Swimming probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Mongolia.
It is, after all, the second-largest landlocked country in the world. More than 30% of the country is covered by the Gobi Desert and, for a good part of the year, Mongolia’s lakes and rivers are frozen solid.
Khovsgol Nuur in northern Mongolia freezes so completely in winter that vehicles traditionally travelled across its surface. Come back in summer and the same lake is an extraordinary mass of deep blue water stretching towards the Siberian border.
Swimming has always been part of my life. I’m not especially fast and I’m certainly not competitive. I just like being in water.
When I’m in the UK, that usually means the sea or a river. In Mongolia, it can mean a lake, a river, or, far more frequently, swimming lengths at a municipal pool in Ulaanbaatar.
The latter perhaps doesn’t fit the romantic image of wild swimming.
But I’m not sure that matters.
There has been a tendency in recent years to package outdoor swimming as an experience. Cold-water swimming. Wild swimming. Blue spaces. Ice swimming. There are books about it, dry robes for it and whole communities built around it.
For me, it remains something much simpler.
I swim because I like how I feel when I am in the water.
There is something about the repetition of swimming lengths that quietens my head. Push off. Breathe. Turn. Push off again. For however long I am in the pool, I cannot answer an email, solve a problem or think about what needs doing next.
And running a tourism business in Mongolia has provided plenty of things over the years that have needed doing next.
It has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. Working across countries, cultures and languages, making decisions that affect other people’s livelihoods, dealing with Mongolia’s weather, roads, bureaucracy and all the everyday unpredictability that comes with tourism here.
Swimming became one of the constants.
Turuu, my Mongolian business partner, grew up in the Gobi. His relationship with water is understandably rather different to mine.
Water is practical.
It is the well that provides drinking water for a family and their livestock. It is watching the weather because heavy rain can suddenly change a familiar track into a river. It is knowing whether his vehicle will make it through a river when there is no bridge and no alternative road.
He has never particularly questioned why, when we arrive beside a lake after a long day on the road, I might disappear off with a towel.
Instead, one of his familiar questions became:
“Boss, you swim?”
It is his shorthand for checking that all is well.
And usually, if I am swimming, it is.
Over the years there have been some fairly memorable swims.
Khovsgol, where the water is startlingly clear and always colder than you want it to be.
Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur in central Mongolia, surrounded by volcanic landscapes and wide open steppe. It is one of my favourite places in Mongolia anyway — moody, exposed and a little rough around the edges.
There is Khar Nuur in Zavkhan, an alpine lake edged by enormous sand dunes. Even after years of travelling through Mongolia, landscapes such as Khar Nuur can still make me stop and wonder quite how they fit together.
I have swum below Ulaan Tsutgalan, the Orkhon waterfall, and in the glacial-fed lakes of Mongolia’s far west, where the Altai Mountains rise behind the water.
None of these swims involved much equipment or preparation.
Normally it is simply a case of standing at the edge thinking this is going to be bloody cold, getting in anyway and then feeling ridiculously pleased about it afterwards.
Although sometimes I don’t get in.
I have learned that enthusiasm for outdoor swimming can disappear surprisingly quickly when faced with a slate-grey sky, a strong Mongolian wind and the knowledge that the towel is back at the vehicle.
Perhaps that is part of why I like swimming as well. There does not always have to be a bigger purpose to it.
So much of travel is now presented in terms of what we should gain from an experience. We are encouraged to seek transformation, connection, wellbeing, adventure.
Sometimes I think we put too much pressure on experiences to mean something.
A swim can just be a swim.
At the same time, looking back, I can see how much swimming has quietly accompanied my life in Mongolia.
It has been there during difficult seasons with Eternal Landscapes and during the good ones. It has given me space when my head has been too full. It has taken me into landscapes in a slightly different way — not looking at them through a camera or thinking about them as part of an itinerary, but simply being in them.
There is also something I like about the contradiction of it.
That someone who loves swimming ended up building much of her adult life in a vast landlocked country famous for its grasslands, mountains and deserts.
That some of my most important swims take place not beneath dramatic mountain ranges but under fluorescent lights in a public swimming pool in Ulaanbaatar.
And that one of the people who understands best what swimming means to me comes from the Gobi Desert.
“Boss, you swim?”
Yes.
And normally, everything feels a little better afterwards.
