The Wishing Mountain

The first stop in our journey to the religious hot spots at the Khamar Monastery area was the Wish Mountain. After getting off of our overnight train at 1:30 am, our merry band of 10 APIP employees sleepily piled into a grey van (whose many “aromas” we quickly became all too familiar with), and tore through the night into the Gobi desert. We made our first stop several hours later at the foothills of the wish mountain.
















Thus began our ascent.
At the shrine a third of the way up the mountain, we made offerings of candy, lit incense, and wrote our wishes on small pieces of paper to later shred and burn in the shrine. Midway up the mountain the girls stopped climbing. I asked Orta, APIP’s IT specialist, why they were not climbing with us. He said to me, “this is the men’s wishing mountain, there is a mens and a womans, they’ll stay down there until we are done.” He then gave myself and the other two guys on our trip, Davi and Carter, blue scarves to wear around our necks.
We arrived at the summit in time to see the sunrise.

At the summit there was a mound of rocks with blue, white green, red, and yellow scarves wrapped around it, and the remnants of a sacrificial animal and some edibles positioned facing the sunrise.

Orta then gave us each a small bottle of vodka and a cup. Noting the look of incredulity on our faces, he quickly explained that we were not meant to drink the vodka, but instead to poor vodka into our cups, and as we focused on our wishes, to fling three cups of vodka towards the sunrise.
Next I walked around the mound three times, and then tied my blue scarf on one of the ropes on the mound.

On our descent, we were greeted by a shepherd who had brought with him his herd of mountain goats.

Hello there.

This guy really liked the candy.

On the way down the mountain I stopped at the small shrine to tear and burn my list of wishes.

A view from the bottom of the mountain

We returned once again to the van for several hours, bouncing through the Gobi until we arrived at the women’s wishing shrine. The women’s shrine resembles a pair of breasts and represents fertility. Rather than vodka, the women offered milk.