Pingyao old city and the Shapotou fiasco

So by the end of June we traveled from Beijing to Pingyao.

Pingyao old city

The old city of Pingyao is one of the few places in China that still keeps their historical look as it was during the Ming and Qing dinasties. The city is pretty nice but it was also pretty crowded with groups of tourists following girls or guys with flags and speakers. The city has plenty of ancient government offices, residences, temples, banks, but in all of them you have a turnstile and someone to check tickets. So if you want to have a glimpse of “ancient life” in China you have to go and buy an overpriced ticket that allows you to enter to all those places in town. It’s not uncommon to pay to see any small thing in China, sometimes you pay at the gate of a place and then you pay again if you want to see something inside that place, and most of the time you pay to see pretty dull stuff. And most of the time, we found the interesting places just wandering around.

Anyway, our dilemma of paying or not paying the ticket to see local sights (except the tower that wasn’t including and the temples outside the old city) was partially solved when I got a used ticket. That meant that the ticket was good only for the sites that weren’t visited (which I had no clue). I had met an English guy who paid the ticket and had enough after entering to a third of the sites and after talking a while he gave me his old ticket.

So we decided to peek at one of the sites using the old ticket and then make our minds regarding buying maybe one or two new tickets. Of course it wasn’t worthwhile to pay the overpriced fee, but we were curious as if some of the sites were good. So we entered one by one and passed the tickets behind the guards’ backs just to see what the sites were and since the tickets were meant to be used only once, we entered to different places.

Most of them were more or less the same, a desk, chairs, sometimes beds… explanations in Chinese and very bad translations (computer translations, probably).In just 2 days, we walked every inch of the city, including biking to Shuanglin temple in the countryside. But our train tickets to Yinchuan, Ningxia  were hard to get and we stayed there three more days.

Among the limited variety of shops in Pingyao, which repeated themselves to the infinite, there were shoe shops that included a shoemaker making the shoes. We didn’t know to which extent this was really craft, or it was just a performance and the shoes were made in an industry. Anyway, Iohi was interested in learning about the shoes, so we asked Robert¹ , the guy from the hostel, if he knew someone who could teach her. He knew a shoemaker that worked in a close village and Robert volunteered to give us bikes (for free!) and come with us and translate. The shoemaker was a really funny guy who knew a couple of words of every language, he took picture with us and all his family and took our postal addresses to send us ehh, well, I don’t have any idea what he wants to send us. Anyway, he explained the whole process, and we saw the only four workers he had and the shoes were really handmade! However, he said that Iohi wouldn’t be able to learn the skills of shoo making so quickly, that’ll take at least 10 days. But she had the chance to know about materials and techniques and get acquainted with their art of shoemaking. And the whole tour ended with me buying a pair of very nice shoes (but very uncomfortable that I threw a week later) and inviting Robert for lunch to his favorite place: Dico’s, a kind of Chinese KFC.

Some days later, we finally got our tickets, but we had to travel to the province capital, Taiyuan, where we spent the afternoon with a bunch of girls who were thrilled to have the chance to speak English…

The Shapotou fiasco

Our idea was to get to Qinghai province, a mountainous area on the north of Tibet, and to travel south getting to the west of Sichuan province, on the east of Tibet. Already in Pingyao, we started to read about the west of Sichuan being closed for foreigners because of demonstrations and Tibetan unrest.

Tibetan populations extend outside the Tibet (Tibetan Autonomous Region), where you need a special permit to enter and some kind of tour, but in fact there are more Tibetans in Qinghai and in Sichuan provinces than in the Tibetan Autonomous Region. According to what I know, a monk in Aba, Sichuan set himself on fire and a series of demonstrations started there and spread to other areas of Sichuan. We decided to head to Qinghai anyway, and to give it a try. Since we wanted to cut the travel, we traveled first to Yinchuan in Ningxia province and wanted to do the only thing that seems to be interesting there, going to Shapotou, some sort of park on the fringes of the Tengger Desert.

