Three days into the Arkhangai region and it feels as if I have never been warm or clean. The landscape is impossibly stunning, but freezing rain pauses intermittently for snow. Or for brief moments to allow God rays to break through heavy bruised cloud, casting beams of golden light onto green mountain valleys cropped short by the wooly yaks that dot them.

“We have no brakes.” 

“Very funny.”

“No, I’m serious. We have no brakes.” He repeats calmly, but urgently. My friend and guide Baataraa is easy going and always making jokes. I imagine this is yet another as we are at the top of a steep road with a long winding descent, a grassy valley spread out below us.

I feel like these are the first deep breaths I have ever taken, as if I have been searching for this, thirsting for this my whole life. The sense of relief is amazing.

Maybe it’s the freedom of living under an immense unbroken sky, feeling as if I can sense the arc of the sky as it stretches out around me, the rotation of the planet throughout the day. Or the profound silence which allows me to tune in to nature of, which I am a part, undisturbed by man-made noise.