Ahh Mongolia.... To me this country was a land that could fill a little boys wildest dreams. Ever since I was small I'd always wanted to visit this land. For me whenever I heard about Chinggis Khaan I would day-dream about a time and life of nomads, warriors, harshness and battles.
For those of you who only know Mongolia as the name of a small country, let me tell you a bit about this place.
Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, for every person there is 3 square miles with your name on it. Back in 1230ad they had a great warrior named Ghengis (Chinggis) Khaan who led a band of some 100 000 herders and hunters and went on a rampage and eventually conquered land from China and Korea in the east, to Russia in the north, all the way down to India in the southwest, and even pushed in all the way to Europe in the west. They were called Mongols and were know to be some of the meanest, feared and strongest people to walk the earth. Every person was a skilled warrior with a bow and arrow and were a born natural on the back of a horse. They mainly ate meat (what ever they killed) and drank milk (that's no joke) and when they wanted to get drunk, they fermented mares milk (horse milk) into a deadly cocktail. That was then.... and the funny thing is, not much has changed in 800 years.
So we found ourselves at Zamyn Uud the dust dirty border town of Mongolia. After an overnight bus from Beijing we were confronted with dust, dirt, and dead animals. We purchased our train tickets onwards to Ulaanbataar and had a few hours to kill so we explored the wind blown town that is slowly being eaten metre by metre by the great Gobi desert. And of course, we drank our first Mongolian beers.
Aboard our cosy train we watched as the never ending scenery of dunes, gers (aka yerts, a demountable round hut made out of felt and timber with a stove) camels, sheep, cows, yaks and horses passed us by until the sun set. At this time a band of local clothes merchants on a returning trip from China dragged me into their cabin and convinced me to do shot after shot of vodka while Robyn ever so diligently took photos to record the event and its outcome. The next morning we were more than surprised to pass around a beautiful mountain to see the the disaster that is Ulaanbataar.
The capitol city of Mongolia houses 1 million of its 2 million people and has the proud title of “the worst place in the world to get pick-pocketed”(at one guest house, one person was getting robed every day!) Upon our arrival we were greeted by the staff from Khongor guest house. The GH staff were a godsend for us, they picked us up at the station, and patiently helped us sort out what we wanted to do for our month. Our original plan was to buy horses and ride for a month anywhere we felt but after a bit of research we realised that it was:
a) becoming way to cold, the temperature was already below zero at night)..
b) not very easy to organise
c) expensive, and we would have to buy an extra pack horse
d) in a month you don't get very far on the back of a horse
e) its been wayyyyy too long since either of us had been on horses.
So instead we decided to rent an old Russian jeep (ie. a vw kombi on steroids with monster truck wheels an engine that is made up of any other car part the driver can get his hands on) and driver/mechanic. It even came with 2 tents, 6 sleeping bags and a bunch of cooking equipment. All we had to do was pay for fuel, tolls and our own food and accommodation. So for the next 3 days Rob, I and the 2 Aussies we hired the van with went shopping for all the worldly goods that we would need from salt and pepper to oil, butter, veggies, rice and pasta. We even managed to go to the black market, which isn't really black but just a massive market full of fake and knock off gear from China and Russia which it turns out is even cheaper than in its original country (if only I had known this before buying my fake NorthFace jacket in Beijing).
After lots of shopping and with our rough plan we met our driver/ new best friend Manal; a bear of a man with a good old fashion communist haircut and a great sense of humour. He greeted us like long lost friends and piled us into his pride and joy declaring that he had paid 11 camels, 8 years ago for this giant grey brick. He used to be a herder and wanted a change, so thought driving tourists around sounded like fun. So off we coughed and spluttered grinding every gear and bunny hopping at every stop. We had only made it a few km out of the city when we were pulled over by the police. Manal jumped out of the van declaring in English “no problem.” 30 mins later and 1000 tg (85 Aus cents) we were on our way again. It turns out that our Russian van was an ambulance in its past life and still bore the registration of this, so the police wanted to know why he was driving around 4 foreign people in an ambulance? Quick thinking Manal said they we were all sick and he was taking us to hospital (AWAY from UB?). The cop who must have been a few brain cells short of the full quid said ok and took a small bribe and sent us on our way.
