After a stunning drive through the Gobi Desert, we arrived in a Ger camp by the Khongor Sand Dunes.

We had a quick bite to eat from our own stash of groceries and then asked Baatar to drop us off at the base of the highest dunes.

From there, we slowly made our way up a massive sand hill with all of our camping gear.

It was a tough climb. Every two steps up, you slipped one step down the sand.

Once in the dunes, we were entirely mesmerized by the views of the infinite sand.

Just stop and breathe. There’s nothing but stillness and silence. A sea of waves in a snapshot.

I’m locked in a millisecond.

We walked around for an hour or two before we found this camping spot-

It was ideal not only because of the epic views, but because there was a little bit of protection from the wind.

Lucky for us, the wind was still quite weak when we were setting up the tent. Especially because one of the segments in our tent pole broke. Fortunately, Felix is a responsible traveler and had a repair kit with him (even though it was my tent) :). I’ve never even carried a first aid kit.

So we fixed the tent and filled a couple of plastic bags with sand to peg it down. Then as soon as we threw our bags in the tent, the wind picked up like no tomorrow and it got very cold.

We put on all of our clothes, grabbed a bottle of vodka, and made our way up to the highest sand dune for sunset.

Yeah vodka really does warm you up when it’s too cold to be outside :D

After sunset we cooked dinner inside the tent and tried to work up the courage to go back outside to look at the stars. It must have been around -15°C, but with the wind it felt like -30°.

Two more shots and we were out the door.

I walked up a sand dune to have a moment alone.

And there I was. All alone. Small Sasha, on top of a big sand dune, on a big plateau on top of a big chunk of land we like to call “Mongolia”, on little Earth, orbiting around our little star. One of hundreds of billions of little stars in our little galaxy- one of hundreds of billions of galaxies…

And all I see is shiny dust.

I walk up to the edge of the dunes. I look out- there it is, eternity at my feet.

Just like my friend Manu used to say, “in the desert, you don’t have to look up to see the stars, just look straight ahead and you will see them all around you.”

I didn’t think that my camera was capable of taking decent night photos with the kit lens (and clearly, I don’t have any money for another lens :)), but Felix taught me a bit about night photography. The first three shots were taken with my camera, the last one was Felix’s.

I also don’t really know how to organize or edit photos either :D
I tried to edit the last one to give you an idea of what the stars look like in the desert, but I don’t have the RAW file or much patience. So just keep in mind that the view was much better than the photos :)

Most people would have HATED it though! :D It was super cold, windy as hell, and there was sand EVERYWHERE! We could barely sleep at night because the wind was so nuts that it sounded like the tent was going to rip in half at any moment. It actually scared me. Felix even woke up in the middle of the night and was convinced that the tent had actually collapsed. It didn’t really, but the wind was so strong that half of the tent was directly on top of us. We also weren’t able to block the top bit of the tent where sand was coming in, so we had to cover our faces all night and just accept the sand…

There are really few people in the world that you can share such precious moments with and still have a smile on your face :) That’s why I chose to travel with Felix ;)

We woke up to a clean slate- no footprints anywhere. Some of the dunes had changed shape a bit and our tent was buried under about a foot of sand on one side.

We watched the sunrise, took a nap, cooked breakfast and hot coffee, then walked around the dunes and made this little birthday photo for my aunt :)

It says, “happy birthday, Masha!”

We watched the sunset one more time, then rolled off the edge of the highest dune and ran to the Ger camp. We felt like kinder in a giant sandbox.

Isn’t that what life’s all about anyway? :)

—

Total expenses of Day 21 in Mongolia:
$0

Total expenses so far of 21 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):

$260.00

While we were in Ulaanbaatar, Javkhlan showed Felix and me some photos of his trip to the Khongor Sand Dunes in the Gobi. These dunes are one of Mongolia’s biggest attractions, so they weren’t originally on our “to-do” list, but after seeing such beautiful pictures, we decided that it would be worth the trip.

The problem with these dunes was that you need a 4WD to get to them, and this, of course, can get quite expensive. People usually hire a car with a driver for $60-100 per day, but our budget was about $10 per day.

