The Plan:
Driver will pick up tourists from their hotel at 7:20am and deliver them to the bus. They will take the bus for 7-8 hours south, to Dalanzadgad and will be met there by tour driver and guide (English speaking).
In reality:
Sometime between last night and when breakfast arrived unexpectedly at 6:30am that morning, a note also appeared on the desk in our hotel room. It read "6:45 going" and was signed by someone who also left us a smiley face. We didn't notice the note until 6:30am, had no idea what it meant or who left it.
6:45 am, there was a knock at the hotel room door and someone (hotel staff?) tried to tell us to check out. Utter confusion ensues as breakfast has just been eaten and the final stages of packing is still in progress. Mark went down stairs to the lobby to find our driver has arrived, with a mini-van full of other tourists waiting for us. Whoops. Lost in translation is pretty normal here, like 10x/day there are language hurdles that simply cannot be leaped.
Long story short... We were off to the Gobi Desert a tad earlier!
The driver is very nice and we discover also that our 3 fellow tourists are ESL teachers in Beijing, here on a mini vacation. One Brit (Jay), one Colombian (Paula) and... wait for it... a young lady from Evergreen CO! That would be Jacklyn.
At the main UB bus terminal our driver puts our luggage under the bus in the cavity and tells us to get aboard. We do and he leaves. Then things go a bit haywire. Other passengers tell Mark and I we are in their seats. According to their printed tickets, we are! Wait a sec, we don't have printed tickets and therefore, don't have seat numbers, so now what?
The bus driver arrives and demands to see our tickets, that's what happens. LOL Not having one to show him, he then proceeds to tell us where to buy tickets. Tickets that we know are included in the tour already. So like all confused kids, we called "dad". Dad being Ganzo - the Mongolian guy we have been emailing with to get this tour organized from the US. Hooray for What's App and being able to phone-a-friend even while traveling in Mongolia!
Ganzo got the shuttle driver to come back and help explain that the tour company bought tickets for all 5 of us, then the bus driver consulted his printed passenger list. I was on there. Mark was not. Jay was on there, his companions were not. Yeah... whoever booked the tour, made it onto the passenger list and the others were a bit out of luck?! Ganzo informed me we were fine and the bus driver was the one who was "confuse-ed". Soon enough that bus driver did just give up, let us sit anywhere on the bus and we headed out of town.
The bus drove on the highway, south from Ulaanbaatar. I used the term highway incredibly loosely, because it appears to be one of only a handful of blacktop roads in this country, outside of the city.
About 2.5 hours in, the bus pulled over and it was apparently a pee break for the driver and whomever else felt the need. On either side of the road was sandy-rocky-dirt as far as the eye could see. Not a mound in sight. Certainly not a toilet. It didn't stop the men-folk and very little concern was given to how the women-folk might make this work or indeed if they had needs at all. Then it was time to get going.
Another 2.5 hours in we stopped for lunch at what I'd say is the Mongolian version of a truck stop. Although I didn't see gas anywhere. We ate at the available restaurant, Mark and I sharing a mutton soup bowl and a pile of noodles with mutton. It was hot and not bad, but I was kinda getting sick of tasting mutton in my mouth all day long and wondered if I would ever get used to eating so much animal fat.
The next stop, you guessed it, in 2 or so hours; there was a pit toilet for the ladies! It was decidedly more private and I was glad it was still light. You opened the door and without so much as a step up, there was a rather large hole about 6 inches in! The drop was at least 10 feet and the hole was large enough to swallow me if I made a wrong move. Yikes! But beggars can't be choosers...
We arrived at Dalanzadgad around 6:15 pm. I know right?! 8 hours was a bit off. This was a 10 hour bus ride where the scenery didn't change in 10 hours. Flat and dusty, not a tree in sight since UB. At irregular intervals I noticed tracks with tire treads that left the main road and headed out into the great beyond. No street signs at all except a 50 km/hr sign I saw once. Occasional herds of goats and sheep, horses or camels. I had my head against the window most of the journey, hoping not to miss a minute of the Mongolian scenery and had all but concluded it would not be necessary to do that on the way back to UB 3 days from now.