Just over a few hours later the lovely sealed road disappeared turning into a series of dusty dirt tracks that zig-zagged in every direction from horizon to horizon. So ended our sealed road and Welcome to the millennium high way (which the locals joke is called that cause it will take that long to finish.) This is how all of Mongolia's roads are, nothing more than a goat track. Every year the snows covers the roads and by the spring a new road is created. When the spring rains come all the goat tracks turn to mud and it can take hours or even days to navigate the quagmire.6 hours later we arrived at our first destination – Amarbayarsgalant.
Amarbayasgalant is the second biggest temple in Mongolia and we found ourselves in a green valley surrounded by gers and nomadic people and their livestock. We quickly set up our tents to find that one of the tent's had broken zippers! Luckily we had borrowed one from a friend in Beijing before leaving, so we set up camp in the diminishing light and cooked our first camp meal. By the time we had cleaned up our mess the temperature had already dropped to close to zero. We had been given 6 sleeping bags for 4 people which at first we thought was an accident but it turns out you really need to have 2 sleeping bags each! Again we were lucky as Rob and I have been traveling with our own sleeping bags but even with 4 between us, we still could have done with 4 more. We had heard rumours that the annual temple festival was going to start but noone could tell us exactly when so we decided to wait and wait and walk around the mountains and rivers and wait some more. Finally after 3 days it started, and although there was alot of build-up about it, I found it got very boring very fast so we left half way through.
Our next destination was a place called Khovsgol Lake in the very north. Although it was only 700km away, due to the bad roads (or lack of roads) it took us 2 days! Camping and cooking in the great outdoors was still a novelty so we decided to camp again on a random patch of grass where Manal decided looked good and after the temperature dropped to below zero over night again, with half frozen bodies we packed up camp, and loaded ourselves back into our Russian van/ brick on steroids and kept driving. Manal told us that his wife who was also a tour guide was going to be in Khovsgol lake as well, and they hadn't seen each other for over a month so we all agreed to keep driving after dark (extemely dangerous with no roads, no signs, no lights and lots of potholes, marrmot holes(a squirrel cross ferret cross chipmunk) and riverbeds) so that Manal could see her for a couple of nights. He was very excited and smiled one of his famous smiles before saying “But first we must shower!” It had been 5 days since our last encounter with water so we were more than excited by the prospect of this! The shower we found was in a basement of a restaurant, opposite a karaoke bar and had multiple shower-heads, a small room with filthy couches and a tv. Hmmm. Public showerhouse or brothel? Feeling cleaner we drove into the night and arrived at Khatgal around 11.30pm and -5C after 14 hours of driving (bumping). We met Manal's lovely wife Bogi. She showed us to our ger,as this was our first night sleeping inside one we were very surprised by the heat wave that we were greeted with once inside, it must have been over 30 degrees! The other thing we noticed when we entered, was the size, gers can be very deceiving from the out side, this one had 4 single beds positioned around the wall , a table and a basin. The designs of these round homes are to keep them low to the ground ( max hight in the centre is 7ft, and on the edge is only 3 to 4 ft) and to retain heat in the winter and disperse heat in the summer.(There is actually a summer ger and a winter ger they look the same but do very different things) The single stove in the centre is used for cooking of foods and heating (and in our case drying clothes. We were so exhausted we collapsed into our beds with the fire roaring. A few hours later the fire had burnt out and we were dissapointed to find that the ger was just as cold as camping, and yet again we shivered into a state just above sleep, but not quite there!
Our plans from here were to rent horses and ride for a week north around the Lake (the second largest freshwater lake in the world), but were told the north (Siberia!!) was already covered in snow and most of the Nomads had left to head south, meaning there would be no gers to stay at. So we decided to give up on the north and just ride as far as we could. Another amazing sunny day in Mongolia greeted us and we climbed onto our Mongolian horses. Some people would make fun of a Mongolian horse for it size or lack of, (I know I did) but these horse are tough mofos! You could whip it for a week and it wouldn't move a foot... the way to make these guys move is by singing to them, the louder you sing the faster the horse moves, our guide never told us that one. Soon we were galloping across dry river beds and through fields bright with yellow pine trees. It was some of the most amazing scenery ever, with the golden colours of autumn combining with the bluest skies we had seen in a long time making it a journey that will forever stay in our minds... along with the memory of our sore arses we got from riding on Russian style saddles (basically nothing more than a piece of cloth stretched over a very small timber frame.) At the end of the second day, we all collapsed off our horses (who were probably just as glad to get rid of us) and declared that we could take no more. It had been a lot of fun and stunningly beautiful, but the saddles were the death of us.
