Mongolian fight club!

Ulaan Baatar clubbing

Believe it or not but last night i was having a beer on the white leather sofa of a super trendy lounge in UB (yeah.. we -locals- just call it UB here!)

And then as we walked out i see these super cool kids with... a skateboard! My legs were just cotton and i was in slippers and the road was the roughest pavement, but i just had to skate UB!!
So i did! scratching my bare feet on the brand new grip tape, but it felt awesome!

Accross the street from the bar was the Silence; UB's hypest night club.. so off we are to experience some of UB's night life.. mmh.. on a tuesday night, but you don't always choose!
From what we experienced, at least on tuesday nights, the Silence should actually be renamed the Gobi! The place was pretty much desert! Not to mention that the sound of Silence (i had to use that one!) really sucked!
But hey you don't get to go clubbing in UB every other day, right? So, you know me, i just had to go burn the dance floor!
Well let's be honest.. i only ignited it!.. Gave them my -now worldwide famous- engineer's dance.. but then Terry really burned the place down!
Beside being a very funny dude, coming straight out of a korean TV show to discover the world, Terry is a DJ in Seoul and a very good dancer (something like the korean son of Mikael Jackson!)

... and some of you thought i wouldn't find an internet connection in Mongolia??!

Now just wait till Terry sends me last night's pictures!


Anyway.. after this great experience it's time to hit the road again.. I'm taking a train this afternoon to Sainchand, east of the country to get closer to the chinese border and enter China sometime this week end.. i probably won't have an internet connection again for a while, so everybody keep cool.. i'll keep you posted when i can!

Mongolian food..

The questions are starting to come.. i forgot to mention food!

Well.. first, you wouldn't go to Mongolia for the culinary experience! Basically it's just a lot of mutton! and some yak butter and some greasy milky salted tea...

The 3 main dishes we found were the "Thoon" (or whatever you want to call it) which is some kind of home made pasta, with bits of (overcooked) goat or mutton meat and some potatoes and carrots.. the "Khurshir", a mutton stuffed fried bread (a bit like stuffed indian "puris" for those who know that).. that was my favorite.. and "Buzz" wich are mutton filled dumplings..

The "Airag" is fermented milk that turns to some kind of "milk beer"!

Some bread and yak butter or cheese for breakfast and you're ready to hit the road again!

(oh and watch for these crispy bits of yak cheese skin.. they're bitter as hell!!)

Ulaan Baatar

Ulaan Baatar is a city you discover twice.

The first time you get here, it looks like a pretty big dusty village.. but returning from a trip throughout the country, you really get the true dimension of this great capital city!
Everything is relative as they say!

The atmosphere has changed quite a lot as well in 20 days.. when we left it was a bit cold and grey and rainy.. but now it gets pretty hot and all the young mongolian girls hang out half naked in tiny shorts and t-shirts!..
In my complete ignorance of this country, i guess the last thing i was expecting from this place were highly fashionable half naked chicks hanging out in the streets and going to disco clubs at night!

...i know.. cliches again.. but hey, that's what i'm traveling for, right?

life 2

the other day it was raining pretty hard and i was starting to be really tired, but then i see this scene and i just have to take a shot! so i jump off the van and in the process i drop my camera into the mud! not the crappy camera of course, the expensive one! and there's a big dent in the body and i'm mad! and of course the scene is gone and the shot sucks! and then i hop back into the van and bang my head on the door frame!

sometimes life sucks so bad you think you don't deserve!

life 1

the other day i got hungry!.. so i get myself a banana at a street shop.. i eat it and there i am with my peel thinking i would need a trash can... and bam! right there next to me: a trash can!

sometimes life is so easy, you think you don't deserve!

Hell o'clock!

"It's beer o'clock!" she'd say
everyone: ha ha.. funny..
- Oulala.. now it's pee o'clock now!
- ...
- Ok guys it's dinner o'clock!
- ... hum.. yeah, we got it now.. :-)
- Terry, is it vodka o'clock already??!
- actually it's just about "Give us a break o'clock" if you'd just be so kind!!

This is the typical kind of expression that makes you smile the first time, but that poison your everyday life with an annoying routine tuned with swiss clock precision! Inappropriately used, i'm sure it could turn a tibetan monk into a mass murderer! So after 15 days of solid o'clocking we were about ready to die o'clock!

Anyway it's over o'clock now.... AAAAAaaaaaahhhhhh!!! stop it now!!

Road trip..

Ha ha!
No, i'm kidding... there weren't any roads! it was just a roadless trip!

