The Mongolia Diaries: Days Two, Three and Four

On day two, I got up fairly early and enjoyed a free breakfast at the Golden Gobi guesthouse. I needed to get some laundry done and track down a phone card. I wasn’t feeling great and knew I would be spending the day in my private room on the Internet. It was lovely to be back in a country where there was no censorship!

I took all of my clothes except for the ones on my back, which also should have been washed, to a small laundromat around the corner. It cost 15,000 Tugrik (NT$176/CAN$7.52) to have someone wash, dry and fold my clothes. I was told they would be ready within five hours.

Getting a phone card was easy. There was a state department store next to the guesthouse and I was able to buy a 30-day/30GB package for 40,000 Tugrik (NT$470/CAN$20.00) from Unitel. I did a bit of research about which carrier would offer the most service on my trip around Mongolia and Unitel seemed to be the best option. In the end, I got service more than anyone else in my group!

I spent day two and three uploading all of my images from China onto Photobucket and posted all of my daily journals from China onto my blog. I would be packing my laptop away for my trip around Mongolia and I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep up with the daily journals. I ended up putting a voice-recording app onto my phone and left some voice journals throughout my trip. It didn't work out as well as writing down my thoughts at the end of each day so these journals over the next while will be mostly based on memory.

I learned that Mongolia has a population of three million people and 1.5 million of them reside in the city of Ulaanbaatar. (UB) I was told that the animal population in Mongolia was 45 million. I didn’t really believe that until we set out on the open road. When I got home, I looked it up and found reports which stated there were about 66 million livestock animals in Mongolia as of December 2018. Wow!

After two days of rest and eating simple salads with chickpeas in the guesthouse, on the morning of day four it was finally time to depart. I was happy to get out of my room and excited for what was to come. I don’t normally book a tour while traveling so the unknown was exciting but scary at the same time. I had no control over the plans and was only required to follow. Traveling alone in Mongolia hardly seemed like an option, as there are very few trains and buses and the majority of things we saw seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. A bus would never make it along those roads, if you could even call them roads.

The guesthouse had a locked safe for my computer and a storage room where I was able to leave some things I wouldn't need for the journey. I ate some breakfast and set off around 9:00AM. There were two young Austrailian girls at the guesthouse who were also joining the tour. We met our guide, Zulla, and set off to pick up the rest of the group. In the end we were with a guy from France and two young girls from Germany, making it six in total.

Inaccurate route/location but a general idea

We drove about 230KM on paved roads, heading south to the Gobi desert in a regular van. The further we drove, the more beautiful the scenery became! We stopped somewhere along the way for lunch at a restaurant but the food wasn't that delicious. I ate noodles with goat meat and very few vegetables. Little did I know that this would be mostly what I ate for the remainder of my time in Mongolia. Also, it was my first taste of Mongolian milk tea which they serve warm with a ton of salt. I could barely stomach it.

After lunch, we went to meet our driver, Ogie, who would be with us for the entire tour. We were invited into his home where we met his mom, his wife and his son. None of them spoke a word of English. Our driver's wife offered us hot tea and coffee, bread and cookies and steamed dumplings. We had just finished lunch so most of us weren't hungry but our guide told us that when we were invited to meet the families, which turned out to be almost every day, it was polite to try everything.

We were at our driver's house for over an hour before it was finally time to get on the road. We had changed to a Russian van and probably drove about another 120KM that day. In total, we were on the road for about six hours. The things I noted on my voice journal were that there were huge herds of animals everywhere and hundreds of animals in each herd. We saw sheep, goats, cows, horses, two-humped camels and I spotted at least 50 eagles!

The last 100KM were on extremely bumpy dirt paths. We didn't see paved roads again until our return to UB twelve days later. We were bouncing around in that russian van, almost hitting our heads on the ceiling and basically falling all over each other. It was quite hysterical!

Our first stop was at a place called "Их Газрын Чулуу". We were in the Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park. The area was stunning! (images to follow) We visited some caves and climbed around on massive boulders before finding a secluded place to camp for the night.

We were served a very simple dinner of goat meat with very few veggies in a noodle soup while the sun was setting. The moment the sun went down, it got very cold. I crawled into my sleeping bag around 9:30PM hoping to get a good night's sleep and wondering if I was going to be warm enough for the night.