This is what I expected for the following two weeks in Mongolia: gers scattered across large distances in huge landscapes where a type of inexorable emptiness dominates. Only 20 minutes after leaving UB you see solitary gers of nomad families with flocks of sheep, goats, horses, cows, yaks or camels depending on the region.
Our driver was called Jack and he was nice. He knew exactly where to stop to collect stones that had interesting colours and shapes. He managed to spot galoping deer and we followed them in the van. He showed us wild animals on the horizon and made us laugh with his comments and good sense of humour. One thing that I could not understand was how he drove 2000km in a place where there are no roads or signs. How he knew at which 'obol' (pile of rocks decorated with offerings, they beeped to have good luck on the road) to beep, where to turn right and what to avoid. My conclusion is that he was guided by the sun and the mountains, but all those mountainous forms really looked almost identical on the horizon. I really respect Mongolian drivers.
The beginning of the journey was towards the south, bringing us deeper into the Gobi desert, which is not the sand desert you expect but a succession of landscapes that vary considerably after each hill. Mongolia's beauty definitely lies in its landscapes and not in its cities, as all of the ones we saw were horrible places where nothing happens and you just can't wait to escape.
Mongolia is not famous either for its exquisite cuisine. Basically its food consists of lamb with rice or pasta or potatoes. There are also other half interesting things, like camel yoghurt, which I liked, but my fellow travellers didn't. There's also camel cheese that just I didn't like. There's also a drink called airag which is based on mare milk and tastes sour. In theory it's alcoholic but to me it seemed more repulsive than intoxicating.
We cooked our own lunch, something that became more interesting with the strong winds that swept across the desert. One day we had to cook inside the van :D The nights were quite cold and some nights we warmed up with vodka; other nights with firewood. The mornings were even colder and my body had (and still has) this annoying habit of waking up at 4.30am, so I had to stay in bed with my thoughts and other people's snores until someone else in my group woke up.
The first night there was a new moon and I saw the milky way as I'd never seen it before: clear, beautiful, full of stars and lightly staining the night sky. It was spectacular. I was the only one who went out into the cold before going to sleep to admire the beauty of the stars, always recognising the Plough and trying to create shapes with the millions of stars.
Another night, while we talked in our ger, Jack told us we should go out. When we looked at the sky we saw a phenomenon we had never seen or heard of! It was a type of circle in the zenith of the firmament, and it was becoming wider slowly and regularly. Its edges were the colour of stars and in the middle, while it grew it took on the colour of a clearer darkness. It grew and grew so much that it almost disappeared on all horizons. Mongolians say that when this happens it means there will be a cold winter. One thing that made this phenomenon so interesting is that no one had heard of it. It took us by surprise and left us speechless. Can anyone tell me what it was that I saw?
My travel group was 1A. There was Joe, the English guy for whom leaving the civilised world was proving difficult; Silvia, the Austrian teacher that added something interesting to the group with her numerous travel experiences (and her Austrian style), and there were Johan and Demian, the Welsh couple who are slow travellers and took everything with such freshness and joy that the added a nice touch to the group. They had been travelling for 8 months: 2 in Vietnam, 2 in Laos and 4 in China, so they entertained us with their many comical and tragic stories about their travels. We also used them as a source of advice as we were all going towards China and they also had alot to tell about being there. Demian loves beer and is always in a good mood. We also enjoyed hearing them speak Welsh (a language that is dying) and a card game that they knew.
As Demian and Johan had been on the road for 8 months, their stomachs were already trained for food with dubious origins. The rest of us were still in training. Silvia and Joe were the first to be affected on day 7 of the journey. That was close to a very interesting canyon in a really strange place.
The tour was really good. We saw different types of very varied landscapes, among those one of my favourite: sand dunes. For me, sand dunes are magical places and there is nothing quite like them on this earth. Mountains are spectacular, beaches are beautiful, forests are charming, rock formations are hair-raising, but sand dunes are just magical!! You can hear the sound of the wind playing with the sand, incessantly changing the landscape, creating figures and shapes from another world. You find strange animal tracks and the mind soars uncontrollably.. oh, how I love sand dunes. I think that the other people in my group thought I was pretty strange because I spent a long time in the dunes in a trance-like state.
I should be ashamed that I spend 19 days in Mongolia and only learned to say 6 words. Mongolian is a language with difficult guttural sounds. After leaving behind the harmony and beauty of the Russian language, hearing Mongolian is like listening to a dog fight. The words I learned are the following: hi, goodbye, thanks, let's go, beer and khushur. Khushur is a type of pasty filled with lamb meat (for a change) which is very fatty. We ate this dish in Kharkhorin, the ancient capital that Genghis Khan established as the centre of the largest empire the world had ever seen. The Khushur tasted really good but my stomach made sure it reminded me twice that night how fragile it is and it punished my greed at eating those fried things three times.
As we got closer to UB it became colder and I wanted to go back to civilisation; it's a somewhat strange feeling to know that you're so close but you still have so many hours on the road and intense heat in the van, but then you go out and freeze in 10 seconds from the savage wind. Back in UB we were happy to not have to spend more hours in the van, to be able to take a shower and eat different types of food. That night we ate at a Mexican restaurant and laughed at the many adventures we'd shared together. Joe left the following morning for Beijing and the rest of us would take the same train three days later.
The last two days in UB I washed my clothes, spent a while on the internet and saw some attractions I hadn't seen at the beginning because I'd been going around looking for a tour. On Saturday the 3rd of October we were taken to the station and we took the last leg of the transsiberian which took us to the Chinese capital. That's how my last 3 weeks in the land of Genghis Khan were spent. It is a unique part of the world thanks to its history and its great and fascinating landscapse.
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