Last August, Filipina equestrian Camila Lastrilla-Curto and Argentinian polo player Nico Curto celebrated an intimate week-long wedding in the Genghis Khan Retreat in Mongolia
When you think of Mongolia, the images that come to mind often range from peaceful images of vast grasslands, Mother Nature’s bitter cold, and the narrative of Genghis Khan’s fierce power. In my personal memory, I think of a yellow souvenir T-shirt I was given as a kid, with three drawings of furry yaks and the words, “Yak yak yak” underneath.
For Filipina equestrian Camila Lastrilla-Curto and Argentinian polo player Nico Curto, Mongolia’s history of horse culture was a natural match for the couple themselves, as ideas for their wedding planning actualized into a sacred yet festive week-long celebration.
The couple were wed in both a native Mongolian and a Western wedding, and stayed at the Genghis Khan Retreat in the Orkhon Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Central Mongolia some 200 miles west of Ulaanbaatar. Run by Christopher Gierke, a now-Kathmandu-based German film producer who worked on “Apocalypse Now,” he and his son D’artagnan Giercke manage the camp during the summer months.
Visiting guests stay in traditional Mongolian felt tents called gers. But the camp is not without a sense of glamour too—from a stocked supply of caviar to legs of jamón serrano and vodka and even customary Mongolian snuff and mare’s milk.
“You get to witness nomadic life, but in a more social way. They have people cleaning your ger every day, amazing food, and you can watch a polo match or Mongolian wrestling right there in the Mongolian steppes,” wedding guest and bridesmaid Bubbles Bermudez describes the experience. “The place discourages you from being online. It’s too magical for you to be on your phone. It’s not just a tourist attraction—it’s really a way to support the Mongolian people, with a children’s village nearby where volunteers teach skills like English and polo.”
Fellow bridesmaid Sabrina Chiongbian continues, “Each day was carefully planned out with different activities… archery, horseback riding, kayaking, swimming, hiking. The entire experience was an immersion in Mongolian culture. We truly felt the hospitality of the Mongolian community and saw how each of them respect each other and contribute to make the camp the one-of-a-kind experience that it is.”
Camila and Nico Curto’s polo field romance
While the majestic Mongolian steppes provided an epic backdrop for Camila and Nico’s wedding celebration, their love story began on a different field altogether—one marked by thundering hooves and the crack of mallets.
Camila, who now splits her time between Manila and Jakarta, first encountered Nico, an Argentinian polo coach, during the 2019 Southeast Asian Games when she was organizing the polo games in Calatagan, Batangas. “After the event finished, we decided to try and see if we could make it work.”
A few years later in January 2022, during a stick and balling polo practice, Nico orchestrated a dramatic proposal. “He pretended to fall off the horse,” Camila recalls. “I was so worried because if somebody like Nico stays down on the ground and doesn’t get up, something bad must have happened.” As she jumped off her horse and rushed to Nico’s side, he surprised her with a ring, transforming her worry into elation.
Just a month after his dramatic proposal, the couple were civilly married in a small wedding in Calatagan on Valentine’s Day.
“We decided to take our time and see what we wanted to do for our wedding celebration. We had already been going to Mongolia. Nico had been three times at this point, and I had gone twice. When we were there last summer, the owner [of the Genghis Khan Retreat] D’Artagnan Giercke, a really good friend of ours, suggested having an intimate wedding party take over the camp for a week, inviting 40 of our nearest and dearest… We thought it was a great idea.”
The Mongolian wedding
After the bride and groom submitted their date, time, and place of birth to the llamas of the Erdene Zuu Monastery in Kharkhorin, the ancient capital of the Mongol Empire, the holy men gave the auspicious time and dates to have their wedding blessings.
“We did the wedding benediction on August 17th, and then the Western wedding on the 18th. It was actually crazy because that week, the only days we had sunshine were on the 17th and the 18th,” Camila gushes, “It was like they knew. Apparently, they pray for us, they read our horoscope, and they align the stars. So I don’t know, man, they know. It’s kind of magical.”
The night before the blessing, the couple and the guests were taken by surprise by a Mongolian tradition. “In the tradition, they need to hide the bride somewhere in the valley, and Nico needs to choose three or four of his closest friends to go find me,” the bride explains. “And if they can’t find me, we can’t get married.”
Nico selected his groomsmen—D’Artagnan Giercke, Martin Ritterband, Juan Tanger, and Rafael Cang—for the monumental task. The search party, equipped with a drone and a time limit, had to not only find Camila but also locate her hidden ceremonial wedding deel (the traditional Mongolian dress, which was given as a personal present by the camp’s local herders), and consume two bottles of vodka before returning.
“They found me pretty quickly,” Camila laughs. “It was good because if they found me really late, they needed to chug all that vodka in that time frame!” Apart from the vodka, the group also needed to drink mare’s milk three times, a custom if you enter a Mongolian household, accompanied by traditional sniffing of snuff.
Blessings under the sacred tree
On that afternoon, the couple proceeded with the ceremony. After Nico met Camila, two went on horseback, accompanied by their entourage, the groomsmen, with maids of honor Julia Chiongbian and Uriel Lastrilla Choy as well as bridesmaids Valentina Curto, Andi Santos, Sabrina Chiongbian, and Bubbles Bermudez. Camila was given away by her father, Artit Lastrilla.
Riding up the hill in the valley, they dismounted at a sacred tree called ‘The Lonely Tree,’ which was planted by the man who brought Tibetan Buddhism to Mongolia.”
Underneath this ancient tree, the Buddhist monks performed chants and rituals. The couple were given rice and cheese they needed to hold and move along in a circle. It also included a symbolic fire-lighting ceremony. “We had to light this fire to basically start the flame of our marriage,” Camila says.
After this was the party. “Their culture is very much surrounded by celebrating during the summer because they experience nine months of winter in Mongolia. That’s nine months of minus-40 weather, frozen ice, and snow, all day, every day. So when summer comes, they’re always celebrating.”
The Western wedding with moonlight and meteor showers
The following day saw the couple exchanging vows in a Western-style ceremony.
“It’s at the top of the camp in a place called the ‘Japanese Gardens’ where there are really huge natural rock formations that are all stacked up together. There’s one that kind of looks like an altar, like it’s already there… The man who officiated was a shaman named Shiva.”
Camila walked down the aisle to Phil Collins’ “You’ll Be in My Heart,” accompanied by nature’s heart-stopping backdrop. “On the left side of the valley, there was a sunset, and then on the right side, a full moon rising. I don’t know when else in time that would have ever happened. It was just so perfect.”
The party kicked off right after that with wood-fired pizza, mushroom risotto, and Aperol spritz. The couple did their vows and their first dances with their parents. Then the dancing with the whole marriage party continued naturally till the early hours of the morning. “That whole week there was a big meteor shower going on. The stars were just falling like crazy,” the bride shares.
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In the middle of intermingling cultures, Camila and Nico’s wedding brought their two families together, too. Camila recounts how her 87-year-old grandmother made the journey and boasts she averaged five to six glasses of wine a night, peppered with a few shots of vodka.
“It was really special that they met and they all got along… It’s such a beautiful place, there’s really no room for any bad energy there. It’s all good energy, all day, every day.”
Looking back on their adventurous wedding in the Mongolian steppes, the bride reflects, “It’s definitely not something that a lot of people experience. For me, this is the least stressful wedding any bride can have because everything was just set up [by the camp]… Everything was seamless from start to finish. Only your nearest and dearest are there… The only thing I needed to worry about was having fun with my guests.”
Discover the Genghis Khan Retreat here.