Shannon's pictures are here!

Mongolia through Shannon's lens, Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

You can read more about our trip in older posts. It's only 4 more days til we begin our next big adventure! We're not sure how much internet access we'll have, but we'll try to keep this updated with photos and stories of our travels.

Beijing and Mongolia Part 1 Videos a la Brian

Brian's become a video editing software wizard and has worked some magic with the clips of video we took in Beijing and Mongolia. Here's Beijing and the Great Wall of Chiner. The music is from an album Bart gave Brian of music from Chinese movie soundtracks.

This one is the first half of Mongolia, before we got to the Gobi. The music in this one is from a CD we bought off of the people you'll see giving us a concert of Mongolian folk music in our ger. They were amazing and I love the Mongolian instruments and throat singing.
Maybe next week we'll get the Gobi video up and Shannon's photos. Only 10 more days of teaching in Korea before we're off to the next adventure!

Great Gobi Goodness

After the green and the cold and the waterfalls and the lakes of Central Mongolia, we took a southern turn and headed into the Gobi. We knew we'd arrived when we started seeing camel herds instead of herds of horses.

These bactrian variety are enormous, but seem friendlier than the one humpers.

Though there are roads (dirt) in the Gobi, we didn't tend to stick to them as often there. Looking out from the van the terrain appeared flat and even, but there were many small canyons, ditches and ruts to look out for. But despite the difficulty of the landscape, we only got stuck once.

Brian and Ryan made quick work of that ditch.

As you can see, most of the Gobi is not sandy. It's mostly rocky with small shrubs everywhere, getting browner as you go deeper, but surprisingly green on a good year. But there are sandy areas. After a night of camping near a cave full of crystals we went to Kongoryn Els, or the Singing Sand Dunes. This is the movie version of the Gobi, and it's gorgeous.

A neighboring ger with the dunes.

Ewwww.

We timed our hour and 45 minute climb up those dunes perfectly. It was sunset when we finally made it. We also discovered why the sands are singing. With each 3 ft step up you take, you slide back 2.5 ft and start a sand slide from about 15 ft ahead of you. The shearing of sand on sand makes a deep reverberating hum that sounds like a train coming on the other side. This of course makes for a very difficult climb, but well worth it.

But the best part was coming back down. The sand was so soft and at such a steep angle that you could jump straight out and run down as fast as possible without fear of toppling forward.

The next day we drove to Bayanzag and got there in time for this spectacular Gobi sunset.

The following morning this guy, our wonderful guide, took us on a camel ride and showed us his secret dinosaur head that he found. The area is famous for dinosaur fossils and has yielded a lot of whole skeletons and the ground is littered with fossil flakes. You can tell the difference between a fossil and regular bone or stone by putting them to your tongue - the fossil will stick (albeit usually only on one facet of the surface) but the others won't. The guide is demonstrating with a fleck from the skull he showed us.

This rock formation is condensed sand, not really rock. We rode by it on our camels.

I love my camel.

When we left Bayanzag we went to a town to restock on food and water. There was a family putting up a ger near where we were staying, so we got to help out and see the process. The land in the countryside is all public and families can set up wherever they wish, but in cities the people have to rent a lot. They still live in gers though. We read that 85% of Mongolians live in gers even though only 50% are nomadic. The other 15% live in apartments in the cities.

They're holding up a layer of felt as it gets tied into place.

Next stop was the Painted Desert. The colors were amazing and the whole thing made me want a big bowl of sherbet.

After the Painted Desert we went to Ice Canyon (Yolyn Am) which was gorgeous (oh the puns) but devoid of any and all ice though it wasn't for lack of looking.

And our last night out in the wilderness Ikman, our driver, took us to a beautiful, mountain wrapped campsite where we built our very own poo fire and had one last look at the starscape before our final drive back to UB.

Scenery near our campsite.

A stupa around the mountain were we camped out.

Back in UB we ate delicious Mexican food and praised something for the change-up from mutton meals, we went to a market where we found amazing, weathered old Buddhist relics, and headed to the main temple in town and the Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan, now a museum full of fantastic Buddhist art and a strange emporium of the bizarre gifts the Khan (King) was given during his life.

