Mongolian ger camp.
If you visit one foreign country within the next 12 months, make it Mongolia – you will be blown away, I promise you.
We caught an early train out of Beijing the other morning and we were soon whizzing past the mountains and parts of the Great Wall and onwards through northern China.
The train is a great lark – the compartments are smaller than expected and although they take four people and ours only had three, it was a hell of a squeeze because the Mongolian girl we were sharing with was returning home after a long time away and had at least three cases and three other bags!
The border crossings took forever and were in the middle of the night – at the Chinese border at Erlian we were stopped three hours 20 minutes while they changed the bogies (wheels) so the train could run on different-gauge track and then we were stopped for a further hour and-a-half or so at Zamil-Uud, the Mongolian border.
We went past Sainshand in the Gobi Desert at 5.20am and I awoke not long afterwards, so I was able to watch this great desert rolling by. I even caught a photo of a few Bactrian camels (two-humped) grazing as we went past.
We arrived at Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, early in the afternoon and from there we were whizzed out on to the steppes to live in a ger (tent) in the countryside for a couple of days. The gers were much more comfortable than expected and because they were designed to cater for tourists, there were even flushing toilets and hot showers laid on!
The steppes are magnificent – they call Mongolia the Land of Blue Sky and it really is amazing – the vistas go on forever and are marked only by the odd herd of horses, cattle, sheep, goats or the occasional yak. The silence is quite breathtaking, too. You really are away from it all here.
I had a glorious two-hour ride on a Mongolian horse yesterday morning to the Genghis Khan monument and I felt quite overwhelmed standing under the steely gaze of this great warrior. In the afternoon we visited a local nomad’s ger and learned many things about life on the steppes – though our host was 65 with an eldest son living in Chicago and his dream was to leave Mongolia next summer to visit his son and drive a car in Chicago!
After that I had a go at Mongolian archery and proved to be quite good, while in the evening, several of us got together and had a Mongolian vodka party! Every Mongolian I have met has been so friendly.
This morning I watched the sunrise over the steppes before returning to Ulaanbaatar. We have got a city tour a bit later today and then we catch the next leg of the Trans-Siberian to Irkutsk in eastern Siberia tomorrow night.
Snow showers are predicted in Ulaanbaatar in the next couple of days and I am just wondering what sort of weather we can expect on the next leg of our journey!
Mongolian horse ready for riding.