The travel to Ningxia was very impressive and we saw from the train an incredible landscape of red desert mixed with very green areas. However, Ningxia’s capital, Yinchuan was very unimpressive, and since one day before the train trip we discovered that the only hostel in Yinchuan didn’t accept foreigners anymore (hotels and hostels in China need a special permit to accept foreigners), we decided to skip the city and travel directly to Shapotou.

It took us around one hour just to find the bus station, and then we took the 3 hours bus to Zhongwei, the nearest city to Shapotou. We arrived around midday, and then we waited other hour until the bus to Shapotou was filled.

We had the fantastic idea to sleep there, (a fantastic idea inspired by the lonely planet guide). We arrived after one hour drive, and we found ourselves in some kind of Dessert Disneyland. It was like the idea of a water park, but with the attractions of the sand dunes. So, who can think of sleeping in a water park? It was the same there, we arrived at the only guesthouse, and they looked at us like we were Martians. I guess the place was booked for groups or something like that, and I think we were the only human beings who thought about going to sleep there by themselves. We were stuck there, we had already paid the expensive ticket to enter to the place and we begged for a place to sleep.

They convinced us to go to the north gate, in the upper part across a gigantic dune, where they claimed there was a hotel. A worker at the place persuaded us to pay for some kind of transport that with his broken English was impossible to understand. Then he guided us to a place were our camels were waiting! We rode the camels with all our bag and we got to the top. There was nothing there, no hotel, no hostel, no guesthouse, nada. We asked everyone around but there was no accommodation there, we couldn’t believe it.

We sat in a kiosk completely shocked, it was around 4 and we didn’t have lunch, but there wasn’t even a restaurant there. And we even missed the last bus to get the hell out of there and continue our journey to Qinghai.

I guess the lady from the kiosk was clever enough to understand the situation (and our faces) even without understanding a word in English. She gave us fruits and candies and didn’t let me buy her water; she filled our bottles with boiled water instead. Finally, she found us a ride with an employees minibus and took us to the train station.

However, we were stuck again, the train was full.

We stayed one night in one cheap hotel without windows (that hotels in Qinghai towns will have made it look as 5 stars later) and we walked through the town answering the repetitive hellouu hellouu. But most of the day we just sat in a café until midnight, when we caught our train to Xining, Qinghai.

More pictures of Ninxia province.

More pictures of Shanxi province.

1. Robert is the English name of the guy, but he was Chinese. Many Chinese people that deal with westerners just pick an English name (or word, I met some woman who called herself Happy)

  

Our first week in China

Now I'm hearing about demonstrations and a train and dead people in China, but I'm uninformed not because of the The Great Firewall but because of the the slow connections of the hostels. I'll post what happened more than a month ago, and I'll try to understand what's going on now...

So Beijing woke up

So Beijing woke up. At 6am the streets started to pack with people, cars, bikes, motorbikes. It took us a while to understand where, in this huge city, we were, but we managed to find the hostel some people in U.B. recommended us. It resulted to be a very nice place in Xicheng district, near the Houhai lake and Nanluoguxiang alley, one of the most young chic streets.

It was one of the nicest areas we saw, there were a few parks around the lakes where Chinese people were doing exercise or playing some sort of badminton, children were running around, women were dancing Chinese folk songs, and a bunch of middle age to old guys were jumping into the lake and swimming.

The post Olympic Beijing is a much modern city than the city I knew 7 years ago. Part of the city has been completely rebuilt. And now you see toilets everywhere, I guess to prevent hordes of tourists from peeing in the alleys during the Olympic Games.

When I was in the city last time -it was one of my last destinations, I remember to be craving for coffee and ice-cream, and having a hard time to find them. Now there are international brands and chains everywhere, and to find coffee and ice-cream is as hard as finding rice. In general lines, the city is meant to be easy to navigate, there are big signs everywhere also in English with street names or pointing tourist spots and the cardinal directions, and the main streets are designed following the exact cardinal points (but this we have to thank to the Ming dynasty, I think).

I heard people complaining that Beijing is not what it was, that it’s now a Chinese Disneyland. I don’t agree, I liked the old Beijing, and I like the new Beijing.

