Its criminal that its been so long without any real updates- I am dying to know about the rest of you gap yah...I was so jealous of the Oz buses and the chance to literally just bum around up the East coast. You owe me a major catch up when I reach Londinium.
So I've briefly abandoned the television and editorial career for a bit of bumming around myself. It was incredible and I'm so glad I did it but it did mean there were a lot of things I couldn't mention- some of the people I interviewed probably wouldn't appreciate being blogged about by a gap yah faring hobo who they thought was a qualified journalist. I kept getting asked where I had trained and which company had paid for my work visa out here. Oh, and then I got offered a job as a PR manager for a mining company. I hesitated to mention that my CV was a little lacking in things they would usually require for that position. Like, I dunno, a degree?
But I had underestimated how draining and manic UB is as a capital city if you never leave. I had been tehre a month and a half working non stop without ever making it to the countryside- which was the real reason I had come of course. To resurrect the spirit of Genghis Khan and raise a warrior tribe of Mongol nomads. Duh.
When a friend of mine got a little sexual harassment at work she decided to call it quits and head into the wilderness, so I followed suit and we jumped on a bus out of town. I literally cant emphasise how that was the extent of out planning. We didnt really know where we were going, we could barely pronounce the names of our destinations and we didnt actually know where the cool places to visit were. Every time we met someone they would ask us which tour company we were with. The conversation would go downhill from there. We had no tour company, no guide, no driver, no guidebook, no map and neither of us could speak more than utterly basic mongolian.
But when they realised that, cause we sure as hell weren't the average tourists, they tended to be so filled with compassion for these poor, retarded, ignorant Western girls who were almost definitely going to get raped and die along the way, everyone was wonderfully kind. After I lent my iPod to a 6 year old girl in a tutu and fairy wings and gave her a little chocolate, her mum rang her sister who happened to have some gers in her guesthouse we could sleep in. So we chilled out there in Kharkorum, the ancient capital of Mongolia, for a night before hitching our way to the next town over.
The next town over turned out to be Bayangol, which wasnt so much a town as three gers beside the road. We got there by hitching with these two Mongolian guys, who spoke less English than we did their lingo, but were so amused by our absolute incompetence that one of them, Dagi, got out number so that we could contact him when we got to Tsenkher. Turned out when we got there we rang him up to hitch our way to the hot springs (which we thought were round the corner) and it was an hour off road up and down these valleys and through rivers and finally into a ger camp. problem was when we got there it turned out it was a VERY expensive ger camp for the likes of middle aged couples on spa retreats. We, on the other hand, hadnt washed in four days, had been hitching our way through the countryside and living off biscuits and chocolate and reused tea bags. Obviously the only conclusion was to haggle the price down less than 50% and stay there anyway. The manager thought we were pretty funny.
It was a god send as well because our entire bodies were battered from the beating they had taken horseriding the day before. At Bayangol, the three ger village, we were going to stay with Janchui, the brother of the woman we had stayed with the night before. So when we rocked up we just walked into the nearest ger and asked where he was. Its a funny thing about Mongolia, and one of the best things, is the wonderful hospitality from everyone. When you enter a ger you have to taste whatever it is they have just prepared, whether it be taragh, unurum or a full meal of tsuivan or a shot of vodka. It harks back to the days of crossing the steppes and knowing that they didnt have to take supplies with them, because someone would always look after them. Good ol' Jesus style hospitality.
When Janchui turned up though, he zoomed up on a motorbike. The only logical conclusion being that he would take Abi and I and our two massive rucksacks over the valleys for half an hour on this rickety motorbike of his. We spent the night there with his wife, child and twenty day old baby and the next morning we rode his horses five hours into the middle of nowhere to Khar Badras, the very very ancient city of Genghis. It was really just a dirt palisade and a flag on a mound but such an wide expanse of just nothingness around us and with only our three feisty horses in sight.
Once we got back to the road we set off again, hitching with a van already crammed full of a Mongolian family on their way to god knows where. It was at this stage we realised why maps had been made and how usually it was advisable to travel with one. It was on day 3 that we actually worked out where we were. They dropped us off in Hotont, a miserable town that was supposed to have a bus leaving for Tsetserleg that night, but this being Mongolia, it never came. Kindly, a biker chick we had met there who gabbled at us in indecipherable rural Mongolian gave us a bed to stay in until we managed to hitch a ride in the slowest pick up truck known to man the next day.
pro
Our greatest adventure was the journey from the hot springs to Tsetserleg, what passes for the centre of the province, because it was when we discovered that no cars were going there and there wasnt a road off of which we could hitch. So someone suggested walking. It was only 18k.
Of course it wasnt till later that we worked out it was more like 27k. And, even better, when we got back to UB a friend informed us that the distance was actually 35k. Our blisters were fantastic. Still, it didnt stop us from checking out Neptune, the only club in Tsetserleg. Someone should teach the Mongolians how to dance.
Anyway, peace out this has been an extraordinarily long message so I'll cop out for a while now.
See you in Reading gorgeous and we'll have a jelly fight xx