After me running a fever of 39.3C and spending 24 hours in a ger with the fire raging, we made our way back to Khatgal (the town at the start of the southern end of the lake where we had started from) and then a further 70kms (3 hours,) to the oddly named town of “moron” for a night in a real house with real brick walls, such a nice warm change from tents and the felt walls of a ger. Small luxuries.
The next day after 15 mins of driving we started to climb mountains that were covered in snow, and within another 30 mins we were begging Manal to pull over so we could play in the snow like a bunch of rambunctious kids, while Manal again took to fixing the car. (Manal was fanatical about his car and every time we stopped he could be found underneath with the drive-shaft or leaf springs out. He never asked for a hand, he just did it by himself every time no matter how difficult it was.) So after a quick tyre change and with 4 grown adults having finished throwing snow balls (it was my first snow and my first snowball hit Rob smackbang in the back of the head!!) at each other, we jumped back into the Scooby Dooby Doo mystery van and kept on driving higher and higher through more and more snow. At the top it was like a white wonder land but heading down hill it took us only 30 minutes before we moved into another world, with the white and cold scenery being replaced with a dry, hot and yellow grass landscape. With not a tree in sight or another living thing, it was like a mini desert. It was amazing to watch Manal drive a vehicle over plains and hills with no real roads or signs for hours on end, every now and then he would pull up to someone on a motorbike and ask them if the way he was going was correct, when he would find out that infact he was exactly where he wanted to be,he would reply with ZAZAZAZA... which translates to roughly yeah yeah yeah...( he only got lost once in 15days!) After passing through a valley filled with about 50 vultures, we decided that the day had been sooo beautiful and memorable that camping would be in order. After a quick set up we discovered that we had been invaded by local nomad children and their horses, ever curious as to who these strange white people where and what they were doing. Mongolia has a high literacy rate but these boys didn't go to school and were amazed to see us. I took out my poi-s and tried teaching them some tricks which they loved! And they thought the whole concept of flicking a bottle top from your elbow and catching it was the best thing since sliced bread! It was the experiences like this, with real locals just as curious about us as we were about them that made Mongolia so amazing.
That night after sending the boys singing on their horses back to their gers so far away that we couldnt even see them, we quickly noticed that the temperature was dropping at a alarming rate, and by the time we decided to go to bed (9pm) the temp had already dropped to 4 degrees. We scuttled to our tents and put on every item of clothing that we could fit, and stuffed the rest of our clothes into our sleeping bags for insulation but the temp kept dropping and got to-15 degrees at its coldest! At 7am we were frozen and awake but it was still -8C and with our water and even our tea bags frozen we couldnt even have a drink! After this a group decision was made, no more camping or the remainder of the trip.
After packing up camp with fingers that wouldn't work from the cold we grabbed Manal from under the van, stuck him in the drivers seat and took off picking up a few hitch hikers along the way. It was awesome to be in the middle of know where with not a living thing around as far as you could see then out of thin air some one would be standing by the goat track, this is one of the only ways to get around Mongolia as there are no bus routes or highways and of course it would be rude not to pick someone up because another car might not pass for another day or 2. We had heard a few good things about White Lake but weren't as impressed as the masses although we did manage to wash our clothes for the first time in 2 weeks (our clothes were practically able to wash themselves).
Our next stop was Tsenkher hot springs for some much needed R&R. Along the way we notice a motor bike lying on its side with a man in a crumpled heap underneath it, we quickly stopped the van and ran to where the victim lay. At first it appeared that he was hit by something, but as we got closer we noticed that he was facing the wrong direction of his bike, then we notice a large graze to his head, but if he had fallen and been pinned under the bike, like we first thought then the wounded side of his head would have been face down. Then we smelt him..... he was blind drunk. What we figured had happened was he got plastered jumped on his motor bike drove somewhere crashed (writing off the bike) the rolling over and passing back out he was lucky he hadn't been run over as he was just over the crest of a hill. Manal who dosen't drink didn't want to waste time on a drunk driver so walked up to the unconscious man and dragged him to his feet then threw him to the side of the road, then dragging the remains of the bike of the road. And told us to let the drunkard sleep it off. Latter that evening Manal received a phone call from his family saying that his mother who had suffered a stroke at the start of our trip had taken a turn for the worst . Manal decided to rush home to his family so we said sad farewells to our best friend, translator, driver, mechanic, comedian, and all round hero who still had to drive another 36 hours to drive to get home. While we waited for our new driver, we spent hours in the hot springs making up for all the times we hadn't showered in the past 15 days.
