Inside the gers, the couple were invariably greeted with cookies made of fried dough, tea, noodle soup, meat dumplings, and bone broth. As a way to earn their keep, they helped the families with animal husbandry as best they could, and spent time herding goats, wrangling lambs, mucking stalls, feeding horses, and even butchering some animals.
“The most difficult task of all was trying to coax a mother and baby yak back to a ger,” says Falcon. “It involved carrying the ‘baby’—definitely an understatement, given its size—for a kilometer back to the ger, while keeping a wary eye on the horns of the following mother.”
As well as the various difficulties with their cart and equipment, they also suffered some health maladies along the way. During one crash, Amber slammed into the heavy cart and badly bruised her ribs. She soon contracted bronchitis, and every cough was agonizing. Luckily, the couple encountered a doctor who was able to provide a salve that helped ease her pain.
Amber kept a diary of the adventure on her her Instagram account. She notes that while they went into the trip knowing they couldn’t plan every aspect of it, people would come along at just the right time—be they welders, healers or just friendly, curious locals. “In many ways, the trip itself was an adventure in learning how to trust,” she says. “We couldn’t plan for everything, yet somehow things seemed to work out. It was an incredible way of letting go.”
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