Mongolia🇲🇳Naadam yearly festival, grand finale

After the preliminaries in the small village, the final rounds in UB were waiting: an opening ceremony on the level of the Olympic Games, raising the question of whether the North Korean mass choreography will surpass it next month. Everything here was bigger, stronger, faster, and more beautiful, but also much less intimate. Now I was sitting in row 43, seat 12, watching two 200kg wrestling giants, whereas just two days ago, I was sitting on the grass 20 meters away, and the wrestler would sit next to me after the match.

The horse race in UB was also the grand finale. I had never seen so many cars at a sporting event. All the surrounding hills were filled with bumper-to-bumper cars. And after the last five-year-old jockey whipped his horse across the finish line, all these cars had to simultaneously descend the hills to a single-lane access road to the nearest asphalt road back to UB. It was complete chaos, estimated to take four hours to reach the asphalt road. However, our driver knew the hills well, and we bypassed the traffic jam by racing through the meadows for an hour until we reached another access road to UB. Compare this to bypassing a traffic jam from Lelystad to Amsterdam by maneuvering your 4WD through the fields from Lelystad to Amersfoort. Roads are a nice-to-have here, but certainly not a prerequisite, as I would later discover during my journey.

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