A stupa at the temple.

One of the halls in the Winter Palace.

African birds that were once a living part of the Khan's zoo. Look at the bill on that one farthest left.

It was wonderful.

It was certainly the most epic trip I've ever done, and I would absolutely recommend it to anyone who can spare the time to go. The landscapes were breathtaking, but the best part of Mongolia is by far the people and the incredible way of life they've preserved for hundreds, maybe even a thousand years. I think all 4 of us would highly recommend UB Guesthouse (Bobbi even came to the hospital to check on Shannon when she got food poisoning) www.ubguest.com, but if I had it to do over again I would want to spend more nights with families that aren't used to hosting tourists, like we did around the lake.

Brian's working on making videos of all our short videos and Shannon's pictures are coming soon. We're down to 14 more teaching days before then end and life's getting hectic in order to prepare for our upcoming trip and the move home. If you have a job to offer us when we get back, please let us know because we've got 6 months to bum off parents and burn through savings and generally be drains on society until we get one.

Central Mongolia - the beginnings

First day on the road. One of very few paved roads.

Our Soviet jeep in the Mongolian landscape.

Tibetan style stupas at Erdene Zuu monastery.

Young monks calling to worship with conch trumpets.

We flew from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, on the 11th where we geared up for our departure the next day. We'd read how awful Mongolian food can be, and seeing as how we'd be eating it for a long while, we opted for Indian in UB. Also, I was feeling quite a lot of trepidation about eating meat for the first time and wanted to put it off a little while longer. I stand by our decision to get foreign food, but let it be known that where there are no chickens to be seen, you shouldn't order chicken. We learned this the hard way. Shannon came down with a nasty bout of food poisoning that eventually landed her in a Mongolian hospital. They got her back into shape for the trip, but gave her some drugs that gave her intense anxiety the next night. We later read in the Lonely Planet in the health section that the greatest risk to your health in Mongolia is a Mongolian hospital. Luckily she pulled out of it safely and now has a story for the grand kids.

Tsagaan Nuur (White Lake) was one of the major highlights of the trip. Our horse guides, Sanbo and Biumbuch, got good and chummy with us, we got to stay with nomads, learn Mongolian games, drink Yak vodka, and we got to eat marmot. Blowtorched marmot. That's right.

The road to White Lake

Cheese drying at a ger on White Lake

Staying with nomads is what we thought we'd be up to the whole trip, but it turns out most families on the itinerary had extra gers where tourists sleep. But in Mongolia you aren't even welcomed in, you're assumed in to any ger you find. Around the lake the families didn't host tourists ever and they had no idea we were coming, but our guides would walk right in, find the dried cheese stash and make a fire and some milk tea even when no one was home. The family would come later and completely casually say hello and go about their business if they were shy or hang around for cards if they were less so. Hospitality is an old custom in Mongolia and was at one time a matter of survival, and probably still is. If you go though, it's polite to either pay 5000 Tougrug for your bed and meals (roughly 3.50 USD) or give a useful gift such as a wind-up radio or flashlight, batteries, duct tape, sewing kit, or crayons and coloring books for the kids. There are lots of kids to give fun stuff to.

Many families settle in small groups when they put up their gers, so the first family we stayed with was in a set of 4 or 5 gers where everyone shared in caring for the livestock.

A family of nomads moving for the winter

The best rainbow in the history of all time ever anywhere

They had yaks, goats, sheep, and horses, and that night we helped the women in a baby yak round up. This was so that the babies wouldn't feed during the night for morning milking. Shannon tried her hand at yak milking next morning, but I didn't give it a go until we got to the waterfall much later in the trip. I was full success though! It's strange, the teats are really slimy because they let the young ones suckle to get it all flowing before milking, and the slime makes them slippery and hard to pull straight down.

Best yak herders in town

Our ger owner, Otoma, milking that yak

Cheeks

Brian, Shannon, and Sanbo riding off into the mountains

There are a ton of photos in these slides, so if you want to see them bigger or slower or download them, click the slide show and it will take you to the website where they're stored and you can look at them closer there.

