Week 6 - Mongolia

The Goat!


our group along with the drivers and guide

A typical view from the Gobi
Our first day on the trip - goat city..
Horses grazing outside the sand dunes. It had a spring nearby which is why there is actually green grass.
Camel riding outside the sand dunes
SongBennu!

Greetings from the land of the Yak! The homeland of Chinggas Khan is strangely different to every other country in the world - that I've seen. If time machines exist, our Air China flight from Seoul took us through time - Mongolia is ancient. Marina thinks its like Russia 20 years ago which pretty much means America in the 1700's. Not really about Russia being that far behind, but this place is just like the wild wild west, without the roughness. There are 10's of thousands of miles of roads and probably only a few hundred miles of paved road. So are trip thus far has been off road!

Most of you will have heard the term nomad.. Well Mongolia is also the land of the nomad. About half of Mongolia's 2.5 million people are nomadic. The live in Ger tents - a round large tend for the whole family and move around the country typically to find better grazing areas for their animals.

Marina and I have chosen a trip with about 7 other travellers and we are going in two small old Russian vans from the 1950's called the Waz. Our trip will be about 2000 miles over 18 days. We will be staying with the nomadic families in a ger tent and eating what they eat.

The Gobi desert - this place is very strange. Being a desert people expect sand everywhere. Its quite the opposite. Not much sand except for in the dunes. Its just a very barren land where water is gold and conditions are tough. You can look in ever direction for miles and not see a thing, but this is just raw beauty - absolute nothingness! The conditions are so tough that the round is littered.. littered with bones.. Camel bones, goat bones, and the occasional cow bones or horse bones, but these two are not so common in the Gobi as they are not good with small quantities of water or food. You will even see animals who may have just died that day, keeled over and being fed on by buzzards or the occasional wild dog - probably not so wild and from a ger camp nearby.

The Sky - I've never seen anything in the world like it. The sky over the Gobi at night is probably one of the most beautiful things to see on this planet; other than seeing Mark McGwire hit the 70th home run of the year! Visit this place and you can expect to see about 100 times as many stars as the brightest night in a rural Missouri farm or sitting on an island in the Seychelles. You will even clearly see the milky way along with about every satellite hovering above. Its purely magical!

The trip...
Ulaanbatar > Baga Gazryn > Tsagaan Suvarga (Gobi Desert) > Bayanzag (Gobi) > Erdene Zuu Khidd (Gobi)

Saturday - UB - Our arrival to UlaanBaatar was pretty simple and easy. I'm still in awe that I'm in Mongolia and its a week later so imagine what I was like this day; giddy in an understatement! We settled in to our guesthouse and started planning our trip around the Gobi. Different to our usual do it yourself travel mentality we opted for a trip via the hostel as its very difficult to do the Gobi without your own transport. Imagine the biggest land of nothing you have ever seen with no roads, no signs obviously and not being able to speak the language.. Its quite a challenge, plus, we wouldn't have been able to stay with the nomadic families as easily... so we opted for the easy choice of a tour.

Sunday - After paying our respect to the great Chinggas Khan's statue in Sukbahtar square, we hit the market. You have to really watch your money in this place. Both because they sell about everything you would want or need, but also due to the petty thiefs who though Marina's backpack actually had something in it... We are not that thick... Being the strong Russian girl she is, nothing happened and she noticed immediately.. That night we saw a traditional folk concert which featured Mongolian throat singers.. Very strange, you may find an example on youtube.com.

Monday - The start of our adventure - Marina and I have chosen a trip with about 7 other travellers and we are going in two small old Russian vans from the 1950's called the Waz. Our trip will be about 2000 miles over 18 days. We will be staying with the nomadic families in a ger tent and eating what they eat. Our first day was a long drive and we then camped in our first ger.

Tuesday - The coolest thing this day was entering the Gobi desert, but you would have read about this above. Let me tell you about a ger camp... There is no running water in these places and no water to drink. Occasionally they will have a well about half a mile away, we found this a good way to cool our beer :D The ger camps have electricity, not for us, but for the family. This is used to boil water for tea, or to watch television.. funny huh. These nomads often even have satellite dishes. The kids work harder than the parents - probably the way it should be, but often the father just hangs about smoking or watching tv. Typically people do not eat veggies, unless from a can; the ground is considered sacred so planting anything is a no no. The people live on rice - imported from China and meat (goat, camel, horse, or beef) - probably in that order. Also they always use the milk; so far we have only seen goat and camel milk - not quite as good as the stuff from Wal-Mart, but it can be tolerated.

Wednesday - T Rex - This day we stayed in Bayanzag. This place is famous due to the American explorer Roy Chapman Andrews who made a major find of dinosaur bones. The main reason this is famous besides finding a lot of dinosaurs and discovering a few different species, is that they found lots of whole eggs. This led the scientists to conclude in 1922 that dinosaurs were born from eggs. It is commonly known in Mongolia that Indiana Jones' character is based on Roy Chapman.

Thursday - Sand Dunes - We hadn't seen a whole lot of sand thus far despite being in one of the worlds biggest deserts. Finally we had some. The sand dunes at Erdene Zuu Khidd are very beautiful - kind of like that wallpaper option on microsoft windows. It looks very similar! We spent the evening hiking the dunes to the top and enjoying the sunset!

Friday - BBQ party - Today was one of our fellow travelers birthday so we adhered to Mongolian tradition and bought him a goat. Not sure how many people in Spain had been given a goat for their birthday.. This was going to be cooked the Mongolian way. I'll spare you the details, but it was a bit gross especially when they burned the hair off with a blow torch. After cutting it into pieces they tossed it into a pot with hot flaming rocks, some potatoes and carrots (these were very hard to get) along with some vodka and water. After about 2 hours we had the feast. Not too bad I must say!

We are now sitting in an airmag capital (like a state capital) and are going north to the lake area. I should be able to post in a week so talk with you then.

Baryahtai

Dan and Marina