A Blast of Wind in your Ear

It’s been a while since the last update so I thought it was about time I made the effort…it’s a long one.

After leaving Irkutsk we headed to Ulan Bator, Mongolia. The train journey was reasonably uneventful, apart from a 7 hour wait on the Russian border to get out of the country. Once we landed in UB, we immediately set about organising a trip into the Gobi desert. We settled on a 9 day stint. All I can say is that it was magic. Those with access to facebook will have seen the pictures. The bluest sky you have ever seen in the world and it was bloody cold; -20 at night-time. To counteract that we were sleeping in Gers (native Mongolian nomadic tents) and sleeping with one sleeping bag inside the other and the bag zipped up tight…you would still wake up in the morning freezing until the woman of the house would come in around 7 and light a fire with camel dung as the fuel. Who would have thought that we would be looking forward to starting each day seeing camel shit!!

Over the 9 day we hiked, went camel and horse riding…the camels were the laziest animals in the world. No amount of encouragement or kicking could get them to move any faster. Other things were rolling down sand dunes and driving almost 2000KM over crap roads.

We also had to learn how to go native from a toilet perspective, thousands of acres of toilet but make sure you don’t go too near the Ger; I reckon I have massive thigh muscles now from all the squatting. John found this part difficult..well not exactly difficult but it is hard to have a crap when you have an audience of 200 goats, 20 sheep, 15 camels (not the most pleasant creature), a couple of cows and the family dog and all of them taking a interest in the boyo grunting in their  field.. Also as you can imagine there was no running water in the desert so no showers were had for 9 days. ..not a pleasant experience..we did have a funny incident one night with one of the carpenters waking up and realising that he needed to use the toilet badly..it took him so long to get out of his two sleeping bags that he had to run out the door into -20 freezing cold in his underpants..to say that he was blue when he came back in would be putting it mildly.

Overall Mongolia was amazing…the highlight of the trip so far by a country mile.. the nomads were phenomenal, and so welcoming…some people we met were just travelling on their own, knocking on the door of a Ger at nightfall and being welcomed in by the family who share everything..speaking of that..they have this cheese which was made from dried goat milk curds..it was quite possibly the most horrible thing I have ever put in my mouth in my life..One of the nomad families slaughtered a goal while we were there… it was amazing to watch how quickly the boss man could complete the whole butchering operation with only a wee penknife.

Our last night of the trip was in a city 50K south of Mongolia. Our first pub in 8 days. One other thing. Mongolians like to fight. There were 3 fights in this pub with the third broken up by the cops with pepper spray. We had to cover our faces and leave the pub, another not so pleasant experience.

Back then to UB where showers were gratefully used and proper toilets…it felt like heaven. We began exploring the city..we found the black market where you can buy almost anything…however it was a rough enough place..we had planned to get out of Mongolia asap to get to China but didn’t have train tickets so we had to get up early and queue in -20 freezing cold weather for 3 hours to try and get tickets..it had to be the coldest I have ever been in my entire life..utterly horrible…then to cap it off, just as we were getting to the front of the line they announced that all tickets for the next 3 days were sold out…we ended up going across the road where we found a ticket centre that was lovely and warm and booked tickets for us on the next possible train (6 days later) in about 5 minutes..Sickening or what???

The next 6 days were relatively quiet, well apart from the carpenters piercing John’s ear with a dirty great big nail. He was nailed thru his ear to the breakfast counter in the hostel and they would only release him when he agreed to buy 20 litres of beer later on in the night. Before anyone asks yes it did do it willingly and I have a video of same to prove it.

Anyways this is a long email just about Mongolia..I am now in Beijing and will do write up about here in a separate email..I have attached links for those not on facebook to see some photos that I have uploaded.

Keep in touch..

Irkutsk (Russia) Photos

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=67781&l=15875&id=646631196 

Mongolia Photos

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=66579&l=4bf54&id=646631196 

John getting nailed

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=66603&l=8f324&id=646631196