We thought about hitchhiking from Dalanzadgad (the city just outside of the desert) to the dunes, but we were worried about getting stuck for a long period of time in the cold (like -20°) and running out of water. The only roads we saw on the maps were dirt roads and we thought that barely any people would be on them in November.

So for safety reasons, we decided to give in and rent a vehicle + driver (renting just the vehicle seemed difficult and just as expensive, if even possible).

The next thing we had in mind was to find other travelers to split the cost of the vehicle. We posted about this on the Mongolian travel forum on Facebook, but nobody replied except for a few Mongolians that wanted to sell us tours. One of these guys, whose name was Baatar, offered us a fair price and accommodation in Dalanzadgad for only $4/night.

We agreed on the accommodation (which was a yurt) and wrote down his phone number, but didn’t make any plans with him in regards to the tour. We decided to first go down to Dalanzadgad to see if we can find more travelers there, and see if we can find a better deal from there.

We left Ulaanbaatar a little bit late and didn’t start hitchhiking until about 2pm. We weren’t exactly sure how to hitch from the city without people asking us for money (because anyone with a car in Ulaanbaatar can morph into a cab driver at any given moment), so we took the public bus as far out of the city as we could, and got off by the airport. From there, we walked down the road going south, and stopped a couple of cars that quickly morphed into cabs. Eventually, we paid one of these cabs to drive us a couple more kilometers out of the city.

It was already getting late so I was sure that we wouldn’t even get halfway to the Gobi that day, but since we had a tent and winter camping gear, it wasn’t a big deal for us to sleep anywhere, whether in the desert or on the side of the highway.

Little did we know, we got two rides straight away. One took us an hour in the right direction, the other one brought us to the doorstep of the Gobi :D

The second ride was another one of those super lucky events- a man in a brand new Landcruiser stopped and offered us a lift. This man was driving at about 200 km/hr., and planned on going to Tsogt-Ovoo, which was 460km in the right direction and just 120km from where we were hoping to get to in two days of hitchhiking (Dalanzadgad).

This man knew a tiny bit of English and was super nice, he even gave us bottled water and candy. It kind of felt like we were his little kids :)

We got off in Tsogt-Ovoo right before sunset. We could have easily caught another lift to Dalanzadgad, but in that case we would have arrived there in the dark. One of the few rules I try to keep when traveling is to not arrive in an unfamiliar city in a poor country in the dark, with all of your stuff. You’re kind of asking for trouble if you do that.

So we looked for a hotel in the tiny village of Tsogt-Ovoo. We walked around in circles for about a half hour before we found the hotel, since it wasn’t so obvious, and then decided to camp when we found out that the cost of the room was $8. Eight dollars was a bit much for our daily budget.

We bought a big bottle of water and walked down the road, away from the village. After a kilometer or so, we took a right onto the flat grassy field and pitched our tent 200 or so meters from the road.

It was another cold, but spectacular starlit night. We cooked dinner, then warmed up under our big puffy sleeping bags. This is what the spot looked like in the morning-

After breakfast and coffee, we had a visitor :). This random little guy drove over to us on his motorcycle, didn’t say a word, just observed us, rolled a cigarette, had a smoke, sat there for a while, and then left when we started packing up our tent. I gave him some of the candy we got from papa driver :).

We walked back onto the road and caught a lift that drove us all the way to Dalanzadgad. There, our mission was to find other travelers and to find out about the cost of renting a vehicle.

We walked around the city for a few hours, didn’t see any tourists. Found out where the Gobi drivers were supposed to hang out, didn’t find any drivers. Went into the tourist information center and found out that their price for a 4WD was higher than Baatar’s. And then eventually, Baatar’s wife found us as we were walking around the city, and brought us back to her yurt! I guess we weren’t too hard to spot since we were like the only white people in the city :). We had no idea she was even looking for us, but she came up to us on the street and showed us the Facebook conversation she was having with Felix. I guess they really didn’t want to let us slip since tourism was so scarce in November…

At that point, we basically caved in and decided to pay Baatar to drive us to the dunes. We agreed on $200 for 3 days in the desert, so it was $100/each. Biggest expense by far in all of Mongolia, but definitely worth it.

