Bush avoids camel spit

2005-11-22 10:28

Ulan Bator - The scene was straight out of a Genghis Khan movie.

Mongol warriors clad in armour and helmets, hoisting colourful battle flags on spears, armed with swords and mounted on the short, stout horses unique to Mongolia.

Dancers in colourful costumes and elaborate masks that resembled the heads of different animals performed traditional routines. Others banged on gongs or played horns.

Cows, camels and grunting yaks roamed nearby.

United States President George W Bush, his wife, Laura, and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice waded into this after his speech, when they were whisked to the Ikh Tenger government complex just outside the city to a settlement of traditional gers set up for the occasion.

Bush drinks fermented milk

With temperatures in the teens, Bush entered the first of the wood-and-felt tent-like homes, made warm by a wood-burning stove, that are a staple of Mongolian living.

He drank fermented mare's milk - sometimes likened to a mix of warm beer and buttermilk - sipped tea and nibbled cheese curd, a White House official said. Reporters were kept waiting outside and could not watch the president themselves.

Inside a second ger, Bush listened as three women in exquisite red and blue-grey gowns performed the traditional Central Asian art of throat singing, a technique that allows the singer to create more than one pitch at the same time.

Walking back to the motorcade for the ride to Air Force One, Bush checked out the camels but stopped short as he approached, saying he did not want to be spit on.

But Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar beckoned Bush to see the yaks and their handlers, which he obligingly did.

Bush's sense of humour

Bush joked that there was another important reason for his visit.

It had to do with a coffee-brown gelding named Montana.

"I'm here on an important international mission," Bush told the Mongolian parliament in his speech at the government house. "Secretary Rumsfeld asked me to check on his horse."

During his own lay-the-groundwork visit in October, US defence secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was presented with a Mongolian horse as a symbol of friendship between the two countries.

He said he would name it Montana because the arid, mountainous landscape around the Mongolian capital reminded him of the state where his wife, Joyce, was born.

But because the horse was the kind of gift Rumsfeld couldn't take back to the Pentagon, Montana remains in Mongolia, cared for by a herdsman who goes by the single name of Bilegerdene, never to be ridden by anyone for the rest of its life.

- AP