After the trip to the Gobi we needed a couple of days in Ulaanbaatar (UB) to recharge our batteries, catch up on sleep and showers. The heat and driving for hours and hours takes a lot out of you. Apart from sleeping, eating Western and Thai food and catching up on emails, we also did a little bit of sightseeing in UB. Among the most interesting sights was the National Museum of Mongolia which gives an in depth overview of the history of Mongolia up to the present day. It’s quite a lot to take in but you get a good insight into Mongolian culture and tradition and we recognised quite a few things we had already seen.

It didn’t take long until we hit the road again. There is so much to see in Mongolia and a 30 day visa can be awfully short. We buddied up with one of the guys who went with us to the Gobi, Jason, to do a 14 day loop through Central and Northern Mongolia. We decided to have a guide with us again because during our last trip we realised that having a translator makes the trip a much better experience. Without a guide we would have never been able to communicate with any locals and would have missed out on a lot. We got lucky with our guide, Aruna, who spoke great English, had a great sarcastic sense of humour, spoiled us with delicious veggie food and never got impatient with our endless questions. Baira, our driver was a fun guy too and had a brilliant singing voice. When you sit for hours and hours in a car any distraction is good (unless it’s the same song over and over and over again…). 

So off we went again via Kharkhorin (remember there aren’t that many roads) to Tovkhon Khiid, a monastery up in the Khangai mountains. The mountains aren’t particularly high in this area of Mongolia but in comparison to the Gobi it felt like driving around the Alps. Tovkhon Khidd was build in the 17th century by Zanabazar a direct descendent of Chinggis Khan and is recognised as the first religious leader of Mongolia. Like all monasteries Tovkhon Khidd was plundered and destroyed in the 1930s but it was rebuild in the 1990s after the Soviets withdrew from Mongolia. It’s a really picturesque temple retreat and it has become an important pilgrimage site for Mongolians. We experienced that importance ourselves as we hiked up to the monastery through the forest finding the hill top packed with Mongolians climbing around the temple and into the rebirth cave where you have to turn three times to be reborn.

The drive from Tovkhon Khidd to our next destination, the town Tsetserleg, was very, very bumpy but also incredibly scenic. If you want to see what Mongolia has to offer you simply have to get used to being on a roller coaster ride most of the times. In comparison to the South, Central and Northern Mongolia is mountainous, at times you see lots of lush green grass, flowers, sometimes the landscape is rocky but never boring. Since there is more vegetation around this part of the country it’s also more populated but not enough to feel even remotely crowded. Still, everywhere feels like the middle of nowhere 🙂  There is a fair bit of livestock – sheep, goats, yaks or a mix of yak and cow (particularly cute when young, a bit like fluffy sheep dogs) and of course horses, the most precious animals for Mongolians. On our way to Tsetserleg we stopped a fair few times to take pictures or stretch our legs. One time we got chatting with a Nomad family who making hay for the winter. Well, Aruna and Baira chatted and acted as our translators and some of us did very poorly when trying the help cut the grass. But we made up for it and let the kids take some pics with our camera, a fun thing to do we learnt on previous trips. We asked for an address where we could send some print out copies and our guesthouse in UB promised to pass them on to them. Hopefully they’ll get them.

In Tsetserleg there is a good aimag museum (aimag means province in Mongolian) with some original traditional clothing, tools, weapons and instruments. Some of this quite old stuff wasn’t behind glass or protected in any form and people were touching things without hesitation. There definitely isn’t too many people travelling around so that things would be destroyed from wear and tear…

Our next stop was Terkhiin Tsagaan Nuur or the Great White Lake as it’s known in English.  Even though it rained like crazy on our drive to the lake and it was freezing cold, it turned out to be one of our favourite places of our entire Mongolia trip. We spent two nights there and we wished we had stayed longer. A legend says that the lake was formed when a boy forgot to cap a well when he was getting water. Then the valley got flooded and someone shot a mountain top with an arrow, the peak fell down, covered the well and built an island in the lake. That’s what a local woman told us or something along those lines. Science says that the lake was formed by lava flows from erupting volcanoes. There is actually quite a lot of basalt rock around the area but all the volcanoes are inactive nowadays. Anyway we spent a beautiful day hiking around the hills and rocks and also went up Khorgo Ul, one of the volcanoes in the area.

