December 30, 2008 by Karin.

On the drive to our hosts in the Mongol Els, our guide asked us if we wanted to eat sheep or goat for our barbeque dinner.

“Goat!”

I suspected no one actively wanted to eat goat but after days of mutton, we were ready for a second option.

“Can we eat a baby?” Juno asked. (On the construction site, he had been running after baby goats for fun, catching them by their baby horns and threatening to eat them.)

Our guide finished conversing with the hosts on her cell phone and said, “no, we never eat the babies.” It’s probably considered wasteful to cut short a lifetime of wool supply.

By the time we arrived at our host’s cosy ger, our dinner was already in preparation. In this picture, you can see pieces of goat chopped up atop a cupboard.

For the barbeque, our host filled a big pot with heated stones, goat meat, carrots, and potatoes. The pot was covered with a lid held down by a random piece of metal. Then it cooked over the campfire for about forty five minutes.

We all ate together in the main ger: the Habitat group, guides, drivers, and the host family. The Mongolians passed around a bowl of the fermented mare’s milk but understood travelers enough to not bother offering us a sip. They also passed around toothpicks but I was sad to not receive one of those because it really is an essential utensil when dining on tough goat meat.

The best part of the dinner was the singing. We asked if they had a Happy Birthday song (in honor of Wei’s birthday) and they said no, but they would sing a song in honor of his mother without whom, there would be no birthday for Wei. Then they sang a song about fathers for the same reason. (I’d read that most of Mongolian music is about nature so it’s pretty hard to find a song not in honor of mother earth, father sky, or indirectly, their offspring’s birthdays…) We sang them “que sera sera” led by Carol and a TGIFriday style birthday song taught to us by Cassandra.

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December 29, 2008 by Karin.

 (he’s not dead, just bored)

We would not be seeing the Gobi dessert on our trip but we were scheduled to cross the Mongol Els (aka “the mini Gobi”) on our way back to Ulaanbaator. We left the waterfall after lunch and six hours later, pulled off the main road where grass was smothered under miles of sand. At the base of the dunes, (aka, giant piles of sand), a half dozen camels sat around waiting for customers. Camel riding was on my Mongolia to-do list but after the adventures on horseback, I was happy enough just hearing about camel riding from other travelers.

“two humps more comfortable than one”
“the scary part is when the camel puts his front legs down first and you tilt towards the ground”
“the camel’s rein is just one rope, attached to a stick poking through its nostrils”
“there are always flies around the camel’s mouth and nose because it’s really stinky” (dehydration=stinky breath)

As we waited for the other two vans to catch up, I drew on the sand with a little Mongolian boy. I drew a happy face with a cap and said “chi!” (you). He corrected my drawing by adding a nose. I drew other things I knew the words for in Mongolian (sheep, camel). I didn’t know how to draw a horse so I asked him to do it.

This is the picture of the yurt we drew together. A man who had been watching us came up to me and asked if I wanted to go on a camel ride. (fingers pointing at camels and at money in his hand.) When I just smiled and kept on drawing, he spoke to the boy ( “sell a camel ride!” I guessed he was saying). The boy squirmed and tried to ignore him. After teaching me the boy’s name, the man decided to teach me the Mongolian alphabet, drawing the Cyrillic characters in the sand. I thanked him and stood up before he started charging for the lesson.

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