At this bus station our group of 5 was split back into a group of 2 and 3. They went with a more mature female guide, we went with our guy. NOT exaggerating, our guide was about 16 years old and his dad was our driver. We honestly tried to learn their names but couldn't get our tongues to cooperate on the pronunciation front, so don't hold it against me. Let's just called our guide William and pretend that is not offensive to rename him.
William and his dad loaded our stuff up and then informed us we had about 100km more to drive tonight in order to reach our Ger Camp.
Now, let me explain what that really means.
1. We were not staying on the highway, but were now headed straight into the Gobi. No more paved roads for us. The next 100km were dirt tracks (or not... since sometimes we just drove over virgin ground too) or dry river beds. Mostly though, it was tracks that crossed river beds. Our driver was an expert and clearly felt comfortable at 50km/hr, off-roading in a mini-van. Mark and I watched the sunset from the middle row of seats, behind the dirty, tinted windows of a Mitsubishi van while being tossed around like a ship in the Beagle Channel.
2. 100km actually takes about 2.5 hours because of the terrain and because at various points the guide and driver appear to be unsure as to which of the 3-4 dirt tracks forking in front of us, are the correct one to take. We stopped for directions 2x before reaching our destination in the very cold and dark, near 9 pm.
I was EXHAUSTED and had done zero exercise and none of the driving today.
Our hosts were lovely (I think). They offered us milk tea - polite but firm no thanks to that one of course - and wanted to keep us in their family ger while the fire in ours got going and warmed it up. Mark endeared himself no end by accepting a little hit of snuff from the patriarch's snuff bottle as it was handed around to the men who were present. Sneezing ensued and even though they laughed, they appeared thrilled by his participation!
Our ger, now ready, was a welcome respite from the long day of travel. A wood stove was burning brightly and it was 100 degrees inside. I was given some instruction about stoking it overnight and then we were left to ourselves. Umm... no word about the bathroom situation? Nope.
Wednesday dawned bright and clear - and cold! So, the fire does go out overnight and given that a ger is never really closed up at the top, the temp inside the ger is close to the temp outside. You heard me correctly, the lid is off the thing! At the very top, where the chimney exits to the sky, so does the warm air. The hole is about 6 feet by 3 feet and apparently this is normal, even in the dead of winter. On the bright side, since there appears to be no means to shower, the ventilation probably serves several purposes.
The wood we were burning over night and during breakfast was said to be Gobi Tree (not cut down, just foraged bits). This mornings first excursion was to the "forest" of these trees, which exists only near this camp. Tree's grow to 3-4 feet, but it takes 100-200 years. IMHO, they are gnarly versions of a Colorado juniper but with incredibly deep roots - 100m or deeper in order to reach water.
Then we headed for Flaming Cliffs. The Gobi version of Arizona's famous red sandstone Monument Valley. The wide open spaces are way bigger here but the monuments are way smaller. And there are dinosaur bones. The whole area was alive with dinosaurs 65-80 million years ago and it has been a archaeologist's dream for the last 150 years. Of course, back then the place was a lush jungle too.
Soon enough the van stopped and William and his dad jumped out, eager to show us dinosaur bones that were still buried. They moved a few rocks and swept red sand soil away with gloved hands then a little brush. Low and behold, there was what looked to be a bone still partially buried. I loved the exercise and the enthusiasm and had to giggle when they took great pains to bury it again before we left. Of course I suspect that the next van load of tourists will also get to see that bone being excavated, but it's all good.
Flaming cliffs was the scene for a bit of hiking to capture various views. It was also where we took our first real breaths of the biting wind that was signaling the close end to tourist season and the onset of the cold season.
We had 120 km to travel this afternoon before arriving at the Gobi Sand Dunes. A destination that had long held a spot on my bucket list.
Again... in and out of river beds, following barely-there tire tracks, winding through a black rock type canyon... wiggling and jiggling all over the back seat, we went. Always, our driver's grip firmly on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the terrain just a few meters in front of the van.
Bingo! Dunes!
In the setting sun, Mark, myself and our little William, hiked/scrambled up the biggest of the dunes in this area. The afternoon was warm and breezy. Beautiful.