From the lake we drove to Khovsgol Nurr, the Blue Pearl of Mongolia, a popular tourist destination for Mongolians and Foreigners. The drive to Khovsgol was again bumpy but beautiful and we were happy whenever we got a break from driving. One of the stops on the way was the town Shine-Ider where we stayed in a guesthouse and not in a ger. It was so weird to sleep in a room and walk through a corridor because apart from UB we slept every night in gers during our entire stay in Mongolia. What was funny though was that the guesthouse had no shower or toilet. We had a shower in the town’s hospital, our first one during that trip, and used the neighbour’s pit toilet. What was not so funny was the howling dogs at night when you needed to go to the toilet. That’s why we decided to go in pairs to be safe. Dogs in the country side can be scary and it’s worth asking for clear directions when you need to go to the toilet. One of our fellow travellers on the Gobi trip got bitten by two dogs when taking the wrong turn. Luckily it turned out not to be bad.

At Khovsgol Nuur we split up from our travel companion, Jason, as he had the ambitious plan to go on a 12 day horse trek further North. We went for a four day horse ride along the lake instead as we didn’t have a lot of time left on our visa. It was  great fun and didn’t hurt as much as expected. After a few hours we really got into it and there was some talk that we wished we could go for longer. However, after four days I must admit that I had enough and I was looking forward to getting back into the car and on the bumpy roads. During our horse trek we stayed in gers of local families and we found shelter in their homes at lunch time or when it was raining. Everyone we met was so hospitable, took us in with and offered us Mongolian milk tea (Not our thing, although James got into it a bit more. It’s milk thinned down with water or tea and some salt. A bit like the Tibetan milk tea without the butter). We were also offered freshly baked bread, sheep or goat curd or hard, dried cheese and this dairy spread, something in between butter and brie. Yumm. We also very much enjoyed a fire in the ger’s stove in the evenings and mornings.  Although gers are very well insulated the temperatures were quite fresh up North. I kept a bit of an eye on James when he was lighting the fire because the guys had this brilliant idea to test how many logs you can put into a stove at the Great White Lake. We ended up with Gobi temperatures in the ger and a volcano flow of sparks coming out of the stove pipe. We also had a cute dog following us during the four days, guarding our ger at night and walking with us the the toilet at night to make sure we wouldn’t be attacked by other dogs or stray yaks. I wish we could have packed him in and taken him with us 🙁

From Khovsgol we headed slowly back to UB where we relaxed for a day before catching the night train to China. But not before stopping at Amarbayasgalant Khidd, the last resting place of Zanabazar. Amarbayasgalant Khidd is the most intact monastery in Mongolia and it is worth a stop if you come from or travel to the North. Unfortunately it was raining and windy when we went there but even in miserable weather it wasn’t a waste of time. It’s normally isolated and quiet there but when we arrived it happened to be Gongoriin Bombani Hural, a yearly ceremony where people from the aimag come to pray and hike up to the eight white stupas. Everywhere you looked people were camping and it had the atmosphere of a music festival. At night people lit flying candles, candles attached to plastic bags (very environmentally friendly) and let them fly in the air. A nice end to our Mongolia experience. Would we recommend coming to Mongolia? Absolutely. Come soon and bring along as much time as possible.

The train ride from UB to Erlian was pretty comfy and we managed to get in a few hours of sleep. Mongolian customs and immigration took several hours again but this time we were aware of them closing the toilets for the entire period. The weirdest thing was that we had to sit still in our compartment for most of the time and the conductor even told us off for reading. We knew we had entered China when we had to forget all our manners and had to push for our lives to get through the gate to the Chinese immigration desk. But all went well in the end and here we are now back in China slowly making our way further West to the border of Kazakhstan.