Mongolia - A Bumpy Ride
After a fabulous explore of the early morning life on Mongol Els, it's time to continue west. We have a couple of hours drive through more wild scenery, alternating between wide open valleys, rolling hills and lonely mountains - always the ubiquitous herds of horses, sheep and goats and the white gers break up the otherwise endless green expanse.
At the end of this is the small town of Khurjit, a mix of permanent gers, Siberian-style wooden houses with brightly painted roofs, and the occasional Soviet era building thrown in to the mix. This is as big as towns tend to get outside of the capital which act as a centre for supplies and services for the thousands of nomadic families that live in the region.
Khurjit also marks the end of the sealed road which is where things get a bit more lively.
Rather than having a single road to follow, the road splits into several meandering dirt threads that crisscross, with several cars competing for pole position as they bounce and slide down the muddy tracks. The vehicles are everything from large 4x4's to small Toyota hatchbacks and Soviet era vans. I start to feel a bit like I'm in an episode of a Mongolian version of Wacky Races.
A combination of Mongolian roads, Mongolian driving and rock hard suspension ensure you get to stay airborne for as much of the journey as possible. The last thing you hear when boarding a Mongolian bus may well be "enjoy your flight" ...
Along the way we come to a cliff with a dark history. Before the second world war there were thousands of Buddhist monasteries in Mongolia. During the Soviet era, Stalin ordered the Mongolian communist government to destroy almost all the monasteries, the only survivors were the ones that managed to convert to museums. Some 30,000 monks were massacred and, at this spot alone, 100 were thrown to their deaths off the cliff top. For such a serene place of beauty, and with modern Mongolians seemingly being such gentle and spiritual people, it's hard to imagine such a thing happening here.
What seems like hours of butt pounding road adventures brings me to the head of Orkhon Khürkhree, a beautiful remote valley flanked by Siberian looking spruce forests and filled with a wild river tumbling it's way towards Lake Baikal in Russia to the north. My family greet me with a bowl of fermented horse milk and dried yak yoghurt - much better than it sounds. A walk along the river is quickly abandoned as lightning strikes the nearby hillside and the skies open.
Lightning struck off the opposite bank a few minutes after this shot ... time to be somewhere else in a hurry ...
Late evening brings a clear in the weather, enough time to try my hand at yak milking (definitely not as easy as it sounds) and a walk out across the ancient lava fields that fill the valley to watch rainbows and sunset colours.
