Khatgal

Khatgal exists because of the water beside it. The lake had long been fished and grazed around by Darkhad and Khalkha herders, but the settlement took shape in the early 20th century as a trading point on the route between Russia and inner Mongolia, where goods were transferred between carts, pack animals and boats. A wool-washing plant was built here in the Soviet-aligned decades, and the village became a small industrial centre: wool from the surrounding aimag was cleaned, baled and shipped north across the lake and on into Siberia. Khatgal was the seat of the new Khövsgöl aimag from 1931 until the administration moved to Mörön in 1933.

The lake port was the heart of that economy. Barges carried fuel, timber and wool the length of Khövsgöl, and trade with the Soviet Union kept the village in work. When the Soviet system ended after 1990 the traffic stopped almost at once, the wool factory closed, and a place of about 7,000 people in 1990 was down to some 3,700 by 1994. Rusting hulls and empty sheds on the shore date from that collapse.

What replaced it was the national park around the lake and the tourism that followed. Ger camps opened along the western shore through the 1990s and 2000s, the road from Mörön was surfaced, and Khatgal became the gateway for boat trips, riding and journeys to the Dukha reindeer herders of the taiga. The village is smaller than in its port years, and its wooden houses and log fences still have the look of a place built for a different purpose.

Khatgal sits where the Mongolian steppe world meets the Siberian forest, and both are present. The district is mainly Khalkha and Darkhad, herding yak, horses, sheep and goats on the flats at the lake's southern end, while to the north-west in the taiga live the Dukha, a small Turkic-speaking people who herd reindeer, ride and milk them and move camp with the lichen. Visits to their camps are made on horseback over several days and arranged through guides connected to the families.

Shamanism is unusually strong in this corner of Mongolia. The Darkhad valley west of the lake is known across the country for its shamans, who drum and wear ironwork-heavy costumes, and the lake itself is regarded as a mother water, with ovoo cairns and scarf-hung trees at the headlands. Buddhist practice sits alongside it without much friction, as it does throughout the north.

Life in the village follows the visitor season and the ice. Summer brings outsiders, work and Naadam, held in July with wrestling on the grass and cross-country horse races ridden by children. In late winter the frozen lake becomes a road and a festival ground, with sleighs, skating and ice sculpture. Hospitality is the same as in the countryside: tea with milk is offered immediately, guests sit to the left of the door, and the exchange of small gifts matters more than punctuality.

Roughly 3,000 people live in the sum, a figure that swells with seasonal workers each summer and thins again in autumn. Households combine several kinds of income: herding yak and horses, running a guesthouse or a handful of gers, driving, guiding, hiring out horses, working for the park administration, or holding one of the salaried jobs at the school, clinic and district office. Fishing supplements the diet where it is licensed.

The village is built of wood, unusually for Mongolia, with single-storey houses inside tall log palisades and gers standing in many of the yards. Heating is by stove, water comes from wells and the lake, and power supply has historically been patchy. Supplies arrive by road from Mörön, so prices in the shops are higher than in the provincial capital and choice is narrow, especially outside summer.

The concerns people discuss are the ones the region shares: overgrazing on the shore pastures, rubbish and sewage from camps reaching the lake, the future of mining licences in the wider aimag, and dzud winters that can kill a family's herd in a season. Young people leave for Mörön and Ulaanbaatar to study and often do not come back, while the tourist season brings some of them home for a few months each year.

The kitchen here is the northern Mongolian one, built on yak and mutton. Buuz, steamed dumplings of minced meat, fat and onion, and khuushuur, the same filling fried flat, are what canteens make; tsuivan, hand-cut noodles steamed over meat, and guriltai shul, a mutton and noodle soup, fill out the rest of the menu. Ger camps cook khorkhog for groups, mutton sealed in a churn with hot stones.

Dairy is the region's speciality, and the lake basin's yaks give it richness. Öröm is the thick clotted cream skimmed from boiled milk, eaten with bread and sugar; tarag is soured milk close to yoghurt; aaruul, hard dried curd, dries in trays on roofs and fences through late summer; eezgii is a toasted, crumbly curd. Salted milk tea, suutei tsai, is drunk all day and offered to every visitor.

Fish is what makes Khatgal unusual. Lake Khövsgöl holds lenok and grayling, and grilled or pan-fried fish appears at camps and guesthouses in a country where many people traditionally did not eat it at all; catches are regulated and seasonally closed. Late summer adds forest gathering — blueberries, lingonberries and pine nuts from the larch and cedar woods — sold by the bag along the road to Mörön.