so day 2 i wake up early to the sound of cows and sheeps and goats… oh, and naturally dogs. so i figure that we’ll be rolling out pretty soon, i mean, in my mind we’re supposed to be going pretty directly to hovsgol and just hanging there, that’s what i was told. but we get up do a lot of nothing, and then i get in the car and ride down to a store about 20 miles away to get some replacement parts for the van. we come back and i go into the ger and i’m looking all around to try to figure out what everything is… and i notice the head of a goat lying on the ground. soko noticed that i’m kind of wide eyed and asks what i think of the place… and i pointed out the goat, and she said, oh, that’s our lunch. ok then.
so we go outside and their playing with a goat carcass. this animal has only had it’s head cut off, but there are no other marks on its body. then they took a bunch of the meat out thru this hole for a head. so now to cook it, they’ve superheated some stones, and they start putting the stones back inside the goat’s skin, along with the meat they’ve taken out. once all the stones and meat are back inside and you can hear them cooking, they break out these flame thrower type things and start burning the outside of this animal…. after about 20 minutes of this, they stop, cut the whole thing open and start passing around these scalding hot stones, apparently it’s good luck somehow to handle these stones, (although they said it would help digest the meat, whatever). anyway, then everyone starts digging in. it wasn’t too bad, and looking back it was one of the best meals i had the entire trip. the problem with the rest of the meals was that we kept eating this same goat for the entire 10 days. they chopped it up in so many ways and stuffed it into every possible hiding spot in the van, so everytime i thought it was finally done, they pulled out more. oh, and clearly, there was no refrigeration. i went along with the madness for 3 days, and then i stopped eating meat altogether.
so after the carnage, we drink vodka, everyone including the driver, we piled into the van. we had picked up the driver’s wife now for the rest of the trip too, which put us at a total of 9.
you can check out the pictures from this trip here
