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All the pretty places I’ve peed… 6 days in the Mongolian countryside

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.

What a wonderful trip we had! We went with Tseren Tours, and because we were on a short time-line, we didn’t find any other travelers who wanted to share the trip (and so lower the costs) for us. But it actually worked out for the better, I think.  We left Ulan Baatar on Tuesday morning around 9 a.m. We met our guide Sunny and our driver Beemba. They were both native Mongolians and Sunny was very sweet and spoke English very well. We learned a lot about her over the course of the week. She is twenty and a University student who wants to study overseas at some point. Before she started as a guide at the beginning of this summer she’d never seen the Mongolian countryside. We were her last tour group for the season, and I was the first American girl she’d ever met (she had two American guys on her first trip and none since). We learned a lot about Mongolia from her and hopefully answered her questions about America (and Germany) well. Some were a little difficult, especially ones about different social classes and the differences between rich and poor since it is so different than Mongolia. Beemba was an excellent driver who always wore a beret and had a wonderful face. I don’t think I ever got a good photo of him since he was a little photo shy, but maybe Nicole did….

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From Crowds to Empty Streets–Beijing to Ulan Baatar

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Ulan Baatar, Mongolia.

The last few days have been just one big silly adventure. We left Beijing Friday evening around 5:30 after making it successfully to the bus terminal with time to spare in order to grab some street food for a little dinner. We had bought some rice to go at our favorite little restaurant by our hostel and then (with Nicole’s help) bought lots of different foods on sticks that had been boiling in a vat of oil. There were noodles wrapped around the sticks, meat balls, tofu, and even some quail eggs. It was all pretty good, but some of it (especially the tofu) was ridiculously spicy! I thought my lips were going to burn off! Nicole didn’t realize that I’m still getting used to spicy food (but really doing better all of the time) and said later that the stick food was notoriously spicy and she wouldn’t have suggested if she would have known I was such a baby (my words, not hers). But it worked out, and we were soon on our bus which much to my delight was full of beds instead of seats! I think Peru and Ecuador need to take some tips from China and buy some bed-buses as it was much nicer to sleep in rather than the seats. But it also couldn’t fit as many people and we probably would have fallen out of them on all the windy roads in the mountains! But I was very excited about maybe getting a little sleep.

Shortly after we started off Nicole realized that she really had to use the toilet, but the toilet on the bus was broken and the door was locked! We were stuck in the Beijing traffic, still not out of the city after an hour on the road, and the bus driver refused to stop until we got farther out. I made lots of suggestions for her like hanging her butt out the window, but finally one suggestion won out… we took an empty soda bottle and cut off the top. Then we took one of the plastic bags from the bus (used to put your shoes in) and put it into the bag, and I held up a blanket around the back stairs while she peed in the bottle! It was awesome and pretty successful all things considered! When we stopped at a bathroom about an hour later we threw the bottle away and no one was the wiser.

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Posted in Mongolia | 4 Comments »