With our new driver and a new (newish) van we made a B line for Tovkon-Khiid, the oldest temple in Mongolia, and built by Zanabazar, a direct descendant of Chinggis Khaan. During the Russia control of Mongolia from the 1930s to the 90s, all religious objects and places of worship had been destroyed in a show of communism might but now rebuilt, it was a popular place for locals and tourists alike. It took an hour or so of asking random gers to find it, and then another hour or so to climb the lush mountain to the hill top retreat temple that was built like a stone fort.
We spent a couple of days in Mongolia's former capital Kharkhoram. Once upon a time it was a major supply route for Mongol armies and was ruled by Chinggis Khaan's second son, however after 40 years Chinggis Khaan's grandson took over control and moved the Mongolian capital to Peking aka Beijing. At Kharkhoram we explored another old temple and bought some alleged antiques. And watched some truly amazing throat singing (a kind of deep throaty growl that could change tones, most intersting indeed!) Already 20 days into our 18day trip, we drove all day again arriving at our final stop, Khustain national park, a place Rob had dreamed of coming to since we saw a documentary on it back in Thailand! It was the home of the last wild horse left in the world, the Takhi, and had some 2000 of them in the park. Only 10 years before there wasn't even a single Takhi left in the wild, but a careful breeding program undertaken from horses bought from zoos around the world and the species had been saved. These horses looked more like a zebra minus the black and white stripes,(but they did have strips on their legs) and within an hour we had already seen more than 20 of these incredibly elusive horses, and even some wild deer. Rob's dreams fulfulled, we convinced a local ranger to let us sleep in his ger for the night and to our surprise were back in the Ulaanbataar by lunch the next day. And this is where this leg of the story finishes, with hot showers, food that wasn't mutton, or goat. And very very glad to be by ourselves...
This was our adventures during the first 20 days in Mongolia, click here to read about part two and our last 10 days in this crazy part of the world!!
For those of you who only know Mongolia as the name of a small country, let me tell you a bit about this place.
Mongolia is the least densely populated country in the world, for every person there is 3 square miles with your name on it. Back in 1230ad they had a great warrior named Ghengis (Chinggis) Khaan who led a band of some 100 000 herders and hunters and went on a rampage and eventually conquered land from China and Korea in the east, to Russia in the north, all the way down to India in the southwest, and even pushed in all the way to Europe in the west. They were called Mongols and were know to be some of the meanest, feared and strongest people to walk the earth. Every person was a skilled warrior with a bow and arrow and were a born natural on the back of a horse. They mainly ate meat (what ever they killed) and drank milk (that's no joke) and when they wanted to get drunk, they fermented mares milk (horse milk) into a deadly cocktail. That was then.... and the funny thing is, not much has changed in 800 years.
So we found ourselves at Zamyn Uud the dust dirty border town of Mongolia. After an overnight bus from Beijing we were confronted with dust, dirt, and dead animals. We purchased our train tickets onwards to Ulaanbataar and had a few hours to kill so we explored the wind blown town that is slowly being eaten metre by metre by the great Gobi desert. And of course, we drank our first Mongolian beers.
Aboard our cosy train we watched as the never ending scenery of dunes, gers (aka yerts, a demountable round hut made out of felt and timber with a stove) camels, sheep, cows, yaks and horses passed us by until the sun set. At this time a band of local clothes merchants on a returning trip from China dragged me into their cabin and convinced me to do shot after shot of vodka while Robyn ever so diligently took photos to record the event and its outcome. The next morning we were more than surprised to pass around a beautiful mountain to see the the disaster that is Ulaanbataar.
The capitol city of Mongolia houses 1 million of its 2 million people and has the proud title of “the worst place in the world to get pick-pocketed”(at one guest house, one person was getting robed every day!) Upon our arrival we were greeted by the staff from Khongor guest house. The GH staff were a godsend for us, they picked us up at the station, and patiently helped us sort out what we wanted to do for our month. Our original plan was to buy horses and ride for a month anywhere we felt but after a bit of research we realised that it was:
a) becoming way to cold, the temperature was already below zero at night)..
b) not very easy to organise
c) expensive, and we would have to buy an extra pack horse
d) in a month you don't get very far on the back of a horse
e) its been wayyyyy too long since either of us had been on horses.
