What happens if if one billion Chinese jump at the same time? You should ask what if one billion Chinese talk at the same time.
I don’t want to find out. Everyone talked in China. That wasn’t the end of it. More than chit chat, they produced noises.
I love big cities. I can’t imagine living in the countryside, waking up and falling asleep to the sounds of roosters and crickets. I love the sounds and the fast pace of big cities. But I seriously doubted it after coming to China and listening or being forced to listen to an entire population who couldn’t stop talking.
“Life is not about eat, sleep, pee-pee/poo-poo” was the favorite wisdom my uncle passed down to his two children to warn them from having their life governed by these three basic deeds.
It seems to me that I committed all three in the last three months. Each sin is guided by the nature of my traveling in each specific country.
— Update 7 Sep, 2016 —
Thanks a blog reader who informed us about the change of the visa process. As of the end of August 2016, the embassy is not giving visas to foreigners not residents in Mongolia. There is a lof of people with interrupted travel plans wandering about Ulaanbaatar. They even canceled visas of some Swiss women who had already been granted the visas but had been out on a tour and didn’t collect them in time. No nationalities are getting visas – we’ve talked to Americans, French, Swiss, Italian, Israeli, and we’re Dutch. Be aware of that before coming and don’t plan on getting your visa here for the next little while at least. No one is quite sure why they’ve changed. Apparently, it’s also affecting other regional offices (such as Korea, Vietnam, and Hong Kong) so get very recent information before making plans.
Where else to ride a horse than the very place which invented horse riding. I did 3-day horse trekking at Khovsgol Lake starting from Jankhal where the guide and his horses lived.
The manager of Garage 24, the Guesthouse we stayed in Khatgal, called other families in the region until we found a family who gave us the best deal. It cost 20000 MNT per day for the guide and10000 MTN per day for a horse plus each horse plus one horse to carry our luggage.
In 1909, Richard Schirrmann, a German teacher, took his students on an organized school trip around the country. They got caught up in a storm and had to find refuge in an empty school building. A simple idea, not the lightning, struck Schirman. He saw a possibility to bring affordable accommodation to students and young people by letting them stay in dormitories when schools were not in session. Three years later Schirman started the world’s first youth hostel. Neighboring countries caught on to the new idea. In 1932, delegations from Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, and UK established the Internal Youth Hostel Federation. The Americans joined a year later. And today as you look around, hostels are everywhere around the world.
To test your knowledge of geography, people always ask for the capital of Mongolia. If you can name “Ulaanbaatar” it means either you didn’t sleep in high school or no one is expected to know about this strange-sounding name.
I ran out of Russian ruble in Ulan-Ude, my last city in Russia. Not wanting to withdraw more oney to have Lenin watch over me, I left for Ulaanbaatar (UB) three days earlier than planned with a lot of misgiving. I wanted to rest after a month of rough train traveling and camping with minimal washing, but not in a country known for its intense sun shining 250 days in the year and not in a city sounded like a dairy product (Ulan-Butter).
Backing Mongolia can be a trip of a lifetime. You’ll see things you might have never seen before. Make sure you pack the right gears and clothing for Mongolia though. If you plan on traveling all over Mongolia, then pack for all occasions: spring, summer, autumn and winter. The weather in Ulaanbaatar, the capital, can be sunny and hot, but as you drive out to the steppe, it becomes windy and cold.
I was in Mongolia from mid-August to mid-September; the sun was less harsh. Some part of the Gobi desert was cold and windy while in another; you can walk in short and a t-shirt. In Yolyn Am, your feet can be stuck ankle-deep in the snow. Most of the time I wore many layers and peeled off one by one depend on the weather condition.
As I watched the drama unfold, I noticed a similarity in the miscommunication among our group to that in projects I worked with. We spoke English, used the same vocabulary and agreed to the same thing, yet we wanted completely different things.
Here is a quick summary of the situation. I met a German couple, Andy and Suzi in Kazan, Russia who planned a trip to Mongolia. They had already arranged for a driver, Mendee, a van and a translator/guide, Erdem and had a rough plan to travel for 18 days in the North and Central Mongolia. Their friend, Neil would join later. They needed three more to fill the van, with me, we only needed to find two more. We found the last two one day before the trip, Moran and Asher from Israel. The Israelis wanted to visit the Tsaatan people up the North. Andy and Suzi wanted to visit Lake Khovsgol. From the map, these two locations looked approximately close, thus we agreed on doing both.
Mongolian children were so adorable with their rosy, puffy cheeks, tiny eyes and faces as dirty as their surrounding. I must be the picture-perfect environment I found them in. I saw toddlers and young children playing around their tents while older boys herding their family’s livestocks on horseback, running small errands on motorcycles and girls fetching water from small streams or assisting their mother greeting guests.
Children growing from the countryside were very eager, polite and resourceful, characteristics I found lacking from those in the cities.
Where else to ride a horse than the very place which invented horse riding. I did 3-day horse trekking at Khovsgol Lake starting from Jankhal where the guide and his horses lived.
The manager of Garage 24, the Guesthouse we stayed in Khatgal, called other families in the region until we found a family who gave us the best deal. It cost 20000 MNT per day for the guide and10000 MTN per day for a horse plus each horse plus one horse to carry our luggage.
My name is Cindy, also rhymes with travel junkie. A friend said I was probably a gipsy in my previous life. One of my many secret missions in life is to convert you to run off every once in awhile.
