Sophie's travels 2011-2012: 13/2/2012 Ulaanbaatar to Terelj National Park, Mongolia TRANS SIBERIAN RAILWAY

Before heading to the ger camp we visited a Buddhist Monastery in Ulaanbaatar which was fascinating to see despite the monk’s stinky feet! There were over 800 prayer wheels and in the Tibetan temple there was a MASSIVE Buddha statue surrounded by shrines and prayer wheels. In the traditional Mongolian temple we watched monks chanting their prayer and then every now and then they would stop chanting and blast out some musical tunes with gongs and bells and even a big sea shell – fascinating to see! There are 2 different types of monks in Mongolia, the yellow headed monks who are allowed to have families and the red headed monks who are not allowed to have babies. Children’s parents and grandparents decide whether they are going to become and monk then when the child is old enough to understand they can decide whether they want to continue living as a monk or not. Most monks are yellow headed in Mongolia.

After our visit to the monastery we went to the supermarket and collected some supplies to give to the lady we later visited in her traditional ger camp. We drove through amazing snowy white mountains and ger villages to arrive at our ger camp. We dropped our bags off and had some tasty Mongolian noodles for lunch then set off on our cultural experience. We stopped to look at an interesting rock formation along the way, in the shape of a turtle with a story to go with it… Then when driving through the snow to the ger camp we were visiting we managed to get bogged. It took about 40 minutes and lots of pushing before we eventually got out thanks to Chris who found some wood to chock under the tires!

We eventually made it to the ger camp and the lady invited us in for hot cows milk and freshly made doughnuts. She told us about the history of ger camps and how they set them up etc and showed us some traditional clothes and snuff boxes (special stone jars with powdered tobacco in them that they sniff… these were used back in the day when tribes met, they would exchange tobacco).

We had tasty steamed dumplings for dinner back at our ger camp before playing Mongolian knuckles with sheep’s ankle bones which was good fun! We settled into our cosy ger tent for the night. It was about -30 degrees outside but we had a toasty fire in our tent and it was stoked every 3-4 hours during the night so we managed to stay warm enough.