Day #58: Tour wrangles and a show

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Thankfully feeling much better today, though still a bit weakened, so another quiet day. In fact I spent most of the afternoon joining a tour to the Gobi desert, which was much more complicated than I had anticipated.

Most travellers in Mongolia join tours to see the country, as the infrastructure is limited - there are public buses, but the system is complicated unless you are a native (for example, there is usually one bus a day or every other day to most places, but the departure times are unreliable - buses leave somewhere within a 2-hour timeframe - and the don't leave from a particular point, you flag them down by the side of the road, but they don't have numbers or anything that tells you their destination, so you just have to "know" which is your bus, and then when you arrive you need to find a driver to take you to the actual sights you want to see - not something I want to attempt alone, although a few people do).

I am joining a tour from my guesthouse as it is easier (ha!) to join a group that way - you have less freedom in that sense as a lone traveller, because if you have a ready-made group you can pretty much tell the guesthouse or any other tour operator where you want to go and they arrange it. I just have to go along with whoever I can find to travel with, although at this time of year there is some choice. So you hang out in the common area and kind of wait for people to turn up who might be interested in the same tour as you. So I hung around and eventually there were 7 of us who wanted to go to the Gobi. This is where it got complicated though, as then you have to decide how long for, and where exactly you will go, and how much you are willing to spend. I am a pretty laid back person and I was happy to go along with whatever within reason, but some people (Germans!) are very particular, and when you have two or three people who are very particular in different ways, things get difficult. The upshot was about 3 hours of increasingly heated argument in a language I don't understand anyway (I drank a lot of tea), followed by a decision to split the group (even though that makes it more expensive for everyone), but at least in the end I have a tour to go on, starting it 2 days' time, with two other people. The worst part is the tour will only cover about half my time in Mongolia, so I will probably go through the same thing again when I return to plan the other half.

The evening was much more relaxing as I went with some other people from my guesthouse to see a show in a temple in the park. It was entirely for tourists - there were only Westerners there - but still really interesting and skillful, featuring Mongolian throat-singing (I really have no idea how they do it), dancing, folk music (really excellent musicianship) and a contortionist who made my (still fragile) stomach flip.

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Comments

[Dolores Evans - George's PA]

Hi Helen
you look to be having a fabulous time. my son is learning Russian at school so I am going to pass on the link to your blog...hope you don't mind. Jimmy still misses you and is looking forward to you return. So all the best and thank you for all the interesting stuff in your blog...

[HelenT]

Hi Dolores Thanks for the message, of course that's fine. Hope you are all doing ok, i know from others that it's not easy at the moment at real, thinking of you all, say hi to george from me! Enjoying writing the blog, it keeps me occupied!