Mongolia - Part 3

Before we get on to the festival, I need to tell you about the gers. We stayed in about 12 different camps, all with shared bathrooms, immaculately clean, meals included and generally very comfortable.

Some had electricity, none have wi-fi, most have beer.

Most beds are really hard but have great blankets

Even the restaurants at the camp were sometimes a ger - check out those gold chairs!

You need to duck to get through the door.

     

The lady in traditional dress came out to greet us with sugared curd (then whipped out of her costume, popped on rubber gloves and started cleaning!). She also 'blessed' the wheels of our vehicle with milk on departure - for a safe journey. They used to bless horses' hoofs.

On our last night we stayed at a camp that had hot springs so we booked a massage after a soak in the pools. What we didn’t expect from the mostly pleasant event was a full-on boob massage and some vigorous head rubbing that wasn’t actually nice L Being in higher, mountainous country, it was quite a bit cooler so our guide offered to light our ger stoves. These are used to warm nomad families in temperatures that get as low as -40C. Seemed like a good idea but I swear our ger went from a coolish 17C to a sauna-esque 47C in about 15 minutes!! We had to leave the door open and stay low to the floor to remain in there. I don’t know how they cope with such extremes.

The frighteningly effective stove.

We also saw a few inappropriate T-shirt, like a 12 year old girl in a village with ‘Shameless’ emblazoned across her chest. At one of the camps, a shy, bespectacled teenager working there was wearing an oversized black T-shirt that had large white letters that said: CUROSITD [sic] KILLED YOUR VIRGINITY. Say what?? It was just so wrong. She was wearing it again the next day and we hoped to get a photo so our guide approached and explained her T-shirt was kind of funny and could we take a photo? She crossed her arms and said she’d bought it at a market and didn’t know what it said. Wisely, our guide decided not to tell her and nor did we take a photo – but you get the visual.

We didn’t meet many other travellers – most were in their 60s or 70s and from Europe, some were from Asia – most kept to themselves. We did meet a lovely family from Scotland who were taking a break from the trans-Siberian rail trip and we encountered the same posse of bikers from Vietnam at a couple of camps.

The driving can be as long as 8 hours a day, on tracks that can be extremely rough and frankly, the ‘sealed’ roads that can be rougher – but the scenery was spectacular, the sites varied and I don’t get car sick so can read – even if it is a tad bumpy!

Next up; The Naadam Festival

Mongolia - Part 2

So we’ve emerged from the desert after 8 days and are now in the grass lands.

The Gobi desert was pretty awesome. The terrain changes – from flat rocky expanses that have quite a lot of vegetation (although no trees), to bear landscape and rugged outcrops of hills. It’s not that sandy other than one amazing range of dunes, sometimes called the singing sand dune for the strange,deep. echoy noise the sand makes when you dig it. We hiked up the range to see the sunset which I’m proud to say we all made. It’s very high and so steep you literally have to crawl some sections on hand and knee. The sun going down was spectacular but as the wind picked up and started giving us an all-over exfoliation, we decided to run down. It took us almost an hour of climbing to get up there and about 7 minutes to run down!

 

Here some other random scenery shots.

 

 

We took an hour long camel ride near the dunes which was surprisingly pleasant as these guys didn’t have the usual overbearing camel smell. They eat this bush – look closely – it has thorn and is mostly stick – delicious! One of our camels ripped a small plant clean out of the ground – I wondered if it was more tender – but then noticed the camel got a mouth full of dirt to go with it – and actually dropped it out of its mouth. Yuk!

Stopping at a small village, I was keen to try some local specialties – fermented mares milk and dried curds. The milk is a summer time special, made like yoghurt (using the culture from one batch to the next) and loved by locals. Some drink as much as 10 litres a day. It is alcoholic but a bit like kombucha , very low. I’d read even locals can get an upset stomach the first time they drink it so we all opted for a tiny sip and bequeathed the rest to our guide. (Even though so low in alcohol, our driver refused any while he was on duty). It kind of tastes like off yoghurt with vinegar – slightly fizzy, pungent and very sharp.

With the help of our guide, I also bought some dried goat’s curd from the current summer season and some older (aged?) camel curd from the year prior. Once dried, curd can last years and is ideal for winter when many Mongolains survive on meat and dairy products – that’s it. Curd was also favoured by travellers of the Silk Road as well as Mongolian warriors due to its nutritional value and logevity. The goat’s one tasted a bit like really strong goat’s cheese but harder and almost chalky in texture. The camel tasted like parmesan cheese but with a really strong after taste of ‘camel’ (like how they smell…) and is quite oily. They also mix some curds with sugar and press in through a mincer to get ‘worms’. They’re not very sweet, they still have a very strong dairy taste.

On our home visit (not a home stay) we rocked up to a random ger and piled in. Apparently it’s rude to refuse visitors – even strangers. They offer us goat’s milk yoghurt in a bowl, which we all took a sip of and also some curd. They were lovely people and some of their neighbours popped over to join the party. There were a few kids there – some visiting relatives from the city during the school holidays so as planned, we gave them a bunch of scented highlighters and other pens and pencils Sass was happy to hand over.

Further to my last post, where I mentioned the loose definitions of ‘beef’ and ‘mutton’, I noticed in restaurants that they just use the term ‘meat’. I checked with our guide and yep, meat covers it all – except chicken. He said Mongolian’s don’t care what type of meat it is or what the cut is. At the meat section in a small village market, the price difference for ‘beef’ was defined by ‘with bones’ or ‘without bones’ – not eye fillet or porterhouse. We also saw a couple of random goats’ heads that reminded me of the Rolling Stones Album – Goats’ Head Soup.

 

 

Mongolia - Part 1

We’re now deep in the Gobi dessert. Each camp has been progressively remote – I think we’re now as remote as it gets. It’s hot, windy and we’ve just had a four course lunch consisting of:

·        Cucumber and tomato salad – vegetables most likely from China

·        Hot mutton and vegetable soup- with potatoes, carrots and seaweed (yes, this is a landlocked country)

·        Spaghetti bolognaise, with the meat sauce made from horse (“Mongolia does Italian” as Elle quipped)

·        A wafer chocolate bar from Turkey

I need a lie down….

Our ger is again, very comfortable, but hot but smells  strongly of sheep. They all do as the walls and roof are all filled with sheep wool felt and I suspect this one is pretty raw as it's particularly sheepy.

 

On meat, we’re learnt that labelling here is fairly general. So mutton could be sheep, or it could be goat – it’s all ‘mutton’. Same with beef – it could be cow or it could be yak. In fact, we also leant that cattle and yaks can breed and that their offspring can also breed so some animals may be part cow, part yak and as far as the Mongolian’s are concerned, it’s all ‘beef’.

As we’ve travelled into and through the desert in our Soviet built military vehicle (no air conditioning) we’ve seen herds of goats (“Hi kids!”), sheep, horses, camels, cows and yaks, as well as ground squirrels and rabbits with very long ears. Most of the animals have lost their winter coat but we did come across one camel that was still very hairy.

 

          

As  complete aside,  if you needed more proof that Australia has outrageously expensive telco, Geoff got a message on his phone from Telstra to say it would be $5 for 3 minutes if he makes a call here. I bought the girls and me local SIM cards with a 15 day package including some calls and unlimited data – for $5.50 each.

This is the first camp we’ve been to that doesn’t have phone reception/internet. In fact, this one doesn’t even have electricity. They run the generator for a couple of house in the evening and that’s it. Geoff’s testing out his portable solar charger.

It does have beer – which they store in a cellar to keep it cool. It’s not cold but it still does the trick.