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.