So instead we decided to rent an old Russian jeep (ie. a vw kombi on steroids with monster truck wheels an engine that is made up of any other car part the driver can get his hands on) and driver/mechanic. It even came with 2 tents, 6 sleeping bags and a bunch of cooking equipment. All we had to do was pay for fuel, tolls and our own food and accommodation. So for the next 3 days Rob, I and the 2 Aussies we hired the van with went shopping for all the worldly goods that we would need from salt and pepper to oil, butter, veggies, rice and pasta. We even managed to go to the black market, which isn't really black but just a massive market full of fake and knock off gear from China and Russia which it turns out is even cheaper than in its original country (if only I had known this before buying my fake NorthFace jacket in Beijing).
After lots of shopping and with our rough plan we met our driver/ new best friend Manal; a bear of a man with a good old fashion communist haircut and a great sense of humour. He greeted us like long lost friends and piled us into his pride and joy declaring that he had paid 11 camels, 8 years ago for this giant grey brick. He used to be a herder and wanted a change, so thought driving tourists around sounded like fun. So off we coughed and spluttered grinding every gear and bunny hopping at every stop. We had only made it a few km out of the city when we were pulled over by the police. Manal jumped out of the van declaring in English “no problem.” 30 mins later and 1000 tg (85 Aus cents) we were on our way again. It turns out that our Russian van was an ambulance in its past life and still bore the registration of this, so the police wanted to know why he was driving around 4 foreign people in an ambulance? Quick thinking Manal said they we were all sick and he was taking us to hospital (AWAY from UB?). The cop who must have been a few brain cells short of the full quid said ok and took a small bribe and sent us on our way.
Just over a few hours later the lovely sealed road disappeared turning into a series of dusty dirt tracks that zig-zagged in every direction from horizon to horizon. So ended our sealed road and Welcome to the millennium high way (which the locals joke is called that cause it will take that long to finish.) This is how all of Mongolia's roads are, nothing more than a goat track. Every year the snows covers the roads and by the spring a new road is created. When the spring rains come all the goat tracks turn to mud and it can take hours or even days to navigate the quagmire.6 hours later we arrived at our first destination – Amarbayarsgalant.
Amarbayasgalant is the second biggest temple in Mongolia and we found ourselves in a green valley surrounded by gers and nomadic people and their livestock. We quickly set up our tents to find that one of the tent's had broken zippers! Luckily we had borrowed one from a friend in Beijing before leaving, so we set up camp in the diminishing light and cooked our first camp meal. By the time we had cleaned up our mess the temperature had already dropped to close to zero. We had been given 6 sleeping bags for 4 people which at first we thought was an accident but it turns out you really need to have 2 sleeping bags each! Again we were lucky as Rob and I have been traveling with our own sleeping bags but even with 4 between us, we still could have done with 4 more. We had heard rumours that the annual temple festival was going to start but noone could tell us exactly when so we decided to wait and wait and walk around the mountains and rivers and wait some more. Finally after 3 days it started, and although there was alot of build-up about it, I found it got very boring very fast so we left half way through.
