About Evelyn Landerer:

Most of the year 2000 saw me riding a horse through western Mongolia. It was a unique experience riding for months through steppe, mountains, swamps and taiga.

The last part of my trip led me near the Mongolian-Russian border in the province of Hovsgol, where you need a special permit to be allowed to ride through. The official responsible for issuing one, Tom Tarag, was travelling himself at that time somewhere in that area and we were told to go and look for him. So we rode into the beautiful Baruun Taiga, meeting first Tom Tarag and then a Tsaatan family and their reindeer.

Later in the year, while waiting at the airport in Mörön for a flight that was delayed for a day, I got to talk to a fellow traveller from Europe who had just happened to come back from the Tsaatan himself. He was Sami and president of the Association of World Reindeer Herders.

He told me how bad the situation for the reindeer in the Mongolian taiga was and thus consequently for the Tsaatan. Illnesses spread amongst the animals and the only way to save the population was to import reindeer from Russia.

Earlier travels led me twice on horseback to Mongolia, on foot through parts of Spain and Scotland, by bus and train through Marocco and along the Trans-Siberian railway.

When I am not travelling I work as a physicist in Austria and am usually busy learning the language spoken in my next destination of travel.

 I love opera and music, theatre and hiking in the mountains.