The Mongolia Diaries: Day Fourteen

A rough idea of our route

We were awoken around 8:00AM to breakfast in our ger. We had a long day of driving ahead of us and this was our guide's way of getting us up and moving! The morning was cool but not as cold as the day before. We were heading to a monastery on our way back to Ulaanbaatar.

We packed up quickly and were on our way. We headed out along the extremely potholed road and back to the paved road we came on two days ago. We went back past the city of Tsetserleg but only stopped in quickly to fill up on gas. We drove straight through to our next destination stopping once along the way for a 'nature' bathroom break. Thankfully the drive was mostly along paved roads.

The drive went quick and we stopped at a set of gers called the Subedei Guesthouse, which were within walking distance of the Erdene Zuu Monastery. This is said to be the oldest Buddhist monastery in Mongolia. We were only to stop here for lunch and a tour of the monastery but our guide said that our driver wasn't happy with the van and that he wanted to spend the night here so he had time to fix the problem.

Part of the Erdene Zuu Monastery

Our guide prepared a simple but delicious lunch. After lunch, we got ready to head over to the monastery. As per usual, I felt like my group was running through it. I lagged behind and missed a lot of what my guide was saying because I wanted to spend more time in each room looking at everything. Every time I turned around, my group was gone. It was an interesting monastery and quite big. No pictures were allowed to be taken inside the rooms without a price. I opted to just look!

After the monastery, we walked over to a small museum. Before entering the exhibit part of the museum, you were required to watch a video. The film showed the inside of some very old caves which reminded me of the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China but the video we were watching was someone filming someone else using a PC and clicking on things to show the audience. It was very poorly done. The rest of the museum wasn't terribly interesting.

After the museum, one of the other Golden Gobi vans took us to a small market and an ATM. We had some time to wander around the market. I wanted to find some envelopes so that we could prepare a tip for our guide and our driver.

After our tour of the market, we were taken back to the gers where we hung out for the rest of the day. We drank some beer since it was our last night together and played cards in our ger. Our guide came in and played with us and had some vodka.

Nothing terribly exciting happened but we were told we needed to be up early as we had a long haul to get back to Ulaanbaatar the following day. This would be our last day together and I was kind of ready for that!