Some countries exist largely in the imagination, and Mongolia is one of them. When I was at school, there were three things we were taught about the place: the Mongols lived in yurts, they survived on fermented mare's milk called kumis, and Genghis Khan was the most bloodthirsty warrior the world had ever seen. In fact yurts are called gers in Mongolia, the locals seem to drink a lot of fermented milk from cows and yaks, and Genghis Khan was not just a genocidal maniac; he encouraged trade and religious tolerance. As we land in Ulan Bator, the capital, a huge equestrian statue — the biggest statue in the world — of the man himself is visible, and above the town there is an enormous outline of him carved on a hillside, rather like the giant figures on the chalk downs of Wiltshire. Genghis Khan is still regarded as the father of the nation.
The moment I leave Ulan Bator — a frenetic, semi-industrialised frontier town — on every distant hill and in every isolated valley there are gers, with a few ponies tethered and vast herds of sheep, goats, yaks and cattle stretched out, moving like the shadows of clouds across the landscape. The ger is a spacious rounded tent, with felt walls attached to a circular wooden frame. The whole thing is relatively light and very warm, allowing the nomads to pack up and move (about a third of the 2.9 million people of Mongolia still live this way). Each family lives at a loosely defined distance from the other. Grazing is, as with all nomadic peoples, a constant preoccupation. Some winters are so bad that half the herds and flocks die.
As I drive over the final hill on my seven-hour journey north of Ulan Bator, I gaze down into a broad valley with a wide gleaming strip of silver silk lying on its floor, the Orkhon River. The Orkhon is Mongolia's longest river, eventually reaching Lake Baikal in Russia after nearly 700 miles; the whole of this part of the Orkhon is a Unesco World Heritage site, because of its beauty and because it contains one of the most important sites of Mongol history, Karakorum, once the capital. Below me in the valley are about 45 gers, the home of one of the most quixotic and glamorous enterprises I have ever come across, the Genghis Khan Polo and Riding Club.
To cut a very long story short, the Club was founded by Christopher Giercke, once an East German and now a resident of Nepal. Giercke believes the Mongols invented polo, although as far as I can see there is no mention of it in the anonymous saga, The Secret History of the Mongols, written after Genghis Khan's death (1227). There are plenty of sports involving the severed heads of enemies, but none resembles polo. However, the Mongols have always been cracking riders: they ride the ponies with a curiously upright seat, which the country's art suggests is age-old. Here the phrase 'born in the saddle' seems to be almost literally true.
