chapter seven - Wee Hike

I always like to think of myself as a hiker. Possessing no athletic skill but the ability to walk (which actually isn’t even vaguely athletic), this is the only sport in which I can really enjoy exerting myself. I like plodding under leafy treetops or clambering up the sides of hills or meandering through still meadows. My dream life involves mountains, a backpack and a tent. And there is a reason why it’s a dream life: my hiking experiences have been limited to a mid-western life; catalyzed by cornfields. Hiking that I’m used to is a short jaunt along well-marked, relatively level, often tarred paths through little state parks. So, in reality, my dream life would probably kill me because I’d get lost within 5 minutes or fall off the mountain…or both.

The hiking I did around Huvsgul Lake was something like a refiner’s fire. It didn’t kill me or obliterate any joy I have for hiking – it revealed to me my own inefficiency and inadequacy as one who labels herself ‘hiker’ and crazily enough, strengthened the joy I find in hiking. I will outline for you the lessons I learned during the first hike we did:

To the north of our ger camp was a formidable hill (maybe 1,000 feet/300 meters or so). It was mostly covered in trees except for a few bald patches near the top. Our goal was to hike the hill and eat lunch on top of it. My first lesson was in methodology: when facing a steep mountain or hillside, I walk straight up. Whereas, more experienced and intelligent hikers walk in zig-zag fashion so they don’t kill themselves getting to the top. Therefore, Zig-zag = genius. I logged this away for future reference.

My second lesson was in resourcefulness: when we reached the topmost bald spot of this hill it was lunch time. Lunch that day consisted of potato chips and ramen noodles. Ian set up the stove to boil water for our noodles while we munched away on the chips enjoying the warmth of the sun. However, we quickly discovered a slight snafu: no one remembered forks. It’s not impossible to eat ramen noodles with out a fork, but anything swimming in boiling hot water really shouldn’t be slurped down without one. Ian to the rescue: taking knife in hand he whittled double pronged fork-like utensils from some twigs on the ground. His wife, Liz, would later follow suit and make a spoon and butter knife.

I should explain that Ian and Liz are disgustingly outdoorsy (they probably would not appreciate that adjective but I’m using it anyway). In college, Ian majored in ‘Nature and How to Be Awesome In It,’ and Liz has gone on many a hiking/camping/canoeing trip. These two are the sort that could easily survive in the wild with only a compass and a fork made out of a twig.

My third and most important lesson was in endurance: after lunch I foolishly thought our hike was completed. I forgot I was in the company of jinkhen hikers**; hikers who feel the most at home when there is no trail in sight and only a vast expanse of possibility before them. After we had packed up the remains from lunch, we traveled down the east side of the hill through endless pine forest. There was such a thick layer of pine needles and moss on the ground it was as if we were stepping on a sponge.

After a couple hours we stumbled across a clearing that ended at a cliff overlooking the lake. We stopped here for a few minutes to rest and then followed a path down to the rocky beach. We followed the beach until it ran into a jutting piece of red cliffside. I wasn’t particularly pleased to have to scramble up another steep hillside at this point, but it was the only way to get around the cliffside.

After finding a decent footing on the side of the hill, we came to a narrow goat path and decided to follow it back to our ger camp. This path was made by animals with some kind of death wish. If one stepped incorrectly, it was a messy tumble downward to an even messier splat on the rocks below. I was walking with Ed and Charli for this bit and to keep our minds off the possibility of dying, we talked about the British and American difference of terms for certain bodily functions and articles of clothing.

We followed the treacherous goat path for at least two hours until it opened up onto flat land. Not too long after, we were back in camp and very ready for dinner. This wee hike was somewhere in the vicinity of 5-6 hours, one of the longest hikes I’d done thus far. If that doesn’t sound wee to you, just wait until Chapter Nine.



**language note: jinkhen means real or genuine in Mongolian

chapter six - Oh! The Soup!

This chapter is entirely dedicated to our first meal on the peninsula. I realize this is strange - but only to you. I remember this meal vividly as the thing which made a long 2 day journey, 20 hour drive and a crappy shower worth the trouble. Kind of like coming home after a hard day of work to be rewarded with ice cream you didn’t know was in the freezer.

Our ger camp had a restaurant that served breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday. The first day we had lunch and dinner, every day after that we just had dinner. The meals were pretty pricey ($11 for lunch, $7 for dinner) but hey, it’s the holidays.

The first course was soup. And honestly, this is the only course I remember. I think it was possibly the best soup ever made. Rich, red, thick and spiced just perfectly, we slurped obnoxiously and repeated – “This soup is so good!” – as if it was our own personal eureka. Nothing after that soup was quite as amazing.

The only other meal I remember from our trip was a shepherds pie – and I don’t remember it because it was particularly good. I only remember it because at lunch time there was a live sheep tied up behind the kitchen, it was gone before dinner and our shepherds pie was with mutton. So…he was probably in the shepherds pie. And we ate him.

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.

chapter four - Wandering Aimlessly and Selling Milk

I remember it being dark. And I remember Jimmy yelling at us. It must be something hard-wired in people to increase the volume of your voice when speaking to either non-natives or deaf people. So when I say Jimmy was yelling at us, it was only so we could understand his Mongolian better. You’d be surprised to know that volume does nothing to help understanding. It just makes you grumpy.

