Mongolia in a rather large meaty nutshell

Hello everyone, I hope you're all well. I'm just thawing out in front of the computer, its -25C by day here atm so walking outside is inadvisable (and yeeeeees I know it got cold in Europe recently, but its gonna be -35C tonight so I have no sympathy).

Since we last messaged you an awful lot has happened, so I'll try and stick to the best bits. We spent a few days in UB, recovering from our time in Russia with a lot of vodka and cheap cheap restaurant food (about 1.50GBP a meal). It was amazing the first few days in this hostel, the Golden Gobi, as there were so many people around we didn't really leave the building for 3 days. We celebrated Mongolian independence day here, and we were treated to free mongolian dumplings and vodka by the hostel, and ended up in a night club at the end of the day regretting drinking such a cheap bottle. The best, and most prestigious vodka here is called simply 'Chingis Khan' after everyone's favorite all conquering Mongol, you might know as Genghis. In fact, he still pretty much dominates everything, he has a huge statue in the main square, and the best beers and hotels (and most pubs) are named after him.

We had 6 days in UB, where we've gone to a cool puzzle museum (aka the international intellectual museum) where we broke our no buying things rule, but lauren's already lost the instructions for her horse and we cant reconstruct it now! We also stocked up on extra warm gear at the black market (which is essentially a massive ice rink where you have to push everyone you walk past). Also, we visited our first temple of the trip, with, what I'm sure we're gonna get sick of, a massive Buddha in the middle. Religion was pretty much outlawed under communist rule here, so most temples in the country are reconstructed after they were destroyed in the 1930s by Stalin.

Luckily, a couple of guys (Mark, Australia and Philip, Germany) turned up in the hostel and wanted to do a tour with us. To save money, we just hired a jeep and a driver (the amazing wrestler Erkha, with all the English and Russian we needed: go, eat, finish etc), which cost us $20 each a day including all petrol. The jeep is more of a soviet version of the VW combi, uses a litre of petrol every 5km, had crap suspension and we managed to break a door, but it did more than the job for us.

Every night on the trip we stayed with locals, as hotels don't really exist away from the capital. Mostly, we stayed in gers, which is like a big teepee with a stove in the middle. The first day we visited a national park with a reintroduced breed of horse, apparently the last remaining wild horse (it has two more chromosomes than other horses, oooohh). It was a bit like a safari, with our guide for the hour with her binoculars searching for them (oh look horses), but we saw the alpha horse getting on its back legs to teach a lesser horse something. After some expert driving through snow drifts we arrived far into the country where we did some horse trekking. I was thrown off the horse in the first 10 mins, but as I had so many layers on I pretty much bounced off the floor. We explored a frozen waterfall, and carried on plodding along on these small horses, they ignored our constant 'choo' and only sped up when our guide would come in to give them a whip.

Here we were introduced to the heart of Mongolian ger cuisine, meat on a bone. It turns out that all everyone eats in the country is boiled meat, with at least 50% fat content, and maybe a bit of pasta or rice. After 2 weeks on this diet, without any fruit/veg/variation I've decided that this isn't the diet for me. Unsurprisingly we didn't meet any Mongol vegetarians.

After the horse riding we headed south, and on the way to sand dunes in the Gobi desert we visited a market where it was possible to buy flatpack gers, with all the 'traditional' ornamentation a mongolian would need! At the dunes we had some birthday drinks for Mark, the typical 'drink a big shot of vodka, pass it on' game . There we rode some two humped camels, and climbed some hefty dunes (about 200m high), which in the cold felt impossible as every deep breath you took was like breathing ice. After walking the camels over a frozen river on the way back, (which cracked at footstep they took), we had a camel race. Camel racing is probably the most uncomfortable thing I've ever done, for the record.

Almost all the 'roads' we traveled on were just paths in the desert that other jeeps had took before, sealed roads are a luxury here, so on many days it would take us all day to travel a very bumpy 300km. Everywhere around us would always be empty, except for occasional herds of animals.

The next few days we visited Yolun Am, which is very famous for the amount of dinosaur fossils found there. The setting and the wind were amazing, but we didn't find any dinosaurs. We also stayed by a couple of cool rocky mountains in the middle of nowhere with some nomads. It turns out, when the sun goes down and all the animals are safely nearby the ger, one great way of entertaining yourself is to grab a big bag of ankle bones and play one of many great games. We were shown how to play a flicking game, and a catching game, but I'm sure that they would have shown us even more if our yawns weren't so exaggerated!

The final port of call was Terelj national park nearby to UB, where we stayed with some Kazaks who are originally from Kazakhstan. What made them so cool is that they use eagles to hunt. We got to hold one, it was amazing to feel the extreme power of its claws through a felt glove, and then the Kazaks set up a demo of how they use it. With a fox's hyde they pulled along they got it to swoop down from above, but it ended up attacking the guy pulling along the bit of fur. It was pretty absurd, and they did their best to impress us, but as our feet were so cold we just wanted to go inside! We finished that day in the best way for any Mongolian tour by visiting a humongous statue of Chingis and heading back to UB.

We're now looking forward to China, its 5C in Beijing by day, a crazy 30C warmer than here so we're looking forward to getting out our t-shirts!

If you've made it this far through the message, congratulations! Check out the photos, theres some pretty cool ones up.

Lots of love to everyone

xxxxxxxxxxxx

written by  harripix on December 13, 2010 from Nalayh, Mongolia
from the travel blog: harripix's Travel Blog
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