Where eagles dare

N 46 00.719 E 104 56.774 - 5 October - Erdenedalai - continued

Ok, so we were heading out of town last time. We had stopped at a fancy restaurant for lunch. We were going to stop at a ger restaurant (ger - the ubiquitous housing unit in Mongolia, felt tents, quite an ingenious housing construction - apparently run about 500 USD for one, which is about two months salary, but enough digression) but they didn't have food so we had to go to the fancy tourist resort restaurant. Ok, that's the other thing, our tour mostly stayed in family guest gers, the tour company has arrangements with private families and we stayed there instead of the tourist camps which were ger camps just for tourists. The restaurant was part of one of those, huge parking area which was completely empty. Mid October is not real prime tourist season, it is getting quite cold and most things have closed (rural museums, ger camps, etc) until the spring. There were some tourists around but probably not as many as I would imagine would be about during the summer. The restaurant also had a very posh toilet, flush one but also with added controls for massage and other things we didn't quite understand. It would be the last one too we would see for a while, most rural toilets being of the wooden floor with a slat missing, or just the wide open land itself. Not that that is bad in itself. Some of the outhouses were quite well constructed, deep holes, well ventilated and just fine. There were a few though, it would be best not to speak of them. Moving on.

Our first stop was Baga Gazryn Chuluu (so many of these places have slightly different spellings for the names, being transliterated from Mongolian. Generally the doubled vowels, uu for example mean the stress is on that syllable, not that really helped us pronounce any of them.) There was one of those ubiquitous shines in near it, a stupa, generally a pile of rocks with blue fabric tied to it or something fancier. We climbed up the hill, the tallest one in the area and enjoyed a nice view of the area. Horses and cattle and goats and sheep wandered around below. The climb was slightly challenging, very jagged rocks but worth the hike up. The most exciting thing was the eagles circling around. White tail eagles, we saw quite a few of those.

It wasn't the best time of year for wildlife but it wasn't quite as bad as we were led to believe. I really would like to come back to Mongolia and see things when it is teeming with all sorts of things and covered with green things, but this was still pretty special. For the sake of completeness and since I like making lists of things I have seen, we ended up seeing during the 10 days, goats, sheep, camels, horses, takhi horses, yaks, dogs, a puppy, cats, a kitten, white tailed eagles, golden eagles, bustards (different than buzzards), black vultures, desert foxes, desert finches, pigeons (and other various doves), ravens, hooded crows, magpies, spotted eagles (I think, we saw those in Siberia too), stilts (C saw one, I didn't), choughs, sparrows, ruddy shelducks, and then probably loads more that we didn't identify like those small lizard things, and the rodents that looked like chinchillas, and the little mice (those seemed to co-exist in the places we saw the eagles), and more I couldn't categorize.

We hiked a little longer than planned and it was feared that the weather was going to be bad and close in on us so we went another 100 km longer than we had originally planned and ended up driving in the dark and got to Erdenedalai fairly late. We pulled up into the town and stopped at a gate in a fence. Ok, so that's another thing, rural towns. Out in the deep country, it is just scattered gers surrounded by livestock. Mongolia does have the lowest population density of any other country. The gers move around, a few times a year, moving a few hundred kilometers with seasons and to let the grass grow again. And winter homes tend to have structures built, places to keep animals warm during the cold winter. In towns, people have gers in the front yard, sometimes built more permanent houses and have rows, blocks, fences with a usually blue gate in front. Then in the bigger towns, they have more Soviet looking buildings, brick and concrete, for the government buildings and medical centers and the rest of that and then suburbs of wooden fenced houses. In Mongolia, it was only possible to own land three years ago. If nobody else is living somewhere, you can set up your ger and make an application to the government to live there. Much of UB has been snapped up now and some of the surrounding areas, but a lot of the countryside is still very open.

We pull up to the gate here, please wait here, they go in and check with the family, dogs barking, and everything is arranged. This was one of the few non ger nights, we ended up putting our sleeping bags on their living room floor while the family moved into their other rooms on the other side of the house. At the beginning then, we were all prissy about getting changed and all that, took turns in the room. By the end of the trip, everybody just kind of looked away and pretended they weren't changing. I guess 10 days, 24 hours a day with the same six people, well, it is a recipe for cooperation or warfare. Luckily our group seemed to do pretty well together over the time and we still happily got along during the entire time.

Zola made the first of her nice meals (really, all her meals, some of them were pretty simple even, were the best food we had the whole time, much better than most of the restaurants we went to), a good soup, and we went to sleep. A pretty good first day then.