Day 3 and 4 Mongolia Ulaanbaatar

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We had a great dinner with Patrick in a restaurant that had sections for Japanese, Chinese and Mongolian foods beautifully furnished in the each country's tradition. We sat in a Mongolian ger to eat. Patrick was able to fill in the history and background of Mongolia and how this made them the Nation they are today. It was a helpful history lesson for us for our next two days in Mongolia.



Our guide picked us up with car at 10am the next morning for our whirlwind tour of the city. First it was off to Chinnghis square, which is the central square of the city with a large statue of Chinnghis (Genghis in our vocabulary). He is very much the hero of Mongolian history and even now after any special event (marriage, birth, graduation) the whole family come to the square for photos and a gathering around the statue in their traditional dress.



After that it was off to the main Buddhist temple (53% of the Mongolians are Tibetan Buddhist although the original Mongolians very shamanistic) and the monk school where the trainees were learning their chants plus a group of monks were producing a new chalk dust art work (as seen on VEEP for all those devotees).



Following this it was off to the Mongolian National History Museum. We discovered the deep attachment of their cultural with the horse. Their long history started with prehistoric bits and bridles in the first display room. In the rest of the museum we caught up with their 3,000 years of history. The last 100 years was fascinating with the involvement of the Russians in their culture and development.



We then headed off to lunch at a Mongolian restaurant. The staff's t-shirt at the restaurant summarised the Mongolian view of food " Men eat meat - animals eat grass".



The afternoon was spent of the 'Cashmere factory outlet' and the last king's winter palace.



In the evening we were treated to a fantastic cultural concert where we were entertained by the national orchestra, Mongolian throat singing, folk dancing (our guide's sister was one of the dancers )



The next day we headed off to the national park to the NE of the city where a number of the other train passengers we'd met on the train out of Beijing had spent the night sleeping in a traditional ger. On the way to the national park we were taken to the largest statue of Genghis Khan in the world (think of 'the statue of liberty' size - see photo). The national park was stunningly beautiful. The Mongolians are very busy building lots of resorts in the park to cater for their growing tourist industry. We lunched at one of these resorts and then went for a short hike and half way through the walk it started to rain. We dried out very quickly as the temperature that day was 30 Celsius (the day before was 28).



Then it was back to the city for dinner at a Mongolian BBQ restaurant and then off to catch our next train and catch up with our fellow travellers on their adventures in the city and park.

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Photos

Julies new ger
Hang the renovations

Comments

[Julianne and Ross]

Busy day
You guys are great tourists, keep up the energy, looks great.