Land of blue sky

We're back in Ulan Bator after our adventure in the Mongolian countryside....

We spent every night of the trip with nomadic family. This country is incredible- 50% of the population are nomadic or semi-nomadic- living in round felt 'gers' (yurts) and moving four times each year with the seasons. The rest of the population lives in U.B. which is really weird as there are basically no tarmac roads in the country apart from in and around U.B. and the government has no money so regional development is impossible. There is a problem with rural-urban migration because everyone wants to move to U.B. but the city is surrounded by hills so can only grow a finite amount. This means that 'ger districts' have grown up on the hillsides around the city. The contrast when you go out of the city is amazing because the country is so vast, there aren't many towns and so you can just drive for hours and hours and days just seeing the odd ger.

Contrary to our expectations now's a really good time for travel in Mongolia because by now families have set up their gers for the winter and so won't be moving until April or so. They don't really have much to do over the winter apart from trying to keep their animals alive- so they have plenty of time to hang out with tourists. It's possible to knock on the door of any ger and expect to be allowed to stay for the night.

Our guide was really a translator and navigator, she had an idea of which gers we would aim for each night (with family friend of our guest house's staff etc.) but sometimes they would have moved on and so we'd just find another ger to stay at. The families were always welcoming even when they weren't expecting us. Some of the gers, in National Parks etc., had sort of spare gers where us visitors could sleep on beds around the edge with a wood burner in the middle, whilst in other places we just all slept in the same ger with the family! This was really cosy at times with six of us on the floor in the middle of the ger and the family in beds round the edge.

On most days we were driving and walking/horseriding/camel riding during the day and we'd arrive at a ger in the early evening. At every ger we were each greeted with a bowl of milk tea with salt and often hard tasteless biscuits. We'd chat a bit (via our translator) to the family and play with the (really cute) kids. Later on the man of the ger would always bring out the meat. We were sometimes eased in gently with a round of steamed mutton dumplings but we would nearly always eventually move on to the bucket of indiscernible meat bits. Eating this involved just sitting (usually on the floor) around the bucket with most of the family either being passed bits of meat of being passed a knife to hack away at the nearest bit. We had to eat not just the juicy meat bits but also big bits of fat that were passed to us and slices of intestine (it's wasteful not to). It was really hard to stomach and i managed to decline sometimes but our driver always insisted that the boys ate loads. The first night we were eating horse meat but i think it was mainly mutton for the rest of the trip.

In the winter Mongolians really don't eat anything apart from meat and bland flour-based accompaniments. The meat is always old because they only slaughter the livestock when it's about to die anyway. It really would have been difficult to cope with for nine days if our guide hadn't cooked us veggie lunches on most days when we were on the road!

After meat on lots of nights someone in the family would get out a bag of (sheep and goat) ankle bones and we'd play a game that involved flicking them around the table. On some nights we got out the vodka- Mongolians seem to like it as much as the Russians did.

During the first few days we went East towards the Khunga Nurum National Park. Our first night was so strange. We arrived in the dark but the stars and moon were so bright that we could half- see the weird landscape of wide openness with nobbly hills sticking up, camels, sheep, goats and cows all around the gers. The sky was incredibly clear (as it always is in Mongolia) so we could see the Milky-Way and watch shooting stars.

It wasn't as cold on the trip as it had been when we were in UB before- though I don't know the temperature. There was usually no toilet (though a couple of families had dug a long drop), and never any water (apart from what we'd brought to drink) so we weed and pood outside in the cold and we brushed our teeth outside. I hate having dirty hands so it was really hard not being able to wash them properly after ripping chunks of meat off bones!

The map shows our route. The landscapes were incredible and I don't think the photos do justice to the vastness of the desert. It's such a diverse country-even just the small part we saw is really varied. We visited Kharkhorim, the ancient capital and spent two nights in the National Park where we went horse trekking to a fantastic frozen waterfall. In the Gobi we drove in the dark in a snowstorm (our driver somehow knew where to go) to a ger camp near to the 'Flaming Cliffs'. We saw sand dunes half-covered in snow and we went to Yolyn Am (in Gurvan Saikhan National Park), the "Ice-filled gorge', which was definitely my favorite bit of the trip. Its a huge valley in the middle of the desert with massive mountains all around. I think it's best to look at the photos because I can't describe all the places.

At one of the gers in the south gobi there was a dog (all the gers have scary guard dogs) that had recently had puppies. Our driver decided he wanted one for his home in U.B. so for the journey back to the city we had a little puppy (we called her 'Dumpling') in the back of the van with us and sleeping with us inside of the ger.

There's loads more I could say but I think I'd better not as this is getting a bit too long! We're going to Beijing on Thursday so I might write another entry before we go about Ulan Bator because it's such a cool city and I haven't mentioned it much.

Hope everyone's OK. Thanks for all the comments...
Love Charlie and Tristan x x

---

---

---