Central Mongolia

After a taste of the Gobi, we turned west and began our trip into Central Mongolia. Travelling through the mountains we saw three ibex perched on a ridge and later an unusually large herd of gazelles. One night we camped high up on a hill where we had to maintain a respectable distance from the site of several ancient graves marked by piles of stones and slanted slabs decorated with petroglyphs.

In Karakorum, the site of Genghis Khan’s capital for a brief 20 years, we visited the Erdene Zuu Monastery. Founded in 1586, it is the oldest Buddhist monastery in Mongolia. It once consisted of 60 to 100 temples and had up to 1000 monks in residence. Stalin’s purges in 1937 saw all but three temples destroyed and many monks killed or shipped off to Siberia. Only after the collapse of communism and the return of religious freedom was the monastery able to be restored and become active again.

Still heading north and west we drove through miles of rolling steppe widely speckled with gers and herds of livestock – goats, sheep, horses, and yaks. (Baby yaks are irresistible and I took a ridiculous number of photos whenever I got near them. They have bushy tails which the stick straight up when they are alarmed.)
One day we were lucky to drive through a small village where they were holding their Naadam Festival. We arrived in time to see the finish of a horse race. The jockeys were again boys under 10 (as is the tradition and as we had seen at UB’s Naadam) but the horses were only yearlings. As they approached the finish line they began to whinny for their mothers. We also got a chance to see some of the traditional Naadam wrestling.

We spent two nights camped in Khorgo-Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur National Park (Great White Lake in English). As we had been moving everyday for a week, it was a welcome chance to do some washing and some hiking – except that it poured for hours on end. It was a lovely spot, never-the-less, with lots of wild flowers and yaks to photograph. Several members of our group took the initiative to buy a sheep from one of the local families in order to roast it up for dinner. The sheep arrived live on a motorcycle with two men who slaughtered it on site. (I was reading in the tent and missed all the drama.) Two of our group were sheep farmers from New Zealand so they knew a thing or two about preparing mutton on an open fire. The meal was fabulous and included lots and lots of vodka to celebrate the occasion.

Photos from central Mongolia...

Central Mongolia