Our next destination was a place called Khovsgol Lake in the very north. Although it was only 700km away, due to the bad roads (or lack of roads) it took us 2 days! Camping and cooking in the great outdoors was still a novelty so we decided to camp again on a random patch of grass where Manal decided looked good and after the temperature dropped to below zero over night again, with half frozen bodies we packed up camp, and loaded ourselves back into our Russian van/ brick on steroids and kept driving. Manal told us that his wife who was also a tour guide was going to be in Khovsgol lake as well, and they hadn't seen each other for over a month so we all agreed to keep driving after dark (extemely dangerous with no roads, no signs, no lights and lots of potholes, marrmot holes(a squirrel cross ferret cross chipmunk) and riverbeds) so that Manal could see her for a couple of nights. He was very excited and smiled one of his famous smiles before saying “But first we must shower!” It had been 5 days since our last encounter with water so we were more than excited by the prospect of this! The shower we found was in a basement of a restaurant, opposite a karaoke bar and had multiple shower-heads, a small room with filthy couches and a tv. Hmmm. Public showerhouse or brothel? Feeling cleaner we drove into the night and arrived at Khatgal around 11.30pm and -5C after 14 hours of driving (bumping). We met Manal's lovely wife Bogi. She showed us to our ger,as this was our first night sleeping inside one we were very surprised by the heat wave that we were greeted with once inside, it must have been over 30 degrees! The other thing we noticed when we entered, was the size, gers can be very deceiving from the out side, this one had 4 single beds positioned around the wall , a table and a basin. The designs of these round homes are to keep them low to the ground ( max hight in the centre is 7ft, and on the edge is only 3 to 4 ft) and to retain heat in the winter and disperse heat in the summer.(There is actually a summer ger and a winter ger they look the same but do very different things) The single stove in the centre is used for cooking of foods and heating (and in our case drying clothes. We were so exhausted we collapsed into our beds with the fire roaring. A few hours later the fire had burnt out and we were dissapointed to find that the ger was just as cold as camping, and yet again we shivered into a state just above sleep, but not quite there!
Our plans from here were to rent horses and ride for a week north around the Lake (the second largest freshwater lake in the world), but were told the north (Siberia!!) was already covered in snow and most of the Nomads had left to head south, meaning there would be no gers to stay at. So we decided to give up on the north and just ride as far as we could. Another amazing sunny day in Mongolia greeted us and we climbed onto our Mongolian horses. Some people would make fun of a Mongolian horse for it size or lack of, (I know I did) but these horse are tough mofos! You could whip it for a week and it wouldn't move a foot... the way to make these guys move is by singing to them, the louder you sing the faster the horse moves, our guide never told us that one. Soon we were galloping across dry river beds and through fields bright with yellow pine trees. It was some of the most amazing scenery ever, with the golden colours of autumn combining with the bluest skies we had seen in a long time making it a journey that will forever stay in our minds... along with the memory of our sore arses we got from riding on Russian style saddles (basically nothing more than a piece of cloth stretched over a very small timber frame.) At the end of the second day, we all collapsed off our horses (who were probably just as glad to get rid of us) and declared that we could take no more. It had been a lot of fun and stunningly beautiful, but the saddles were the death of us.
After me running a fever of 39.3C and spending 24 hours in a ger with the fire raging, we made our way back to Khatgal (the town at the start of the southern end of the lake where we had started from) and then a further 70kms (3 hours,) to the oddly named town of “moron” for a night in a real house with real brick walls, such a nice warm change from tents and the felt walls of a ger. Small luxuries.
The next day after 15 mins of driving we started to climb mountains that were covered in snow, and within another 30 mins we were begging Manal to pull over so we could play in the snow like a bunch of rambunctious kids, while Manal again took to fixing the car. (Manal was fanatical about his car and every time we stopped he could be found underneath with the drive-shaft or leaf springs out. He never asked for a hand, he just did it by himself every time no matter how difficult it was.) So after a quick tyre change and with 4 grown adults having finished throwing snow balls (it was my first snow and my first snowball hit Rob smackbang in the back of the head!!) at each other, we jumped back into the Scooby Dooby Doo mystery van and kept on driving higher and higher through more and more snow. At the top it was like a white wonder land but heading down hill it took us only 30 minutes before we moved into another world, with the white and cold scenery being replaced with a dry, hot and yellow grass landscape. With not a tree in sight or another living thing, it was like a mini desert. It was amazing to watch Manal drive a vehicle over plains and hills with no real roads or signs for hours on end, every now and then he would pull up to someone on a motorbike and ask them if the way he was going was correct, when he would find out that infact he was exactly where he wanted to be,he would reply with ZAZAZAZA... which translates to roughly yeah yeah yeah...( he only got lost once in 15days!) After passing through a valley filled with about 50 vultures, we decided that the day had been sooo beautiful and memorable that camping would be in order. After a quick set up we discovered that we had been invaded by local nomad children and their horses, ever curious as to who these strange white people where and what they were doing. Mongolia has a high literacy rate but these boys didn't go to school and were amazed to see us. I took out my poi-s and tried teaching them some tricks which they loved! And they thought the whole concept of flicking a bottle top from your elbow and catching it was the best thing since sliced bread! It was the experiences like this, with real locals just as curious about us as we were about them that made Mongolia so amazing.
