So Ben finished at our horse ride at the White Lake. I will let you all in to my secret method of getting a good horse. When they are dishing out the horses, look very alarmed, ideally frightened. This encourages them to give you the best horse, after which time you can smugly plod along with a horse which obeys left, right, go and stop, while everyone else gets stuck in bushes with horses trying to bite each other!
If you can look frightened enough, you can even get the best camel later in the trip! This is a huge bonus, because the camels are certainly taller and less stable, and seemingly rather less keen on being ridden. As they are controlled through their noses, who can blame them?
Ben called his camel (can you guess?) ‘Boris the Camel’ but sadly their bond was not as strong as the bond between ‘Boris the Horse’ and Ben. Trouble set in when Ben wobbled Boris’ hump. Boris was not amused, and gave Ben a look of terrible disappointment.
We rode the camels to the sand dunes in the Gobi just before sunset, which was a magical experience. Climbing the enormously high dunes wasn’t in itself magical – more sweaty and snotty and hard work – but the view from the top was utterly breath-taking.
Another spectacular Gobi experience was seeing the Flaming Cliffs at sunset, when they really do glow with a fiery red light.
The wonder truck really took us everywhere. We went 3000km without passing a fence. We saw waterfalls and canyons and amazing rock formations which were originally created on an ocean floor. We stayed in gers of all sizes (but not all shapes, round being pretty much your only option) with their own individual quirks. Quirks like beds made of everything from boards to springs (mattresses not included) and a whole variety of animals from spiders to guinea pig sized unidentified rodents!
We met lots of lovely families who welcomed us with Mongolian tea (tea, milk and salt), biscuits, yoghurt and snuff. In return, we desperately attempted to abide by the terrifying list of ger etiquette we were presented with on the first day, including such gems as:
– Do not put one leg over another, or people will think you are looking down on them.
– Women cannot sit in the place of honour.
– Do not pass the place of honour while going out of the house, therefore you pass clockwise by the side.
(As we were not given details about what or where the place of honour was, this was made all the more stressful!)
– If one gives praise to the wife, the husband dislikes it and the wife feels ashamed.
– Never put your hat upside down or place it on the floor. A man or woman’s hat represents his or her fortune.
– Do not whistle inside gers. If we whistle a whirlwind will come and destroy our home.
(Ben whistled in a ger twice. Fortunately we don’t really have a home at the moment!)
Mongolia is really on the cusp of change. After a century of upheaval and yoyo-ing between China and Russia (and we saw the detroyed monasteries and heard about the massacred lamas as a result of this) 40% of people, maybe more, still live traditional nomadic lives. But in the last ten years the nomads have started to have vans, satellite dishes and solar panels. After 20 years of democracy life is getting harder in the cities because prices are rising, but it’s hard to know if people would return to the land… But even in the grounds of the biggest, poshest houses we saw, there was a ger or two.
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