We paid for the tour and stocked up on more groceries. Then we spent the night in the yurt and took off for the Gobi in the morning.

It turns out that we (and mapsme) were wrong about some of the dirt roads. There’s actually a paved road and a lot of cars driving between Dalanzadgad and Bayandalai (83km). So if you’re looking for a cheap way to get to the Gobi, I would suggest having a look for a driver in Bayandalai (or even trying to hitch to the desert from there).

The ride to the dunes was pretty amazing. We drove through beautiful fields of nothing, towards sand, small hills and mountain ranges, sprinkled with snow and herds of sheep and camels. We saw some ibex and black-tailed gazelle on the way as well.

The dunes were stunning. I would love to see them in the summertime after a rainstorm, when the grass in front of them is green. Or in the spring, when the Gobi blooms.

Total expenses of Days 19-20 in Mongolia:

$1.00 taxi & bus
$4.00 yurt
$15.00 food (groceries + local eatery that I didn’t mention)
$100.00 4WD to the Gobi
= 120.00

Total expenses so far of 20 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):

$260.00

Remember the guy that picked us up hitchhiking from Ulaanbaatar and drove us an hour out of his way so that we could camp in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park? Well, he promised to come back for us and drive us all the way back to Ulaanbaatar for free as well :)

So we packed up our tent and walked back down to the road where he said he will meet us, and surprise surprise- he actually came! Picked us up with a nice smile and drove us back to Ulaanbaatar for free. This means that he spent 3 or more hours of his day just helping us out. And- even crazier- on the way back, he stopped in a Khuushuur House and bought US a bunch of khuushuurs (meat pastries)! We tried to pay for them, but he didn’t let us!

And these were the best khuushuurs we had in all of Mongolia. Khuushuur is like Russian chiburekk (if you know what that is) or an empanada with different spices. Basically minced meat with onions and spices, wrapped in fried dough. The ones in this Khuushuur House (which was just a tiny little shack on the side of the road) were super fresh. And super tasty ;)

A tourist bus would never stop in a shack like this…

Sadly, we couldn’t communicate much with our friend, since he didn’t know English or Russian, and we don’t know Mongolian. But we understood that he said he was a shaman and he drank a lot of vodka the night before.

He dropped us off in Ulaanbaatar city center, where we found an Airbnb for $5. This was kind of a funny night too. The Airbnb host was an interesting girl named Ulegma, she was originally from Ulaanbaatar but lived in Holland and Greece for a long time, and just recently came back to Mongolia. She was reconnecting with some old friends and they were just getting hammered :D Her friends were super funny and they all knew both Russian and English very well! They even sang Russian songs to me :D And on top of the very nice hospitality, Ulegma made an amazing dinner for us and her friend gave us a giant beer. In many countries, you would pay double the price of our entire stay, just for the beer.

Total expenses of Day 16 in Mongolia:
$5.00 (this includes transportation, accommodation, food and beer)- Thank you to the wonderful people we’ve met!

The next day we had to deal with visas again. We would have left Ulaanbaatar right after all the paperwork was finished, but a couchsurfing friend of mine texted me saying he was back in Ulaanbaatar.

This guy’s name is Javkhlan and he’s pretty badass :D He likes to travel around on a dirt bike, so that if he sees an interesting looking place (like the top of a mountain or sand dune), he can just drive there. No road needed!  Talking to him really made me want to get into dirt biking…

Javkhlan’s from Ulaanbaatar but lived in Japan and Ireland for a while, and has also traveled extensively. So he looks Mongolia, but sounds Irish :) He stayed in my place in Irkutsk about a year ago, when he was traveling through Russia.

That’s really what couchsurfing is all about- meeting such interesting people and connecting with them on a true human to human level. No trades, no money involved, just people helping each other out and learning from each other. I would say that couchsurfing is one of the best tools that any real traveler can (and should) use.

So we spent the night in his super nice (huge) apartment in Zaisan, cooked dinner and shared some drinks and stories. He even had two spare bedrooms for guests! (When he stayed with me in Irkutsk, he had to sleep on the floor of my shitty old cockroachie studio apartment :)).

