Meet the Hot Guy of Mongolian Eagle Hunting

So I was recently in Mongolia when the single hottest man I’ve ever seen in real life showed up on a horse. I’m straight by the way, and not even straight in some exciting secret-inner-life way, like I once had a gay fling on a yacht or something cool like that. I’m just straight in the most boring sense of the word that equals like a zero on the Kinsey scale. So when this guy showed up, riding a horse and brandishing an eagle, I felt aroused, and then surprised at my own arousal.

Let me set the scene. I was on a press trip hosted by Intrepid. The deal was that they’d fly me to Mongolia and show me a good time, and in exchange I’d write some articles about their (amazing!) guided tour through Mongolia. And of course I said yes. So we were on the tour, over in the far west towards Kazakhstan, and we met these hunters who use eagles to catch foxes and rabbits. The practice is called “eagle hunting,” even though it’s technically more like “fox and rabbit hunting using eagles,” and each hunter cares for their eagle like a pet before releasing it back into the wild after five years. And I was taking photos of a small group of eagle hunters when suddenly our tour guide got excited.

This was our local guide and his name was Timur. He was also pretty straight, so I was intrigued to hear him say: “look over there! See that man coming this way—he’s so good looking! You’ll see when he gets here. He’s very, very good looking.”

We were all intrigued. Who was this man on a horse who’d captured our guide’s fancy? As he got closer we all got a bit flustered and some of the women on the tour pulled out their phones to film his approach while I stood back casually watching, expecting to be… well, amused, I guess.

But then he pulled up on a horse and something happened in my head. It was like a thunderstorm at night when the power goes off and suddenly there's a bolt of lightning outside the window and everything gets lit up like daylight and you can see everything sharp and clear—but differently. Like the insides of my head looked new, with new possibilities, and I had an overwhelming urge to… do… something. Like maybe I just wanted to borrow his cow-skin jacket and wear it for a little while. I don’t know.

The guy’s name was Jinsbek, which translated to “strong victory," explained our guide, beaming heavily. And we all looked up at Jinsbek, who was slouching on his horse and pouting at a distant horizon, as though somehow disrespecting the sky and general landscape around him.

This squinty-eyed pout is a special look gifted to a particular breed of hot men. It’s an expression ridiculed in Zoolander, and imitated in a variety of forms by a billion average-looking dudes on Tinder. Some guys also combo the squinty-eyed pout with a slight lift of the eyebrows, which can lend a bit of sultry innocence to the package. But as you’d know, most guys who pout and squint at the horizon look like total knobs, unless they’re genuinely doing it by accident—in which case it’s hot.

Let’s talk about cheekbones for a minute, because when you don’t have them it’s easy to forget they exist. Me? I don’t have cheekbones. My English lineage gave my cheeks a gentle nothingness from ear to ear, but some people fill that space with cool, pointy bones that lend their faces a fierce sensuality. In my opinion the world’s best cheekbones once belonged to Ezra Miller, before I traveled to Mongolia and learned about the existence of Jinsbek: the Mongolian eagle hunter. So now Jinsbek is at number one and Ezra is at number two.

At this point, you might be thinking “yeah, Jinsbek isn’t that hot” but maybe you’re overlooking the fact that he’d cantered in on a horse clutching an eagle, and the fact that he spends the year as a nomadic shepherd tending to his herd of goats on the steppes of western Mongolia. Certainly Timur, our tour guide, found this combo of free-range lifestyle and cheek bones very intoxicating, and demanded to get a photo of himself and Jinsbek flaunting eagles.

After this photo we ate some dinner and headed back to the hotel, and Jinsbek and his mates galloped off into the sunset. I’ll probably never see him again, but if you’re single, and you’ve always wanted to do a two week sojourn through the wilds of Mongolia via Intrepid and you just needed one final reason, then I say go for it. You’ll have a spectacular time and you should get in while Jinsbek the hot Mongolian eagle hunter is still unmarried.

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