Our problem now was where to find a new driver to get us from Murun to our last stop, Hatgal. Hatgal is a tiny town, much like Murun, that lies at the southern tip of Huvsgul Lake. But here’s the deal: zero people are conscious at 4 am, and to a certain degree that included us. We were informed that no buses would leave for Hatgal until 5 or 6 that evening. And Hatgal was only 4 hours away. Murun didn’t exactly look like the kind of hotspot that offered much outside of wandering aimlessly through the streets or selling milk. Besides, where were we to stay until that evening?

But good old Jimmy, being half businessman half rescuer, didn’t skip a beat. Although he hadn’t had a lick of sleep for 20 hours, he offered to drive us straight on through the morning clear to Hatgal, provided we let him stop quickly at his home in Murun to do whatever (change, wash, eat…). The price for this was haggled, discussed, haggled again and then finally agreed upon. A collective sigh of relief could be heard issuing from the back of the micro: thanks Jimmy. After getting gas we waited outside Jimmy’s home, or what we suspected to be Jimmy’s home, for a few minutes.

The sun came up enough to light up Murun while we waited. Murun is the place you land in and leave from when you are smart enough to take an airplane on your way to Huvsgul Lake. Murun is small and surrounded by mountains. And honestly, the part I said about wandering aimlessly or selling milk (for fun and leisure) is at least half true. I saw neighborhoods with houses rather than blocks of apartment buildings or poor ger districts. The neighborhood we were in that morning surprised me by its straight streets and high, well-built fences. I forget sometimes that not all cities and towns in Mongolia look like UB.

It wasn’t long before Jimmy was back in the driver’s seat, hunched over the steering wheel, chomping on the last bits of whatever kind of breakfast he must have found inside his home. Within minutes our little micro was hopping down the road towards Hatgal. We began passing fewer herds of sheep and goats and more herds of yaks. At one point we crossed a dry, impossibly rocky river bed. Jimmy told us something like 5 cars were suddenly swept away due to flash flooding as they attempted to cross this very same river bed not too many days before us. I looked up at the sky – not a cloud present.

Before you arrive in Hatgal you have to enter the Huvsgul Lake Park, and of course there’s a fee. At this point, we think were swindled. We didn’t’ know this at the time, but it should only cost 300 tugruk to enter – we were told, by Jimmy, that it was 3,000 - which we gave him, which he took to a guard shack. Moments later he was back with the guard who was incredibly disheveled and quite drunk (this was about 6 in the morning). The guard peeped in at us, mumbled something to Jimmy and then stumbled back to his shack. And that’s how we got into the park and an hour closer to Hatgal.

chapter three - Things You Don't See From An Airplane

Our trip to Murun took 20 hours. The fun thing about road tripping in Mongolia is that there are no roads to road trip on. They are more like dirt paths or sometimes tire tracks cut along through the countryside. There are no road signs, mile markers, rest stops…pavement. Think of the worst gravel road you’ve ever ridden on. Multiply the worseness by 10 or 15, add high speeds and maybe that will give you an idea of what the entire 20 hours was like.

No one got sick, though. And Jimmy didn’t get lost, not even at night.

Besides, we were able to see what you just can’t possibly see from an airplane: the incredible loveliness that is the Mongolian countryside. Herds and herds of goats, sheep, horses, camels, and yaks passed us by in succession. Broad, rocky mountains jutted up from deep green valleys. Icy blue creeks and rivers cut zig zag through the landscape. We drove through wide desert patches and sparse forest, past ger hashaas** and the very rare vehicle. We watched the sun set behind a row of tree topped mountains.

Somewhere around 10:30 or 11 at night we stopped at a solitary ger to the far northwest of the road-path we’d been following. This was the stop for our Mongolian busmates. Apparently, we made a good impression on them or perhaps they were just very nice people, but before we left them at their ger they hurriedly crammed some dried dairy products in our hands. The things tasted awful but it was a lovely gesture.

I used this brief stop to take out my contacts (having already learned to do so without a mirror) knowing that once we started bumping along the road again, any risk that existed of having my eye poked out on this journey would increase exponentially. Having your eye poked out is not, by the way, a good way to begin any vacation. Just as I was sliding my glasses on, Jimmy hopped up front and we were back rumbling along in our dusty microbus.

At about 4 am, the bus stopped. If you have ever seen the middle of nowhere, that’s where we appeared to be. I think we were all too jostled and groggy to be nervous about this. Jimmy unfolded himself from the front seat and came around to the back door. He slid it open and shouted in at us that we had arrived in Murun.




**culture note: ‘yurt’ is the very ugly but commonly used American word for ‘ger’. a ‘hashaa’ is a yard.

chapter two - Jimmy

There we were, three English people, one Norwegian/German and an American sitting quite pleased in the back of a microbus thinking the second part of our journey was about to begin. This was around 10 am. We expected to be out of Erdenet by 10:30 or 11.

