Thursday, May 10, 2007

Mongolia - Friday 11 May

Woke up today to a boiling hot shower! Yippee! This morning we are just ringing home, updating emails, picking up our laundry and food shopping before our epic train journey to Moscow.

This afternoon at 2pm we board the train for Moscow, which will be home for 4 days and 4 nights! This will be interesting. We will make sure we're stocked up with plenty of food, plenty of entertainment and plenty of vodka for my birthday on Monday.

Signing off until next Tuesday/Wednesay.

See ya!

Mongolia - Thursday 10 May

We left the Ger camp at 6.00am this morning to start the long journey back to Ulaanbaatar. We made sure we didn't get the back seat this time. We arrived back to the city around 12.30 and checked back into the hotel. Everyone jumped straight into their showers after not seeing one in 3 days. It was great to have the use of a 'real' toilet again as well. The drop style hole in the ground ones we'd used in the desert were revolting and got worse as the days went on. So most of us ended up having a cold shower because the hot had run out, but it was a great feeling to be clean all the same. The weather in Mongolia has been pretty cold although indoors is always heated.

Later in the afternoon we went off to have a $12 one hour long massage (cheaper than the $17 I thought it was going to be). I had a tiny little Mongolian woman as my massuese, and I almost asked our tour guide to ask her to give me a hard massage as she looked as though she didn't have the strength to do so. How wrong could I have been!! She almost killed me! For an hour she pinched, punched and pumelled my body, jumped on my back with her whole body, jabbed her knees into my butt and almost made me throw up as she attempted to rip my arms off. I was so sore by the end of it, and so grateful I hadn't asked for a hard massage. But it was a good massage all the same.

We had caught a taxi to the massage parlour, and our tour guide hailed one down to take us home. There are real taxi's in Mongolia, although every car is potentially a taxi (so you are basically hitch hiking). We jumped into the car and were almost back to the hotel when another car rear ended us. It was a pretty harsh collision but we were all ok, and just jumped out, paid the driver 80c (that was including a .30c tip) and walked the rest of the way to the hotel.

Dinner was at a western restaurant called Mongolian Bar B Q and Grill, which was an all you can eat for about $8. You chose your own meat and veges etc then took it all to the cooks that chucked your food on a huge cylindrical hot plate where they cooked it for you. They were show offs and threw all the food in the air, making it land on the plate. Yum Yum!!

Mongolia Gobi Desert - Wednesday 09 May

It was breakfast at 9 which was delicious bread with the most delicious homemade blackberry jam ever! We bought some for the long train journey to Russia. After breakfast we were loaded on the bus again, and drove back to the first Ger camp, stopping at some sand dunes on the way. Today we experience a desert storm which ended up in every orifice possible.

When we returned to the Ger camp, we walked for about 10 minutes to a nomad's ger where we all piled in and drank fermented mares milk from small bowls. Not my cup of tea, but some people enjoyed it. Our hosts also passed around a bowl of fried bread but I declined. This wasn't the right thing to do, so as everyone was munching on their parculiar bread, the nomad husband told the wife to offer me the bread again. I took a tiny peice which she thought was hillarious. Next came a bowl of fermented hard yoghurt peices and this time I thought I had better take a big bit to keep the hosts happy. It was digusting and I ended up dropping it into the bottom of the mare's milk to get rid of it. Then the fried bread dish came around again, I wasn't coping, so took a large chunk and again the wife laughed at me. I managed to put it into my pocket to get rid of later. Unfortunately later on, I was reaching into my pocket for a tissue and out pops the bread - the husband and wife both saw it pop out and I tried to explain with sign language that I was full now but saving it to eat later. They didn't look like they believed me.

We all had to sing a song to our hosts to show our appreciation of their hospitality. The three guys sang Jingle Bells, although only one of them seemed to know the words. Odd! Us girls sang 'Lean on Me' which they really enjoyed. They then sang some songs to us, one of which brought a tear to a couple of eyes it was so beautiful. These people looked around 60 but were probably much younger, the harsh desert weather ages them to the extreme. They had been nomads most of their lives and had 8 children all of which lived in the city, some attending boarding school. The nomads move their location 4 times a year, each season, and hardly ever return to the same location. They took us on a camel ride then we went on a one hour horse ride, all the while being whipped by the sand from the storm.