On the downside, many hutongs, the small alleys in the traditional neighborhoods, were replaced by modern buildings, malls, banks. Most of those neighborhoods lacked plumbing, and most people were happy to get compensation and move the hell out of there, but many of those alleys had hundreds of years, and they could also improve the plumbing without demolishing the whole place.  I’m reading a fantastic book about China called Oracle Bones by Peter Hessler. The author is a journalist from US, who lives in Beijing since 1999 and recounts his experiences, as an English teacher and as a journalist. I recommend this book to whoever wants to try to understand something so vast and huge as the Chinese culture. Anyway, the book has a chapter about the hutongs, and tells about the order of demolition of a hutong in 2000 even though the hutong supposed to be an historic relic even  “older than the United States of America”. If the pace of demolition was fast at that time, I can’t imagine what China did with Beijing towards the 2008 to “deserve” the Games, a real plastic surgery.

It’s really a shame that old buildings were destroyed, but at least I think that maybe now, maybe a late though, the city is understanding a little more what makes Beijing special. We saw a lot of construction sites where they were building traditional Chinese buildings, for example, and we were in an area which had the traditional hutongs with a lot of signs that asked to protect the old Beijing.

Anyway, we spent 3 days just waling and biking around. We put certain places as objectives to ourselves, just to ignore them when we found something more interesting on the way. We were like moths distracted by any bright light, but we enjoyed more the distractions than the actual objectives.

Postcards!

 We spend a lot of time just eating, we wanted to try everything everywhere, and we found out that we could split food in three categories: amazing, tasteless and awful. So we fought to get as many of the dishes from the first category, but no matter what the taste is, food almost always surprises you: what seems sweet is salty, what seems hot is cold, what seems strange is something known.

The best soup ever!

Stinking tofu! puahh

By that time, China was warming up for the summer break vacations and many of the tourist spots were already packed with thousands and thousands of Chinese. So we avoided the more or less closed sights, but we did enjoy the classic food market (I guess you’ve seen pictures from any person who traveled to Beijing) and the even more classic Beijing duck, we walked through the silent hutongs and we visited the average 798 art district, but basically we just enjoyed the city. We had the chance to meet our friends from Mongolia for beers in Nanluoguxiang alley and to meet up with our Israeli friend atthe shining Sanlitun bar street in Chaoyang  district.

Biking on the hutongs

And after 4 days in the civilization we decided to make an adventurous side trip.

Great Wall

Just FYI, there isn’t such thing as The Great Wall, there are a lot of Walls built by different dynasties with different materials to protect themselves against different invaders. Now many of the Walls are invaded with tourists and vendors of sweets and Coca Cola and women that chase you while they yell postcards and put them inside your face. So many hostels sell you trips to go to less accessible parts of the Walls, which means less people and less vendors.

We went far with the part of less accessibility, we read in a forum about a part of the Wall called Jiankou Wall which is unexploited and not far from Beijing, but there’s no public transport to that place, and parts of the Wall are literally falling apart, I mean pieces of rock fall while you walk.

We took a bus from Beijing to Huairo, an ugly city which seems as the continuation of the furthest and ugliest part of Beijing. From there we couldn’t find buses that would drive us closer to our destination and we had to take a taxi. So after 1/2 hour bargaining we got to a convenient price and we started going.

The concrete and the buildings gave place gradually to more and more rivers and green and cultivated lands. Suddenly the road started to go up and down on the mountains and we continued going and going for more than 2 hours. And it already seemed too much and the driver started to call and ask people around until he turned around and we drove back one hour to take the right turn. He was so ashamed that he stopped in kiosk to buy as mineral water.

We finally arrived to Zhao's guesthouse at Xizhazi village, the closest village to Jiankou Wall. It was a small village surrounded by mountains and corn fields. The guesthouse was managed by a young family and besides us only a young Chinese couple was staying there.

We only took small backpacks to the village and our plan was roughly to start walking from the nearest part of the Wall on the next morning until we get to a more transited area and take a bus to Beijing from there.