Javkhlan said that he had some friends who were building a climbing wall and a zipline in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, and invited us to join him to check it out the next day.

These fun activities were located in an incredible spot, just down the hill from where we camped 2 nights before.

We even got to ride some quads :D

And Javkhlan cooked up some awesome Mongolian BBQ

We spent one more night at Javkhlan’s and then hit the road to the Gobi Desert the next day.

Big thanks to Javkhlan for everything! You’re an awesome dude :)

Total expenses of Days 17-18 in Mongolia:

$13.00 groceries

Total expenses so far of 18 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):

$140.00

The next day we had more fun with camels. This time we decided to feed them our left over scraps of cabbage and carrots.

The camels seemed really sweet at first, but then they got so excited that they almost started chasing us for these vegetable scraps. And being chased by a camel is scarier than you may think! :D

:)

We took it easy in Gorkhi-Terelj National Park. Woke up late, made a fire, cooked some food. Then we wandered around the curved yellow hills and gigantic boulders.

Since this national park is very close to Ulaanbaatar, and is very beautiful, it is a crazy tourist destination. There are dozens of Ger camps every few hundred meters or so along the road, and everybody is obsessed with one rock, “Turtle Rock”. I don’t really know why, since all of the other big boulders are equally (if not more) impressive.

(Picture from Wikipedia)

And these are two random unnamed rocks that we found somewhere in this park:

Why is Turtle Rock cooler than random unnamed rock?

Luckily it was off season when we were there (November) so most Ger camps were closed and the park was pretty empty. We wandered away from the road and the Ger camps anyway, to check out the natural beauty of the park. We walked off trail, to the highest hilltop we could see. And we found this spot:

I think it’s better than “Turtle Rock” but nobody knows about it.

We also ran into a camel family and fed them some grass :D

I love this baby camel, he looks like Sid from Ice Age :D

We watched the sunset from the top of a hill and spent one more night camping between the giant boulders.

Total expenses of Day 15: $0

Total expenses so far of 15 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):
$122.00

*Night photos (and a couple of the other ones) by Felix

We wanted to get out of Ulaanbaatar ASAP because neither Felix or I are big fans of huge overcrowded cities or spending money. Also, Ulaanbaatar is so polluted that I felt like I was getting sick just from breathing. See this article.

We got out of the city center by sunset but only managed to get a few km away, to a wealthy neighborhood called Zaisan. We watched the sunset from a huge monument on top of a hill in Zaisan, which explained perfectly why Mongolians were so nice to me :)

I’m not a fan of hitchhiking in the dark (especially when it’s -10° outside), so instead of trying to get to Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, we decided to camp on the outskirts of Zaisan, where we knew there were some small hiking trails.

We paid for a cab to take us 5 km up the road towards the hiking trails *($1/each), and pitched our tent in the dark, in some closed down Ger camp.

The view was pretty cool-

Nobody bothered us at night, although it was funny to see hikers going up these trails in the morning as we were getting out of our tent :)

We walked back down to Zaisan and started hitching east. It didn’t take long for us to find the most epic ride of the entire trip. A young guy picked us up, didn’t speak a word of English or Russian. He understood where we were going (about an hour drive) and offered to drive us all the way there. We confirmed that he was not a taxi driver before we got in the car (by saying “ugui taxi” (no taxi)) so it seemed like a bit of a strange (or overly nice) offer, and we got a bit confused.

Then he called a friend who spoke English and had the friend translate that he wanted to drive us to the national park, leave us there, then pick us back up from the same place when we wanted to go back to Ulaanbaatar! The friend also added that he didn’t want money or anything, he just wanted to help us out. He’s just a really nice guy! We were a little bit shocked by the situation but, of course, we thanked him and accepted.

So he drove us all the way to Gorkhi-Terelj National Park for free, dropped us off, and said that he will come back for us two days later at 3pm.

Now that’s Mongolian hospitality!

We thanked him a lot, waved goodbye, and made our way up some beautiful rolling hills for sunset.

Then we found an amazing camping spot overlooking the valley between two huge boulders.

Set up the tent. Made a fire. Cooked dinner.

