Don't go chasing waterfalls

N 46 47.048 E 101 57.964 - 10 October - Orkhon

Ahh, maybe this is the favorite days of the trip, although it does seem to be the day most fraught with sickness and trauma.

Although I am now in Beijing, have been for a few days, am really loving it, so maybe I need to just do summaries of the rest of Mongolia and move on to China.

Quick summaries, I'm not very good at those. Might just do like in my diary, short sentences. Light bulb in the cabin which you turn off and on by pulling the wire out of the switch. Landscape gets hillier and there is a bit of snow out. Lunch in a fancy restaurant with a menu, had the traditional noodles meal. Dorj's toothache comes to light, he looks tired and worn. We have showers in a very strange spa/sanatorium, sulfur water, random naked people covered in mud coming into the showers without warning.

We cross paved road, actual paved road for about 3 seconds before we head onward on the same bumpy stuff, and apparently it gets much worse later on today. We come upon lots of eagles on the road, actually on the road. We nearly run one over. Our book only has European birds. I'm still claiming it was a golden eagle, since they are fairly common in Mongolia, but I've also looked and seen steppe eagles listed there too and they seem to be almost identical. So, I'm not sure, I need to send that out to the bird experts I know. There is a really good picture of one of them in the mass of photos I've uploaded.

Much of the drive is in the dark and from what we can see through the headlights, it looks just really crazy. Vast fields of rocks, thousands of rocks, poking up a foot or two about 10 feet apart. We have to wind and swerve and run over a lot of them. Dorj looks like he is really suffering. We clap when we arrive at the ger. We see the field the next day and it looks just as fearsome. That night, somehow I sleep through a whole lot of turmoil, as everybody else in the camp comes in and out of the ger helping Alex as his sickness reaches its peak, a bitterly cold night out too.

As usually happens, somebody comes in early in the morning and lights the fire. I really like her technique of ripping the wood apart and picking off slivers to use as kindling. Out jam supply just consists then of the one jar of the icky all fruit one (blueberries, grape, pineapple, and about 8 other tastes). We barely touch it for the next few days.

We get ready for horse riding, brief introductions to how horses work, steer them and all that. They are small horses in Mongolia, much smaller than the huge American west sort of horses that intimidated me last so many years ago. These are spirited but it seems to be ok. Slow ramble, maybe not more than a kilometer to the waterfall. They gesture, down there, wow, so close. A steep rocky climb down into the small valley and admire it. The river has also iced over in places and that is almost as pretty as the waterfall.

We walk on, past the camp and over a lot of the plain that we drove over last night. My horse is pretty good and it goes into trot pretty well and occasionally over the edge into a canter. It is a bumpy ride but great fun. The horse man is quite cute, he mostly rides behind us giving the horses a swat and chanting choo-choo. He also sings a bit, nice long song. We go out for another longer ride after lunch and really push hard to get the horses going fast. A pretty nice day out.