Mongolia, the Horizontal Vertigo - Patrick Bard

"Past the airport gates, the steppe begins immediately. A horseman emerges at the height of the car, at full gallop, standing in his stirrups. The folds of his robe flutter in the wind. He turns at a right angle and spurs toward the horizon, shrinking rapidly into a cloud of dust. So it's really like this? The myth incarnate.... Then, suddenly, a three-by-four metre advertisement for credit cards featuring a beaming Mongolian businessman, another for cell phones, and immediately after, the tall chimneys of Ulaanbaatar's power station. The dilapidated apartment blocks rise from the earth. In the open air, the serpent of heating pipes garlands the streets, vacant lots, bare squares and undulates toward the dwellings. A cloud of pollution hangs over the city. Students with phones pressed to their ears cross paths with grandfathers indifferent to it all, their legs bowed in tired worn Russian cavalry boots. In twenty-four kilometres, you have just understood that there are two Mongolias: that of the steppes, whose regular waves break at the very gates of the city, and that of Ulaanbaatar, capital, emerging metropolis of Central Asia and citizen of the global village."

Nomads living to the rhythm of the cosmos, breathtaking equestrian races across vertiginous spaces...Patrick Bard, writer and photographer, shows us the daily life and memory of this centaur people grappling with modernity.

Certainly a little less dreamlike, given that Patrick Bard takes a more journalistic perspective, but a lucid and realistic approach to the country and its duality between Ulaanbaatar (45% of the population) and the rest of the nation. Essential reading to better understand contemporary Mongolia.