From my sandy perch, I played with ladybugs in the sand and watched camels at the Gobi Oasis below us.
These Gobi sand dunes stretch for 180 km and are up to 27 km wide in places.
This is not the only patch of dunes in a desert that is otherwise mostly exposed rock - and it is still expanding (southward into China) by a process called desertification. The Gobi Desert is the 5th largest desert in the world and if I'm not mistaken, the most northern. For the most part is a cold desert and can reach temps of -45 F-ish.
'Tis a harsh climate indeed down here. I have traveled far and wide and many places have called me to perhaps revisit and stay longer. I wonder often "could I live here?", when I travel. I already know I could never live in Mongolia. There would be a loud period of whining about the cold, but it would be short lived, then I would perish at the hands Mother Nature in Mongolia! I know I am way too precious.
Our guest camp was different on night 2 in the Gobi. It was a little bigger for one thing. We found ourselves eating dinner in the 'restaurant ger' with a Serbian couple whom we had run into a couple of times over the last 2 days. They were super nice, clearly enthusiastic travelers and engaging to talk to. Another bonus was the ability to mix it up with the other guide. She was clearly more experienced, spoke better English and was overall, more enthusiastic about her job than our young man was.
Dinner was awesome. A noodley bowl with lots of veggies and some meat too. OMG, I miss vegetables! Probably too much information, but the things have not been "right" since we left Ulaanbaatar and I have no choice but to blame it, at least partially, on my new found high fat and mutton protein diet. Seriously, I'm already at the point where I believe I might have eaten more mutton on this trip than in the whole rest of my life. AND I'm ok if I don't eat another bite... ever.
Our ger was toasty warm again that night, by way of a mad hot wood-fired stove that our host lit with a little flame thrower.
But I knew that delightful heat was escaping out of the hole in the roof and it wouldn't/couldn't last 'til morning. :-(
Driver will pick up tourists from their hotel at 7:20am and deliver them to the bus. They will take the bus for 7-8 hours south, to Dalanzadgad and will be met there by tour driver and guide (English speaking).
In reality:
Sometime between last night and when breakfast arrived unexpectedly at 6:30am that morning, a note also appeared on the desk in our hotel room. It read "6:45 going" and was signed by someone who also left us a smiley face. We didn't notice the note until 6:30am, had no idea what it meant or who left it.
6:45 am, there was a knock at the hotel room door and someone (hotel staff?) tried to tell us to check out. Utter confusion ensues as breakfast has just been eaten and the final stages of packing is still in progress. Mark went down stairs to the lobby to find our driver has arrived, with a mini-van full of other tourists waiting for us. Whoops. Lost in translation is pretty normal here, like 10x/day there are language hurdles that simply cannot be leaped.
Long story short... We were off to the Gobi Desert a tad earlier!
The driver is very nice and we discover also that our 3 fellow tourists are ESL teachers in Beijing, here on a mini vacation. One Brit (Jay), one Colombian (Paula) and... wait for it... a young lady from Evergreen CO! That would be Jacklyn.
At the main UB bus terminal our driver puts our luggage under the bus in the cavity and tells us to get aboard. We do and he leaves. Then things go a bit haywire. Other passengers tell Mark and I we are in their seats. According to their printed tickets, we are! Wait a sec, we don't have printed tickets and therefore, don't have seat numbers, so now what?
The bus driver arrives and demands to see our tickets, that's what happens. LOL Not having one to show him, he then proceeds to tell us where to buy tickets. Tickets that we know are included in the tour already. So like all confused kids, we called "dad". Dad being Ganzo - the Mongolian guy we have been emailing with to get this tour organized from the US. Hooray for What's App and being able to phone-a-friend even while traveling in Mongolia!
Ganzo got the shuttle driver to come back and help explain that the tour company bought tickets for all 5 of us, then the bus driver consulted his printed passenger list. I was on there. Mark was not. Jay was on there, his companions were not. Yeah... whoever booked the tour, made it onto the passenger list and the others were a bit out of luck?! Ganzo informed me we were fine and the bus driver was the one who was "confuse-ed". Soon enough that bus driver did just give up, let us sit anywhere on the bus and we headed out of town.