The woman of the family, Zhao's wife, seemed to be in charge of talking with the foreigners and I tried to explain her our plan and ask for a map using simple English words and our magical Chinese phrase book. She answered us back using the translator of her mobile phone; we got a schematic map of the Wall written in Chinese and of the size of a credit card, and we understood that it will take around 7 hours walking until the point where we could take a bus, the part of the wall called Mutianyu. The afternoon we got there we just explored the surroundings and we prepared boiled water for the following day.

We woke up around 6:30 and there was a drizzle which made us start to doubt our plan of 7 hours walking. When we finished breakfast, the day was still very cloudy and humid but the rain stopped and we understood from the Zhao’s wife that there won’t be heavy raining and that it’ll be ok.

So we walked half an hour between the thick vegetation until we got to the Wall. In order to only start our trek, we had to climb a part of the wall which consisted of destroyed stairs (I guess) which become with time a 70 degree floor of rocks sticking out of the surface. I said to Iohi, “Don’t worry this should be the ruined part we heard about”.

 This came out to be one of the easiest parts of the trek along the wall. For 6 hours we walked completely alone, up and down, up and down, we had to climb with legs and hands in many parts, we walked over falling stones, we crawled into holes/doors and we jump from roofs, we walked down on surfaces so stepped that we had to grab from the sides.

Then suddenly we found ourselves in a refurbished area: all the tiles are in their place, there are signs, and refreshment stalls! We got to Mutianyu Wall! We started to see tourists everywhere; we were completely worn out and covered in sweat and around us many Europeans with leather shoes and their new clothes. Around one hour more, we found a cable car –yes, we deserved it. And we went down to an area full of shops, restaurants, and the bus stop to Beijing!

And back to Beijing –some successful negotiations

So we returned to the same hostel and Iohi found out that she forgot her Shoresh (Source) new sandals in the village’s guesthouse. For the next two days she conducted diplomatic negotiations to get her sandals back. She made the hostel workers to call the woman from the village’s guesthouse several times and discussed options that included making a whole day bus trip just to take them. She finally acceded to ship the sandals after a money bank transference, and shortly before we left, we won back the sandals!

Those days we were fed up with the lack of usb in the internet café, we walked around with the camera from internet café to internet café trying to download the pictures without success until we made the drastic decision of just buying a computer. So we went to the famous Zhongguancun District, which has several buildings full of computer and telephone shops. I did the proper research and we decided to buy an Asus so we had to look only for an official Asus vendor. Once we found it and found the computer, we started a new round of successful negotiations this time through Google translator, which ended in the computer I’m using now.

 From Beijing, with the new computer and the Shoresh sandals, we took a sleeper train to Pingyao, a rather touristy place but, anyway, a cute and small old city, in Shanxi province.

From Mongolia Countryside to Beijing

We’re already a month in China. Now we’re in Kanding, Sichuan, and we've been for a looong time without internet connection. But for now, I’ll just tell about the last days in Mongolia and how we got to Beijing.

From Hot Springs to White Lake – and a heart attack?

So we quickly flew from the scene of the crime (see the previous post) and we headed to the Hot Springs, where we had a small dose of civilization and we even took a shower (after 8 days!). We only stopped to see the completely dry falls of Orkhon, to push the van when it got stuck in the mud (twice), to wait for petrol provided by the other group’s van and to wait the driver called his wife (several times).

So we arrived at the Hot Springs, we had a relaxed time with beers and hot thermal water and we got drunk playing cards till late.

On the morning we left the ger guesthouse complex and we had some more hours of the only Mongolian tape we had (and of course many stops to call the driver’s wife). Around midday we entered into a small town to buy food -a chance to find another tape!

So we entered to a closed market with no electricity where our guide chose in the almost complete darkness not so rotten vegetables.

And then on the open market that was in the back, she helped us to pick some two new tapes!

We continued our journey by van and when we played the tape, we discovered that the new tapes sounded almost the same as the previous one!

