of the Golden Eagle competition.
To expertise eagle hunter tradition, we journey to what feels just like the ends of the earth—to the small city of Ulgii, deep within the Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s wild West. We’re right here to attend the Golden Eagle Pageant, which started in 1999. After Mongolia emerged from Soviet affect, its residents started restoring and celebrating their tradition.
It’s the primary weekend in October, however in Mongolia winter has already arrived. It’s chilly, it’s windy, and the snow is flying.
We keep in an exquisite ger camp a couple of kilometers from the competition web site. Good for nomadic life-style, gers may be erected in lower than an hour. Layers of thick felt and heavy canvas shield in opposition to the weather. Doorways elaborately painted in shiny colours stand out in opposition to the winter panorama. Inside, stunning hand-made tapestries line the partitions and a coal-burning range retains us heat.
Many Kazakh hunters and their households journey lots of of miles to compete within the Golden Eagle Pageant. This hunter joins us in camp and exhibits us his eagle. Feminine eagles are most popular as a result of they’re bigger, usually three kilos heavier than their male counterparts, and higher hunters.
Early on the primary morning of the competition, extra hunters cease by our camp en path to the competition web site.
Amongst them, a feminine hunter exhibits off her shut relationship along with her eagle. She wears the normal heat fur coat and hat.
On the competition grounds, 114 hunters carrying conventional clothes parade on horseback. Hunters relaxation their forearms on baldaks (forked wood sticks fitted into their saddles) to assist their weighty eagles. All opponents line up in entrance of the judges.
The primary rounds of competitors are fierce. Whereas a hunter rides throughout the steppe typically at break-neck pace, calling to his or her eagle, an assistant atop a close-by mountain unhoods and releases the eagle. The eagle swoops down and lands on the hunter’s raised arm, lured by a bloody lamb bone. Later, the eagles swoop once more, this time for a freshly killed rabbit the hunter drags behind the horse. Judges award factors for the way shortly the eagle reaches its hunter and the way distant the hunter is from the mountain.
Based mostly on Kazakh tradition, the competition of spouse chasing and playfully beating her husband is nice enjoyable for opponents and spectators alike.
In between competitions, a hunter exhibits off the prowess of his hooded eagle, her highly effective claws on his gauntlet, her wings unfold large.
Though most opponents are males, a rising variety of younger ladies are becoming a member of in. Sadly, these two ladies don’t fare properly this weekend. As soon as launched from the mountain high, their eagles fly off to different mountains. Neither advances to the subsequent day’s finals.
Many former, now aged, eagle hunters attend the competition as spectators.
After two days, the competition involves an finish. To the winners: medals, money, airplane tickets, and the title Eagle Hunter!
The subsequent day, we go to a neighborhood Kazakh household nonetheless at their summer time ger. The husband is likely one of the hunters who competed within the competition and was a winner a number of years prior. He meets us on the highway, his eagle swaddled in a blanket—an surprising show of the intimacy that exists between hunter and eagle.
His spouse treats us to a breakfast that features milk tea and a bottle of vodka whereas he serenades us with conventional folks songs. After we ask them how they met, she smiles coyly and says, “in highschool. All the ladies have been after him as a result of he was so good-looking.” To which he replies with fun, “I nonetheless am!”
Later, he takes us outdoors the place we every have an opportunity to attempt on his looking regalia and let his eagle perch on our arm. She might weigh solely eleven kilos, however she’s stable.
Our expertise of Mongolia and the Golden Eagle Pageant was completely thrilling—one that we’ll cherish for the remainder of our lives.