In central Mongolia lots of the milk products, which makes up the majority of summer food, come from yaks. Even vodka comes from yaks, though it's only 20% alcohol. There's not much water for cleaning either, so the one pot in a ger is used for everything and everything tastes kind of yak-y. Yaky became our descriptor for anything tasting animaly, even once we got to the Gobi and there were no yaks anywhere and the flavor was probably sheep. Yaky instant coffee is hard to stomach, but yaky milk tea is pretty good. Milk tea is green tea mixed with fresh whatever-animal-that's-around's-milk, butter and salt. It's more of a soup than a tea, but it warms a body up when it's freezing and raining and windy out. It's served without question at every ger in Mongolia as soon as you walk in the door.

Back to the blowtorched marmot bit - Biumbuch had shot this thing right before we arrived on the scene. He froze it and we started our horse trek during which he and Gilki, our translator, had a crush; and also he liked us because we played card games and drank vodka and the boys wrestled and had a jolly old Mongolian time. So when we got back he wanted to hang out more and share his marmot with us. He was so proud and excited about the marmot process, bossing his friends around and taking control.

We have lots of video of this part too, but Brian's going to compile it all so it'll be on the blog later. For now, you can see all the steps in these pictures. Again, these are only half the pictures, I'll post Shannon's in a couple of weeks when she gets back from Australia.

After White Lake we went to some caves, a rock formation, Tsetserleg town, and a waterfall before leaving central Mongolia for the Gobi.

If school stays as slow as it has been I'll post the Gobi later this week. We're busy procuring visas and booking flights and eating as much Korean food as possible before our go day. There are only 17 more days of teaching til we're finished. It's hard to believe we've been here nearly a year, and harder to believe that we'll be coming home soon(ish).

Beijing is Peking is Beijing

We're back! Our trips were amazing and now we've only 1 month left in Korea and lots to do before we go, so these posts from our travels are going to be short on words and heavy on pictures.

It's strange to throw Beijing in a trip as an afterthought, but it seems like it's common enough judging by all the travelers we talked to. I wish we'd have had 1 more day there, but we slammed all that we could into the time that we had and it was better than all of us were anticipating. Shannon, Ryan, Brian and I all arrived in the evening on the 8th of August and jumped right into the fun. The first night we went to Tianenmen Square and Wangfujin snack street and the night market there for all the creepy crawlies there are to eat.

Tianenmen Square

Wangfujin Snack Street

The next day we rented bikes and did a bike tour of the city, stopping at all the major and minor sites like the Forbidden City, historic hutongs (alleyways that look like old Peking (which really is Beijing, an older name for it) from Kungfu movies), newer quaint areas, and the Temple of Heaven.

Roofs of the Forbidden City

Shannon and me in the FC

Here are half the photos. Shannon and I both went camera crazy, but she's gone to Australia and all over really for 2 weeks, so rather than wait on her to come back to show pictures, I'll just post her photos later when I get them. She's got all the Temple of Heaven photos too. For now, feast your eyes on these.

On our last day in Beijing it was Ryan's 30th birthday. We did an excursion to the Great Wall that our hostel put on. But most experiences on the Great Wall are filled with shoulder to shoulder tourists and hawkers yanking your arm to get a sale the whole time. Where we went it is technically illegal to go. The land is owned by villagers that live in the nearby valley, and they encourage people to visit, but other sections you must buy a ticket from the government to see. We had to hike up to our section, which is completely unrestored and original, crumbling and lovely. Our guide was a 73 year old woman from the village who does the hike everyday, and it wasn't a cake walk. One guy in our group spoke Mandarin, so he told us how her village took bricks from the wall in the 60s to build the village. Here are too many more of the Wall.

That night we took Ryan out to what we thought would be Shaolin Monks doing their cosmos bending kungfu magic, but it turned out to be a theater full of fat tourists and the performers were certainly not monks. They were wearing makeup and shimmery robes for goodness sake. That was the only fault of the China portion of the trip. And because of it we missed out on one more delicious Chinese meal. The menus are funny in China. Beside the normal fried rice and noodles and tofu and mushrooms and chicken are dishes with donkey, dog, horse, and sea cucumber. Someone should give us a travel show where we eat weird things. We're building an impressive resume.