On the afternoon we arrived to the White Lake National Park, which wasn’t nearly as beautiful as the previous places. The national park title only provided a guard at the entrance of the valley, electricity, more rubbish, a couple of restaurants and a sense of fakeness which we didn’t in the previous places we were.

We slept there and next day on the morning we see our cheerful driver with the face contorted with pain. Our guide translates to us that he has pains in the chest but that his friends are coming with some “medicine”.

Teresa, a nurse, assumed that our overweighted heavy drinker driver is having a heart attack. She explained to our guide that he should take a small dose of aspirin and if it helps it means that he’s having a heart attack and he must run to the hospital. But by the time we asked around and managed to find aspirins, the driver’s friends already gave him the “medicine” and he felt better.

Teresa assumed that he was feeling better because he relaxed and moved less. So after explaining again to our guide what to do if he feels bad again, we went for a walk. When we returned, we heard from our guide that he was really thankful for our help and that he took “our medicine” and he OK now

Teresa tried to explain her again that he must go to the hospital, while our guide explained to her that Mongolian people are tough and they don’t need to go to the hospital. Anyway he was back to normality and to drinking for the rest of the trip.

A couple of raining days later, we left the place stopping in an unimpressive crater of a volcano.

Karakorum and Semi Gobi – the way back to the city

After the white lake we started our way back to UB (Ulan Bator), spending one night near Karakorum and the last one in a family ger in the Semi Gobi desert.

We politely refused to sleep near a very artificial ger guesthouse that surrounded a Big Rock (that I forgot the name, but there you should throw stones over it to get rich or something like that). And we passed through very nice small valleys where we tried to persuade the driver to stop. He made up some excuses and we drove until he had reception for the phone. Even though it was near the city, the place was very nice and clean and we found a nice spot between two hills. There were no trees around and we lit a fire the Mongolian way, with shit! While some of us set the tents up, others pick dried yak dung until we had a huge pile of shit. It really worked and we made a huge fire that inspired entrepreneur ideas to some of the guys, namely, start selling shit!

On the morning we entered to Karakorum, the old capital of Mongolia founded by Genghis Khan himself. However, it’s dirty and ugly as most Mongolian cities and the only things remaining from ancient times are some stone turtles at the corners of the city. Besides that, the only sight around is a penis statue and a temple complex.

So after visiting the sights we headed to the north part of the Gobi desert, called the Semi Gobi. The Semi Gobi is the area in Mongolia where steppes and desert are mixed; and grass gives place to sand dunes.

The view was astounding but since it was midday and around 40^o C, I decided to take a nap and by the time I woke up, there was a storm!

We rode camels on the evening when the sky was clear again and the twilight sun faced the moon for a couple of hours. We rode the camels until we got to wet sand dunes that popped in the middle of the grass and then we came back to the gers.

Taken by Duncan

Next morning we took “the group picture” and we headed back to UB, exhausted, dirty and extremely happy.

Crossing the border China– a stupid way

After spending a night in UB, we took a 12 hour night train to Zamyin Uud, a town in the Mongolian side of the Chinese-Mongolian border. I guess there are two ways to cross the border: the wise way and the stupid way. The advantage of the stupid way is that it gave material to write.

There are international trains that go straight from UB to Beijing three times a week and they are all either 2^nd class, 2^nd class plus, or 1^st class. With these trains, you arrive to border in 12 hours, you wait in your comfortable cabin for like 5 hours and then 12 hours later (or so) you get to Beijing, China.

So we did it the stupid way, which supposed to be cheaper and faster. This way, instead taking an international train - which is more expensive only because it crosses the border - you can take a 3^rd class train that brings you to the Mongolian side of the border. Then you cross the border by jeep and take either a bus or another train in the Chinese side.

So we took our train to Zamyin Uud, which was fine at all, and we arrived on the morning to a dusty train station in an area of desert, which resembled to the stations in American westerns (but without the romanticism). We got outside by walking between the rails and passing through a broken part of the fence where we looked for a taxi, that is a jeep.

