It was the most unlikely disco on earth.

With the moon as mirror ball, yaks for bouncers and animistic chanting in lieu of Top 40, it was also the weirdest disco on earth. But weird is why people come to Mongolia, one of the world’s most obscure destinations.

I’d come to get a break from Russia, which I’d been criss-crossing for three months, and to give my liver a rest from the Russians and their vodka-centric hospitality. I’d imagined Mongolia to be an almost desperately quiet place, serene with its ancient Buddhism and population of peaceful nomads. I saw myself gently trotting across the steppes on small native horses and breezily adjusting to the taste of the staple thirst-quencher airag, fermented mare’s milk.

I did not, however, imagine I’d find myself rolling down a hill in a wrestler’s embrace with a pissed descendant of Genghis Khan and a bottle of cheese vodka under my belt.
We’d arrived at the isolated Khorgo-Terkhiin Tsagaan Nurr National Park, after four days of aimless driving around the wilds of Mongolia. Five of us – a 25-year old New Yorker, an Aussie couple en route to teaching jobs in China, an intrepid Englishman and I – had hired a local van driver with the improbable nickname “Ozzy” as our guide. We had no idea where Ozzy had actually taken us since leaving Ulaan Baatar, as Mongolia has virtually no paved roads outside the capital and what actual destinations there were – much of the country is free of permanent settlements - had names as impossible to fathom as that of the park’s. But we didn’t care much; one of the joys of Mongolia is the detachment it offers from realities like time and space, and as long as we found a welcoming ger (Mongolian nomad’s tent) to sleep in at the end of the day, location mattered naught.

We’d decided to camp at the park, an isolated playground of volcanic lakes and Martian hillscapes, instead of hunting out any nearby ger settlements, and were looking forward to a quiet night under the stars when the silhouettes appeared on the horizon. Despite three nights spent eating mutton and sharing progressively humble sleeping quarters with a miscellany of nomadic families, the novelty of contact with these elusive reminders of an erstwhile era hadn’t worn off, and we welcomed them – three nomads and their herd of yaks – to our campfire.

The men were dressed in traditional garb. Unlike Germans and their lederhosen or Australians in powdered wigs and pantaloons, Mongolians don’t reserve their national costume for special events. Grime-smeared with dust-crusted hair that stuck up in all directions, the men were nevertheless resplendent in long woollen gowns (del) tied with bright sashes and when we offered them a belt from my bottle of vodka (new habits die hard), their mood became as colourful as their apparel.

With no common language bar the Russian gesture for “Let’s drink!” (a light flick to the throat), East met West with loud slurps from the bottle and increasingly boozy smiles. As with the throat-flicking, Mongolians had adopted their former conqueror’s taste for vodka and were proving themselves equally adept at knocking it back.
“Finished?” I cried, as one of them, a cheeky-looking twentysomething, handed me the empty bottle. I shook my head sadly and prepared myself for the departure of our new friends.

But there’s no such thing as “finished” in Mongolia. Ever-resourceful, these are the same people that established the largest empire the world has ever known, using tiny horses and alarmingly garish hats. So it should have come as no surprise when one of them pulled two bottles of label-less, clear spirit out from under his robe. “Vodka, yes?”
I am unsure to this day if he was merely proffering the bottle or seeking confirmation as to its contents. In the latter case, the answer is a resounding “Not where I come from.” The so-called vodka tasted like Mongolian cheese which, like nearly everything else in the country, was made of warm, sour horse’s milk and reeked of mutton. But while cheese vodka will never overtake absinthe as the exotic drink of choice in trendy overseas bars, it went down a treat at the Khorgo Cabaret.

After entreating us via Ozzy for some Australian music, the men were soon bopping around the campfire to You Am I, not quite blasting out of Discman headphones amplified through an overturned glass. Half the bottle later, they were drowning out “Berlin Chair” with spontaneous attempts at khöömei, the famously tricky Mongolian throat singing. Culture swapping being the theme of the festivities, it only took them another two shots to introduce us to the oldest of national institutions: Wrestling.

Traditional Mongolian wrestling – boke, the country’s favourite “manly sport” - involves contestants dressed in what resemble ornate hotpants several sizes too small, grappling with each other for first prize, usually a live camel. Sadly, none of us had thought to pack glitzy trunks or dromedaries, so we wrestled for pride. Unfortunately, this too was in short supply, for the tourists anyway; no sooner had the match begun than the three wiry men had us five hulking Westerners pinned and flailing uselessly in the dirt. Boke philosophy dictates that size is irrelevant, but try telling that to a six-foot Queenslander who’s just been whupped by someone the size of Kylie Minogue.

Robbed of dignity and the chance to earn a really cool honorific (boke champions are conferred with elaborate titles, the most famous being “Eye Pleasing Nationally Famous Mighty and Invincible Giant”), it was a relief when closing time was called by the impatient shuffling of the yaks. We waved goodbye to the warriors beneath the waning mirror ball and staggered, indescribably filthy and stinking of horse cheese, to our tents.

Just another Saturday night in Weirdest Mongolia.

Editor’s note: Tamara Sheward is the author of Bad Karma: Confessions of a Reckless Traveller in Southeast Asia (Penguin 2003). She is currently working on her second book, a deranged look at modern Russia and those crazy Russians.