Day 290 - "Where we're going we don't need roads"

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Mongolia is a sparsely populated country to say the least, with 3 million people in a country the size of western Europe. And a third of them live in the capital city, which doesn’t leave many others to fill the remainder. So to get a proper idea of Mongolia you really have to venture outside Ulan Bator into nomad-occupied lands. Virtually all the organised tours go to one or other of 2 national parks where you can see a traditional Mongolian village in operation or indeed stay in one. You will also get to hear a variety of European languages, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. As luck would have it we stumbled across a tour company who like to do things a bit differently and they suggested we head out away from roads, houses, villages, telegraph poles and in fact far away from anything except nomads and their animals. The company was appropriately called Nomad Journeys. So we set out in our Russian van accompanied by English-speaking guide, Asemgul, and a driver called something impossible to pronounce but who shortened his name to Shaggy, and a couple of hours later we could have been anywhere. The tarmac roads deteriorated quickly outside Ulan Bator and before long it was just tracks or nothing at all. We spotted a couple of round felt tents called ‘gers’ in the distance and made a bee-line for them. As is apparently always the case, we were invited in for tea (more like just goat’s milk) and biscuits (deep-fried bread). It was an amazing experience being inside this nomadic home and seeing how they live before moving on to pastures new - their houses can be built in 90 minutes! They also had a couple of new born goats in there, as well as a baby who looked just like a Buddha - he’s going to make a good wrestler apparently - and for some reason a Singer sewing machine.

A little later we found another ger, after the driver had asked a lone horseman if he knew of any reasonably close by. This was a bit more substantial, with a satellite dish (!) and a certificate saying that they have over 1000 animals (something that highly impressed Shaggy). That’s a lot of legs. With that many animals half the inside of their house was taken up with a pen for new born ones to sleep in. Again they offered us tea (and again no evidence of a tea bag) and rock hard biscuits. It was just amazing that these people interrupt what they’re doing to spend half an hour staring at you whilst you sit in the best chairs inside their homes and eat and drink what they’ve given you. It’s also all the better for the refreshing lack of cynical ploys to part you with your money that most tourist trips include. So spontaneous and so memorable.

We ate lunch by a river with views stretching miles and miles but with not a single sign of the presence of man. It’s a great feeling getting away from things for a day. We drove back and realised that we had enough time for a visit to the Natural History Museum which was closed yesterday, and our guide stayed with us because there are not many translations inside. The museum’s primary attraction is dinosaurs because a lot have been found in Mongolia, well fossils have anyway. And one of them is utterly enormous - with claws 30cm long and 2m forearms.

The rest of the day was spent catching up on things like internet surfing and, for Ed, sleeping. This might sound lazy but he had dragged himself out of bed between the hours of 3am and 5am to watch Manchester City almost snatch a point at Arsenal.

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