Orjan is a Swedish PhD student who bought a one-way ticket to Mongolia to work at the base camp of our long-term research project. These are his adventures…
Home again! It really felt like home as I entered the ger (a Mongolian yurt)…
But I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t have mixed feelings about going back to camp. When I departed from camp in November and spent a bit of time in Ulaanbaatar, and later Sweden, it was quite hard to adapt, and I longed to be back to camp. But, after being home for two months, the thought of eating the same food, not being able to shower, and to be so far away from everyone – it felt heavy on my heart. Now that I’m here, though, it feels great to be back, and to start up the work again.
I have prepared for an arctic winter, with temperatures averaging 20-30 degrees Celsius below zero (that means COLD for you folks that are used to Fahrenheit). So far, the Mongolian winter doesn’t seem too frightening. Daytime temperatures have even been above zero a couple of times! As soon as the sun sets, though, the temperature drops ten degrees. I don’t want to get lost without extra clothes in my backpack here, so it’s a good thing I have extra. However, unless it gets even colder (and I suppose that it might, rapidly), I won’t use half of the arctic gear that I brought. (Just because I wrote this, I bet that temperatures will drop and I will die in hypothermia…)
Nadia and I have installed ourselves in the small field camp nearby. When first I came to the Gobi, we had three gers there. Now, we are living in one small ger (the one we used for kitchen earlier), and it is jam-packed. I think that it’s safe to say that the expression “compact living” has a new meaning here…
We’ve collected our self-operating field cameras. There were a few mishaps, but in all, eight cameras have been visited by snow leopards, with a grand total of 24 visits. Bummer has been photographed 17 times, and if we don’t collar him soon I will rename him “Major Bummer”. We’ve also taken pictures of a new cat that has an “S”-shaped spot, and we’ve named it “Superman”.