get up early and we do leave at 8, I am sure to Chaga’s surprise. We get up, roll up our sleeping bag and the extra wee mattress he gives us. Re pack our bags, and food that we bring in every night even if the family feeds us. We’ve got this thick tasting biscuits we are so fed up with. I can only eat one at a time! We’re given bread and jam I think, and boiling water for coffees and teas. Long day driving today. It’s all foggy today. You’d not say there’s a lake across the road. We stop by in Moron to buy more food. It’s 11.30 in the morning and we’ve been driving for about 3h. the cute guy at the entrance of the NP. Hard to find stores with things we may want: sick of noodles but not much else available other than sweet foods and noodles. More coffee to share. K wants to have lunch. At 11.30. Not just have a bite. Lunch. I refused to have lunch mid-morning, well, just was not hungry. We go into a restaurant and J and I say that as we are not eating now, we’ll pop up to the Kodak shop we saw a minute before and see if I can buy a memory card. We leave them to it and we head off.
We go into the shop, and it’s busy. Unsmiling female workers, and lots of people around. They have no memory cards but judit suggests transferring pics to a CD. It takes ages, she goes shopping and I wait behind the counter, checking up on what the assistant does. I am so please to at last have more memory space! Computer freezes and we leave it half way over, but that’s fine. We’ve been in there for a good half hour. 3000tg. No car in front of the restaurant … and then we hear Chaga, calling us out. They were waiting for us in front of the shop. Apparently food wasn’t very tasty. We’d tried to find koshoor but no shops around. And the restaurant we’d eaten the goulash three days earlier was further up the road (with solar panels). She bought, while I was waiting, crisps and Spanish olives and that was our lunch in the car, sitting at the back. We had our wee party there so that we didn’t have to stop again for our lunch. Drive up to the Selenge river. Guesthouse or simple family? I would have liked simple family one more and last day despite the awkwardness of it at times and lack of privacy as the trips is coming to an end but we all choose guesthouse in the end. No flies, but after so much jumping off our seats, tired from yesterday’s climb and almost no lunch and the heat I feel absolutely exhausted, physically difficult to walk. I lay on the bed for an hour while others wrote in their diaries. It’s dusty too…I don’t even take pics of the surroundings! I drag myself to the wooden restaurant a few yards, too far it seemed to me, from our ger (three there), and have a plentiful dinner consisting of rice, vegetables and meat in rich juice. Delicious. I have a second helping when offered.
I regain a bit of energy by eating but still shattered: sore legs and bum from yesterday’s trek too! Off to bed early. Mosquitoes, flies, … and k takes out again her mosquito net and again Chaga says “tourists have everything” which he’d said the day before when I produced my umbrella to take pics out in the rain and the head torch! Hahahah he’s so funny. Yes, I guess we have everything to make our stay in Mongolia as easy as possible within the limitations of it. We pee by the ger, which you shouldn’t do and brush our teeth there. And again, this family wasn’t too smiley. What is it with Mongolians and not smiling? It’s an achievement to make them do so!
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