Thursday, October 28, 2004
more housekeeping
happy birthday for saturday to andy.
and rip to john peel. teenage kicks all through the night.
and rip to john peel. teenage kicks all through the night.
the mongolian incident
first let me start by saying that pete and i are safe in beijing... as pete inferred when he posted the photos, we beat a hasty retreat from mongolia. interestingly courtneypete.blogspot.com seems to be one of the 'contentious' sites that the chinese government has deemed to politically risky for the eyes of the citizens... so we can make postings - but we can't read them on the site afterwards! ok - time to test post to see if this works!
anyway, back to mongolia.
we arrived in mogolia with 'high minded eco tourist' plans to spend time
with the nomads, check out their gers, eat mutton and generally be worthy
and get off the beaten track (read - save money by not booking touristy
packages). Our aim was to get out of Ulan Batar quickly and get out into
the countryside - the best way to do this seemed to be by booking a private
jeep and driver - and seeing as in togrogs (mongolian money) we were
millionaires this didn't seem to be a problem.
After much thought we decided on our 8 day circular route with lots of
opportunity for hiking and horse-riding, and booked it via our hostel. the
next morning we met our driver Bulldog (name changed to protect the
innocent) and his russian jeep, and got off to an early start - shopping for
a few provisions in The State Department Store (kind of like buying your
food for a camping trip in the Mongolian Harrods Food Hall).
By midday we had noticed a disturbing build up of snow (not so easy for
hiking). When we stopped for lunch in our first ger it only took 3 seconds
for me to realise that 8 days was going to be a VERY long time... you can
probably see from the pictures that 'rustic' doesn't quite go far enough to
describe the conditions! dirt floor, chunk of dead sheep hung on the wall,
no room to stand up... alarm bells were going off. The food made matters
worse - i managed to down salty tea, globs of mutton fat, runny yoghurt and
other unidentifiable stuff - but pete wasn't having any of it! over first
lunch pete and I quite enjoyed the freedom of knowing that nobody had a
clue what we were saying to openly plan how we were going to get ourselves out of this mess.
After we got over the initial shock our hosts turned out to be a very nice
father/brother/sister team who thoroughly enjoyed dressing us up in their
clothes and parading us around on their horses for most of the afternoon.
Next came dinner - another excercise in gag-control and then we all lay down
to sleep on the floor of the ger... our hosts even took the time to tuck us
in under mounds of extra coats and blankets. I think it sunk to -10 that
night.
The next morning a confused Bulldog agreed that we could shorten our 7
remaining nights to one. Cue a fast forward drive around the key sites (key
sites according to Bulldog that is) of the mongolian countryside... punctuated by increasingly frequent jeep breakdowns (i did mention it was a russian jeep didn't I?). We ended up spending the second night at Bulldog's brothers house/camp so that he could get him to fix the jeep's engine... their unique brand of hospitality meant that they left us alone to sit in an ever darkening room (by candle light apparently) while the whole rest of the clan (at least 9 others) huddled in the kitchen. Once again we enjoyed the 'opportunity' to speak openly (and loudly) about how bizarre we thought the food and customs were. One thing I can't fault them on was their tucking in ability as for the second night in a row we were supervised getting into our sleeping bags and then thoroughly wrapped up in extra blankets.
The following day we made the 8 hour sprint back to UB (and judging by the
number of jeep breakdowns we had along the way we were completely justified
in not going further afield afterall). Then we queued up for 3 hours to get
our tickets to beijing changed... a small inconvenience and worth it to get
out of the country 5 days early.
all in all it wasn't THAT bad. and the further we get into china the more
pleasant it becomes in memory... nevertheless I am not sure that we will
ever want or need to go back to mongolia!
anyway, back to mongolia.
we arrived in mogolia with 'high minded eco tourist' plans to spend time
with the nomads, check out their gers, eat mutton and generally be worthy
and get off the beaten track (read - save money by not booking touristy
packages). Our aim was to get out of Ulan Batar quickly and get out into
the countryside - the best way to do this seemed to be by booking a private
jeep and driver - and seeing as in togrogs (mongolian money) we were
millionaires this didn't seem to be a problem.
After much thought we decided on our 8 day circular route with lots of
opportunity for hiking and horse-riding, and booked it via our hostel. the
next morning we met our driver Bulldog (name changed to protect the
innocent) and his russian jeep, and got off to an early start - shopping for
a few provisions in The State Department Store (kind of like buying your
food for a camping trip in the Mongolian Harrods Food Hall).
By midday we had noticed a disturbing build up of snow (not so easy for
hiking). When we stopped for lunch in our first ger it only took 3 seconds
for me to realise that 8 days was going to be a VERY long time... you can
probably see from the pictures that 'rustic' doesn't quite go far enough to
describe the conditions! dirt floor, chunk of dead sheep hung on the wall,
no room to stand up... alarm bells were going off. The food made matters
worse - i managed to down salty tea, globs of mutton fat, runny yoghurt and
other unidentifiable stuff - but pete wasn't having any of it! over first
lunch pete and I quite enjoyed the freedom of knowing that nobody had a
clue what we were saying to openly plan how we were going to get ourselves out of this mess.
After we got over the initial shock our hosts turned out to be a very nice
father/brother/sister team who thoroughly enjoyed dressing us up in their
clothes and parading us around on their horses for most of the afternoon.
Next came dinner - another excercise in gag-control and then we all lay down
to sleep on the floor of the ger... our hosts even took the time to tuck us
in under mounds of extra coats and blankets. I think it sunk to -10 that
night.
The next morning a confused Bulldog agreed that we could shorten our 7
remaining nights to one. Cue a fast forward drive around the key sites (key
sites according to Bulldog that is) of the mongolian countryside... punctuated by increasingly frequent jeep breakdowns (i did mention it was a russian jeep didn't I?). We ended up spending the second night at Bulldog's brothers house/camp so that he could get him to fix the jeep's engine... their unique brand of hospitality meant that they left us alone to sit in an ever darkening room (by candle light apparently) while the whole rest of the clan (at least 9 others) huddled in the kitchen. Once again we enjoyed the 'opportunity' to speak openly (and loudly) about how bizarre we thought the food and customs were. One thing I can't fault them on was their tucking in ability as for the second night in a row we were supervised getting into our sleeping bags and then thoroughly wrapped up in extra blankets.
The following day we made the 8 hour sprint back to UB (and judging by the
number of jeep breakdowns we had along the way we were completely justified
in not going further afield afterall). Then we queued up for 3 hours to get
our tickets to beijing changed... a small inconvenience and worth it to get
out of the country 5 days early.
all in all it wasn't THAT bad. and the further we get into china the more
pleasant it becomes in memory... nevertheless I am not sure that we will
ever want or need to go back to mongolia!
