Enter The Gobi - Day 3

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First up this morning we paid a visit to the flaming cliffs, named incidently because of the firey twinge that they possess. An area also famous for the discovery of Dinosaur eggs and also Velociraptor specimens. Close by was a ger set up as a museum, or 'useum' as the 'M' had fallen off. Several pictures, bones and artifacts were held inside that had been recovered from within the area. Karin licked the biggest bone in the 'useum', this was different. Up yonder from the 'useum' was a captivating view of the canyon, a view that sort of cropped up unexpectedly out of the blue, but welcome all the same. Ellie colonized the canyon with one of her Canuck flags.

I grabbed a beer from the 'usuem' and we hit the dirt road for the town of Bulgan. This would be the last town we would see for the next couple of days before heading deep into the heart of the Gobi. The towns existence in the realms of the bleakest of bleak, again you have to question how such a setup exists. Crops few and far between, livestock seemingly a key ingredient to the Mongolian diet, but lack of lush vegetation also make you wonder how even the livestock survive, especially during the winter months yet to come.

From Bulgan we could see the distant Khongoryn Els, the singing sands rising up along the horizon. It took about 4 hours to reach them. Our ger adjacent to the dunes were an exceptional spectacle, in places the dunes reach up to about 200 metres in height and the dunes themself run for some 185km. Its locale seeming completely random, just a mass of sand dumped in the middle of nowhere, its like a big order got put in somewhere along the line to build a Mongolian Tokyo but they just never got around the fore-filling the project.

Outside our ger the Mongolian host family were mustering goats to be treated. Methods somewhat very different to that of the western world, the goats being held in no yards or pens, just being contained by a circle of adults around them, someone would run towards the herd and grab themselves a beast, the goat would then be dragged kicking and screaming and then slam dunked into a hole of water dug in the ground, which presumably contained chemical in order to cleanse and de-lice them. Very old school techniques, but effective all the same. I don't personally fancy using this method with cattle however

Goats aside the prospect of climbing the dunes could not be put off. So we set off, the dunes were steep and the terrain smug, some patches more stern than others. England coming in pole position, naturally, I scaled to the peak in just under 10 minutes, the rest of the losers followed some 5 or 6 minutes later, Italy came last.

Sweating my shins off I pitched a seat upon the sand and admired the spellbinding views. The habitual landscape changes still taking me by surprise, a grassy plain with a decadent stream running through it right next door to a big fuck off pile of sand, it was like something out of a Stephen King dream sequence, but without the ghoulies and killer clowns.

During the night I thought I could hear a goat outside the ger going into labour, turns out it was just Ellie snoring.

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Comments

[Dancing Dave]

GO GOBI
Great blog...into the Gobi...one desert I have only got near...I'm interested to see what else you find.

[dsd_uk]

Cheers Dave, slowly but surely I get the other blogs up, Gobi is an amazing place, take care.