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!!