Didn’t manage to get much sleep last night as it’s hard to adjust to the times as all the train times are in Moscow time but your trying to live in local time so sleeping is a nightmare. We stayed up most the night talking to Peter, he seems like a really nice guy. We have all swapped email addresses and he has said we can visit him in Amsterdam and he wants to come to Manchester for a weekend.
We arrived at the station at 7.30am and managed to get a couple of hours sleep from about 5am. Felt absolutely knackered though as it seems like really long day with no sleep. We got hassled the minute we got off the train for taxi’s but luckily our guide was pretty quick at finding us.
Our new guide is called Jenny (or the Mongolian version) and speaks really good English. We drove about an hour to the Flower Hotel where we were advised we could get showered and freshen up. What we hadn’t banked on was that it was Japanese-style showers where it was one big open plan room with plastic stools around the room and you all had to sit and wash yourselves with pans of water from shower heads together. We all felt very uncomfortable about the whole thing as we didn’t really know each other that well. I decided to pass on the offer and Phil stayed outside waiting for shower gel while Jason had a shower and Haiden just decided to have a shave.
After that we went to a local restaurant for breakfast, which consisted of a small omelette each, sausages in a spicy sauce with onions, and a kind of fried rice. This was followed by Danish type things and donuts with Mongolian tea.
After breakfast was another city walking tour in the blistering cold which I really was not in the mood for (firstly due to the cold and second my shoes had started to rub. I also wanted to try and use the internet so I could at least make proper contact with family n stuff. We started our tour of the city and when we got to the post office she dropped me off and carried on with the others. I tried to use the internet but it wasn’t working and there was a bit of a cuffuffle at the in
internet PC.
I made my way back to the restaurant where we had agreed to meet for lunch at 1pm.
Eventually I got our driver to find out where I could use the internet and ended up being able to get online at the hotel not far from us for about an hour for $3. The rest of the group got back about 12.30pm and we had lunch. Although it was a Mongolian restaurant the chef was Indian and cooked a lot of Indian dishes so a lot of us had curry with nan bread. The curry was really nice but the chicken was a bit ropey.
After lunch we headed up to the Ger camp, via a supermarket as we needed to get some gifts for the Nomad family we would be visiting tomorrow. Our guide advised us to buy rice, flour, salt and oil between us as gifts.
When we got to the Get camp it was in the middle of snow-covered mountains with nothing around for miles. We were staying in the dome type tents that had beds round the edge and a big metal wood burner in the centre with a chimney out through the top of the tent. There was about 20 of these tents that slept between two and six people. Due to it being winter we were the only guests at the Ger camp. We had a lady that would keep topping the burner up with wood and coal throughout the day and night. Jenny showed us where the “outhouse” was which was a metal hut with 3 doors and behind each door was a rectangular hole in the floor ( you can work out the rest).
Inside the Ger..
We had a bit of a sleep until dinner at 7pm where we went into another tent with another interconnecting one for the kitchen. We all sat an very small stools covered with fur at a very low table.
Our meal consisted of apple salad for starter, which was basically sliced apple with mayonnaise and sugar. Main course was a kind of mutton stew, which was very fatty, with rice. I ate what meat there was in the stew and the rice but had to hide the rest under a napkin on the plate. For dessert was a heart shaped cookie.
Straight after dinner we played two games with cows anklebones :-/.
We had a bag of dry small bones that depending how they landed represented a sheep, cow, horse or camel. The aim was to tip them out on the mat and then try to flick one bone into another of the same animal and then you could collect them. Then we raced our “horse” bone along a race track by shaking bones and trying to land them as horses to gain moves along the track. It’s a lot harder to explain than it was to play lol.
After games and a few beers we went back to our Ger. I’ve already been to the loo’s twice and its so cold just going from you heated tent to the loo that your ears are sore with the cold and its only about 100 yards away.
And this was the inside of the loo..
Tomorrow we are visiting a typical Nomad family in their Ger camp and playing archery.