The actual border is really close, but the entrance is only allowed to vehicles. After bargaining the relatively high price, which remained pretty high for one kilometer, we jumped in.

He drove us near the border and started to call by phone and drive around and back and forward and stops and calls until one hour later we finally returned to the place where we started and he left the jeep again. The doors didn’t open and we went out of the car from the front seat, and started to look for another jeep. We walked around for 15 minutes not knowing what to do. The same driver saw us and point to another jeep that had already other two passengers, two Mongolian women. This time we headed straight to the end of the queue.

It took hours to move a meter! Then we got the first control where we stand for half and hour and then again to the jeep, to a jam as terrible as the previous one and then the second control. It took around 7 hours under the heat of the desert.

When we finally crossed to Erlian in China, we found out that we would have to wait until 1am to take a train in the direction of Beijing. We checked in the bus station and we found an overpriced “sleeper bus” to Beijing. A sleeper bus, is like regular bus, just that the seats are removed and replaced by two-berth beds.

The bus left us somewhere in Beijing at 4am. Beijing is a very lively city, and shops and cafes open early and close late, but in the middle of the week at 4am, at least on that area, everything was closed. Luckily, a 24 hours McDonalds received us, and we drank bad coffee until the amazing city of Beijing woke up.

More of Mongolia -Vegetarians beware, "hot pot"

We were kind of stuck in Pingyao for a couple of days, waiting for the train than goes to the exotic Yinchuan, once the capital of the Western Xia Empire. The guy of the hostel was stunned that we want to go where there are people that don't eat pork. (There is a lot Hui population there which is Muslim). Then we were stuck in Zhongwei for other day (and that's a very interesting story that will be told some days (or maybe weeks) later and we finally got to Xining in Qinghai province to realize that most of the inland ways out of the province are closed because of Tibetan unrest. Anyway, more of this later, the point is that I had time to continue the Mongolian story.

Eight Lakes Valley - the yak's way

The Yak!

So we hit the road (or the mud) again: 400 km (see footnote), 12 hours, several stops when the driver had signal and only one Mongolian tape played in loop. Almost a month later we still hum the songs.

Taken by Teresa

We were supposed to start a 2 day walking, 2 day horse riding trek, but the evening we arrived it was raining so heavily that we started to doubt the plan. But when we woke up, it was sunny. But (again) when we were ready to go, it started to rain. We decided to start anyway.

One hour later, it was raining so heavily that we were completely wet and we had to stop in some ger on the way. We were received, as usual, in the Mongolian way, salty milk tea and some more diary products, and we had the chance to dry ourselves.

Wet!

We asked our guide for the forecast, and for what will happen with the weather and our trek. However, in a country where weather changes every other hour, it was useless. One hour later, the rain stopped and we had a sunny day again.

“It’s better for you to go on”, I’m pretty sure the guide said.

We went on for another hour until the storm forced us to stop in another ger. It wasn’t the place we were supposed to spend the night, I mean, the guide knows the families that are glad to receive foreigners for some tugriks, and we usually stopped at those families. However, this family was also happy to host us and this place happened to be highlight of our countryside trip.

We got dry there, and ironically it stopped raining for the rest of the day. The little boy of the family was glad to show us the sights of the place. Everything was bright green because of the rain and the yaks moving slowly into the twilight added a surrealistic flavor to the view. There was a small frozen body of water and also pieces of ice that broke the earth from underground (I think it’s called permafrost). And maybe one kilometer after that, a big transparent lake under the mountains.

The permafrost

The new little guide - taken by Duncan

We walked around until it was getting dark. When we came back, we saw the poor family cat tied to the front of the ger. Our guide was so afraid of it  that she wanted to have it tied outside!

Next day was sunny, but we were worried that we would have to make up for what we didn’t walk the previous day.

The distances and the times she told us didn’t make any sense and they seemed to change depending who asked…

The thing is that asking for information to English speaking Mongolians is a very hard task.

I’ll give my linguistic explanation, for something completely different. Mongolian is an SOV language: first, the subject, then the object and then the verb.

