Hello there! I'm back and survived my epic Mongolian adventure but have come back a new woman.... really I have. This however, does not include, hair braiding, tats, children or further piercings. But I have changed nonetheless. All will be revealed later!
As before UB is an interesting place and I think I left you with a squity bum and a difficult choice between curry and green tea. I wisely opted for the green tea and met a crazy Mongolian artist lady, who freaked me out. We chatted about all things English including Hyacinth Bucket (her favourite English "TV star").
The day after this I arrived at the tour hotel. A hotel. A place which would not normally feel me with excitement, but after what felt like an eternity (1 month?) I was very excited to enter the very mediocre Zaluuchud Hotel in UB. As I was on a tour I was in a Twin room sharing with an unknown. After some confusion about keys, I managed to get in to the room to find the unknown was Stephanie (not Jon and Steph, Stephanie, a new Stephanie), sleeping with a very cute eye mask on. Having just flown in from London, with a big delay in Moscow (or Hell as I like to call it) she was k-nackered. A quick summary about Steph, a drama teacher in London, she's from Liverpool, a dedicated football fan, loves yaks, hates peas, and is about as lovely as you can get. We got on immediately, went to the massive Black Market (over 60,000 people visit it a day and it is thought to be Asia's biggest) and then watched a chinese vampire movie whilst waiting for our elusive tour guide to turn up. It was excellent and had Jackie Chan in it, a prize is available for anyone who guesses the name, Christian I think this one is in the bag for you....
So the guide does turn up and the rest of my fellow travellers also arrive. They all seemed like a good bunch of people, a mix of Swiss(5), German (1), English (3) and Australian (4). We went out that evening and I realised I had grown very accustomed to travelling on my own. It seemed this next part of my trip would be very different to the last.
We left the next morning and headed off to our first place Arburd Sands in a bus with wheels that a monster truck would envy. This was in the Gobi - I learnt that the Gobi itself isn't all sand,
there are massive areas of grassland and mountains.
We arrived and checked in to our Ger which was, surprisingly,
very well equipped.
I also got my first experience of the Mongolian horse - small (my feet nearly reached the floor) but incredibly quick when you get them into a trot, and how you do that is shout "choo" as aggressively and manishly as you can. Really only Mongolian men ride the horses (in a very odd style) and they were unconvinced of my ability even when I showed them what years of polite European schooling can do for you. Oh yes, I looked awesome. However I soon lost the politeness and slumped in the saddle just to fit in with everyone else.
In the afternoon we visited a nomad family who had hundreds of horses. They milked the mares to make all sorts of milk based products including arag (fermented milk - potentially the most rotten drink you will ever encounter), arag vodka, arag cheese, arag yoghurt, arag cream, milk tea - the list is really endless.
The milking process is quite interesting - the men lead the foals to the mare and allow them to suckle for a few seconds, and then lead them away and the woman begins milking. If I was doing it I'd get dragged around by the foal but these guys were well practised. Later on in the trip I did try milking a mare but was absolutely useless at it - the men looked at me like I was a waste of a female and I felt sad. What have I been doing with my life if not learning to milk a mare?Mongolian horses are semi wild, and so even though you can ride them, you can't really get very close to them for petting purposes, which of course I was bitterly disappointed about. Same with most of the dogs, but they all looked quite dangerous anyway. They eat horses too, which is necessary I guess. Most families also have sheep and goats too, for cashmir and meat. They say that the last winter was so severe over 9 million livestock animals were lost due to the cold. This is out of a population of around 40 million animals in total. It's worth bearing in mind that the Mongolian population is only 2.7 million people......
The sky that evening was incredible, I saw the milky way and lots of shooting stars, and just to be cheesy I fell asleep looking through the hole in the roof of the Ger watching the stars. A nice way to start.
One thing to say about this trip is that we did a massive amount of driving, which was sometimes so unpleasant I wanted to scream. The roads are so bad, in fact there are no roads, there are dirt tracks. I saw maybe one or two tarmaced roads during my whole time, and on both of them I saw cyclists. On the dirt tracks I saw none. So just in case any of you are thinking of cycling in Mongolia (heaven forbid) or if you happen to know anyone planning to cycle there, prepare yourself for a very difficult journey.
Next day we headed off to Zorgol Hairhan Uul and Baga Gazriin Chuluu to see a collection of sacred pectographs of SIberian Ibex and red deer, and some sacred mountains and crazy rock formations (geologists you're back in it). We stopped to look for Ibex but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
This would be our first night camping and it was quite a spot too. If you're wondering about the weather, it was unusual. If you imagine English weather can be changeable, multiply that by approximately a million and you get an idea of the changeable nature of the Mongolian climate. Before I left I looked on the BBC website for the weather in UB and it was just a random selection of weather pictures, rain, sun, cloud, fog and snow all in half a day. I thought oh that's just the crappy BBC forecast but actually that just about sums it up. Baking hot one minute, pissing it down with high wind 30 seconds later.
The Buren mountains were our next stop and our first truely windy night.... the clouds were awesome, and the sunset made for a (or maybe a few) pretty spectacular token photograph(s). Random boulders dotted throughout the landscape allowed me to mistakenly try some bouldering. Bad sandstone plus bouldering equals Emma falling off the boulder which further equals a sad Emma. This was the beginning of the Steppe and what can only be described as an insanely massive landscape.
I also had my first shower behind a rock with a view to beat all others, however it was a cold shower and so began my love affair with cold water. Plus if you are wondering about what we ate, well I wish I could tell you that we starved but alas the Russian-diet-and-squity-bum-episode was quickly superseded by the Mongolian-eat-your-own-weight-in-meat diet, and sadly so ended my weight loss. The food was awesome but imagine 3 meals a day combined with sitting in a bus for most of the day, I could visibily see my ass expanding.
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