I think I need nothing else in life ;)

Total expenses of day 14 in Mongolia:

$1.00 (water and pastries).
$1.00 taxi
=$2

*Taxis in Mongolia cost 1000turgik ($0.38) per km. Make sure you arrange the price before the drive because cab drivers (everywhere) love taking extra money from people.

Accommodation: tent

Food: cooked

Total expenses so far of 14 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):
$122.00

*Night photos by Felix

Day 12 of hitchhiking Mongolia.

The first people that picked us up were two cops. If I were in the States or any western country, I would have been worried about cops stopping their car for me while I was hitchhiking, but these Mongolian policemen were extremely friendly and helpful. They were happy to drive us to the next town down the road and didn’t even check our passports.

After they dropped us off, we walked for a while longer, then caught a small truck ride with a poor looking couple, then another one in a van. The back of this van reeked because it was stuffed with dozens of sheep skins, some of which still had legs, blood, and gunk on them. The driver threw our backpacks on top of the skins, and told us to get in the back. There were already 3 people sitting in the back seat, but we managed to stuff in with me sitting on Felix’s lap. The driver was heading all the way to Ulaanbaatar and said that we could go all the way with him, but since we were sharing 3 seats with 5 people, we asked him to drop us off at a train station a couple of hours down the road.

We got out in Erdenet, with our necks and legs cramped and sore, and our bags splattered with blood and reeking of sheep. Then this driver asked for money! We gave him 5,000 tugrik, which was the price of the bus. He wasn’t too pleased about that but neither were we. This was the first person in Mongolia that had asked us for money at the end of a ride, and it was the worst ride of the entire trip.

Next, we bought 2 overnight train tickets ($4/each) and some food for the road ($1).

We slept in the train and arrived in Ulaanbaatar at around 6am. We booked into the same hostel we stayed in before ($8) and had 3 things to do in the city: buy gas for my portable stove, get Felix’s Chinese visa, and extend Felix’s Mongolian visa. The greatest piece of bullshit that any traveler has to deal with is visas. It is so sad that we live on this incredible beautiful planet but we restrict our own species from seeing it, all because of modern day tribalism. I mean, it’s not like you choose where you’re born, but as soon as you’re born you get assigned some papers that tell you which tribe you belong to, and where you can and can’t go. If you’re lucky, you get assigned a piece of paper that gives you access to most of the Earth, if you’re unlucky, you might not even be able to leave your tribe. And the funny thing is that all of these papers are based purely on imagination.

Unfortunately, Felix screwed up a little with this visa bs and as a result, we had to be back in Ulaanbaatar just 5 days later, which meant that we couldn’t go too far from the city. So we decided to go to Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, just an hour from Ulaanbaatar, instead of Central Mongolia.

Total expenses of days 12-13 in Mongolia:

$2 dead sheep van
$4 train
$1 food for train
$8 hostel
$5 gas for camping stove
$9 groceries
=$29

Accommodation: Overnight train, hostel (one easy way to save money is to take overnight transport)

Food: Cooked

Total expenses so far of 13 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):
$120.00

* Of course visas will add to your expenses, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about that…except not go to the countries that require expensive visas, which was what I did this time.

We started hitching from Tosontsengel at around 11:00. We didn’t get so lucky this time. Waited in one spot for over an hour before we decided to walk. The next town over was about 50 km away, so we weren’t planning on walking there, we just walked to keep ourselves warm.

But walking worked quite well! A young guy picked us up within the first 10 minutes of our walk, asking us what the hell we were doing (well, miming that since he didn’t speak English or Russian). We tried to explain that we were hitching to Ulaanbaatar, but I think he understood that as “we are walking to Ulaanbaatar”, which is over 600 km away️ :). Maybe he thought we were crazy. He mimed a bunch of stuff that we didn’t understand and then took a right onto a dirt road and brought us to his friend’s yurt.

There were a few young guys in the yurt, none of them spoke English or Russian so we couldn’t communicate much, but our new buddy clearly told them that we were walking to Ulaanbaatar. They laughed a little bit, and gave us salty milk tea and white bread.

