With the huskies on Mongolia’s Terelji lake

A pack of Siberian Huskies stood waiting, tethered to the sled. After a brief instruction from the musher, Balram Menon was set to go on the experience of his lifetime. He climbed on to the sled, mumbled a few commands in Mongolian to the dogs and off they leapt down Terelji lake, which had frozen into a blinding expanse of white.

It was -20 degrees at the Gorkhi Terelji National Park, 140 kilometres from the world’s coldest capital, Ulaanbaatar. And the day had just begun. As he slid down the lake, pulled by the macho dogs, Menon was overwhelmed by the landscape. At some spots, through the translucent ice, he could catch a glimpse of the water beneath. “Though nomads live in the valley, it really is pure wilderness. And the silence is intensified by the cold... it was surreal.”

He speaks of a silence so perfect it seemed eternal and the bluest of skies he has ever seen (Mongolia has 260 days of blue skies a year, on an average).

The sled is a metal contraption, with handlebars, brakes and a steering. It has a snow-hook for anchoring in ice. “If you don’t anchor, the dogs will just keep pulling your sled along. They have a mind of their own,” says Menon, who fell off the sled a couple of times. “These dogs are trained to be friendly with humans, but they are ferocious and are known to attack animals. Anyway, a jeep escorts the sledders for their safety and I made friends with the dogs.”

The 35-kilometre journey on the sled, pulled by eight huskies, included a stop for lunch. “It was barbecue with a camp fire. The locals usually just cut a hole through the ice on the lake and catch fish.”

An instrumentation engineer from Kanjiramattom, near Kochi, Menon is an intrepid traveller in the true sense of the term. “I came across an article on dog sledding and found that it is done in Finland, some parts of Alaska, Norway and in Mongolia. I found that only five Indians had travelled to Mongolia in 2016-2017. So I zeroed in on Mongolia and it was an adventure right from the start.”

There are no direct flights from India to Mongolia. Menon took the shortest route geographically from Kochi to Ulaanbaatar via Colombo-Bangkok-Beijing. The 18-hour flight was stretched to 28 hours on return, including a long layover at Beijing. He could have taken the Trans-Siberian railway through Russia and China, which is known for its picturesque route, but skipped it, as it would have consumed more time. “No travel operator does trips to Mongolia, especially in winter. Anyway, I don’t go through them; the thrill of travelling includes planning and doing it all myself,” he says. Menon spent close to a year researching Mongolia.

In the past five years, Menon has been to non-touristy parts of several countries in Central Asia, including Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Russia. “There is something about travelling solo. You chart your own itinerary. Go off the touristy spots, try the local cuisine, meet people, make friends. That is how one experiences the soul of a place.”

He stayed in a Ger (a traditional, portable tent where nomadic herders live), hosted by his Mongolian friend Bold Purvedelgar, who, incidentally, owns the huskies who took Menon on the sled. Purvedelgar has around 50 more huskies who he trains in sledding.

The inside of a Ger compensates for the bleakness of the icy landscape. “It was full of brightly coloured carpets and warm, with food on the burner.” Most of the Gers make use of solar power.

Menon ate what the locals ate — a couple of swigs of the country’s national drink airag (fermented horse milk, which Mongolians drink to withstand the bitter cold), followed by steaming hot guriltai shul (noodle soup with minced mutton and cheese) and buuz (meat dumplings). Other Mongolian must-haves are the boodog (stuffed, barbecued goat), the khuushuur (deep-fried mutton dumplings) and the suutei tsai, made of milk, water, green tea and salt, which the locals drink through the day.

The six-day backpacking trip included visits to the Khustai National Park, famous for its flora and fauna, in the Tov Province, the Tsojin Boldog where the tallest equestrian statue (40-metre-tall) of Chinggis Khan is located, a 13th-Century museum and some Shamanist temples. Menon also managed to pack in snow paragliding. “It felt like flying above sheets of white.”

Borrowing Haruki Murakami’s words, for he says he cannot describe Mongolia better than the Japanese writer, Menon says: “In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward higher and higher....”