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Hello, it's Asami. Long time no hear from me or Len, I guess, for you guys.
How has your summer been? It's been a month since I left for my trip as I talked about in my
previous episode and I just got back and my first impression is when was Tokyo this hot?
Seriously, when I was a kid growing up in Tokyo, I don't remember this place to be this hot.
But it's neither here or there to complain about the heat or the weather. So, yeah, just here to
say I'm back and Len and I have some episodes ready for 科学芸ポッドキャスト in August.
So, in the meantime, I guess, enjoy our travel. Oh, not our, I guess, my travel recap
dotted here and there. So, I thought, you know, why don't I try to capture each cities I've been
to in maybe, let's make a rule, like less than 15 minutes, shall we say,
on, you know, what I did, how I felt and just generally how my travel in that city was.
And if that sounds good to you, please keep listening. So, if you remember very well,
the first place I stopped on this trip is Mongolia. Again, kind of a random choice,
perhaps, but if my, you know, my goal being eventually to end up in Europe during this trip,
Mongolia just made sense to break up the trip because I didn't want to fly, you know,
16 hours to Europe all in one go when I didn't have to. Also, this trip, you know, is happening
because I'm in between jobs and, you know, when will I ever go to Mongolia, really? Unless it's
like this kind of opportunity, you know, I'm pretty sure my job won't take me to Mongolia. So,
I figured why not? At the same time though, you know, I'm solo traveling for most of this trip
and I don't have friends in Mongolia, nor do I speak the language, nor do I have any sort of
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like specific things I wanted to do. So, I looked up, you know, what sort of tours are available
in Mongolia and the first thing that came out was
They have various different itineraries. You can pick, you know, anything from five,
six nights travel or what I did, which was three nights with airport pickup and drop off.
So, that's what I did and like the name suggests, it's a joba tour, right? So, it's
the whole or at least most of the way of this plan is to be on the horse.
Closest thing to come to that is maybe, you know, being a small kid at a zoo riding a pony
while the zookeeper kind of, you know, guides the horse and I just had to sit on it.
It felt like a wall of grass just hit me in the face and
I have never had a country that felt like that. So, you know, I guess it's very fitting that
Mongolia, famously one of the largest steppes in the world, have that kind of impression.
So, it really felt like, from the moment I got off, it felt like a grassland.
And then I got picked up at the airport. The first camp was maybe an hour-ish right away from
the airport and it was interesting, you know, going through like peripheral of Ulaanbaatar
and getting to the camp, at the main camp. So, everyone is given each little
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like, you know, those like very elaborate tent. Everyone gets one of those and there's one giant
that is for eating and shopping and other things. So, I had the dinner there and that was it,
I think, for the first day. And from day two, three, four, it was just like, get up in the morning,
get on the horse, move. And move to the next step and then, you know, break, take a break,
lunch break and then get back on the horse and move. It's not like there's any sort of
any other activities planned in between, just simply being on a horse. But it was really nice
doing that because I didn't know that I enjoyed riding horses that much.
I often hear that the butt hurts a lot and that the inner thighs have to engage a lot, so it hurts a lot.
Maybe because the Mongolian horses are not that big?
Like, they are bred as family, so when we're moving, you know,
there were like me and three other guys from Japan and a few other nomads who are guiding us and
one Japanese staff, or not Japanese staff, he's Mongolian but he can speak Japanese a little bit.
They're all like very friendly, they like to be close to each other, no one horse would just start
randomly, you know, run away from the pack. They like to follow the lead, which is usually one of
the Yubokumin-san, and we just follow. They were so well trained and very easy to ride,
even though all they taught us was basically like, this is how you ride a horse, this is how you stop
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them, this is how you start them, this is how you go right, this is how you go left, and that's it,
and off we go. But the really special moment for Mongolia, I have to say, was the galloping
with this horse. It's really difficult at first because
when you're walking, like when the horse is walking, your center of gravity doesn't change
all that much.
Our center of gravity is now going to move a lot more and a lot faster
with the horse.
It's really interesting because at first you feel like you're gonna get thrown away.
Within like maybe 10-20 seconds, if you're lucky, you start to sync with the horse.
If you can adjust your center of gravity and the rhythm that it goes up and down with the horse,
and once it's synced, once it's completely synced with your horse,
it feels like you're flying. I think it's similar to how
skiing feels or motorcycle feels. You're in a speed that you as a human cannot physically
create on your own, and unlike skiing or motorcycle, which has basically different
inanimate gadgets to it, it's you and the horse. You're in sync with another animal
which has its own independent desires and thinking and own instincts. It's a really special
moment to be invited into that space where you are allowed to be one with the horse.
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It sounds really magical, doesn't it? Because it really was magical to me, at least.
And doing that in this massively expansive space, there's absolutely nothing else in sight
other than more grass, more hills, maybe speckles of trees here and there,
and some horses. There's nothing. It's just sky and a grass and just hills all over.
It's just like, I can't believe that somewhere like that is only maybe five, six hours away from
Japan, and to be able to experience that and to be able to access those sceneries, because mind
you, some of these places, I mean, you can't really go without horses, so you do need to go with them.
And you're seeing these amazing intact scenery, so foreign, so nothing like I've ever seen,
but at the same time, it doesn't reject me, you know? It really feels like,
you know, as long as I'm humble and respectful, I'm invited to these spaces.
And yeah, I think I would definitely want to go back to Mongolia, and now I'm really interested in
exploring other sort of cultures that have horse riding as a really important part of their lives,
like other parts of Central Asia, like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, you know, that stuff. I would love to
do that. I also heard that you can do something like this, like a horseback riding tour type thing
in some parts of the Andes mountains, so like in South America, that's also a thing. I would
really love to do more of this as a part of my travel. But I think Mongolia really is sort of,
you know, the easy gateway for Japan, for people based in Japan, because it's, one,
it's really not that far, and it's, you know, the horses are gentle, and it's a funny feeling.
It's like, it's completely foreign land, but it's a little bit nostalgic at the same time.
And I went there on my own, right? Like, I checked myself in a tour. It's a very solo-friendly
activity. So if you are interested in sort of being away, if you're bored of, you know,
normal tourist stuff, I highly recommend this.
I really enjoyed, and would probably return with their other itineraries, maybe the one
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that involves more riding. Yeah. All right, that's it for Mongolia. In the next episode,
I will explore Vienna. All right, bye! That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening,
and find us on X at Ego de Science, that is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C. See you next time!