“The boy ate the goat” is said by a Mongolian speaker as:

“The boy the goat ate”, change of course every word and use a completely different phonologic system.

Then something more complex as “The boy thinks that the girl ate the goat”, should be something like “The boy that the girl the goat ate thinks”.

So think about the effort for Mongolians to understand complex sentences such as:

“What do you think we should do if the rain doesn’t stop?” or “Do we have to walk today for all the distance we didn’t walk yesterday?”

So we ended up making simple yes/no questions or multiple options questions. The problem is that most of the time we got a “yes” as an answer (as it happens in many Asiatic cultures), and the yes, we found out, has many meanings:

1.      “The answer is yes”

2.      “One of the multiple options you gave me is correct”

3.      “I don’t have the faintest idea what are you talking about”, or “You talking to me?” or, simply, “I don’t understand”

So the rule was to only take “no” as a valid answer.

Anyway, it take around 5 hours walking with many stops and very minor rains through an astonishing landscape of mountains and lakes and we got there – handmade dumplings waiting.

Lunch!

What’s more, after 5 days far from a shower, we had the chance of a bath in the cold lake.

We slept there one night and we spent the next two days riding horses through more of that beautiful landscape and many yaks everywhere. The riding was amazing; the horses didn’t hesitate in running and galloping with a small kick and some “choo choo” at their ears. But those two days killed us, and we could barely move afterwards!

Evening after our first day riding

After horses

Next morning, we met our driver and van again and a big pot of stew. We started a short drive again and we had new promises of “hot pot”.

Orkhon Valley – where we ate the famous hotpot and the driver gets into a fight.

After half an hour driving, we stopped near a herd of goats. Our guide left the van and we see her talking with the herder. 5 minutes of discussion, she  points to a goat and pulls some tugriks from her pocket. Then she and the herder start to chase the goat until she almost throw herself over it and grabs it from its horns. The driver runs out to open the door, and the guide drags the goat –next day lunch- to the front seat.

They were thrilled and happy and talked loudly, and our vegetarian girl was completely in shock!

It seems that doing a hot pot is an especial occasion and kind of a celebration. I think it’s pretty clear but picking a goat is not so different than going to the supermarket and picking some meat, only that in the Mongolian way, you don’t need a fridge.

So we drove with the goat screaming once in a while and the girl silently crying in shock until we arrived to our next destination on the side of the Orkhon river.

The father of the family that received us there seemed very glad with the goat and the prospect of doing a hot pot and they killed it while we were exploring around... By the time we came back the goat was clean, the little girls of the family were playing with it, and our guide was again preparing inside meat sausages (not our meal this time).

Next day, after a beautiful sunny morning and 2 seconds under the freezing water of the river, we had the famous hot pot.

They put a rather big pan with some water over the stove in the ger, then some layers of meat and hot stones, onions, carrots, potatoes, and again meat, stones, veggies, etc… The meat was assorted pieces of the goat, which was cut in chunks of different sizes with bones and skin. This was an activity that involved all the women around cutting veggies, and all the men trying to catch the incandescent stones from the stove and putting them in the pan...

Our driver putting goat pieces in the pan

The hot pot is ready!

The result was, well er.., pieces of boiled goat. By Mongolian food standards, it was, well er…, kind of ok.

The same day started sunny became a stormy day with hail that caught me, and two of the girls, Teresa and Jen, several kilometers away. And again I had to unfreeze myself in front of the stove. The gers were packed with people this time. It seems that it was a popular spot and another group was also there, and we slept in tents despite the rain.

The night in the tents was ok, except for the yells and what I correctly guessed were the sound of punches. It was raining heavily and none of us left the tents, but on the morning our guide told us that our cheerful driver got in a fight with the father of the family when he refused to provide him with cigarettes and vodka. It seems that the fight also included our driver waving a knife, but everything ended there.

On the morning, the driver did his best to hurry us out of the place.

The footnote: Distance are provided as perceived the Mongolian sense of distance and I’m not sure regarding the relationship with reality. But it was a relatively short distance done in a very long time.