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Russian Border Town - Stranded!
Our carriage was left on the platform by itself for 5-6 hours while our "passports were checked". We weren't told this and until our cabin mate went out to use the loo we had no idea. Strange. Very strange. We were carriage no.9 of about 15 before and after this!! Getting There 24 hour train journey, 12 hours at 2 border towns and 12 hours moving.
First Impressions We instantly liked Mongolia. Russia can be a little tiring at times as people don't smile nearly as much as we are used to and when you don't speak much of the language it can be disheartening - you're never sure if the conversation's going well or badly! However, the Mongolian style of interaction was mucj more open and despite not speaking ANY Mongolian we felt very welcome. We did actually have good intentions of learning a few words and had spent a couple of hours on the train coming up with memory hooks to learn numbers 1-10 from a book. This was a complete waste of time as within 10 mins of arriving we asked someone to say the numbers and realised that they sounded nothing like what we'd
read and the sounds were so alien to us that we could not say them. So we learned to say thankyou and stuck to that for the rest of our stay!
So pretty much as soon as we arrived we signed up to a 5 day, 4 night tour
into the countryside with another newly married couple who had arrived on the same train and were booked onto the same train as us to go on to China. This was very much the done thing and alll 8 people who'd come in on our train grouped together likewise for similar trips depending on how many days they had.
The Itinerary Day 1: Drive to Ogiy Lake & stay overnight in a ger with a family, dinner included
Day 2: Drive to Karakoram (the old capital) then on to Orkhon Valley National Park to see a waterfall & stay overnight in a ger, breakfast & dinner included.
Day 3: Drive to sand dunes "mini gobi" & stay overnight in a ger, breakfast & dinner included.
Day 4: Drive to Terelj National Park via Ulaanbaatar & stay overnight in a ger, breakfast & dinner included.
Our Crew As I already said we teamed up with another newly married couple. They were Kim & Brian, a dentist and optician respectively, from Northern Ireland but living in Edinburgh, had got married a couple of weeks AFTER us, the cheek!
Also along for the trip
was our very competent driver "Cyril" and our less competent (studying English, but proved to be expert at breaking into people's back gardens so that we could use their "toilets") translator "Rachel". These are, of course, their
English names. Rachel did tell us (once) their Mongolian names but we didn't stand a chance pronouncing them. The drivers name did actually sound a little bit like Cyril though, as I remember.
Highlights/insights 1. Vodka - not the russian kind though. The Mongolian national drink is fermented mare's milk (imagine a cup of fizzy milk that tastes of cheese and needs to be downed in one) and we also got to sample fermented yogurt (as strong as vodka, not as palatable though)
2. Landscape + crazy driver - the Mongolian landscape is truly mental, hardly suprising when you consider that the country's area is greater than all of western europe put together. We saw waterfalls, mountains, lush medows, barren landscapes, cravasses and much, much more. This was made even more adventurous by the fact that our driver, "Cyril", had to navigate these landscapes without the aid of conventional roadways in van that had seen better days (although, given the
Ulaanbaator
Main square: Chingis (Ghengis) Khan statue with mountain backdrop. The city is mostly surrounded by mountains which aptly reflects the location: middle of nowhere! punishment it took over the course of our 5 day excursion, I have serious respect for the mechanics that put that machine together).
3. Mongolian dogs - these appear to live according to a different timetable to everyone else. They spend all day sleeping and pestering you for food, and at night stand outside your Ger, barking loudly under the pretence that they "scare off wolves".
4. Taking a leak in the Mongolian dessert in the middle of the night - there are no conventional toilets. Walk into the outback in the middle of the night to answer nature's call and it's a bit of a lottery as to what you'll run into. Graham got interupted by an inquisitive horse in the Gobi, but inquisitive cows and rabid dogs (see point 3 above) were just as common. No wolves were encountered, which makes me even more suspicious that the dogs in point 3 above are on easy street.
5. Small children in high risk horse riding sports - unfortunately we missed Nadeem (the Mongolian equivalent of the Olympics) by a week but we did get to witness a warm up for one of the horse racing events
that are due to take place in early July. Whilst driving through the National Park our eagle eyed driver spotted (from a distance of about 1.5 km) a couple of horses being prepared for a race. Turned out that an inpromptu race was about to take place. Over the that course of the next hour or so about twenty 5-10 year old children appeared on the scene with horses and proud fathers in tow (only 5-10 year olds ride at Nadeem, with many horse and child casualties each year unfortunately). We then got to follow the final 1km or so of the race (it was 4km long) race by driving alongside the riders in our van!!!! I can't describe how crazy this was. Our driver, Cyril, just put his foot down with a "to hell with the territory" kind of attitute (there was no road) and we tracked the horses all the way to the finish line. Truly, truly mental, but brilliant and easily the highlight of the trip.
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Keith Moran
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Horse play
I love the picture of the exhilarating horse, wind in the hair, stallions in their prime etc. Then what is in the photo below? A sheep-ish looking Levere, trotting along on some old nag, way past its best. Its like Steptoe and Son on Tour.