Hovsgol trip day #1

so… in true Mongolian style, i was told 3 days before we left that we would leave at 9:00 am.  i knew that this was mongolia and that that time was not realistically going to happen… but then the day before the time was switched to 3:00 pm.  i still knew we wouldn’t leave until at least 4… but as it happened, we didn’t actually get into the car until a little after 7.  the insanity begins.

so let me first lay out what this situation looked like… when we started there were 8 of us.  Narahuu and Gantogtoh (both math teachers and my basketball companions) and their wives Zulaa, and Bayarma.  Then there was the driver, i have already forgotten his name.  Then this other woman from school, Serjai, she is an older woman who i always thought hated me because she was in charge of keeping people in the right places at the right time, and i never was…  then me and soko.  so after 30 minutes of drving across town we stop to get some food, i already had some stashed in my bag because i knew how much i wouldn’t want to eat their food.  but soko and i go in, and when we come out there are 2 kids in the car too.  hmmmm.  i don’t know who they are, but i just assumed they were along for the long haul.  this became a recurring theme, TJ doesn’t have a clue what’s going on…

on that note, only soko and zulaa spoke any english, soko’s english was decent, terrible grammar, but she can get almost any idea across, zulaa’s wasn’t as good and her accent was almost impossible to decipher. 

so anyway, we are hauling ass now outside of UB and i’m terrified because this road is terrible, there are pot holes everywhere so the driver is swerving all over the road to miss them.  Mongolians on the other hand don’t know any better and are not used to riding in cars much so they didn’t have enough sense to be terrified.  anyway, after 4 or 5 hours, we stop at this little soum and the driver goes inside this little shanty building, and out come some people and the kids are taken inside.  now i decide to ask what’s going on and it’s explained that these are the driver’s nephews and we were just taking them here.  oh… so now we continue on, it’s pretty pitch black now, and now we’re on a dirt road, which parallels the real road because there was some work being done and the paved road is now impassable… the next thing i know we’re pulling off into the grass.  if you’ve never been to mongolia, just imagine being nowhere.  that’s what mongolia is like, there is nothing, and the nothing stretches forever.  there are no trees, and very few rivers or streams or any bodies of water.  the only thing there is a lot of is mountains.  so in the middle of all this nothing, we’re driving around in circles… i have no idea what’s going on… but after 5 minutes of this, the driver asks everyone if they’re getting any cell service… which surprisingly someone is… so he takes their phone and starts calling someone… at this point i decide i have to know what’s going on, and i find out that he looking for his brother’s ger.   so after about 20 minutes of just searching wildly and honking like mad, a motorcycle appears with his brother on it and he leads us off to these 2 gers in the middle of nothing.  we get out… set up our tents, and go into this ger for tea… ew, i hate the mongolian tea, although this was probably the best that i’ve had, so i drank the whole bowl of it.  they were all wide eyed to see a whitey, and they wanted to know a lot about me.  after about 30 minutes, we went outside and slept.