Then our buddy (whose name we can’t pronounce or remember- so we’ll just call him “Buddy” :)) drove us to his grandma’s house in the village of Ikh Uul. It was a little larger than a yurt, but was still just one room and seemed to be colder. Everybody in the house was really nice, they gave us a cup of salty milk tea and white bread, then laughed about us walking to Ulaanbaatar :). His grandparents even called a friend who spoke Russian and had the friend translate that there was a bus going to Ulaanbaatar at 7am the next day.

After the salty tea, we got back in the car and Buddy drove further down a dirt road, away from the town and main highway. We had no idea where we were going, but the drive was spectacular. There was a beautiful winding river, light brown mountains sprinkled with bits of snow, dozens of dried out trees with wilting branches, and a few white yurts here and there.

Our next destination turned out to be his mother’s yurt, where we had yet another cup of salty milk tea and more white bread. I think he had fun showing everybody these foreign morons who were walking to Ulaanbaatar :). His mom spoke some Russian and told me about the bus again️.

The family yurt was really warm and cozy, and was placed in the most incredible location.

Check out the view from their toilet!

Yep, that is the toilet. Imagine pooping there when it’s -45!

Buddy’s sister, her two kids, husband, and a few other family members were all hanging out inside this yurt. Buddy’s cousin was cutting the meat of a whole sheep and his sister was cooking meat on the fire.

We were never exactly sure what was going on or where our buddy would take us next, but we got back in his car together with his cousin and drove down the dirt road again. He brought some kind of tool with him this time- a thin, shovel-like instrument with 2 rods. He stopped the car at a shack and walked out with this tool. Felix and I had no idea what that tool was, and the first thing that came to my head was, “he’s gonna kill a sheep!” We went to the back of this shack, where I was expecting sheep, and then used this shovel to dig garlic out of the ground :). Actually, it wasn’t garlic, I don’t know what it was, it looked just like garlic but tasted sweet. And we didn’t kill a sheep :).

Next, Buddy caught his own horse and brought it back to the yurt. He saddled up the horse for Felix and me to ride on it. We didn’t go very far, since neither one of us knew how to ride a horse, but we were pretty impressed by Buddy’s horse riding skills!

He seemed like a really happy and funny person in general, even though we couldn’t understand anything he said.

After the horse riding, we went back in the yurt and his sister made us the best meal I had in all of Mongolia. It was mutton roasted on a fire (from their own sheep herd, of course), along with fresh tortilla shaped softly cooked dough, boiled potatoes, spicy sauce, and some kind of mystery thing that we hoped was pickled vegetables. We ate using just our hands and a knife.

Next, we got back in the car with Buddy and cousin, and started driving eastward, down another long dirt road. We still had no idea where we were being taken but we were excited about the adventure. Luckily, we didn’t have any plans for Mongolia, or any specific place to be at any specific time, so we could just go with the flow. And Buddy didn’t seem to be very concerned about our time management either :).

We drove up a mountain and got stuck on the way, but managed to dig the car out with sticks after about 20 or 30 minutes.

The destination was quite impressive- we went up to the top of the mountain, where there was a huge black boulder. It was clearly a sacred place for the locals. There was a big ovoo (shrine) facing a fantastic view of the tan and white rolling hills and mountaintops.

Not many tourists get to see this place, but surely if somebody advertised it enough, it could be turned into one of these “must see” sites of Mongolia. So I’m not telling you where it is! :P

Buddy did the expected ritual, walked around the shrine in circles, spraying fermented horse milk for the spirits of the mountain. Then we walked around the top of the mountain and admired the incredible views.

Buddy also brought dry horse poop with him, along with some kind of powder that he lit up in a cave. It turns out that horse poop burns very well! It smoked up the cave where Buddy sprayed the remainder of his fermented horse milk.

Buddy was so stoked about this stuff that he even brought a second bottle of horse milk for Felix and me to spray! :D

You see, when we were back in the yurt, his mother (who knows some Russian) asked me how old I was and whether I had children or not. I told her 29, and that I don’t have children. And I suppose that all villagers (everywhere) think that you must want children! And fuck 29 is old! :D

I don’t want children

So Buddy called another friend who knew Russian, passed the phone to me, and had this friend tell me that we were at a very sacred place where you should ask for babies!