2 kilometers to get out of town, a left turn out of the road and off we are for 20 days of bouncing around on all the bumps and holes we could find.. heading south to the Gobi (i could say the Gobi desert but Gobi means desert in mongolian so it wouldn't make sense, although none of you know that, or care so it wouldn't make much of difference.. anyway)

To those of you who think the desert is nothing but a boring infinity of nothingness, i say think again! It is actually a fascinating infinity of nothingness!
After Arizona, the Sahara and the Thar, the Gobi is the fourth desert i visit, and from what i've seen it's probably the most interesting.. The Gobi is not just one desert, but dozens of different deserts.. plains, rocks, cliffs, sand dunes, moutains.. you name it.. and after 4 days of driving through non stop desert dryness, you end up just behind the next hill into a paradise of mountainous greenery and... an ice valley! then you're really blown away!

Like many deserts, the Gobi is the bottom of an ancien sea.. so at some point i started to think of Mishka -our driver, very nice- as a sailor.. a sailor on a long gone sea but that was not to stop him! His destiny is to sail this sea, so as the water dried out and the waves petrified into rocky bumps and sand dunes, Mishka (he's our driver) (very nice man) exchanged his old sail boat for a rock solid russian van and just kept going like nothing had changed...

I don't know if i introduced Mishka.. he was our driver for 20 days.. a really nice man.. The stereotypical desert sailor! if any such stereotype exists! Tough short body, mongolian moustache, his skin burned by the sun (only the arms actually, under his shirt he's super white!), not talking too much (especially since he doesn't speak english!), but just put him in front of a kid and he melts like an ice cream in the Gobi!

So we camped the first night in the mongolian wilderness.. the second night we arrived at a small ger camp.. the gers are the typical mongolian nomads houses, that some of you might know as "yourts" but that's the russian name.. the proper name is ger, which is cool cause it allows extremely funny people like me to come up with hilarious play on words in french, such as "a la ger comme a la ger", "ger et pets" or many others that you probably don't want to know..
so anyway we arrived at the ger and realised that it was so much more comfortable, fresh, typical, nice... than our tent that we just kept sleeping in gers for the rest of the trip.. Being with families, we also got to see some typical nomadic lifestyle activities.. such as the killing and skinning and cutting and emptying of a goat by two men and a pocket knife.. while the woman and kid were cutting a sheep's wool with a pair of scissors.. we also helped mounting a couple of gers, that was pretty cool..

camping the first night..

our first ger in the middle of the desert..
some desert roads.. (this camera only sees yellow so you'll have imagine some more colors!)

a herd of horses by the ice valley..

and then we found this ibex(?) up on a cliff!
so i went to ride it!

and Mishka touched its balls for good luck!
a place of worship of some kind?

of course i had to try it on!

Terry shares his experience and teaches me how to recognise a dinosaur bone when you find one; supposedly, only dinosaur bones stick to the tongue, like this one! (i'm glad he didn't find a femur!)

The 3rd night (or was it the 4th?) we reached the first shower place!.. When Bobby showed us our itinerary at the UB guesthouse, on a map of the whole country she pointed 3 spots: "you can take a shower here, there and there" she said! After 3 days of driving in the dust, our 1000Tg (~1$) for a shower were no luxury!

After the desert, we drove up north to the central part of the country, to the white lake and up north to Hovskol lake and then back east and south back to Ulaan Baatar.

Yet, after 20 days of driving all around this huge country, i still have one question: is there any part of it that sucks?? everywhere we'd look was just endless beauty.. it's one of these places that make you think that the whole world would be just like that if it wasn't for man to mess everything up...

The central and north parts of the country look just like switzerland! A gigantic version of switzerland i mean, with lower mountains.. like switwerland mashed and spread by a giant rolling pin.. and with yaks instead of cows, and gers instead of wooden houses and herds of wild horses and real cowboys horseriding everywhere...
ok at that point i may as well admit it's got nothing to do with switzerland except for the color of the grass!
In many ways it's actually closer to being in a western movie.. the towns are so far west like, with their wooden constructions and empty wide dirt streets.. not to mention the evening bal! That was an awesome exprience.. one big wooden room, with chairs all around and everybody sitting.. people of all age, from kids to teenagers to adults to babouchkas.. the music starts, the light gets dimer.. people looking at each other for a few seconds and the bolder ones getting up and starting to dance, soon joined by more until the dance floor is packed.. then the music stops, the light is turned back on and everybody runs back to their seats! and it starts all over again with the next song!! hilarious! but i had so much fun.. learning the mongolian valse and dancing with local ladies..

leaving the desert..

lunch break

a herd of yaks..

the volcano close to white lakecrossing rivers!

one of our last squats..

And i shot these two with Patricia's camera.. amazing what you can do with a digital camera, a 300 zoom.. and an eagle!!

So much beauty, so much to see, so much that is hard -when not impossible- to translate into words or images...

It's a hell of a lot of driving.. but the view is really worth the trip!