Mongolia's coming as soon as I can sift through the photos, til then... watch this.
Ryan



Then Brian


Then my turn


And finally, Shannon eats it too.

Seokbulsa and a trip to the Korean dentist

This past weekend was just like old times with all the chingus together again. Everyone had gone their separate ways the week before, and it was our second to last time all together. Friday we met up at David and Duck's with the intention of going to PNU, but we never made it with all of the raconteuring going on.

Some highlights were that David slept in a random tent that he found on Jeju Island because it got cold sleeping in the open outside. Luckily no one was around. And there were some pretty gruesome tales of a tent pisser at the music festival Ryan and Shannon had just come home from, but I've got to leave it at that for diplomacy's sake.

Saturday morning Brian and I headed up the ole mountain again, this time to find Seokbulsa (temple). We'd read about it a long time ago, but never successfully found it. Until Saturday. It was a small temple, but it had amazing details. Here's a picture in one of the temple halls.

The temple was nestled into the jutting rocks on a ridge near the South Gate of Geumjeongsan. It was a short hike, but it was down off one ridge into a valley and straight back up another. Well worth it though.

Saturday Shannon also found out that her closest sibling, her older sister, got engaged! So once again the crowd was together again and Will came too. It was Will's birthday and Shannon's good news day, so we went to lock and lorr bal to cereblate. And of course, there was the obligatory arcade trip. It's hard to believe it was our (2nd to) last time together. We'll do it all again Thursday for Ryan's birthday (he'll turn 30 while we're in China), but after that we may never all be in the same country again. After our big trip Shannon and Ryan will go to Australia and Canada respectively and won't be back in Korea (they've signed on for another year, Ryan's actually taking over at Brian's school) until after David, Duck, Brian, and I all leave for good. Brian and I will still get to see plenty of everyone, but it's the end for the 6 chingus.

Sunday we kind of realized all that must be done before leaving for Beijing and Mongolia, so this week has been busy. Only 3 more days of camp before the adventures begin again. Not that life in Korea isn't adventure in it's own right. Yesterday Brian and I went to the dentist for our yearly checkup and cleaning, thinking that we'd do it while we had great insurance and dental care is cheap in Korea. We looked up the words for checkup and cleaning and that seemed to ring some bells so we sat nervously waiting in what looked like the reception area of a swanky spa. I was worried I'd get knocked out before I could get my point across and wake up with a fresh set of veneers slapped on my teeth. Brian was worried we'd get slapped with some enormous bill for we didn't know what. Luckily those specific fears were unfounded. When the receptionists sat us down it was in an area with small partitions between the dentist chairs so that I could see Brian's feet and hear him clearly but I couldn't see what was going on with his face. No one cleaned us up, no hygienists materialized, but soon the doctor came along.

The poor dentist was baffled. "What's the problem?" he asks. Well, nothing necessarily. He was with Brian first and I could hear all. Brian says something to the effect of check me for cavities and clean my teeth please and seconds later I hear the dentist say he has no cavities. Brian asks how much for cleaning, doctor says maybe 10,000 Won (8 bucks) and Brian again mentions cavities. Now the doctor is plaintive, "No! No cavities!" (you should read this with the very Korean sort of whining trail off). "I will scaling to remove your calculus". Oh, perhaps this is cleaning? We though scaling was Konglish until we talked to Mom and Frank that night who mentioned that scaling is a real English word. So maybe calculus is the right word in that situation too, but I doubt it and also hope not because it's funnier that way. So again about 1 minute goes by and all of a sudden Brian's finished. Next it's my turn and the same thing happens. No tapping on the teeth or scraping while checking for cavities (though he did use a mirror, no gloves though), the scaling was most ungentle and it was a toe-curling minute that he spent scraping my gums to bloody pulps only on my lower front teeth, leaving the rest alone. Then he told me "Now you have no cavities AND no calculus". That's great, I never liked calculus. And nobody likes cavities. The whole thing set us each back 4,500 Won, or around 3.50 USD. Not as thorough, but much much cheaper than US dental care. It seems that the only preventative medicine we practice in the US is for something that would make us uglier if we weren't to do so. Korean dentistry seems to have much more to do with whether or not there's a problem in your mouth than keeping your smile nice. The lady at the counter who checked us in had a dead tooth in her mouth. Unsightly, but maybe not medically a problem to leave that sucker in there?

