Homemade bread today! Yum yum with a bit of jam! What a treat! Food has been boring, bland, rather tasteless most days when eating with families but undeniably an experience. Freshly- and hand-made flour noodles, boiled with dry meat, all kinds of milk and dairy products. So the bread was a real treat, it was as sign that this is coming to an end.
Today we’ll be in the car the whole day too. We drive along a road Chaga had never driven through before and I was just in awe how he can be so sure what’s the right way when there’s no road signs. “Only one road” he replies. Well but still! Vegetation today resembles more our European bushes and trees. The Selenge river is on our left and we drive across dense vegetation and cool-shaped mountains. Fields with yellow flowers and alpine vegetation further east, and we stop by a river to collect some water to boil for our lunch, pee and I take the opportunity to sink and dip and soak my fingers to try to remove the almost permanent dirt in my nails. The water we collect looks dirty, it has this pale brownish colour which is a bit off-putting to be honest and the boiling we give it I doubt it's enough to kill the germs in it. Landscape is beautiful, as usual. These days Chaga has been explaining that that week flowers, in a given area, were yellow and that within 10 days they’d change colour, another type will blossom, and he said: this week yellow, in 10 days, pink and later blue… We’ll stop and look at the pink twisted one, and the amount of grasshoppers there is is also hard to believe! Different sizes, big as I’d never seen them before, and colours (brown and green).
We drive past an ovoo, which I have re-named as “a nest of shit” since with the excuse of leaving an offering, all kind of rubbish is dumped there: bags, broken pair of glasses, lots of empty bottles of whisky and money basically. Would you feel tempted to nick the money? Maybe but superstition wins and you don’t as it may be a bad omen! The pines in the trees are nice too, small, red and softish. Herds block our way, 3 boys in their teens and 2 adults herding the sheep, goats, and horses. Later, they’ll be having a tea with us, which will give the chance to see the ritual with mongol tea that Chaga makes for them.
We stop for lunch at a field swamped by flies. Very annoying, they even show in our pictures. And the nomads we drove past half an hour earlier stop by us. We take pics of them, with them and we even see the offering some tea before drinking that Chaga has performed for them. He took a ladleful of tea and threw it up to the skies. And I offer them our chewy biscuits we don't like. We are sick of them. In 10 minutes none’s left! Cool. Good deed of the day.
It’s amazing to have so many animals right next to us, cows, the horses and goats,… these people explained that their wives were in the new location, behind a mountain, and they drove there while they are in charge of leading the animals there on horseback. Modern women! The girls complain and make a fuss about bees in the car. Today is my turn to sit in front. Drive through the very soviet looking and copper mining town of Erdenet, famous for an almost all Russian population a couple of decades ago. You go in through the all-Mongolian wooden and metal housing to reach the communist part of town with soviet blocks of flats. Apparently it used to be misplaced in maps so that it was hard or impossible for people to find this town, I guess because of its mining resources. Now it’s the second biggest city in Mongolia. We have our room temperature, which is warm, coffee, I developed the habit of pouring the coffee sachets into the bottle of water to make us a “cold” water coffee mid-afternoon without having to stop and heating water.
We get to a nice spot, and we see the Amarbayasgalant Monasetry in the distance on our right. Get to our guesthouse and the old lady with a very nice and pleasant smile lights us a fire and brings more chips of wood, which I help her to put in our ger basket and she starts making us dinner and chaga to fix the car, for a change. J and I decide to go for a walk, and in the end, K tags along: “girls give me a minute!” and it’s about a long 20-minute wait there in the ger, just waiting. The left hand side of the monastery is kind of developed, the Mongolian way, not nice, it’s like a small community here, and so far it had all been quite if not very pristine. A pool table, monks wandering about, horses, a few shops and new-looking, squatting but walled, blue toilets, and gers and houses. And the monastery of course. And the big stupa being painted (or built?), behind our ger.
I don't remember what we ate for dinner. But i do remember a few blokes a bit younger than us in the house next to our ger, looking at us and us trying not to look at them but hard to resist, much as mongolian men are not attractive, to say the least. The girls take the piss with me and Chaga, they say he goes follows me whereever i go. I think I am the only one who listens to him and takes some interst in him. He's a nice man.
It must have been another night in the ger with no light, just a candle and our headtorches, dogs barking outside and bit of sky seen from the crown of the ger...
There's a different feel now, we are not far from the city and it all looks a bit more populated, more like the outskirts of the capital, so to speak. The amazing, pristine landscape is no longer. Fields, industry, blocks of flats.
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