My Mongolian Diary

These are my final few hours in Mongolia and in 4 hours, I will be back on a plane heading back to a swelteringly hot Beijing. We have spent 2 weeks in Mongolia. We spent the first week on the tourist route and so I will share my diary on tshi week in brief.

The second week was more of a personal and spiritual soujourn and so too private to blog but perhaps i may get an opportunity to share in person with any of you over a coffee someday in the not too distant future.

Kenneth and I have thoroughly enjoyed Mongolia - the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly.

Here's a rundown of our first week in Mongolia...

We have been staying at Khongor Guesthouse on Peace Avenue in the heart of UB as our base. We spent the first week joining a tour with Khongor Tours as it was the most convenient thing to do and the Khongor manager, Toroo has been very friendly, helpful and obliging. Initially, we only had 7 days to see Mongolia and Toroo and his wife recommended a tour in a westerly direction to Central Mongolia considering our timeframe and the fact we wanted to see the more lush and green landscapes as opposed to the Gobi desert which most Europeans travellers tend to opt for.

Our tour experience to Central Mongolia was wonderful despite very bumpy 2-4 hour drives across pot holed land (they weren't even proper roads!) from one destination to the next. Roughest rides I have ever had in my life but the novelty made it a fun adventure. We were very well looked after by our English speaking guide Iwho also doubled as our cook!), Hogee and our experienced driver, Jooweh. Whilst UB itself is probably the ugliest city I have ever been to with its soviet style buildings and high crime rate, Mongolia has the most vast and varied landscapes I have ever laid eyes on. Mix empty deserts, snowcapped mountains, dramatic gorges, yellow grass steppe lands and sparkling lakes and you have the Mongolian countryside!

The highlights of our time to Central Mongolia were:

- Staying with Hogee's family who happen to run a ger camp on the outskirts of Kharkhorin (the old capital), having our first taste of suutei tsai (salty milk tea) and homemade bayslag (one of a variety of cheeses which Mongolian families make). We learn how to play Mongolian games with Hogee, Hogee's niece and a friend using sheep's ankle bones. Hogee also doubled as our cook on the tour and she was fantastic. We had some Mongolian food but she would mix it up with plenty of vegies which is not part of the usual Mongolian diet. In fact, she told me that whilst most Mongolian young people can tolerate some vegies now, most older generations (including her parents) absolutely hate vegetables! The typical Mongolian diet is made up of boiled meats like mutton, beef or horse and supplemented by dairy snacks which are homemade like cheeses, butter cream and yogurt. Mongolians love eating fat. This is partly due to the fact that winters are very long and it gets down to -45 degs. Fat helps to keep them warm. For the most part, the nomadic life is very healthy - hardly anyone ever gets sick or has even seen a hospital. Whereas people in UB get sick - different diet, stress and pollution factors.

- Staying in a ger with a nomadic family at the Great White Lake. The kids are on summer holidays and I really admire the way nomadic families raise their children in many ways. They run barefoot everywhere and look so dirty but they help with everything from collecting water from the lake to catching fish for dinner and cooking to starting fires for the tourists' gers with animal dung or woodfire they have chopped to milking the yaks/cows and herding the animals whilst on horses. I learnt about separating the baby animals from their mothers each evening so that the mothers can be milked at 6am the next morning. Got to try homemade yogurt here - delicious! We also horse rode till our butts were so sore, got to experience a surreal landscape dotted with pine trees on lava filled land and hike up to a volcanoe crater. The Great White Lake itself was beautiful and actually looks white from a distance for most of the day! We had to bathe in the lake because there was no running water. It was too cold on the first day so we skipped the bath but on the 2nd day, it was a perfect 26 deg for a dip! The only down side is that there was heaps of dung everywhere and consequently it was flies galore everywhere which was rather annoying. This is also where I learn that a yak is totally different to a cow!

- Camping by a magnificent gorge. We set up camp amidst the pine trees. The river in between the gorge was so pristine and there were so many fish in there! Kenneth caught one trout and Jooweh caught another. We cooked the fishes for dinner.

- Tsenker hot springs. We stayed at a ger camp by some hot springs. The water from the springs are channeled to a rock pool and mixed in with cold water as the water from the springs themselves would be very hot. It was such an indulgence to bathe in the hot springs after having not showered for a while (due to camping). It was also so nice to use a proper toilet after days of using pit toilets (exactly like the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire.... I had to pray each time that I would not fall into the mush below me). The area around the hot springs were also so beautiful and if you love horses, there were plenty around. The young foals would clumsily follow behind the elegant mares - a very cute sight!

- Staying with another nomadic family out in semi-desert terrain, camel riding with the 2 older sons and playing with them in sandunes - they taught us how to sand surf and wrestle in the sand! They also gave us Mongolian names b/c our real names were too difficult for them! I am Deigee and Kenneth is Mogee in Mongolia, by the way! This is where i learnt how to milk a cow and i also got to watch the father comb cashmere from the goats. The 3 boys were fantastic with fetching water daily from the well, sweeping and keeping their gers clean, milking the goats and sheep and the middle son really gave us a good show with his super fast horse riding (he happens to be a Naadam horse jockey as he is a pint sized 11 year old). This is also where we experienced a ger filled with meat hanging all around it (they eat the meat as a snack) and the family simply passed around a bucket of boiled sheep's head for dinner! There were also plastic buckets from which I tried the home made yogurt (more sour here than with the other family due to the warmer climate), milk and butter cream. In the evening, we played cards and sheeps' ankle bone games with the boys and also did some drawing and colouring with them.