The bus drove on the highway, south from Ulaanbaatar. I used the term highway incredibly loosely, because it appears to be one of only a handful of blacktop roads in this country, outside of the city.
About 2.5 hours in, the bus pulled over and it was apparently a pee break for the driver and whomever else felt the need. On either side of the road was sandy-rocky-dirt as far as the eye could see. Not a mound in sight. Certainly not a toilet. It didn't stop the men-folk and very little concern was given to how the women-folk might make this work or indeed if they had needs at all. Then it was time to get going.
Another 2.5 hours in we stopped for lunch at what I'd say is the Mongolian version of a truck stop. Although I didn't see gas anywhere. We ate at the available restaurant, Mark and I sharing a mutton soup bowl and a pile of noodles with mutton. It was hot and not bad, but I was kinda getting sick of tasting mutton in my mouth all day long and wondered if I would ever get used to eating so much animal fat.
We arrived at Dalanzadgad around 6:15 pm. I know right?! 8 hours was a bit off. This was a 10 hour bus ride where the scenery didn't change in 10 hours. Flat and dusty, not a tree in sight since UB. At irregular intervals I noticed tracks with tire treads that left the main road and headed out into the great beyond. No street signs at all except a 50 km/hr sign I saw once. Occasional herds of goats and sheep, horses or camels. I had my head against the window most of the journey, hoping not to miss a minute of the Mongolian scenery and had all but concluded it would not be necessary to do that on the way back to UB 3 days from now.
At this bus station our group of 5 was split back into a group of 2 and 3. They went with a more mature female guide, we went with our guy. NOT exaggerating, our guide was about 16 years old and his dad was our driver. We honestly tried to learn their names but couldn't get our tongues to cooperate on the pronunciation front, so don't hold it against me. Let's just called our guide William and pretend that is not offensive to rename him.
William and his dad loaded our stuff up and then informed us we had about 100km more to drive tonight in order to reach our Ger Camp.
Now, let me explain what that really means.
1. We were not staying on the highway, but were now headed straight into the Gobi. No more paved roads for us. The next 100km were dirt tracks (or not... since sometimes we just drove over virgin ground too) or dry river beds. Mostly though, it was tracks that crossed river beds. Our driver was an expert and clearly felt comfortable at 50km/hr, off-roading in a mini-van. Mark and I watched the sunset from the middle row of seats, behind the dirty, tinted windows of a Mitsubishi van while being tossed around like a ship in the Beagle Channel.
2. 100km actually takes about 2.5 hours because of the terrain and because at various points the guide and driver appear to be unsure as to which of the 3-4 dirt tracks forking in front of us, are the correct one to take. We stopped for directions 2x before reaching our destination in the very cold and dark, near 9 pm.
I was EXHAUSTED and had done zero exercise and none of the driving today.
Our hosts were lovely (I think). They offered us milk tea - polite but firm no thanks to that one of course - and wanted to keep us in their family ger while the fire in ours got going and warmed it up. Mark endeared himself no end by accepting a little hit of snuff from the patriarch's snuff bottle as it was handed around to the men who were present. Sneezing ensued and even though they laughed, they appeared thrilled by his participation!
Our ger, now ready, was a welcome respite from the long day of travel. A wood stove was burning brightly and it was 100 degrees inside. I was given some instruction about stoking it overnight and then we were left to ourselves. Umm... no word about the bathroom situation? Nope.
Wednesday dawned bright and clear - and cold! So, the fire does go out overnight and given that a ger is never really closed up at the top, the temp inside the ger is close to the temp outside. You heard me correctly, the lid is off the thing! At the very top, where the chimney exits to the sky, so does the warm air. The hole is about 6 feet by 3 feet and apparently this is normal, even in the dead of winter. On the bright side, since there appears to be no means to shower, the ventilation probably serves several purposes.
