Blogs from Terelj, Mongolia, Asia

17-18 juillet Le ciel colérique éclate sur Oulan-Bator. Il est 6AM. Il n'est pas rare qu'une terrifiante averse soudaine ébranle d'un coup le Pays, lui qui subit des écarts de température impossible. Il a neigé dans le désert de Gobi en juin l'an dernier que m'a confirmé Moogi, l'attentive propriétaire du guesthouse où je loge depuis mon arrivée. Un 20 minutes d'intense pluie a suffit pour nettoyer la ville. Puis sans se faire attendre davantage, l'alarmant soleil nucléaire reprit rapidement sa place en dévoilant une prévisible journée à 30 degré. Après le déjeuner, Geneviève (une comptable du Missouri... c'est pas moi qui l'invente) et moi-même prenons place à l'arrière d'une Hyundai grise métallique que conduira Rainbow, une forte mère de famille qui pourrait mettre hors d'usage n'importe quel portier de la province. Matriarcale, la société mongol ... read more

R: The next day was our trip out into the Mongolian countryside. The best way to do this is hire a 4x4 and guide so we did just that. First we headed out to the Genghis Khan statue which is about 55km out of town. Its a strange site - really in the middle of nowhere - the intention being that the statue looks over the land of the Mongols. It has a large car park and then a flight of stairs up. The statue was completed in 2008 but the noticeable thing was the decaying steps as you headed up to the building. You go in through a building at the bottom which has a shop and museum filled with slightly unusual exhibits in the basement, before taking the lift up to just below the ... read more

Today we were heading a couple of hours out of the capital to go to a ger camp in Terelj National Park, about 60 kms northwest of the city, where we would stay overnight in a ger or yurt, as they are otherwise known – the traditional nomadic round tent “house”. Nemo had said to us that, even though our destination wasn’t that far away from the city, it would take us about 2 and a half hours to get there because the road conditions out of the city were very rough in parts until we reached the outskirts so, we would have to travel slowly. All tar-sealed (for the most part) we did, however, encounter some very large pot holes and other areas where the asphalt had broken away from the edges of the road, ... read more

After 100 hours of train from Moscow, on the morning of 14th of October, we made it to Ulan Baator. A driver picked up us just before sunset to make our way to the Terelj National Park. In the city, it must have been something like minus 10 Celsius...it's already winter here! UB, aka Ulan Baator early morning looks like in the middle of a property boom...till, not sure I ever want to live here...but that will be for next blog. But we were not here to discover Ulan Baator...the plan, and it's the same for most tourists...was to discover Mongolia...or rather, it's beautiful countryside... Now the trick is...it's middle of October, the official season is over....we have just spent nearly 5 days on a train....Mongolia has a bad reputation for food...and it was out of ... read more

Because of its proximity to Ulaanbaatar - only about an hour's drive - Terelj National Park is touristy, in fact the first part of Mongolia I have been to that could really be described as such. Ger camps are as frequent as hotels in the city, lined up one after the other, and I even saw one where some of the gers, on closer inspection, turned out to be be made of concrete. Maybe for people who want to fool their families into thinking they stayed in a ger? Others were in garish colours, bright blues and oranges. At the entrance to the park there was a collection of grand-looking houses, which turned out to be the holiday homes of wealthy Mongolians. The park's main attraction is the Gunjiin Sum monastery, which sits up in the ... read more