Day 3 Recap

Day 3 We wake up from sleeping outside and let the horses out to graze. 7am comes and we bomb out headed to HS 6. Our fresh horses from yesterday aren’t quite as fresh this morning. We stop to water at every puddle and make it to HS 6 before 9am. this is where I get one of my top horses of the whole race. A herder brought me to the back of the lines and points to a dun #23. Looks perfect, let’s go! The coordinates of the next stop have changed after a family held a funeral at the previous location. It’s bad luck to stay there so they’ve moved the horse station.

Sean and Willemien and I ride out all three of us on absolute rockets. With these guys we decide to go directly as the crow flies. Willemien’s is a complete psycho and she’s bolting circles around us as we barrel up hills and down the other side. It’s a miracle no one dies. I name my horse GOAT. He’s an absolute machine and with the #23 that seems appropriate. Her horse finally settled down enough to plant him right on the ass of mine and we finish the leg into HS 7.

I go off script at station 7 and pick a beautiful buckskin with a long mane, which means he’s a stallion. He was right in front of me on the line and I honestly didn’t even bother to look at any of the other horses. Sean’s mate Tyler is at HS 7 and while they plan on riding out together Willemien and I quickly change horses and ride out. One of the beauties of the race is that you get to ride with different people as the ebb and flow of the race bring you together and pull you apart. We set off on what will become known as our afternoon slog. The hottest legs of the day are 12 - 4 where everybody is hot and tired and the horses don’t wanna move. Because it is so hot we are extra aware of finding water for the horses. We come to a few ponds where the water level is so low the mud around them instantly is up above their knees. We can’t get out far enough to reach the water. We pass by a family taking mud baths, and as we look back we can see Sean and Tyler fighting the same mud we did. They catch up to us and the 4 of us join up again. No one’s horse is going fast so we trot the rest of the way. Despite being hot, we start hearing what first sounds like thunder in the distance. Looking at the sky, there is absolutely no way that it’s thunder, it sounds more like artillery. We roll into HS8 and find out there are tanks just on the other side of the hill performing target practice. We are given specific instructions to not ride that way as moving targets are hard to come by. Seems like sound advice. Once again, we ride in at 5:45 PM with enough time to ride out tonight but not enough time to make it to the next station. Story of our derby. Sean and Tyler are also making the same choice.

Since we’re going to camp out we try to ask the herders for horses that are easily caught and bridled. I pick a little white horse and we head out all at the same time, sure to stay clear of the tanks. My grey decides to throw in some bucks as we leave and I tell Willemien if he’s not quit in a mile I’ll turn back and grab a different one. He settles down and we head out as fast as we can in the route, eyes peeled for a ger anywhere. Turns out he likes to throw in random bucks along the way, keeping me on my toes. The boys ride in generally the same direction but with a fair bit of space between us. It’s clear to us they’re riding on their own, but we’re all headed the same way. Our horses are well matched and cruise along at a gallop. It looks to be a pretty unpopulated leg and I begin to stress about finding a place. The boys are a bit behind us at 6:40pm and see 2 gers about 2 miles off to the south. We turn immediately and head straight towards them. When we look back, the boys have stayed on the course towards HS 9. Guess we’re not camping together.

As we approach the gers, multiple horse lines begin to appear, then we see trucks, and more gers. We’re riding up on a bonafide compound. We ride up to a few guys hanging about the back of some trucks near the closest horse line. We get off and give them our card that asks to stay. They immediately say yes, but we seen only men and small boys, no women. Our rule of thumb is that we try to only camp where there are women and children for our personal safety. We’re a little wary that this is a good place to camp. I see a woman step out of a ger towards the middle of camp so we head over there. We give her our sheet and while she nods and says yes, she then disappears into the ger and does not come back out. We’re attracting a lot of attention and there’s a posse of kids and men coming over to laugh at and pass around my Mongolian card. It’s now 6:50 and we have to make a choice as to whether we’re going to stay here or Move On. A younger man comes up on your motorbike and takes the card and reads it. He says yes and beckons us back up towards the gers where we started. He shows us his ger, which is the bachelor pad of gers with just a table and some beds. He says in some English tonight “this is your home”. Feeling good about where we’ve landed, we decide to stay. After we pull our tack, they hobble and turn out our horses for us. We heard to explore the horse lines. There’s at least 150 horses tied on the lines. They don’t look like the Mongolian horses we’ve been riding. We found one horse owner who speaks very good English after years of working in Australia and have a nice chat with him. It turns out this is a Nadaam camp thats training jockeys & horses. Many of these horses are crossbred with thoroughbreds or Arabians, and we can see by how tall and leggy they are.

They end up turning all these resources out for the night. We catch our horses and tie them to the line so they don’t bugger off in the middle of the night. As we are getting ready to crawl in, he comes in to beckon us to the neighboring ger where a woman has prepared dinner for us. As we sit down at the table he brings over a bowl full of boiled sheep bones and begins slicing off chunks of meat and handing them to us. Willemien is a sheep farmer in South Africa and says the shin meat is quite good. I have no such experience, but there’s only one way to remedy that. She’s right. We’re then presented with a heaping bowl of noodle soup with pieces of mutton, carrots and potatoes. I didn’t feel hungry, but I devour the entire bowl and cannot wait to get into my sleeping bag. It turns out to be the best night of sleep I got during the entire Derby and we’re so grateful for the private space.