Romancing the Toilet Bowl

Well... I was expecting to have exciting stories of wild horses to tell you all by now. But, plans change, and I'll tell you a slightly boring story instead....

My flight to Ulaanbaatar was short and the MIAT food was seriously dodgy so I just watched a kids movie and looked out the window at the Gobi desert for a couple of hours. There were some beautiful salt lakes and rock formations but it's very barren.

John met me at the airport so getting to the guesthouse was no problem.

To sum up Ulaanbaatar would be to say 2 days is plenty. It's not as soviet as I'd been expecting, but it is run down and there are limited sights to see. The first couple of days I spent visiting the State Department Store and the museums. My plan was to wait for Elise, who was arriving a couple of days after me, and see if she'd like to share a car out to Hustai National Park which is where the herds of Przewalski wild horses are roaming. The cost is quite high to go alone but one or two others sharing the car makes it do-able. So I resigned myself to another day in UB. I'm really not a city person. And you'd have to love cities to appreciate UB.

On Thursday night we went to Dave's pub which is popular with ex-pats and entered the pub quiz along with an american guy and a couple of Irish guys who'd got in on the trans-Siberian. We came second to a team that apparently wins every week so we suspect insider knowledge of the questions. We were pretty pleased as there were 11 teams competing. Now, you may think that's an inordinate number of westerners in Ulaanbaatar and you'd be right. You may remember I mentioned Jamie the Brit who'd just done the Mongol Rally... well, Dave's pub is the End Point for the Mongol Rally and teams were drifting in and will be for a few weeks yet. The state of the cars was quite hilarious. They were pretty much falling apart. We spoke to an Irish couple (so many Irish folks on this trip so far... almost more than I met in Ireland!) who had just arrived in the city the day before. They were in his granny's Toyota Starlet and had had all manner of things go wrong. We heard about two guys who were doing the rally on monkey bikes (little 50cc mini motorbikes) in a batman suit and a superman suit. They hadn't arrived by that point, they'd last been seen in Russia. There was also a team in an ice cream truck that was en route through Russia.

An interesting item of information: to take a London taxi from Hyde Park in London to Sukhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar would cost you, in Pounds Sterling, 27,440.70. I know this because someone did the Rally in a London cab with the meter running. The things we humans do to amuse ourselves.....

When Elise arrived she arrived without her bags which is a common occurance on Aeroflot flights from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar. So, she had to wait until the next day and we delayed our departure to Hustai. Trina was also arriving the next day and we thought she might like to come too. That night we went out to dinner in one of the more expensive restaurants in UB. I had a yummy salad with side-effects. The long and the short of it is I experienced my first ever case of food poisoning. And bloody horrible it was too. I felt quite cheated that it was from a salad, though I'm told that salads are far more likely to be poisonous than meat. I spent the night getting progressively sicker, vomiting etc. Thank god (!) for the collection of homeopathic stuff Francie gave me for my birthday. Thank you little sister; the Nux Vomica plus and the Nausyn got a good amount of use. I decided not to use the anti diarrhea pills from the doc because I thought it's better out than in, really. In the morning I managed to pass out dramatically in the doorway while trying to get a bucket to use at the same time as sitting on the loo. I yelled on my way down and Sam heard me from the next room, so she came and picked me up off the floor. I think that's the first time I've genuinely fainted right into unconsciousness to wake up on the floor, all confused. Luckily for my travel companions I had that room to myself. It wasn't pretty... I managed to puke on two pairs of clean trousers and the bathroom smelled pretty funky in the morning. On the upside; it was a wonderful, lovely, user-friendly western toilet (not a freaky Chinese squatter) for which I'm eternally grateful.... I shudder to think of the results of using a squat pan in the dilerious state I was in that night!

Needless to say, our trip to Hustai was cancelled, hopefully to be resurrected after the pack horse trip. I think the others weren't that keen anyway.

We visited the Natural History museum to see the dinosaurs today along with the Bogd Khan's Winter Palace, which was very pretty. But I'm well and truly ready to get out of the city now and see some of the countryside. Just as well I'm going to be getting plenty of that!

Everyone on the trip is here now, we even managed to pick up a last minute American guy to add on to our train. He kind of spoils the female dominance we had going but he seems nice enough. We leave early tomorrow so I'll say goodbye for now.... In a couple of weeks I should have some better stories to tell.... hopefully sans salmonella et al.

xxx

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