The cold air from the toono above your head. The sound of horses outside. The particular quality of dawn light through felt walls. This is what waking in a ger feels like.
The Rara Avis Team
You wake in the half-darkness of a ger, the cold air coming down from the toono, the circular skylight that opens directly to the sky. The stove in the centre of the space is dying; the heat that warmed the night is dispersing now into the felt walls and the canvas beyond. Your blankets are heavy. Outside you hear horses moving, someone already at work, the sounds of camp beginning. The felt walls glow slightly where the early light catches them. This is not discomfort, exactly. It is a different kind of home, and you have arrived inside it.
A ger is fundamentally an engineering solution to a problem: how to create a structure that is warm enough, spacious enough, and moveable enough to serve a nomadic people on a high cold plateau where the weather can change in minutes. The solution is elegant. The wooden lattice walls, khana, expand and contract to adjust the diameter. The roof poles, uni, run from the top of the walls to the central crown. The toono serves multiple purposes simultaneously: chimney for smoke from the central stove, window and connection to the outside, and the way that structural forces are distributed. The entire frame is covered in thick felt, made traditionally from the family's own sheep's wool. Over the felt, canvas or modern weatherproofing secures everything. A family that knows how to assemble a ger can do it in under an hour.
Inside a ger, the world is organised according to principles that have held for centuries. The door, always a wooden frame covered in canvas, faces south. The central stove sits in the exact centre of the space. The khoimor, the place of honour, occupies the space directly opposite the door at the north. This is where the family keeps its most valued objects and where honoured guests are invited to sit.
Tourist ger camps vary enormously in their facilities. The most basic offer wooden plank beds, shared outdoor toilet facilities, water heated on the stove for washing, and central dining in a large ger. More comfortable camps provide proper beds, en suite facilities with indoor plumbing, solar-powered lighting, and central heating systems. Rara Avis works across this entire spectrum and matches the standard of camp to the nature of the journey.
The stove itself deserves attention. A ger's stove is small and efficient, burning dried dung or wood, and it requires feeding at night. Camp staff will stoke it before you sleep. You will likely wake once or twice during the night to tend it, to add fuel, to keep the fire alive. Learning to do this in the dark, watching the fire glow and catch, seeing the stars visible through the toono above: this becomes one of the small, private pleasures of staying in a ger.
Step over the threshold of the door, never on it. Whistling inside a ger is considered bad form. Do not point your feet at the hearth. When accepting food or drink, accept with both hands or your right hand. Do not pass objects over the hearth. When approaching a stranger's ger, call out "nokhoi khor" — hold the dog. The dogs at a ger are working animals, and they should be managed by the family before a stranger approaches.
Rara Avis guests receive a briefing on ger etiquette before their first family visit. Not because the rules are complicated, but because understanding them deepens what you receive. A family that sees you attempt to follow their traditions, even imperfectly, opens more fully to you. The experience becomes something genuine rather than something performed.