chapter five - Hatgal, It's a Dump

This is Hatgal: a road, some goods stores, a ‘bus station,’ a few scattered restaurants, some houses, a lot of dirt. Oddly enough, this also describes 80% of the towns in Iowa – minus a bus station. Hatgal, to our bleary, crusted eyes and travel weary disposition presented itself as being quite a dump. Though to be fair, it really was just another small countryside town weathered, wrinkled and smudged by circumstances.

Fortunately we weren’t staying there during our vacation. After unpacking ourselves from Jimmy’s bus, paying him and muttering goodbyes, we just stood around long enough to blow the black snot out of our noses (we must have inhaled at least half of the dirt road we traveled), buy some supplies, and use the toilet. Some 30 or so minutes later a ‘fogron’** from our ger camp rumbled up. It was only 6 more km (3 miles) across another impossible stretch of road to our final destination. After maybe 3 km of knocking our heads against the windows and perfecting a rigor-mortis like grip on the indoor handles, the pine trees parted and Huvsgul Lake shimmered into view. It was as if none of us had ever seen a lake before. I’m not sure about anyone else in the fogron, but my face was plastered to the window.

If I had a list of top 5 things I never get tired of looking at, one of the things would be Huvsgul Lake. The water is so clear you can see straight down 50 meters (31 miles). When the sky is gray, the water looks like a stormy sea. When the sky is clear and blue, the water is the most brilliant shade of tropical turquoise you could imagine. Everything around it is gorgeous, too: dense forest, chiseled mountains, red crumbly cliffs, grey stony beaches. I immediately wanted to stay forever.

Our ger camp was located on a peninsula at the southern section of the lake. It was virtually absent of people besides a gaggle of staff – mostly college kids on internship. When our fogron lurched through the front gates, they had lined themselves up parallel to each other waving us welcome like a spirit tunnel at a high school sports assembly. How sweet. But all that was on my mind then was: shower, bed, food.

Very nearly after we had settled into our respective color coded gers: Ed and Charli in the ‘red ger,’ and poor Ian and Elizabeth with me in the ‘silver ger’ – because each ger only had 3 beds – I was merrily skipping to the shower. The bathroom/shower was in a small cabin a short distance from our gers. The sink, toilet and shower water was all pumped from the lake and heated in an adjacent room. We later learned that if you wanted hot water at say, 6 pm, you had to tell the staff at least 2 hours ahead; otherwise it just remained its icy cold self all day. My shower was taken by candle light as the bulb appeared to be non-functional. In fact I think the light bulb only worked once during our stay.

That first shower was frustrating. The water gurgled from the shower head and was either freezing or boiling – but never anywhere near a comfortable in between. I think it was just dashed expectations of a ‘real shower’ after a long, tough journey that made me close to tears as I hopped around like an idiot under the ice water and cussed out the faucet when I was scalded.

I had an otherwise non-adventurous, yet gloious rest in a very clean, white bed. But the food came next, and that gets its own chapter.




**culture note: a fogron is a kind of sturdy, chunky, funny looking bus made in Russia. I wish all buses were called fogrons.