I told some Korean teachers at my school about the escapades today and they asked how many times Americans go to the dentist a year. I told them once and asked about Koreans. Both women are in their 50s and neither had ever been to a dentist. That explains the dentist's confusion.

This will probably be the last post until early September so the blog will be dormant a while. Check back then for all the sights and sounds of Beijing and Mongolia!

Now That's a Monsoon, and, Do You Know That's Poisonous?

Last week brought more action than usual. Wednesday we hosted Sam, our first couch surfer ever. If you don't know, www.couchsurfing.com is a great network of people with an extra bed, couch, or floor space who agree to let you stay for free. There are hosts all over the world, and anywhere you go you can stay for free, meet some locals, get an insiders view, and connect with interesting people. We just signed up a few weeks ago and we're hoping to surf for a good deal of our upcoming trips.

Sam came on Wednesday and stayed two nights. He was a great introduction to the whole concept of couchsurfing and I hope we meet him again someday. He's from Switzerland and taught us proscht! (cheers), and that Swiss people either speak Swiss-German, French, Italian, or something he called Romanic. He was a Swiss-German speaker himself, and he had a slight grudge against Germans because he went to learn English in New Zealand (loved it) and found that Germans could get a work visa there very easily whereas he could not. He has some amazing photos from New Zealand, which bumped that place up on my travel wish list quite a few notches. We took Sam to Gwangan Li to see the night view his first night with us. The twin buildings were new from the last time we'd been there.

But the colorful, fashion conscious yappy dogs were old favorites from the beach scene.
Thursday we got a proper introduction to monsoon season. I thought we'd met before, but we hadn't seen anything like this. The little girl on the right was bawling. For some reason this was hilarious at the time. Probably because she would be home in no time and all would be right as rain. Or maybe because she was still holding that umbrella over her head even though she was wading through chest high water.
It was up to my hips at some points. We left the apartment geared up with wellies and umbrellas, but around the first turn we saw what a river we were going to have to ford, and we turned back to change into running shorts and rain slickers before going for our morning swim to work. Because of the flooding though we didn't make it to school until around 9:10 (1st period starts at 8:50). There I changed into teacher wear and toweled off before going to the teachers room where the principle promptly cancelled classes seeing as how there were only about 5 other teachers besides me who made it. The principle commented on how dry my clothes were because the last time the rain was flooding the streets over the rim of my rain boots I came in soaked. And then a teacher who speaks no English told him something like "blah blah I don't know what she's saying hotpants blah blah still don't know". She told him I wore hotpants to school. This was very funny to me, but I was a bit offended that she would think I would have such bad taste in hotpants (my running shorts don't have any glitter and they're not even purple, red, or gold). Unfathomably, Brian still had school. I waited out the storm til 12 and then went home, but he had a full day. There are more photos of the flooding at the end of the post.

We went to a slow dinner with Sam that night and then came home to show each other where we live on google earth, share photos and travel talk. He left Friday, and we went to school where there were no classes because it's the end of the semester and who knows what was going on. That night Brian and I went to blow fish dinner date and were reminded how great it was. So Saturday, after a dud of a trip to the Museum of Modern Art (closed) and a successful trip to a free traditional dance performance at the Busan Cultural Center near our house Ryan, Shannon, David, and Duck came to meet us for another round of it. Here's blow fish dinner 101.

First course is banchan, Korean for ayce side dishes, and blow fish lip salad. Though this sounds terrible, not only is it tasty, it's also very fun to play with.

Next up, the meal. You can see the blow fish soup in the slide show at the end, but here was my blow fish fry plate. It's so yummy.

We also ordered blow fish sashimi, but unfortunately that turned out to be a really large portion of blow fish lip salad, which we already had never ending plates of. Now we know. But the good news is, we survived both nights. No one even had any tingly tongues. But I think that's a very expensive Japanese style blow fish sushi that leaves the tingles in. The rest of the night, since no one died, we all played rummy with rum and felt like we were already on vacation. Monday and Tuesday we have to go to school, but there's no class, so we're almost vacationing now.