chapter eight - The Boat Ride

If you’re just joining us now, this is a brief summary of what you’ve missed: a train ride with snorers, Jimmy and his man boobs, roadless road trip, swindling, frustrating shower, delicious soup, treacherous goat path.

If you’re still with me, God bless you. There are only two more chapters to go and then we all can get on with our lives.

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You can’t go to a lake without getting in to it. This rule is suspended, though, when the water is too flipping cold to even stick in a finger. Such is the case with Huvsgul. It may be pretty but it’s also frigid – and year round at that. So if you can’t get in to swim, you try to find a boat. We soon found that pickings were slim. These were our options: 1. The Sukhbataar – a booze-cruise type ship that takes you round the lake blasting horrible party music. In order for The Sukhbataar to leave port there must be 60 people on board and you only have 15 minutes to get from your camp to the port after its horn is tooted. Plus it’s expensive. 2. Private ventures – little, rusty motor-boats owned by individuals or other ger camps. A base price for these seemed to be in the vicinity of $150 an hour per person.

This did not discourage us, however. With a little more investigation and bargaining, we found a private venture that dropped their price to $10 an hour per person – significantly more doable than $150. So we hired them for a two hour trip around the lake.

As it happened, our boat ride fell on a veritably windy day that had a chill and stirred up white caps from the east. And what direction did we go for the first hour? East, of course - against the wind and waves. And who was the idiot in front? Me, of course - pretending not to be the idiot. Luckily it wasn’t altogether miserable, just a little soggy and bumpy – the driver was worse off than any of us. I figured I could withstand the spray and splashes for the first hour, but was herded to the back after 30 or 40 minutes by Ian who took my place up front.

Not long afterward, our boat driver (the antithesis of Jimmy) slowed and ‘docked’ our vessel at a little peninsula. By ‘docked’ I mean ‘rammed into the steep, rocky side of the peninsula.’ Apparently, this was a good sightseeing place and we were urged to de-boat and have a walk around. If you’ve ever de-boated onto the steep side of a hill, you can imagine how hilarious we looked flinging our legs over the boat railing and scrambling up for dear life. Or maybe that was just me. Yeah, it was just me.

After taking some pictures, stretching our legs, and covertly going to the bathroom, we were all back on the boat to finish our little tour. It was on this return trip that Ian took bearings for a mountain range a little more than 8km (5 miles) from our camp. There was rumor of a second hike involving this mountain range, which I thought was incredibly ambitious and a little frightening. But it was only a rumor, right?

The way back was significantly less soggy and bumpy and by the time we eased up to the dock (a real one, not a cliffside), we felt two hours had been satisfactory. Really, if we wanted to boat the entirety of the lake, it would have taken all day…and we didn’t have enough money or dry clothes for that kind of thing.

Thus the boat ride ended and we merrily skipped our soggy bottoms back to camp. At dinner that evening, the rumor of the second hike turned into a plan for the next day’s excursion. It was to be a very big day. I like to refer to it as the epic hike.

And epic it was.