We made a mysterious stop at some official building and our driver exited quite hurriedly and disappeared inside. To this we didn’t give much thought and continued whatever conversation we had been having. During this time I learned that Ed has an answer for everything – whether it is true is another matter. For example, when I asked the meaning of ‘dactyl gram’ (a random word that came up at English camp), Ed’s answer involved something about a winged dinosaur. Later he would explain to us about giant Mongolian moles and how Murun got its name.

About half an hour later, our driver returned sweaty and distracted and off we went. Not long after we had left the mysterious official building our driver parked the bus on the side of the main road next to some buildings and other microbuses. Suddenly there was a swarm of bus drivers hovering around us, peeking in through the windows and staring at us. Then some kind of argument erupted between our bus driver and another so he got out, taking the keys with him. We watched him walk away amid a scrambling group of drivers.

Thoroughly confused we sat and stared at each other wondering what was happening. Other drivers began calling English speaking friends in order to translate for us about the current goings on. Ed was given multiple phones and told there was some “problem” but was given no clarity as to what the “problem” was. Finally we somehow figured out that we could no longer take the bus we were currently in as our bus driver did not have the proper documents to make such a trip (hence the stop at the mysterious official building). We had to locate another driver and bus.

Enter Jimmy. Let me paint you a picture if I can: our next driver was nothing short of extraordinarily obese. Pudgy jowls, sausage fingers, man boobs, a belly that would put several sumo wrestlers to shame – our driver had it all. And if he wasn’t proud of much, he was absolutely proud of his belly. Many times we observed him hiking up his shirt to his chest and contentedly rubbing it like a pregnant woman**. Jimmy, by the way, is not his real name. It was the nickname bestowed upon him by us, linked to an English footballer who had a friend named Jimmy Five Bellies – so named for his extreme roundness.

At any rate, Jimmy became our new driver. So we yanked all our stuff from bus number one and stuffed it into Jimmy’s bus after discussing with him that the agreement should remain the same: us and three other people for the same amount. Jimmy seemed ok with this.

After what seemed like 800 different stops at various places to pick up various needs for our journey ahead (extra car battery, oil, spare tires, gas) and picking up not three, but six extra people, we were on our way to Murun.

It was 1:30 pm.




**culture note: Mongolian men – or just Asian men in general, will often hike up their shirts to chest/armpit level on hot days and spend the day walking around like that.

and now the other half...mostly.

preface: after some thought, i decided that the best way to describe my vacation experience is through a long, drawn out story divided into chapters. i could have summarized it very easily and saved myself the time, but what's the point of doing that when, at the moment, i've got all sorts of time and a blog? the following are the fruits of these particular circumstances:


Chapter One – The Train

Our journey to Huvsgul Nuur - or Huvsgul Lake to those not in the know - began in UB at the train station. Huvsgul Lake is in the north west corner of Mongolia. It’s one of the purest bodies of water in the world and the only body of water in Mongolia. I had just returned from a countryside English camp and had been at home long enough to shower and do laundry before I found myself with two young married couples on a train bound for a small mining town called Erdenet, our first stop to Huvsgul.

There were Ian and Elizabeth, a wonderful English/Norwegian/German couple, Ed and Charli – Charli being short for Charlotte – a sassy English twosome and me, the boring American fifth wheel.

Our train ride from UB to Edrenet was 12 hours and largely unadventurous as the majority of it passed during the night. I’ve never had a worst night’s sleep. My little bed was across the way from three large, snoring men who cut loose the moment their heads hit their pillows and didn’t stop until 6:30 am when we were woken by the stewardess coming down the isles saying “Bosooroi! Bosooroi!” (which is the polite way to say ‘Get up!’). Two hours later our train stopped in Erdenet.

We stumbled out of the traincar into a brilliant, sunny morning and a scattered hoard of taxi and microbus drivers looking for fares as the actual city of Erdenet was still another 15 minutes from the train stop. A rather flabby and sour looking taxi driver led us to a very tiny car; very insistent that we should have him drive us. There was no possible way 5 people plus baggage plus a driver could fit all at once into that vehicle, so we found a microbus driver who happily stuffed us into his bus and for a decent price took us to Patrick and April’s home.

Patrick and April are a Swedish/American couple with a very adorable daughter and a baby on the way who live and work in Erdenet. Arrangements were made earlier about visiting their home, having some breakfast and some kind of quick wash up before leaving for the next leg of our journey. When we arrived, we were welcomed with fresh pancakes, hot coffee and steaming water from the tap**. Nothing short of glorious!

Before entering Patrick and April’s abode we attempted to get our microbus driver to drive us to Murun (our next stop). We tried arranging it so it would only be our party in the bus as it is common for these microbuses to have five people crammed onto three person seats with babies, animals, baggage and other various things layered upon each other. The driver gave us some ridiculous quote for that kind of service so we said no and left it at that.

Upon exiting Patrick and April’s abode, we were met at the door by this same bus driver who explained that now he would take us and three other people for a much more decent price. We thought it was a good plan so we agreed. In retrospect, I think it was the pancakes talking. What happened next, I’m not even sure how to describe…




**culture note: hot water from the tap can be spotty here in Mongolia – sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t.