I sprayed fermented horse milk on the rock and asked for an RBE and no babies.

After the rock, we drove back to the family yurt, where more fire roasted sheep was waiting for us. This time it was served with the dough chopped up into noodles, and some broth on the side.

We figured out that Mongolian villagers basically eat the same thing every day, just chopped up in different ways. That seems quite harsh since that basically means eating little else but sheep, flour, milk, cheese curds, and a potato here and there.

Even though Buddy doesn’t speak a word of English, he became our ultimate tour guide. He took us around on his motorcycle and kept on showing us all kinds of things, from his tractor, to his dog, to his pile of wood. He even let Felix drive his motorcycle through the beautiful valley. And in the evening, his mom invited us to sleep in her yurt.

We felt very honored to have this experience. This is the kind of experience that you could never pay for. Because if you did, it would be fake. But this family was so real and so genuine. They welcomed us into their home and shared everything they had with us. They didn’t do this because they wanted something in return, they did this simply out of kindness, understanding that we are all human, and in a sense, we are all family. This cultural attribute is common in many traditional cultures, but is quickly fading due to the influence of our trade-based global economy.

Of course, you can always pay for a tour where you can sleep in a yurt, eat fire-roasted mutton, ride a horse and a motorcycle, and see some nice landscape. But when you pay for such a tour, you miss out on the most important part of the experience, which is this genuine trade-free hospitality, based simply on kindness. That is something that no amount of money can ever buy.

We slept by the fire in the yurt. It stayed warm all night and in the morning, there was hot salty tea waiting for us. I started to get used to the tea at that point :). We shared the only stuff we had, which was jam and chocolate spread, but the family seemed to like it. Mom also made us some amazing fried noodles with sheep and potatoes before we took off.

After breakfast, Buddy’s uncle drove us back to the main road on his motorcycle. Another amazing drive.

We thanked him and started waking to Ulaanbaatar :).

Танай гэр бүлд маш их баярлалаа!

We stayed in the cabin in Hatgal for one more night because there was another snowstorm and it would have been difficult and dangerous to hitchhike. Our original plan was to head to a village called Khankh, in the north of Lake Khovsgol, and then see if we could climb a mountain called Munku Sardyk (3,500 meters). This is a pretty popular trek among Russian hikers, that’s how I knew about it. But, after the second snowstorm, we realized that not only did we not have enough equipment for such a trek at this time of year, but also that it would probably take us weeks just to get to Khankh because the only road going north is a small dirt road- meaning snow-covered road with nobody on it.

So we gave up on that plan, stocked up on groceries ($7.50) and prepared to hitch back to Moron :D

It was a good thing that we didn’t even try to hitch to Khank, because it was quite difficult just to get a ride to Moron- on a paved road. The road was covered in snow and there were hardly any cars going by. After about an hour and a half of hitching in the cold, one couple agreed to drive us to Moron for 15,000 tugrik ($3/each). We were quite cold so we took the offer.

The couple dropped us off at the Moron Bus Station :), which was close to the eastern exit out of the “city”. From there, we walked down the road for a km or two, then started hitching east.

Basically, at this point we decided to go to either Central Mongolia or the Gobi Desert, but in order to get to either one of those places, you basically have to go through Ulaanbaatar (the capital). There are a few dirt roads going through other parts of Mongolia, and I think that hitching through them would be doable, but we didn’t have enough camping gas left to risk being stuck in the middle of nowhere for weeks (which is a risk you should account for if you plan on hitching through those roads in October/November). Plus, it was getting real cold. Like -15, -20° cold.

It was so cold that as the driver approached the village he planned to stop in, we started scouting out abandoned buildings where we could possibly pitch our tent. We figured that an abandoned building could at least protect us from the wind, and offer a tiny bit of extra heat if it had a roof. It was getting dark too, and we were quite far from any city, so we didn’t want to continue hitching.