There are many nomads in the desert, who live their lives as gypsies, living off the land and selling their sheep or cattle for the small amount of money they need to survive. Most families in Mongolia have 8 children, and in 1921 the population was a mere 500,000. The population today is 2.8 million. Lots of tv's on the blink in the last 70 years!!

Mongolia Gobi Desert - Tuesday 08 May

Breakfast at 9am, bags packed and we were off on the bus for a 100km drive to stay in a different Ger camp for the night. On the way we stopped at a 2m high rock mound which was actually a shrine, and tradition meant if you threw a rock on and walked around the mound once, you would have good luck. There were also gifts left on the shrine for Buddha which included traditional scarves, empty bottles of vodka and a steering wheel??

We then went in search for the Phallic Rock which was a small rock in the exact form of a penis. You can imagine the photos we took! The rock was barred off to the Monks many decades ago as they would go to the rock which would make them amorous and then hit on the local girls. Behind the rock was a huge mountain called the vaginal slope. We actually thought that many of the mountains in the desert looked like vaginal slopes. There were many Mongolians selling their wares, and we all picked up some beautiful jewellery and old things such as spear heads, bowls etc which are apparently from the bronze age. I bought a pendant type peice in the shape of a bull, which is (apparently) from the bronze age and was used as a passport to cross the border.

Next stop was a Buddhist monk monastery which we did a tour of but unfortunately missed the praying and chanting time. It was quite interesting but by this time many of us were so hungry that we lost interest. Finally we left and found our next Ger camp and ate some much needed lunch. The food was aweful but we were so hungry, no-one was complaining. Later in the day we helped build a ger with the Mongolian men who found our help rather amusing. It was hard to tell whether we were a help or a hinderance, but they let us keep helping so we couldn't have been doing that bad a job. We also saw our first Yak!

Mongolia Gobi Desert - Monday 07 May

Today we packed our bags again and left for the Gobi Desert, stopping on the way for breakfast and food shopping. It was 280kms to the desert, although took us around 6.5 hours to get there due to extremely bumpy and windy roads. There was one toilet stop on the way and...you guessed it...another drop toilet. Aaarrrgghh! The girls and I took the back seat of the mini bus, which was the worst decision ever. The seats were situated over the wheels and we felt every bump and pot hole in the road, and ended up with extremely bruised behinds by the end of the trip. We were constantly almost thrown over to the next seat, but it made for some good laughs by all. We never took the back seat again.

We reached our Ger camp, which is a cluster of Mongolian style tents. A ger is a cylindrical house made out of a wooden base structure that is covered with a thick padding made of yaks hair, then covered with a material type cover and another one. They are big enough to stand up inside and walk around, and include a pot belly stove which is stoked throughout the night by a Mongolian, 4 large day beds, a sink (without running water) and dressing table with mirror and a small table with 4 stools. They are extremely sturdy and they are home to many Mongolian nomads.

That night we ate a delicious Mongolian meal with many different delights. Later it was drinking time, and everyone pulled out their stashes of vodka and met in one of the ger's for hours of drinking games. One of the games meant all 14 of us were running around the perimeter of the ger 3 times in the pitch dark, and then we were piggy backing each other around another time. Good times!!

Mongolia - 10 May

This afternoon we returned to civilisation (well as civilised as Ulaanbaatar can be) after three days in the Gobi Desert, with no showers, hole in the ground drop style toilets and a Desert storm. Despite the inadequacies, we had an absolute ball and being in the desert was truely an amazing experience. We're off for a spa and sauna and a $17, one hour massage now, so i'm hoping to update the last few days adventures before leaving for Russia tomorrow early afternoon.

Hope everyone is well, and thanks for all your well wishes. Thanks Elsie for the thought that I didn't actually eat Yak's digestive system!!