That night after sending the boys singing on their horses back to their gers so far away that we couldnt even see them, we quickly noticed that the temperature was dropping at a alarming rate, and by the time we decided to go to bed (9pm) the temp had already dropped to 4 degrees. We scuttled to our tents and put on every item of clothing that we could fit, and stuffed the rest of our clothes into our sleeping bags for insulation but the temp kept dropping and got to-15 degrees at its coldest! At 7am we were frozen and awake but it was still -8C and with our water and even our tea bags frozen we couldnt even have a drink! After this a group decision was made, no more camping or the remainder of the trip.
After packing up camp with fingers that wouldn't work from the cold we grabbed Manal from under the van, stuck him in the drivers seat and took off picking up a few hitch hikers along the way. It was awesome to be in the middle of know where with not a living thing around as far as you could see then out of thin air some one would be standing by the goat track, this is one of the only ways to get around Mongolia as there are no bus routes or highways and of course it would be rude not to pick someone up because another car might not pass for another day or 2. We had heard a few good things about White Lake but weren't as impressed as the masses although we did manage to wash our clothes for the first time in 2 weeks (our clothes were practically able to wash themselves).
Our next stop was Tsenkher hot springs for some much needed R&R. Along the way we notice a motor bike lying on its side with a man in a crumpled heap underneath it, we quickly stopped the van and ran to where the victim lay. At first it appeared that he was hit by something, but as we got closer we noticed that he was facing the wrong direction of his bike, then we notice a large graze to his head, but if he had fallen and been pinned under the bike, like we first thought then the wounded side of his head would have been face down. Then we smelt him..... he was blind drunk. What we figured had happened was he got plastered jumped on his motor bike drove somewhere crashed (writing off the bike) the rolling over and passing back out he was lucky he hadn't been run over as he was just over the crest of a hill. Manal who dosen't drink didn't want to waste time on a drunk driver so walked up to the unconscious man and dragged him to his feet then threw him to the side of the road, then dragging the remains of the bike of the road. And told us to let the drunkard sleep it off. Latter that evening Manal received a phone call from his family saying that his mother who had suffered a stroke at the start of our trip had taken a turn for the worst . Manal decided to rush home to his family so we said sad farewells to our best friend, translator, driver, mechanic, comedian, and all round hero who still had to drive another 36 hours to drive to get home. While we waited for our new driver, we spent hours in the hot springs making up for all the times we hadn't showered in the past 15 days.
With our new driver and a new (newish) van we made a B line for Tovkon-Khiid, the oldest temple in Mongolia, and built by Zanabazar, a direct descendant of Chinggis Khaan. During the Russia control of Mongolia from the 1930s to the 90s, all religious objects and places of worship had been destroyed in a show of communism might but now rebuilt, it was a popular place for locals and tourists alike. It took an hour or so of asking random gers to find it, and then another hour or so to climb the lush mountain to the hill top retreat temple that was built like a stone fort.
We spent a couple of days in Mongolia's former capital Kharkhoram. Once upon a time it was a major supply route for Mongol armies and was ruled by Chinggis Khaan's second son, however after 40 years Chinggis Khaan's grandson took over control and moved the Mongolian capital to Peking aka Beijing. At Kharkhoram we explored another old temple and bought some alleged antiques. And watched some truly amazing throat singing (a kind of deep throaty growl that could change tones, most intersting indeed!) Already 20 days into our 18day trip, we drove all day again arriving at our final stop, Khustain national park, a place Rob had dreamed of coming to since we saw a documentary on it back in Thailand! It was the home of the last wild horse left in the world, the Takhi, and had some 2000 of them in the park. Only 10 years before there wasn't even a single Takhi left in the wild, but a careful breeding program undertaken from horses bought from zoos around the world and the species had been saved. These horses looked more like a zebra minus the black and white stripes,(but they did have strips on their legs) and within an hour we had already seen more than 20 of these incredibly elusive horses, and even some wild deer. Rob's dreams fulfulled, we convinced a local ranger to let us sleep in his ger for the night and to our surprise were back in the Ulaanbataar by lunch the next day. And this is where this leg of the story finishes, with hot showers, food that wasn't mutton, or goat. And very very glad to be by ourselves...
This was our adventures during the first 20 days in Mongolia, click here to read about part two and our last 10 days in this crazy part of the world!!
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