Mongolia Video!

It's been a long, long time since we were in Mongolia. But Brian's just finished the video of the second half of our trip there. We talked about it enough back then, so with no further ado, here it is.

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).

Good Cheesy Fun

The weeks continue to go by faster and faster. We've only 3 months left on our contracts, but it feels like much less because of all the revving we're doing in preparation for our Summer escapades, and we're already starting to think about where to start in South East Asia after it's all said and done. Partly in an effort to conserve money, and in part because it's too hot to do much else, we had a slow and easy weekend.



Friday I met Ryan and Shannon in Seomyeon for a short soju tent time. Brian was out with the teachers from his school, so it was just the three of us, but I think the ajuma who ran that tent could be considered part of our party because she did hand feed us some of her wares. I suppose she thought she was showing these strange foreigners how to go about eating the food on our table. I can't assume to know what was in her mind, but I can report her actions. She came over after delivering some cucumber sticks with a yummy sauce called duenjang (pronounced dwen jang). She picked up a cuke, dunked it in the sauce, and then came for my face with it, and I duley opened up. Next one for Ryan, and last, but certainly with just as much care, one for Shannon. This is actually pretty common; about every other day some kid comes up to me at school with a grimy fist full of love wanting me to open up for them to put some food in my mouth. I usually take it in my hand first, just in case. Korean kids aren't devious like students at home. I can imagine some American 6th grader trying to put a piece of chocolate that'd freshly met with a bathroom floor in a teacher's mouth, with full malicious intent. But what do I really know about American 6th graders?



Saturday David came over in the morning for some nutritional yeast gravey. If you're a meat eater and that sentence disgusted you, you really should give it a try. It tastes like a cheese sauce fit to please any T-bone muncher's palate. Just ask David. After the compulsory Super Laggis Brothers gaming, we took off for Haeundae.



On the way we found one of Busan's great Summer offerings - beverage promotions. This one was a giant can of Cass, one brand of the ubiquitous budweiser-esque lagers of Korea. I don't mind the darts promotions, those are fun, but I'm particularly partial to the spin the wheel variety. I spun and got a glass of Cass Lemon, somewhat like Tequiza. Brian got a whole can, and David won a glass of light. A great welcome to the beach it was. That night David, Brian, Will and I caroused in Kyungsungdae for a bit, but we all turned in fairly early. That gave us plenty of time for cheese making on Sunday! We'd tried before in Korea, with mixed results. But this time we were success! Yummy fresh mozzarella was ours! At home we'd made cheese with 2% milk, and it was a long time ago, but it seems to me that the whole milk we used here yielded a lot more cheese for the same amount of milk.
What with a bowl full of fresh cheese, we decided for pizza and movie night. Here's what our cheese turned into. This may not look so special to Western eyes, but keep in mind we eat rice for every meal and those bottles of beer on the table are not sold in Korea. Maybe with this cheese block we can start bulking up our dairy intake to prepare for Mongolia. I read that in the Summer months the nomads there subsist on what translates to "white foods", meaning milk, cream, cheese, yogurt, and dried cheese curds, as well as fermented mares' milk. These come from yaks, sheep, horses, goats, and maybe cows, but I'm not sure. I am sure that until we made that cheese our diet for the past 9 months has contained less than 1% dairy and I hope all my lacto-digesting parts and critters are still fully functional.



Speaking of Mongolia, we've just bought our tickets (we used Ken at Unique Travel in Pusan who speaks perfect English and finds flights 200,000 won cheaper than we or the competition can; uniquetravel@korea.com) and we're getting the final plan ironed out. Shannon, Ryan, Brian and I are leaving Busan August 8th on a flight to Beijing. We'll have 2 and a half days there to see the city and the Great Wall and hopefully catch a Shaolin Monk Kung-Fu performance. Then we're flying to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, on the 11th. Which means that we've got from the 12th-27th, 16 days, 15 nights, to see all that we can see of Mongolia. We're hiring a guide and jeep through Nomadic Adventures (ganerdene_y@hotmail.com) for the duration, and we're going to the Gobi, Central and Northern Mongolia. We're still working out the itenerary, but whatever happens, it's going to be slack-jaw-amazing.