It was time for breakfast and being the polite (naive) little guests we were, we simply said "we'll have whatever the family has for breakfast". Yes, it could have been more well thought out. Breakfast was a bowl of some kind of cereal cooked into a firm glob with tiny bits of... you guessed it... mutton. Not oats, not rice but maybe a barley type affair. It was cold, but our host family showed us how to make it more palatable. You simply add a cup of hot camel milk from the thermos flask to it. Then mix it around a little. And choke it down. I don't mean to sound ungrateful because I ate it, all of it. It was warm and not as bad as the traditional tea in Ulaanbaatar or the kvass we had in Russia! But I'm just not used to having salty camel milk porridge with bits of meat in it for breakfast so in hindsight, if I did this again another time, I'd probably politely decline the traditional breakfast. Good to try these things though, right?
The wood we were burning over night and during breakfast was said to be Gobi Tree (not cut down, just foraged bits). This mornings first excursion was to the "forest" of these trees, which exists only near this camp. Tree's grow to 3-4 feet, but it takes 100-200 years. IMHO, they are gnarly versions of a Colorado juniper but with incredibly deep roots - 100m or deeper in order to reach water.
Then we headed for Flaming Cliffs. The Gobi version of Arizona's famous red sandstone Monument Valley. The wide open spaces are way bigger here but the monuments are way smaller. And there are dinosaur bones. The whole area was alive with dinosaurs 65-80 million years ago and it has been a archaeologist's dream for the last 150 years. Of course, back then the place was a lush jungle too.
Soon enough the van stopped and William and his dad jumped out, eager to show us dinosaur bones that were still buried. They moved a few rocks and swept red sand soil away with gloved hands then a little brush. Low and behold, there was what looked to be a bone still partially buried. I loved the exercise and the enthusiasm and had to giggle when they took great pains to bury it again before we left. Of course I suspect that the next van load of tourists will also get to see that bone being excavated, but it's all good.
Ok, so when your guide is 16, you get some "extra" info that most likely the older women guides will not show you. Like "bones are sticky" - as he places one on his tongue and demonstrates how it doesn't fall off. Hahahaha
We had 120 km to travel this afternoon before arriving at the Gobi Sand Dunes. A destination that had long held a spot on my bucket list.
Again... in and out of river beds, following barely-there tire tracks, winding through a black rock type canyon... wiggling and jiggling all over the back seat, we went. Always, our driver's grip firmly on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the terrain just a few meters in front of the van.
Bingo! Dunes!
In the setting sun, Mark, myself and our little William, hiked/scrambled up the biggest of the dunes in this area. The afternoon was warm and breezy. Beautiful.
From my sandy perch, I played with ladybugs in the sand and watched camels at the Gobi Oasis below us.
These Gobi sand dunes stretch for 180 km and are up to 27 km wide in places.
This is not the only patch of dunes in a desert that is otherwise mostly exposed rock - and it is still expanding (southward into China) by a process called desertification. The Gobi Desert is the 5th largest desert in the world and if I'm not mistaken, the most northern. For the most part is a cold desert and can reach temps of -45 F-ish.
'Tis a harsh climate indeed down here. I have traveled far and wide and many places have called me to perhaps revisit and stay longer. I wonder often "could I live here?", when I travel. I already know I could never live in Mongolia. There would be a loud period of whining about the cold, but it would be short lived, then I would perish at the hands Mother Nature in Mongolia! I know I am way too precious.
Our guest camp was different on night 2 in the Gobi. It was a little bigger for one thing. We found ourselves eating dinner in the 'restaurant ger' with a Serbian couple whom we had run into a couple of times over the last 2 days. They were super nice, clearly enthusiastic travelers and engaging to talk to. Another bonus was the ability to mix it up with the other guide. She was clearly more experienced, spoke better English and was overall, more enthusiastic about her job than our young man was.
Dinner was awesome. A noodley bowl with lots of veggies and some meat too. OMG, I miss vegetables! Probably too much information, but the things have not been "right" since we left Ulaanbaatar and I have no choice but to blame it, at least partially, on my new found high fat and mutton protein diet. Seriously, I'm already at the point where I believe I might have eaten more mutton on this trip than in the whole rest of my life. AND I'm ok if I don't eat another bite... ever.
Our ger was toasty warm again that night, by way of a mad hot wood-fired stove that our host lit with a little flame thrower.
But I knew that delightful heat was escaping out of the hole in the roof and it wouldn't/couldn't last 'til morning. :-(
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