The small village where we were dropped off is called Tosontsengel. We walked around the village and checked out a few abandoned looking houses, but everything was locked. Eventually, we ran into a Buddhist temple. I had heard of people sleeping in churches and temples before, so we gave it a try and asked the monk if we could sleep there. The monk said no, but pointed us in the direction of a dodgy looking motel.

The motel looked like something you would find in the Wild West 150 years ago… or maybe today in a dodgy area in Reno :). There was no reception or anything, just a small grocery store on the first floor. We weren’t 100% sure that this actually was a motel when we first walked up to it, but we figured that the people in the shop would tell us. We asked the cashier about the hotel (by signaling the “international sleep sign”), and she opened up a dusty looking drawer and found a set of keys. One for the building (the hotel), one for the room. Looked like we had no neighbors.

The sheets were dirty and it didn’t have running water, but at least it was warm and only cost about $5.

We cooked dinner and breakfast on our camping stove in the motel room, and did some great people-watching in the morning :D

Total expenses of days 9 and 10 in Mongolia:
$8 cabin + $5 motel
$7.50 groceries
$3 ride to Moron
= $23.50

All food was cooked.

Total expenses so far of 10 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):
$91.00

It was so peaceful and beautiful by Lake Khovsgol that we ended up camping in the snow for 2 more days. Khovsgol is quite similar to Lake Baikal- crystal blue water, white mountains in the distance, no noise, no one in sight. Just the wind brushing up against icy little waves, snow falling gently from the trees.

It got down to -12°C at night, but it was still worth going outside to see such incredible stars twinkling over the mountains and shimmering lake.

We ran out of food after 3 days of camping and decided to walk to a village called Hatgal, just south of Lake Khovsgol. We walked around this small village for over an hour, looking for a café or restaurant, but everything seemed closed! The locals seemed to understand “restaurant” and pointed us in some direction, but since it was “off-season”, all we could find were little grocery stores and empty cafes with locks on the doors.

Then finally, a white guy in a truck stopped and greeted us. He was an American missionary who was doing some volunteering in Hatgal. He told us to hop in his truck and drove us a block away, to the only restaurant that was open. We would have never known that this place was a restaurant without this man. There was no sign of food, or the words хоол (food), зоог (meal), ресторан (restaurant), кафе (cafe), picture, or anything that would give us a clue that this was a restaurant. But that’s great because it meant that it’s real local (i.e. it’s cheap!).

This is what the place looked like:

“Сарнай цайны газар” translates to “rose tea shop” :)

And then try ordering from this menu:

Lucky I can at least read the Cyrillic alphabet (that’s usually what they use in Mongolia), and was familiar with a little bit of the food since it’s similar to ethnic Siberian food.

We were starving by the time we entered this restaurant and ended up ordering so much food that we could barely move after ($3 each).

Then we decided to stay in a cabin in Hatgal ($8) so that we didn’t have to move, and also so we could take a shower ($2).

Apart from in Ulaanbaatar, most houses (and yurts) in Mongolia don’t have running water. That’s also the case in most Russian villages, but the difference is that in Russia, almost every house in a village has a banya if they don’t have running water- that’s a sauna where you can also wash yourself. But in Mongolia, banya’s are just not a “thing”. They have public showers instead. One building with running water and a few different stalls where people take showers individually or with their little kids. Mongolian villagers go to a public shower once every week or two (or three), but we’ve been told that nomads will go 2-3 months without a shower in the winter. Despite that, I’ve never met a smelly Mongolian :) Maybe because it’s too cold to sweat over here.

We searched for the public shower for about an hour (in like a 200 sq meter “block”), but it was closed in the middle of the day on a weekday. We waited around for a while, hoping that somebody would show up. Then when we gave up, we went to a little shop where we ran into two Swiss girls who happened to be looking for the public shower as well. Someone in the shop understood English and found the keys to the shower, then opened it up just for us.

I wonder if the locals think that white people have an obsession with showering :)

Total expenses of days 7 and 8 in Mongolia:
$8 guesthouse + $3 restaurant food + $2 shower
$13.00

Accommodation: tent and guesthouse
Food: cooked and restaurant

Total expenses so far of 8 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):

$67.50

More pictures of Hatgal and Lake Khovsgol: